In Gilmore Girls S1, E9, “Rory’s Dance,” Rory calls Dean her “gentleman caller” from The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. One of my favorite plays, it’s considered a “memory play” because it’s told from the memory of one character. So, it’s one point of view and not contemporaneous. By nature, the story is subjective and incomplete. I actually loved this literary device.
The Genius of The Glass Menagerie As a “Memory Play”
Catapulting Tennessee Williams to fame, the 1944 play The Glass Menagerie relies on both style and content about memory to convey its meaning. Why? First, memory is subjective; second, it is overpowering.
Note that there are some spoilers in this discussion.
Characters and Plot
Set in a low-class St. Louis apartment in the 1930s, The Glass Menagerie offers a window into a few relatively inconsequential moments in the lives of the Wingfield family to show the stronghold that memory has had on their happiness:
Amanda Wingfield is the mother. A former Southern belle, she is disillusioned and trapped in ideas of the past, when men called on her. She believes marriage is the key to happiness for her daughter, Laura.
Laura Wingfield is a twentysomething high school dropout who hasn’t done much of anything but play with her collection of glass animal trinkets, listen to old records, and recall the high school crush she once had. She walks with a limp and is extremely shy and naive.
Tom Wingfield is her twentysomething brother and the play’s narrator, a poet who dreams of adventure but works in a factory to support his family —a painful reminder of the father who abandoned them.
The story itself is rather simple: Amanda finds out that Laura secretly dropped out of business school and convinces Tom to invite a “gentleman caller” to come to dinner to meet Laura and, hopefully, become her husband.
How the Theme of Memory “Plays” Out
What makes such a simple story a work of theatrical art is in how it’s told— as a memory play. First, the narrator, Tom, tells us this in his opening soliloquy:
“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you an illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
Here, the themes of illusion and memory tie together directly (as memory is never perfect but rather filled with subjective illusions) and indirectly (as the characters face disillusionment about the past in their own lives, which prevents their current happiness). It’s brilliant!
Tom notes that the play is “dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.” This is a visual representation of how memory appears in the mind— skewed and unclear.
Tom also refers to how “[i]n memory everything seems to happen to music.” This is why music plays at various moments throughout the play!
Tom then admits, as will soon be made clear, that he and his family are the least realistic characters in the play. Again, this alludes to how memory affects his point of view. The characters’ words and actions depend not on how they occurred, but on how this narrator remembers them.
For example, Tom holds a lot of disdain for his mother’s overbearing nature and dramatic flair, so these characterizations are highly exaggerated throughout the play. Amanda’s character remains consistently over-the-top to the point it’s almost cartoonish. Likewise, Laura is not just shy, but painfully shy. Being in a gentleman caller’s presence makes her physically ill.
Amanda’s obsession with the past also contributes to The Glass Menagerie being a memory play. She simply cannot grasp the reality of the present. Likewise, Laura’s childlike naivety, old phonograph records, and even her teenage recollections of the gentleman caller, Jim, are grounded in memory.
The Glass Menagerie can also be seen as a memory play through the photograph of the father that hangs on the wall. Photographs essentially are memories, and this is all that remains to the Wingfields of the man who abandoned them.
The foil to the Wingfields is the gentleman caller: Jim. While he recalls the past, he isn’t bound by it, and thus he can find happiness in the present.
In discussing The Glass Menagerie as a memory play, it’s also worth noting that the stage directions occasionally refer to screencasts of key words and images in the play, such as “Blue Roses,” the name Jim called Laura during high school. This visual cue is memory-like: Our brains can recall things in flashes and/or bits and pieces.
Even Laura’s glass figurines can be seen as a symbol of memory! Glass is clear, but when viewed at certain angles and in certain lighting, it offers unique, colorful reflections that vary.
Lastly, as the play ends, Tom reveals that, as time has passed, the trappings of memory have become all the clearer. He remains stunted by his family’s memory as he retells this story.
This may also remind the very literary reader of the ending of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which famously reflected this way on life at a similar time in history:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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