Discussion Topic
The Glass Menagerie: Play Type and Title Meaning
Summary:
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is aptly titled to reflect the fragility and isolation of its characters, particularly Laura Wingfield, who is symbolized by her glass animal collection. These delicate figurines represent Laura's vulnerability and uniqueness, as well as the illusory world she and her family inhabit. The play is a memory play, emphasizing emotional truth over realism, with Tom Wingfield narrating from his recollections. The title underscores themes of fragility, isolation, and the quest for connection in a harsh world.
What does the title The Glass Menagerie mean?
The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams in 1944, derives its title from the collection of small glass animals that belongs to Laura Wingfield, an extremely frail, shy, and reclusive young woman, who spends most of her time attending to her glass collection.
The glass animals are symbolic of Laura's physical and emotional fragility. Laura is physically disabled—according to Williams's character description, "one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace"—and she lives in her own world of loneliness, dreams, and imagination, almost wholly estranged from reality.
Laura is self-conscious, has a strong sense of inferiority, and finds it almost impossible to come to terms with the world in which she lives, either within her own family or in the world at large. As her brother Tom says, "She lives in a world of her own―a world of―little glass ornaments...She plays old phonograph records and—that's about...
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all" (scene 5).
The play of The Glass Menagerie evolved from a short story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," which Williams wrote in 1941 and which provides further insight into Laura's character. In the short story, Tom says about Laura,
She made no positive motion toward the world but stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move.
In scene 6 of the play, Jim O'Connor, one of Tom's high school classmates and now a coworker, "the only one at the warehouse with whom I was on friendly terms," (scene 6) comes to dinner at the Wingfield's house. Laura remembers Jim as the only boy she liked in high school, although he barely knew she existed, and she's too overwhelmed to sit at the dinner table with him.
After dinner, Laura overcomes her shyness to sit alone with Jim on the couch in the living room and reminisce about high school, and she shows him her glass animal collection. "Mother calls them a glass menagerie!" she says (scene 7). Laura lets Jim hold her favorite, a unicorn.
JIM: Unicorns, aren't they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome (scene 7).
Jim later kisses Laura and even talks her into dancing with him, but during their dance they bump into a table and knock the unicorn to the floor, breaking the horn off the glass animal.
LAURA. I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish !
[They both laugh.] Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns (scene 7).
The symbolism of the broken unicorn becomes clear when Jim tells Laura that he's engaged to be married, and is further emphasized when Laura gives Jim the broken unicorn as "a souvenir" (scene 7), a symbol of her broken heart and her broken life.
Laura then retreats into her own familiar world. "She rises unsteadily and crouches beside the Victrola to wind it up" (Stage directions, scene 7) and doesn't say another word to Jim.
Justify the title of the play "The Glass Menagerie."
In The Glass Menagerie, the title symbolizes Laura, the crippled daughter around whom the play develops. The different animals in her collection express the various aspects of her personality, and the ways in which they catch the light reveal Laura's changing moods.
At a more factual level, Laura can connect to her glass animals much more easily than she can relate to the real world. One particular piece -the unicorn- is her favorite. Laura unconsciously identifies with the unicorn because, in their respective environments, they are both unique. Besides the parallelism between the menagerie's fragility and her own physical and emotional weakness, Laura is totally different from other girls, just as the unicorn is supposed to feel isolated because it does not belong in any known species.
When Jim, "the gentleman caller," accidentally drops the unicorn, its horn breaks. This turns it into an ordinary animal that will now be able to take its place in an imaginary animal community. Along the same lines, the fact that Jim has persuaded Laura to dance with him has turned her into an ordinary girl enjoying the simple pleasures of ordinary life.
While this is a fleeting moment, it somehow implies a turning point in Laura's life. She now knows that she can lead a normal life. It will be her decision to withdraw into her dream world once again or to take courage to fend for herself.
Why is The Glass Menagerie an appropriate title for the play?
"The Glass Menagerie" is the perfect title for the play as Laura's collection of glass animals is a major symbol in the play. Tennessee Williams used a LOT of symbols in the play (the victrola, the dad's portrait, the ballroom outside, etc.), but this collection underlies one of his major themes. In many of his plays, Williams is interested in what happens to society's outcasts. Certainly, Laura is one of those outcasts. Because of her handicap, she developed into an extremely shy young woman. A very fragile young woman. Just like her glass animals, in whom she finds comfort and escape.
One of the most poignant moments in the play comes when she talks to Jim about the unicorn, her favorite piece. He asks about them being "extinct in the modern world." He may have been talking about Laura - her type does not have a place in the modern world either. After they dance a bit, the table is bumped and the unicorn loses its horn. Laura assures Jim that it is all right, that now the unicorn may feel less "freakish" and will be able to play with the other horses. The hope may have been that Jim was able to get Laura to also be less "freakish" and connect with someone outside of the immediate family. Unfortunately, that hope is dashed when it is discovered that Jim as a fiance.
What type of play is The Glass Menagerie?
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. In fact, it is the first memory play, defining the conventions of the genre. In his introductory stage directions, Tennessee Williams specifies that memory is not realistic and "takes a lot of poetic license." The factual details are not important; what matters to memory is the emotions that were aroused.
When Tom Wingfield enters, he is dressed as a merchant sailor. This signifies that he is narrating the play from memory, some time after its events are over, since he finally escapes from home to join the merchant navy. In his opening monologue, Tom claims to be the opposite of an illusionist: he delivers truth "in the pleasant disguise of illusion." He then goes on to reiterate Williams's points about the nature of a memory play, this time going on to emphasize the importance of music in creating the emotional atmosphere:
The play is memory. 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. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.
Since The Glass Menagerie launched Williams's career in 1944, various other works, including plays by Brian Friel and Harold Pinter, have been described by critics as memory plays. The term, however, has generally been used to describe a mental atmosphere which resembles that of The Glass Menagerie, rather than to indicate the use of a set of theatrical conventions.