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... world below. () Although, Oedipus and the citizens of Thebes do not know the truth, the audience understands that Teiresias represents vision, therefore his wise words should be perceived as prophecies of events to come and morals to learn. Teiresias though physically blind can see better or more clairvoyant than Oedipus who has perfect vision and yet still blind to the truth. In the same dialogue, Teiresias foreshadows the double lash of your parents curse will whip you. Out of this land someday with only night upon you precious eyes. (Seblonka, p. 40) Leaving with the last word, Teiresias exits the stage telling Oedipus the truth once more. It is not till the confession of the Shepherd and the suicide hanging of his mother, wife and bearer of his children, does Oedipus realize the horrible truth about himself.
Now with the truth of himself realized, Oedipus is filled with grief and guilt. He blinds himself, left forever with the knowledge of the destruction and shame he has brought on his family. He says goodbye to daughters because he must live the rest of his life in exile and die where his parents intended, the wild hills of Kithairon. Oedipus blinding himself symbolizes his increase of knowledge, his sensitivity, and gives him the ability to finally see. (Seblonka, p. 56) He is now able to recognize the flaws of his hubris and the consequences of which his pride brought him.
The same theme appearing in most Greek stories applies to Oedipus; the will of the gods is ultimate, and one must live humbly. Oedipus Rex is a tragic story in which Sophocles leaves the character Oedipus beaten and destroyed by fate. It is not fate that Oedipus takes his sight, it is by his own will. The blind man seer, Teiresias, could always see because he did not fear the truth, nor did he have reason to. The vision motif in Oedipus Rex helps to develop the theme of blindness, both physical and moral, and Sophocles does his best to deploy that motif within the conceptual framework of his famous play.
A professed "memory play, " The Glass Menagerie seems to derive its continued if wavering force from its partly repressed representation of the quasi-incestuous and doomed love between Tom Wingfield and his crippled, ultimately schizophrenic sister, Laura. Williams deployment of memory throughout the play will be analyzed within the scope of this research. It is apparent that for Williams, life itself, through memory as its agent, shatters itself and scatters the colored transparencies of the rainbow, which ought to be, but is not, a covenant of hope. The structure of the play helped Williams to move away from realistic drama and too great a dependence upon only the literal significance of word or action. His development of The Glass Menagerie as a "memory play, " organized around Tom's remembrances of things past, gave Williams the freedom to develop the "new plastic theatre" of which he spoke in the author's production notes to the published versions of the play. Lighting, music, and the device of the narrator who is both a commentator on and a part of the series of tableaux which he presents in his search for the meaning of the past all contribute to the play's fluidity, a quality and metaphor which one critic sees as central to Williams's art. (Crandall, 1996) Williams's virtual invention of the "memory play" form, which differs from either a confessional format or the involuntary recall of stream-of-consciousness expressionism, is quite innovative, because in the "memory play" we not only see exclusively what the narrator consciously wants us to see, but also see it only in the way he chooses that we should.
It is precisely here that the main interpretative problem of The Glass Menagerie lies. It is a problem both of "mood " that is, the complex attitude that Tom-remembering has to the events he recalls and of "tone " that is, the slightly mocking, not wholly ingenuous stance that Tom seems to take to the audience, a stance that is much more subtle and ambiguous than the sentimental, poetic sincerity (lightened with a few wry laughs) that has determined the way of acting Tom-the-narrator. (Crandall, 1996) Since the setting in Menagerie is that of a "memory play, " Tennessee Williams could feel free in its staging. The setting of The Glass Menagerie was interesting in its symbolism and technical experimentation. Moving from the deep South to St. Louis for his story, Williams retains the memory of the South, as a haunting presence under the superimposed Midwestern setting. The audience, never seeing the gracious mansion that was the scene of Amanda's girlhood, feels its remembered glory and its contrast to the mean present.
Awareness of the past is always an element in Williams's plays. His characters live beyond the fleeting moments of the drama back into a glowing past and shrinking from a terrifying future. The depiction of the Wingfields' apartment follows the dicta of expressionism. The ugly uniformity of the tenements depresses Tom and makes him frantic to escape. The place is described as "one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class populations. " (Williams, 1985) They are, says the temporarily socially conscious author, "symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfered mass of automatism. " (Williams, 1985) Of the characters in the play, only Tom seems aware of this grotesque uniformity; and since the whole story takes place in his memory, he would naturally exaggerate the dismal reality he sees. On both sides of the building, dark, narrow alleys run into "murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans and sinister lattice-work of neighboring fire escapes. " (Williams, 1985) The meaning of these alleys is clear if the reader recalls Tom's picture of "Death Valley, " where cats were trapped and killed by a vicious dog. (Crandall, 1996) The predicament becomes a symbol of his factory work, murderous to his creative imagination.
For Laura, the alley represents the ugly world from which she retreats to gaze into her tiny glass figures. For Amanda, too, the alley is the world of her present hopeless poverty and confusion from which she retreats into her make-believe world of memory and pretence. Inside the apartment, where she tries to create an illusion of gentility, her husband's portrait grins at her futile efforts. The Glass Menagerie is a product of Williams's own experience. When his family left Mississippi to live in St. Louis when he was about twelve, he remembered the rural South as "a wide spacious land that you can breathe in. " (Martin, 1997) Like Amanda, he prized his Southern associations. "My folks, " he said, "were pioneer Tennesseans, mostly of a military and political disposition, some of them, such as Nollichucky Jack Sevier, having been famous Indian fighters when the South was being settled. " (Martin, 1997) Above all, the quiet rectory life of his childhood in Columbus and then in Clarksdale (the Blue Mountain of his plays) is lodged in his memory and serves as a touchstone against which the tawdriness of urban life is measured.
In The Glass Menagerie time is used another way, an equally poetic one. Tom stands with us in the immediate present. At the start he wears a merchant seaman's outfit indicative of escape from the physical past, of his having left his mother and sister behind. But through his consciousness we are carried back in time to his life in the drab apartment before his escape, and we retrace with him events leading to his decision to leave. Within this train of memory there are two types of time, the generalized and the specific, and through the use of these two we are given a deeper insight into the lives and relationships of the Wingfields. (Martin, 1997) The first scene in the apartment, the dinner scene, is an example of generalized time. It is not any one particular dinner but a kind of abstraction of all the dinners shared by the trio in their life of entrapment.
Amanda's admonitory speeches are ones often repeated, her stories of the seventeen gentlemen callers are oft told tableland Tom's irritated responses are those he makes each and every time the stories are retold. Amanda's telephone call to Ida Scott, with its pathetic attempts at salesmanship, is not one specific call, but, as the isolating spotlight tells us, it is an action out of time and place, the essence of a repeated action rather than a unique event. There are also unique moments in the parade of Tom's memory, highlights with a significance of their onthe imaginative reconstruction of the visit of Jim (for Tom was not present during some of the dialogue with Laura), for example. Through this multiple use of time Williams embodies both the concrete, the particular, and the general, the typical, his images often achieving the force of what Eliot has called the objective correlative of abstract truth.
Williams heightened Tom's emotional tension between his necessary cruelty and his affection for the ones he is hurting. (Crandall, 1996) His cruel side comes out when he says, "Then I escaped. Without a word of goodbye, I descended the steps of the fire-escape for the last time. " (Martin, 1997) The incestuous implications of the speech become more explicit: "In five years' time I have nearly forgotten home. But there are nights when memory is stronger. I cannot hold my shoulder to the door, the door comes softly but irresistibly open... I hold my breath. I reach for a cigarette.
I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger. For if that vision goes on growing clearer, the mist will divide upon my sister's face, watching gently and daring to ask for nothing. Then it's too much: my manhood is undone and the night is hers. " (Williams, 1985) This "memory play" is often spoken of as an exorcism of the past, but, if so, it is no more than an attempt to exorcise. (Martin, 1997) It is better understood as an obsessive reliving of the experience in an attempt to come to terms with it, which recurs to Tom against his will. In The Glass Menagerie, the sister is left to destroy herself in the prison of the home, while the brother is caught just as surely in the prison of memory, his own imaginative inability not to relive the past. It is evident that memory is one of the cornerstones of this play by Tennessee Williams. Bibliography Crandall, G.
The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Dawson, R, How to Become a Philosopher, London: Books, Inc, 1997. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Merton, T, Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, Michigan: Zondervan Publishers, 1996. Martin, Robert A. Arthur Miller: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982.
Martin, R. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (Critical Essays on American Literature). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Miller, Arthur. The Death of a Salesman.
New York: Random House, 1977. Seblonka, P, Sophocles, New York: Random House, 1998. Weales, Gerald C. Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman; Text and Criticism.
NY, Viking P, 1977. Williams, T. The Glass Menagerie. New York: Random House, 1985.
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