"Through Soundproof Glass": The Prison of Self-Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie

"Through Soundproof Glass": The Prison of Self-Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie ERIC P. LEVY '.! In his production notes introducing The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams refers to nostalgia as "the first condition of the play.'" This appraisal at first seems accurate, for the drama disposes the past in a series of receding planes by which the very notion of nostalgia is progressively deepened. From the perspective of Tom, the narrator and a chief character, the past when he started "to boil inside" (97) with the urge to leave home becomes a haunting memory from which his present struggles vainly to flee. But the confining power of that past derives from his mother's nostalgic attachment to her own more distant past and the desperate need to exploit motherhood as a means of reviving "the legend of her yoU/h" (87). Yet once we analyse how Amanda manipulates maternity, a factor in the play more fundamental than nostalgia will begin to emerge. This principle is self-consciousness - a term which, as we shall see, the text supplies and in its own way deftnes.' Each character is hampered in relating to others by the need to inhabit a'private world where the fundamental concern is with selfimage . 'Some characters (Amanda and Jim) use others as mirrors to reflect the self-image with which they themselves wish to identify. Other characters (Laura and Tom) fear that through relation to others they will be reduced to mere reflections, trapped in the mirror of the other's judgment. In virtue of this preoccupation with self-image and the psychological mirrors sustaining it, the world of the play is aptly named after glass. Indeed, Laura's remark ironically becomes the mollo of the play: "My glass collection takes up a good deal of time. Glass is something you have to take good care of' (118). I Let us begin by examInIng Amanda's influence on Laura. Unwittingly, Amanda exploits her maternal concern about Laura's lack of marital prospects Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 529 530 ERIC P. LEVY as a means of identifying with her own past when she herself was visited one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain by "seventeen! - gentlemen caHers" (33). In effect, she turns her daughter into. a mirror in which her own flattering self-image is reflected, but to do so she must fIrst tum herself or, more precisely, her parental judgment, into a mirror reflecting Laura's limitations. The play itself suggests this seminal image. After helping Laura dress and groom herself, Amanda instructs her to stand in front of a real mirror: "Now look at yourself, young lady. This is the prettiest you will ever be! ... I've got to fIx myself now! You're going to be surprised by your mother's appearance !" Then "Laura moves slowly to the long mirror alld stares solemnly at herself" (86). Look closely at what is happening here. Amanda slights Laura's appearance even as she praises it. Laura is told that she has reached her peak at this moment: she will never again be as attractive. But Laura's limitation only enhances Amanda's excitement about her own "spectacular appearance! " (87). The literal mirror in which Laura beholds her own image ultimately symbolizes her mother's judgment of her. Yet the fundamental purpose of that judgment is to provide, by contrast, a flattering self-image for Amanda. Though on this occasion Amanda's judgment seems benign, it participates in a subtle pattern of comparison by which Laura is made to .identify with the sense of her own "Inferiority" (II8) to her mother. Indeed, at one point she alludes explicitly to this fact: ''I'm just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain" (35). Laura is, in her own words, "crippled" (44). But her primary handicap concerns, not the limp caused by a slight inequality in the length ofher legs, but the negative self-consciousness instilled by her mother. In fact Jim, the gentleman caller, approaches this very diagnosis. When Laura recaHs how in high school she "had to go clumping aH the way up the aisle with everyone watching," Jim advises: "You shouldn't have been self-conscious" (1 12). The...