Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie is one of the major plays in modern English dramatic school. It embodies the bold experimental spirit of the young American playwrights active in 1930s and 1940s whose sensitivity to the turbulent occurances of those decades led them to explore new possibilities in the field of theatrical performance. This momentous play creates a world in which women occupy in the central place. The gloomy and shut-in-life of a mother and a daughter pivots around their temperaments which are highly strong and show desperate attempts to find release. Though each one of the characters lives on a different level occupied with her or his own problems, need to relate desperately felt by them. It is this problem of finding a linkage that complicates their lives.

Looking from a point of view of women's lives it is not difficult to see that vthey live in a man's world which is remorselessly unfeeling and self-centred. After the "Stock Exchange" crash of 1929 when the huge middle class of America was "matriculating in a school for the blind", a great depression has come in people's lives as economic degradation and unemployment has taken place. Men cannot cope up with the hard core realities of Darwinian Socialism which makes total distance between mind and body. So they are nothing but the victim of Schizophrenia. The characters of this very play are not devoid of these cruel realities of life. As a member of nuclear family Amanda Wingfield presents the haplessness who with her two children is not able to cope up with the harsh realities of the Darwinian's "Survival of the fittest theory". Her plenty strong character could be taken to be just a weak facade with plenty of things to show her essential vulnerability and defenceless existence and everything in this play is laid upon her. As she is the only figure in the family to maintain the household as her husband has left them long ago by sending his last words through a picture post-card containing only- "Hello- Goodbye" and nothing she has nothing to do without excepting the American Machoman realities of life. She is very tensed that her two children Laura Wingfield and Tom Wingfield are busy in "the room of their won" away from the hectic and rushing materialistic world outside. Laura who is physically crippled and always stay in her favourite world of glass animals in her "attic" (Concept from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "The Mad Women in Attic"). She is virgin and leads a misarable and unmarried life. She finds her own interest by collecting transparent glass animals which she can order or control. It is her shyness -disability which makes her unfit to live in this Darwinian socialism. On the other hand Tom who though work in a shoe factory with a revulsion and disgust his Republic but strangely he has a mind full of poetic fervour and that is his own world different totally from the Brave new world outside and who, according to Plato, should be banished from society in Republic as poets have imagination and emotion which are for him faminine spirits and not worthy for a good and moralized society. So such effeminacy of Tom and the emotional frazile world of Laura are nothing but admonished by their mother. Because she knows well what the society craves for and they all have nothing but to accept these ongoing tough processes of lives. We can see in this play that she continuously has become a fastidious and nagging mother who use to rubuke their passions which has grown as a rebelious instinct for both Laura and Tom to their mother. They find their world of art and satisfaction in their chosen world that's why Tom dos have little interest to go to work just as Laura who is not thoughtful for her wedlock. But Amanda is hard nut to crack such illusionary worlds of them. She encourages them all the time to be the fittest person for society. Hence, Laura's reaction is significant when she tells her mother's attitude –"Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face like the pic of Jesus's mother in the museam ". So already this family has nothing but a painstaking and combatting world of their own where happiness is a far-fetched thing. But even like Azzaro, the spoilt-child of Ben Okiri's The Famished Road both Amanda and Laura have to accept these hard core socialism. As Laura is physically weak she know it is really difficult to survive in the world which just want efficiency and for her marriage is beyond question for which Amanda always prepares her because Amanda is the victim of societal diease where women should be married in wedding worthy age and men have to earn. Whereas Laura feels herself free and liberated in her attic where she can create and express her own choices and this is same when Amanda encourages Tom "Eat food leisurely son really enjoy it" and food is important for health so that he can work nicely. Tom's answer diminishes her and society's will when he proclaims-"I can rise but cannot shine" just the opposite of "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"

Amanda indeed has no way to accept this mad world's ethics as before said. She wants to survive and hence she is forced to follow the iron necessities of life which is quite different from Arthur Miller's hero Willy Loman who is not forced but spontaneously pursed the myth and beauty of illusionary American Dream (Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller) in which an individual has to earn money almost like that of Horatio Alger's "Rags to Riches". So Amanda neurotically needles Tom and caustically upbraids Laura due to economic degradation of Stock Exchange Crash and for which Money becomes a big matter and issue for each of the people including her. She is the caricature of the faded Southern belle who lives in an imaginary world of suitors and social halls. Critics often have shared Tom's angry judgement that she is an "Ugly bubbling old-witch" and he often engages quarreling with his mother who is not ready to make liaison with her children's passions. Tom is totally filled with past. He writes poems in his shoe factory as it is outright humiliated by others as Shakespesre there. His quest is "to find in emotion what was lost in space". Travelling alone is not solace for him as he forever remembers a particular moment in the past "I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with the pieces of coloured glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colours like bits of a shattered rainbow". Amanda lives in an world which is far from his children's world. She always intermediates in the lives of Laura and Tom for their social and mental improvement. She makes hindrance in Tom's reading of D.H Lawrence by snatching the book. She only demands them to be persons which society does demand. She always encourages Laura to be married though we know she is not interested. She does not hesitate to share her "Blue Mountain" days where seventeen gentlemen callers came to see her. When Tom informs her that he has been able to bring Jim O'Connor, the gentleman caller for Laura around to supper, Amanda is so happy that she makes everything in the house new –new table linen, new curtains, old silverware to be polished and so on. Seen through the eyes of Amanda, Jim fundamentally is a potential husband for Laura. She explains to Tom that once Laura "has got married, a home of her own, independent .. You will be free to go whereever you please on land, on sea, which ever way the window blows you!" Against Laura's wish Amanda prepares her to receive Jim who is the perfect figure of American civilization with acute freudian pleasure principle and without having any emotion. It is that Jim with whom Laura once had relation and this very man had deceived her due to her physical disabilities. He penetrates into Laura's physical and mental sphere and once again deceives her and creates an outright isolation for Laura for which she also becomes psychologically crippled.

'Love and escape' is a common theme which is used in The Glass Menagerie, A street car Named Desire by this playwright. Jim comes and toys with Laura's emotion and bids adieux to her by creating an eternal vaccuam which is almost like the situation of Balance in A Street Car where hopes ae elusive for her. Laura's glass unicorn is shattered like her life which is so transient like a glass. And we find the oppressor-oppressed and "sado - masochim" complex between Laura and Amanda who are Oppresseds cum mosochists. The entire episode from this point to the end of play highlights the intense emotional pitch to which Amanda works her hopes. Her failure is the failure of plain common sensical vision. She has to live in a man's world having all worldly responsibilities. She is the finest representative of millions of such women.

Thus the women in this play play a pivotal role due to its very absence and Tennessee Williams has provided us with an illuminating example of what it was like for women who were unable to stand uo fpr their own rights or rise above their oppressed circumstances.

1.  Richardson,Gray A. American Drama from the colonial period through World War 1.
     a Critical History. Twayne publishers, New Work 1993.

2.  Murphy, Bendra. A Realist in the American Theatre. Ohio.univ.press

3.  Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie .Ed.Dr. Sharad Rajimwala.
     New Delhi: Rama Brothers India, 2013.