Glass menagerie 2

As the play The Glass Menagerie comes to a conclusion, I further analyzed the relationship between Amanda Wingfield, the mother, and her children, Tom and Laura. In my previous post, I wrote that Amanda is the main source of strife in the family, something that I still believe, but after finishing the play, I began to realize that she is not as bad as I painted her out to be.  She is constantly nagging Tom about life and how he needs to his sister because his “poor little sister has never received a single gentleman caller” (43). Though this causes the rift between her and Tom to widen and ultimately ends with Tom leaving the family; she means well. She is a product of a bygone age and is trying to enforce the old morals and values in a society that has no need for them. Her efforts to instill traditional values comes off as mocking and accusatory remarks. Such as when she states that “it seems extremely peculiar that you wouldn’t know your best friend was going to be married”(94). She fails to see that the world has changed and so have relationships. She is also not completely blind to her surroundings as she does that she knows how hopeless her situation is as a “deserted mother and a an unmarried sister [Laura] who is crippled with no job”(96).  Despite all of this she does truly care about her children as she would rather remain unmarried than the wife of a man who drinks, “old maids are better off than wives of drunkards” (44).

                After reading the play in its entirety, I have found a new sense of appreciation for Amanda. I fully understand where she comes from and why she acts so from my own personal experiences of being from a family of immigrants. Everybody desperately wants to hold onto old world values as much as possible and hope that the younger generation will carry them to their children. That way, even when they have nothing left, they can at least pass down the morals and traditions from the life they once had.

The Glass Menagire:acts 1-4

While reading the play The Glass Menagerie I cannot help but notice the obvious strife between the mother, Amanda, and her children, Tom and Laura. They live in “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units” which emphasizes their own misfortune and poverty; a key factor to the disconnect between Amanda and Tom (3).  Their mother is constantly trying to relive her glory days through her daughter, Laura. Amanda constantly insists that it’s “time for our [Laura’s] gentlemen callers to start arriving” but they never arrive (10).  Unfortunately Laura can never fulfill her mother’s hopes and dreams, leaving her to be viewed as a failure. Moreover, Amanda is in denial about her own daughters physical state, as she ignores the fact that her daughter is crippled and states” You’re not crippled, you just have a little defect- hardly noticeable, even” (17). Since Amanda cannot relive her glory days through her daughter, she continuously dwells on the past, even going as far to think as far back as a high school crush. Though Laura isn’t the only person who has a strained relationship. Since Tom is the only, if not the main, source of income of the house Tom obviously feels more entitled, but is constantly reminded by his mother that no such thing exists for him. It is because of his family that he stays at his job at the show factory, even though he would prefer “somebody pick up a crowbar and batter out my [Tom] brains” rather than return to work (23).

                The entire time reading the first four scenes, I was eerily reminded of a novella called Maggie: Girl of the Streets. They both show how poverty affects people and their behavior. It becomes apparent that the stress of taking care of his family single handedly is too much to cope with. Something that can easily be translated into the reality of the vicious cycle of poverty.