Her Own Little World a Paper on Amanda from the Glass Menagerie

Amanda Wingfield is a character in the play The Glass Menagerie, which is set in St. Louis in 1973. She is from a genteel southern family and has a prominent southern upbringing. She is a mother to two children, Tom and Laura; her husband abandoned the family and left her to raise two children. Amanda loves her children immensely and lives for them, but can often come across as overbearing and constantly nagging to both Tom and Laura. It is as if Amanda fluctuates between illusion and reality; like she closes her eyes to the brutal realistic world. Through her actions, it seems as if she is living in an illusionary world of her youth. Some would say she is evil, but I think she is just deeply flawed. It is as if the fluctuation between these two worlds is her only defense between the loneliness and emptiness of what her life has become.

Amanda is different from most people. Her southern upbringing is extremely apparent. She lives in her own little world and crosses back and forth between illusion and reality. She is a very caring mother, but does not accept the harsh realities of life. She tries to live vicariously through her daughter, Laura, and constantly nags and tries to run her son’s life. I see it as almost being a form of bipolar. Sometimes, she accepts things and acts fairly normal but the vast majority of the time, she tries, to create different situations her own way and tries to make people do what she wants in her mind. She tries to live in a fantasy but there are some realities she does have to accept.

It is obvious to me that Amanda has suffered a reversal of economic and social fortune at some point in her life. She has a hard time coming to terms with her new status in society. Throughout the play she repeatedly states that when she was younger, living in Blue Mountain, she had seventeen gentlemen callers on one Sunday afternoon. Most of the time, she is saying this because she is trying to relive her own life, by living vicariously through her daughter Laura. She has high hopes that one day a gentlemen caller will come to sweep Laura off her feet and take care of them. She refuses to acknowledge the fact that Laura is crippled. Instead, she says she has a slight defect. She completely fails to understand that what her children want is not precisely what she wants. What she does not know is that her constant nagging and trying to control their lives is really driving the children further away from her. She sometimes indulges in playful games to escape the reality of everyday living. An example is when she role plays with Laura. She will say things like, “You be the lady this time and I’ll be the darky.”

She refuses to accept reality. She pushes Tom so hard because she does not want him to be like his father and she wants so much for him to be happy. Without