Reading Order
The Glass Menagerie Reading Order
The Glass Menagerie (1944, Broadway premiere 1945) by Tennessee Williams is his 'memory play' — Tom Wingfield's retrospective narration of his family's life in a St. Louis apartment in the 1930s: his mother Amanda (a faded southern belle who promotes her absent daughter's qualities and denies reality), his sister Laura (who has a slight physical disability and retreats into her collection of glass animals), and the Gentleman Caller Jim O'Connor whom Tom brings home. Williams invented the concept of the memory play — a form in which the narrator explicitly states that the events are distorted by memory and feeling, in which the staging is deliberately non-realistic — and it became one of the most influential formal innovations in American theater. The play launched Williams's career and established the formal and thematic preoccupations that would define his major work: the southern belle unable to adapt to the present, the fragile character destroyed by reality's demand, the brutal male world that surrounds and eventually overwhelms the delicate.
Where to start
The Glass Menagerie (1945) — the complete play. Williams's production notes (included in most editions) are essential for understanding his formal intentions for the memory play. Best Tennessee Williams reading order: The Glass Menagerie → A Streetcar Named Desire → Cat on a Hot Tin Roof → Suddenly Last Summer → Night of the Iguana
Complete The Glass Menagerie Book List
- 1Buy
The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams·1945·The memory play — Tom Wingfield's retrospective account of his mother Amanda, his sister Laura, and the Gentleman Caller. Williams's formal innovation (the narrator who explicitly distances the audience from the realism they expect) established the memory play as a form in American theater - 2Buy
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams·1947·The companion and the play that fully established Williams's reputation — Blanche DuBois in New Orleans. A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie are companion explorations of the southern belle unable to adapt to the world that has replaced hers (Amanda; Blanche), and both are organized around a male protagonist's ambivalent attempt to escape the trap that his connection to a fragile woman has set for him (Tom; Stanley) - 3Buy
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller·1949·The companion American memory play — Willy Loman's memories intruding on the present. The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman are companion memory plays: both organized around a protagonist whose memories intrude on the present, both about the damage done by a parent's romantic self-deception to the children who must live with it, both using theatrical innovation (Williams's non-realistic staging; Miller's Expressionistic flashbacks) to render memory visible - 4Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O'Neill·1956·O'Neill's companion in the tradition of the autobiographical family play about the playwright's own past — the Tyrones' terrible day. Long Day's Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie are companion plays in which the playwright uses his own family as the material: Williams as Tom, O'Neill as Edmund, both escaping from families that needed them more than they could afford to be needed - 5Buy
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson·1919·Anderson's companion in the tradition of the American work about the 'grotesques' — people deformed by the adoption of a single truth — who inhabit a small-town world. Amanda Wingfield and the Glass Menagerie's characters are in the tradition of Anderson's grotesques: people whose inability to adapt to reality has given them a specific deformation (Amanda's faded southern gentility; Laura's retreat into the glass animals) that defines them - 6Buy
The Awakening
Kate Chopin·1899·The companion in the tradition of the southern woman who cannot adapt to the world that has replaced the one she was formed by — Edna Pontellier's gradual recognition of her own desires. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is in the tradition of the southern women in American literature who cannot adapt to the present: she maintains the fiction of her past (the seventeen gentleman callers, the cotillion) as a way of not facing what the present actually offers - 7Buy
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger·1951·Salinger's companion in the tradition of the retrospective first-person American narrator whose account of his own past is simultaneously honest and selective — Holden Caulfield's account of three days in New York after being expelled from Pencey. The Glass Menagerie and The Catcher in the Rye are companion retrospective American narratives about the gap between what we remember and what actually happened, and about the unreliability of the narrator who is also the protagonist - 8Buy
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry·1959·Hansberry's 1959 companion in the tradition of the American family play about aspiration and constraint — the Younger family's attempt to use Walter Lee's life insurance to move to a better neighborhood. A Raisin in the Sun and The Glass Menagerie are companion family plays about the gap between the dreams that sustain a family and the reality that confronts it, and about the complicated love between family members who need each other and damage each other simultaneously
The Glass Menagerie — Frequently Asked Questions
What does the glass menagerie symbolize in Tennessee Williams's play?
Laura's collection of glass animals — the 'glass menagerie' of the title — is the central symbol of the play and has several interlocking meanings. Most literally, the glass animals are fragile and beautiful but unable to survive in the real world: they must be kept in their cabinet, protected from the reality outside. They represent Laura herself — her fragility, her beauty, her inability to engage with the real world of school, work, and social interaction. They also represent the world of romantic illusion that Amanda has created for her children: the world of 'magnolia blooms' and 'lovely girls' that no longer exists but that Amanda insists on maintaining as the standard by which the present is judged. The unicorn — the rarest and most singular of the glass animals — is Laura's favorite, and when Jim dances with Laura and knocks the unicorn's horn off (accidentally making it like all the other horses), the gesture crystallizes what the Gentleman Caller's visit does to Laura: his ordinary humanity makes her briefly ordinary, then his ordinary thoughtlessness (his fiancée) destroys the illusion that his attention created.
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