The Glass Menagerie - Anti-Capitalism - Tennessee Williams
Uploaded by scrubtk on Dec 27, 2007
Blown Out Candles
by Tom Kraft
The most autobiographical play by Tennessee Williams is The Glass Menagerie which subjectively examines a past life through the character of Tom Wingfield. Falk goes on to describe Tom as “an itinerant dreamer like his creator” (47). Such comparisons instill a likeness in thought between Tom and his creator which enables attitudes and feelings of Williams to be inferred by the characteristics of his fictional self. Furthering his findings, Falk goes on to declare that Williams “has admitted that he has not written anything that he has not known firsthand” (156). Williams wrote from personal tragedies that are lived through the abstract lens of his own vision or more specifically, in the form of a ‘memory play.’ While denouncing Williams as a political writer, R.B. Parker quotes the author as saying “I don’t deal with social problems, because those are not the problems that move me… My politics is that of the heart. I am only interested in human nature” (8). Will a close look at The Glass Menagerie present Williams’ writing to be otherwise? Even though Williams decries being a political writer, he is expressing a pessimistic view of capitalism paired with an adoption of ‘Marxist’ ideology through the character of Tom which may be construed as framing a left-leaning sociopolitical agenda.
The play begins with a narration by Tom who goes on to describe the social setting: “To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy” (Williams 282). This soliloquy establishes a present Tom reflecting on a past time with a particularly high degree of pessimism. He speaks of the time period being in the 1930s during an unspecified transitional period in American history which may be referring to the “New Deal.” In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented this program of reform legislation to overcome the crisis of the depression by stabilizing the economic system of capitalism and minimizing the growth of rebellion within the United States (Zinn, People’s 392). The “New Deal” was basically an allotment of programs such as the National Recovery Act which “was designed to take control of...