“I’m going to the movies!” Glass Menagerie analysis action.

Especially since we’re now knee-deep in amazingly depressing Eugene O’Neill’s work, it might be nice to take a quick break and go back to the less depressing, slightly less drug-addicted and lust-filled characters of Tennessee Williams. One of his most famous plays, The Glass Menagerie, tells the tale of a man named Tom, his crippled and painfully shy sister Laura, and their shrill-voiced, overprotective mother, Amanda. Williams based the character of Tom off of himself, so the play was described as somewhat autobiographical, although not to the extent that O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was. Let’s just hope that for Williams’ sake, his mother didn’t have a voice nearly as annoying as Katharine Hepburn’s in the film version of this play.

Tom is a dreamer who wants to get out of his mother’s house as soon as possible, but he feels guilty even thinking about leaving his family. His mother is desperate for Laura to find a gentleman caller and has Tom bring one home from his work. In a somewhat ironic twist Mr. Jim O’Connor, the potential suitor Tom brings home, was Laura’s high school crush. After some awkward moments, the two hit it off, only to be separated again by the fact that Jim has a serious girlfriend. Laura is heartbroken, Tom is stunned, and Amanda is convinced that Tom did this in order to make a fool of his family.

AMANDA: You didn’t mention that he was engaged to be married.

TOM: Jim? Engaged?

AMANDA: That’s what he just informed us.

TOM: I’ll be jiggered! I didn’t know about that!

AMANDA: That seems very peculiar.

TOM: What’s peculiar about it?

AMANDA: Didn’t you call him your best friend down at the warehouse?

TOM: He is, but how did I know?

AMANDA: It seems extremely peculiar that you wouldn’t know your best friend was going to be married!

TOM: The warehouse is where I work, not where I know things about people!

AMANDA: You don’t know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions! Where are you going?

TOM: I’m going to the movies.

This is usually Tom’s excuse for leaving his hectic, eclectic family. He wants to get lost in the non-reality of movies, just like most of us do today. Maybe that’s a little reason why Williams wrote so much–it provided for him a temporary escape from reality, just like Tom and his movies. There’s also some foreshadowing action going on, when Tom engages Jim in a conversation about how he wants to leave his mother and sister. Not too surprisingly, the conversation is about movies.

TOM: Yes, movies! Look at them–All of those glamorous people–having adventures–hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them!…But I’m not patient. I don’t want to wait till then. I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move!

Looks like Tom’s gonna pull a stunt like his father did years earlier, deserting the family with no real hope of survival, emotional, monetary, or otherwise.  This is where the possibility of open endings comes in, once again.  There aren’t as many choices here.  Tom does end up leaving the family but feels haunted by Laura’s constant presence in his mind; does his act spell death for his family?  Will he end up in an asylum, maybe becoming inmates with Williams’ Blanche DuBois?  The reader can listen to Monty Python’s Spamalot and “Always look on the bright side of life,” believing that the confidence Jim instilled in Laura will carry over into college or the workforce, and she and Amanda will be able to begin a new life without Tom.  Jim could leave his steady girlfriend, Betty, and go back to Laura.  That’d be nice.  Or maybe more people would subscribe to Amanda’s magazine program–that’s unlikely, but there’s always hope.