Tom calls Laura “peculiar,” but Amanda bristles at this word. What is “peculiar” about Laura?
When Amanda asks Tom to explain what he means
when he calls Laura “peculiar,” he refers to the fact that she never
goes out and says that “[s]he lives in a world of her own—a world
of little glass ornaments.” Her inability to talk to strangers is
also unusual, as is the violent illness that overtakes her when
she is faced with the most minimal of social pressures. One of her
legs is shorter than the other, and it is quite possible that this
physical deformity contributes to her pathological shyness. Jim
suggests another possible explanation for her oddity: he believes
that all of her peculiarities stem from an inferiority complex and
that they would disappear if she could only learn to think more
highly of herself. Another more complex explanation for Laura’s
odd behavior is that she lives in a fantasy world of her own creation.
Like the glass menagerie, this fantasy world is dangerously delicate.
Because direct contact with the real world threatens to shatter
Laura’s fantasies, much as the touch of any solid object will pop
a soap bubble, she is terrified of any interaction with reality.
If such is the case, then Laura begins to look a little less
A single line from Laura reveals the complexity of the question of exactly how peculiar she is. In Scene Seven, she says to Jim that she has never heard her glass horses argue among themselves. If we are meant to believe that she actually expects the glass figures to talk, then this quote demonstrates that she is deeply and unhealthily engrossed in her fantasies. Yet the stage directions indicate that she should say this line “lightly.” It seems that she is just making a joke, which would indicate that she can, on the right occasion, distance herself enough from her fantasy world to find humor and absurdity in it.
Why is the fire escape important in the play?
On the most concrete level, the fire escape is an emblem of the Wingfields’ poverty. In Amanda’s youth, she would have stepped onto a veranda or a porch for fresh air. But she and her children now live in a tenement in an urban center, and outdoor space is hard to come by. Yet in Scene Five, in one of the play’s few cautiously optimistic moments, the Wingfields still manage to find romance and hope on the fire escape, when Tom and Amanda wish on the moon. The fire escape also represents exactly what the name implies: the promise of escape from the overheated atmosphere of the apartment. Williams describes life in these tenements as the constant burning of the “slow and implacable fires of human desperation.” Tom, for one, is suffocated by the heat of these fires and occasionally steps onto the fire-escape landing to have a smoke. “I’m starting to boil inside,” he tells Jim in Scene Six. The photo of Mr. Wingfield operates with the fire escape to remind Tom and the audience that leaving is possible, and at the end of the play, Tom does indeed walk down the fire escape steps, never to return. Yet this possibility does not exist for everyone. In Scene Five, Laura slips and falls on the fire escape while on her way to a nearby store. For her, escape is impossible, and the fire escape, which takes the people she loves away from her, represents only the possibility of injury and destruction.
Which aspects of The Glass Menagerie are realistic? Which aspects are the most nonrealistic? What function do the nonrealistic elements serve?
In the Production Notes to
Though the style of the play is overwhelmingly nonrealistic, its content is a different matter. Williams also claimed that inventive stylistic devices like those he favored must never lead a play to “escape its responsibility of dealing with reality.” Emotions like Tom’s boredom, Amanda’s nostalgia, and Laura’s terror are conveyed with all the vividness of reality. So are the sorrowful hostility between Tom and Amanda and the quiet love between Tom and Laura. Similarly, the bleak lower-middle-class life of the Wingfield family is portrayed with a great deal of fidelity to historical and social realities. In fact, it often seems as if the main effect of the play’s nonrealistic style is to increase the sense of reality surrounding its content. The play, as Tom says, is committed to giving its audience “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”