The+Glass+Menagerie

= //The Glass Menagerie// by Tennessee Williams =

Jim O'Connor and Laura Wingfield Amanda and Tom Wingfield

Setting
A setting is the total environment for the action of a fictional tale. It is also the time, place, and physical details where the situation occurs. The setting of __The Glass Menagerie__ takes place in an apartment in St. Louis, Missouri. Tom is the narrator and he remembers the winter and spring of 1937. The setting of __The Glass Menagerie__ is interesting because it has many symbols that contribute greatly to the story.

In the apartment, the fire escape is a very important symbol. On this fire escape, Tom searches for liberation from his private agony. Tom smokes his cigarettes on the fire escape. From the fire escape, the sounds from the nightclub across the street can be heard. Even though it’s an escape, it is still the doorway to the trap which is Tom’s life. The fire escape is also a symbol of the Wingfield’s poverty. When Amanda was young, she stepped out into a porch when she wanted fresh air, but now her and her children live in an apartment and the closest thing they have to a porch is the fire escape. For Tom, the fire escape is a symbol of being able to leave, because at the end of the play, Tom does eventually walk down the fire escape, never to return. To Laura, it was the total opposite. For Laura, escape is impossible, and the fire escape, which takes the people she loves away from her, symbolizes the possibility of injury and destruction.

The Wingfield apartment faces an alley in a lower-middle class St. Louis tenement. Tom wants to escape so badly because he wants adventure and the ugliness of the apartment depresses him. To Tom, the narrow alleys on both sides of the building represents a kind of “Death Valley” where cats are trapped and killed by vicious dogs. To Amanda, the alley represents the ugly world of her hopeless poverty and confusion that she escapes from by having a make believe world of memory and pretence.

The lighting and music of this play also contributes to the setting of __The Glass Menagerie__. The lighting changes with the mood. Shafts of light are focused on certain areas or actors, sometimes in contradiction to what is the apparent center. The strength, tone, and occurrence of the lights have the power of emotional emphasis. The tune “The Glass Menagerie” is used in the play to give emotional emphasis to different scenes. It is like circus music when you hear it at a distance. It returns in every scene as a reference to the emotional, nostalgia, which is the first condition of the play. The music becomes Laura’s symbol of the world because it’s like a circus to her. The music comes out clearly when the play focuses on Laura and the lovely fragility of glass which is her image. St. Louis, Missouri in the 1900s 

 **Historical Context**
<span style="COLOR: rgb(102,38,5)">Historical context reflects the time in which something takes place or was created and influences how you interpret it. The historical context of a play and novel can contribute to the way a character acts, setting and the story as a whole.

__The Glass Menagerie__ takes place in the 1930 during The Great Depression and slightly before the beginning of World War II. “Here there was only shouting and confusion” states Tom during his narration in Scene 1. T he Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. World War II was the war that shortly followed. For Americans the most significant historical event of the first half of the 1940s was the entry of the United States into World War II. The author of the play, Tennessee Williams, wrote the play at the beginning of World War II but before the victory. After being produced in Chicago in 1944, the play arrived in New York in 1945 the year the war ended.
 * __The Great Depression/ World War II__**



“We won’t have a business career – we’ve given it up because it gave us nervous indigestion! What is there left but dependency all our lives?” say Amanda. During World War II there was a sudden increase of women in the workplace because most men were serving in the armed forces. Possibility of war probably prompted Amanda to put her daughter Laura into business so she can get a job and be able to support herself.
 * __Women in the Workforce__**



“In Spain there was Guernica,” states Tom in his narration. T he German bombers appeared in the skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937 and immediately transformed the sleepy Spanish market town into an everlasting symbol of the cruelness of war. Knowing about this occurrence prior to writing his play, Tennessee Williams was able to mention it in his play. It also allows Tom the character to predict occurrence of war. He states on numerous occasions that war makes life interesting although it is a very remorseless thing to say.
 * __Bombing of Guernica__**

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<span style="COLOR: rgb(8,36,110)"><span style="COLOR: rgb(0,87,163)"> Thomas Laner Williams, or Tennessee Williams, was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius Coffin Williams, a shoe salesman, and Edwina Dakin Williams. Tennessee’s father was not accepting of his son’s career choice; he tried to help Tennessee form a business career but failed. However, Tennessee did have the support of his mother, an Ohio woman who gave the impression of a southern lady. He was also extremely devoted to his sister, Rose, a fragile, mentally unbalanced young lady whom he depicted in his first significant play, //The Glass Menagerie// (1945). In 1918, Tennessee, his two siblings, and his parents moved to St. Louis, Missouri (the setting of //The Glass Menagerie//). The family lived in a boardinghouse temporarily then settled in an apartment at 4633 Westminster Place. The building has been renamed the Glass Menagerie Apartments in Williams's honor. The family moved twice more, lastly to a confined apartment at 6254 Enright Avenue. This apartment was the representation for the Wingfield home in //The Glass Menagerie //. Williams later attended the University of Missouri before graduating from the University of Iowa in 1938 with a bachelor’s degree. When he published //The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone// he became a recognized playwright. In the 1940s Williams had difficulty producing great plays in New York. His first play, //Battle of Angels// (1940), was a disappointment; however when his second play //The Glass Menagerie// came about, it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and established his reputation. The play was narrated by a personality name Tom (a portrayal Williams himself) and concentrated on Tom's mother, Amanda Wingfield (resembling Williams 's mother) and on Tom's sister, Laura. The play dwells upon how Williams felt as he longed to leave home, and guilt he felt after deserting Rose. The play was successful because it use of language. Tennessee Williams was the leading American playwright of the 20th century, known for his countless now-classic productions. He published more than 60 plays. As a gifted fiction writer, Williams also wrote two novels, two collections of short stories, four volumes of poetry, an autobiography, and a variety of essays. Tennessee Williams also had his own tribulations with a drug and alcohol addiction, and he died unintentionally by choking on the cap of a pill bottle on February 24, 1983, in his suite at Hotel Elysie, in New York. Williams was buried back at home in St. Louis, Missouri. His manuscripts and letters are kept in the Humanities Researc  <span style="COLOR: rgb(8,36,110)"><span style="COLOR: rgb(0,87,163)"> h Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

**External Links**
[|The Battle of Guernica] [|The Great Depression]

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