Tennessee Williams Essay
By Julia A. Keirns
Evidently, Tennessee Williams crafted facts of his personal life and upbringing into his written works. As a writer myself, I know this to be true. We write what we know. Williams’ father was absent from the home a lot, much like the character Tom in “The Glass Menagerie” (Tennessee, 2020). The fact that the absent father had such a prominent place in the play tells us that it was an important point in Williams’ life. It was probably one of the deciding factors in how he felt his life played out. He apparently blamed everything bad that happened in his life on his father not being around. To him, this was an important aspect of his upbringing.
In the play, the mother Amanda and Tom argue constantly about everything. Mother is extremely overbearing on both Tom and Laura and is probably the main reason why Tom drinks and why Laura has retreated inwardly so drastically, knowing that she does not meet the standards that her mother expects from her. Tom has realized exactly why the father left. He cannot hardly stand to be around her either. Again, this could be how Williams saw his own mother. I also think as Tom throws his coat and breaks one of Laura’s precious glass ornaments, and we hear Laura cry out as if it hurt her personally, it resembles another piece of her sanity being broken. She seems to be so fragile, like the glass, and I think over the years many glass ornaments have probably been knocked off and broken.
Later in the story when Jim, the supposedly gentleman caller, broke the unicorn, it was almost like he actually fixed it at first. Laura was beginning to feel that her curse of being different was about to be broken too. She didn’t seem to care that the unicorn’s horn was broken off. She felt as if the thing that made him so different from everyone else was now gone and he could be a normal horse and fit in with all the other horses. She so quickly felt that maybe she too could be like everyone else. Jim was actually breaking through her shell. He was making her feel normal and worthy of being liked.
And then it happened. He really did completely break her when he announced that he was actually engaged to someone else and had absolutely no intention at all of continuing to call on her or see her. At that moment, as she stares at the broken unicorn in her hand, she sees it as truly broken, not fixed. She too, now, would remain broken for the rest of her life – and Tom will follow in the footsteps of his father and leave and not look back.
This truly is a very sad story, but one that probably played out in a lot of families behind the curtains. People put on a show for their friends and neighbors wanting everyone to believe that their lives were pretty and gay, like Amanda always wanted to put on a show. I think at the time that this play came out, literature had been portraying beauty and perfection as in the Romantic Era. It was not common for writers to reveal so much truth in their literature and Williams was praised for shining a light on such a hushed reality.
Personally, I felt this reading quite dry and unimpressive. I actually was somewhat surprised that he had to throw the “n” word into his play. That probably resembles something also, but it is beyond me exactly what, other than he was probably somewhat prejudiced or had been raised to be prejudiced. Just another sign of the times. Today we are so used to seeing and reading much harsh reality that this play was nothing spectacular when considering what we currently know. But understanding the time period it was written I can see why it broke through so many barriers and paved the way for other writers to share much more truth in their writing.
Works Cited
“Tennessee Williams.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2020,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tennessee-williams