The Failure of Amanda

In Tennessee Williams', "The Glass Menagerie" Amanda was a woman who liked to reminisce about the past in order to escape from reality. Amanda was not wicked but intensely flawed. Her failures were centrally responsible for the adversity and exaggerated style of her character. Certainly, she had the endurance and heroism that she was able to support her children when her husband was gone. In her old life, she was once a Southern Belle with a genteel manner who lived on Blue Mountain. This was a place where Amanda's version of the good old days back when she was young and popular. Amanda was full of charm in conversation that she managed to have seventeen gentlemen caller in a single day. Amanda liked to talk to her children having seventeen gentlemen callers but ended up marrying a charming Irishman who worked for the telephone company. He traveled and left the family and the only reminder of him was his smiling photograph. Amanda turned the tragedy of her husband's abandonment as a joke, "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances" (643). Amanda's relationship with her children was illustrated by her failure in life and the exaggerated style of her character.

Amanda always put up a defensive front for others to view that hid the reality of her life. She painted a colorful picture for others to perceive. Amanda worked hard to make the apartment ready for her daughter's gentleman caller. She talked of polishing the wedding silver, taking out the monogrammed table linen to be laundered, cleaning the windows and putting up fresh curtains. Amanda even went so far as to enhance Laura's bosom with two powder puffs. She called it "gay deceiver"(662).

Amanda was affectionate and loving but demanding beyond reason. She was not in anyway cruel, in fact, very loving but her desires for her family became so unpleasant for her children. Amanda's relationship with Tom was difficult with and often unreasonable. Although he was a grown man whose wages supported their family, she still would intervene with the affairs of his life. Amanda would instruct Tom how to chew his food by telling that "animals have secretions in their stomach which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down"(644). Tom goes to the movies as an escape from his nagging mother. Tom looked like his father and whatever anger she had toward her husband, she projected it to her son. Amanda on the other hand is doing this because she does not want him to be like his father. Most of all, she was doing this because she wanted him to become a better person.

Amanda's strong and outgoing personality has made Laura become submissive painfully shy and self-conscious. She never let Laura make her own decisions. Laura was forced to attend a Business College because her mother wanted to, which resulted her escaping from school. So, to retreat from the real world, she resorted to playing her victrolla and admires her glass menagerie collection.

The gentleman caller was Amanda's fascination and great hope for the Wingfields to attain financial security. With a husband, Laura will be provided for and the two women will no longer depend on Tom. Amanda's ambition for Laura showed the level of disconnection from the real life and fragility of her dreams. Even if Laura could find a husband, it was strange that Amanda should have so much faith that a husband for Laura would mean security for their family. In spite of everything, Amanda's husband was unfaithful, and his choice to leave the family led to their current dilemma. Amanda was fixating on the idea of the gentlemen caller; she proposes a switch for Tom's freedom in exchange for a husband to Laura. She was trying to make plans for Laura because she knows that she is getting older. Laura needs a husband to support her. Amanda was still putting her safety into the hands