Escapism vs. Escape in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ - Continued

Part Two: Escape
Right from Tom’s opening monologue, the audience discovers how escape has shaped the lives of the Wingfields. Tom’s father was ‘a telephone man who fell in love with long distances’, who escaped the lives of the Wingfield family with a letter that simply stated “Hello – Goodbye!”. His ‘larger-than-life-sized photograph over the mantel’ serves as a constant reminder to the family (especially to Tom) that escape can be achieved (it is often lit up at crucial moments of the play to emphasise its symbolic nature), but also as a mocking reminder that the characters remain trapped.

Just as ‘art’ (an image of the father) acts as a symbol of escape, so does music. Laura constantly relies on the music of the Victrola for an escape from any awkward situation she finds herself in: i.e. any time she feels she is being forced to face reality. For example, when Amanda insists that Laura answer the door to ‘the gentleman caller’, Laura avoids this duty by going to play the Victrola to ease her anxiety. Music often has the effect of transporting the listener to ‘another world’, one that is less stressful and wrought with troubles as reality, and so acts as an escape to another place, even whilst the listener remains static. However, despite this escapist quality, the listener can only escape momentarily with music – Laura does eventually have to answer the door – and it is therefore, as many of the other forms of escape in this play, it is only a futile method of temporary escape that is metaphysical rather than spatial.

The events of the play throughout are also governed by the theme of escape. One reason for this is Amanda’s control over the domestic setting, with her desires for her children to have successful futures controlling the family. Amanda wishes to ensure her children escape from their current depressing existence; Tom through his job providing for the family, Laura through being married off to a nice ‘gentleman caller’. However, ironically, her obsession with this ends up actually repressing the whole family’s capacity for escape two-fold. It entraps Amanda in her neurotic state (‘her life is paranoia’), and entraps the children in her mother’s ambitions for them, which neither of them can ever fulfil.

Despite her ambitions’ overall failings, Amanda’s will does ensure that a ‘gentleman caller’ does materialise to meet Laura. His arrival is so critical and anticipated by the family as his role could be to free the entire family from their enslavement in their unwanted roles. However, after raising their hopes, Jim too further entraps the family, sending a devastated Laura deeper into regression in her fantasy world, dashing Amanda’s hopes of her children’s success, and denying Tom his chance to escape his warehouse job whilst ensuring the family’s safety – so that eventually, ‘to escape from a trap he has to act without pity’.

One of the main symbols of escape in the play is, of course, the fire escape. It is literally the escape from the domestic setting, but its true function also hints at the escape from danger and damage – which it really is. It is the place where wishes of brighter futures are made on the moon; the place where Laura stumbles whenever she tries to, showing her dependency on her own little world, and the place Tom constantly seeks to, and eventually does, escape.

Tom is the character most desperate for escape from his depressing existence. Sick of futile escapism through visits to the movies, and living through the escapades of Hollywood stars (which he uses as ‘compensation’), he seeks adventure of his own. He is particularly inspired by a magic show he witnesses, seeing the magicians trick of escaping from a coffin bolted down without removing a nail as similar to the trick he must perform to escape from the home.

‘But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me - get me out of this two-by-four situation.’

Tom’s job at the warehouse pays the rent and bills – he has been forced to provide for his mother and sister since his father left. He cannot escape the ‘coffin’ of his home without removing a nail, until there is someone to take his place (i.e. a husband for Laura) – which never happens.

But Tom is so desperate to escape that he eventually does so – removing several nails in the process. He abandons his mother and sister without anyone to provide for them, leaving them symbolically in the dark after using the money supposed to pay the electricity bills to fund his application to the Merchant Marines. So he escapes and gets to travel the world – but he can never escape entirely. He’s constantly haunted by the sad memory of his lonely sister, and everywhere he goes, however far away, the memory of her stays with him.

‘Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger—anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura’

And it is this that adds the element of tragedy to the domestic drama – not one of the characters escapes their depressing, mundane existence unscathed. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ highlights how the world - and all our lives - contains suffering, and it’s a fact we have to face: ‘life's not easy, it calls for - Spartan endurance!’ Life is about commitment; to both other people and yourself, and responsibility has to be taken (which both Laura and Tom are very reluctant to do), and duties have to be done. As Amanda states, even time itself is an inescapable sentence:

‘the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!’

Escapism vs. Escape in ‘The Glass Menagerie’

Escape and escapism are major themes in Tennessee Williams’ play, ‘The Glass Menagerie’. The themes span the entire play, control the lives of the characters, and are manifested throughout through Williams’ use of symbols, setting and structure.
I’m going to upload this article in two parts because it kind of turned into an epic rambling on the themes, so I’ll separate it nicely into ‘Escapism’ and ‘Escape’ for you all.

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Part One: Escapism
Escapism is a very real aspect of the Wingfield family. Each member has its own methods and reasons for their desire to slip through the meshes of reality into the realms of fantasy (though these reasons generally boil down to dislike of their depressing, mundane existences). This wish to dismiss the painful reality of their lives through the use of fantasy or memory is manifested in such ways because of the futility and impossibility of a clean break from the family, and of real escape. The family members are inextricably bound to one another by their joint need for escape and for fulfilment. This makes escapism extremely important in keeping their world in one piece.
Amanda’s escapism is very much rooted in her memories of the past. She is described as ‘a little woman of great vitality clinging frantically to another time and place’: somewhere where she was happy. Amanda’s memories of Blue Mountain, her home when she was young girl, is her where of trying to bring some of the spirit of the good ol’ days, when she was young and popular and loved and sought after, into her current, boring, life. She buys jonquils, a flower she was obsessed with in her youth, to try and bring this spark of happiness and vivacity back into her life.

But this flower of youth is now faded and ineffectual when faced with Laura’s relative failure at attracting gentlemen callers compared to Amanda’s tale of 17 gentlemen callers in one day back at Blue Mountain. Laura crippling shyness prevents Amanda from living through her daughter’s youth and beauty as she would like to. Her only other method of escapism in the present is through her membership of the prestigious D.A.R (Daughters of the American Revolution – a women’s society for descendants of the patriots of the Revolutionary War). Her membership is a way of holding on to her faded glory – hence she wears her best outfit (all cheap or imitation) and presents her sugary Southern charm to other D.A.R members. But even this escapism proves relatively ineffectual: she is shunned by other members that she speaks to on the phone; one woman even hangs up on her. All Amanda wants is love and acceptance, something she had in abundance in her youth, but now seems scarce to her. Her futile escapism strives for these, even if it means searching for it in places that are really out of reach for her.

Tom uses escapism because he longs for adventure. He goes to the movies every night to escape the drab life he leads as a warehouse worker (a profession he detests when he truly wishes to be a poet and travel the world), living with his overbearing mother and dependent sister. These over-frequent trips to the movies he feels are ‘compensation for lives that passed like [his], without any change or adventure’. He is accused by his mother, who relies on him to ‘make sacrifices’ and generally face reality on behalf of the family via his work at the warehouse, of retreating into fantasy: ‘you live in a dream: you manufacture illusions’. But, far more so than the other characters, Tom actually focuses on making his escapism a reality through attempts at practical escape. In the end he does follow in the footsteps of his father and successfully escapes the family – though how effectively this is achieved is debatable...

However, the third Wingfield really takes the biscuit when it comes to escapism, for Laura is the ultimate fantasist. Almost everything Laura does or says in the play is for some kind of escape or escapism. She is described as a girl who has ‘failed to establish contact with reality’, who lives ‘in a world of her own – a world of glass ornaments’. Her ‘glass menagerie’, as Amanda calls it, is Laura’s main means of escapism in the play: it is a world into which she becomes absorbed, and focuses all her energies on. The glass menagerie is Laura’s escape from the harshness of reality. Her disability and lack of confidence has led to an intense shyness. So she chooses to isolate herself in a world of glass, and dotes over the tiny ornaments to avoid interaction with others. It is no surprise that this key symbol of escapism gives the play its title.

Laura’s glass menagerie is a collection of tiny glass animal figurines. She feels a far stronger connection with these creatures than any human, even ascribing the glass figures personalities. She, in many ways, feels herself one of her own glass collection, and Tom notes her increasing regression into this world of fantasy: ‘she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile’. The glass animal that she particularly identifies with as her favourite is a glass unicorn, a creature that shares her singularity and fragility. But the horn of this unicorn is broken off when it falls from a table knocked by Jim and Laura whilst dancing. Laura’s comment to reassure Jim after this is that ‘glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are’. This is also true of Laura, who after Jim’s rejection of her, on account of his engagement, retreats further back into her fantasies, and also of the nature of her escapism – it is truly a fragile world that is almost destroyed by the interference of Jim, the ‘emissary from a world of reality’. But there is a difference between the unicorn and Laura. The unicorn becomes just like the other glass horses, and transfers from the world of fantasy to reality. This could symbolise Laura’s refutation of her escapism, but instead she gives the broken unicorn to Jim as ‘a souvenir’, thus separating the assimilated unicorn from herself and retaining her singularity. The glass unicorn leaves the Wingfield home with Jim on his departure, whilst Laura remains trapped in her world of escapism.