T
Tennessee Williams
An award-winning American playwright and poet.
The Glass Menagerie
Synopsis
Tennessee Williams's first major success is a memory play: Tom Wingfield steps out of the action to narrate it, warning at the outset that he gives us truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. The stage is a cramped St. Louis apartment in the late 1930s, where Tom works a warehouse job he despises to support his mother and sister, and escapes most nights to the movies.
Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle long ago abandoned by her husband, presses her children toward the futures she once imagined for them. Her daughter Laura, left with a limp and a paralysing shyness, has quietly dropped out of business college and withdrawn into her collection of small glass animals. When Amanda persuades Tom to bring home a gentleman caller, he invites Jim O'Connor, a co-worker at the warehouse — who turns out to have been the boy Laura adored in high school.
The evening that follows is the heart of the play: a candlelit conversation, a dance, a broken glass unicorn, and a revelation that closes the door Amanda had just opened. Written out of Williams's own family — his mother, and his sister Rose — it was first produced in Chicago in December 1944, opened on Broadway and was published in 1945, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. It made Williams's name and remains one of the most performed plays in the American repertoire.
Genres
Characters
Tom WingfieldProtagonist
The narrator. A would-be poet stuck in a shoe warehouse, supporting his mother and sister and escaping nightly to the movies; he tells the play as his own memory.
Amanda WingfieldSupporting
Tom and Laura's mother, a faded Southern belle abandoned by her husband, who presses her children toward the lives she once imagined for them.
Laura WingfieldSupporting
Tom's older sister, left with a limp and a paralysing shyness, who has withdrawn from business college into her collection of small glass animals.
Jim O'ConnorSupporting
The gentleman caller. Tom's co-worker at the warehouse and a high-school star Laura once adored from a distance.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Glass Menagerie based on Tennessee Williams's own family?
Largely, yes. Williams drew the Wingfields from his own household: Amanda echoes his mother Edwina, and Laura is closely modelled on his sister Rose, whose fragility and later institutionalisation haunted him for the rest of his life. The narrator shares the playwright's own first name — Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams — and his warehouse job mirrors the years Williams spent at the International Shoe Company in St. Louis. It is not a documentary, though: Tom opens the play by telling the audience he gives them truth "in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
What does it mean that this is a "memory play"?
Tom tells the audience in his opening speech that what follows is a memory, and that memory is sentimental, selective and dimly lit rather than realistic. Everything on stage is filtered through him years after the fact, which is why Williams's stage directions call for music, soft light and projected screen legends instead of a naturalistic set. The term matters for reading it: Tom is a narrator inside his own recollection, so the scenes are shaped by what he remembers and by his guilt over how they ended.
What happens to Laura's glass unicorn?