The Glass Menagerie
The role of the imagination and fantasy is critical in understanding each of the characters in Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie. Each character relies on their fantasies and imaginations to escape from the reality of his or her own world. Amanda uses her imagination to go back in time to Blue Mountain, when things seemed better for her. Tom spends time on the fire escape in order to remove himself from the world that Amanda and Laura have in the apartment. He also goes to movies in order to enhance his imagination and fantasy world. Laura is completely lost in her world of small figurines, an act that prevents her from living in the real world. Jim's role becomes important to the play because he illustrates how out of touch the Wingfelds are. Tom exercises his imagination when he steps out onto the fire escape. He also escapes the "slow and implacable fires of human desperation" (Williams 968). He can also escape the world that his mother and sister have created in the apartment. Tom also feeds his imagination by going to movies because this allows him to be completely removed from the apartment. The movies provide Tom a place where he can stretch his imagination and dream of a life that is filled with de
Laura's imagination and fantasy world prove to be the most interesting in the play. She escapes into the world of her glass figurines, where she seems to find a level of contentment that the others do not. The glass figures are extremely fragile and Laura takes the matter of caring for them very seriously. The way she cares for them reveals how they have consumed her imagination. For example, she moves them around the apartment so that they will not become bored with their surroundings. She tells Jim, "Glass is something you have to take good care of" (Williams 1015). Additionally, she acts as though they are real. When Jim picks one up, she urges him to be careful because "if you breathe, it breaks" (1016). Here we see how she uses her imagination to escape the truth of the world in which she really lives. Tom pinpoints Laura's condition perfectly when he tells Amanda that she exists in a "world of her own--a world of--little glass ornaments" (995). He also observes that she escapes when she plays the records. Listening to music gives her the freedom to become another person and go anywhere she wants. Her imagination is the only things stopping her. Imagination and fantasy become essential elements in Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, because they are tools that many o
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Approximate Word count = 880
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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