The Glass Menagerie : a Memory Play
The Glass Menagerie: Memory Play
The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams most autobiographical work. However, it is not a true autobiographical work in the sense that there is chronological order and true documented facts to his life. Instead the play is more along the line of an “emotional” autobiographical piece. At times individuals exhibit selective memory, this is a period whereby we choose to remember certain things the way we would like them to be rather than the way things actually happened. The Glass Menagerie is similar to the author’s life and his biographers often rely on it as a thematic source. The play centers around three family members – Laura, Tom and their mother Amanda. Missing from the family group is the father. He is represented in the play by a photograph that sits on the mantle. It is learned early on in the play from Tom that the father had abandoned the family and that the father had sent a postcard one time. Tom says in Scene One, “The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, containing two words: ‘Hello-Goodbye!’ and no address” (Williams 5). Also in Scene One Tom tells us that the play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental and not realistic. Here the audience begins to have the feeling that it is a flashback to a type of recollection – whether it is true enough to the reality of the event is yet to be determined. In memory plays everything seems to happen to music. The tone and the timing of the music give another type of dimension to the audience. It sets the mood and even foreshadows events to come. Given the strong emotional similarity to William’s life and the fact that the main character tells us the play is memory, the play begins to obviously feel more like a dream and because of that element there is an abundance of themes, motifs and symbols that permeate the play with literary significance.
Tom is the narrator of the
The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams most autobiographical work. However, it is not a true autobiographical work in the sense that there is chronological order and true documented facts to his life. Instead the play is more along the line of an “emotional” autobiographical piece. At times individuals exhibit selective memory, this is a period whereby we choose to remember certain things the way we would like them to be rather than the way things actually happened. The Glass Menagerie is similar to the author’s life and his biographers often rely on it as a thematic source. The play centers around three family members – Laura, Tom and their mother Amanda. Missing from the family group is the father. He is represented in the play by a photograph that sits on the mantle. It is learned early on in the play from Tom that the father had abandoned the family and that the father had sent a postcard one time. Tom says in Scene One, “The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, containing two words: ‘Hello-Goodbye!’ and no address” (Williams 5). Also in Scene One Tom tells us that the play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental and not realistic. Here the audience begins to have the feeling that it is a flashback to a type of recollection – whether it is true enough to the reality of the event is yet to be determined. In memory plays everything seems to happen to music. The tone and the timing of the music give another type of dimension to the audience. It sets the mood and even foreshadows events to come. Given the strong emotional similarity to William’s life and the fact that the main character tells us the play is memory, the play begins to obviously feel more like a dream and because of that element there is an abundance of themes, motifs and symbols that permeate the play with literary significance.
Tom is the narrator of the
Cited: Devlin, Albert. Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. New York: New Directions, 2000. King, Thomas L. "Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie." Educational Theatre Journal (1973): 85-94. Kolin, Philip. A Guide to Research and Performance. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. New York: Brown, Little, 1985. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York, 1945.