Author’s Note: This paper represents my examination of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie as a phenomenon—a static example of the early creative genius of Williams—with an eye toward presenting some possible influences of philosophies and individuals on the author’s work. Through Williams’ two most respected poets, Hart Crane and Rainer Maria Rilke, passes an avenue of thought that reaches, ultimately, back to Auguste Comté, Walter Pater and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The goal of this paper, then, is to establish the possibility that this avenue of thought exists, and to speculate as to how the ideas of Pater and Hegel (through Crane and Rilke) might have affected The Glass Menagerie.

The link between Tennessee Williams and both Rilke and Crane is clear; Williams acknowledged these poets as the most profound examples of purity of poetic thought, adding that his exposure to them began as early as 1935 (Menagerie was written in 1941 and produced first in 1945). In a preface to his own poems, dated 1944, Williams acknowledges his debt:

Hart Crane’s Collected Poems had such a profound effect on Williams that the playwright kept a copy of the work (pilfered from the library of Washington University in St. Louis) as "my only library and all of it" (Debusscher 114). Williams stated frequently that "I am inclined to value Crane a little above Eliot or anyone else because of his organic purity and sheer breathtaking power. I feel that he stands with Keats and Shakespeare and Whitman" (Debusscher 114).

Additional evidence of Williams’ affinity for Crane and Rilke lies in the playwright’s works. Even if indirect references to these poets are eliminated, Crane and Rilke exist directly as epigraphs to Williams plays. Less directly, evidence of Crane can be found in the title of one one of Williams’ plays, Summer and Smoke, which comes from Crane’s "Emblems of Conduct."

Agreeing to accept indirect references to Crane allows an examination of The Glass Menagerie. According to Gilbert Debusscher:

Having established a link from Williams to Rilke and Crane, and determined that these poets had a philosophic impact on the playwright, mapping out an avenue of thought to Pater and Hegel necessitates examining the poets for evidence of the influence of the philosophers. Such an examination, thoroughly done, would be the work of a lifetime — for the purposes of this paper, secondary sources and a less thorough examination will have to do.

Rilke, like Williams, devoted considerable space in his works to references to Greek mythology. While it is not known if the mythological references first attracted Williams to Rilke’s poetry, it is known that Rilke based his poetics on Winkelmann, Goethe and Hegel (Arndt xvii), from whose authority the poet argues that beauty is a translation of divinity from the inanimate (sculpture) to the animate (spirit).

As the epigraph to this paper indicates, Hart Crane was influenced both by classical dramatic and philosophic ideas (such as agon, or resistance which creates both dramatic rising action and Aristotlean adversarial argument) and by positivism (the creation of order through definition of field and law). Similarly, Williams may have been influenced by classical philosophy, through the texts in his grandfather’s library, and positivist order, through those same texts, his college reading, and the influence on his work which derives from Hart Crane’s poetry.

This approach does not, however, eliminate the possibility that Williams came directly into contact with the works of Hegel and Pater. It is commonly known that Williams attended two universities, at which works of both philosophers were collected. Another possible source of direct exposure to either Hegel or Pater (or both) is the library of his grandfather. In his Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams confesses that he was tormented by his father because, at age 14, Williams "would rather read books in my grandfather’s large and classical library than play marbles and baseball and other normal kid games" (Williams, Where I Live 106). While the contents of his grandfather’s library are not known, it is likely that any "large and classical library" kept by a clergyman would contain, if not the works of Hegel and Pater, works which either mention these individuals or were influenced by their philosophies. If an additional link can be found through Crane and Rilke, the possible exposure to Hegel and Pater through Williams’ grandfather’s library only strengthens the argument that these philosophers affected the playwright’s work.

Accepting the possibility of a connection or connections from Williams to Comté, Hegel and Pater, the next step in following such a connection is to examine The Glass Menagerie for signs of those philosophers’ influence. The situation experienced by Williams’ Tom Wingfield (the narrator of the play, as well as a character in it) and the content of that character’s soliloquies shows signs of the phenomenology of Hegel and the positivism of Comté. Further, Tom’s situation and soliloquies indicate an aesthetic from which an association to Pater can be drawn. Although the ideas of Hegel and Pater bear fruit in this play, the structure and order within it are, primarily, positivistic.

EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT

The soliloquies spoken by Tom Wingfield determine the extent to which the other characters in The Glass Menagerie exist as aspects of Tom’s consciousness. The other characters — Mr. Wingfield, Laura, Amanda, and Jim O’Connor — are representations of Tom’s consciousness; they are not "real" in the sense that their actions do not represent exactly what the physical characters did, but Tom’s memory of their actions (filtered through Tom’s subconscious). Tom is engaged—is, indeed, forced by his own psyche—into a mode of phenomenological reduction; the characters, who exist only as idealizations, act and reenact the text which is Tom’s memory.

In "Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie," Thomas L. King makes an important statement about Tom Wingfield. King asserts that Tom is the only character in this play; the other characters can possess no consciousness because they are not real. "Indeed, Amanda, Laura, and the Gentleman Caller do not appear in the play at all as separate characters," King states, adding that "we see not the characters but Tom’s memory of them — Amanda and the rest are merely aspects of Tom’s consciousness" (86). Many critics overlook this, according to King, which leads to what he calls a distortion of the play and an overemphasis on Laura and Amanda (85).

Critics who approach The Glass Menagerie through analysis of the characters Amanda and Laura are distorting the play, King states, because they ignore Tom’s speeches. The five soliloquies spoken by Tom "form and contain the entire play," King claims (85). In his opening soliloquy, Tom informs the audience that the characters and their actions in this play are fictions of his memory, and it is possible to argue (as does King) that Tom Wingfield is the only real character. Amanda, Laura and Jim exist only in Tom’s memory; these characters can have no consciousness independent of Tom. He has created a field, which is his memory, to which the laws laid down in his soliloquies apply in a positivist manner.

In his first soliloquy, Tom puts forward a logic which applies to the characters as portions of his consciousness. It is a "magic" logic (Williams, Menagerie 1521), Tom tells us, an inverse relationship of the real to the unreal. This is an important element in a phenomenological approach to literary criticism — identification of a critical consciousness within a work, criticism of that consciousness with an eye toward reducing its content to the strictly arguable, and interpretation of that consciousness as something possessed by a person or persons who appear to be independent of the work being examined.

King’s criticism of The Glass Menagerie offers insight crucial to understanding the phenomenon at the center of the play. To ignore or de-emphasize Tom’s soliloquies is to miss the most important aspect of the play (86). The message Tennessee Williams delivers, through Tom, is that there is a "mechanism by which art is made out of the material of one’s life" (Menagerie 87). King states:

King examines Tom’s soliloquies and his subsequent actions, concluding that this character’s actions illustrate the power of the artist. Tom is able to leave the play, though the action is not resolved, by acting artistically; the audience is forced, by Tom, to make conclusions which the artist has escaped (94).

Harold Bloom asserts that Tom gives the play its "driving force" as a "repressed representation of the quasi-incestuous and doomed love between Tom Wingfield and his crippled, ‘exquisitely fragile,’ ultimately schizophrenic sister Laura" (3):

Judith Thompson, in Tennessee Williams: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, devotes a great deal of space to a Jungian analysis of the characters in The Glass Menagerie. Her psychological and biographical commentary is directed toward constructing the life-world of Tom Wingfield. Thompson uses Jung’s psychoanalytic theory to determine what symbols (archetypes, universals) are represented by the characters, and at least in on instance — claiming the photograph of Mr. Wingfield as the objective correlative to Tom’s wander-lust — makes the connection between the existence of the other characters and Tom’s consciousness.

According to Thompson, "Williams’ belief in ‘a great vocabulary of images’ that derive from the unconscious closely resembles the fundamental assumption of Jungian psychology of a ‘collective unconscious’" (8). Memory is the avenue Williams uses to approach the collective unconscious. He demonstrates, through Tom’s recollections, how powerful memories revolve around characters whose actions reflect the inner turmoil of the person doing the remembering. Thompson states that Williams’ characters "are representatives of a modern suffering humanity, victimized by their own conflicting drives and desires and existentially alienated from a world become a metaphysical ‘heap of broken images’" (11). These "representatives" form the constituency of Tom’s consciousness; the suffering in each of them is a reflection of Tom’s pain.

Perhaps Thompson’s most interesting contribution to the construction of a phenomenological understanding of Tom Wingfield is her argument that Williams employs a three-part format in structuring his memory plays. According to Thompson, this format begins with [1] a recounted memory; [2] the memory causes an "arrest of time," (8) a phenomenon in which the protagonist is frozen in the act of looking back and the characters are static (rendered abnormal, neurotic, or otherwise disturbed). In the second half of the play, [3] the memory is reenacted (for example, Amanda’s story about seventeen gentlemen callers is reenacted by Laura and Jim, and the memory of Mr. Wingfield’s abandonment of the family is reenacted by Tom). Here too is a connection to Comté; Thompson outlines the basic laws of the field which is Williams’ memory plays.

In Day and Woods’ collection of essays, Williams directly addresses the arrest of time mentioned by Thompson:

The outcome of this phenomenon, Thompson states, is the recognition of a reality: "Human love, itself, however, is shown as ultimately inadequate compensation for our epiphanic desires. Fleeting, incomplete, and too easily betrayed, human love too often leads only to the recognition of mutual despair" (23). Throughout her examination of this play, Thompson presents Tom as the existential man whose abandonment of his mother and sister represents both a personal search for self-realization and the collective quest of 20th century humanity to restore wholeness of self fragmented by dehumanization and disintegration.

In "The Synthetic Myth," Esther Merle Jackson puts forward the idea that The Glass Menagerie is a "schematic explication of modern life" (26). Williams’ uses memory, Jackson states, as a reference point around which are clustered the psychological, sociological, religious, and philosophical symbols he wishes to present (27). The ending of the play is significant, according to Jackson, mainly in that it is not a conclusion; in this play "the playwright stops the movement of his progression of suffering and announces that the play, as yet without a philosophical resolution, is over" (35). It is the poet, Tom Wingfield, who directs the action of both the characters in the drama and the audience viewing the play. In his first soliloquy, Tom directs the attention of the audience to the "fiddle in the wings" (Williams, Menagerie 1522). In his final soliloquy, he restates his position as narrator by speaking to the audience, and as director of the play’s action by giving instructions to Laura to "blow your candles out" (Williams, Menagerie 1568).

Also commenting on the phenomenon of Tom Wingfield is Eric Levy, who states:

Levy writes that the photograph of Mr. Wingfield is "Tom’s mirror" of self-image and self esteem (530). This echoes Thompson’s argument that Williams makes use of archetypes. In a Jungian sense, Mr. Wingfield is the objective correlative to Tom’s inner turmoil.

In Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation, Harry Rasky uses extensive interviews with Williams to explore the author’s intent; through these interviews, Rasky presents a glimpse of the life-world of the author and the driving force behind the author’s creations. Rasky reports Williams as saying:

This statement supports the idea that Williams incorporates "something crippled" into all his major characters — another law positively attached to the play.

An examination of the biographic nature of Tom Wingfield begins with Williams’ own comments about "honest" writing:

This distillation is, for Williams, an essential element in development of characters as symbols. Responding to criticism that his characters are generally grotesque or violent, Williams writes that this is necessary "because a book is short and a man’s life is long. . . . The awfulness has to be compressed" (Day and Woods 45). This compression, a phenomenological obsession with a situation, fits also into Pater’s description of the benefits of "poetic passion" (Pater 238). Williams also states:

If the versions of Laura, Amanda and Jim exist only as Tom has imagined them, then all the characters could be said to be facets of the personality of Tom Wingfield. The other characters are, at least, projections of Tom’s psyche on this idea of his mother, sister and best friend. An examination of this possibility leads to Williams’ descriptions of the characters (Williams, Menagerie 1519-20). If these descriptions are of elements of Tom’s personality, as well as of characters in the drama, Tom has five-part personality:

Perhaps the most powerful argument that Tom Wingfield (in his persona as narrator/magician) is the only real character in the play is contained in his first soliloquy. As Tom opens the play, he tells the audience outright that, in the play, what is truly illusion is that which looks most like truth. "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket," Tom says. "I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (Williams, Menagerie 1522).

In the first soliloquy, Tom tells the audience that the play is "memory," and, as such, is "not realistic" (King 89). Attaching this idea to the logic that the truth in the play lies in that which is most illusory, those characters which are most realistic (including Tom in the character list) must be the most illusory, and that character which seems most like an illusion (Tom as narrator/magician) is the only real character. This idea allows us to take Thompson’s memory play model a step further. Not only is a memory from early in the play (Amanda’s gentlemen callers) reenacted toward the end (in the situation between Laura and Jim), the entire play (both memory and reenactment) is part of a phenomenological reenactment in the mind of the narrator/magician.

Even among those characters who are most illusory, and given the notion that the unreal characters are parts of Tom’s consciousness, the logic of Tom might determine which characters represent most strongly Tom’s consciousness — in other words, how powerful each character’s nature is represented in Tom. Tom’s fourth soliloquy is the key: in that speech, Tom informs the audience that Jim O’Connor is the most real character. By Tom’s magical formula, Jim O’Connor (as the most realistic character, Tom’s "emissary" from reality) represents the least dominant aspect of Tom. The desire to be "ordinary," then, is the least strong element in Tom’s consciousness (Williams, Menagerie 1520).

The strongest element in Tom’s consciousness must be represented, in Tom’s magical formula, by the most illusory character. But what element among the remaining characters can indicate who is least realistic? What profound unreal element is present in but one of the remaining characters? Amanda, Laura and Tom (as a character) exist as physical manifestations of Tom’s consciousness; they are able to act. There is another character, as Tom tells us in his first soliloquy, who does not possess a physical manifestation — Tom’s father, who exists as a fixed symbolic representation as a larger-than-life photograph (Williams, Menagerie 1520). The most powerful, energetically expressed aspect of Tom’s consciousness, then, must be a desire to act as did his father, to transcend the reality claimed by the other characters, to escape. Indeed, if the outcome of the play is any indication, this part of Tom’s personality triumphs. "I left St. Louis," Tom tells us. "I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space" (Williams, Menagerie 1568).

Amanda and Laura vie for the middle positions of power in Tom’s consciousness. Which of them is least realistic? In Tom’s second soliloquy, Amanda is credited with the ability to take "logical steps" (King 90); she is certainly depicted both within and without the soliloquies as the most practical, most strong, most heroic character. The third soliloquy also precedes the scene in which Laura retreats farthest from reality, when Jim announces that he is engaged to be married. Laura suffers physically and emotionally. "We see, as through a soundproof glass," Williams directs, "that Amanda appears to be making a comforting speech to Laura, who is huddled upon the sofa" (Williams, Menagerie 1568).

Laura, then, is a less real character and a more powerful element of Tom’s consciousness than Amanda. Tom can be expected, from a psychological standpoint, to react more from Laura-driven feelings of emotional distress then from an Amanda-driven mixture of heroism and foolishness. This he does; at the end of the play he abandons his mother and sister, hardly an heroic act, fleeing the apartment and St. Louis with all the emotional distress of one whose very survival is threatened. Tom’s memory of Laura is an index of the "something crippled" which Williams claims as an important aspect of his major characters (Rasky 134).

King writes:

CONCLUSION

There are two Tom Wingfields in The Glass Menagerie. The first Tom is the narrator/magician, who introduces his second self, the character. In his fifth soliloquy, Tom the narrator/magician indicates that time has detached him from the drama, "for time is the longest distance between two places" (Williams, Menagerie 1568). In the closing soliloquy Tom recounts how he lives and re-lives the story in his memory, though he is detached from the participants in the original affair. Like his father, "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances," (Williams, Menagerie 1523), Tom has fallen in love with the long distance that is time.

Tom is a sensitive, artistic man who is forced by circumstances into a phenomenological situation. He is compelled to live and re-live the situation of the play, in which he sought for and found what he believed to be freedom. Although he escapes the situation, he does not find freedom; his consciousness forces him to dwell upon the situation until he finds meaning in it. Because Mr. Wingfield, Laura, Amanda, and Jim are parts of Tom’s consciousness, he can never truly escape them. In this sense, as Tom states in his fifth soliloquy, he is truly "more faithful than I intended to be" (Williams, Menagerie 1568). Tennessee Williams gives us no indication that Tom’s escape from his father, Amanda, Laura, and Jim ever happens — what is most compelling about the play is that Tom passes to the reader and the audience the responsibility of making meaning out of his life.

Although signs of Pater’s aesthetic, poetic passion, can be found in this play, the premise of the action is phenomenological and the structure of the argument is positivistic. Because Tom continues to experience the memory, again and again, his philosophic approach to understanding the grief and guilt attached to his abandonment of his mother goes beyond Hegel’s aim to that philosopher’s idea of Concept: Tom refuses to accept the situation as "the corpse which has left the tendency behind" (Kaufmann 10). In the play, Tom is able to relate his experience to the audience he has discovered, "by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena—that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness" (Comté 2). He is able to express the logic and the laws of his situation (his field, memory); however, at the end of the play Tom has not grasped the meaning locked within his own memory.

In remembering himself in relationship to his father, his mother, his sister and his best friend, Tom the narrator/magician imbues the characters with the magic he claims in his first soliloquy to possess. Although The Glass Menagerie is considered to be a non-realistic play, there is a definite reality in Tom’s coloring of his memory with his unique consciousness. Although Tom the narrator/magician may express this idea through hyperbole, who among us can claim not to edit our memories in this fashion? This, indeed, is what separates memory, which is subjective, from our objective experience of reality.

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