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Throughout human history, man has redefined the society that he lives in. With new inventions

and ideas, many societies were reformed. During the 20th

 century, there was a significant amount of

change. Large amounts of new technologies and ideas were created. New things such as rockets,

telephones, and radios shattered what society thought were possible. Plenty of these ideas were

incredibly beneficial to human life, but some were quite destructive as well. In The Glass Menagerie by

Tennessee Williams, these new ideas’ effects on society are shown to be catastrophic. Williams uses the

family, the nation, and the world, to present the idea that one’s breaking of the basic units of society is

dangerous because he will lose respect from that unit of society and as a result experience an

intellectual, moral, or physical death. An example of societal breakage and result the resulting

intellectual death comes from the last scene in The Glass Menagerie.

In The Glass Menagerie, the Wingfield family has experienced family-related problems. The

father left the family so that he can live his own life and forced his son, Tom Wingfield, to sustain the

family (5). In the last parts of the play, Amanda Wingfield, Tom’s mother, asks Tom to get a suitor for his

sister, Laura Wingfield, which Tom does (36). The suitor, Jim O’Connor, is a coworker of Tom and a

former classmate of Laura. Jim reveals to Laura that he is already getting married to someone else (93).

This information does not hurt Laura at that moment, but later it has major implications on the family.

When Amanda finds out that Tom has brought a suitor that is about to be married, she becomes furious.

Amanda believes that Tom brought Jim as a selfish joke (95). Tom says he had no idea that Jim was

getting married. A huge fight ensues in which Tom says he will leave, to which Amanda responds, “Go,

then! Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer!” (96) Tom has broken his relationship with his mother, but

still has a relation with his sister. In a final act of rebellion, Tom throws his glass on the floor, and as it

shatters Laura screams. The breaking of the glass symbolizes the breaking of Tom and Laura’s

relationship (96). Without the need to earn respect from his peers, Tom turns to drinking and loses his

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 job (97), symbolizing Tom’s intellectual death. Tom lost respect from his mother and sister as a result of

his breakage of the family, but the breakage of society also applies to the nation.

Tom says many times “In Spain there was Guernica” in The Glass Menagerie. Guernica was a

small town in the Basques region of Spain. From 1936 to 1939, a civil war was going on in Spain between

the Republicans and the Nationalists who Hitler supportedi. In 1937, Hitler bombed the small town of

Guernica to test his war machine. As the town had no significance to the ongoing Spanish Civil War,

people around the world saw the bombing as an act of great immoralityii. But the bombing of Guernica

was not the only place one sees immorality in this time period. About 5 years after Guernica, the

Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. As a result of the bombing, the U.S. Government decided that

Japanese Americans, many of which had lived in America for quite a while, should be placed in

internment campsiii. These camps tore Japanese away from their shops and homes and broke any

relations to society that the Japanese had. In some cases families were even separatediv. The United

States government broke up its own society, and soon would feel the repercussions of what they had

done. In 1944, the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States concerning Japanese internment was

ruled on. The ruling, in a 6-3 decision, was that interment was constitutional

v

. The case had much

controversy, and in 1983 the ruling was overturned as the U.S. government had submitted false

evidencevi. Two of the three Justices who voted against issued dissent statements. The two, Justices

Robert Jackson and Frank Murphy, both vehemently stated that the decision was immoral, as it violated

the constitutional and basic humanitiesvii. The Pledge of Allegiance states that the U.S. is “one nation,

under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”viii

, and the U.S. government broke this pledge. The

United States government lost respect from two of its senior officials, all because the U.S. decided to

break its own “indivisible” society apart, and experienced the death of the U.S.’s morality. The United

States was not the only nation to split up its society, as at the time Hitler was coming to power.

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Tom alludes to Hitler and Hitler’s escape from society, Berchtesgaden, in The Glass Menagerie ().

In the time the play was set in, Hitler and Nazi Germany were separating all those deemed unfit from its

“better” society, often killing them or putting them to workix. Countries around the world did not agree

with such travesties, and so a second world war started. A year before the war ended, Germany was

sufferingx. A group of conspirators created a plan to kill Hitler and make peace so as to avoid the

complete and utter destruction of Germany. The plan, or the 20 July plot as it came to be known,

involved many higher ranking Nazi officialsxi. One official, Claus von Stauffenberg, was a German

conservative nationalist. He fought for Hitler in the North African front. He was the archetype of a Nazi

soldier. Stauffenberg was not part of the original group of conspirators, but joined when Stauffenberg

saw that Hitler would inevitably cause the destruction of Germanyxii. Hitler refused to surrender, even if

it meant that Germany would be torn apart by invaders. Stauffenberg had lost all respect for Hitler,

resulting from Hitler’s disregard for Germany’s society. Even though in the end the plot failed, Hitler lost

respect from his own countrymen as a consequence of splitting the country apart, and almost

experienced physical death as a result.

In The Glass Menagerie, one can clearly see that when one breaks a basic unit of society, he will

experience the loss of respect from others. With Tom breaking his family, the United States breaking its

communities, and Hitler and Nazi Germany splitting its society, they all lose respect from their peers.

This loss of respect has serious ramifications, causing intellectual, spiritual, or physical death. Tennessee

Williams definitely uses the basic units of society and allusions to history in The Glass Menagerie to

criticize society and the world at that time.

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ENDNOTES

i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War 

ii http://books.google.com/books?id=1R304lcSa4kC&lpg=PA251&ots=9t6Gh-

MvaZ&dq=immorality%20of%20guernica&pg=PA251#v=onepage&q=immorality%20of%20guernica&f=false 

iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment iv http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/ 

v http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States 

vi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States 

vii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States 

viii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance ix http://www.ushmm.org/education/forstudents/ 

xhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II 

xihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot#Background 

xii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot