The Glass Menagerie As A Memory Play

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play because both its style and its contents are shaped and
inspired
by memory. Tom is the narrator of the play. The play comes from his memory. In a memory play the
playwright enjoys unusual freedom of convention. Tom as a narrator explains to the audience that the
playwright usually provides the audience with the illusion that looks like truth. Here he means that the
regular dramatist creates a dramatic illusion on the stage which the audience takes for the truth. But he
will not follow the conventional tricks of the dramatist. He will offer the audience truth under the pleasant
cover of illusion. Under the guise of dramatic illusion, he will tell the audience the story of his own life as
memory flashbacks. Here it is hinted that the play is not realistic, but is being presented through the
memory of Tom.
A memory play focuses on the past. All the characters in the play live in the past; they “turn back time”.
Living in their memories they are trying to escape from the responsibility of dealing with the present.
Tom narrates his recent past from the chaos of 'the latter years of World War 11. Amanda is haunted by
the memory of her youth. She was an extremely popular and pretty young lady but she lost her chances.
Now she refuses to understand life and reality. She does not let her children face reality like adults. With
this denial of the truth she prevents Tom from becoming a man. She doesn’t even ' accept the fact that
Laura is crippled.
The play is also a memory of Laura’s infancy. She is like a little girl living in her own world of dreams
and illusions. She is very shy and fragile. As she is a cripple, she suffers from a terrible inferiority
complex. She is so nervous and ashamed that she has trouble facing people from the outside world. She
rarely goes out of the house, and spends her time by listening to phonograph records and playing with her
collection of miniature animals her “glass menagerie.” The beauty of the glass menagerie fascinates her
and helps forget the pain of real life. also as a reference in scene four, when she slips in the fire escape
before leaving the apartment , depicts how she is not ready to face the outside world.
Another memory is of the father, who had left the family sixteen years ago to travel long
distances. He never appears onstage but he played a significance role in the lives of Amanda,
Laura, and Tom. The phonograph and records that he left behind become part of the
fantasy world of Laura. His portrait is constant reminder of happiness in the past. The Glass
Menagerie is a memory play, and Tom makes it clear from the beginning that we are seeing
events through the lens of his memories, heightening emotions and drawing out significances as
memories do. We are also privy, however, to memories within memories – the recollections of
Amanda as she speaks of her girlhood, and her futile attempts to relive it. Even Jim is trapped in
a cycle of memory, as he yearns to recapture the glory days of his high school career and
becomes attached to those who remember him from that time.
Laura is actually the means whereby we know and better understand the other characters. Tom
is gentle with her, protecting her even though she is the older sibling. He understands her
innocence and accepts her limitations. He also concedes to her intercessions between him and
his mother. When Jim, the only boy she ever liked, “an emissary from a world of reality” (401),
accidentally breaks the horn of her unicorn, her favorite glass ornament, changing it from
magical to ordinary, Laura’s concern is for Jim. She does not want him to feel bad.
The play’s style may best be described as expressionistic—underlying meaning is emphasized

at the expense of realism. The play’s lack of stylistic realism is further explained by the fact that
the story is told from Tom’s memory. As Tom puts it in the first scene itself, the fact that what we
are seeing is a memory play means that “it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In
memory everything seems to happen to music. ”
In the end, however, we are left with the haunting image of Tom’s last memories, as he
describes the figure of Laura following him through the rest of his guilt-stricken life. Generally,
Williams found realism to be a flat, outdated, and insufficient way of approaching emotional
experience. The glass menagerie, however, although drawn from memory, is not attempting to escape
its responsibility of dealing with the reality, but rather is drawn from real experience and does not need
to be constrained by the conventions of realism to convey truth. The despair of this character
circumstances clearly illustrates the theme of imprisonment. William makes it obvious that tom is
trapped from the exposition of the play as tom is both the narrator who escaped character and a
character in conflict. As he himself says, “I give truth in the form of disguise.” This shows that he doesn’t
believe in reality. He would rather just leave everything behind and get as far away as possible from the
WINGFIELD APARTMENT.
As a consequence, The Glass Menagerie is fundamentally a nonrealistic play. Distortion,

illusion, dream, symbol, and myth are the tools by means of which the action onstage is
endowed with beauty and meaning. The play is created by memory and nostalgia. The characters in
the play cannot be conscious human beings. For Torn, Amanda and Laura memory is the crippling force
that prevents them from finding happiness in the present.
Also an interesting piece of information, Being a” memory play”, this play has also some affinities with
Tennessee Williams’ own life. So far as the play is concerned, the likeness within The Glass Menagerie
and Tennessee Williams’ personal life are, the similarity between the playwright’s childhood name and
the narrator’s name, both of them live in St.Louis, Tennessee Williams also worked in a shoe factory and
dreamt to be a successful author. His father also emotionally abandoned them like Tom’s father” who
who was, as Tom says, "in love with long distances." The character of Amanda is
also a reflection of the playwright’s mother, who always wants to stick to the rituals of her bygone days.
Furthermore Laura, Tom’s shy and timid sister is also a replica of Williams’ elder sister Rose.
Williams’s own sister, Rose, was high spirited and exuberant as a child but suffered emotional
problems as she grew older. After high school she started business school with her bother. She
“could not cope with the workload” or her instructor’s criticism and stopped going, “without telling
her mother. Eventually she was institutionalized in 1937, and in 1943 doctors assured her
parents that a lobotomy would improve her condition, now diagnosed as schizophrenia. The
surgery reduced her rages but did not restore her sanity.
Even if Tom Wingfield, like his father, abandons his family, Tennessee Williams could not. His
family provided the material for his writing, and his writing provided the support for his family. In
1945 he assigned half of the royalties of The Glass Menagerie to his mother and assigned half
of the royalties of Summer and Smoke to Rose. In 1949 he arranged for Rose to be transferred
from the state hospital to a private sanatorium. Throughout his life he endeavored to improve
her comfort.
Thus memory is one of the recurrent themes of this play which the dramatist used to compelling his
desire to write a play based on the real life characters. Although, in The Glass Menagerie, the characters
are drawn from the playwright’s own memories and experiences but the events have not much
association with the events of playwright’s personal life .Actually he fictionalizes his memories and
constructs a new story. Thus the play achieves universality, and is not merely confined into the author’s
past but depicts the condition of the middle-class people in the American society during a period of
transformation and conflict.

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The Glass Menagerie is a memory play because both its style and its contents are shaped and

The play’s style may best be described as expressionistic—underlying meaning is emphasized

As a consequence, The Glass Menagerie is fundamentally a nonrealistic play. Distortion,

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