The Glass Menagerie Essay Research Paper Subj — страница 2

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offers Jim her broken unicorn, symbolizing her broken heart that Jim will take with him. She is unable to cope with the truth and once again retreats to her fantasy world of glass figurines and Victrola records. Laura can only live a brief moment in reality. Amanda obsesses over her past. The moment Tom or Laura worry her, she uses her Mississippi Delta childhood memories like a cooling balm. She flashes back to her days dancing at the governor’s ball in Jackson, Mississippi and recalls the gentlemen’s “chivalric nature” during her youth. (Ghiotto) She constantly reminds Tom and Laura about that “one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain” when she receives seventeen gentlemen callers (Williams, 148). The reader is not confident that this actually occurs. However, it is

clear that despite its possible falsity, Amanda has come to believe it. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as “a little defect?hardly noticeable” (Williams, 157). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is “crippled” and then she resorts back to denial. Moreover, Amanda does not perceive anything realistically. While she has not met him yet, she believes that Jim is the man that will rescue Laura. As Laura nervously awaits Jim’s arrival, Amanda tells her, “You couldn’t be satisfied with just sitting home” (Williams, 192). Yet, Laura prefers that. Amanda cannot distinguish reality from illusion. Amanda dresses in the same girlish frock she wore on the day she met their father. Upon Jim’s

arrival, she reverts to her childish, giddy days of entertaining gentlemen callers. Amanda chooses to live in the past. Tom escapes to his poetry writing and movie world. He is a victim of his mother’s relentless smothering and captures all the angst of his poetic soul going to waste in a factory warehouse. His outbursts with Amanda exhibit a powerful manifestation of his growing frustration. He cannot handle his menial job and his unsatisfying home life. He believes that the atmosphere is stifling and damaging to his creative capacities. He regards the warehouse as a prison that shackles all the basic impulses with which, he believes, men are endowed?”Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter” (Williams ). In the warehouse, Tom does not find any satisfaction at

all?“I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains?than go back mornings!” (Williams )?let alone amiable, intimate friendship or companionship. Even more stifling to his poetic creativity is his home where Amanda, prompted by her motherly solicitude and her fear for the family’s sole source of income, is the major obstacle to his creative concentration. Home is more like a cage as oppressive as the warehouse by Amanda’s austere parental control and over-protectiveness (Ng). During meals, she insists that he listen to long sermons such as “Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something . . .” (Williams ). As Tom reaches for a cigarette, she complains, “You smoke too much!” (Williams ). Unable to tolerate Amanda’s

failure to understand his needs and her smothering affection, Tom ends up turning to movies, where he feels reprieve. The movies satisfy his vicarious gratification of adventure. In the cinema, he becomes a hero, which he can never be at home. On the other hand, the magic shows provide him an illusionary world he yearns for in his daily life. Sometimes his mother and his family’s financial hardships shatter his world. The movies serve as an anesthetic, along with bouts of heavy drinking. Hence, it is possible for him to temporarily forget the oppressive apartment. Nevertheless, his poetic aspirations end up in frustration and doom, which partly contributes to his nocturnal film-going behavior. Finally, when he does leave the Wingfield apartment, he entraps himself with memories

of Laura. He escapes one prison only to fall into another, that of his guilty conscience, his nostalgia of home, the glass menagerie and old fashioned melodies. He is unable to function in the present and wanders aimlessly thinking of his sister. Jim, though not as severely as the Wingfields, also reverts to his past as he looks through high school yearbooks with Laura and recalls the days of his heroism. The present does not satisfy him?working at the same warehouse as Tom, despite Tom’s prediction that he would “arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty” (Williams, 190). Tom realizes that he “was valuable to him [Jim] as someone who could remember his former glory” (Williams, 190). Jim reminisces about his lead in the operetta and Laura asks