The Fragile Home of a Precarious Girl: A Butlerian Study of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Part One

Abstract

The present article aims to explore Butler’s notion of precarity in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Agencies that induce precarity in characters of the play, Laura in particular, reaction to the repercussions of precariousness and the ways it leads to a new identity are also put under scrutiny. In the last decades, feminist and gender studies, with all their subcategories and subdivisions, have been one of the main concerns and interests in literary criticism as well as in social and cultural studies. A highly influential scholar in feminist and gender studies is Judith Butler. Normative power and gender related issues are sustained motifs throughout the study, which addresses the following questions: What are the roots of Laura’s feeling of precarity? How does her precarity affect and inflict those around her? How does she cope with or respond to her sense of precarity? To answer these questions, the researcher will draw upon Butler’s conception of precarity and precariousness and will focus on such key terms as femininity, patriarchy, pipe dreams, physical impairment, regulative system, and financial insecurity. This section of the article is divided into three main parts, namely, “Introduction,” “Theoretical Framework,” and “Analysis,” which comprises “Femininity” and “Disability.”