The first symbol of escape, presented in the first scene, is the fire escape. The play opens with Tom addressing the audience from the fire escape. This entrance into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the characters. Overall, it is a symbol of the passage from freedom to being trapped in a life of desperation. The fire escape represents the "bridge" between the illusionary worlds of the Wingfields and the world of reality. This "bridge" seems to be a one-way passage. But the direction varies for each character.

The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to get out of the apartment and away from his nagging mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Amanda sees the fire escape as an opportunity for gentleman callers to enter their lives. Laura's view is different from her mother and her brother. Her escape seems to be hiding inside the apartment, not out. For Laura,

Another symbol, which deals with both Amanda and Laura, is Jim O'Connor. To Laura, Jim represents the one thing she fears and does not want to face, reality. Jim is a perfect example of "the common man." A person with no real outstanding quality. To Amanda, Jim represents the days of her youth, when she went frolicking about picking jonquils and supposedly having "seventeen gentlemen callers on one Sunday afternoon." Although Amanda desires to see Laura settled down with a nice young man, it is hard to tell whether she wanted a gentleman caller to be invited for Laura or for herself.

Williams uses the theme of escape throughout "The Glass Menagerie" to demonstrate the hopelessness and futility of each character's dreams. Tom, Laura and Amanda all seem to think that escape is possible. In the end, no character makes a clean break from the situation at hand. The escape theme demonstrated in the fire escape, the dance hall, Mr. Wingfield and Tom's departure prove to be a dead end in many ways. In some way or another, everyone has had to escape from something in their lives that they may have felt that they could not or did not want to deal with. We do this by either focusing our attention on some activity or hobby or by physically distancing ourselves from our particular problem. And in some extreme cases, by losing touch with reality and developing some form of mental illness.

Mr. Wingfield, the absent father of Tom and Laura and husband to the shrewish Amanda, is referred to often throughout the story. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of his family is still living in. Amanda always makes disparaging remarks about her missing husband, yet lets his picture remain. Tom always makes jokes about his dad, and how he "fell in love with long distances." This is his attempt to ease the pain of abandonment by turning it into something humorous. It is inevitable that the thing which Tom resents most in his father is exactly what Tom himself will carry out in the end...escape! Through his father, Tom has seen that escape is possible, and though he is hesitant to leave his sister and even his mother behind, he is being driven to it.

Still another symbol of escape is across the street from the Wingfield apartment, the Paradise Dance Hall. Just the name of the place is a total anomaly in the story. Life with the Wi

Some common words found in the essay are:
Laura Amanda, Amanda Jim, Wingfield Tom's, Tennessee Williams, Tom Laura, Laura Jim, Life Wingfields, fire escape, Jim Jim, Glass Menagerie, Dance Hall, symbol escape, dance hall, glass menagerie, laura amanda, laura's glass, laura jim, glass represents, jim represents, tom laura,
Approximate Word count = 1640
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)