The Glass Menagerie Analysis

Yes, we’ve got some flower stuff going on here. Amanda always talks about jonquils when referring to her past, when she herself was a pretty little Southern Belle surrounded by dozens of gent...

Tennessee Williams makes a big deal out of telling us all about the apartment. He wants us to know how the buildings are all stacked up like a beehive, so we get the sense of dehumanization and con...

The narrator is an older Tom, some years after the scenes that are played out. He defines the way in which the play is presented here, as a "memory scene." Not only does the narrator guide us throu...

We say ‘tragedy’ because things don’t really work out so well in the end. Family drama, well, that’s pretty self-explanatory, what with the family and the drama and all.

The tone of this play is the product of its narrator. Because Tom tells us about the play by looking back from a rather sad state, the scenes are necessarily imbued with narrator Tom’s emotio...

We thought we would let a quote do the talking here. Here we go: "Tom appears at the top of the alley. After each solemn boom of the bell in the tower, he shakes a little noisemaker or rattle as if...

The Glass Menagerie is a collection of small glass animals that Laura Wingfield obsesses over. She spends her time polishing and, well, obsessing, using the menagerie as a retreat from the real wor...

"Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." – e. e. cummingsThe epigraph comes from an e.e. cummings poem, "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond." What’s up with it? We...

Laura is painfully shy, Amanda lives in the past, Tom hates his life, and they have no father. Wow, things completely suck to start off. As with many initial situations, we get the idea that things...

Amanda commits to finding a gentleman caller for Laura.Amanda feels that her family is unfulfilled, so she focuses her energies on finding a husband for Laura. She anticipates Laura getting married...

A gentleman caller is needed; Laura is shy; Tom wants to leave the family.A gentleman caller comes; Laura stops being shy; Tom hints he is about to leave the family.The gentleman caller is engaged...

Tennessee Williams wrote an essay called "The Catastrophe of Success" after The Glass Menagerie made him famous, basically saying he hated himself for becoming one of the pampered elite and offerin...

Sex in the glass menagerie…Hmm…Well, there isn’t exactly any explicit banging up there on the stage, but things get pretty smokin’ hot between Laura and Jim. In fact, we bel...

D.H. Lawrence (Scene Three, dialogue line 16)Shakespeare: Tom’s nickname is Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Scene Seven, dialogue 296)e.e. cummings: "somewhere i have never traveled" (epigraph...