Essay on The Glass Menagerie

Essay on The Glass Menagerie

3. Laura escapes to her glass menagerie. To what do Tom and Amanda escape? How complete do you think Tom’s escape is at the end of the play?

When we read Tennessee Williams's play, we rapidly understand that Laura escapes to her glass menagerie. In the following work, I would like to present to what Tom and Amanda escape and how complete Tom’s escape is at the end of the play.

Tom escapes reality in two different ways. First, he goes out to movies and drinks to forget the pitiful situation of his family. The second way he uses to evade reality is by reading literature, writing poetry, and dreaming of adventure. But he cannot abandon his warehouse job because Amanda and Laura need the money he brings home to survive. In the play, we encounter multiple examples where Tom gets out of his desolate home by the fire to escape to another world where nagging mothers, sisters and runaway fathers do not exist. As the strain gets worse between Amanda and Tom during the play, the movie watching becomes more frequent, as does Tom’s drinking. The apartment’s fire escape symbolizes Tom’s will to go away. It shows Tom’s attraction to the outside of the Wingfield household. He is frequently having a cigarette there or looking in that direction. His departure seems inevitable. When his mother accuses him of being a selfish man, he answers that he is sacrificing himself for them, that because of them he will never be able to do what he really wants to become and achieve in life. On the other hand, later on we know that he reads D. H. Lawrence and follows political developments in Europe, but the content of his intellectual life is otherwise hard to discern. We have no idea of Tom’s opinion of Lawrence, nor do we have any indication of what Tom’s poetry is about. All we learn is what he thinks about his mother, his sister, and his warehouse job, precisely the things from which he claims he wants to escape. Tom’s feelings about being a writer...