Joan Sony Cherian Essays - , Term Papers, Research Papers

Joan Sony Cherian English (H) 2 nd year Professor Themeem T American Literature October 8 th 2016 Memory in Tennessee Williams G lass Menagerie It was Tennessee W illiams who first coined the idea of a memory pla y with respect to his play the Glass Menagerie . A memory play by literal definition is a play which is memory, a memory of a character of the play and thus seen th rough his/her viewpoint.in the G lass Menagerie in particula r the play is being recited by T om who is also a character in the play. His memory, the play is about his sister Laura and Amanda and about a gentleman caller who comes to visit them. The objective of this paper would be to more critically analyze the concept of memory in the play. This paper aims to bring to light the various ways in which memor y is manifested throughout the course of the narrative especially in how the past memories of each character affect them , how the idea of memory becomes a sort of illusion for the characters in the play and lastly on how one deal s with stage direction and settin gs when it comes to a memory play. American theatre grew out of the changing economic, social and political systems in the country. The rise of industrialism and globalization , rise of the material istic and consumerist culture all contributed to the rise of realisti c theatre, which was further divided into two other factions which were Naturalism and E xpressionism . N aturalism being the philosophy which propounds that since man is a natural being he is always victim to his own desires and increasing physical needs wherein expressi onism brought in subjectivity to the idea of the reality. While Tennessee W illiam ' s plays ar e mostly reflecti ve of the above two movements they are not entirely confined to them. E merging concepts of Nihilism and E x is tentialism are there throughout the play. The main themes of Tennessee plays are ideas of the dysfunctional family, alienation, the American se lf-image , fragmented reality, sexual depravity, existen tialist angst and a definite challenging of puritan morality. Coming to the G lass M enagerie in particular, t he play set in seven scenes is the reliving of T om ' s memories about his family. The pl ay starts with T om introducing his family, the W ingfield family. His mother Amanda Wingfield is a woman who is infinitely stuck in the past, reminiscing her g ay and dainty past. The only time when she comes out of her reverie is to fret about her children specifically about T om not being ambitious and caring about the family and about L aura , her daughter not getting a proper husband nor an education . Laura W ingfiel d, Tom's sister on the other hand is a very shy and reclusiv e. Being crippled since birth had taken a big toll on her self-confidence and therefore she retires to her own world of her collection of glass animals and her father's old phonographic records. T om ' s father being represented by just a picture having fallen in love with long distance had left the family a long time ago. The other character which feat ures in the play is Jim O'Connor , T om ' s friend from the shoe factory and the prospective gentleman caller who is going to apparently whisk Laura of her feet. Tom Wingfi e l d both a character and the narrator of the play is a poetic soul who dreams of adventure and romance but is trapped within the bounds of his family and the only outlet he has are his recurring trips to the movies and his typewriter. Coming back to the idea of memory Edward L S ayers in his essay " memory and the south " says that the sudden interest in memory cam e because of the democratization of history, there is an ever increasing need to know and define history more intimately and in one's own terms. One always has a ne ed t o define the self