The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #6 ｜ The Glass Menagerie

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to this next episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be

00:00:17.500 talking all about The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, because I thought we could do with a

00:00:24.320 change from Martians, Kings, and colonialism, so this time we're just going to bring it down to

00:00:31.420 ground level and talk about a play that really is just all about family, not in like a sort of,

00:00:37.680 you know, lame, fast and furious sort of way, but genuine family, real family. Before we do get into

00:00:46.120 this particular play itself, though, I actually just want to spend just a few minutes talking about

00:00:51.360 theatre generally, because actually, aside from discussing Shakespeare plays, I've not actually

00:00:57.480 so far talked about just theatre, and so I don't want this to bleed too heavily over, but it's a

00:01:06.620 good opportunity now, given that this is the first singular play that we're actually discussing here

00:01:11.660 on Chronicles. The misconception with theatre, which is entirely informed by just contemporary

00:01:18.440 examples, and, you know, the modern times that we live in, where theatre and actors generally seem to

00:01:25.820 consider themselves vanguards of progressivism, you know, at the first frontiers of all social change, 0.85

00:01:32.740 and basically all of that change kind of sucks and is bad. But fundamentally, theatre has always had a

00:01:41.440 political bent to it, even going back, you know, the days, of course, of ancient Greece, with playwrights

00:01:46.720 such as Aristophanes, who we'll get to in a few Chronicles time. But theatre makers, writers are

00:01:53.640 really just always reacting to whatever the social circumstances, what the, you know, the state of

00:02:02.020 society at the time in which the playwright is writing. And you have with this certain playwrights,

00:02:08.420 such as those from the Soviet Union, who were, of course, writing under very, very censorious

00:02:15.340 conditions. But, you know, in their hearts, they were, they were anti-communists. And so we'll get to

00:02:21.920 playwrights like that further down the line. But a lot of, you know, playwrights and actors and

00:02:28.380 theatre practitioners were sent to the gulag, right, for not being sufficiently communist enough,

00:02:34.300 many such cases, as it were back then. But also the fact that we seem to be in an age where everything

00:02:40.900 has to have an opinion, right? Everything has to have a political purpose to it. And some of the best theatre

00:02:48.300 is that where you can just go and spend an afternoon and be entertained. And I actually think that you should

00:02:55.960 judge any creative endeavour, whether it's a novel or a play, primarily, first and foremost, by its merits,

00:03:03.460 as literature, as a read, as a story, more than any actual analysis that you will put on it afterwards,

00:03:12.020 right? It's, did it feel like four hours? Or was it just a really, really good two hours that left me

00:03:17.580 wanting more? Was that novel a real page turner? That first and foremost is, of course, the hallmark

00:03:24.040 of good writing, and the one that should always be at the forefront of the mind before any theory or

00:03:31.320 political application or social reading gets put on top afterwards. So with all this said, let's begin

00:03:38.820 to talk about The Glass Menagerie and Tennessee Williams as a playwright and as a life. Tennessee

00:03:46.280 Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams. Williams was a man who

00:03:56.180 grew up on Shakespeare, grew up on Dickens. Those were the first two loves, literary loves of his life,

00:04:03.480 and everything else sort of fell forward from there. But he didn't really have a happy childhood

00:04:10.900 or a very happy adolescence at all, really. There was a lot of misery, a lot of abuse, and a lot of

00:04:17.860 control in Williams's very, very early life. His father was Cornelius Williams, and his mother was Edwina.

00:04:27.320 His father was anything but paternal, and his mother was anything but maternal. Cornelius was abusive. He

00:04:36.000 was absent. And also when he was at home, it was hell at the same time. He was not good company to be

00:04:44.340 around. He sounds like he was just quite a, quite a wretch of a human being. And conversely, his mother 0.89

00:04:50.540 was always at home. But she, in her own way, was very manipulative, very domineering, very zealous,

00:04:58.360 religiously zealous. And I've no doubt that these harsh, you know, decrees of order on William's life

00:05:06.560 is what led him to living such a libertine existence once he broke free of it and was out

00:05:13.900 there in the world making his own fortune and making his own way in life. But beyond his parents,

00:05:19.580 there is also just one other person that's very, very key to his life that is worth addressing before

00:05:25.200 we get into the play itself. And that was his sister, Rose. Now, Rose was, I believe, slightly older

00:05:32.260 than Williams, slightly the elder child. But Tennessee Williams actually had a very, very good

00:05:37.940 relationship with his sister, Rose, who he loved very, very dearly. And unfortunately, this one good

00:05:45.100 thing, even in itself, was ruined and taken away from him. When Rose was in her late teenage years,

00:05:52.600 was she seemed to develop all of the hallmarks of schizophrenia or something of the kind, right?

00:05:59.240 Just really, really severe episodes, you know, changes in mood, aggression. And she was eventually

00:06:06.600 taken into a mental asylum. And the year before the Glass Menagerie was first performed in 1944,

00:06:15.020 the year before that, in 43, Rose, his sister, was actually lobotomized in this mental institution.

00:06:23.200 And so, of course, after a horrible backward procedure like that, she was, of course, 0.99

00:06:28.720 never the same again. And any evidence of even those purer moments of heart that she'd once possessed

00:06:35.180 were replaced by this tranquil state. You see pictures from before people have been lobotomized

00:06:43.820 versus what they're like after. And it's a marked difference. You can see the change behind the eyes,

00:06:50.680 you know, all of a sudden, there seems to be less of a soul there. It's a very, very grim thing to

00:06:56.120 observe. Moving forward, then, let's start to talk about the play itself. In some ways,

00:07:02.360 it's very by the numbers. Dealing with family is a very, very old thing. People have been writing about

00:07:08.940 family for almost as long as they've been writing. But also, in many ways, Tennessee Williams brings

00:07:15.760 into this play a lot of 20th century technology, such as a screen that would have had a projector

00:07:25.220 to enhance the imagery of the play and act as a prop of its own. And he also brought music to it as

00:07:34.140 well. There's a musical motif that's supposed to play this theme of the glass menagerie, which is

00:07:40.080 very, very delicate and adds a certain atmosphere to scenes involving Laura, the sister, in the play.

00:07:46.480 But other than that, it is a memory. It's called a memory play. And it's the first of its kind in

00:07:53.380 that respect. This is the first memory play that we have. And really, that just simply is a framing

00:07:59.480 device. It's a device by which Tennessee Williams frames the action of the play. And so you've got Tom

00:08:05.380 and it's him at the start of the play remembering these events back to himself. And we'll get into

00:08:12.440 more of what the implications of that are once we've gone through the actual overview of the plot itself.

00:08:22.820 The play begins in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1930s, where the Wingfield family lives.

00:08:28.880 Amanda, the mother, and her two children, Tom and Laura. Their father left home 16 years

00:08:35.360 ago when they were very young. And the Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building in

00:08:40.580 what is described as one of those hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units that

00:08:47.080 flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower middle-class populations.

00:08:54.060 The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape.

00:08:58.800 The play is a memory, which, as Williams assures us, means that it is therefore non-realistic.

00:09:05.540 Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details. Others are exaggerated,

00:09:12.480 according to the emotional value of the articles it touches. For memory is seated predominantly

00:09:18.260 in the heart. Tom walks on stage, dressed as a merchant sailor. He speaks directly to the audience,

00:09:26.320 telling them about the characters that they will meet in the play, and the one that we won't,

00:09:30.800 his father. A telephone man who fell in love with long distances, such as Mexico.

00:09:37.860 Tom then steps into the memory, and the story begins in earnest. Mother and children are at home,

00:09:44.280 and Tom is told to come to the table by his mother. She tells him not to push his food with his fingers,

00:09:50.380 to chew, to not smoke as much. Amanda demands Laura stay at the table, in case some gentleman callers 1.00

00:09:57.700 come and visit. The mother then tells her children, whether they care to listen or not,

00:10:03.060 of the story she has told them many times before. Of her days of youth at Blue Mountain, Mississippi,

00:10:09.720 as a southern belle. She recounts the attention she'd had from these gentleman callers. She recounts who

00:10:16.980 they were, the lives they'd gone on to live or didn't live, and the ones who got away, and how

00:10:22.960 instead of them, she'd fallen for their absent father and his charm. But Laura is not her mother,

00:10:31.840 and weakly says that she should not expect any visitors. In the next scene, Tom is at work,

00:10:38.240 having a lowly job at the shoemaking factory, and Laura sits at home at the typewriter.

00:10:44.840 Laura is a gentle, fragile soul. Without confidence or purpose, she spends her days

00:10:52.120 hoodwinking her mother into thinking that she's attending Rubicum's business school.

00:10:58.220 It is a comfort to her mother that, even if her daughter cannot seem to find a look in love,

00:11:03.580 she at least has a prospect of a job. But even this hope is broken, when Amanda learns that Laura

00:11:09.920 hasn't been attending her classes for over six weeks. Instead, she's spent her days walking,

00:11:16.540 visiting museums, filling her hours with footsteps that are leading nowhere, and thoughts that create

00:11:23.040 no future. It is revealed to the audience that the reason for this is that Laura is crippled, 0.92

00:11:30.020 a word that her mother refuses to use. As a child, she wore a leg brace, metallic and clanking.

00:11:37.680 It came to define her childhood, setting her apart from the other children. Self-consciousness led to

00:11:44.480 isolation. Isolation led to shyness, and shyness left her detached from society and its demands.

00:11:52.720 Her mother tries to give her a reality check.

00:11:55.500 So, what are we going to do for the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch the parades go by? Amuse

00:12:02.200 ourselves with the glass menagerie, darling? Eternally play those worn-out phonograph records

00:12:07.760 your father left as a painful reminder of him? We won't have a business career. We've given that up

00:12:13.760 because it gave us nervous indigestion. What is there left but dependency all our lives?

00:12:19.920 I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. 1.00

00:12:25.780 I've seen such pitiful cases in the South. Barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging 0.99

00:12:31.980 patronage of sisters' husbands or brothers' wives. Stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room,

00:12:39.640 encouraged by one-in-law to visit another. Little bird-like women without any nest, 1.00

00:12:45.140 eating the crust of humility all their lives. Is that the future we've mapped out for ourselves?

00:12:51.120 I swear, it's the only alternative I can think of. Of course, some girls do marry. 1.00

00:12:59.020 This leads Laura to recollect a boy from high school that she'd once had a crush on.

00:13:05.120 She remembers his operata voice, his grin, his name for her. Blue roses.

00:13:11.180 But his girlfriend had been the best-dressed girl in school, and Laura could never hope to

00:13:16.660 compete for his attention. Seasons pass, and to make extra money, Amanda tries to telephone 1.00

00:13:23.200 for potential subscribers to a magazine. In her usual overbearing manner, she smothers Tom with 1.00

00:13:30.680 criticisms until he needs to go out and go to the movies. He goes there often, and his mother doesn't

00:13:37.100 trust him. Where does he really go? Who does he really see? What poor life choices does he make

00:13:44.060 out there in the world beyond their fire escape door? In the world beyond Amanda's control? Tom snaps.

00:13:51.860 Listen, you think I'm crazy about the warehouse? You think I'm in love with the Continental

00:13:56.960 Shoemakers? You think I want to spend 55 years down there in that Sellatex interior with fluorescent

00:14:04.740 tubes? Look, I'd rather somebody pick up a crowbar and battered out my brains and go back 0.92

00:14:12.660 mornings. I go. Every time you come in yelling that, god damn, rise and shine, rise and shine, 0.98

00:14:19.920 I say to myself, how lucky dead people are. But I get up. I go. For $65 a month, I give up all that 0.99

00:14:28.660 I dream of doing and being, ever. And then to torture his mother and play into the fears of his

00:14:35.600 nocturnal activities, he jokes, I'm going to opium dens. Yes, opium dens of vice and criminal hangouts,

00:14:43.700 mother. I've joined the Hogan gang. I'm a hired assassin. I carry a Tommy gun in the violin case. 0.89

00:14:49.600 I run a string of cat houses in the valley. They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield. I'm leading a

00:14:56.380 double life. A simple, honest warehouse worker by day. By night, a dynamic czar of the underworld.

00:15:03.480 Mother, they're going to blow us all sky high some night. I'll be glad. Very happy. And so will you.

00:15:10.720 You'll go up on a broomstick over Blue Mountain with 17 gentleman callers, you ugly, babbling old witch. 1.00

00:15:18.340 Naturally, this leaves mother and son on rather sour terms. But even more egregiously, in his haste 0.99

00:15:26.940 and rage, he accidentally knocks over one of Laura's glass animals from her menagerie, leaving her

00:15:33.540 distraught. Later that night, Tom returns, drunk. Very drunk, in fact. But against the prison of home,

00:15:42.400 it only validates his longing to escape for adventure. He's seen travel logs, Mickey Mouse,

00:15:49.120 musicians and an organ solo, all from the comfort of a cinema and a night out in St. Louis.

00:15:55.720 What adventures could he have if he went further than that? If he abandoned his commitments to his

00:16:01.180 family? If he was like his father? His key falls through the crack in the floor. But fortunately,

00:16:07.800 Laura is awake and lets him in. And it's clear in her care for him that this familial love is very

00:16:14.740 strong and one of the key reasons that Tom stays. In fact, the only thing that keeps Tom there.

00:16:22.420 Morning breaks. Rise and shine, bellows the mother, who had only been told the night before how much the

00:16:29.480 son hates that ritual. They will not speak to one another, only childishly passing messages through Laura

00:16:36.700 until Laura leaves to go to the shop. And this allows a moment for Amanda and Tom to reconcile.

00:16:44.500 Amanda beseeches her son to find a young gentleman of good morals at the factory that she can invite to

00:16:50.460 dinner and set up with Laura. And begrudgingly, Tom agrees to it. When he returns, he tells his mother

00:16:58.700 that he's invited a work colleague, Jim O'Connor, a shipping clerk on a slightly better salary than Tom,

00:17:06.500 and he'll come to visit tomorrow evening. But Amanda laments that it's all too sudden.

00:17:13.140 Nevertheless, she cleans and prepares and gives Laura one of her old dresses from a now long-lost age

00:17:19.280 of antebellum elegance. The stage notes detail that Laura's hair is changed. It is softer and more

00:17:26.300 becoming, a fragile, unearthly prettiness that comes out in Laura. She's like a piece of translucent

00:17:33.160 glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance. Not actual. Not lasting.

00:17:40.260 As Laura's mother readies her with extra padding for her breasts and the obligatory stories about her 0.55

00:17:47.500 own youth. And then she tells Laura the name of her gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor. Laura is

00:17:54.240 overwhelmed. It's the same boy she once had been enamored with from her school days. Before she has

00:18:00.400 any time to come to terms with this revelation, the knock is at the door. Laura musters all her courage

00:18:06.880 to answer it and Jim and Tom enter. Jim is surprised to see her, having no idea that Tom even had a

00:18:13.860 sister and was ignorant of the Wingfield's plans. Laura cannot deal with the social situation and

00:18:21.180 promptly bolts like a deer. This leaves time for Tom and Jim to chat. Jim wants to go into public

00:18:27.260 speaking and he assures Tom that we're not for the warehouse. Tom concurs, revealing to Jim that he's

00:18:34.560 paid for membership into a merchant seamen's union, rather than his family's electric bill for that

00:18:40.160 month. All those evenings sat at the movies has led Tom to finally seize the reins of his life

00:18:46.480 and go out and have an adventure of his own. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from

00:18:52.000 the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.

00:19:04.560 See ya next time.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 19, 2025

PREVIEW： Chronicles #6 ｜ The Glass Menagerie

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