Laura's Glass Menagerie

 

     We had a short seminar regarding mental health in college today, which brought back the memory of a character who had stuck with me for some time. Laura Wingfield from Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie is a reserved yet complex character who, in my opinion deserves a closer attention since she plays a structural role both in contrasting the other characters of the play as well as providing a wider context to the play.

 

    The Glass Menagerie is a one-act drama directed by Tennessee Willaims and is regarded as one of the most iconic Broadway plays for its innovative use of postmodern ideas such as memory, fragmentation and so on. We are introduced to the Wingfield family, a struggling middle class family struggling against the urban chaos and its hardships. Since Tom, the brother of Laura was the breadwinner of the house, he becomes increasingly frustrated with his commitments affecting his dreams of a life of adventure. In the midst of that, we have Amanda, Tom’s mother asking him to find a suitor for Laura. Laura is extremely quiet and shy and unable to accept a life outside her home, her insecurities affecting any social interaction and she finds refuge in her world of glass animals and old gramophone records. Later efforts to find a suitor ends up in a disaster which ends up in Tom abandoning his family to leave Amanda and Laura by themselves towards a bleak future.

 

      Now back to the subject, Laura. As a “terribly shy” character she has the least number of lines in the play, yet we learn a lot about her.  She has a limp on her leg which makes her wear braces. This “crippling” effect is not just limited to her physical attribute which we shall see soon. We learn that she had stopped attending business college of an ‘incident’ which although seems irrelevant to the common reader, shows the great about of insecurities that is deep embedded within her. She is distant from Tom and the rest of the family. In a scene where Tom and Amanda are engaged in a heated argument, the scene gives a warm limelight on the silent Laura who is standing in a corner, frightened and stunned for any words. What makes Laura the character as she is?

     Laura can be seen as a contradiction to Tom’s high spirited, adventurous and impulsive character. Her whole world revolves around old gramophone records and of course, the glass menagerie. And when I’m saying this, yes if something were to happen the glass animals, we as the audience do feel her heart shattering, for example when Tom accidently breaks one of them. She is seen as someone too “fragile for the real world” and is afraid of the idea of marriage.

 

      Amidst all this we see a small ray of hope as Jim, her suitor brought by Tom, finds her character unique and relates to her worries. Although he accidently breaks the unicorn glass toy, we see that it does not have a more pervasive effect on her. Jim suggests how she could slowly move into reality, braving over her insecurities, forming a real connection with her. However as tragedy strikes, it is concluded that an escape would now be almost impossible.

  

     Perhaps I would be romanticizing her character too much, but in my reading, she was the most interesting character throughout the play. She is an innocent bystander, who is helpless as the tragedy unfolds. The playwright has also taken the effort not to let her little world of glass animals overshadow the rest of the play, striking a neat balance amidst all the characters. As I said in the beginning, her insecurities are more in the mind than in her leg.

      Analyzing the root cause of her character to be the way as it is does require a lot more information than what is revealed in the play. However we post covid readers could definitely relate to her escapist nature with the little worlds that we create for ourselves having our own glass menagerie.

 

Hang in there, dear reader….

Until next time

Lan