Glass Menagerie What Does Tom Reading Lawrence Mean
By Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
A Study Guide
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Written report Guide Prepared by Michael J. Cummings ... � 2011
Type of Work and Publication Year
.......The Glass Menagerie is a stage play in the course of a tragedy involving the three master characters. The play debuted in 1944 at the Civic Theatre in Chicago. Random House published the work in 1945.
Setting
....... An introductory address to the audience by one of the main characters, Tom Wingfield, takes place in the 1940s. The action in the play takes place in the winter and spring of 1937 in an apartment in a dreary tenement in St. Louis.
Source
....... Tennessee Williams based The Glass Menagerie on "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," a short story he wrote in 1943 and published in 1948. Both works drew upon Williams'due south own experiences. When he was growing up, he was close to his sis, Rose, who resembled the fragile and psychologically disturbed Laura Wingfield in "The Glass Menagerie." His mother resembled Laura'south female parent, Amanda. Williams himself resembled Laura's brother, Tom Wingfield. Williams was fifty-fifty nicknamed Tom in his youth.
Characters
Tom Wingfield: A merchant marine who introduces the play and is one of its iii principal characters. Tom became a sailor at an undisclosed time after he left home following an argument with his mother. He explains that the activity in the play takes place in the 1930s, when he lived in a St. Louis apartment with his mother, Amanda, and his sister, Laura. The play presents his recollections of the wintertime and leap of 1937. In that year, he worked in a shoe manufacturing plant to back up himself, his sister, and his mother. He hated his task, argued frequently with his mother, and looked forrard to a day when he could leave home and strike out on his own. Tom likes to write poetry. In fact, he was fired from his task at the shoe manufacturing plant for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox.
Laura Wingfield: Tom's older sister by two years. She is incredibly shy and shrinks from whatsoever contact with everyday life outside the Wingfield apartment. She likes to spend time taking care of her collection of glass animal figurines (a glass menagerie) and playing old records on a Victrola. One of her legs is lame, and she wears a brace on it.
Amanda Wingfield: Mother of Tom and Laura. She is the opposite of her girl � outspoken and assertive. At ane time, she was a charming belle with many wooers. But in in 1937, she is an abased wife forced to alive humbly among the grey, desperate masses of the Dandy Depression. She constantly nitpicks and nags Tom about every aspect of his life � the way he eats, the way he entertains himself, then on. Amanda takes comfort in memories of earlier days, when the sunday was ascent on her instead of going downward. She hopes to marry Laura to an eligible bachelor.
Jim O'Connor: Tom Wingfield's friend and co-worker, who accepts an invitation to dinner at the Wingfield apartment. Tom extended the invitation as part of Amanda's efforts to lucifer Laura with a marriageable young human.
Mr. Wingfield: Army veteran and phone-visitor employee who abandoned the family unit. Although he is not an onstage character in the play, Amanda and Tom refer to him frequently. A photograph of him hangs on a wall on the phase.
Plot Summary
Tom Wingfield'southward Introduction
....... Tom Wingfield walks onstage wearing the uniform of a merchant marine. He lights a cigarette and tells the audience that he is turning back time to the 1930s, when the vast American eye class was struggling to cope with the Great Low.
....... �In Spain there was revolution," he says. �Here in that location was just shouting and confusion. In Espana there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labour, sometimes pretty trigger-happy, in otherwise peaceful cities such equally Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis. . . ."
....... Tom says he is the narrator of the play and also a character in it. He then identifies the other characters: his mother, Amanda; his sister, Laura; and a gentleman caller (Jim O'Connor). Some other character�his father�has no office in the play, Tom says. However, a photo of him smiling and wearing a Globe State of war I infantryman cap is displayed prominently on a wall in the Wingfield apartment. He was a telephone-visitor employee who abandoned the family �a long time agone," Tom says. Since then, the family unit has heard from him only once. He sent a postcard from Mazatlan, Mexico, which said, �Hello�Goodbye!"
....... The play and then begins. It presents scenes that Tom remembers and occasionally comments on. The play also presents scenes in the Wingfield apartment that Tom did not witness.
The Play
....... Laura and Tom Wingfield are eating at a table with their mother mother, Amanda, in the dining room of their flat in a tenement edifice. When Amanda tells her son to chew his food properly, he rises and tells her that her abiding nitpicking makes him race through meals. She says he has the temper of a Metropolitan Opera singer. Every bit he leaves the table to go a cigarette, she tells him she has not excused him. He goes for the cigarette anyway, and she says he smokes besides much.
....... Laura rises to become the dessert, blancmange, but Amanda goes for it instead, saying she wants her daughter �to stay fresh and pretty for gentlemen callers." One never knows when a gentleman volition come calling, she says.
....... Returning with the dessert, she says she once received seventeen callers one Sunday afternoon at Blueish Mountain. Tom, who is smoking on the landing of the fire escape across the alley from Paradise Trip the light fantastic Hall, asks how she entertained them all. She says she did so with intelligent and witty conversation.
....... All of her beaux were gentlemen, she says, and some were prominent planters in the Mississippi Delta. She tells Tom virtually several of her callers�one who became vice president of a bank, another who drowned and left his wife $150,000 in government bonds, and some other�Bates Cutrere�who was shot in a quarrel and left his wife between 8,000 and x,000 acres of country. Amanda says Bates was in love with her, not his wife, and had a pic of her on the day he died. Then there was Duncan J. Fitzhugh, who went to New York and earned a reputation as the Wolf of Wall Street. Amanda could have married him, she says.
....... Time passes.
....... Laura sits at a table polishing her collection of drinking glass figurines of animals. On the wall is an illustration of a typewriter keyboard she is supposed to exist studying while nursing a cold. Her mother had enrolled her at Rubicam Business organization School six weeks earlier so that she could get a job to provide for herself and her mother. When she hears her mother coming up the burn escape, she hurriedly hides the figurines and pretends to written report the keyboard illustration. Amanda is wearing a fabric coat with an false fur collar and carrying a large black pocketbook.
....... When Amanda enters, grim-faced and out of sorts, she removes the illustration from the wall and rips information technology up. She then informs Laura that on her way to her D.A.R meeting�at which she was to be installed every bit an officer�she stopped at the Rubicam Business concern School to talk over her daughter'due south progress with her teachers. They told her that Laura quit after simply a few days because she was besides shy to participate in class. Amanda, paraphrasing a instructor, says, �Her hands shook so that she couldn't hit the correct keys! The first time we gave a speed-test, she broke downwardly completely [and] was sick at the stomach and virtually had to exist carried into the launder-room!"
....... Under questioning from her mother, Laura says she spent her school days, from 7:30 to 5, walking in the park even though it was winter. She could not suffer going back to form. Yet, sometimes she visited the art museum, the zoo, and a hothouse for tropical flowers. She did non want to face Amanda.
....... Amanda then talks on about the bleak futurity that Laura faces but ends up raising the possibility that Laura will marry someday. She asks her girl whether there was ever anyone she liked. Laura tells her about a boy in high school with whom she occasionally conversed. But he was going with a daughter named Emily Meisenbach. Laura thinks they must exist married by now (vi years later graduation). Her mother then decides that Laura will marry as well.
....... �But, Mother . . . I'chiliad crippled," Laura says.
....... Her mother replies that Laura has just a minor defect, �hardly noticeable."
....... Later in the winter and early spring, Amanda sells magazines subscriptions to make enough coin to properly gear up her daughter equally an attraction for young men.
....... I day, Tom and his mother argue viciously. She had returned a book he was reading to the library, a book by D. H. Lawrence which Amanda says was shamefully obscene. She will not allow such books in the house, she asserts. Tom reminds her that information technology is he who pays the rent and supports the family and, therefore, has a correct to read the books he pleases.
....... When they proceed to contend, she accuses him of taking function in unseemly activities whenever he goes out. He pretends to go to the movies, she says, simply his real purpose is to beverage. Then he comes in around two in the morning, stumbling and mumbling, and gets three hours of sleep. He has no correct to jeopardize his job and thus jeopardize the security of the whole family, she says. He is selfish.
....... Tom says he gives up all his dreams�all that he would like to do�to work in a dead-cease job at Continental Shoemakers just then he tin support the family. If he decided to call up only of himself, he says, he would practice what his male parent did�leave. Becoming even angrier, he calls his mother an old witch. When he attempts to put on his coat to leave, he catches his arm in the sleeve, then hurls information technology across the room. It falls on a shelf containing Laura'southward figurines. There is the sound of shattering glass.
....... �My glass!�menagerie," she says.
....... He helps Laura pick up the the figurines while his mother shouts that she volition not speak to him over again until he apologizes.
....... At five the next forenoon, Tom arrives dwelling house drunk. His first attempt at opening the door fails when he drops the key. Laura opens the door and asks where he has been. To the movies, he tells her. There was a long program�the characteristic, a cartoon, a travelogue, a newsreel, coming attractions, and a phase show with Malvolio the Wizard.
....... At about seven, Tom apologizes to his mother while drinking coffee. Amanda, sobbing, says her devotion to her children has made her hateful to them. Tom tells her she'south not hateful. Having been pacified, Amanda then praises him for his considerable abilities and makes him hope never to be a boozer. After they talk farther, Amanda says she is worried about Laura, who spends all her spare time fooling with her glass menagerie and playing her father's old records on the Victrola.
....... When Tom asks what he can do about her situation, his mother says, �Overcome Selfishness! Self, self, cocky is all that you ever think of !"
....... Angry, Tom gets up and puts on his coat and lid. Before he leaves, Amanda asks him to find a beau for Laura at the Continental plant. He refuses to cooperate at beginning, merely after she pleads with him he agrees to see what he can do.
....... At sunset on a leap night, Tom informs his mother that he has bundled for a young man from Continental to come to dinner the next evening. He is a aircraft clerk named James Delaney O'Connor, who makes good coin and goes to night schoolhouse to study public speaking and radio engineering. Tom says, however, that he did not tell him about Laura.
....... Amanda, delighted, says, �When he sees how lovely and sweet and pretty she is, he'll thank his lucky stars be was asked to dinner."
....... In high school, Jim O'Connor was a star basketball actor, president of the senior class and the glee lodge, captain of the debating squad, and a singer of calorie-free opera. Now, nonetheless, he works in the warehouse of Continental Shoes, making only a little more money than Tom. Laura knew Jim in high school and admired his voice, Tom recalls. Simply he doesn't think Jim remembers Laura.
....... By five Friday evening, Amanda has worked wonders with the flat�new defunction, chintz covers on the sofa and chairs, and other touches. She is at present crouching before Laura as she works on the hem of her new clothes. Laura looks fragile but pretty, like translucent glass. Amanda and then enlarges Laura's bosom with powder puffs. Laura protests just ends upward wearing the �Gay Deceivers," as her mother calls them.
....... A short while afterward, Amanda reveals herself in a yellow frock with a bluish sash, recapturing a semblance of her youth. She says, �This is the clothes in which I led the cotillion, won the cakewalk twice at Sunset Hill, wore ane bound to the Governor's ball in Jackson!"
....... When Laura asks what Mr. O'Connor's commencement name is, she becomes suddenly flustered when she hears her female parent say Jim. She asks whether it is the aforementioned Jim O'Connor that Tom knew in high schoolhouse. Amanda says she thinks they showtime became acquainted at the warehouse. Laura says if it is the same one, she won't make an appearance. But her mother orders her to answer the door when they go far. Amanda volition exist in the kitchen preparing the food.
....... When Tom arrives with Jim, he introduces Jim to Laura, who is exceedingly nervous. Laura then excuses herself and hurries into another room. When Jim asks most her strange behavior, Tom explains that she is exceptionally shy. While awaiting dinner, Tom and Jim talk about work, and Jim warns Tom that Mr. Mendoza, a dominate at Continental Shoes, has been threatening to fire Tom.
....... Tom then discloses that he will soon make a major change in his life. He says he has joined the Marriage of Merchant Seamen, paying his ante from money for the lite bill. When Jim asks what will happen when the lights go out, Tom says he won't be effectually. He will exist leaving just equally his father did 16 years before.
....... When Amanda comes in, she musters all of her Southern amuse and lavishes it on Jim, and so makes excuses for Laura. Laura, she says, has been cooking the dinner and the oestrus of the stove made her a flake sick. Laura is in another room lying on a sofa.
....... The lights go out. Amanda lights candles, and Jim goes with her to check the fuse box. His finding: All the fuses announced okay. Tom so owns up that he did non pay the light nib. �Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on the back of information technology," Jim says. (Shakespeare is his nickname for Tom because Tom likes to write poesy.) She so asks Jim to keep Laura company in the parlor. When he assents, she gives him a candelabrum and some vino.
....... Jim speaks gently to the very shy girl gently as he sets the candelabrum down and sits on the floor. He invites Laura to join him. She does, with the candelabrum between them. He says Laura seems like an former-fashioned girl.
....... �I think that's a pretty skillful type to exist," he adds.
....... When Laura compliments him on his singing voice and asks him whether he remembers the name �Bluish Roses," he realizes she went to loftier school with him. They were in the same singing grade in the auditorium. Laura recalls then that whenever she entered the auditorium she always made a loud clumping sound with her lame leg. Jim says he didn't notice. They continue to hash out Jim's singing, and Laura gets out their yearbook, The Torch, and shows him his picture show as he sings in The Pirates of Penzance. Her shyness is gone.
....... When she asks him how Emily Misenbach is, he says, �Oh, that kraut-head . . . I never encounter her." He says Laura has an inferiority circuitous, and that he had i also until he took his public-speaking grade. As four her lame leg, he says, �A lilliputian concrete defect is what you have. Hardly noticeable fifty-fifty! Magnified thousands of times by imagination!"
....... He says he's taking a course in electro-dynamics�that is, radio engineering science�and plans to become part of the television receiver industry when it begins to blossom.
Laura tells him about her interest�her collection of tiny glass animals, a glass menagerie. When he sees the figurine of a unicorn, he remarks that they are supposed to be extinct and adds that the lilliputian thing must feel lonesome.
....... �Well, if he does," Laura says, �he doesn't complain about it. He stays on a shelf with some horses that don't take horns and all of them seem to become along nicely together."
....... When they hear music coming from the Paradise Dance Hall, Jim talks Laura into dancing with him. They waltz. Laura seems to be enjoying herself. As they move about the room, they bump into a table, knocking the glass unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. Laura doesn't mind, though, saying, �I'll only imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to brand him feel less�freakish!"
....... Jim tells her she'due south pretty and kisses her on the lips. A few moments afterwards, though, he tells her that he is going steady with an Irish gaelic Catholic girl named Betty. He met her the previous summer, he says, and cruel in beloved with her. Laura is deeply disappointed�in fact, devastated.
....... �Being in honey has made a new man of me," he says.
....... Laura opens his hand, then closes it around the unicorn, proverb she wants him to have it equally a souvenir. Amanda gaily brings in fruit dial and macaroons, then asks Laura why she looks so serious. Jim says the reason is that they were having a serious conversation.
....... �Good! At present you're amend acquainted," she says.
....... She and then says she'south going to leave them lonely to go along their conversation. But Jim says he himself is leaving. Amanda, thinking he has to become up early, says, ....... �You're a young working man and accept to keep working men's hours."
....... He tells her he has ii clocks ii dial: ane for work and one Betty. Amanda asks who Betty is, and Jim tells her. He says he and Betty will shortly get married. After Jim leaves, Amanda calls Tom and says, �You didn't mention that he was engaged to exist married."
....... Tom says he was not aware of the engagement. Amanda says information technology is odd that he was unaware, considering that he works with Jim and is his very good friend. When she starts in on ane of her rants, Tom crosses over to the door, saying he is going to the movies.
....... Amanda says, �That's correct, now that you've had united states make such fools of ourselves. The effort, the preparations, all the expense ! The new floor lamp, the carpeting, the clothes for Laura!"
....... Amanda continues to browbeat him. Tom smashes a glass and leaves.
....... A curt while later on, Continental Shoemakers fires him for writing a verse form on a shoebox. Tom leaves St. Louis and travels. And the image of his sister travels with him.
Themes
Escape
....... Escape motivates each of the primary characters. Amanda�disenchanted with her dreary and unglamorous life in a tenement�frequently steps out of the present and into the memories of her past as a Southern belle with numerous beaux. She recounts her memories for her children.
....... One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain, your mother received seventeen gentlemen callers! . . . Among my callers were some of the most prominent immature planters of the Mississippi Delta - planters and sons of planters!....... Because of her farthermost shyness, Laura escapes any situation in which she must interact with others. She quit loftier school. She quit business organization school. She hides from Jim O'Connor when he comes to supper. When O'Connor's kindness and low-key fashion draw her out of herself and away from her glass menagerie, she enjoys a few moments of normalcy with a young man she thinks is interested in her. But when she learns that he is engaged to marry some other adult female, she returns to her sheltered world.
....... There was young Champ Laughlin who later became vice-president of the Delta Planters Bank.
Hadley Stevenson who was drowned in Moon Lake and left his widow one hundred and fifty thousand in Government bonds.
There were the Cutrere brothers, Wesley and Bates. Bates was i of my bright particular beaux! He got in a quarrel with that wild Wainwright boy. They shot information technology out on the flooring of Moon Lake Casino. Bates was shot through the tum. Died in the ambulance on his way to Memphis. His widow was also well provided for, came into 8 or x thousand acres, that'south all. She married him on the rebound � never loved her � carried my movie on him the night he died!
....... Tom escapes in small ways�smoking on the fire escape, going to the movies, drinking�earlier escaping in a big way by leaving home. While traveling, the image of the wounded Laura remains with him. He continues to travel, trying to escape this image, to no avail.
Communications Breakdown
....... When Tom and his female parent discuss serious or even trivial matters, the conversation often erupts into an statement�ordinarily considering of Amanda'southward sarcasm and nitpicking and Tom's volatile temper. They can go simply so far in their discussions before rising acrimony short-circuits their ability to communicate. As for Laura, she would rather run from a trouble than talk it over with someone.
....... Jim O'Connor at kickoff seems gifted with an power to communicate. Inside minutes, he talks Laura out of her cocoon. But O'Connor commits mayhap the most reprehensible act of the play when he takes the liberty of kissing Laura without informing her that he is in love with some other woman. After Laura's middle swells with romance, he pierces it with the revelation that he is engaged to be married.
The Haunting Past
....... Memories haunt the main characters. For example, later Tom leaves domicile, the memory of his fragile sister follows him wherever he goes. He travels from place to identify to escape the memory of Laura, the records she played, and her drinking glass menagerie.
It [the memory of Laura] always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was simply a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at dark, in some foreign city, before I accept plant companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of coloured glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colours, like bits of a shattered rainbow........ Amanda frequently resurrects the glory days of her past as a popular immature lady with many gentlemen callers. They give her temporary refuge from the harsh reality of the present as an abandoned, middle-aged woman living in a dreary apartment and dependent on her son's earnings to get from one 24-hour interval to the next.
Then all at in one case my sister touches my shoulder. I plow around and look into her optics . . . Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to go out y'all behind me, just I am more true-blue than I intended to be!
....... Laura, meanwhile, suffers from her painful memories of high schoolhouse, when the caryatid on her leg hampered her ability to get in on time for classes. When she arrived late for music class in the auditorium, she recalls, "everybody was seated before I came in. I had to walk in front of all those people. My seat was in the dorsum row. I had to go clumping all the way up the alley with everyone watching." Laura also has only bad memories of her brusk stay at business school. One of her for teachers describes what happened to Laura there: "Her easily shook and so that she couldn't hit the right keys! The commencement time we gave a speed-test, she bankrupt downwardly completely [and] was ill at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the launder-room!"
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Climax
....... The climax of the play occurs before long later on Jim kisses Laura. The shy daughter thinks her prince has come. And she feels comfortable around him. And so Jim tells her devastating news: He is already engaged to be married to a young woman he fell in love with the previous summertime. Laura retreats back into her lilliputian world of her father's Victrola records and her drinking glass figurines�possibly never again to emerge. This event precipitates Amanda'south burst against Tom for matching Laura with a immature human who is already halfway to the altar with another woman. Although Tom maintains that he was unaware of Jim's engagement, Amanda doesn't believe him. When Amanda further browbeats him, he leaves�for good.
Conflicts
....... Amanda and Tom are both in disharmonize with their situations in life. Amanda �heart-anile, abased by her husband�must live in an gloomy tenement on the earnings of her son. Tom is a cog in shoe factory whose talents equally a writer are largely untapped. They are likewise in disharmonize with each other, mainly because of Amanda'south error-finding. In the opening scene, her criticism of him at the dinner table � and his sharp response to it � foreshadows the direction of this mother-son human relationship.
AMANDA [to her son]: Dearest, don't push button with your fingers. If you accept to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread. And chew !chew! Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to assimilate flood without mastication, merely human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down. Eat nutrient leisurely, son, and really savor it. A well-cooked meal has lots of delicate flavours that have to be held in the oral cavity for appreciation. So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function.Laura suffers from a serious psychological problem � deep feelings of inferiority � that put her in disharmonize with nearly all social situations
TOM: I haven't enjoyed ane seize with teeth of this dinner because of your constant directions on how to swallow it. Information technology's you that makes me rush through meals with your hawk-similar attention to every bite I take. Sickening - spoils my appetite - all this give-and-take of - animals' secretion - salivary glands -mastication !
Signals to the Audience: Legends, Music, and Images
....... Twice during the play (if staged according to the author's directions), the audience sees the words "O � sont les neiges" on a screen. These words are part of a refrain at the cease of each stanza of "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" ("Ballad of the Dead Ladies"), a poem by Fran�ois Villon (1431-1463?). Information technology was translated into English language past Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). The complete refrain is "Mais o� sont les neiges d�antan!" Rosetti translated this line as "Simply where are the snows of yester-twelvemonth?" Villon's verse form laments the passing of once-famous ladies. They are all dead; their glory has disappeared. The refrain sums up the theme of Villon's poem with a metaphor comparing the past and its people to snowfall that eventually melts and disappears.
....... In The Glass Menagerie, "o� sont les neiges" appears on the screen to signal that Amanda is well-nigh to reminisce nigh her glamorous past. But similar the snow, her by has melted away. She is no longer the belle of the ball, no longer the eye of attention. Moreover, her husband has abandoned her � perhaps because of her carping tongue.
....... Other word signals � referred to every bit legends by the writer � besides appear on the screen to innovate dialogue or commentary. For example, "Later the Fiasco" appears on the screen preceding the post-obit comment by Tom addressing the audience from the fire escape:
After the fiasco at Rubicam's Business College, the idea of getting a gentleman caller for Laura began to play a more and more important part in Mother's calculations. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment.This comment occurs before the following dialogue:
Some other instance is this legend: "Plans and Provisions."
TOM: All correct! What about Laura?Williams likewise uses music and images to signal the direction of the plot. An example is a screen image of a sailing transport flight a pirate flag. Here is the dialogue that follows:
AMANDA: We take to be making some plans and provisions for her. She's older than you lot, two years, and nothing has happened. She just drifts along doing naught. It frightens me terribly how she just drifts forth.
AMANDA: Most young men find risk in their careers.Dramatic Irony
TOM: Then most young men are non employed in a warehouse.
AMANDA: The world is total of young men employed in warehouses and offices and factories.
TOM: Do all of them find adventure in their careers?
AMANDA: They do or they do without it! Not everybody has a craze for run a risk.
TOM: Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
....... Williams uses dramatic irony throughout the play to call attending to Amanda'south cocky-centeredness. For example, when Tom and his mother are having a heated give-and-take about Laura's inability to socialize, Tom asks, "What can I do about information technology?" His mother answers, "Overcome Selfishness! Self, self, self, is all that you ever recall of!"
....... Merely the audience knows it is Amanda who continually exhibits selfishness. She wants her way at all times every bit she attempts to command the destinies of her children.
Symbols, Allusions, and Terms
Berchtesgaden : Town in southern Germany. On a mountain above the town was Adolf Hitler's chalet, the Berghof, where he conducted fateful meetings before World War II. Other Nazi leaders maintained chalets nearby.
blancmange: Molded dessert.
Chamberlain: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), British prime minister accused of assenting to a policy of appeasement with Adolf Hitler that enabled the German dictator to take over Czechoslovakia.
D.A.R.: Abbreviation for Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic American organization.
Daumier: Honour�-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), French artist famous for works that satirize French order and politics.
doughboy: U.S. infantryman in World War I.
El Diablo: Spanish for the devil.
fire escape: Symbol of Tom'southward desire to go off on his ain.
Franco: Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Spanish full general who led rightist forces in the overthrow of the leftist authorities during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
Garbo: Greta Garbo (1905-1990), glamorous star of motion pictures.
drinking glass menagerie: (1) Symbol of Laura's fragility. (2) Symbol of Laura'southward ethereal qualities. Of these, the commentary says, "She is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting."
glass unicorn figurine: Symbol of Laura. Like Laura, it is a strange, alien animate being. It resembles a horse but has a horn growing from the centre of its brow. While Laura and Jim O'Connor are dancing, they crash-land into a table and knock the figurine to the floor. The horn breaks off. This happening suggests that Laura'south abnormal shyness has as well "broken off" while under the spell of O'Connor's charm. Yet, when O'Connor informs Laura that he is engaged to be married to a woman named Betty, she is devastated. The broken unicorn figurine then becomes a symbol of Laura'south broken spirit.
Guernica: City of Guernica Y Luno in northern Kingdom of spain. On April 26, 1937, German language shipping bombed the city in back up of Nationalists nether Generalissimo Francisco Franco in his efforts to overthrow the Republican government in the Castilian Ceremonious War. The aerial assault devastated the city and killed hundreds of people by one estimate and up to one,650 people by another estimate. The tragedy of Guernica was the field of study of Pablo Picasso'south most famous painting.
Hogan gang: Notorious St. Louis criminal gang of the 1920s and 1930s. It was headed by Edward J. (Jellyroll) Hogan and his blood brother, James.
Jolly Roger: Pirate flag with an image of a white skull and crossbones on a blackness background.
jonquils: Symbols of Amanda'due south self-centeredness. Jonquils are a species of the flower narcissus. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a young man who fell in love with himself after seeing his paradigm in a pool of h2o. He was and then in love with the epitome that he could not leave information technology and eventually died next to the pool. A cute blossom grew in the identify where he died. The flower became known equally the narcissus.
kimono: Traditional Japanese robe with a sash and broad sleeves.
Lawrence, Mr.: D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), influential British novelist.
Mazatlan: Resort on the western coast of Mexico.
O'Hara, Reddish: Beautiful and tempestuous Southern belle in the novel Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949).
Pirates of Penzance: Operetta by Westward.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900).
pleurosis: Inflammation of membranes covering the lungs.
porti�res: Curtains hung in a doorway.
Victrola: Phonograph, or record player, manufactured by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which became part of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1929.
Report Questions and Essay Topics
- Who is the nigh admirable character in the play? Who is the least admirable?
- In your opinion, why is Laura and then shy?
- In your opinion, why did Amanda's husband abandon her?
- Write a short psychological profile of one of the characters. Employ data from the play, also as library and Net research, to back up your findings.
- In Tom'southward opening speech to the audience, he says,"I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it." How is it possible for him to know virtually conversations that took place when he was not present. An example is the conversation in the parlor between Jim O'Connor and Laura.
- Write a scene with dialogue betwixt Laura and Amanda that presents their reaction to Tom'south departure.
Source: https://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides8/Menagerie.html
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