Scene 7
Character. A character is a person who figures in the action of a literary work. A static character is one who does not change during the course of the action. A dynamic character is one who does change. As you read this scene, decide whether Amanda is a static or a dynamic character and determine her primary characteristics.
Scene 8
Theme. A theme is a central idea in a literary work. As you read, decide what theme Williams develops about the modern world.
Symbol. A symbol is a thing that stands for or represents both itself and something else. As you read, decide what the symbols of act 2 are and what they represent.
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The closest companion of Williams’s youth, his sister Rose, provided the model for the central character in the play that was to be his first major success, The Glass Menagerie. This largely autobiographical play, originally called The Gentleman Caller, deals with a socially isolated young woman, Laura, whose intense fragility is symbolized by her collection of glass figurines. Laura’s nickname, “Blue Roses,” recalls the name of Williams’s sister, Rose, and evokes numerous connotations: oddness and rarity (because blue roses do not actually occur in nature), fragility and weakness (because of the association of the color blue with the blue veins that show so clearly against the white skin of a sickly, anemic person), and sadness (because of the use of the word blues to describe a melancholic or depressed state). Such strong symbolism is characteristic of Williams’s work and that of other Expressionist writers. The character Tom in the play, a young writer, is something of a self-portrait, and critics have often expressed the idea that Williams wrote the play because of the guilt that he felt for abandoning his sister Rose, who ended up in a mental institution. Williams’s sister, like Laura, collected glass figures, and this remembered detail became an evocative image in his work. Williams wrote of his fascination with his sister’s glass collection, “They were mostly little glass animals. By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for all the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive.”
First staged in Chicago in 1944, The Glass Menagerie was an immediate success, opening in New York the following year. Since that time the play has been produced many times on Broadway and by theater companies throughout the world. Several film versions of the play have been produced, one in 1950 starring Jane Wyman and Arthur Kennedy, one in 1973 starring Katherine Hepburn and Sam Waterston, and one in 1987 starring Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich. The last of these versions was directed by Paul Newman.
Stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947.
Scene 7: What does being successful mean to you?
Scene 8: Whom in your peer group do you look up to? Why?
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