Comprehensive Study Notes: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Introduction to Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie

• Playwright and Period: Tennessee Williams lived from $1914$ to $1983$. The play, The Glass Menagerie, was published and first produced in $1945$.
• Constituents of Drama: While academic study often isolates plot, character, setting, and theme, the actual experience of attending a play involves a sense of "involvement." The production emphasizes the unfolding performance in the theater rather than just its constituent parts.
• Spectacle as Action: Following Aristotelian principles, "spectacle" in this context is not a mere addition of theatrical effects but is the encompassing and progressing action occurring on the stage.

The Production Notes: A New, Plastic Theatre

• The Concept of the Memory Play: As a "memory play," it allows for unusual freedom of convention. The material is delicate and tenuous, requiring atmospheric touches and subtle direction rather than rigid realism.
• Expressionism vs. Realism: Unconventional techniques, including Expressionism, aim for a closer approach to truth. Williams argues that straight realism—represented by "genuine frigidaires" and "authentic ice-cubes"—is merely a photographic likeness. Truth and reality are organic things that the poetic imagination must transform to represent their essence.
• The Plastic Theatre: A "new, plastic theatre" must replace exhausted realistic conventions to restore vitality to theater as a cultural force.

Technical Devices and Theatrical Effects

• The Screen Device: Originally conceived for magic-lantern slides, this device projects images or titles onto a section of the wall between the front room and dining area.
  • Purpose: It provides structural accent to the most important points in each scene, preventing the episodic play from feeling "fragmentary" and making it "architectural."
  • Emotional Appeal: It strengthens the effect of allusions in the writing, allowing primary points to be made more simply and lightly than spoken lines alone could achieve.
• Musical Score: A recurring tune titled "The Glass Menagerie" provides emotional emphasis.
  • Tone: Described as similar to circus music heard from a distance—light, delicate, and sad. It represents the "surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow."
  • Symbolism: It is primarily Laura’s music, reflecting the fragile beauty of spun glass. It serves as a thread of connection between the narrator’s time and the subject of his story.
• Lighting Design: Non-realistic and dim, consistent with the atmosphere of memory.
  • Technique: Shafts of light focus on specific areas or actors. For example, during a quarrel between Tom and Amanda, the focus remains on the silent figure of Laura.
  • Artistic Influence: The lighting should evoke early religious portraits or the work of El Greco, where figures are radiant against a relatively dusky atmosphere.

Analysis of Characters

• Amanda Wingfield: The mother. A woman of "great but confused vitality" who clings to a vanished time and place. She possesses endurance, heroism, and tenderness, but her foolishness can be unwittingly cruel. Her life is described not as paranoia, but as being "paranoia."
• Laura Wingfield: The daughter. Suffering from a childhood illness that left her crippled with one leg in a brace, her separation from reality is severe. She is compared to a piece of her own glass collection—too fragile to move from the shelf. She lives vitally within her own illusions.
• Tom Wingfield: The son and narrator. A poet who works in a shoe warehouse. To escape the "trap" of his life, he is forced to act without pity, though his nature is not inherently remorseless.
• Jim O’Connor: The gentleman caller. An ordinary young man who acts as an "emissary from a world of reality" and a symbol of the "long delayed but always expected something."

Scene I: Social Background and the Memory of Blue Mountain

• Setting: A St. Louis alley, specifically a "hive-like" tenement building expressive of the lower middle-class impulse to exist as an "interfused mass of automatism."
• The Fire-Escape: A structure described as an accidental piece of poetic truth, as these buildings burn with the "slow and implacable fires of human desperation."
• Tom’s Prologue: Set in the $1930s$, a time when the American middle class was "matriculating in a school for the blind," facing a dissolving economy.
  • Historical Markers: Guernica was being bombarded in Spain, while labor disturbances occurred in Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis.
  • The Fifth Character: A photograph of the father, a telephone man who "fell in love with long distances" and left the family $16$ years prior. His final message was a postcard from Mazatlan, Mexico, reading: "Hello—Good-bye!"
• Amanda’s Seventeen Gentlemen Callers: Amanda recounts her youth in Blue Mountain. On one Sunday, she received $17$ gentlemen callers, requiring the borrow of folding chairs from the parish house.
  • Success of Suitors:
    • Champ Laughlin: Became Vice-President of the Delta Planters Bank.
    • Hadley Stevenson: Drowned in Moon Lake, leaving $150,000.00$ in government bonds.
    • The Cutrere Brothers: Bates Cutrere died after a gunfight at Moon Lake Casino; his widow inherited $8,000$ to $10,000$ acres.
    • Duncan J. Fitzhugh: Known as the "Wolf of Wall Street" with the "Midas touch."

Scene II: The Fiasco at Rubicam’s Business College

• The Deception: Laura has been pretending to attend Rubicam’s Business College for $6$ weeks. In reality, she dropped out after the first speed-test when her hands shook so violently she became physically ill.
• Laura’s Wanderings: To hide her failure from Amanda, she spent her days (from $7:30$ AM to $5:00$ PM) in the winter cold, visiting:
  • The Art Museum.
  • The birdhouses at the Zoo (visiting penguins daily).
  • The movies (skipping lunch to afford them).
  • The "Jewel-box," a glass house for tropical flowers.
• The "Blue Roses" Memory: Laura recalls a high school boy named Jim who called her "Blue Roses." This originated when she told him she had "pleurosis," which he misheard.
• The Future: Amanda is terrified that Laura will become a "barely tolerated spinster" or a "little birdlike woman without a nest."

Scene III: Conflict and The Magazine Campaign

• Economic Struggles: Amanda conducts a telephone campaign to sell subscriptions for The Homemaker’s Companion to raise money to "feather the nest" for a gentleman caller.
• The Quarrel: Tom and Amanda fight over Tom’s reading material (a novel by D.H. Lawrence, which Amanda labels "filth") and his constant visits to the movies.
  • Tom’s Grievance: He earns $65.00$ per month at the warehouse, a job he detests. He compares his life to a "celotex interior" with "fluorescent tubes."
  • The Damage: During the argument, Tom hurls his coat, accidentally striking Laura’s glass collection and shattering a piece.

Scene IV-V: The Coffin Trick and The Invitation

• The Magician’s Metaphor: Tom describes Malvolio the Magician, who escaped from a nailed-up coffin without removing a single nail. Tom views this as the trick he needs to escape his life.
• The Promise: Amanda asks Tom to find a "clean-living" man at the warehouse for Laura. Tom reveals he has invited James D. O'Connor to dinner the following night.
• Jim O’Connor’s Stats: Tom estimates Jim’s salary at approximately $85.00$ per month. Jim studies radio engineering and public speaking at night school.
• The Warning: Tom warns Amanda that Laura is "terribly shy" and lives in a world of her own, but Amanda refuses to acknowledge Laura as "peculiar" or "crippled."

Scene VI-VII: The Visit and the Breaking of the Unicorn

• Preparations: Amanda wears a yellowed voile dress with a blue silk sash and carries jonquils, obsessed with reviving the "legend of her youth."
• The Encounter: Laura realizes Jim is the same boy she liked in high school and becomes so ill she cannot sit at the dinner table.
• The Climax: The lights go out because Tom used the money for the light bill to pay his dues to the Union of Merchant Seamen.
  • The Conversation: Jim and Laura sit on the floor by candlelight. Jim diagnoses Laura with an "inferiority complex" and encourages her to be proud of being "different."
  • The Breaking: While dancing a clumsy waltz to "La Golondrina," they bump into the table. The glass unicorn's horn breaks off. Laura calls it a "blessing in disguise" because now the unicorn is "just like all the other horses."
  • The Revelation: After kissing Laura, Jim confesses he is "going steady" with a girl named Betty and they are to be married on the second Sunday in June.

Final Monologue: The Longest Distance

• Departure: Tom is fired for writing a poem on a shoe-box lid and leaves the family. He follows in his father's footsteps, "attempting to find in motion what was lost in space."
• The Haunted Memory: Tom cannot escape the memory of Laura. He sees her in the glass bottles of shop windows or hears her in a familiar bit of music.
• Conclusion: Tom’s final words are: "Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! … blow your candles out … for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura—and so good-bye."