In his play, ‘The Glass Menagerie’, Tennessee Williams creates a tableau of human desperation and discontent. The narrator, Tom, presents his recollections of life with his neurotic mother, Amanda, and Laura, his retiring sister. Williams provides detailed stage instructions, paying particular attention to lighting and issuing specific instructions to light technicians. The presence of absence of light in each scene, as well as its intensity, is a considered tactic on William’s part. In addition, he makes several references to light in the play. It’s clear that light plays a significant role in his work, and upon closer inspection, several meanings for light can be discerned. Extinguished hopes and crushed dreams are a recurring theme in the play, and they are usually set against a dim backdrop. Much of the family’s pathetic drama is played out on a dim set. The set opens on a softly lit interior, and the morose mood is made all the more palpable by the dimness. The exasperated Tom bickers with Amanda about his table manners, while Laura retreats even further into herself. Amanda’s chirpy inquiries about Laura’s ‘gentleman callers’ irritate Tom and mortify Laura, for they belie the stark reality that Laura has no romantic prospects whatsoever.
‘A spot of light’ alights on Amanda as she recounts her days being courted by the eligible young bachelors of ‘Blue Mountain’. The spotlight would illuminate her joyous expression, and suggest that she is being transported to happier times. She becomes invigorated and her countenance acquires a ‘glow’. This association of light with optimism and hope also arises on the evening of the gentleman caller’s visit. Laura is imbued with a luminescence; she is like ‘a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance’. She shares her mother’s anticipation, and hopes to form a rapport with the dinner guest, Jim.
However, this radiance is ‘not lasting’, and this could be a sign of the crushing realization that Jim is actually engaged to be married and is therefore unavailable to Laura. In honour of the occasion, Amanda purchases a new floor lamp ‘with rose-silk shade’. Its appearance in their drab apartment marks an expectant, hopeful mood. This too comes to nothing however, when Jim reveals that he will not be pursuing Laura. During dinner, the electric lights go out. This is because tom neglected to pay the bill, choosing instead to spend the money on membership fees for the Union of Merchant Seamen’. He wants to leave, with disastrous implications for the women. They depend on tom financially and emotionally, and when he chooses not to pay the light bill, he is opting out of his responsibilities and burdens. Tom realises the effect of his departure, and at the plays conclusion we see him racked with guilt for his abandonment, unable to escape his sister’s image. Lighting also serves to convey atmosphere and to communicate the characters’ private realities. Dim lighting evokes the depression that has settled over the household – Tom seethes and chafes under his constrictions. Laura cowers before her robust mother and a hostile world, while Amanda struggles against her disappointing reality and poverty. Some significance is lent to the intensity of lighting. Aside from evoking the sombre and representing the haze of the narrator’s memory, soft lighting also created a soft cocoon-like setting which supports the character’s escapist fantasies. Whenever Laura is shown engrossed in her glass menagerie and her victrola, the stage is dimly lit. Tom finds refuge in the darkened movie theatre where he watches film after film enduring at home. When the electricity goes out, candlelight helps to create a soft, romantic atmosphere for Amanda to weave her illusions for the guest’s as well as her benefit. The soft glow is also conducive to Jim and Laura getting to know each other better, as Laura’s defences are lowered, and the light, accentuates ‘the fragile, unearthly prettiness, which usually escapes attention’. The soft lighting is flattering and kind; it supports the dreams with which the characters placate themselves. Conversely, brighter lighting is less forgiving and it sets everything in harsh contrast. The characters’ foibles become glaringly obvious under the spotlight. Thus it is in the glare of daylight that the audience sees Amanda at her most vulnerable, as the sunlight reveals her ‘aged’ but ‘childish’ features with its ‘cruel’ clarity. Moreover, some of the plays most jarring truths are played out in the glare of the spotlight. It is on a lighted stage that Tom and Amanda’s have their most violent argument in which she expresses her disdain for his lifestyle and ambitions,’ I know you’ve been doing things that you’re ashamed of’ and he hurls the insult ‘You ugly – babbling old - witch!’ at her. Tom’s final appeal for Laura to ‘blow out (her) candles – for nowadays the world is lit by lightning’ could be interpreted as William’s association of harsh brightness, lightning, with a brutal, hostile reality. Perhaps Tom is saying that the soft glow of Laura’s candle that has been illuminating her daydreams must be snuffed out, as she and Amanda will have to come to terms with the reality of their bleak condition. Not to do so would be to their detriment, and the worldly Tom recognizes that they must divest themselves of the illusions and hopes that flourish in the soft candlelight of their insular world in order to survive the world without him.