Individual Happiness and Responsibility in “The Glass Menagerie”

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) play The Glass Menagerie tells the tarradiddle of a family un fitting to cope with the harsh reality of impoverishment and how its members compensate to the creation of alternate worlds to sustain their interest in life. In the play, Williams explores the impinge between an individuals properly to be happy and his or her duty to others by means of the principal(prenominal) protagonist tomcat Wingfield who finds himself hindered from doing the things that gives him fulfillment by his position as the family breadwinner.Set in St. Louis in 1937, the play to a fault reveals the tensions arising from failed expectations and broken relationships. Hence, Tom is caught in a perennial argument with his stimulate while his sister Laura finds it difficult to adapt to the outside world. However, Williams also makes it clear, through Toms narrative in the play, that individual happiness is nil but an illusion and that individuals can derive a greater signif ied of fulfillment by answering to their more important familial and social responsibilities.Being part of the larger social structure, individuals cannot campaign their overriding responsibility to others. Toms main conflict with his mother, Amanda, is therefore representative of the clang that results when an individual puts his own happiness above his own familys survival. In this case, however, Tom is unable to accept the concept of self-denial and puts leisure at the top of his priorities. He uses his dissatisfaction with his job as a worker at a shoe warehouse as an excuse to amuse himself in movies and drinking sprees.The biggest flaw of his character is therefore revealed when he uses the money think to pay the electric bill to realize his dreams of adventure. In the same manner, individuals as part of the larger society are expected to be able to fall in to its growth and progress. In the play, Amanda represents the pressure of social expectations on Tom which he finds difficult to fulfill. Consequently, Tom accidentally breaks his sister Lauras prized accrual of glass figurines.Although clearly unintended, the act precludes the shattering of Lauras world imputable to her disappointment with her brothers selfishness when he finally leaves her and her mother without each regard as to how they would survive without his support. In his selfishness, he neglects the feelings not save of his mother but also of his vulnerable sister Laura. Thus, it is in his neediness of consciousness for his familys situationand his inability to answer to familial and social expectationsthat Tom wishes to escape from his current world.It is only much later, as he is haunted by Lauras memory, that he realizes that his actions have an impact not only on his life but on hers as well. His escape and abandonment of familial obligations to pursue real-world adventures therefore makes Tom feel delinquent particularly of his sister Laura. In the end, Toms narrative is i nfluence not by the real-life adventures he sought and left his family for but by the uncertainty of Lauras future after he abandons her and by the companionship that his escape meant entrapment for her.The Glass Menagerie therefore illustrates that while individuals have the right to pursue their happiness, this must be balanced with a clear sense of responsibility to others and to society as a whole. As the narrative of the main protagonist reveals, individuals cannot truly attain happiness by attempting to escape from responsibilities or by letting their own happiness destroy the happiness of some other person. Ultimately, individual fulfillment and contentment is attained from being able to contribute to the happiness and contentment of others in the wider society one is in.