What kind of Play is The Glass Menagerie?

GCSE English

There are three basic ways in which we can look at plays: tragedy, comedy and social commentary.

Tragedy

Comes from the Greek tragos meaning goat sacrificed to give thanks for the harvest and expel any evil in the community; hence the term scapegoat
The ingredients of Greek tragedy were the scapegoat, that is the person who had brought evil to the community who must therefore be sacrificed or expelled, Oedipus and Agamemnon. family strife, (Oedipus, The Oresteia); the high status of the hero, the fatal flaw, and the role of the Gods
Aristotle said that ‘a perfect tragedy should imitate actions which excite pity and fear’ and these emotions are exorcised in the denouement of the play in a process more commonly referred to as catharsis.

Tragedy and The Glass Menagerie

Although Tom and his father before him sacrifice others for their own ambitions we cannot say that the play contains a sacrifice in the sense I spoke of above consequently we cannot say that there are any scapegoats in the play.
We are on slightly stronger ground with family strife. Amanda constantly tries to force Laura to do things Rubicam’s business school to learn typing, or to marry and she criticises Tom’s eating habits, (1: 6), she censors his reading matter (3: 21) and demands to know where he goes every evening (3: 23 & 4: 33). However, this is very mild compared to Greek tragedy where sons kill their father and sleep with their mother, where wives slice open their husbands as they relax in the bath, and where sons plunge swords into the breasts which once fed them milk.
Also, we cannot say that the hero, Tom, has a high status since he lives in a lower middle class area, works at Continental Shoes, and because his mother never married any of her gentleman callers who were prominent planters (1: 8-9), instead she married ‘a telephone man who fell in love with long distances and skipped the light fantastic out of town’ (1: 5).
We can say that no-one character has a flaw but rather that all of them are flawed in the same way: they prefer a dream world to the real world. Amanda is nostalgic about the past (1: 8 & 6: 54) and does not face facts about her children (5: 47-8) which leads her to try and shape their lives as she wants rather than as they want (5: 42), Laura ‘lives in a world of her own’ (5: 47-8) and cannot tear herself from her menagerie and her records (4: 35), while Tom dreams of adventure (4: 33) and Amanda says that he ‘lives in a dream, that he manufactures illusions’ (7: 95) they are not fatal.
The role of the gods is probably the least applicable of the elements of Greek tragedy to this play. The basic idea was that the Gods willed your fate and there was nothing you could do to escape it; Oedipus is the prime example. But in this play there are no Gods and two people do escape if not their fate at least the condition into which they were born: Tom and his father.
Nevertheless, the sense of fate lingers in the play. Amanda says ‘things have a way of turning out badly’ (7: 94) and if fate is too strong a word we can talk about character instead: can we imagine Laura overcoming what Jim calls her ‘inferiority complex’ and being ‘comfortable with people’ (7: 88)?
The point to stress is that our experience of tragedy depended on the idea of a god or gods who gave meaning to our lives but once we move to a secular age then we are faced with the prospect of no meaning and perhaps that is modern tragedy. Jim is an important figure ‘he is’ as Tom says, ‘the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for’ (1: 5) in other words the thing that gives meaning to our lives. Samuel Beckett explores this condition in Waiting for Godot. But instead of waiting, perhaps we should act to create meaning.
Finally we have Aristotle’s definition of tragedy. The first thing to be said is that there is no action; everything is recalled in memory. The play is more poetic than dramatic. The same could be said of Hamlet. There we have a character rather like Tom, though the comparison should not be pushed too far. Both are cut off from those around them by the intensity of their own introspection and both consider their fathers as some kind of role model and neither act. Secondly, although we may feel pity for Laura and even Amanda we are unlikely to feel fear. Furthermore, do we have any other feelings towards the characters admiration, sympathy, irritation and so on? Finally, do you feel that whatever emotions the play rouses in you are purged, if indeed it arouses any emotions at all?
In short, although there are tragic elements in the play, we cannot call it a tragedy unless we are very clear about what we mean by tragedy, a word that is used far too loosely these days.

Comedy

The Greek word koma means ‘sleep’. Hence comedy is linked with dreams rather than reality and, according to Freud, dreams are wish-fulfilments
The Greek word kome means ‘country village’ and the country has always been seen as a setting for comedy, think of any Shakespeare comedy and the comic figure of the country bumpkin. The country setting is a reminder that comedy also has a connection with the harvest. Indeed comedy and tragedy are closer than you think, both contain a scapegoat that’s either killed or laughed at.
Comedy was also a fertility rite involving ...