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What role does abandonment play in The Glass Menagerie and how does it affect the play's overall meaning?
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In "The Glass Menagerie," abandonment is pivotal, affecting each character deeply. The father's departure leaves the Wingfield family in hardship, setting the stage for Amanda's anxiety over Tom's potential desertion. Tom eventually leaves, echoing his father's actions. Laura experiences abandonment when Jim reveals his engagement after their intimate moment. This recurring theme highlights the unreliability of men and the necessity for women to rely on themselves, contrasting Amanda's dreams with harsh realities.
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie incorporates abandonment into the experiences of his three main characters—Amanda, Tom, and Laura—through the physical and the metaphysical. The first clear example of abandonment comes within Tom’s introduction to the play, in which he asserts that his and Laura’s father plays the fifth character, only present as a “larger-than-life-size photograph over the mantel” (scene 1). The father left long ago, abandoning his children, his wife, and his home, but even before his physical departure, it seems that he was already far from them through his characterization and career. “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,” Tom explains (scene 1). In this quotation, we learn that the father, long before he skipped town, abandoned his family through his work as a telephone man,...
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preferring to be mentally far away despite his family being nearby.
Similarly, we later find out that Laura has abandoned her schooling and instead spends her time walking the city. Her ties to the physical world are slowly disintegrating as she drifts farther and farther into the mystical world she seems to have in her head. She is abandoning the world as it is, where she is crippled, dependent, and alone save for her overbearing mother and loving but flighty brother. She flits closer to the idea of the glass menagerie she so adores rather than to the reality around her.
In contrast, Amanda clings more and more to her children as she senses their inclination toward abandoning her and the life she has shaped around them. Her son’s long absences and supposed vices wear at her, as she sees these as examples of him slipping away, much like her husband. She desperately tries to bring Laura closer to a life she believes she herself lived, with gentleman callers and respectable social connections, while she senses her daughter floating farther into her own imagination and delusion.
There is also abandonment on the part of Jim, when he suddenly introduces the fact that he is to be married to another after having kissed Laura. Laura’s and her mother’s visions of love and a life beyond her current situation are quickly extinguished as he departs.
Eventually we see Tom indeed abandon his mother and sister, but he can’t seem to extricate himself entirely from his emotional connections. He has left them physically but is struggling to bring his heart, mind, and memory with him. In his final monologue, he bursts out, “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” (scene 7). This suggests that perhaps the abandonment we see woven throughout the play is more dimensional than is laid out prior to this scene and asks us to re-examine our understanding of abandonment as it is referenced in the rest of the work, both in the physical and metaphysical senses.
The Wingfield family long ago endured abandonment when the father of the family left them. The father's abandonment of the family has resulted in their living in straightened circumstances and in Amanda's worry over her daughter, Laura, who walks with a limp. Laura and Amanda fear that Tom, like his father, will abandon them and he does at the end of the play. Therefore, the abandonment of the family by the father and the abandonment of the family by the son serve to bookend the play. In the middle, Laura is abandoned by Jim, who tells her that he is engaged after he kisses her.
The play is marked by the abandonment of Laura and Amanda by three men. The women are left, in the end, to fend for themselves and to withdraw further into their personal world, away from the wider world. The three examples of abandonment underscore the theme of the unreliability of men and the way in which women, who are ironically raised to rely on men, must in reality fend for themselves. The dreams Amanda harbors (first, when she is young, of her own marriage and later of the marriage of her daughter) are just that—dreams—and do not represent reality.