The Composition of The Glass Menagerie: An Argument for Complexity

The Composition of The Glass Menagerie: An Argument for Complexity BRIAN PARKER Though Mrs. Edwina Williams has pointed out the many differences between the Williams family and the Wingfields,' The Glass Menagerie is nonetheless Tennessee Williams's most autobiographical play, accurate to the imaginative reality of his experience even when it departs from fact in detail. The essentials of that experience - the mismatched parents; the shock of the family's move from early years in his grandfather's Mississippi rectory to a series of shabby fiats in downtown SI. Louis; Williams's breakdown after working as a clerk in a warehouse, trying to write at night; his close companionship with his sister, Rose, disrupted by her withdrawal into schizophrenia; and the disastrous mistake of submitting her to a frontal lobotomy - are too well known to bear expansion. The recent publication of Williams's Memoirs,' however, with their startling frankness about his sex life, helps fill in some further details. In particular, Williams is explicit about his feeling of personal guilt because new companions and interests, the excitements of university life, and perhaps especially his gradual discovery of his own homosexual preferences led him to neglect and even be unkind to his sister at her period of greatest need. "It's not very pleasant to look back on that year [1937]," he writes, "and to know that Rose knew she was going mad and to know, also, that I was not too kind to my sister" (p. 121). He tells of her tattling on a wild party he gave at the house during their parents' absence, in resentment of which he hissed at her on the stairs, "I hate the sight of your ugly old face!", leaving her stricken and wordless, crouched against the wall. "This is the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect", he comments, "and one for which I can never properly atone" (p. 122). Later that year Rose was put in an instiIution; and the following summer, while Williams was in Illinois with some of his new friends, his parents gave their permission for the operation that rendered Rose harmless but childish for the rest of her life. 410 BRIAN PARKER This tragedy was one of the most traumatic experiences of Williams's life, from which he has never freed himself. It lies at the root of his feeling that love leads inevitably to loss and betrayal, as rellected in such poems as "Cortege" and "The Comforter and the Betrayer."3 The pattern is extraordinarily clear in Suddenly Last Summer, written in the late fifties after psychoanalysis, in which the heroine is threatened with lobotomy for revealing the sado-masochistic homosexuality of her cousin, Sebastian, and an ambiguous brother-sister relationship recurs throughout Williams's work4; fittingly, the last pages of Memoirs express his concern to release his sister from her mental institution to live in a house he has bought for her near his own in Florida. Not surprisingly, these events and tortured relationships are rellected in much more of Williams's early writing than just The Glass Menagerie: in short stories such as "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and "The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin"; poems like "Cortege" and part 3 of "Recuerdo"; and one-act plays such as The Long Goodbye, Auto-do-fe, The Last ofMy Solid Gold Watches, and perhaps The PurificationS; and the produced but unpublished full-length play, Stairs to the Roof. But exactly how obsessive and intractable, how emotionally complex and contradictory the memories were, can be grasped only when one looks at the mound ofrewriting which lay before The Glass Menagerie itself. To set the final play against these earlier efforts reveals nuances that are easily overlooked. Before examining this material, however, a word should be said about Williams's habit ofconstantly revising and reworking his creations. Typically, a Williams play starts life as a poem or short story, is revised to a one-act, then a full-length play; the play itself is changed during performance and again between performance and publication; if the production has not been as successful as was hoped, the play is likely to be completely...