Essay on the Symbolism of the Menagerie in The Glass Menagerie

The Symbolism of the Menagerie in The ice rink Menagerie Tennessee Williams play, The chalk Menagerie, describes three separate characters, their dreams, and the harsh realities they face in a sophisticated world. The Glass Menagerie exposes the disoriented dreams of a grey family and their desperate dispute to escape reality. Williams use of symbols adds depth to the play. The folderol menagerie itself is a symbol Williams uses to represent the broken lives of Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield and their inability to live in the present. The glass menagerie symbolizes Amanda Wingfields overwhelming need to cling to her past and her fulfilled alarm of being alone. Amanda resents the poverty-stricken neighborhood in which she lives so much that she ask to mentally escape from it by invented romance and self-deception. Williams describes her as having endurance and a kind of heroism, but she is also silly, snobbish, sometimes cruel and sometimes contemptible in her well-inte ntioned blundering(Williams 1865). Abandoned by her husband, Amanda comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious, southern life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by adult male callers. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter, Laura, a husband, the kind of gentleman caller that she herself longed for, who would non have deserted her. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. exclusively vestiges of gracious living Gone completely I wasnt prepared for what the future day brought me. (Williams 1893). She foists her illusions on her unwilling children, lives in the past with pretensions to glory. Lauras collection of glass animals represents her supersensitive nature and fragility. The glass menagerie is ... ...tle glass animals came to represent in my keeping all the softest emotions that belong to the recollection of things past. They stood for all the tender things that relieve(Williams 64). They retreat into their own separate w orlds to escape the harshness of life. Amanda, Laura, and Tom are incompetent of living in the present. Mirroring the social and economic despair in the U.S., The Glass Menagerie is nostalgia for a past world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love, which celebrates, above all, the human need to dream. Works Cited and Consulted Crandall, George. The vital Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport Greenwood, 1996. Martin, Robert. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (Critical Essays on American Literature). naked as a jaybird York Simon and Schuster, 1997. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York Random House, 1985.