Motivations in The Glass Menagerie

Wednesday night I finished reading Tennessee William's powerful play, The Glass Menagerie. I referenced an article by Williams this past Saturday and have been drinking the story like a daily nightcap since. You can feel the tension ebb and flow throughout as you ache for Tom and Laura. 

There are four characters in the play--five if you count the absent father whose influence hangs like stale air over the family's apartment. Tom is the narrator, Amanda his mother and Laura his handicapped sister whose life now revolves around her collection of glass figurines, and the "Gentleman Caller" who waits in the wings till the climax of the play.

Tom works at a warehouse, supporting the family with a meager income. In the evenings he goes out. Amanda from the start needles him about his smoking and his late nights. Where does he go? He says he goes to the movies. 

In Scene Four Amanda asks, "Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom?"

"I go to the movies because--I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to. the movies."

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What struck me about this statement is how it parallels a central theme in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a mid-1950s bestseller that, along with The Lonely Crowd, said a lot about the shadows that hung over our nation's post-war years. 

The central characters in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit are Tom and Betsy Rath. This Tom had been in the service during the war, and now that he was back in the States in the daily grind of the corporate world, he'd begun to feel himself unable to just accept the drudgery of his working life compared to the adventures he'd experienced abroad. It's interesting that the author, Sloan Wilson, gave his central characters the name of Rath. 

* * * 
In The Glass Menagerie, the character of Amanda is a smothering overbearing presence throughout, micromanaging the lives of her two grown children. Tom escapes into the night, in part, to escape Amanda's perpetual needling and the stifling atmosphere of the apartment.

From the outset we're made aware of the walls Laura has built around her self, the "safe place" that allows her to function. This is another area of tension in the story as Amanda glosses over Laura's interior fragility, sees her daughter in an unrealistic, idealized image. Tom has no such illusions, but out of duty brings home the "gentleman caller" that Amanda desires for her daughter.

Amanda's primary motivation is security. Her husband went rogue a long while ago and her fear is that Tom will abandon her as well. What she doesn't see is that instead of love being her motivating principle, it is fear that impels her to smother the joy out of everything as she compensates with a fake cheer and fake caring. 

The message Amanda needs to take to heart comes from the pen of Robert Burns:
O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
to see oursels as others see us.

Interpretation: 
Oh, would some Power give us the gift
To see ourselves as others see us!
Source: To a Louse