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Description
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since... read more
Cast of Characters/Important People
- Amanda Wingfield: The mother of Tom and Laura Wingfield; she's living in the past and has unrealistic expectations for her children; she tells the same stories about growning up in Blue Mountain over and over again; she nags Tom and sometimes, Laura; she is suspicious of Tom's every move.
- Tom Wingfield: He is cynical, long-suffering and disillusioned; he works a warehouse job that he loathes mainly because he was expected to take his father's place after he left them; he loves his sister, Laura, and feels a responsibility to her, but he has lost respect and love for his mother, Amanda, after having been inflicted by her nagging for many years.
- Laura Wingfield: She is a shy young woman who wears a brace on her leg as a result of having pleurosis when she was younger; she is a delicate person and she collects little glass animals (hence the Glass Menagerie); she pretends to go to business school to learn to type and become a secretary.
Memorable Quotes
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“The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism”
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“I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it”
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“I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains-than go back mornings”
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“Yes, I have tricks up my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
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“I'm going to opium dens! Yes, mother. Opium dens. Dens of vice and criminal's hangouts, mother, I am a hired assassin, I joined the Hogan gang, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! I run a stream of cat houses in the valley! they call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, see I'm leading a double life, really, a simple honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic czar of the underworld, mother, I just go to gambling casinos, spin away fortune on the roulette tables, mother, I wear a patch over one eye, and a false mustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers, on, on those occasions, they call me-El Diablo! Oh, I could tell you many things to make you sleepless! mother, My enemies plan to dynamite this place. they're gonna blow us all sky high! I'll be glad,very happy, and so will you! You'll go up, up, over Blue Mountain, on a broomstick with seventeen gentleman callers! You ugly, babbling old witch...”
First Sentence
The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Tennessee Williams (Author)
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