"Death of a Salesman" and "The Glass Menagerie"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the lives of the main families in the plays "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller and "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams. It describes the way in which the Loman family experienced tragedy because they hoped and depended too much on the belief that subsistence to the American dream would, inherently, be the catalyst that will propel them towards economic prosperity and success. It then contrasts this to the Wingfield family who experienced tragedy because they thrived in the culture of hopelessness, believing that the world in itself was too cruel and their life was an already tragic one.

From the Paper:

"The Wingfield family of "Glass," meanwhile, suffered not from the hopefulness, but from the sheer lack of it. The pervasiveness of hopelessness in the family affected the lives and attitudes of Amanda and Tom. Like the Loman sons Biff and Happy, Tom failed to realize that hard work was the best recourse to take in alleviating his family's hardships and sufferings, taking them out of the tragic lives they led. From Tom's end, in fact, he showed no conscious effort to redeem himself from the fact that will always be poor and underprivileged, in the midst of the affluent lives of other people in the society they lived in."

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