Autobiographical Elements In The Glass Menagerie
(Tennese Williams)
Autobiographical Elements in the Glass Menagerie
The origins of the Glass Menagerie lie in a story Williams wrote in1941: ?Potrait of a Girl in a Glass. It differs in certain respects from the final play version. Laura is similar to his sister Rose as she is mentally fragile. At the age of twenty she believes that stars are five-pointed because they are represented such on the Star of Bethlehem which fixes to the top of her Christmas tree. Tom, the narrator who shares Tenesse William?s first name, chooses to write the play on what seems to have been the key moment in his past life. He revisits the past because he knows that his own freedom, such as it is, has been abandoned at the price of abandoning others, as Williams had abandoned his mother, and more poignantly ,his sister. He writes the play because he has not in the true sense escaped from the past. Tennese Williams may have felt guilty that his success with that play was built on the exploitation of others. Tom lacks even the consolation of success; fired from his job of the warehouse, he wanders from city to city, looking for the companionship he had failed to offer his sister.
The initials T.W, as for, both Tom Wingfield and Tennese Williams also hold significance. The conflict the author potrayed in the play, was the conflict the author had to go through in his childhood with his mother. Like Amanda , his mother used to chastise and scold him. She carped at him continually regarding his eating habits, his smoking, his going to the movies at a late hour etc. Almost all the talks led to a quarrel. The Glass Menagerie reflects the typical conflict between body and spirit, which Williams as a young man had to forbear in the southern puritanic society of his time
The Glass Menagerie is more autobiographical than any of Williams? plays. Just as Williams had worked during the Depression as a Clerk for the International Shoe Company at St.Louis, Tom the narrator, works for the ?Continental Shoemakers? in the same city. The name of his beloved was Laura Young who was as beautiful as Laura Wingfield of the play.
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