Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie: The Dark Side of the American Family

Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie offers a glimpse into the dark side of the American family. Representationally dysfunction, the Wingfield family is a typical American unit who survive the unpleasant intrusion of reality upon their lives by creating their own illusions to deny the emptiness of their existence. It is the relationship between the mother, Amanda, and her daughter Laura that best exemplifies the play's theme of the futility of attempting to escape reality which depicts a crippling dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter. The Glass Menagerie offers a family that is systemically unable to fully live in the present so they search vainly for happiness and the capacity to become a functional unit by retreating into their own individual fantasy worlds as a way of coping with life's unfortunate version of reality.

The Glass Menagerie is a dramatic play about human nature, the conflict between illusion and reality. The struggle between the love of freedom and the love of family. If there is a signature character type that marks Tennessee Williams's dramatic work, it is undeniably that of the faded Southern belle. Amanda is a clear representative of this type; a faded belle from a prominent Southern family, who has received a traditional upbringing, but has suffered a reversal of economic and social fortune at some point in her life. Her relationships with men and her family are turbulent, and she staunchly defends the values of her past. Amanda is the play's most extroverted and theatrical character.