The Glass Menagerie

In his opening monologue, Tom explains that the events of the play are a memory. Tom’s location in time is perpetually unclear, and at the end of the play, he says, “Time is the longest distance between two places” (784). The passage of time has moved him farther and farther away from the actual events, but memory keeps them close. Time also distorts memory, which the play depicts through the conventions of expressionism—a means that works to convey an unreliable narrative, warped by Tom’s perspective and hindsight. He admits that, as a poet, he has imposed poetic symbolism. When Tom left his mother and sister, he had to be ruthless and save himself. This raises the question as to what his memory changes in recounting the moments that led up to his escape. In Tom’s version, his escape is justified. Amanda is overbearing, unreasonable, and at times, delusional. Laura, although seemingly hopelessly helpless, appears to have achieved a new level of self-reliance after the evening with Jim. The Laura who gives Jim her broken unicorn and smiles at her mother seems like a young woman who will survive without her brother.

In Tom’s memory, Amanda, Laura, and his younger self are suspended in time—both as a memory that cannot be revised and as characters who are frozen and unable to move forward. Each member of the Wingfield family has a different relationship to reality and time. Amanda sees the world through the rosy-colored glasses of the past. She maintains a portrait of her husband as if he will return to make the family whole. Amanda retreats to the past when her present becomes unbearable. When she dons the yellowing ballgown from her teen years, Amanda shows that she sees the evening with a gentleman caller as a porthole to the past, as she desperately tries to live vicariously through her daughter. Laura buries herself in the fantasy of the present. She has cordoned off the past as traumatic, and becomes extremely distressed when Jim, an agent from that past, enters her present. Preparing for the future, as in attending business school or attempting to find a husband, generates such anxiety that she becomes physically ill. Laura only seems happy when she exists in the moment with her glass animals. Tom focuses only on the future, desperate for forward momentum. He treats the present and the past as traps that stifle him and hold him back.

Tom’s dual perspective illustrates the importance that the play places on time. Young Tom is rash, angst-ridden, and frustrated. He becomes exasperated with his mother’s determination to focus on the past. The alarm clock each morning, along with his mother’s daily shout to “Rise and shine!” (761), makes him wish for death as it marks the continued passage of time—another day in which he has not begun his future. However, narrator Tom reflects. He has found that living for himself and his future has caused the past to flood over life regardless of how hard he tried to avoid it. The play shows that the past cannot be fully buried. And although he cannot go back and revise the events or choose differently, they nonetheless change with time. Memory is unstable, permeable so that hindsight and guilt can invade, shifting meaning and events. In his production notes accompanying the play, Tennessee Williams states:

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing with the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance (750). 

Tom’s heightened version of remembered reality finds meaning and cohesiveness through interpretation rather than simply recreating.