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Drama |
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Tennessee Williams |
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Discussion of Williams' work has customarily been sharply divided between admirers and detractors. Depending on one's point of view, he was either a poet of the theater or a garrulous manipulator of language, a contemporary moralist or a philosophizing bore, a loving analyst of human complexity or a wallower in sentimentality, a bold realist unafraid of life's darkest corners or a purveyor of the grotesque and the obscene, a restless experimenter going where small sensibilities could not follow or a writer of limited gifts who couldn't tell when he had exhausted his meager imagination. FORMALIST criticism has addressed itself to the structure of his plays, with some critics professing not to be able to discern any. PSYCHOLOGICAL criticism has focused on the frequently extreme personalities who populate Williams' plays, with some seeing them as vehicles of a unique angle of insight into human nature and others dismissing them as shallow cartoon-like figures.
Both the FORMALIST and the PSYCHOLOGICAL approaches are, of course, quite applicable to The Glass Menagerie. Since the play is so thoroughly grounded in certain details of Williams' own life and family relationships, down to the narrator's being named Tom, the BIOGRAPHICAL approach--focusing not only on that which is autobiographically based but also on that which does not directly reflect Williams' own experience--will provide interesting insights into the process by which Williams transmuted life into art, as well as yielding insight into the nature of such transmutations in general. And in the light of contemporary emphases, one might employ a DECONSTRUCTIONIST approach to consider the function of memory in this "memory play," in terms of whether and to what degree memory can be looked at as a reprocessing of facts to serve the PSYCHOLOGICAL needs of the memoirist.
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