Discuss the symbol in Tennessee Williams' 'The Glass Menagerie'. Symbolism in The Glass Menagerie '
Answer :
Tennessee Williams, from yet another point of view, a poet of the Symbols adds greatly to the value and significance of The Glass Menagerie. They are essential to its poetic nature and treatment. The symbols play a significant role in underlining the isolation of the characters in the play. There are more than a dozen major symbols in the play.
As the title of the play informs us, the glass menagerie, or collection of animals, is the play’s central symbol. The symbol of The Glass Menagerie, which is full of little glass animals, suggests the isolation, fragility, and lonesome soul of Laura. Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines represents a number of facets of her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, but, when light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an entire rainbow of colors. They have to be protected from the malice outside world. This is a dominant symbol which reveals the isolation in the life of Laura. Williams also suggests that like the glass animals, the life of Laura is cold, and inanimate, and she, too cannot move from shelf. Her world is a sterile and static one. Similarly, Laura, though quiet and bland around strangers, is a source of strange, multifaceted delight to those who choose to look at her in the right light. The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura devotes herself—a world that is colorful.
The glass unicorn in Laura’s collection significantly, her favorite figure represents her peculiarity. As Jim points out, unicorns are “extinct” in modern times and are lonesome as a result of being different from other horses. Laura too is unusual, lonely, and ill-adapted to existence in the world in which she lives. The fate of the unicorn is also a smaller-scale version of Laura’s fate in Scene Seven. When Jim dances with and then kisses Laura, the unicorn’s horn breaks off, and it becomes just another horse. Jim’s advances endow Laura with a new normalcy, making her seem more like just another girl, but the violence with which this normalcy is thrust upon her means that Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a “souvenir.” Without its horn, the unicorn is more appropriate for him than for her, and the broken figurine represents all that he has taken from her and destroyed in her.
At the beginning of the play, Williams describes the Wingfields’ small apartment. One of its main characteristics is the fire escape. It is the first symbol in the play and it represents the only way in and more importantly the only way out. Fire exits are mainly used to escape from a burning building, so the fire exit in the play symbolically tells the audience that someone is in danger, in a life-threatening situation, and must escape to safety.
Amanda, Tom and Laura’s mother, mentions Blue Mountain, the plantation in the South where she spent her childhood. It is her emotional, psychological sanctuary. Barnard (2007) comments on the interior design of the apartment, which Amanda has transformed “into her otherworld in several ways by decorating the interior with Blue Mountain memories; by appearing in her Blue Mountain dress and particularly by her evoking Blue Mountain charm with every word she speaks” (pp.30-31).
The name Blue Mountain functions as a symbol in two different respects. Firstly, the colour blue is often affiliated with sadness, melancholy and exhaustion. Blue can also symbolize the general feeling of the characters in the play. Moreover, mountains may symbolize the obstacles before all the characters and their inability to overcome them
Even the character names have a symbolism of their own. The name Amanda means “the one who deserves to be loved” (“Amanda,” n. d.) but ironically, she is the character who is the least loved. She was abandoned by her husband, then abandoned by her son and ignored by her daughter. She was not loved just like Edwina Williams, Tennessee’s mother upon whom Amanda’s character was based, was not loved (Jacob, 2013, para.3). Her name is symbolic of what should be but does not come to pass.
Amanda introduces jonquils as a symbol into the play while describing her youth and the particular summer when she met her husband.
In the end of Tom's final monologue, the symbol of hope turns to Laura's candles, which were brought by Jim into the scene, a symbol of hope for Laura, that Jim may be a chance at love.
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