Glass Menagerie Research Articles

Conflict between Reality and Illusion in Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie

Conflict between Reality and Illusion in Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams's “‘Homage to Ophelia’ (A Pretentious Foreword)” with Commentary

In January 1944, Tennessee Williams wrote “Homage to Ophelia,” the foreword to his and Donald Windham’s play, You Touched Me! Although the version published here was arguably Williams’s final version, and it does bear a specific date, a brief look into the earlier versions of the draft tell a more complex story, not just about how Williams revised the foreword over several weeks, but also how he revised the play and, to a certain extent, himself. Comparing the earlier and later versions of the foreword demonstrates that the changes he made from the first to the final draft were influenced by certain professional and personal trials that Williams was experiencing at the time. Due to complications from the play’s two imminent premieres and the deaths of his two beloved Roses (one symbolic, the other very real), the weeks closing 1943 and the days opening 1944 were traumatic enough for Williams to have him rethink entirely the content and tone of the foreword from earlier drafts, a reshaping that extended to the play itself and, with the current revisions of The Glass Menagerie, to his career in the theatre.

Remembering to Forget: Fragile Memories in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

This paper explores the dramatization of Tom and Amanda’s memories and the transformation of Tom’s relationship with his father in The Glass Menagerie. This study contributes to existing studies, that tend to treat Tom as an autobiographical figure or contrast him with Jim or Laura, by analyzing Tom’s dual role and the play’s use of memory. Tom, who performs the roles of character and narrator, illustrates the conflict between remembering and attempting to forget. As a character, he is troubled by the legacy of the absent patriarch, and he is frequently reminded by his mother to not emulate his father. Father-identification, in Tom’s case, occurs after repeated scenes of distancing himself from his absent father. The use of costume, props, and scenery also highlights the effect of memory. The glass wall in the final scene allows the audience to witness how, as narrator, Tom experiences alienation and helplessness. Moreover, this study posits that the play invites foundational question on the boundaries between illusion and truth through examinations of Tom’s views on a memory play and of his fascination with movies and a stage magician named Malvolio.

Narratives of (De)materialisation: Gothic Spectralisation in Flannery OʼConnorʼs “The Enduring Chill”

The genre structure of the “ghost stories” is preserved in the key works of the so-called Southern Gothic, although these works often lack the real ghosts which were repeatedly portrayed in the early British prototypes of the genre. The basic genre technique employed in the “ghost stories” can best be described as “spectralisation”. Flannery O'Connor's “The Enduring Chill” is perhaps the focal text in the analysis of the spectralisation theme in the Southern Gothic fiction, since it evokes various procedures used in the two pivotal works of this American genre: Tennessee Williams's drama The Glass Menagerie and Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! . This paper explores various subcategories of Gothic spectralisation, such as the motifs of “body loss,” romanticisation of death, and fictionalisation of experience.

Anasyrma et la hantise du rire dans le théâtre de Tennessee Williams

I propose to look at laughter in the theater of Tennessee Williams between 1941 and 1948 through a close study of a single play, Summer and Smoke (1948), and two short stories written in parallel, Yellow Bird (1941-1947) and One Arm (1942-1948). To a lesser extent, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) will also be discussed. The short stories will allow us to consider that these plays, and perhaps Williams’ theater in general, embrace an ambivalent but constructive sense of laughter. Laughter in Williams’ plays is almost invisible; still it sets action in motion, haunts the characters and roams like a doppelganger between words and phrases to illuminate what is dark and demystify what is poignant. In this essay I contend that Williams’ plays are not what they appear to be: laughter endows the action with a salutary haunting authority stemming from autobiographic and perhaps traumatic material which eventually drains pathos offering wit instead.

The Crucible (Czarownice z Salem)

The Crucible (Czarownice z Salem)

Comparison Between Ideal Feminist and Discriminated Feminist From Characteristics of Amanda and Lauraas Seen In The Glass Menagerie Bytennesse Williams

The problem in this thesis is the analysis of ideal feminist and discriminated feminist from the characteristics of Amanda and Laura is based on the three waves of feminist movements. Both Amanda and Laura represents the different kinds of feminist in literaty work, Amanda is the strong woman as the representation of ideal feminist, whereas Laura is the weak woman as the representation of discriminated feminist. Then, the purpose of research is to describe Laura as the discriminated feminist, Amanda as the ideal feminist, and to explain Laura and Amanda as the ideal and discriminated feminist from The Glass Menagerie.In research methodology, the data collection is performed through library research, which the writer gains the data and information about his object trought the books and other audiovisual equipment that related and relavant to the topic in the form of words or pictures. In the data analysis, it uses genetic structuralism, it looks the external factor of the literature that conveys the internal element of literary work such the actions of the main character, such as characters and author.
 The findings in this thesis can be seen from the characters of Amanda and Laura represents the different kinds of feminist in literaty work, Amanda is the strong woman as the representation of ideal feminist, whereas Laura is the weak woman as the representation of discriminated feminist. Amanda, a typical southern belle, trapped by the cruel reality, seeks comfort from her glorious past and causes her isolation from her life, which is the embodiment of her alienation. Laura, a fragile and terribly shy girl with a crippled leg, withdraws completely to her own world made of glass animals and eventually isolates from the society. It is her disability and the family environment cause her isolation from the society, which is just the embodiment of her alienation.

The Comparison Between Ideal Feminist and Discriminated Feminist From Characteristics of Amanda And Lauraas Seen In The Glass Menagerie Bytennesse Williams

The Comparison Between Ideal Feminist and Discriminated Feminist From Characteristics of Amanda And Lauraas Seen In The Glass Menagerie Bytennesse Williams

Representing the Erotic Life of Disabled Women: Jennifer Egan'sManhattan Beachand Anne Finger'sA Woman, in Bed

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams'sThe Glass Menagerie, waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce'sUlysses, the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison'sSula, is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. InThe Sexual Politics of Disability, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

Luminous Road

Luminous Road Speer Morgan Surrealism is often associated with an absurdist worldview and the gloomier aspects of the larger movement of existentialism. Yet André Breton’s defining 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism is playful and hopeful in tone about the power of the human mind and art. Breton uses the word “luminous” twice in the manifesto, first by imagining himself to be living in or visiting the “romantic ruins” of a castle on the outskirts of Paris, a place occupied and enjoyed by the artists, writers, and philosophers he feels blessed to know, who reach that castle by means of a “luminous road.” He recognizes that this is just a fantasy but asks rhetorically “why not” imagine that one might live in such a place. In the second passage he refers to the “luminous phenomenon” of how the mind works and how the spark between two ideas—the association of ideas—can lead to beauty and meaning. In Breton’s thinking and in the larger movement, surrealist ideas arose from new views about both the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the mind and its creative potential. Elements of the surreal find their way into almost every phase of literature in the last century, including modernism, existentialism, Beat writing, and postmodernism. Recently I have noticed an upsurge of belief in the power of the unexpected and the unconscious and of somehow finding new realities through the larger engagement of the whole mind. The surrealist idea of taking elements out of their usual contexts and associations—whether they be persons or settings or objects—is a simplified and resilient model of the broad subject of creativity itself, whether in the arts or sciences. Surrealism believes in the power of the [End Page 5] unconscious or attendant mind and of finding new realities within the dream. Pocket watches don’t hang from trees or have liquid properties, yet such an image may be, in some unpredictable way, exactly what inspires a poet or a scientist toward an important new idea or solution. Over the past century, the practical arts have made widespread use of surreal and expressionist methods. This issue’s Curio Cabinet, “Stage Pictures: Jo Mielziner and the Art of Set Design,” opens with a detailed note from Tennessee Williams regarding the set for his new play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to open on Broadway in 1955. Williams and Mielziner had previously worked together on A Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Mielziner’s minimalist approach emphasized one or two key images within the play, which perfectly expressed Williams’s lyrical realism. Yet the playwright encouraged Mielziner to push the designs for Cat into the realm of the metaphysical, asking that Maggie and Brick’s bedroom be “roofed by sky” to suggest the mystery of the cosmos. Williams also provided the designer with detailed notes on the huge console—the combination radio, phonograph, and liquor cabinet—that dominates the room as an objective correlative for “all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide,” with the overarching cosmos as a powerful commentary on those illusions. Mielziner’s sketches from the archive at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts demonstrate his skillful interpretation of Williams’s requests. They also show an expressive talent that sustained a fifty-year career and helped transform set design from craft to art. Cat Powell’s powerful story “Manifold Northeast Life and Trust” is about an isolated middle-aged widower working for a once thriving insurance company now in such decline that its multistory office building is scarcely occupied. In his isolation, he notices fantastical changes in his workplace. A pond appears in one of the offices, fish populate it, and then a forest starts to grow. He does less and less of his regular work and more and more tending of the forest and dismantling the offices to make room for it. Later, ghostly shades of dead former colleagues start to appear and populate the building, going about the business of work and interacting with each other. The narrator seems to have made the transition from the necessary labor of supporting self and family in the real world to tending a...

THE IMAGE OF MOTHER IN THE DRAMA OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (in the example of PLAYS “THE GLASS MENAGERIE” AND “THE ROSE TATTOO”)

THE IMAGE OF MOTHER IN THE DRAMA OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (in the example of PLAYS “THE GLASS MENAGERIE” AND “THE ROSE TATTOO”)

The construction and the representation of the mother figure in the film production of Tennessee Williams: Typology and case studies | A construção e a representação da figura da mãe na produção do filme de Tennessee Williams: tipologia e estudos de caso

The maternal figure has an important presence in the literary and film works of the American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). This writer, who grew up in a southern environment marked by the religion and social conservatism, had in his own family a source of inspiration to build their characters. In this sense, the influence of his mother, the absence of his father and his sister’s disability, were determinants for the author to develop a special sensitivity to understand personal relationships. The person who exerted a great influence on his development was his mother, Edwina, who was first portrayed in “The Glass Menagerie”, and, subsequently, reflected his character and personality traits that were evident in some of his major works and adaptations. With the aim of reflecting on the important influence of Williams’ mother for the development and representation of their mothers in fiction, the aim of this article was to propose a typology of the parent that are present in his work. To do this, and with reference to Edwina, the article addresses mother-protagonists of some of his most relevant film adaptations, which were adapted in Hollywood between 1950 and 1968, such as “The Rose Tattoo” of Daniel Mann of the year of 1955, “Suddenly, Last Summer” of Joseph L. Mankiewicz of the year of 1959, and “This Property Is Condemned” of Sydney Pollack of the year of 1966, the latter being one of the most important film adaptations of the playwright.

장애학적 시각으로 『유리동물원』과 『일곱 개의 기타』 다시 읽기

장애학적 시각으로 『유리동물원』과 『일곱 개의 기타』 다시 읽기

The Clash of Genders in A Streetcar Named Desire

The world of Tennessee Williams includes a wide range of complex and diverse characters, pointing to the complexity of human nature: Tom, Amanda and Laura in “The Glass Menagerie”, Maggie and Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, Maxine and Shannon in “The Night of the Iguana”, Chance and Alexandra in “Sweet Bird of Youth”, Val Xavier in “Battle of Angels” and “Orpheus Descending”, Alma in “Summer and Smoke”. The dramatic world of the Elysian Fields, the place where the action of the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is located, is populated by an equal number of female and male characters. The female figures present in the play are Blanche du Bois, her sister Stella, Eunice (Stella’s friend and neighbour), the matron, an Afro-American woman, a Hispanic woman selling flowers. The gallery of male characters includes Stanley (Stella’s husband), Steve, Mitch and Pablo (Stanley’s friends and poker companions), the doctor and a young man. There is a very good balance as far as the importance attached to masculine and feminine characters is concerned: there are two protagonists, Blanche and Stanley, followed by Stella and Mitch, the characters that come after them in order of importance. The play witnesses the clash between femininity and masculinity apparent in the relationship of the most important characters: Blanche and Stanley, Stella and Stanley, Blanche and Mitch. The article will analyze the relationships between these characters as representatives of femininity and masculinity and the changes that may be perceived in their relationships in the unfolding of the action.

Escapism as Reflected in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie

Escapism is a part of psychology which in this research connected into literature as an interdisciplinary study which shows inclination of human personality to seeking for a way out or escape from unpleasant realities. The aim of the research was to describe the characters got acquainted with escapism and the way the characters’ cope with escapism in their daily life. The research employed a descriptive qualitative method with psychoanalytical approach of Sigmund Freud’s personality structure from anxiety theory, defense and problem solving mechanism. Data sources were primary and supporting data. The primary data were taken from Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, and supporting data were taken from the books, journals, articles, and internet sources. The research indicated that each character experienced anxiety that made them got acquainted with escapism. They had their own way in dealing with escapism through defense and problem solving mechanism. Some characters solved emotional problems with negative mechanism consciously or unconsciously, and others handled emotion with positive mechanism, therefore the result were also positive.

『유리동물원』(The Glass Menagerie)의 메타연극성 강화를 위한 연출 접근 방법 연구

테네시 윌리엄스(Tennessee Willams)의 『유리동물원』(The Glass Menagerie)은 재현(representation)과 환영주의(Illusionism)가 가진 한계를 비사실주의적 특성으로 보완해 다양한 변주와 재해석의 가능성을 가지고 있는 메타연극이다. 작품내에서 발견되는 메타연극성은 관객으로 하여금 이중으로 보기 혹은 소외의 체험을 전달하며 동시에 연극에 투영된 현실세계와 관객 자신을 객관적 거리에서 바라볼 수 있도록 기능한다.BR 그런데 『유리동물원』의 메타연극성에 대한 선행연구는 공연 중심이 아니라 이론적이고 문학적인 연구 위주로 진행되어왔다. 메타연극의 목적인 소외의 체험이 공연관극을 통해 이루어지는 것을 생각해볼 때, 『유리동물원』의 메타연극성에 관해 공연중심의 연구가 이루어져야할 필요가 있다.BR 본고의 목적은 연출적 차원에서 공연을 통해 『유리동물원』이 가지고 있는 메타연극성을 강화하는데 있다. 이를 위해 메타연극의 개념과 특성을 간략히 살펴보고 이를 토대로『유리동물원』에 나타난 메타연극성을 분석하고자 한다. 이후 메타연극성 강화를 위한 연출 접근 방법을 극중극과 역할놀이, 시노그라피로 압축하고 이를 ‘1. 다층적 서사층위의 극중극 구조 확립’, ‘2. 다층적 서사층위에 각각 현존하는 시뮬라크르적 캐릭터 구축’, ‘3. 시노그라피의 자기 언급적 특성 강화’로 제시, 그 효과를 검토해보고자 한다. 나아가 본고가『유리동물원』의 독창적이고 창조적인 메타연극 연출 접근의 작은 시발점이 되고자 한다.

СОЦІАЛЬНО-КУЛЬТУРНИЙ КОНТЕКСТ ДРАМАТИЧНОГО ТЕКСТУ: ПРОБЛЕМИ ВІДТВОРЕННЯ (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ ПЕРЕКЛАДІВ УКРАЇНСЬКОЮ ТА РОСІЙСЬКОЮ МОВАМИ П’ЄСИ ТЕННЕССІ ВІЛЬЯМСА «THE GLASS MENAGERIE»)

The article is devoted to the problem of translation of the drama. The article focuses on revealing peculiar linguistic and stylistic features of the drama. The research has been done on the case study of Russian and Ukrainian translation variants of the drama text by T.Williams «The Glass Menagerie». Basic methods of translation are investigated in the article. On the basis of comparative analysis the author investigates the problem of lexico-semantic transformations in translation of the drama. There has been proved that lexico-semantic transformations play an important role in the process of translation, providing the text with dynamics, enhancing expressivity, serving to enhance the image-expressive functions of a language. The units of different language levels, which help to verbalize cultural information of the source text, words with national and cultural semantic component have been considered. It was outlined that structural and functional peculiarities of each target language in regard to source English language and personality of translator have an impact on the reflection of the national and cultural colour of the source text. The task of the translator is to provide the reader with necessary explanations, since the transfer of the cultural and social specifics of the dramatic text requires a special approach from the translator in achieving the pragmatic adequacy of the translation. It is determined that the literal translation does not correspond to the adequacy of reproduction of the source text. The nationally marked means contribute to the emotional and expressive colour of the source text and emphasize the national colour. The adequate reproduction of stylistic means leads to the preservation of the original intention of the author. The dramatic text is a peculiar model of the socio-historical context of society. The main task of the translator is the reproduction of the national components of the model of another culture and preservation of national-historical context of the source text.

A study of The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield's acting aspect: Focused on Michael Kirby's 〈acting and not-acting〉

A study of The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield's acting aspect: Focused on Michael Kirby's 〈acting and not-acting〉

指先の詩学 : 『ガラスの動物園』における書くこと/描くことの戦略

指先の詩学 : 『ガラスの動物園』における書くこと/描くことの戦略

Introvert Character as Seen In Tennessee William’s Glass Menagerie

This thesis tell about a drama Glass Menagerie by Tennessee William. This drama memory play of narrator, Tom wingfield. He is an aspiring poet which work in warehouse to support his mother, Amanda and his sister, Laura. Mr. wingfield, Tom’s father, ran off family years ago, except for one postcard, has not been haeard from since. Amanda, originally from a genteel family, regales her children frequently with tales of her idyllic youth and the scores of suitors who once pursued her. She is disappointed that Laura, who wears a brace one her leg and is painfully shy, does not attract any gentlemen callers. Amanda then decides that Laura’s last hope must lie in marriage and begins selling magazine subscriptions to earn the extra money she believes will help to attract suitors for Laura.