You know it don’t take much intelligence
to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell
ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
A bell tolls five times as Tom returns home. He has been
drinking. After painstakingly extracting his key from a jumble of
cast-off items in his pockets, he drops it into a crack on the fire-escape
landing. Laura hears him fumbling about and opens the door. He tells her
that he has been at the movies for most of the night and also to a
magic show, in which the magician changed water to wine to beer to
whiskey. Tom then gives Laura a rainbow-colored scarf, which he says
the magician gave to him. He describes how the magician allowed
himself to be nailed into a coffin and escaped without removing
a nail. Tom remarks wryly that the same trick could come in handy
for him but wonders how one could possibly get out of a coffin without
removing a single nail. Mr. Wingfield’s photograph lights up, presenting
an example of someone who has apparently performed such a feat.
The lights dim.
At six in the morning, Amanda calls out her habitual
“Rise and Shine!” This time, though, she tells Laura to pass the
message on to Tom because Amanda refuses to talk to Tom until he
apologizes. Laura gets Tom out of bed and implores him to apologize
to their mother. He remains reluctant. Amanda then sends Laura out
to buy groceries on credit. On the way down the fire escape, Laura
slips and falls but is not hurt. Several moments of silence pass
in the dining room before Tom rises from the table and apologizes.
Amanda nearly breaks into tears, and Tom speaks gently to her. She
speaks of her pride in her children and begs Tom to promise her
that he will never be a drunkard. She then turns the discussion
to Laura as the “Glass Menagerie” music begins to play. Amanda has
caught Laura crying because Laura thinks that Tom is not happy living
with them and that he goes out every night to escape the apartment.
Amanda claims to understand that Tom has greater ambitions than
the warehouse, but she also expresses her worry at seeing him stay
out late, just as his father, a heavy drinker, used to do. She questions
Tom again about where he goes at night, and Tom says that he goes
to the movies for adventure, which, he laments, is so absent from
his career and life in general. At the mention of the word “adventure,” a
sailing vessel appears on the screen. “Man is by instinct a lover,
a hunter, a fighter,” Tom says, and he points out that the warehouse does
not offer him the chance to be any of those things. Amanda does
not want to hear about instinct. She considers it the function of animals
and not a concern of “Christian adults.”
Tom is impatient to get to work, but Amanda holds him
back to talk about her worry over Laura’s future. Amanda has tried
to integrate Laura into the rest of the world by enrolling her in
business college and taking her to Young People’s League meetings
at church, but nothing has worked. Laura is unable to speak to people
outside her family and spends all her time with old records and
her glass menagerie. Amanda tells Tom that she knows that he has
gotten a letter from the merchant marine and is itching to leave,
but she asks him to wait until Laura has someone to take care of
her. She then asks him to find some decent man at the warehouse
and bring him home to meet Laura. Heading down the fire escape,
Tom reluctantly agrees. Amanda makes another call for the magazine
subscription drive, and then the lights fade.
Analysis
For the first production of The Glass Menagerie, the
composer Paul Bowles wrote a musical theme entitled “The Glass Menagerie.” This
music plays when Amanda discusses Laura at the breakfast table with
Tom and at other crucial moments involving Laura. The title and
timing of the music equate Laura with her glass animals. Like the
objects that she loves so well, Laura is incredibly delicate (a typing
drill is enough to make her physically ill) and oddly fanciful. Somehow,
the fights and struggles that shape Amanda’s and Tom’s lives have
not hardened Laura. Amanda and Tom argue constantly about their
respective responsibilities to the family, but Laura never joins
in. Interestingly, Laura does not participate in supporting the family
and, though Amanda is upset when Laura deceives her about the business
college, neither Tom nor Amanda resents Laura’s dependence in any
way. Her physical and resultant emotional disabilities seem to excuse
her from any practical obligation to the household.
Though she does nothing to hold the family together financially, Laura
holds it together emotionally. Amanda hits on this truth when she
reminds Tom that he cannot leave as long as Laura depends on him.
Both Tom and Amanda are capable of working to support themselves,
and, without the childlike Laura, this family of three adults would
almost certainly dissolve. In addition, Laura’s role as peacemaker
proves crucial to ending the standoff between Tom and Amanda. Laura
valiantly tries to douse the “slow and implacable fires” of her
family’s unhappiness—to play firefighter, in a sense. Interestingly,
she trips on the fire escape when she leaves the apartment. This
event contributes to the reconciliation between Tom and Amanda,
who are united in their concern for Laura, and it also draws attention
to the fact that, for Laura, escape from the emotional fires of
her family is impossible. Thus, she has no choice but to do everything
she can to extinguish them.
The closeness and warmth of Tom’s relationship with Laura becomes
evident when Tom comes home drunk at the beginning of Scene Four.
In general, when Amanda is around, she tends to dominate the conversation,
and the siblings can exchange very few words exclusive to the two
of them. Here, though, they are alone. Laura’s love and concern
for Tom are great enough to prompt her to wake up at five in the
morning to see if he has come home. Tom uses his account of the
magic show to share his most intimate experiences and thoughts
with Laura. He subtly confesses to her about his drinking when he
talks about the magician turning water to whiskey. Then, the coffin
anecdote reveals both Tom’s sense of morbid confinement in his job
and family life and his impossible dreams of escaping the family
“without removing one nail”—that is, without destroying it. A number
of critics have suggested that Tom feels an incestuous romantic
attachment to Laura. This theory is supported by the subtly presented
intensity of the relationship between these two young adults, both
of whom are, in their different ways, incapable of establishing
complete lives outside their family.
