The Glass Menagerie Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

The Glass Menagerie - Essay Example The Glass Menagerie is â€Å"his most intimate and personal play† , and this intimacy allows the audience to enter some of the more vulnerable sides of what may be argued to be Williams’s own character through Laura. We see the delicacy of her mind in the most intimate detail, and come away from the play understanding our own vulnerabilities better. Laura is crippled in two ways: physically and emotionally. The weight of her psychological problems is embodied by her physical condition, which never allows the audience to forget what miseries the world may bring to an individual. One might contrast the effect of her crippled self on her with that of Shakespeare’s Richard III . He loathes the world and seeks vengeance upon it because of what fate has dealt to him, she reveals an almost martyr-like compassion towards others because of her misfortune. Thus she sheds genuine tears of sadness over Tom’s unhappiness, as is revealed by Amanda in Scene 4. She is a stark contrast to the embittered selfishness of most of the characters. Williams uses an effective dramatic technique to make her even more mysterious: he gives her the fewest lines and yet much of the plot seems to revolve around her. As one online source puts it, â€Å"she is the axis around which the plot turns, and the most prominent symbols – blue roses, the glass unicorn, the entire glass menagerie – all in some sense represent her.† Laura may the fulcrum around which the other characters revolve, but she is also deeply involved in their lives. Laura is used by other characters to valorize their own feelings, or to recapture aspects of their personality that they think they have lost. For example, Amanda contrasts herself with Laura’s poor physical state in order to exemplify the joyous glamour of her own youth and to suggest that she can also somehow rekindle that youth through Laura. Echoes of Miss Havisham