Last night, I spent all night for writing an essay as a final American literature project about Tennessee William and his drama, The Glass Menagerie. However, it seems that a number of expected words on the essay are not enough to all my thought. So now I’d like to release some more, consider as my personal feeling to this great masterpiece.
Someone accuses William of being too personal in his writing, and the truth, as he does confess is just because he didn’t think he could escape being. That doesn’t mean he is the one of characters in the play, it’s simply is the dynamics of them. To me, it’s true to say that completely the ‘too personal’ in William builds his success in each symbolic presented during 7 scenes of the play. However, the limit in his characters not only for Tom, Jim, Laura in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ but also for Mrs. Blanche, Stanley in ‘The Streetcar named desire’ still remains. There’s no much developing in his characters, or William doesn’t want any change to them, setting their destinies up to forever that the fantasy and reality can’t never be made to a circle?!
It’s not really an unconventional technique in drama, but is an indirect way of dealing with approaching to the truth, closer and closer completing the responsibility for the reality that certainly shouldn’t be escaped.
It’s also right for the expressionism which is the tendency of a dramatist to distort reality for an emotional effect. Being a memory play, the narrator can be free to release his own feeling, for the memory which is “seated predominantly in the heart” according to the emotional value. Memory is something un-realistic, so likely enjoyed in a dim and poetic atmosphere, for the audience facing with dark, leading them to the world of the Wingfileds’ apartment where there are three members trying out to escape from their worlds by living in the illusion they are trapped in.
There’s Tom, the young man who has full of increasing conflict, even in himself. He’s nostalgic, sarcastic and bitter toward everything around him. In spite of being torn between the family responsibility and his desire, at last he archived his escape from home. But tragically, it’s just a physical escape, he can’t get rid of the image of his sister in a fragile face with broken smile beside her glass world waiting for someone to protect. So the dream of adventure is still somewhere that he can never ever touch, while memory is haunting and biting him over.
There’s Laura, a sister who is too sensitive and frail. She builds a barrier to the outside world with her inferiority complex that no one can break through except for her gentleman caller she’s going to keep in her notebook. Confining her world of make-believe, staying away from others, spending all time walking around even deceiving her mother skipping business class, Laura doesn’t know what should she wish for by the time the bright star appeared. In the end, it seems she can touch the real world, but up and down, her future is still dim as it was…
In the way of effort and time apparent in each scene, memory is alive and seated forever in their mind, no matter how they tried to escape. Like William, he gets trouble to forget his life…
So we call it, the power of the memory :).
Continue reading
T.William
