Amanda hopes that Laura will get married to a nice man and settle down. She imagines all manner of gentleman callers for her and is thrilled when one does finally materialize, in the shape of Tom and Laura's old schoolmate, Jim O'Connor. However, things do not end the way she hoped, as Jim turns out to be already engaged.

What Amanda really tries to do is to mould Laura in her own image, as a popular and romantically-inclined young woman. Amanda endlessly harks back to her own days when she was a Southern Belle and a resounding social success, with a string of gentleman callers always at hand. This is the way she would like Laura to be. However, she wilfully ignores the fact that Laura is the complete opposite of what she was as a girl. Laura is painfully, indeed almost pathologically shy, who neither wants nor expects gentleman callers. She lives in her own little world, quite apart from society. Amanda has to admit she cannot fathom what kind of person Laura is:

I don't understand you, Laura. You couldn't be satisfied with just sitting home, yet whenever I try to arrange something for you, you seem to resist it. (scene 6)

Amanda does not realise, or cannot accept, that Laura is indeed content with staying at home, and suffers whenever she has to venture out into the world at large. However, it is true that she does respond warmly to Jim during his visit, and is devastated when it turns out that he cannot be with her after all.

Amanda often comes across as domineering in trying to arrange Laura's future. It is not surprising, though, that, as a mother, that she wants to see her daughter settled. She really just wants a happy, fulfilling life for her.

  In The Glass Menagerie, what does Amanda hope for Laura?

Like many a mother, Amanda hopes for a better life for Laura, her daughter. Having lost her husband to another life to which he fled, Amanda finds herself the matriarch of a family of broken dreams.  Her hopes of having married a wealthy, stable man now dashed, Amanda dreams of Laura's having "a gentleman caller" as she had when young. Perhaps, then, Laura can marry a man who can support her as well as her mother, Amanda hopes. For, she puts little faith in her son Tom, who escapes to the movies and in books by D. H. Lawrence.

Because Laura represents the potential for what Amanda calls "success and happiness" in the Wingfield family, she is the main character. However, as Laura's toying with the glass menagerie suggests, reality and truth in the Wingfield family is disguised as illusion. As Amanda tells Tom when she asks about Jim O'Connor,

"...the future become the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."

Moreover, she is unrealistic about Laura, refusing to listen to Tom's remarks that Laura is "peculiar" as she lives in a world of her own, and she is terribly shy.

In Scene 6, on the evening that the gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, arrives, Amanda strangely attires herself in an old, "girlish frock of yellow voile with a blue (the color of illusions) silk sash" that she wore when she herself had callers. And, she has dressed Laura in such a way that there is a "fragile, unearthly prettiness" to her. However, when she learns the caller's name, Laura recognizes it, and she rushes through the portieres "like a frightened deer."

Despite Laura's strange behavior and hers, Amanda wins Jim over with her charm as she is coy and shakes "her girlish ringlets." When a storms comes after the lights go out because Tom has not paid their bill, Laura draws herself up on the couch, clutching a blue pillow. Finally, though, Jim's warmth draws Laura from her timidity, and they converse about when they first met in high school. Then, while Jim's confidence and dreams of success encourage Laura, his revelation that he is engaged, shatters Laura's hopes and "the sky falls." The stage directions read,

The holy candles in the altar of LAURA's face have been snuffed out.

Amanda's hopes for Laura are dashed, and Tom and she argue about Jim; Tom says he was unaware of Jim's relationship with another woman. He angrily states that he is going out to the movies, and Amanda angrily tells him what is true of all of them, "You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions."

What does Amanda hope for Laura in The Glass Menagerie?

In a nutshell, Amanda wants Laura to be just like her when she was a young woman; she wants to mold Laura in her own image. Back in the day, Amanda was a social butterfly, with countless young men beating a path to her door. Unfortunately, things didn't work out all that well for Amanda as the man she came to marry eventually left her and her family.

In wanting Laura to be like her, Amanda is attempting to recreate happier times, when, as the archetypal Southern belle, she was the center of attention and never short of dashing young suitors. Though Amanda must also hope that if Laura does manage to find herself a nice guy and get married, then her marriage won't end the same way as hers.

The main problem here, however, is that Laura's absolutely nothing like her mother in terms of temperament or personality. It's all very well hoping that Laura will settle down one day, but the sad fact is that she's physically and emotionally crippled and therefore constitutionally incapable of living out her mother's dreams.

Simply put, Laura is way too fragile to fulfill the role that Amanda has in mind for her. But as Amanda doesn't really understand her complicated daughter, she's unable to see this.