The Glass Menagerie....

 The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams was an intersting and sad read for me. I found that all the characters in the play write were all suffering from loneliness and from broken dreams. They are long-delayed but always expecting something that they can live for. With the absense of the Man of the house who abandonded his family to fend for them selves creates the main setting for everyones broken dreams and self-esteem. "He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town..."(5) Even though the father abondonded his family they still kept a portriat of him on the mantel. Amanda who plays the mother is very hard on her two grown children. She pokes and pokes at them to better themselves for their family and their future. "What are we going to do, what is going to become of us, what is the future?"(12) Her daughter Laura has low self esteem and never finishes anything she starts. She didn't finish school because she was self-conscious about herself when she had pleurosis. She did poorly on her tests and therefore never went further in her study's. She pretty much excluded her self from the social scene. In this she does not have any gentlemen callers banging at her door. This worries her mother Amanda. She worries that her daughter Laura will become a lonely old maid. But Laura does leave the home during the day and explores the city. she takes long walks and goes to the musuem and visits the bird houses at the Zoo. She goes to the movies sometimes and she spends her afternoons in the Jewel Box, a big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers. She finds beauty and wonder in her little glass collection of ornaments so delicate like her.

As for her son Tom he had to take the role of the man of the house. He took up working in a warehouse basement making shoe's. "You think I want to spend fifty-five years down ther in that-celotex interior! with-fluorescent-tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains-than go back mornings! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever!"(23) Amanda, Toms mother thinks that he is selfish. That all he thinks about is his self. But Tom states that if he were selfish he would be long gone just like his father was, to leave her and her sister to pick up the broken peices of their lives. Tom compares his life there at home as being nailed shut into a coffin. "You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in the hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?"(27)

This is very sad to read. It is such a grey and somber life for the three of them. Amanda wants her daughter to find a man to marry to take care of her. That is the only way she see's that her daughters future will prosper. She never mentions that she is intersted in her son Tom finding someone to tie down with and make him happy. She only focuses on Tom helping find his sister Laura a gentlemen caller. And that mean while Tom should continue supporting them until then. "I mean that as soon as Laura has got somebody to take care of her, married, a home of her own,independent-why, then you'll be free to go wherever you please, on land, on sea, whichever way the wind blows you! But until that time you've got to look out for your sister. I don't say me because I'm old and don't matter! I say for your sister because she is young and dependent."(35) That is so sad that Tom has this preasure put on him, but also sad that Amanda feels that she does not matter to anyone. This is all the damage that the abscent father has put on his family. Three very lonely and lost people trying to find their way into the existence of the world ahead of them. In the end Tom does leave his mother and sister to live his life. Still a lonely life full of wonder and worry of what he left behind. Wow...