Essay analyzing the biographic
Essay analyzing the biographicTennessee Williams’ Life and The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie first opened on March 31, 1945. It was the first big success of Tennessee Williams’ career. It is in many ways about the life of Tennessee Williams himself, as well as a play of fiction that he wrote. He says in the beginning, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (1147). The characters Tom, Laura, and Amanda are very much like Williams, his sister Rose, and his mother Edwina. We can see this very clearly when we look at the dialogue, and the relations between the action in the play and the actions in Tennessee Williams’ life.
The first character that we will look at is Tom, the narrator. It can be interpreted that Tom is a likeness of Tennessee Williams. There are many similarities between his life and Tom’s life. Some of them are about his own actions, and some of them are about the actions in the life of his family. First we will look at Tennessee Williams life, and how it is much the same as the life of the character Tom in The Glass Menagerie.
He is the narrator, “an undisguised invention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention as is convenient to his purposes” (1147).
“I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it. The other characters are my mother, Amanda, my sister, Laura” (1147). Because Tom is the narrator, and the narrator is the one who tells the story, we can decide already that he stands for Tennessee Williams, who wrote the play and tells the story through Tom. Also for the same reason, Amanda is Williams’ mother Edwina Williams and Laura is his sister, Rose Williams.
Tennessee Williams dropped out of school when his father asked him to. He went to work in a shoe factory, but he hated it. In the play, Tom says, “Listen! You think I’m crazy about the warehouse! … You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that – Celotex interior! With – fluorescent – tubes! Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains – than go back mornings!” (1156) . Both Williams and Tom blamed their families for the horrible jobs that they were in.
Also Williams had a habit of going into his room after the job to write poetry and plays. Tom is a poet. “[Jim} knew of my secret practice of retiring to a cabinet of the washroom to work on poems when business was slack in the warehouse. He called me Shakespeare” (1168). Both Tom and Williams wanted to go away from their real life into their art....
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