The Metaphor Of Disability In The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams

This thesis offers an analysis of the disability in Tennessee Williams’s The GlassMenagerie at three levels: the physical disability, cultural disability, and social disability. Itargues that the disabled body in Menagerie serves as a trope for the crushed southerncivilization and the disillusion of American Dream. Williams sets his characters in brokenhomes where the social influence of the old American South is overbearingly present,regardless of physical location or practicality of such social standards. He crafts his storiesaround dysfunctional family relationships within their distorted social contexts, where hefocuses on the bottom of society people to illustrate how the society can be so irrationallyoppressive that it can cripple the human cultural ideology and social perception to the point ofcomplete mental breakdown and failure to participate in any form of society. Chapter Onecontents that Laura’ disability functions as a symbol, along with many other symbols in theplay. Chapter Two intends to expose the declined and crushed southern civilization bydepicting the displaced woman and absent man in the southern family. Chapter Three shifts tothe crippledom of American Dream in the Great Depression, representing Tom and Jim’spursuit of the American Dream in absence of morality. In doing so, it concludes that the tropeof disability is manifested on the crushed southern civilization and the disillusion of AmericanDream. In Conclusion, it concludes that the trope of disability is Williams’ enthusiastic pursuitof a new “plastic theatre”.