Research Paper on:
The Character of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
tells the story of Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a match between Laura and the gentleman caller" (Anonymous Tennessee Williams clsc9.htm).  It was a play which received many rave reviews and also a play which "won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the season" (Anonymous Tennessee  Williams clsc9.htm). One reviewer of the time, Claudia Cassidy of the Chicago Tribune, saw the play four times during its original run. She claimed that "If it is your play,  as it is mine...it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell" (Berson glass.html). One of Cassidys colleagues, Ashton Stevens from the Chicago Herald-American,  deemed the play, "a lovely thing and an original thing. It has the courage of true poetry couched in colloquial prose. It is eerie and earthy in the same breath"  (Berson glass.html). Its great success lies in its simplicity and also its depth and complexity. It is a story of a single mother in the 1930s. She is a  woman who is not accustomed to living life in the slums, and has done everything she possibly can for her children, although she clearly lives in the past. At the  time in which the play takes place Amanda has apparently raised her two children to adulthood, an accomplishment for a single mother in the 1930s. The play runs the course  of a few days, presenting us with a woman who is stressed, romantic, and perhaps ill prepared to raise her children in a world that is far different from the  one she envisions it to be. In the following paper we examine the character of Amanda, as a mother, illustrating that while she is a good mother to a great