Sunday book pick: Matchmaking in hard times in Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play ‘The Glass Menagerie’

“The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie was an instant success. Before that, he was a playwright of very little success and in fact, most of his early works were poorly received. Since its debut in Chicago in 1944, Williams’s play has been performed numerous times on the stage and adapted for the screen. The Glass Menagerie made him something of a star – which Williams noted “snatched [him] out of virtual oblivion and thrust [him] into sudden prominence.” As far as he was concerned, he was afflicted by the “catastrophe of Success.”

Williams was forthcoming about the “inspiration” behind the play. It is his most autobiographical creation. He was unable to absolve himself of the guilt of neglecting his sister’s well-being – she was seriously mentally unwell, and as was the norm of the day, was made to undergo prefrontal lobotomy. If it were up to him, as Williams would later say, he would have tried harder to prevent the operation. By creating Laura, Tom’s mentally unwell cripple sister, Williams had written his “saddest play.” And despite its tremendous success, it was “painful” for him to see it. Williams, whose real first name was Thomas, shares his name with the play’s male protagonist, a helpless brother of a hapless sister.

Tom–Laura–Amanda

Unlike most plays that keep stage directions and scene narrations to a minimum, each scene in The Glass Menagerie is set up with great care. Williams is meticulous in his instructions on settings, costumes, lighting, and legends. The description of the Wingfield apartment in Scene One would give a career novelist a run for their money. There is no doubt that this is a play about the American working class, the most sorry slice of the population pie in the years immediately following the Great Depression. Money is tight – and this incites desperation of all kinds. Williams calls this unfortunate class “fundamentally enslaved” and “one interfused mass of automatism.”

The Wingfield family comprises Tom, Laura, and their mother Amanda. The father has fled and exists only in a photograph and Amanda’s bad memories of his drinking. Amanda considers herself the head of the family in his absence – and she’s desperate for her children to have a good life. Tom is a warehouse worker who mysteriously disappears to the “movies” every night. Laura has a defective leg which has sorely wounded her confidence – Amanda has enrolled her in a typing class at a business college but Laura drops out of it without her mother’s knowledge. She cannot stand to be the only disabled person in the classroom and worries that she is harshly judged by her peers for it. The alternative to financial independence, Amanda believes, is marrying well. She has an obsessive fascination with “gentleman callers” and impresses upon her daughter the importance of finding a suitable man. She reminisces about her own bachelor days, when she was apparently in great demand. Tom, for his part, stays out of this feminine drama by smoking and drinking when he’s not at work – vices that his mother sternly disapproves of.

Amanda’s involvement in her children’s lives is so meddlesome that it provides no opportunity for them to pave their own paths. Amanda sees herself fighting a “solitary battle” where money and love are both scarce. She’s in charge of Tom’s meagre earnings and worries about Laura who simply does not seem to grasp the hopelessness of her situation. Laura’s days, on the other hand, revolve around tending to her glass menagerie – in which there’s a unicorn that she’s particularly fond of. When all efforts fail to straighten out Laura, marriage reveals itself to be the only recourse.

Fundamentally enslaved

From hereon begins an almost tragicomic search for the right man. Tom plays the role of a reluctant, uninvolved brother who asks his only acquaintance at the warehouse, Jim, to dinner with his family. He is secretive about the motive and Jim agrees to Tom’s proposal for he has run out of gas to cook at his own place. The exuberant Amanda cannot believe her luck – Tom is finally stepping up and there’s actually a man who might be interested in Laura. What unfolds is alarmingly similar to the Indian matchmaking process. The mother cannot wait for the bemused, unwitting couple to fall in love; the brother cannot believe he has been made to partake in the extravagance, and the girl is no better than a showpiece. Laura’s terror, brought on by an old memory and her own lack of confidence, draws extreme pity in the reader’s mind while the mother’s desperation evokes understanding. The women’s overpowering presence leaves Tom unsure of his position in the family – he walks a tightrope, failing to protect his sister’s tender condition and only half succeeding at being the man of the house. The more his mother chides him for drinking and smoking, the more he feels determined to slight her. The relationship between the mother and her children, which should have been ideally founded on love, trembles upon fear.

It is this fear – of addiction, poverty, indignity – that dictates the Wingfield family life. There is very little space for genuine affection, and this, The Glass Menagerie says, is the biggest curse of poverty. The Great Depression, which left millions of Americans out of work and out of savings, threw workers into an endless grind, worsened by the war and an increasing devaluation of hard labour.

The reason why The Glass Menagerie is able to elicit tremendous reactions to this day is because of how pertinent it feels to our times. In the 80 years that have passed since its first production, little has changed – prefrontal lobotomy might be an outdated procedure now, but marriage mistaken for a woman’s emancipation and the stigma against mental illness, addiction, and poverty remain as real as ever.

The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams, Penguin Modern Classics.