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Tennessee Williams, the writer:

Tennessee Williams, the playwright, novelist, short story writer, screenplay writer and poet descended the barriers of language, distance and culture and redefined the techniques in writing plays.

His plays are the hot content of the university curriculum around the world. His writings reveal the inner conflicts and frustrations of the human mind and are often studied for the psychological deviation presented in his characters and expressionism. His view of life is far from natural, and his early critics blamed him for overburdening his plays with sordid elements of life, but these elements are bits of his past and formed intrinsic layers of his plays.

He drew characters from his life and X ray-ed their mind and heart in his plays. To quote him, he said, “I understand women and I can write about them”. Indeed his understanding of the mental turmoil in women is astounding. This evident in his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, which won both Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The honour bestowed on him by the celebration of Tennessee Williams Festivals will continue for a long time to come.

The Glass Menagerie, a reminiscence of the past:

The Glass Menagerie, which won Williams the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award, won him great eminence all over the world and has been played on stage and made in to movies in various languages. This play, it is claimed, has autobiographical touch. The characters, the Wingfields, Tom, Amanda and Laura are said to represent the playwright himself, his mother Edwina and his unfortunate sister, Rose. The absent father in the play corresponds to his father, who was often away, travelling. Tom’s mental conflict in the play is the introspection of the pressures and frustrations of Williams’ early life.

The women in the play:   

Amanda:

Amanda is introduced as a woman who is not given in to delusions; but as one whose memories of the past in the gracious Southern plantations, when her beauty and vivacity was appreciated by all, create a tragic illusion in her, which she gives vent by her pathetically comic display of energy to help her children. Tom, the narrator says, “A magician gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.“ Truth eludes Amanda. The magic of her past, dresses illusion as truth.

In the first scene Amanda’s self revelation unfolds. She insists her genteel ways on Tom, teaching him how to eat dinner. He has no patience to listen to her stories of her past, when rich planters were her gentleman callers. She escapes into her illusory past. That was a defence against mental depression, a therapy that her own mind has fashioned.

In fact Amanda should be appreciated for her brave, positive attitude towards life. She is the most practical among all the three. She knows what would sustain them. It was the time of depression and hers would have been the right attitude to survive. She is stifling for the one who cannot understand the rational in her.

 Her husband has abandoned his responsibilities as a father and she raises her children without a help. She wants her daughter not to be dependent on anyone.  Laura’s handicap seems only a very slight defect to her. She insists on her typing classes. When Laura proves that she is not up to it, Amanda thinks of marrying her off to a nice man. Here she meets with terrible failure. Her efforts to brace the times they live in and sustain her family are commendable, though the writer gives her comical attire at times.

Laura:

A delicate, shy girl with one leg shorter than the other and held in a brace, she is a contrast to her mother, who is physically energetic with a will of her own. Laura has an obsession for her glass menagerie. Like her brother she is more interested in arts (her visiting the arts museum during her typing class hours).

 She understands her mother but is unable to live up to her dreams. She is perhaps belittled by her mother’s stories of her gentleman callers. She does not escape into dreams like her mother, but lives in a dream of her own, with her glass dolls and Just like them, she is fragile.

The fact Jim calls her Blue Roses is not reason enough to expect him to love her. Yet he is Laura’s dream lad right from the time she had pleurosis. It is a surprise for her that he descends from her dream and brings with him a reality hitherto unknown to her. He advises her to be confident and shed her inferiority complex. But just as he breaks the single horn of her glass unicorn, he breaks the single thread of hope that holds her to a new world and she falls into the abyss of her complex, and ever deepening dream.

Jim gives up his mother’s memory willingly. But Laura? She is a Blue Rose, something rare. Her memory keeps haunting Tom and he entreats her to blow out the candles of memory.

One woman is strong and would not break under any circumstance. The other is as Williams says “as glass, pretty to look at, but easily broken.”