The Glass Menagerie
Most writers are taught to write what they know. Tennessee Williams took that advice to heart when constructing The Glass Menagerie , his breakthrough play and the most autobiographical work of his career, in which he presents the Wingfield family, matriarch Amanda and her children, Tom and Laura. Much like Williams’s own mother, Amanda is overbearing and disappointed in her children. Like Williams, Tom is a poet and a romantic, stuck in a dead-end factory job. (Williams had several punch-the-clock jobs before finding success as a writer.) And Laura is a tribute, almost, to William’s sister, Rose, who, like Laura, had a physical abnormality and was terribly shy. Fittingly, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. As Williams wrote in the stage directions, “the scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated.” Tom, our narrator throughout, expands on this. He says, “I am the opposite of a stage...
