Prompt #1 - Symbolism

Prompt #1: Read the following prompt and answer to the best of your ability! Choose a symbol used in a novel or play of your choice and discuss its function in the world of the work. Be sure to give the title of the work and its author in the Introduction paragraph. You should strive for 4 - 5 paragraphs. Good Luck!


Tennessee Williams’ play "The Glass Menagerie" is, as one of the main characters and narrator Tom Wingfield says, a “memory play”. It is the story of what happened to a crumbling family, trying to keep everything (and everyone) together but finding it slipping from their grasp a little more each day. Amanda is the ambitious mother who wants nothing but “success” for her two children: Tom, who works at a factory to support their family but wants nothing better to do than quit and escape, and Laura, shy, self-effacing, and always alone. Their father had abandoned them long ago and now only his picture remains on the wall of their living room.

In the play, there are many symbols to recognize and contemplate: the fire escape, “Blue Roses”, alcohol, the movies. But the one that really caught my interest was Laura’s glass menagerie, her little collection of glass animals. I find Laura’s connection, her bond to it to be fascinating, and, after sitting and thinking about it in depth, I discovered there were many ways one could interpret the significance and meaning of the glass menagerie.

The play takes place in America during the Great Depression in the 1930s, so right off the bat, the reader knows that life is hard for the main characters, financially, physically, even mentally and emotionally. Because of this, the characters all find ways to escape their problems: Tom leaves the house on the fire escape and goes to the movies, losing himself in alcohol, while Amanda relishes and constantly reminisces about her past as a young socialite in the South, her glory days now far behind her. But for Laura, her way to get away from her problems, particularly the stress and pressure her mother puts on her, is to occupy herself with her glass menagerie. When she connects with it, it becomes almost like her own private world, where she can get away from reality and just be safe, be herself, without having to worry about what others think or say.

The glass menagerie is, in a way, like Laura. Both are fragile, delicate, and can break with the slightest mishandling. Laura is a very sensitive person, and when speaking or interacting with her, you have to be careful and use extreme caution or else you may “break” her. They’re also similar in the way that when you first look at them, they just seem pretty plain and unassuming. At first glance, glass just appears to be clear, transparent, nothing to notice about it. But once you shine the right light on it, it becomes absolutely beautiful. It shines, it glows, it sparkles…and a rainbow of colors comes bursting forth. Laura is just like this. When one first meets her, she is a very quiet, boring girl, with nothing so special about her, nothing to grab your interest. But once you see Laura in the right light, once you get to know her and she opens up to you, you’ll see the multitude of colors she’s made up of. You’ll see that, like glass, she has that beauty that is deep within her, something you can’t see on the surface right away, but must look hard for.

There is one piece in the collection of glass that is of great importance, symbolically. The unicorn that Laura shows to Jim, Tom’s friend and the gentlemen caller that he invites over for dinner, is, in an interesting way, a representation of Laura herself. Both are unique, very different when compared to other horses or humans. (To think about how rare Laura is, consider that unicorns are thought to be extinct or not having existed at all). Physically, they are different from everyone else: Unicorns have a horn on their forehead while Laura has a crippled leg. Laura’s “disability” as she thinks of it has, ever since childhood, made her feel that she never could fit in with other people; she feels so nervous around others that she even threw up and quit her classes at the business college her mother enrolled her in.

But then later on, as Laura and Jim are dancing in the living room, they accidently bump into the table and the unicorn falls onto the floor, its horn breaking off. Jim starts apologizing but Laura stops him, saying, “Now it is just like all the other horses” (pg. 1766). When he continues on, she tells him, “It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise” (pg. 1766). This moment, when Jim gets to know Laura and she becomes comfortable and starts to enjoy herself, is important in that it is a turning point for her. She finds herself opening up to a person that not only did she just start getting to know, but a person that she’d admired ever since high school, someone she never dreamed would even take the slightest interest in her. Her words to him, particularly about the “blessing in disguise”, represent what she feels Jim has done for her: he’s made her feel that she can fit in with others, that she is more like them than she believed she was and that she’s not such a “freak” anymore; she’s finally able to be normal. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to have a normal, healthy relationship with another man.

What brings this crashing down though is when Jim eventually tells Laura that he is already engaged. The moment these words come out of his mouth, Laura’s face falls and she becomes quiet and withdrawn once again. But before Jim leaves, Laura, to his surprise, gives him the broken unicorn, as, she says, “a souvenir”. The symbolism in this is that by giving him the unicorn, still representing Laura, she wants him to remember, to see and realize what he’s done to her. She wants Jim to know that he’s broken her; she’s broken beyond repair, emotionally, because in that moment, he's broken her heart.