The Glass Menagerie. A play in seven scenes by Tennessee Williams. Out-of-town preview: Civic Theatre, Chicago, 26 December 1944. New York premiere: Playhouse Theatre, 31 March 1945. Set and light design: Jo Mielziner; original music: Paul Bowles (yes, that Paul Bowles); produced by Eddie Dowling and Louis J. Singer; directed by Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones. With Laurette Taylor (Amanda), Eddie Dowling (Tom), Julie Haydon (Laura), and Anthony Ross (Jim). Closed 3 August 1946 (563 performances). Text: The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions, 1999. This “definitive text” includes an introduction by Robert Bray and “The Catastrophe of Success,” an essay by Williams.

Eddie Dowling, Laurette Taylor and Julie Haydon in the original Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie. (Photo: The Lester Sweyd Collection, New York Public Library)

The three great American plays that premiered on Broadway in the years immediately after World War II — The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Death of a Salesman (1949) — share themes of the disparity between truth and illusion, between self-definition and the forces that conspire to deny it. They also acknowledge the close relationships among violence, sex and death as they simultaneously undermine and undershore the conceptions of community and the family. Murder in The Iceman Cometh, rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, adultery in Death of a Salesman — while staples of American melodrama, these themes in the plays of O’Neill, Williams and Miller do not result in reconciliation of these forces or in comfort; they lack the tidy conclusions and justice of the melodrama, leaving their stages in an uneasy peace. If not tragedies, these plays are shot through with an erotic, tragic consciousness which anxiously underlies their more melodramatic, romantic yearnings.

Tennessee Williams’ 1944 The Glass Menagerie provides a prelude of sorts to these three plays. A “memory play” set in 1939, before the entry of the United States into World War II, it is an example of the exploration of the prelapsarian American consciousness.[1] It is also a tale of duelling romanticisms — that of Amanda Wingfield’s, based in the memory of a Mississippi delta youth (as well as its social prejudices; she makes references to “darkies” and “niggers” in the very first scene of the play), and that of her son Tom, who seeks refuge in Hollywood fantasies. A warehouse clerk, Tom remembers the 1930s as a time “when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” (5)

The Wingfields now live in the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri. Much of the play deals with the attempts of Amanda and, more reluctantly, Tom to draw his sister Laura into a conventional romantic relationship. Laura is, however, somehow maladjusted, somehow incomplete, handicapped after a childhood illness and left with one leg slightly shorter than the other. Laura is drawn into the Southern romanticism into which Amanda tries to attract them both, but it is a curious romanticism, born of seduction and practicality. She admits the manipulative quality of a woman’s seduction as well as its ecstatic, alternatively submissive and aggressive character, characterizing “all pretty girls” as “a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be” (52); and also, despite her dislike of the word “cripple” to describe Laura, admits the accuracy of this characterization as well as her own status as a marginalized victim of abandonment: “Don’t think about us,” she tells Tom at the end of the play, “a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!” (96) In at least one sense, Amanda is far less romantic than her son Tom, who characterizes the approaching war as “adventure.” “Adventure and change were immanent in this year [1939],” he tells the audience. “They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! … All the world was waiting for bombardments!” (39)

Perhaps, but Amanda and Laura are only awaiting the gentleman caller that Tom arranges — a warehouse colleague and former high-school athlete Jim O’Connor, on whom Laura has had a crush for many years. While Amanda’s romanticism may be counted by Tom as an illusion, this romanticism and Amanda’s subtle divination of the dynamic forces of masculine and feminine psychology indeed works, and Jim and Laura are drawn into a deep sexual flirtation, symbolized by the exchange and eventual accidental destruction by Jim of Laura’s small, delicate glass unicorn (Freudian and Lacanian critics, go to it). In fact, it is the seemingly more realistic consciousness of Tom and Jim that abandons the two women to a sexless adulthood, Tom to follow his father’s footsteps out the door and Jim to a career in television (introduced to the American general public at the 1939 World’s Fair; a prescient adventurer, that Jim O’Connor).

By 1944, American dramatic realism and naturalism as produced by David Belasco and Clyde Fitch had been repudiated for almost a generation; apart from O’Neill’s experimentation with masks in The Great God Brown and the stream-of-consciousness monologue in Strange Interlude, there was also the 1938 example of Our Town, to which The Glass Menagerie bows in its scenic minimalism — “Eating is indicated by gestures without food or utensils,” Williams writes in a stage direction (6). To judge just how disorienting Williams meant the poetic realism of The Glass Menagerie to be, one must turn to the reading edition of the play prepared after the Broadway premiere. In the original text of the play as written, Williams described “the use of a screen on which were projected magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles,” he writes. “I do not regret the omission of this device from the original Broadway production … but I think it may be interesting to some readers to see how this device was conceived. … [The screen] is to give accent to certain values in each scene. … The legend or image upon the screen will strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more simply and lightly than if the entire responsibility were on the spoken lines. … In fact, the possibilities of the device seem much larger to me than the instance of this play can possibly utilize.” (xx) More disconcerting still would be the first projected legend, a quotation from a French poem, no translation provided: “Ou sont les neiges …” (“Where are the snows [of yesteryear]?” from François Villon). This explicit (nearly) post-war break with the conventions of prewar American drama, in its self-conscious reference to the melodrama of the silent film if not the pedagogic emphasis of the Brechtian projection, suggests a post-war dramatic and theatrical consciousness as well; like Laura and Amanda, a certain pre-war consciousness, a knowing innocence (if such can be conceived) has been abandoned.

The Glass Menagerie remains a work of Williams’ late apprenticeship — near the maturity of A Streetcar Named Desire, but lacking the broader sweep of the sexual dynamics that lay underneath that play. It remains almost embarrassingly autobiographical (Tom Wingfield = T.W. = Tennessee [Thomas Lanier] Williams), and like Death of a Salesman and Our Town it is hung perilously and not altogether successfully between tragedy and melodrama. But in its success it did lay the groundwork for a reconceived American drama that opened the stage for the darker forces that lay beneath American experience.

Below, a short excerpt from scene five of Anthony Harvey’s 1973 television production of the play, with Katharine Hepburn and Sam Waterston. A DVD of this production is available through the Superfluities Redux bookstore.

1. In scene five, Tom reads a newspaper with the “enormous” headline “Franco Triumphs,” fixing the play in that year. (38) [↩]