Use of Symbolism & Imagery in The Glass Menagerie

The characters themselves whoremaster be give tongue to to stand for intangibles, and it is possible to see turkey cock, Laura, Amanda, and the piece Caller as figurations of response to and of coping strategies for the found universe. For the Wingfields, what this comes down to is their entire stirred content, and more than break awayicularly their manner of dealing with the tension among illusion and reality. For Jim O'Connor, the emblemism is more direct, inasmuch as he brush off be interpreted as functioning more or less as a synecdoche, which is a figure of dustup in which a part is made to stand for the whole. The Gentleman Caller, of course, stands for the whole orbit outside the environment of the flatcar, as allow be seen hereafter.

Tom functions as personification of the illusion, principally, that he can successfully straddle the illusory human race deep down the apartment and the outside world of unpleasant truth in a way that will keep Laura from being doomed. In the straddling function, Arnott sees Tom as a "chorus figure" mediating between designate and past, and eventually fully "estranged from his family and finally leaving it to apply some sort of life for himself" (Arnott 479). Indeed, the illusory world inside is made unbearable to him by Amanda's insistence on donjon as if her memory of decorous plantation manners had relevancy to the realities of life in the St. Louis apartment. Though his everyday experience of the world of truth tells him how vulnerable the household

Laura's reality is of paralysis not only of body only when also of spirit. Her illusion is that she can live a adapted life by living a life of limitation, and by retreating to the shelter of with her glass menagerie. According to Cardullo (161), Laura is a Romantic symbol familiar to the landscape of nineteenth-century American society, "the fragile, almost unearthly swelled head brutalized by life in the industrialized, depersonalized cities of the Western world." As a Romantic, however, she fails the test of the real-world gentleman caller in large part because she cannot keep from investing this particular man and this particular call on the carpet so much with Romanticism itself, in particular a dream of transformed life.

Once having failed that test, she cannot conceive of attempting to cope with a new man, a new evening, an predictable world outside. adept(a) feels she will never extend herself out the doorway into the alleyway and will remain confined to the delicate and ephemeral world of the glass menagerie, as vulnerable to the real pressure of one disappointment as the glass animals are to one curt blow.

illusion is, he cooperates in Laura's illusion, trying to make it emotionally whole--also trying to relieve himself of responsibility for her well-being--by means of the gentleman caller. The clog is that he is not careful enough in his attempt, so that the gentleman caller turns out to be engaged, no more serious suitor material for Laura than Laura is serious material for both suitor. Amanda says accurately that Tom manufactures illusions and lives in a dream. She is, however, inaccurate active the content of the dream, which has less to do with Laura than with his own wish to be free of an emotionally oppressive family environment.

Because Williams says Amanda is "clinging frantically to another beat and place," it is tempting to think of Amanda as being lost in the illusions of her past in Laurel, Mississippi. This is Arnott's view (479), as well as Tynan's (94), which
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