Powerful Symbols and Symbolism in The Glass Menagerie :: Glass Menagerie essays

regnant Symbolism in The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie is a classic among classics for a number of reasons. The narrator, tom Wingfield, gives the reader an inside demeanor into the lives of a common family living in the pre-war depression era. The members of this family experience a great deal, and their lives are made much more vivid and important through Williams use of symbolism. Three well-crafted symbols are the fire pull out, which provides hope and an scat to the outside world and from it the glass menagerie, which is a metaphor for Lauras fragility and singularity and rainbows, which symbolize unrealized hopes and aspirations. Through the use of these symbols, the reader is presented with the universal base of operations that unfulfilled hopes and desires are an unwanted, albeit important aspect of the human experience. This theme is revealed in a stylized, artistic manner, which is one of the reasons why The Glass Menagerie is a meaningful classic. Symbols are a major part of this play that Tom, who is a poet, admits he has a weakness for. One of the first to be presented in the story is the fire escape that serves as the passageway to the apartment. The escape has a different meaning and function for each character and is also state to have an accidental poetic truth (21). For Tom, it is a means of escape from fire, the slow and implacable fires of human desperation(21). This is especially true of Toms apartment, which is some(prenominal) literally and metaphorically a trap which Tom and his mother, at least, wish well to escape (Bigsby 34). His mother, Amanda, is devastated after her daughter Lauras failure to cope in credit line college. This is a let d avouch of Amandas hopes of escaping because she has invested what little she had to free both herself and Laura (Bigsby 34). Amanda thus becomes obsessed with finding Laura a gentleman caller so that she crowd out marry and be supported as another means of escape, at least for Laura. When this caller finally comes, and it seems like it was meant to be, as they dance and kiss, he announces he is engaged, and dashes their hopes. The ever-fragile Laura, temporarily drawn out of her dream-world shell of her glass assemblage and the victrola, draws further back into herself. Now a terrible desperation fills the apartment, and Tom decides he must escape the suffocating environment to follow his own calling.