Tennessee Williams play “The Glass Menagerie” is one full of interwoven, complex characters who, in their lives, share a common pain and loss. The portrait of the long lost father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances” sits above the mantel as a stinging reminder of what they all could have been. They could have been a family, but instead are broken and torn apart by the loss. However, this common pain is what holds these very individual and unique characters together through their tense lives.
Each character holds an important role in the family dynamic and in the events of the play, but none so much as the character who is oddly enough a mere ghost throughout it. The fifth character, that of the father, is the catalyst to the feelings which hang over this family and creates this tension, especially in the son, Tom. The relationship between Tom and his father seems especially tense, especially in later scenes in the play when the mother Amanda makes direct references to Tom as being like his father and wanting to leave. In fact, even Tom admits his yearning to get out of their small apartment and live the kind of free-form life his father took on. This parallel between characters is the most evident at the very end, in Tom’s final monologue when he says, “I descended the steps of this fire-escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space” (1048). Just as his father did years earlier, Tom became trapped in his family life, in Amanda’s expectations and in his sister’s insecurities and felt that he could no longer remain there.
The father creates other kinds of tensions, especially in the mother Amanda, who is intent on finding a better life for her daughter, Laura. It is clear that in marrying the father, Amanda married for love, and the regret in that is clear throughout her references to the successful men she could have married, the happy life she could have had. But no, she married for love. Her loneliness and pain from that betrayal causes her to feverishly hunt for a male suitor for Laura, although this obsession is in fact hurting her daughter more than it is helping. The absence of her husband seems a constant thought with Amanda, as she frequently references it, not just with family but with the gentleman caller, Jim.
Imagining this family with a father would be difficult, as their relationships depend almost entirely upon this loss. Perhaps Laura would be more confident without her mother’s pressure to marry, perhaps that pressure would be alleviated if Amanda had no regrets about her past, and perhaps Tom would look at that “larger-than-life” portrait hanging above the mantel and wonder about all the places life could take one if only they took the risk to travel. The growth in each of the characters depends entirely upon this piece missing from their hearts and this story, this play, would not exist without that tension and longing. Longing for a life they could never get back, a life they may never have, and the possibility of a world that seems only imagined.
