O’Neill’s plays are sometimes disparaged for their social pleading, their Nihilism and their

occasional lapses into “ over –heated rhetoric”. yet his psychological probing of alienation and

his depiction of the suffering of the ordinary mortals made him America’s most influential

playwright. In little more than a single decade he transformed the American theatre , changing it

“ utterly” in the words of Sinclair Lewis. “from a false world of neat and competent trickery into

a world of splendor and fear and greatness”

(Anthology of American literature

1052)

This type of structure forces Tom to be both a narrator and a character in the play,

Tom opens the play with:

Yes I have tricks in my pocket , I have things up my sleeve

But I am the opposite of a stage magician . He gives you illusion

That has the appearance of truth . I give you truth in the pleasant

disguise of illusion ( Scene 1 13)

Two years later William s managed to get hired as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

in Hollywood .None of his scripts werev accepted , and after a few months he lost his job, but

one of his rejected scripts The Gentleman Caller , he later rewrote , turning it into his first great

success, The Glass Menagerie.

In The Glass Menagerie , William’s characters and their actions are exaggerated.They are made

to ressemble the characters and events of ancient myths. Certain character types recur frequently:

the outsider, a man or woman who differs from the mass of humankind by seeing clearly the

frightening horror of life ; the physically and emotionally deformed ; the neurotic and the

insane; real or would –be artists ; victims and victimizers; and foreigners – strangers likes the

Gentle man Caller in The Glass menagerie – who intrude on and disrupt the lives of others . His

characters are commonly over whelmed by one another and by a growing awareness that the

universe is indifferent to their suffering .

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier williams in in Columbus Mississipi. His father a

traveling salesman, spent little time at home ,and for the first two years of life , Williams and his

mother lived with his mother’s father, an Episcopal clergyman . In 1918, when Williams was

seven , his father became a sales manager for a shoe company in St. Louis, Missouri and

Williams and his sister were uprooted, moved to the city . timid and sickly , the boy found

St.Lewis a painful change from the happy life he had led while living in his grandfather’s rectory

in Mississipi . He found few friends ; his mother and father quarreled incessantly . Enveloped in

an unhappy world Williams, like his counterpart Tom Wingfield in The Glass menagerie , found

escape and adventure in the movies which affected him so intensely

The “ memory” play is a very successful non-linear structure pattern in modern

American drama. In post –World War II many American play wrights began to tap into the

power of memory as a narrative device . influced by the forces that were shaping American

society , espically the psychoanalytical concepts of Sigmund Freud and Carl jung , these

playwrights used the concept of memory to fuel non- linear plots and intense character.

One of these playwrights was Tennessee , whose Glass Menagerie is one of the

seminal pieces of American theatre .

Williams writing has sometimes been dismissed as willingful pandering to the prurient interests

of theatergoers .Yet the popular and critical acclaim that his work continues to receive has come

not simply because he writes of the bizarre and fantastic but also because his plays are filled

with fascinating characters and compelling dialogue. They are illuminated , even gilded, by

verbal, visual and sound symbolism that is intended to convey meanings beyond those possible

in what Williams termed “ the exhausted theatre of realism” . he employs an array of

expressionistic literary and theatrical devices: special settings , musical themes , unusual sound

and lightings effects – all as a means of leader his auduiences to see the truths that lurk beneath

life’s surface

The photograph of Mr. Wingfield is one of the major symbols of The Glass Menagerie. This

picture dominates the Wingfield’s living room-and in a sense, their whole life . To Amanda , it

represents her tragic mistake, her marriage to the gentleman caller who was handsome and

charming, but iresponsible and cruel. Nevertheless, she loved him, and she displays his picture in

a prominent place. To Tom , his father represents the adventure that has been denied to him.

Mr . Wingfield ran away to see the world , and Tom is determined to do the same . Mr.

Wingfield “was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the

telephone company and skipped the light out of town.” He sent only a post card marked” Hello-

Good-bye!” from Mexican town without any address.

Tom ‘s attitude towards his father is also ambivalent . One the one

hand, Mr. Wingfield is the architect of the circumstance that traps Tom into responsibility and a

lack-lusture life. Like Amanda,Tom resents his father’s irresponsibility and blames him for their

poverty . But he cannot help envying his father, who managed to escape . Tom calls himself the “

bastard son of a bastard.” Tom feels that he and his father are spiritual alies . throughout the

play , he identifies himself with his father . He would like the adventure and excitement he

imagnes Mr. Wingfield to be experiencing. At times Tom makes it appear that he is not as selfish

as his mother considershim to be and if he were so, he says that he would have gone the way his

father had gone. But he is no doubt selfishlike his father . He is a chip of the old blocks and he

like his father thirsts for daventure and “distance” . Although tom inally breaks from his family

just as his father did in the ast, he is never able to make a complete emotional escape.