The Failure of Technology in The Glass Menagerie

The Failure of Technology in The Glass Menagerie JAMES REYNOLDS Laura's fragile collection of glass animals gives Tennessee Williams's play its name and a central symbol with both an esthetic and a personal focus. But the play is punctuated with another set of references, an array of ordinary products of twentieth-century technology, that expands its significance beyond the personal even as it illuminates the narrow lives of its protagonists. Williams introduces The Glass Menagerie through a context of social upheaval- war already in Spain, imminent in Europe; labor unrest in American cities. Tom's opening narrative announcing the "social background ofthe play" sounds like a manifesto of both esthetic and social reform. Yet the only specific allusions to these events during the rest of the play are the incidental headline in Tom's newspaper about Spain, and Tom's narrated contrast between the Europe of Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain, and Guernica, and the St. Louis ofthe dance halls. Roger B. Stein sees in the allusions to the Depression and impending war a "note ofsocial disaster [that] runs throughout the drama, fixing the lives of individuals against the larger canvas.'" But the prominent focus of the play is on personal levels of inadequacy -the fragile lives and the conflicts of the Wingfield family - rather than on a specific set of social, economic, or political issues. So Gilbert Debusscher should not be faulted in criticizing Bulgarian critic Grigor Pavlov for making of the work a "kind of dramatized social pamphlet, a play whose overall aim is to denounce ... the deplorable effects of capitalism.'" Short of so specific a socio-political program, though, Williams does encourage us to place the play in some larger contexl. Terry Eagleton states that "all major art is 'progressive' in the limited sense that any art sealed from some sense of the historically central, relegates itself to minor status."l If the play's milieu beyond the SI. Louis tenement is significant- if the social background impinges on the lives of the characters - we must look for a pattern that consolidates those lives in a "historically central" sense. One pattern that looms (199 I) 34 MODERN DRAMA 522 Failure of Technology in The Glass Menagerie in the background of the Wingfield family is the way that changing economic and social modes can restrict the potential for happy and successful lives. We are always aware of Amanda's grand past in the Old South, her wealthy suitors and her servants, as we watch her make do in a walkup tenement. And Tom and Laura are pushed into commercial careers that conflict with their temperaments and aspirations. A specific agent for change that Williams alludes to time and again in the play is technology, one of the strongest forces to redirect society in the twentieth century. While one character, the "realist" Jim O'Connor, sees the future of America as tied to progress in technology, the play consistently reiterates the failure oftechnology to achieve social or individual values - or, for that matter, even to function at a practical level. Lights go out, the telephone is hung up; cinema and phonograph serve merely as escapes, for men whose lives are governed by impersonal commercial enterprises embodied in warehouses, and for women who are expected to live by serving business through mechanical clerical work, or by marrying successful radio engineers. Williams's recurring use ofcommon domestic technologies - the phonograph, telephone, cinema, radio dynamics, and the electric light - in critical episodes throughout the play would seem to render futile Marx's hope for a society in which technology satisfies human needs. While many social upheavals have contributed to the Wingfields' personal situation, it is technology which confirms the hard boundary of elements beyond their control. Their lives have been limited by a number offorces: the shift from old agrarian to modem urban life; the breakup of the traditional fantily economic structUre; the dependence upon impersonal manufacturing and marketing employers. These bear on the Wingfield family's daily lives implicitly, Amanda and Tom victims of their impact but unaware of them as historical forces. More explicitly, the ordinary technologies already taken for granted in American households by 1939 serve as markers that define...