Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” is a memory play told by the only son of the Wingfield family in St. Louis, Missouri.  This brief essay will compare and contrast two of the award winning play’s key characters.  Amanda Wingfield is the mother, and a faded southern belle; a character type Williams used repeatedly in his works.  Laura Wingfield is Amanda’s daughter, and although she has the fewest lines in the play, the plot revolves around her.

            Laura, as well as her mother, has trouble accepting and relating to reality, and withdrawals into their own private worlds of illusion.  Laura’s private world is filled with the glass animals that make up her glass menagerie.  These glass animals, like Laura’s inner life, are dangerously delicate and incredibly fanciful.  Amanda cannot accept that she is anything less than the pampered southern belle she was raised to be.  She cannot accept the reality that Laura is crippled, or that her son, Tom, is not a successful businessman.  Amanda’s private world is one where she pretends all of these things are true.

            Laura and Amanda are both abandoned repeatedly by the men in their lives.  The first act of abandonment takes place in the time before the play’s settings; Mr. Wingfield, Amanda’s husband and Laura and Tom’s father, leaves his family because he “fell in love with long distances.”  During the play Jim, Laura’s gentleman caller and a nice, ordinary young man, deserts her.  The play’s narrator, Tom, deserts his mother and sister to pursue adventure.  Amanda and Laura, who are handicapped by their illusions and old memories, will never be able to assume the role of the abandoner, and are doomed to be repeatedly abandoned. 

            Their old memories have an inflexible grip on both women.  Amanda lives in a constant search for her long lost youth when her family’s name and social status were highly valued and respected.  Laura cherishes old records from her childhood almost as much as her glass animals, and plays them constantly as she slips into her inner life.  Laura and Amanda’s memories are a crippling force that prevents them from finding happiness.

            Two of the play’s key characters, Amanda and Laura Wingfield, are very much alike in very different ways.  They both live their own pretend lives, and are unable to cope with the reality that is their lives.  “The Glass Menagerie” was Tennessee Williams’ first commercial success, and is a classic play that is preformed still today.