The Glass Menagerie Themes

In The Glass Menagerie, Tom feels confinement from being stuck in an uninspiring job, cramped into a small apartment with his family, and unable to see the world or have adventures. Amanda is simil...

In The Glass Menagerie, duty and responsibility largely arise from family. The play examines the conflict between one’s obligations and one’s real desires, suggesting that being true to...

In The Glass Menagerie, family means obligations. This play raises questions of duty and responsibility to your other family members, and for the most part in gender specific roles. We see that it...

In The Glass Menagerie, memory plays an important part, both thematically and in terms of the play’s presentation. Thematically, we see the detrimental effects of memory in the form of Amanda...

In The Glass Menagerie, weakness is linked to fragility, which comes to mean both beauty and breakability. While Laura’s shyness and fragility keep her in her own little world of equally frag...

In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda retreats from reality by denial and deliberately deluding herself as to the true nature of things. She refuses to see that her daughter is crippled or her son a write...

In The Glass Menagerie, dreams of the future are the source of conflict, primarily when one character’s dream doesn’t match up with another’s. While Amanda wants her children to f...

In The Glass Menagerie, abandonment refers to a member of the family abandoning the family unit, and leaving others behind to fend for themselves. The play deals a little with the moral implication...

In The Glass Menagerie, marriage is used as a tool rather than a celebration of love. Amanda believes that marriage is a necessary step for her daughter to live comfortably, to be supported by a ma...

In The Glass Menagerie, gender roles play a large part in dictating the future plans of each character. Laura must get married because she is a girl; Tom should take business classes because he is...

In The Glass Menagerie, love is tricky. We’re never really sure if love is genuine, or convenient, if it’s really love, or whether it’s just infatuation. The closest thing there i...

In The Glass Menagerie, alcoholism is not major or explicit, yet becomes a symbol for all undesirable activities. Amanda uses alcohol as an umbrella to cover any un-ambitious activities that her so...