The Glass Menagerie

3 Pages 759 Words

To create a better understanding of a character’s personality, we must delve deep into a character’s thoughts, his traits, and his many other distinguishing characteristics. Our character, Laura Wingfield, from Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, suffers from a crippled leg that causes her to limp whenever she walks. Over time, her crippleness has caused her to become incredibly shy to strangers and almost everyone around her. Her shyness ricochets back at her by making her lose all self confidence in herself and thus makes her afraid to face or even talk to people. It causes her to turn into an outcast among regular people and even causes her to drop out of social institutions like high school and business college.
Her crippled leg over time has become a looming invisible adversary. She has been living in a dream world created by her mother whereas her leg is not crippled, but only a minor defect. Over time, she has lost all self confidence in herself and resorts to the confines of her glass menagerie and old phono records. She uses it as an escape, not from her confined home life, but rather as an escape from the life outside. She prefers not to have interaction with people and would rather spend all day caring for her glass animals. There, she can get away from the pressures her mother constantly places on her and be in perfect nirvana. Her shyness and tendency to keep to herself even made her drop out of high school. Even in business college, she threw up on the first day of class and never returned. Her shyness has alienated her to a point where even the most slightest conversation can frighten her.
Laura is also afraid of confrontations. When she dropped out of business college, she walked around town or through the parks for months in cold and freezing weather just to avoid having to confront her mother with the news. When her mother finally found out about it, she tried to avoid having to talk b...