Drama Analysis - The Absent Father in Tennessee Williams' the Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams

In March 1945, The Glass Menagerie, by an almost unknown young author, opened in Chicago, getting a great critical and commercial success, a circumstance that was repeated a year later when the drama was presented in the scenarios Broadway. The author, Thomas Lanier Williams III, Tennessee Williams as we all know him, got it, thanks to the success of this work, starting a literary career that made him one of the most important American playwrights of the past century.

In the figure of Tennessee Williams confluence of several key features, given its importance, we should mention. These traits are individual and intimate profile of a man who looks in writing to build a place for himself, a small universe in which we seek refuge from the troubles and hostilities of the real world. While the desire for professional success is recurrent in the artists, and as the author explains in an essay entitled Catastrophe of Success, lies in the desires of American society, it is also true that the author turns to writing because only his work the artist can find satisfaction.

It is at this moment, when it can include some details of his biography that, because of their relevance, they help us understand this point. Everyone knows that Tennessee Williams was gay at a time in the history of the United States and the world in which sexual status "no standard" was considered, sometimes disease, and immorality and corruption of morals others. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, virile and handsome man, but violent and abusive, who made his living as a traveling salesman, became a father figure gone a long before he abandoned his family. Williams's relationship with his father was always difficult, as it was a delicate and sickly child who insulted his father calling him sissy. The most important male figure in his life was his maternal grandfather, with whom she spent long seasons.

Edwina was an aggressive woman, prone to fits of hysteria, obsessed with fantasies of a great South and still alive, to fill the loneliness of their children and the constant absence of her husband, I had these fantasies about parties, party favors and elegant suitors in mansions located in a mythic South that did not exist in the macula.

The Glass Menagerie - The Glass Menagerie

The world of Williams is very visible in this story. Laura's small room, a bit dingy and dilapidated, it becomes a haven in a world apart from the horror that happens in the alley. That world is a world of Laura embellished by the colored glass figurines, placed in different shelves throughout the room, collect the few rays of light from outside and fill the room with beautiful reflections in contrast to the world Shadow of Death Valley.

The four characters in this book dream, but each chooses his own chimera. Tom seeks refuge in drinking, adventure movies and dreamed that, possibly, will never experience, not even the ...