Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie is a play written in the year 1994. The plot of the story figures out the relationships between men and women in terms of their differences of characters and possibilities to express their feelings. The play was entitled like this to show the parallels between the inner world peculiarities of main characters and the fragile nature of glass animals and that unicorn in particular.
The role of gender influences in the play on the reader, because women, Amanda and Laura, tend to think of that they ought to be defended by the men, Tom and Jim, represented to fulfill ladies’ hopes who are disabled physically, Laura, and mentally, her mother Amanda. However, the story is written by looking at it with Tom’s eyes and his thoughts. Women seem to be helpless in the story. Amanda sees the solution for her daughter in the appointment with one gentleman called Jim, a so-called “gentleman caller”. Laura being a cripple, like a small glass unicorn with a broken horn, was unhappy.
Her desires and hopes were so fragile that it was not noticeable for Jim, who breaks them and leaves Laura again in her hopeless and imprisoning world of “cold glass”. Amanda’s son Tom leaves her and his sister alone with the cruel and harsh reality of how people see each other opposing gender characteristics of men and women. Tom discredited himself due to his refusal to be the one on whom two women could and should rely on.
The play is fully realized in Williams’s manner to depict his depressing characters in the framework of “plastic theatre”, so that to show the sorrowful fate of the main heroes focused on the societal problem of men’s and women’s attitudes towards each other in order to get some probable primitive physical benefits or to move somewhere far from the limited in actions family in case with Jim and Tom, on the one hand. On the other hand, the story displays the conventional social inner struggle of women with broken hopes of their life due to the irresponsibility of men.