Symbolism plays a huge role in the play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. Throughout the play, Williams uses symbols to represent and show different aspects of things. It makes the viewer/reader discover the underlying meaning of these objects. For example, a dove can symbolize peacefulness, holy spirit, and purity. Another example, in Williams, play the apartment in which they live in, it symbolizes something different for each character. For Tom, it symbolizes prison, for Laura safety, and Amanda burden and regret. Symbolism is a literary device that authors use to add meaning to stories and plays and make them more understandable and fascinating. However, William uses symbols in the play, The Glass Menagerie, In order to show
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One of the main symbols is the glass menageries, this represents Laura’s fragility. At the beginning of the play, Tom gets into an argument with his mother after he called her an “ugly witch” (Williams 1619), as he is struggling to put his jacket, his frustration makes him clumsy and throws his jacket across the room, breaking some glass collections. Laura yelled, “My glass! -menagerie …. (She covers her face and turns away)”. The reader can view that Laura demonstrates fragility. The way she reacts when even a small shift is made in the apartment. She represents a very shy girl, fragile, and an emotionally crippled girl that does not have a connection nor sense of the real world. Laura is trapped in a world of illusion simply because she feels different from others. As she drops out of college, she starts visiting the zoo and a glass house of flowers places that are vulnerable like she is. In Liebestod, Romanticism, and Poetry in The Glass Menagerie, by Robert J. Cardullo. He describes Laura, “For she is a fragile, almost unearthly ego brutalized by life in an industrialized, depersonalized Western metropolis filled with the likes of Gentleman Jim O’Connor, or someone who blithely accepts the terms of his own material, as well as spiritual, alienation” (Cardullo 76). He explains the physical, as well as emotional fragile girl young lady she
One of the main symbols is the glass menageries, this represents Laura’s fragility. At the beginning of the play, Tom gets into an argument with his mother after he called her an “ugly witch” (Williams 1619), as he is struggling to put his jacket, his frustration makes him clumsy and throws his jacket across the room, breaking some glass collections. Laura yelled, “My glass! -menagerie …. (She covers her face and turns away)”. The reader can view that Laura demonstrates fragility. The way she reacts when even a small shift is made in the apartment. She represents a very shy girl, fragile, and an emotionally crippled girl that does not have a connection nor sense of the real world. Laura is trapped in a world of illusion simply because she feels different from others. As she drops out of college, she starts visiting the zoo and a glass house of flowers places that are vulnerable like she is. In Liebestod, Romanticism, and Poetry in The Glass Menagerie, by Robert J. Cardullo. He describes Laura, “For she is a fragile, almost unearthly ego brutalized by life in an industrialized, depersonalized Western metropolis filled with the likes of Gentleman Jim O’Connor, or someone who blithely accepts the terms of his own material, as well as spiritual, alienation” (Cardullo 76). He explains the physical, as well as emotional fragile girl young lady she