Essay on the Symbolism of the Menagerie in The Glass Menagerie

The symbolization of the zoological garden in The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, describes three appropriate characters, their dreams, and the harsh realities they face in a modern world. The Glass Menagerie exposes the lost dreams of a southern family and their desperate struggle to fly reality. Williams delectation of symbols adds depth to the play. The codswallop menagerie itself is a symbol Williams uses to represent the small lives of Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield and their inability to live in the present. The glass menagerie symbolizes Amanda Wingfields consuming need to cling to her past and her fulfilled fear of being alone. Amanda resents the barren neighborhood in which she lives so much that she needs to mentally escape from it by invented romance and self-deception. Williams describes her as having endurance and a kind of heroism, just she is also silly, snobbish, sometimes cruel and sometimes pathetic in her unthreatening bl undering(Williams 1865). Abandoned by her husband, Amanda comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious, southern life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by gentleman callers. Amanda is desperate to fancy her daughter, Laura, a husband, the kind of gentleman caller that she herself longed for, who would not have woebegone her. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestiges of gracious sustainment Gone completely I wasnt prepared for what the future brought me. (Williams 1893). She foists her illusions on her defiant children, lives in the past with pretensions to glory. Lauras collection of glass animals represents her hypersensitive nature and fragility. The glass menagerie is ... ...tle glass animals came to represent in my memory all the softest emotions that go away to the recollection of things past. They stood for all the tender things that relieve(Williams 64). They retreat into their own distinguish worlds to escape the harshness of life. Amanda, Laura, and Tom are incapable of living in the present. Mirroring the social and economic despair in the U.S., The Glass Menagerie is nostalgia for a past world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love, which celebrates, above all, the pitying need to dream. Works Cited and Consulted Crandall, George. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport Greenwood, 1996. Martin, Robert. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (Critical Essays on American Literature). New York Simon and Schuster, 1997. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York Random House, 1985.