UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE OURO PRETO

DOCENTE: MARIA CLARA VERSIANI GALERY

DISCENTE: GABRIEL VAZ NOGUEIRA / 17.1.3411
DISCIPLINA: INTRODUÇÃO A LIT. DE EXPRESSÃO INGLESA

“The Glass Menagerie” - QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

• What is the family’s financial situation? Is lack of money their only problem?

During the Great Depression, that started in 1929 and still continued in the 1930s, a gigantic
poverty was unleashed on earth. Both rich and poor people suffered the economical effects that was
mainly spread throughout the countries dependent on industries. The United States, the most
affected target, had their people unemployed, in total misery. Banks, industries, farms, stores,
everything was going bankrupt. And the whole situation that was going back on its track worsened
again with the eclosion of the second world-war.

In Tennessee Williams’ work “The Glass Menagerie”, the setting takes place in the United
States during this dark era of the 20th century. Therefore, even before reading the play, it’s easy to
predict that the characters are probably facing that harsh reality, and are struggling to survive
decently. And that’s exactly what’s happening. The Wingfields are represented as a humble family
formed by three members: Amanda, the “pushy” mother; Tom, the youngest sibling who works in a
Warehouse; and Laura, the oldest one who is a low self-esteem person, and is also crippled.

Amanda and Tom are the ones who fight to earn and income. The mother works as a reseller
charged of getting subscriptions for a magazine. Her rhetoric is notable in her dialogue; she is
always trying to persuade her clients to buy her products (or rather, making them subscribe to the
content she is selling), as we can notice, for instance, during her dialogue with Ida Scott about a
new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper (line 55, scene 3): “Oh, honey, it's something that you can't miss”
and “You simply couldn't go out if you hadn't read it”. The son, however, can’t stand his job,
because it’s tedious and it does not produce any adventurous sensation that he seeks.

With that income, however, the Wingfields live a barely decent life in contrast to most
Americans who had to go to public places and wait their turn in huge lineups just to get food. The
money Tom and Amanda brought home was somewhat sacred specially to the mother, and it was
meant to be spent on important things, such as the rent or the business college’s tuition for Laura.
When the money is used to other purposes, Amanda immediately starts to get uncomfortable. She
feels this way when she discovers that her son spends so much on movies and, afterwards, on
alcohol.

When Mr.Wingfield, the father, abandoned his family, the responsibility felt under Tom. The
son had to “take the lead” in order to keep the family alive and safe. Though Amanda is still taking
care of many things in the house, it’s Tom that works hard in a job that he doesn’t even like just to
bring money to the family. But doing something against your will is a tough task, and Tom feels
stressed for this reason. Thus, in order to mend his pain of being trapped in a complicated situation,
he starts to go every time to the movies and, later on, he clings to alcohol.

But besides that, Laura’s another source of problems. The daughter is in the age that she is
supposed to find a man to marry and have a life together. Nonetheless, Laura thinks she is quite
different from many women because she is crippled; the deformation plays a big role in her mind,
overcoming her thoughts and making her conclude that she is unable to do conventional things that
everyone does. Her low self-esteem shapes her entire profile: she is shy, dependent, afraid of the
world and always worried about being accepted. Yet her own mother serves as an example that was
meant to be followed but that Laura simply won’t be able to do so. Amanda was popular, knew how
to to treat man and how to talk to them. She had the ability to impress men in many ways. To the
daughter, however, all those perks were impossible to be acquired.

• What type of social comments are made by Tom the narrator in the opening of the
play?

In the opening of “Glass Menagerie”, Tom makes a statement relating what was going on
during the time when his memories took place: “In Spain there was revolution. Here there were
disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise, peaceful cities such as Chicago,
Cleveland, Saint Louis.” Firstly, he points out the chaos in Spain: Guernica is a small city in the
northern Spain that was bombarded during the Spanish Civil War, killing more than one thousand
innocent people. Tom describes this fact in order to show the darkness of the human kind. Showing
this is the first step of building a realistic, but also a poetic play. He is living in an era that hasn’t
changed: people are still suffering, but in different ways. He then focuses on his country, which is
also facing “disturbances”. The Americans had to fight against the First World War, the Great
Depression and finally the Second World War. Every type of civilian (soldiers, workers, children
etc.) were struggling to live, and that’s what the narrator wanted us to understand. Life had not been
easy back at that time; everyone knew that. Consequently, this feeling of despair started to be
reproduced in many forms, such as plastic arts, music, cinema, poetry, prose etc.
 In my opinion, describing the social background was a way of showing how the narrator was
not only trapped in his house, in his routine, in his family, but also in his society. The first half of
the 20th century was written with blood and the world noticed that. Tom, with his poetic perspective,
was only trying to escape from this barbaric reality of wars and crisis; he was seeking for a way to
fill his soul with adventures, and not with violence or misery. We can infer, just by looking at Tom’s
favorite leisure activity, the movies, that he really desired to transfer his thoughts to another
dimension, where his mind could be safe from all the hell unleashed on earth. The fictional
universes created by the movies probably made Tom drift away from this brutal reality he was
enduring in real life. Watching films was his own way of keeping his sanity on balance.