Since authors select carefully their titles, the reader
must look for the implicit and explicit meanings of these titles. Of course, the
significance of the menagerie for Laura becomes apparent as the play progresses. For,
like the delicate little animals, she too is enclosed in a fragile, small world that is
subject to break at any time. Like the unicorn, she is markedly different both
physically and spiritually. By her brother she is treated with care and by her mother
she is handled as though she is only of certain
dimensions.
Besides Laura, the other characters exhibit
behaviors that are of those looking through glass. Whether Williams intended it or not,
with respect to Amanda and Tom, the reader is reminded of the line from 1
Corinthians 12:
For now we see through a glass darkly, but then
face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I also am
known.
As Tom stands outside
the screen of Williams's stage directions, he sees through a sort of "glass darkly" as
he selfishly abandons Amanda and Laura. Likewise, Amanda has seen "darkly" in that she
has only focused on the financial well-being of the family and not the interior
conflicts of Laura and Tom. At the end of the play, as yet part of the unusual
"menagerie," Tom muses about his remembrances of his family from whom he has
fled,
I pass
the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of
colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shatter
rainbow.
Indeed, the
symbolism of glass and the fragility of the enclosed and shelved menagerie is a trope of
Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie; the title is
truly fitting.
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