Analyze the character of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie.

In the list of characters at the start of the play, Amanda is introduced as 

A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place.

Amanda appears throughout the play as a lively garrulous character, but she is, essentially, lost. Deserted by her husband, trapped in a run-down St Louis apartment, she nevertheless spends her days chatting brightly, forever reminiscing about her sparkling youth in the South, constantly exhorting her son Tom to improve himself and making plans for her daughter Laura’s future.

However all Amanda’s plans and ideas seem doomed to fail. For one thing, Laura is anything but the kind of bright vivacious young girl that she herself was, although she keeps on trying to mould her in her own image, conjuring up all manner of suitors for her.

Amanda appear foolish and almost cruel sometimes in her failure to accept what her daughter is really like, a quite pathologically shy character. Like her endless recollections of her youth, this might be cited as another example of the way that she refuses to face up to unpalatable reality, However, she is genuinely concerned for her daughter’s future and tries her best to get her settled. She does not shirk that responsibility. She is not so lost in her visions of the past that she cannot plan for the future, although she is unsuccessful.

Similarly, although Amanda always antagonizes her son by her constant nagging, it is understandable that she wants him to face practicalities and set his aims higher, for instance when she suggests he save up for a study course instead of frittering away money on smoking. She does appear quite self-righteous and moralistic when she attempts to censor his reading material, but it is the way she has been brought up, and generally people in that time who prided themselves on their respectable and genteel backgrounds, as Amanda unfailingly does, were not a little shocked by the level of sexual frankness to be found in the work of writers like D H Lawrence, whom Tom reads.

Amanda does manage to alienate her son altogether by the end of the play, it seems, but earlier, in a rare instance she opens up to him:

I know your ambitions do not lie in the warehouse, that like everybody in the whole wide world – you’ve had to – make sacrifices, but – Tom – Tom – life’s not easy, it calls for - Spartan endurance! There’s so many things in my heart that I cannot describe to you! I’ve never told you but I – loved your father…. (scene 4)

This is Amanda at her most vulnerable. She admits her constant heartache at the loss of her husband, who swept her off her feet and then turned out to be a worthless drifter. She shows, too, that she has understanding of Tom’s situation, she recognizes his needs and desires. Unfortunately, this rare moment of confidentiality between mother and son does not last long, but it does give a crucial glimpse of a different Amanda under her usual bright and often exasperating exterior.

Amanda has had to endure quite a lot in her life, but she tries not to give up. Her more admirable qualities are foregrounded at the end of the play. After Jim’s visit goes disastrously wrong and Tom leaves for good, she does what she can to comfort her daughter, and in doing so she gains a certain ‘dignity and tragic beauty' (scene 7). 

Why are Amanda's traits significant to the theme of The Glass Menagerie?

I think that Amanda's characterization is significant to the thematic development of the drama in a couple of ways.  The first is that her obsession with who she was, the nostalgia of the past she demonstrates, is representative of how the theme appearances vs. reality is illuminated.  Williams deliberately gives Amanda traits that prevent her from fully embracing who she is in the present in light of what she was in the past.  Amanda's crumbling present with her daughter, son, and the husband who abandoned them is in stark contrast to what her past was.  In showing how Amanda struggles to acknowledge this, there is a sense that Amanda lacks the understanding to see the present in the future without her clinging to the past.  At the same time, I think that Amanda's character as one clinging to Tom and demanding that he accept the duties she has placed on him ties into how the theme of desire colliding with duty develops over the course of the drama.  Amanda's insistence that Tom's duty is to the family, a family that drove her husband away and will soon do the same to Tom, is something that is both a part of her character and something that drives the drama to its final scene while helping to establish its exposition.  In this, Amanda's character traits become significant to the thematic development of the drama.

How is the character Amanda introduced in The Glass Menagerie?

Just after the curtain goes up, Tom gives us some brief details concerning each of the characters— including his mother, Amanda. But it's not until Amanda appears on stage that we get a good idea as to what kind of person she is. Straight away, we can see that she's a bit bossy, nagging Tom to eat his food in what she considers to be the correct manner. This is clearly a woman who exerts a great deal of control over her children by infantilizing them: trying her level best to keep them in a state of arrested development. By giving Tom lessons in etiquette, Amanda undoubtedly means well, but we can understand why Tom snaps at her ceaseless fussing.

Unlike her brother, Tom, the docile Laura is not in a position to resist her mother's constant nagging. She meekly does as she's told, practicing her shorthand and typing in the living room of the cramped apartment, in preparation for the vast hordes of gentleman callers that are supposedly going to turn up. Laura knows full well that this isn't going to happen, but Amanda's resolute that it will.

This reveals another one of Amanda's important character traits: her self-delusion. She's forever trapped in a fantasy world—in a dim and distant past when numerous eligible young gentlemen would beat a path to her door. She reminisces fondly about those long lost days, even though Tom and Laura must've heard all of her anecdotes at least a hundred times.

How would Amanda be characterized in a "prequel" to The Glass Menagerie?

I think that one could construct Amanda in a prequel through a variety of characterizations.  I would think that a part of this would be depicting her as a woman that upheld the standards of traditional femininity.  Her emphasis to Laura about her physical beauty, the presence of "gentlemen callers," and the entire notion that she creates for her children that she was the center of all attention represents a traditionalist notion of what it meant to be a woman.  I think that a part of this would be to construct her character as someone who would represent social popularity and power.  Amanda is quite happy conforming to a standard where women are power brokers based on their physical appearance and the stature they gain through social recognition.  I think that a prequel would explore this dynamic in her upbringing, reflecting this behavior encouraged by her own mother in much the same way that she encourages this in Laura.  At the same time, I think that a "prequel" might explore how power is seen in purely social terms and that personalized notions of identity are deferred for this social construction.  This would have to be part of her upbringing as it is such a part of how she carries herself throughout Williams' drama.