The Glass Menagerie

Front 1

"The apartment...is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation."

Back 1

Tom in scene 1

Front 2

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."

Back 2

Tom in Scene 1

Front 3

There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation!...

"You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?"

Back 3

Tom to Laura in Scene 4

Front 4

"The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart."

Back 4

Tom in Scene 1

Front 5

"Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!"

Back 5

Tom to Amanda in Scene 3

Front 6

"You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."

Back 6

Amanda to/about Tom in Scene 5

Front 7

"I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life..."

Back 7

Amanda to Laura in Scene 2

Front 8

"Williams was more interested in private issues than public ones."

Back 8

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 9

"Certainly, the harsh economic and political realities of 1930's America are a driving force in the action of the play. However, private emotions were the driving force within the playwright himself."

Back 9

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 10

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth... a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are... which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms, than those which were merely present in appearance."

Back 10

Williams in Production Notes

Front 11

"to insist, as most critics do, that the projection device is jejune or pretentious, is to do Williams and his play a grave injustice."

Back 11

Parker

Front 12

"the roles in this Wingfield family drama / memory play consist of the 'rejected parent', the 'identified-patient', and the 'parentified-child'."

Back 12

Goldenberg (74,330,333)

Front 13

"Ironically, within this stasis of rigidly assigned roles, there is typically a perpetual dance of mask swapping, with each character taking turns at playing the persecutor, the victim, and the rescuer."

Back 13

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 14

"In her failed adjustment to her new position as a single parent, she has victimized both of her children in different ways."

Back 14

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 15

"Laura actively resists both the role that society prescribes for women as well as Amanda's insistence that she conform to it."

Although the nick name was originally linked to a physical illness, the screen image becomes linked to a psychological illness.

Back 15

George W. Crandell in Lori and Lori in images of escape and selfhood

Front 16

"Tom has to renounce his adult responsibilities toward his family in order to become an adult in his own right."

Back 16

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 17

"Tom repeatedly associates his role as bread winner with a living death, a nailed-up coffin, because for him to remain is to commit psychic suicide."

Back 17

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 18

"He wants more than just forgivenes; he wants forgetfulness; he wants to wish it all away. This, of course, is no more possible for Tom than it was for Williams himself."

Back 18

Lori Leathers Single in images of escape and selfhood

Front 19

"Williams' plays partake from Realism, Expressionism and Surrealism as also new dramatic inputs synergised to form 'plastic theatre'."

Back 19

Payal Nagpal in Introduction

Front 20

A menagerie is literally the "domestic management of cattle, a collection of wild animals in cages or enclosures, especially one kept for exhibition."

Back 20

Payal Nagpal in Introduction

Front 21

"However, in remaining stationed where they are, the women in TGM show a sense of responsibility that remains wanting in the male characters."

Back 21

Payal Nagpal in Introduction

Front 22

"Marriage is certainly another menagerie in which the women will be exhibited as beautiful objects."

Back 22

Payal Nagpal in Introduction