Free Glass Menagerie Essays: Hopelessness, Futility and Escape :: Glass Menagerie essays

Hopelessness, Futility and Escape in The glaze Menagerie The Glass Menagerie is set in the cramped, dinghy flat of the Wingfield family. It is just angiotensin converting enzyme of many such apartments in this lower-class neighborhood. Not one of the Wingfield family members desires to sojourn this apartment. Poverty is what traps them in their humble abode. The ply from this lookstyle, this apartment and these relationships is a substantial theme throughout the play. These escapes may be related to the fire escape, the saltation hall, the absent Mr. Wingfield and Toms inevitable departure. The play opens with Tom addressing the audience from the fire escape. This ingress into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the characters. Overall, it is a figure of the passage from freedom to being trapped in a life of desperation. The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to get out of the apartment and away from his nagging mother. Amanda sees the fire escape as a n opportunity for serviceman callers to enter their lives. Lauras view is different from her mother and her brother. Her escape seems to be hide inside the apartment, not out. The fire escape separates reality and the unknown. Across the pass from the Wingfield apartment is the Paradise Dance Hall. Just the name of the place is a total anomaly in the story. Life with the Wingfields is as far from nirvana as it could possibly be. Laura appears to find solace in playing the equivalent records over and over again, day after day. Perhaps the harmony move up to the apartment from the dance hall is supposed to be her escape which she just cant take. The music from the dance hall often provides the background music for certain scenes, The Glass Menagerie playing quite frequently. With war ever-present in the background, the dance hall is the last chance for paradise. Mr. Wingfield, the absent arrest of Tom and Laura and husband to the shrewish Amanda, is referred to often througho ut the story. He is the final symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of his family ar still living in. His depiction is featured prominently on the smother as a constant reminder of better times and eld gone by. Amanda always makes disparaging remarks about her missing husband, yet lets his picture remain.