Research Paper on:
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Escape

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
of isolationism, loss of reality, and personal responsibility. However, all of these themes, it can be said, are created out of each characters need to escape from one another, their  various situations, and from what they might become. The play, in a nutshell tells the story of a man who is hopelessly trapped between a feeling of responsibility to his  family and who he knows/feels he may become. The family consists of Tom(who is the main narrator in the play), his sister, Laura, and their mother, Amanda. Their father has  abandoned them some many years before, and so it has fallen to Tom to become the central breadwinner for the family. Each family member is terribly dysfunctional and one decides  rather early on that each of them would be better off without the other to feed, fuel and nurture the dysfunction of their personalities. Tom Wingfield is a poet by  nature, but a cog in a wheel, so to speak, at a local factory. He works for the Continental Shoe Warehouse. Tom feels stifled because he cannot pursue his desire  of becoming a full time poet. After seeing Malvolio the Magician escape from a coffin without removing a nail, Tom is very impressed, and he believes it parallels his situation  at home. He has to find some way to escape without destroying his family the way his father had sixteen years ago. It is for this reason that he also  wants to find Laura a husband. Thus relieved of that burden, he feels that his mother would be able to fend for herself. He is also trapped, he feels, by  the extreme dependence of the others in his family. His guilt over leaving them to fend for themselves is only compounded by the problem of his father having done the