Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’
Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21534024 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ramón Espejo Romero (0000-0002-4239-244X, Universidad de Sevilla Sevilla Spain, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 139 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 475-493 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-13 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0340-5222 • E-ISSN: 1865-8938 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ang-2021-0039 |
| OpenAlex | W3200068638 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Craft · Drama · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Menagerie · Visual arts · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · History · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|