Idaho Commission for Libraries

Information on Tennessee Williams

The following website is a lengthy dissertation about Williams entitled, "Certain Moral Values: A Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Play of Tennessee Williams." The dissertation was written by Darryl Erwin Haley of the University of Alabama Graduate School. http://www.etsu.edu/haleyd/DissHome.html

Book Reviews of The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie opens on a near-slum apartment, with Tom Wingfield setting the time (the Depression and Spanish-Civil-War 1930's). Tom works in a shoe warehouse, writes poetry, and feels imprisoned by the knowledge that his hateful job is essential of the family’s financial survival. His relationship with his mother is a combination of love, admiration, frustration, and acrimony, with regular flare-ups and reconciliations. His relationship with his sister is one of love and sympathy. Laura is physically crippled as well as with drawn from the outside world. She is psychologically unable to attend business college and lives in a world of her phonographs records and fragile glass animals. Amanda, a more complex character than the others, is the heart of the play: a constantly chattering woman who lives in part for her memories, perhaps exaggerated, of an idealized antebellum Southern girlhood and under the almost certain illusion that her son will amount to something and that her daughter will marry. Yet she also lives very positively in the real world, aware of the family’s poverty, keeping track of the bills, scratching for money by selling magazine subscriptions. Amanda must accept the fact that a job for Laura is out of the question, and she therefore starts planning for the other alternative, marriage. Scene 1 introduces a second symbol (the menagerie being the first) in a nickname that Laura says a boy gave her in high school: "Blue Roses." Roses are delicate and beautiful, like Laura and like her glass menagerie, but blue roses, like glass animals, have no real existence.

At Amanda’s urging, Tom invites Jim O’ Connor, a friend from the warehouse, home to dinner, in the hope that the "gentleman caller" will be attracted to Laura. Scene 6 shows the arrival of the guest and his attempt to accept Amanda’s pathetic and almost comical Southern-belle behavior and elaborate "fussing" and Laura’s almost pathological fright and consequent inability to come to the dinner table. By Amanda’s inevitable machinations after dinner, Jim and Laura are left alone. Jim-who has turned out to be the "Blue Roses" boy from high school, the boy with whom Laura was close to being in love–is sympathetic and understanding person who, even in the short time they are alone together, manages to get more spontaneous and revealing conversation out of Laura than her family ever has and even persuades her to dance. Clearly, here is a person who could bring to reality Amanda’s seemingly impossible dreams, a man who could lead Laura into the real world (as he symbolically brought her glass unicorn into it by unintentionally breaking off its horn), a man who would make a good husband. Later, however, Jim tells Laura that he is already engaged, and Laura’s life is permanently in ruins. What might have happened will never happen. When Amanda learns the truth from Jim just before he leaves, the resulting quarrel with Tom convinces Tom to leave home permanently, abandoning his mother and sister to an apparently hopeless situation. (Roth, John K. American Diversity, American Identity: The Lives and Works of 145 Writers Who Define the American Experience, Henry Holt & Company: New York, 1995.)

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