Plot Summary:

Amanda, Tom, and Laura lived in a small cramped apartment in St. Louis. Amanda harasses Tom about going out to the movies every night and reminds Laura to stay fresh and pretty for gentleman callers. When Amanda discovers that Laura has not been going to her business classes, she begins to panic about Laura’s future. Amanda talks Tom into inviting a nice young man from the warehouse over for dinner at the apartment. When nice Jim O’Connor comes to dinner, Laura recognizes him as the boy that she had a crush on high school. Laura becomes so sick that she has to be excused from dinner. After dinner, Amanda tells Jim to keep Laura company in the parlor. Initially Laura is petrified but she begins to feel more comfortable around him as they reminisce over high school days. Then Jim dances with Laura and kisses her, only to reveal that he is engaged to another woman and must leave. Amanda believes that Tom has purposely made them look like fools and Tom leaves just as his father had. At the end of the play, Tom realizes that he will never be able to forget the sister he left behind.

Character Sketches:

Tom Wingfield-

The son of Amanda Wingfield. He is the sole economic supporter of the Wingfield family. Tom is a poet who is employed at a shoe factory and spends his nights drinking in order to escape.

Amanda Wingfield-

Mother of Tom and Laura. She is a middle-aged southern belle whose husband had abandoned her. She spends her time reminiscing about the past and nagging her children. She is completely dependent on Tom for financial security and holds him fully responsible for Laura’s future.

Laura Wingfield:

Daughter of Amanda Wingfield. She is hypersensitive, crippled young woman who spends all her time in a world of glass ornaments and phonograph records. Though she tries several times to participate in the outside world, she is too fragile.

Jim O’Connor:

Gentleman Caller. Jim is a friend of Tom’s who works at the warehouse. he is the only outside connection for Laura and Amanda. Though he finds Laura unique and special, he is engaged to a woman named Betty.

In The Glass Menagerie, none of the character are capable of living in the present. All of the characters retreat into their separate worlds to escape the brutalities of life. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various escape mechanisms to avoid reality. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old phonograph records. Even when it appears that Laura is finally overcoming her shyness and hypersensitivity with jim, she instantly reverts back to playing the Victrola once he tells her he’s engaged. She is unable to cope with the truth so she goes back to her fantasy world of records and glass figurines. Laura can only live a brief moment in the real.

Amanda is obsessed with her past as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of that “one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain” when she received seventeen gentleman callers(Williams 32). The reader cannot even be sure that this actually happened. 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 45). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is “crippled” and then she resorts back to denial. She doesn’t perceive anything realistically. She believes that this gentleman caller, Jim, is going to be the man to rescue caller, “You couldn’t be satisfied with just sitting home,” when, in fact, Laura had preferred that(Williams). Amanda cannot distinguish reality from illusion. When Jim arrives, Amanda is dressed in the same girlish frock that she wore on the day that she met their father and she regresses to her childish, giddy days of entertaining gentleman callers. Amanda chooses to live in the past

Tom escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. He cannot handle his menial job and his unsatisfying home life. He believes that the atmosphere is stifling and damaging to his creative capacities. Finally, when he does leave the Wingfield apartment, he is still trapped by his memories of the past of Laura. As a result, 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 remembers the days when he was a hero. He is also not satisfied with the present–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 83). Tom realizes that he ” was valuable to him [Jim] as someone who could remember his former glory” (Williams 84). When Jim reminisces about his lead in the operetta, Laura asks him to sign her program and he signs it “with a flourish” (Williams 116). Only by entering into the Wingfield’s world of illusion can Jim become this high school hero again. As the scene progresses, Jim regresses to his high school days of wooing women ad he woos the innocent Laura by dancing with her and kissing her. However, this might as well be an illusion, because the reality of the situation is he is engaged.

I feel that Amanda’s children’s fate is her own fault. Her constant living in the past generates devastating consequences for her children, crippling them psychologically and seriously inhibiting their own quests for maturity and self realization. Because Amanda lives in a fantasy world of dreamy recollections, her children cannot escape from this illusory world either. Amanda suffers from a impulse to withdraw into a lost time. The present exists for these men and women only to a degree that it can be verified by constant references to the past. This explains why none o the characters are successful in their present situations. The thing was that they can live is through the past, but the problem is that the past no longer exists. While these characters stay the same, the rest of the world is changing. This explains the characters’ repeated failures in the outside world of the present.

However, though Jim is pulled into the Wingfields’ illusory world, Jim still maintains a sense of reality. This accounts for why Jim is such a “stumblejohn” in the Wingfield apartment. He is more realistic than the others and is clumsy in a world of such delicacy. Likewise, Laura’s fragility and hypersensitivity prevent her from participating in the outside world, a world that is harsh and brutal. Just as Jim was clumsy in Laura’s irrational fear of the outside, known as agoraphobia, explains why she cannot successfully enter the outside world. The major characters in this play are so warped and their lives so distorted and perverted by fantasies that each is left with only broken fragments of what might have been. Hence forth…the broken fragments of a Glass Menagerie.