The Glass Menagerie is one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed plays of the stalwart playwright, Tennessee Williams. The play really impresses the audience and the readers with the quintessential use of dramatic elements that work to portray the play’s content in the best possible way. The setting goes on to have an enormous effect on the audience. One needs to reckon that the play deals with the issues of vulnerability, escapism and claustrophobia. The male protagonist of this play escapes from the household as he goes for the movies. The setting is the household where the characters live. This place is essentially drab and mundane so as to signify the mundaneness in the lives of the characters shown in the play.
The picture of the male protagonist’s father hanging from the wall signifies his absence and his spirit of escapism- something that is also imbibed in the character of the male protagonist. The entire setting of the household gives the sense of claustrophobia. Life of the people living inside this place is left shackled and emancipation lies beyond these walls of the household. While the protagonist’s vulnerable sister finds refuge in this place, her mother lives in the days of her past, endeavoring to escape from the drabness of her present. The playwright goes on to portray the setting of this play in a way in which it echoes the central theme and idea of the literary work. The setting expresses the confinement and the dehumanization. The audience comes to comprehend that the buildings are quite stacked up like beehives. Thus, the Wingfield apartment is of utmost significance in the play and its dramatization. The play’s setting works a lot toward accentuating the affective appeal of the work.
References
Williams, Tennessee. (1945). The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions.
