"The Glass Menagerie"

Paper Summary:

Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie" exposes the conflicts between the old Southern values and the brute force of the new, Northern values. Some of those conflicts in society - with reference to women's place in America in the 1940s - are reviewed in this paper, in order to present a psychosocial background into the characters Amanda Wingfield and her troubled daughter, Laura Wingfield. It also looks at how Williams painted literary portraits of his female characters with the brushstrokes from his own family experiences (his sister was schizophrenic) and from the society that he observed all around him and about which he held strong opinions.

From the Paper:

"In the interest of offering further perspective on why Williams portrayed female characters in The Glass Menagerie the way he did, it is worth noting that when Williams was just five years of age, he suffered from a paralytic disease, causing him to be paralyzed. At seven, he was diagnosed with diphtheria. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, approached his difficulties during this period in his life by encouraging him to dream up stories and read. But Edwina is also reported to have been a pushy, sometimes smothering woman by a biographer writing for ThinkQuest (http://library.thinkquest.org). Indeed, his mother did not approve of him "...playing with other boys" and his father made him quit the University of Missouri to work in the shoe business. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Beattie, L. Elisabeth. "The Glass Menagerie: Psychological Realism." Retrieved February 18, 2008, from Masterplots, Revised Second Edition. MagillOnLiterature Plus.
• Brown, Lenora Inez. "When Autobiography Isn't." Court Theatre. Retrieved Feb. 18, 2008, From http://www.courttheatre.org/home/plays/0505/glass/playnotes1.shtml.
• Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. "Glass Menagerie, The Play by Tennessee Williams." Retrieved February 19, 2008, from MagillOnLiterature Plus.
• Epstein, Randi Hutter. "A Conversation with Sarah L. Berga: A Low-Tech Approach to Fertility: Just Relax." The New York Times (2007). Retrieved February 18, 2008,From http://www.nytimes.com.
• Fambrough, Preston. "Williams' The Glass Menagerie." The Explicator 63.2 (2005): 100-103.

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