The Glass Menagerie - Unicorn

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The Glass Menagerie: An Analysis
The play The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Williams in 1944 is termed a
memory play. It was through this play that Williams explored various innovations on stage. The
use of music, innovative lighting effects and on screen projection were all unconventional and
path breaking techniques used to create the environment of illusion and memory flashbacks.
There is an element of autobiography in the play where William’s has used broad strokes from
personal experience to paint the characters of Amanda, Tom, Laura and their missing father. The
play is replete with symbols and the glass figurines that Laura collects which are both beautiful
and delicate symbolizing her character the most closely. Laura is strangely beautiful and delicate
and like her glass figurines is fragile and easy to destroy.
In The Glass Menagerie all the main characters escape into a fantasy world when faced
with the cold facts of their existence. They dream of what might have been or what will be but
never really come to grips with what is. Laura escapes into her glass menagerie to seek freedom
and peace. She conjures lives for her glass animals and talks about them in such a way as to
indicate that they were actual beings and that she could communicate with them as she did with
Amanda and Tom. For Laura fantasizing was a necessity as that was the only time when she felt
unfettered and free. Her personification of the animals justifies her existence in this world of
illusions where she spends most of her time and can feel uninhibited. When the horn of the
unicorn breaks accidentally, she makes another fantasy out of it and says that now the unicorn
would feel more relaxed and less “freakish” in the company of other horses. This is, perhaps, a
reflection of her own secret longing to be more like other people and not be constantly reminded
of her disability because of her leg-brace. The unicorn had special significance as Laura has a
special bonding with the unicorn. The unicorn does not exist in reality, just as Laura is unable to
exist in her real life. She has a limp and feels deformed; the unicorn has only one horn, which
makes him different from the rest of the animals. This imagery is again brought to the fore when
Laura and Jim are dancing and the horn of the unicorn is accidentally broken. Laura says, “Now
it is just like all the other horses” (Williams 7). She, too, feels more normal and like other girls
she knows now that Jim has danced with her and made her feel good. Ironically, however, when
Laura hears that Jim is engaged she gives him the unicorn as a symbol of her relinquishing
claims to normalcy and that the now “normal” unicorn minus his horn was more suitable for
Jim’s world more than hers. Jim’s breaking off its horn also symbolized the fact that he had
broken something inside of Laura by the announcement of his engagement.
Laura is the tragic hero of this play as her character is the most tragic. Amanda has her
memories of “blue mountains” and can carry fantasies of her being just as youthful and sought
after as when she was a girl through the advancing years of her life. Jim escapes to the Merchant
Marines and breaks away from the physical ties that held him trapped in the Wingfield family.
Jim goes away to marry Betty and have a “normal” and commonplace life. Laura’s situation is
the most difficult. Painfully shy and conscious of her “deformity” she is as fragile as her glass
figurines. She is also trapped in her menagerie and there is no escape for her. Jim for a few
moments had given her the hope of being able to find salvation but his declaration that he was
engaged to be married shatters even that dream for Laura. Laura had a close bonding with the
unicorn because both were special but with the unicorn’s horn gone it had become ordinary and
for a breathtaking moment Laura had thought that she probably had the opportunity of become
“normal” like the unicorn, but that was not to be. So she gives the unicorn to Jim as a souvenir
and an indirect message to the audience that he had broken her dream of ever having a normal
life. At the end of the scene Tom asks Laura to blow out the candles which indicate that
whatever hopes she may have had were blown away as well and plunged her life in darkness.
In The Glass Menagerie, Williams captures the more common tendency among humans to
escape difficult situations rather than face them and have the energy to change their
circumstances. Laura, perhaps, resorts to the more realistic practice of escapism and living in a
bubble. Both these reactions to life’s realities are true and widely prevalent and one should not
draw false conclusions or be judgmental about the methods opted by the characters to deal with
their situations.
Works Cited
Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Eds.
McMichael, G. et al. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.

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[Insert Student’s Surname] 1

The Glass Menagerie: An Analysis

and like her glass figurines is fragile and easy to destroy.

broken something inside of Laura by the announcement of his engagement.

McMichael, G. et al. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.

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