Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Williams is one of the most claustrophobic familial plays in the known universe. He packs everyone tightly together in the same place, like a regular family at dinner time, but that’s the way it stays. There is no outside life for these people. Tom, one of the characters, goes to work every day, but the play never shows him actually at work. It takes place always when he’s back, or just the other two characters, Amanda and Laura, isolated without him.
The idea of these characters being so close together plays on the psychological aspect; they all get on each others’ nerves. Tom is stuck at home with his sister and his mother to take care of. His sister is a shy cripple, and she has a phobia of getting out into the real world because she is afraid of working, and what people might think of her. Amanda, his mother, is just simply one of the most annoying characters in play history, most famous for her words, “Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!”
Now, Laura’s mother is obsessed with getting Laura a gentleman caller. She states that back in her day, she had them by the dozens but she chose their father, but he took off and left them all to forge for themselves. To them it must feel like they are worthless, and it’s demeaning. Tom works for the whole family to live, and his mother is so very ungrateful and always complains of him not caring and not doing the right thing for them, (I would be very angry if someone said that to me) but he put up with it anyway.
To sum it up at this point, there’s Laura, the over-self-conscious daughter who has a fetish with glass animals. They bring her off into her own isolated fantasy world. Then, there’s Amanda, the mother, who does nothing but rain down chaos of her own fantasy world away from the one they are all currently living in, segregated from that of Laura and Tom. Lastly, Tom, is just about the only honestly sane one in the entire household. He writes, brings in the money working at the factory, yet there is one thing that makes him just like the other two: his fantasy dream. He wants to get out of that place so bad, but he has nowhere to go. He just wants to roam and leave all the past behind him and leave his family to make-ends-meet on their own. He ends up being just like his father.
So in the end, Tom ends up leaving, yes, but his feelings aren’t as free as he’d liked them to be. He’s regretting every moment of leaving them, and his mother and sister are just as miserable. No one wins in this situation. It’s basically everyone goes insane from dealing with each other all the time, with their own little problems. Then they separate into their own little fantasy worlds to get away from each other. Next, one of them actually leaves. I bet that was exactly the situation before with the father. No one was really together at all in this play, they were all out for themselves and were isolated inside.