Unanswered Questions

            Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie is talking about the American Great Depression after it happened, being written in the year of 1945.  The play surrounds a family in St. Louis that lives within a tenement home.  With American-Soviet tensions beginning to build with the close of the Second World War, perhaps the economic status of the play’s characters could play an important role in the message Williams is trying to portray.  We talked in class about the “fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy” where people are forced into touching the alphabet.  I’d like to connect this to another reference Williams makes in the play, one about D.H. Lawrence.  Lawrence was a novelist, but many of his books were banned or censored due to the graphic scenes within.  It seems interesting that Williams would relate the economy to an alphabet; perhaps this has something to do with books.  It is hard to connect censorship of novels to Williams’ feelings about the Great Depression, but it is certainly an intriguing relationship.  Williams also makes note of several labor riots within his work, which could be a commentary on capitalism.  Opponents of capitalistic view would point out the harsh conditions that this type of economy puts on lower and middle class people, especially laborers, and labor riots are a bursting example of this economic pressure.  The pressure the system puts on its people, combined with the fact that Williams’ play revolves around these lower class people and the fact that Amanda puts pressure on her children for success creates some astoundingly complex questions about what seems to be an astoundingly simple play (though the cover has quite a complex line design).  Perhaps some of these unanswered questions Williams has set up will be revealed by the end of the play.