The Glass Menagerie

Recent scholarly criticism has remained convinced that The Glass Menagerie is "Tennessee Williams's most autobiographical play, accurate to the imaginative reality of his experience even when it departs from facts in detail" (Parker 3) and that "No one who has reviewed even the bare details of his biography can overlook the obvious similarities between the record of his early life and the events described in The Glass Menagerie" (Presley 86); the playwright's official biographer also contends that "Tennessee Williams had still to prove that this was not a writer's single autobiographical (emphasis mine) success" (Leverich 585). It is futile to dispute the resemblance between biographical facts and dramatic fiction in this play and yet it is worth pointing out that a number of features of the play are not attested in reality and, conversely, that well-established aspects of Williams's early adulthood are not reflected in the play. Mrs. Edwina Williams, the playwright's mother, pointed out the many differences between the Williamses and the Wingfields (149-150, 174-175), and Cornelius Williams, the father, is recorded as having failed to discern any similarity between Amanda and Edwina and having resented the accusation of abandoning a family from which, on the contrary, he felt he had been psychologically excluded and ultimately physically exiled (Leverich 567); moreover, literary models other than the members of the Williams family--D.H. Laurence's characters in Sons and Lovers or Hart Crane, as man and poet--can be discerned as in filigree through the texture of the Wingfield saga (Debusscher 167-188). Therefore, without disregarding the personal, documentary nature of the material but giving equal weight to the omissions, the discrepancies, and the additions--the dramatic strategies--I suggest that The Glass Menagerie be termed "autofictional," i.e. the result of a conflation of real life and fantasy, the poetic (re)arrangement of fact within fiction, the imaginative fictionalization of autobiography.

¶ 2 It has often been reported that in later years when The Glass Menagerie had become a classic of the American stage, and together with A Streetcar Named Desire, his most often performed and anthologized play, Williams would attend a performance and either doze off or, more disturbingly, sneer incongruously at unexpected moments, finding reasons for loud exasperation where other members of the audience were provoked to quiet sympathy. Had Williams grown aware of pretense, sentimentality, "pseudo-poetic verbiage" (Krutch 424), or was he laughing at family secrets, truths implicit in the text which he, as narrator and stage magician, was concealing under the pleasant disguise of theatre illusion and which he now, in retrospect, found puerile to have even wanted to hide? Was he gloating at those aspects of his earlier situation which the times and his immediate human environment--and, not least, his own tendency to dissimulate--had forced him to relegate between the lines, to leave unspoken, but which his artistic integrity compelled him to include all the same? Could he then have been laughing at his own autofictionalizing strategies, his ingeniousness at dodging without eluding, at revealing without being explicit?

¶ 3 In crossing that space between life and letters, two characters, Mr. Wingfield and Tom, have been reassembled in such a way as to keep from view a constituent trait of their personality and conduct--alcoholism for one, homosexuality for the other--which nevertheless conditions in fundamental ways the course of the action and their modes of behaviour as well as those of the other characters. Williams seems to have had a problematic relationship with his father, who called him a sissy and terrorized the boy and his sister, Rose. As long as he travelled extensively as a shoe salesman and appeared only temporarily at irregular intervals in the southern rectories of Reverend Dakin where Mrs. Edwina lived with her two children, his influence within the family may have been limited. But with his promotion to an administrative and sedentary job and with the subsequent move of the family to Saint Louis, his thundering presence and drinking bouts became a cause of alarm for his wife and children.

¶ 4 Leverich reports (192-193) the incident in which Cornelius got involved in a quarrel with another of the company's salesmen who bit off a piece of Cornelius's ear, making an already precarious situation with Rose much worse and putting an end to any prospect of advancement and promotion at the International Shoe Company:

Cornelius was not just a hard drinker, as he liked to think of himself, but in truth, clinically alcoholic. He was resorting to what were open secrets within the family: the familiar, but what he thought to be clever, deceptions, such as hiding a bottle behind the bathtub or in other dark corners. He was on an irreversible course towards self-destruction. No one knew why. It would be too facile to say, well, with a wife like that . . . Edwina in her defense contended that it was because he was a bridled aristocrat. His sisters felt it was because of their mother's early death. Dakin said it was because he liked gin. (192)

Cornelius Williams/Mr. Wingfield is of course absent from the list of dramatis personae in The Glass Menagerie but, as if acknowledging his lasting influence on the household and reminding the audience and the protagonists of it, Tennessee Williams transforms him into one of the features of the set, "the blown-up photograph . . . of the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say `I will be smiling forever'" (144).

¶ 5 The picture hangs on the back wall of the family room; it is initially pointed out by Tom as Narrator (145), illuminated several times at strategic moments of the play, and re-introduced periodically (by implication) the alcoholic who was a problem through his presence and became another, after his departure, through his absence. Amanda stops in front of it several times, reminiscing about her husband's charm (158), her love for him (172), and their first meeting in Blue Mountain amidst the jonquils (194). He represents the great illumination of love in her life, the one figure whose influence is not likely to diminish with the passing of time since, as Nancy Tischler noted early on, "Not having seen her husband growing old and ugly enable(d) her to preserve her romantic image of him" (96). But just as many qualifying touches creep into her