How and to What Effect are the Key Themes of The Glass Menagerie Presented in Scene One?

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How and to What Effect are the Key Themes of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Established in Scene 1?

Essay

‘The Glass Menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams incorporates a numerous amount of themes throughout the play. As it is known to somewhat reflect on the playwright’s own life, some of these themes are notably profound and evocative, allowing the audience to maintain an ample grasp on the messages put forward by Williams.

Primarily, the idea of memory is established in Scene One. The play inaugurates with lengthy description as to the setting and stagecraft, followed by the entrance of the narrator, Tom Wingfield, who soon states that ‘the play is memory’ and makes it clear that we are viewing events through the lens of his memories, intensifying emotions and extracting significances in the way that memories do. When the scene progresses, we as an audience also have an insight to recollections within recollections, such as those of Amanda as she recounts her days as a girl and her inept attempts to relive this time of her life. This complex theme is an imaginative device which Williams uses effectively to express truth, and one of the methods he uses to establish this is through the stagecraft.

       To begin with, the lighting is key in the portrayal of memory, because it displays the interior as ‘dim and poetic’. This not only helps us to distinguish the contrast between the past and the present, but reflects how the memories which the character of Tom will be showing us are coated with unhappiness and pain, and creates the effect of a thoughtful, slightly morose mood.

Furthermore, Williams’ precise and detailed descriptions of the stage setting, such as ‘murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and the sinister latticework of neighboring fire escapes’ allow him to achieve a dreamlike atmosphere, as opposed to straightforward realism. Tom himself tells us that the play is ‘sentimental’ and ‘not realistic’ and Williams draws attention to the ruse of the theatre by introducing lowered and raised gauze scrims during the play and shifting walls, whilst representing the mysterious attribute that memory brings. When he asks us to peer through the gauze, Williams reminds us that we are being taken back in time and made to observe things from a particular point of view.

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The theme of memory is also depicted through the use of music in Scene One. Just before Tom begins to explain how it is ‘a memory play’, the stage directions indicate for music to be played, and this aids the emphasis on this theme by again showing the difference between the past and present. It is clear that the playwright is trying to connect music with the theme as Tom even tells us, ‘In memory everything seems to happen to music’.

In relation to the setting, lighting and music, the screen device is used a significant amount. The legends which ...

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