Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

The Glass Menagerie

(1945)

 

Tennessee Williams

(March 26, 1911–February 25, 1983)

 

 

Notes

The Glass Menagerie premiered at the Civic Theatre, Chicago Illinois, on December 26, 1944. 


93  The cat's not out of the bag:




 

Theater


There is a duality in my attitude toward an audience now. Of course I want their approval, I want their understanding and their empathy. But there is much about them that strikes me as obdurately resistant to my kind of theatre these days. They seem to be conditioned to a kind of theatre which is quite different from the kind I wish to practice.

       Actually my own theatre is also in a state of revolution: I am quite through with the kind of play that established my early and popular reputation. I am doing a different thing which is altogether my own, not influenced at all by other playwrights at home or abroad or by other schools of theatre. My thing is what it always was: to express my world and my experience of it in whatever form seems suitable to the material.


—Tennessee Williams, "Foreword," Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. xvii.



Life


[...] There was a real book in there which was titled International Who's Who or something of the sort. Quite naturally I snatched it out of its case and turned immediately to the index to see if I had made that scene. [...]

       Among the list of my honors and awards was the astonishing announcement that in a certain year of the early forties I had received a grand of one thousand dollars, yes, what is called a "big one," from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is the year, not the donor, of the alleged grant that stands out so prominently in my mind, for that was the year (several years before my life was changed irrevocably by the success of The Glass Menagerie) in which I had to hock literally everything I owned, including including an old borrowed portable typewriter and everything else old and new and portable, including all clothes except a dirty flannel shirt, riding breeches and a pair of boots which were relics of a term in the study of equitation I had taken in preference to regular R.O.T.C. at the University of Missouri, and it was the year when I was bounced from lodging to lodging for nonpayment of rent, which was a minimal rent, and it was the year when I had to go out on the street to bum a cigarette, that absolutely essential cigarette that a living and smoking writer must have to start work in the morning and it was even the year when I usually had what the French call “papillons d’amour” because I did not have the price of a bottle of Cuprex, the standard pubic pesticide in those days and when I was once embarrassed by this outcry on a crowded street corner in daylight, “You bastard, you gave me crabs last night!”—an outcry which cut short my social season in the French Quarter of New Orleans and sent me packing—well, packing is hardly the word, since I had no luggage—on my thumb to Florida, coughing, hawking and spitting up blood, yes, blood, not catsup, and presenting upon the highways such a spooky appearance that motorists would push their accelerators to the floorboards when they sighted me in the light of day and when I had to try to catch rides mostly at night, and I have journals to prove these specific recollections of that year when I was supposed to be the hilarious recipient of that “big one” from the Institute of which I am now a tolerated member.

 

—Tennessee Williams, chapter 1, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 1, 2.


       My first years of childhood in Mississippi were the most joyously innocent of my life, due to the beneficent homelife provided by my beloved Dakin grandparents, with whom we lived. And to the wild and sweet half-imaginary world in which my sister and our beautiful black nurse Ozzie existed, separate, almost invisible to anyone but our little cabalistic circle of three.
       That world, that charmed time, ended with the abrupt transference of the family to St. Louis. This move was preceded, for me, by an illness diagnosed by a small Mississippi town doctor as diphtheria with complications. It lasted a year, was nearly fatal, and changed my nature as drastically as it did my physical health. Prior to it, I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature. During the illness, I learned to play, alone, games of my own invention.
 
—Tennessee Williams, chapter 2, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 11.


       My adolescent problems took their most violent form in a shyness of a pathological degree. Few people realize, now, that I have always been and even remain in my years as a crocodile an extremely shy creature—in my crocodile years I compensate for this shyness by the typical Williams heartiness and bluster and sometimes explosive fury of behavior. In my high school days I had no disguise, no façade. And it was at University City High School that I developed the habit of blushing whenever anyone looked me in the eyes, as if I harbored behind them some quite dreadful or abominable secret.
[...]
       Literally, from that incident on, and almost without remission for the next four or five years, I would blush whenever a pair of human eyes, male or female (but mostly female since my life was spent mostly among members of that gender) would meet mine. I would feel my face burning with a blush.

—Tennessee Williams, chapter 2, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 17.
 
 
[...] Dad announced that he could no longer afford to keep me in college and that he was getting me a job in a branch of the International Shoe Company.
       This job was to last for three years, from 1931 to 1934. I received the wage of sixty-five dollars a month—it was the depression.
       Well, truly, I would take nothing for those three years because I learned, during them, just how disgraceful, to the corporations, is the fate of the white-collar worker.
       I got the job because Dad had procured for the top boss his position at the Continental Shoemakers branch. (This was still before the poker game and the decline and fall of “Big Daddy.”) Of course the bosses were anxious to find an excuse to get me out. They put me to the most tedious and arduous jobs. I had to dust off hundreds of shoes in the sample rooms every morning; then I had to spend several hours typing out factory orders. Digits, nothing but digits!

—Tennessee Williams, chapter 3, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 36.
  
  
       There were years when I was in the shoe company and summers when I was a student at the State University of Missouri when my sister and I spent nearly all our evenings together aside from those which I spent with Hazel.
       What did we do those evenings, Rose and I? Well, we strolled about the business streets of University City. It was a sort of ritual with a pathos that I assure you was never caught in Menagerie nor in my story “Portrait of Girl in Glass,” on which Menagerie was based.

—Tennessee Williams, chapter 7, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 120.
  d
d
I have known some people who were indifferent to Tennessee, and some who disliked him, but I have never known anyone who liked him and did not feel the need to protect him. A great deal of the time in those unsuccessful days he was literally punch-drunk from writing. No one I have encountered any place, at any time, in any field of endeavor, labored as intently as he did; and the desire to prevent his walking straight into the wall when he got up from his typewriter, the longing to remind him of some of the meals he was forgetting, was irresistible.
 
—Donald Windham, Introduction, Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham 1940–1965, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, p. v.
    
 
The Glass Menagerie

[53 Arundel Place, Clayton, Mo.]
[April 22, 1943]
Dear Donnie:
       I am out of cigarettes and very nervous so I can not write much of a letter. i have been writing with tigerish intensity on "The Gentleman Caller" every day, and today I felt like I was going to just blow up, so I quit. What I am doing to that quiet little play I don't know.

—Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham 1940–1965, edited by Donald Windham, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, p. 60.
 

       On the Broadway opening night of Menagerie, the performers took bow after bow, and finally they tried to get me up on the stage. I was sitting in the fourth row, and somebody extended a hand to me and I went up on the stage. And I felt embarrassed; I don’t think I felt any great sense of triumph. I think writing is continually a pursuit of a very evasive quarry, and you never quite catch it.
        In the essay that accompanies one of the printed editions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I talk very honestly about my goal in writing, what I want to do. That goal is just somehow to capture the constantly evanescent quality of existence. When I do that, then I have accomplished something, but I have done it, I think, relatively few times compared to the times I have attempted it. I don’t have any sense of being a fulfilled artist. And when I was writing Menagerie, I did not know that I was capturing it, and I agree with Brooks Atkinson that the narrations are not up to the play. I didn’t feel they were at the time, either. Thank God, in the 1973 television version of it, they cut the narrations down. There was too much of them. And the play itself holds without much narration.

       Mother came up to Chicago for the opening there of Menagerie in the late December of 1944. I don’t recall her precise reaction to the play but it was probably favorable, for Mother was very concerned with my long-delayed success. I do recall her coming backstage after the performance which she attended and paying her respects to Laurette.
       “Well, Mrs. Williams,” said Laurette, briefly scrutinizing Edwina Williams in her dressing-room mirror, “how did you like yourself?”
       “Myself?” said Mother innocently.
[...]
       In Chicago the first night, no one knew how to take Menagerie, it was something of an innovation in the theatre and even though Laurette gave an incredibly luminous, electrifying performance, and people observed it. But people are people, and most of them went home afterward to take at least equal pleasure in their usual entertainments. It took that lovely lady, Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, a lot of time to sell it to them, to tell them it was special.

—Tennessee Williams, chapter 3, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1975, p. 84, 85.

  

 

Comprehension Check

Scene 1

  • Why does Tom say "I know what's coming!" when Amanda says "Why, I remember one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—" (7)?
Scene 2
  • Where does Amanda think Laura has been going "every day for the past six weeks" (13)?
  • Why does Jim call Laura Blue Roses (17)?
Scene 3
  • Who is "that insane Mr. Lawrence" whose "hideous book" Amanda confiscated from Tom and returned to the Library (21)?
  • Does Tom go every night to the movies? What is the evidence?
            

 

Study Questions

  • What is the difference between “a stage magician” (4), stage magic and/or Tom?

  • What deceptions occur in the play?

  • Symbols and symbolism
    • Tom, "the narrator of the play, and also a character in it" (5), declares in his opening monologue that he has "a poet's weakness for symbols" as he explains the gentleman caller: "I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for." Examine the symbolic use of Jim and other things in this play. What resonances do they have when read in connection to other elements and to the play's themes and preoccupations? Look at some of the following:
      • The Wingfield apartment
      • The fire escape
      • The portieres
      • The thirties ("that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy" 5)
      • "A blown-up photograph of the father" (4)
      • Laura; Laura's being crippled (xviii, 17, 81)
      • Tom; Shakespeare; clerk
      • Jim; the gentleman caller
      • Amanda
      • Telephone
      • Books, novels; poems, poetry
      • The movies
      • Continental Shoemakers (23); warehouse
      • Cigarette; smoking
      • Glass; colored glass; the glass animals
      • The Victrola
      • Music
      • Dance, dancing; the Paradise Dance Hall
      • Moon
      • Electricity; fluorescent light
      • Candle(s)
  • Racism
    • How do you explain the presence (or absence?) of black people in this play? Consider, for example, these lines:
      • AMANDA [rising]. No, sister, no, sister—you be the lady this time and I’ll be the darky. (7)
      • We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house. (8)
    • Is Amanda racist?
    • What are the benefits or drawbacks of reading racial issues in this play historically versus ahistorically?
  • What tricks does Tom have in his pocket and what things does he have up his sleeve (4)?
  • Tennessee Williams mentions the play's "considerably delicate or tenuous material" (xix). What might these be?
  • Nonrealism
    • The play's nonrealism is emphasized frequently, sometimes overtly, at others more subtly through various means in the reading text. What effect do these unrealistic and often self-reflexive elements have on the reading and/or theatrical experience? Look at how the following could be staged and with what impact.
      • Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. (xix)
      • The lighting in the play is not realistic. (xxi)
      • The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. (3)
      • Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. (5)
      • [She addresses Tom as though he were seated in the vacant chair at the table though he remains by the portieres. He plays this scene as though reading from a script.]
  • Why is the play divided into only scenes rather than acts and scenes as is common?
        

    


 

Review Sheet

Characters

Amanda Wingfield – "A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place. Her characterization must be carefully created, not copied from type. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at. Certainly she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her slight person" (xviii); "my [Tom's] mother, Amanda" (5); "One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!—gentlemen callers!" (8); "When I was a girl in Blue Mountain" (45)

Laura Wingfield – "A childhood illness has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace. This defect need not be more than suggested on the stage. Stemming from this, Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf" (xviii); "my [Tom's] sister, Laura" (5); "Resume your seat, little sister—I want you to stay fresh and pretty—for gentlemen callers!" (7); "I said pleurosis—he [Jim] thought that I said Blue Roses! So that's what he walways called me after that" (17)

Tom Wingfield – "A poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity" (xviii); "Tom enters, dressed as a merchant sailor" (4); "I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it" (5); "I'm getting a cigarette" (7); "You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [...] You [Amanda] think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that—celotex interior! with—fluorescent—tubes!" (23); "I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box" (96)

Jim, James Delaney O'Connor, the gentleman caller – "A nice, ordinary, young man" (xviii); "He is the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from [...] I [Tom] am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for" (5); "When I [Laura] had that attack of pleurosis—he asked me what was the matter when I came back" (17); "This young man's position is that of a shipping clerk, Mother" (44); "[salary] approximately eighty-five dollars a month" (45); "James D. O'Connor. The D. is for Delaney" (45)
father – "A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room [...] It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. he is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say 'I will be smiling forever'" (4); "There is a fifth character in the play who doesn't appear except in this larger-than-life-size photograph over the mantel. This is our father who left us a long time ago He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town...The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: 'Hello—Goodbye!" and no address" (5)

  

 

Setting

Time – "Now and in the Past" (xvii)


Place

St. Louis, Missouri – "Scene: An alley in St. Louis" (xvii)
    Wingfield apartment – "The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower-middle-class populations and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism" (3); "The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic" (3)
        living room – "Nearest the audience is the living room, which also serves as a sleeping room for Laura, the sofa unfolding to make her bed" (3–4); "In an old-fashioned whatnot in the living room are seen scores of transparent glass animals. A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room" (4); "Also hanging on the wall, near the photograph, are a typewriter keyboard chart and a Gregg shorthand diagram. An upright typewriter on a small table stands beneath the charts" (4)
        dining room – "Just beyond, separated from the living room by a wide arch or second proscenium with transparent faded portieres (or second curtain), is the dining room" (4); "Amanda and Laura are seated at a drop-leaf table. Eating is indicated by gestures without food or utensils" (6)
        kitchenette



 

Vocabulary


stage directions

scene

stage

curtain

set
expressionism

setting

props

dialogue

syntax

diction; denotation, connotation

repetition

literal language

figurative language
trope; device

metaphor

simile

overstatement

understatement

image

imagery

allegory, allegorical

symbol, symbolic, symbolism

gesture

facial expressions

mood

tone

theme
memory

American dream and reality

family relationships

guilt

freedom

theater arts

difference

modern economy

individualism


Character, Characterization

major characters
minor characters

protagonist

antagonist

stock or type characters
stereotypes
foil
personality
direct presentation of character
indirect presentation of character; indirect characterization
show v. tell
consistency in character behavior
motivation
plausibility of character: is the character credible? convincing?
flat character
round character, multidimensional character
static character, unchanged
developing character, dynamic character, active character
direct methods of revealing character:

character flaw(s)


Plot

Freytag's Pyramid

linear, nonlinear, linearity

beginning, middle, end
inciting incident
chance, coincidence

plot, main plot, minor plot, subplot, underplot, double plot,

story
conflict, internal conflict, external conflict, clash of actions, clash of ideas, clash of desires, clash of wills, major, minor, emotional, physical

suspense (suspenseful)

mystery (mysterious, mysteriously, mysteriousness)
dilemma
surprise (surprising, surprised)
plot twist
ending

artistic unity (unified)
time sequence
exposition
in medias res
complication (complicate)
rising action
falling action
crisis
climax
anti-climax (anti-climactic)
conclusion (conclude, conclusive)
resolution (resolve, resolving)
denouement
flashback, retrospect
back-story
foreshadowing
causality
plot structure
initiating incident
epiphany

recognition

reversal
catastrophe
disclosure, discovery
movement, shape of movement
trajectory
change
focus

 

 

 

Sample Student Responses to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie

Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Kanokwan Surapornchai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 10, 2009

Reading Response 1

 

Title

 

Text

 

 

 

 

 

            

 


 


 

 


Links
Interviews
Articles

 

Media
  • "I Remember One Sunday Afternoon in Blue Mountain," The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany, performed by Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Zachary Quinto, The Glass Menagerie Broadway (2014; 1:18 min.)

  • "Blue Roses," The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany, performed by Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Zachary Quinto, The Glass Menagerie Broadway (2014; 1:30 min.)

  • The Glass Menagerie, directed by Julia Sandra Rand, performed by Julia Sandra Rand, Michael Gurrieri, Lindsay Adkins, Bradley Beach Arts Council (2016; 1 hr. 44:00 min.)

  • The Glass Menagerie, directed by Michael Elliott, performed by Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook, and Barbara Loden, CBS Playhouse (1966; 1 hr. 44:00 min.)

  • The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman, performed by Joanne Woodward, John Malkovich, and Karen Allen Cineplex Odeon Films (1981; 2 hr. 8:48 min.)

  • The Glass Menagerie, directed by Christopher Scott, performed by Saundra Santiago, Richard Prioleau, and Olivia Washington, Masterworks Theatre Company (2015; 2 hr. 20:27 min.)

  • "The 1930s," America in Color, Smithsonian (2017; 48:15 min.)

  • "Tennessee Williams: No Refuge But Writing," The Morgan Library and Museum (2018; 3:44 min.)

  • "Tennessee Williams," The Dick Cavett Show, KCBS TV Los Angeles (1974 interview; 45:44 min.)

  • Christopher Bigsby, "Tennessee Williams: Radical of the Heart," Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2005 lecture; 1 hr. 3:04 min.)
 


Tennessee Williams

 

Reference


Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. Introduction by Robert Bray, New Directions, 1945.


Williams, Tennessee. Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham 1940–1965. Edited by Donald Windham, Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.


Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday, 1975.

 

 

Further Reading


Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Little, Brown, 1985.


Williams, Tennessee. "Portrait of a Girl in Glass." One Arm and Other Stories, New Directions, 1967, pp. 97–112.

 


 

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Last updated November 28, 2020