Research.edited.edited.docx

Topic: Reading ‘Laura Wingfield’: Victimization and Silent Acts of Rebellion in “The Glass Menagerie”. Sub-Theme: Silence as Agency Author: Simarprit Kaur Bahth (Daulat Ram College, B.A. Honors English, III year) Email: [email protected] Phone no: 7289827919 Draft: This paper undercuts the widely accepted sidelining of Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Her silence is often looked upon as passivity whereas there are clear hints throughout the play of her rebellion through this very silence. In her character, we come across the only linear progression that takes place in the course of the entire play. She develops from a highly anxious person who would not tailor her actions to be considered acceptable by society to someone who realizes that despite her disability, normalcy could prevail in her life. It is paradoxical that this change within her occurs with her coming face to face with the paragon of the American dream, a character that Williams seeks to critique, Jim O’Connor. The reader is given all the reasons that she would make strides into mainstream society and would replace the absent Tom as the breadwinner of the family. Tom’s asking of Laura to blow out her candles after such a long time has passed away since he left home is clearly symbolic of the fact that the flame set ablaze within her would continue to: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”1 Because Laura would “not go gentle into that good night”.2

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams tells the tale of a dysfunctional family set in the 1930s during the Depression-era America. Life is hard for the three members of the Wingfield family- Amanda, Tom, and Laura- because of no proper sources of income and the drudgery of their daily existence. The mother, Amanda, does not affiliate herself with the hole in town that she now inhabits and instead seeks mental relocation in the memories of her past at Blue Mountain. Her son, Tom, has to come to the forefront of the family as the breadwinner as his only other sibling, his sister Laura, was incapable of providing for herself. His job at the warehouse makes the poet within him feel cramped up and just like his father he also seeks to escape from the homestead. Laura is the character who attracts most of our sympathy because of her mental and physical disabilities. It is for her benefit that a gentleman caller is invited home but the outcome turns out to be markedly different from the one projected by Amanda. I shall now begin to justify why I feel that Laura's silence was, in fact,

a form of agency and that the passive interpretation of Laura's actions by most critics does not do justice to the depth that Williams invests in her character. The most heinous crime critics commit while analyzing “The Glass Menagerie” is placing the character of Laura at the periphery of all the action in the play by affording her no agency to break out from the imposed silence of the unreliable narrator, Tom. This mostly happens when critics look at the memory play in an autobiographical light. There might be similarities between Williams’ real dysfunctional family life and the Wingfield family but assumptions cannot be made on the basis of it. Rose3 , the sister of Williams, is often considered to be the model on which he based the character of Laura. She is incorrectly looked upon as the literary manifestation of his sister's emotional and mental frailty. It is important to note that the play begins with the author declaring the narrator, Tom, to be someone who cannot be trusted: “The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes.”4 His entire narrative is tainted with guilt- especially for Laura whom he regards as being a perpetual dependent. It is his idea of the “fragile, unearthly prettiness”5 that we stretch by looking upon her as the person who would be worst affected by the departure of Tom. Thomas L. King notes that “we see not the characters but Tom’s memory of them—Amanda and the rest are merely aspects of Tom’s consciousness”6. He says that Tom’s narration and monologues “show us the artist manipulating his audience, seeming to be manipulated himself to draw them in, but in the end resuming once more his detached stance”7. It is important to read into the smallest incidents to understand that Laura was, in fact, an artist who would not be forced into the constructs of acceptable femininity. Her mother, Amanda Wingfield only has two options to offer to Laura to allow her to fend for herself- either

becoming a businesswoman or securing a husband who would be a believer in the theory of the American dream and would be constantly in pursuit of prosperity and happiness. Likewise, George W. Crandell writes that “Laura actively resists both the role that society prescribes for women as well as Amanda’s insistence that she conform to it”8. Likewise, Michael Paller claims that the notion of Laura as a helpless victim "is not…an accurate view of Laura"9 . Instead, to Paller, Laura is an intentional innocent, one who "will have her way in the end and the final image of her in the play, being cared for and comforted by her mother, is the way things will always be for her because she wants them that way"10. This view gives Laura a considerable amount of agency but the critic still submits to accepting the fragility that is imposed upon her by her mother and brother. Laura, instead, achieves enlightenment and emaciation by the end of the play as I have taken it upon myself to explain how. Her excessive anxiety and insecurity attached to her lameness lead her to be extremely aware of how she carries herself in society. Most of her problems arose from being the daughter of a man who skipped town as soon as the monotony of a stable existence started taking roots within him- "He fell in love with long distances."11 This abandonment was followed by the incapability of the other family members to identify the existence of physical weakness and accept its consequences, thereby making Laura feel comfortable in her own skin. A delusional Amanda refuses to accept that her progeny suffers from a disability. Laura can only broach this taboo subject in Scene Two, “in a tone of frightened apology,”12 to which Amanda replies, “Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word”13. Laura’s paranoia because of her physical disability is aggravated by Amanda’s denial to acknowledge and empathize with her daughter’s problems. Amanda tries to create amnesia about the fact that she is not really the epitome of physical perfection or even anything close to it, but her refusal to accept Laura’s lameness for what it was only served to exponentially increase Laura’s shame for being born the way she was.

Laura’s silence throughout the play is often used against her to strengthen the argument that she would be further handicapped by the desertion of her brother, who had formerly acted as the breadwinner of the Wingfield household. I would explain her dominant silence as a materialization of her dislike of chaos and conflict- two factors that had a large role to play in her taking solace in the glass menagerie to avoid the loud clashes that would always take place between Tom and Amanda. Sam Bluefarb puts forward the opinion that because Amanda is no longer the young, charming Southern belle that she may once have been, she becomes intensely preoccupied with “superimpos[ing] her past on her daughter Laura’s future”14. This constant persuasion of Amanda to force Laura into the constructs of the “try and ye shall succeed” American dream constitutes a major chunk of the pie chart that is formed by the reasons behind Laura’s self-imposed silence. Ahmed argues, “If parenting is about orienting the children in the right way, then children must place their hopes for happiness in the same things”15; but Laura is forced to take classes, to enjoy the company of “gentleman callers”, to become what her mother had supposedly been at Blue Mountain. On the very first day at business school, Laura suffers a serious nervous breakdown and “almost had to be carried to the washroom!”16 This leads to an absolute cessation of her attendance of classes at the business college. She instead spends her time in going to the local zoo( which is again seen as a manifestation of the glass menagerie, an escape from the harsh realities of her life) and visiting art museums. These activities were well suited to the peaceful mindscape of Laura Wingfield that strove for solitude and an escape from the dominant presence of her mother and her brother’s dissatisfaction with life in totality. Even when Amanda blames Laura for eternalizing her dependency by staying unmarried as well as unemployed, Laura refuses to abandon her peace but instead just “twists her hands nervously”.17 Laura actively refuses to be the center where the attention is concentrated, thereby surfacing as the antithesis of her mother. She seeks solace in the privacy of the world of the glass

menagerie that alone affords her the power of control in the chaotic world of the Depressionera and the propagators of a mechanistic lifestyle. Only Laura in the Wingfield family has the ability to see the present for a flash of a second- she understands the truth about herself in that momentary acquaintance with the misshapen face of the present in the shape of her lameness. Being aware of the fact that her mother’s euphemisms would in no way eradicate the disability that was a part of herself, she instead chooses to lose her conscious self in the world of the glass menagerie and her father’s phonograph records. This differentiates her from her mother who lives in the flowery memories of her past and her brother who merely survives through his hope for a better future on the sea. The monotony of the Wingfield household is broken momentarily by the appearance of a gentleman caller on the horizon- Jim O’Connor. Williams has presented him as being representative of the prototypical all-American boy, good-looking and good at heart as well, wearing “the scrubbed and polished look of white dishware”18 and fuelled by an urge to rise upwards in society through hard work towards the acquiring of “social poise”19 . Jim had suffered a major downfall after his glorious days on the debate team and the chorus and was now stationed only slightly above Tom in the work hierarchy at the Shoemakers’. The graph of his life merely served to point out another fact of life in Depression-era America that caused problems for people like Jim, as well as Tom: an all-pervading shift from individuality to the question of the group. As Malcolm Cowley once remarked, the thirties were a time when virtually everyone has been swept along in "a daydream of revolutionary brotherhood,"20 living a collective passion that he could see especially in “the shiny eyes of younger people,”21 particularly those who themselves as artists. However, the appearance of Jim at the threshold of the Wingfield household holds much more potential for Laura than what Amanda hopes for. Unlike Tom and Amanda, Jim looks upon Laura as just another regular person- gives her the freedom to air her opinions and is sympathetic to all that hinders

Laura from coming into her own. Williams clearly declares that "shyness is dissolving in”22 the comfort of Jim’s camaraderie. An easy-going conversation replaces Laura’s usual jerky replies when she is in the company of others. They discuss the days of the past and through Laura’s memory Jim reminisces and relives the glory of a time gone by. Benjamin Nelson describes Laura and Jim’s attraction towards each other as a mutual desire for something that will take them beyond the boundaries that they had constructed around themselves.23 For Jim, Laura’s otherworldly beauty and fragile charm take him beyond his mundane existence and beyond his utilitarian ways; for Laura, Jim symbolizes a normative banality that she has never before come across. Nelson writes, “So they come together, for one instant in their mutual need and Jim once more gains control. It’s ridiculous, he convinces himself, I must be crazy; I’m engaged to Betty (wholesome part of the American Dream!) and the sooner I tell this odd girl the better. And so he tells Laura and they have suddenly passed in the twilight, each visibly shaken by this unexpected moment of truth.”24 Williams constantly makes the audience aware of the silences that Laura flaunts which could be compared to the beautiful but easily annihilated animals of her glass menagerie. Through the nickname “Blue Roses,” Laura is cast outside of an imagined natural world: because of her disability; because of her refusal to perform a productive, legible version of femininity; and because of her silence. Pleurosis is often confused with “Blue Roses”: it is a homophone for Laura’s fight with pleurosis, a swelling of the thin membrane covering the lungs that leads to difficult, hurtful breathing—an illness that makes it difficult for her to speak. Later we hear the word “holler[ed]”25 by Jim at Laura. The choice of the word strikes us as something that cannot be simply taken at face value. Laura’s silence is casually sidelined to the backseat by

Jim’s “holler”, but the word’s root in hollo also furnishes it with a relationship to the word hollow (“Hollo”), hinting at the gentleman caller’s holler being hollow. It can be looked upon as a glimpse into Laura’s internal landscape that regards the words of even a man she likes as hollow. It hints at a shrouded feminist rebellion taking place within her. Jim hopes to inspire Laura and make her feel so comfortable in her own skin that she would become capable of surviving independently in the world. However Laura’s warning about the glass animal that she held closest to heart- “Oh, be careful- if you breathe, it breaks!”26 still lingers even when Jim draws Laura to him and “kisses her on the lips.”27 Her first venture into the world of physical intimacy opens within her feelings that had been never stimulated before. The prolonged silence that enwraps her after he releases her confirms our suspicions that it was her mode of repose during both times of despair and happiness. However, when she understands the gravity of the situation and comes to terms with the fact that Jim was in fact engaged to someone else and that is just how far their dalliance would go, her look is one of absolute desolation. After a pause of crushing despair, Laura "opens her hand again on the broken glass ornament. Then she gently takes his hand and raises it level with her own. She carefully places the unicorn in the palm of his hand, then pushes his fingers closed upon it"28. What Jim takes away with him is Laura’s expectations of emotional satiation through the figure of a male. She was like the unicorn with the broken horn where the horn symbolized the phallic symbol. Its destruction signifies her restarting of life through the normalcy that Jim had shown her could function within her despite her disability, but her heart would now be resistant to any attacks of emotional attachment with any male figure. This in itself becomes a prevalent queer motif, especially when she is identified as "Blue Roses"- a queer object in itself, not easily found blooming in the heteronormative surroundings. Through absolving her life of a man's influence on it Laura again comes forth as a staggering feminist. She is further dropped from the debilitating gaze of her brother by the end of the story as

well. The readers are given all possible hints that signal at a better independent future for Laura, devoid of all heteronormative strictures she had succumbed to earlier before the moment of epiphany struck her. When Jim drops Laura's favorite glass unicorn, Laura refuses his apology by saying, “I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish! [. . .] Now he will feel more at home with the other horses”.29 These concluding conversations in The Glass Menagerie bring to light the hopes and desires of those who would like heteronormative married happiness for Laura: which would be both her family members as well as the viewers of the play. We intend for Laura to be romantically desired by Jim, for her life to become the real-time receptacle of a Walt Disney fairytale and therein lies our fault. From her small exchange with Jim, Laura experienced an “unexpected moment of truth”30. She realizes that none of her mother’s fears with respect to her turning into a dependent, old maid having to chew on the bread of humility would come true. Rather she realized that she was not inherently damaged. She could, in fact, have her moments of confidence and her shyness would be paralyzed in the face of her glowing faith in herself- she would be lit “inwardly with altar candles”31. Jim identifies Laura’s fragility and, rather than attempting to smother it, ignore it, or force past it as Amanda has tried to do, Jim empathizes with her, affirms her fears, but offers an alternative. He says things like “People are not so dreadful when you know them”; “You don’t have the proper amount of faith in yourself”; “Which of [the common people] has one-tenth of your good points!” and “You’re—pretty!”32 From Jim, she receives the reassurance that had always eluded her despite the presence of a family. After Jim accidentally knocks over the unicorn and expresses his penitence, Laura says, "I don't have favorites much. It’s no tragedy, Freckles”33. In this particular line, Laura not only gives away her loss of attachment with the glass creatures but assumes the flippant tone that Jim utilizes throughout the play. Laura’s reaction differs immensely from the scene when

Tom absentmindedly throws his coat into the menagerie’s shelf. When Jim destroys what Laura confesses to being her favorite animal, it seems like it did not matter to her much. If Laura would have been pretending to not be obsessed about her glass collection just to impress Jim, she could not have maintained such a flawless sense of composure. This clearly indicates her departure from the escapist fantasies that she used to hold close to her bosom and is hopeful of her foray into a mainstream social existence. Laura resists traditional narratives of what might be looked at as a good life through her sincere observations scattered throughout the play. In narrating her high school memory of Jim, she states, "I didn't care for the girl that he went out with. [. . .] She never struck me [...] as being sincere"34 , hinting at Laura never being alienated from the fact that the sheer act of entering a heteronormative relationship is not a good enough confirmation of future happiness. She uses this knowledge and her sincerity to her own desires to quash Amanda’s plans and provisions. In the introductory scene of the play, when Amanda concludes that only a natural disaster like a hurricane or a tornado could keep the male hopefuls away from lining up outside their door in pursuit of Laura’s hand in marriage, the sincere daughter assures her: “It isn’t a flood, it’s not a tornado, Mother. I’m just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain”35. Laura, through her sublimated sentences clearly articulates the idea that they need not be anxious over the absence of gentlemen callers as for her it was not a debacle. She had not sheltered herself from reality and was aware of the fact that she was not her mother and that her unpopularity did not trouble her. Laura resists the happy objects that Amanda imposes upon her and instead seeks to create a utopia for herself by dropping out of business school and go walking in winter to “[a]all sorts of places,” a daily routine she describes as “the lesser of two evils”36 . Her skipping class for six weeks to walk from seven a.m. to four p.m. daily seems to Amanda like a deliberate invitation to pneumonia. Her defiant attitude comes into the light even when we realize that she was comfortable gallivanting around the

town as long as the eyes of Amanda and her peers were not on her. Before Amanda confronts Laura at the beginning of scene 2, she “stares” at her. Laura begs, “Please don’t stare at me, Mother.” Of this “look,” she says, “I couldn’t face it”.37 Laura’s solitary walks, unhindered by the gaze of absolutely anyone, even the audience, becomes the time when she enjoys the bliss of normalcy. The enjoyable hours Laura spends strolling around, at her own leisure, seem to imply that her physical disability is also an aesthetic construction and that she is held down by the constructs of the good and beautiful. The above anecdote, then, is a lived experience of spaces of utopia that tend to function beyond the realm of possibility her mother can imagine. This bit of happiness is appropriated by Laura only through aimless wandering. We also notice Laura subverting another construct of a heteronormative home and turning it into a mode of resistance- the sofa. After breaking down when urged to accept Jim’s call, Laura lies on the couch while Tom, Amanda, and Jim eat dinner. She is “huddled”38 on the sofa, a verb that denotes a secret conference or consultation, often when a player considers his or her next move. Laura accepts this object as a safe haven—uses it as a means of resisting her mother’s authority. She seeks a world beyond the immediate reality and schools the audiences using her conjured realities to show that the happy objects imposed upon her are just not satisfactory. In aligning herself with these strange objects, objects not commonly understood to be happy, as opposed to success and marriage, Laura rebels against this present that is not palatable to her. Whereas Laura’s entrance depended on her brother, the narrator, to extricate her from the comfort of the couch, her exit is her choice: she moves toward the couch herself, after the explosive last exchanges between Tom and his mother, which ignore Laura’s perspective on the entire matter. We have already looked into the reduced affection of Laura for the glass menagerie after having come face to face with the idea of what she could be. This idea is confirmed in the final scene during the beginning of which the stage directions clearly specify that "Amanda

appears to be making a comforting speech to Laura, who is huddled on the sofa"39. This shift from seeking solace in inanimate objects to looking for warmth in human companionship shows us how far Williams has been able to develop the character of Laura. When Amanda finishes her speech, Laura "lifts her head to smile at her mother"40. During Amanda's speech, Laura's hair hides her bowed head like a curtain, but when she raises her head, it seems that her hair falls back to reveal not resignation and heartbreak, but hope. The fact that she does not go back to the glass menagerie to console herself regarding the loss of a pivotal glass animal says a lot about how she had moved on to accepting human consolation and was now open to newer avenues in life. The predominant symbolism of candles in scene six and seven offer a glimpse into the inner workings of Laura’s mental landscape. There is a mention of an inward lighting up of candles and candelabra as well. Tom delivers his final monologue, ending, “Blow out your candles, Laura--and so goodbye.”41 This statement can be analyzed in two ways. Firstly, it might be an indication of Laura rationalizing and losing any feelings that she might have for her high school sweetheart, Jim, and she can blow out the candles of an unnecessary fiction and thus, the transition to a new part of her life. Tom may be trapped in memories of Laura, but there is no evidence to suggest that Laura must be similarly confined. Secondly, when, the play concludes, Tom tells Laura to blow out her candles, because “nowadays the world is lit by lightning”42, he is aware of the fact that Laura's candles will not remain extinguished but will repeatedly re-light. This can be looked upon as the patriarchal anxiety at work within Tom that wants to silence the agency that Laura exercises through her silence and hence, continuously feel validated by the thought that Laura is a dependent and that she needs his help and resources and that she might not survive without his overarching heteronormative benevolence.

A kind of static fragility prevails upon the lives of Tom and Amanda. Amanda cannot bury the remnants of her past at Blue Mountain and keeps losing touch with reality whereas Tom suffers from an unquenchable thirst for adventure and is continually asphyxiated by the guilt of having abandoned a fragile sister that does not let him sleep at night. Even Jim O’Connor is more or less static as he enters with lofty aspirations and leaves by reaffirming the status quo in his life by choosing Betty over Laura. The only linear progression that is witnessed in this play takes place in the character of Laura Wingfield. Judging by the analysis that I have with much hard work charted here, it can be said that Laura would go on to become a confident woman with a huge repository of independence within her and continue to resist any activity that would not please her soul.

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10. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York : Dramatists Play Service, 1976. Print.