Curtain Call: The Glass Menagerie

Throughout Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, certain symbols

and themes are portrayed; among them the fragility of glass in the form of Laura’s glass

menagerie and cowardice symbolized by the portrait of Laura and Tom’s father. The

thread that runs through both the symbols of glass and the theme of cowardice, is self-

image. The way these characters view themselves, and each other, bind them together

and tear them apart simultaneously. In fact, the symbol of glass and the theme of self-

consciousness are tied together in the mirror that hangs in their apartment. Eric P. Levy

writes, the mirror “becomes a vital symbol of the act of self-consciousness by which a

character apprehends his or her self-image” (529).

We see these themes throughout the play and they are stressed upon the most at

the end of the play. One of the most significant symbols, is the fire escape. As Williams

writes, the “fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth,

for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of

human desperation” (345). This desperation burned in earnest for the entire Wingfield

family- Amanda, Laura and Tom- enclosed by their own limitations and views on

themselves and each other. Amanda is trapped in her views of her former self, a lovely

lady entertaining seventeen gentlemen callers; Tom is wracked with guilt and fury

whenever he sees himself and all that he has given up for his family, and Laura is trapped

overcrowded urban centers” (345) as well as in the realm outside her home “in the Jewel-

box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers” (342) where she escapes

the humiliation of the Rubicam Business College. In fact, Williams used this the Jewel

Box in another one of his