Amanda did love him and yet almost seems to resent him for leaving them all to fend for themselves, and leaving them to slip from reality into a world built on illusions.
This lack of a man in Amanda’s life obviously has some sort of effect on her. Her stories of past admirers ‘seventeen! – Gentlemen callers’, show her love for living in the past. She obviously prefers it to reality and tells many, most likely exaggerated, stories of her youth. Amanda’s philosophy appears to be that a woman needs a man to be dependant upon, and so she puts all of her efforts into believing that despite Laura’s condition, she will still find someone,
“Don’t say crippled! You know that I never allow that word to be used!”
Amanda seems to think that by avoiding the word crippled it will go away and Laura will be perfect. To her Jim O’Connor is the dream man, the one who will solve all their problems. Her comment of ‘a little silver slipper of a moon’ shows what a delicate illusion she holds. The silver slipper coincides with the idea of Jim as the prince charming, and this small bit of hope that Amanda is holding onto. However, this illusion that Amanda holds of Laura breaks as easily as the horn from the glass unicorn. When they find out that Jim is engaged this illusion is not simply on the verge of being shattered, but is in fact in pieces. Amanda refers to Laura as ‘an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!’ She uses the word that she has been so adamant to avoid. It is possible that Amanda has begun to come back to reality and that the illusion has been shattered for good. However it could also just be part of an attempt to make Tom feel guilty for getting their hopes up for no reason.
Tom does not have as many illusions as Amanda and in many ways is much more settled in reality. He realises that Laura is not only physically crippled but far too emotionally unstable to find a man and be part of the real world. However, Tom is not happy with life and escapes through movies and drinking. The coffin trick accurately symbolises his feelings of life and his longing to leave,
“We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without moving one nail.”
He feels to suffocated by his job and his family and is desperate to leave but does not want to hurt anybody, does not want to ‘remove a nail’. This trick and Tom’s fascination with it reveals the depths if his unhappiness. He spends his time writing poems in order to maintain this delicate illusion of adventure that he holds.
When Tom does not pay the light bill in order to follow his dream, they are all suddenly plunged into darkness. This is symbolic of what will happen when Tom leaves. Amanda and Laura will be plunged even further into personal darkness. They temporarily light candles to bring light to this darkness but candles are very easily extinguished, they do not last for long. Tom may have got out of the coffin but he has not done it without removing a nail, he has left hurt in what he’s left behind,
“Like bits of shattered rainbow.”
The shattered rainbow is a symbol of the shattered hope of all the characters at the end of the play. Tom has left shattered illusions and so has not successfully escaped. His own illusion of freedom symbolised by the coffin trick, has also been shattered.
Laura is the most delicate of all the characters and it is her interaction with Jim that reveals to us the true frailty of her illusions. Laura’s meeting with Jim is the pinnacle of her fantasy life; all of her hopes are in that meeting. Her own aspirations, added to those of her mother, make the evening a very tense night of hopes and shattered illusions. Jim’s role is to fulfil the illusion of Laura happily with a man, the solution to all of their problems. However Jim shatters these illusions both physically and metaphorically. By breaking Laura’s unicorn, even if by accident, he is symbolising this. When the horn is broken off, the unicorn becomes normal, is becomes just like the other horses. This is how Laura feels; for a very small moment in time when she is with Jim she feels normal. Momentarily when Jim kisses her, Laura’s illusions appear to have become a reality,
“He suddenly turns her about and kisses her on the lips.”
He is engaged and so he has no right to kiss her. He is showing the thoughtless and self centred side of his personality. He may appear confident and popular, but really he is only a shadow of his former self in high school and needs Tom and Laura around him to maintain his own illusions,
“I had know Jim since high school. In high school Jim was a hero.”
Jim talks of becoming something big in the world and seems to, like Mr Wingfield, be fascinated by the future and technology. However he doesn’t seem to be doing anything about moving up in the world, it is merely an illusion he entertains in order to survive his low paid job as a clerk in a shoe factory. Jim wants to be seen as a man in pursuit of the American dream, but in reality is far from it.
At the end of Jim’s evening with the Wingfields, none of his personal illusions have been shattered because he did not have any. To him it was simply a nice meal with two people he remembers from high school and their mother,
“It’s been a wonderful evening. Mrs Wingfield. I guess this is what they mean by southern hospitality.”
It may have been a harmless evening for Jim, but for Laura the evening momentarily brought her alive. She came out of the private world in which she lives, and her dreams were brought to life. However by the end of scene seven all of her illusions have been destroyed. The candles that provide the only light for their world are blown out and they are plunged into darkness, the darkness of shattered illusions and of loneliness,
“’Blow out your candles, Laura – and so goodbye…’ she blows the candles out.”
Laura blows out the candles and blows out any sign of light in her small, secluded world.
There is certainly a great deal of dramatic power throughout the play in terms of delicate illusions always on the verge of being shattered. Each character has created their own world of illusions in order to hide from reality, and each character is so weak that these illusions are easily damaged. In many cases they are completely shattered. It was never likely that any good would come out of the situation with Jim, yet so many hopes were placed in him that the disastrous outcome is not surprising.
However we can also see that the plays dramatic power lies not only in these illusions on the verge of being shattered, but also in the shattering of these illusions and the effect they have on the lives of all those involved. It could perhaps be said that Laura suffers the greatest from these shattered illusions. Amanda is a lot older and has already lived a lot of her life, and Tom managed to leave to follow his dream, whereas Laura, incapable of living in reality is trapped in her own world of darkness, with her whole life ahead of her. We are lift doubtfully wondering if there can ever be any hope for such a situation.
