Literary analysis of the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Essay - 1

Literary analysis of the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams - Essay Example Toms expresses his frustrations through his drinking and attending the movies in the evenings in addition to writing and reading poetry at work. A good amount of the play centers on Laura, however. She is tremendously shy, to some extent due to her crippling disease (pleurosis). She wore a brace on her leg and walked with a limp spending a lot of her time fantasizing about her glass menagerie. One of the central concepts this story clearly projects is the notion that the memories of our youth influence our fantasies of the present which in turn protect us from the realities of the present. Tom explicitly affirms that this is memory play in his first words, the first words of the play: â€Å"The play is a memory† (I, 145). To promote that effect, Williams continues to permit Tom to detach himself out from the play from every so often to narrate particular events or ideas, bring the audience up to speed on what has occurred in the period between two of the scenes or make other remarks. In reciting how the impression of memory is achieved, Richard Vowles (1958) describes its dreamlike characteristics, â€Å"One scene dissolves into another. There is, indeed, almost a submarine quality about the play, the kind of poetic slow motion that becomes ballet and a breathless repression of feeling that belongs to everyone but Amanda† (54). Williams illustrates the way memory has functioned to form Tom’s impression of life, never allowing him the escape he sought after through the merchant marine by sustaining the concept that almost the entire play is a Tomâ €™s memory in clear focus by means of this otherworldly light. Laura lives in possibly the most evident life of illusion as she drifts through her existence ostensibly in a cloud of detachment. She connects classical music with a happier time in her life while she connects her time in school with the ‘thunder’ of her leg brace while she struggles into her music room. She â€Å"takes refuge in