The Glass Menagerie

The first scene takes place on the fire escape outside of the Wingfields’ apartment. Tom Wingfield, “dressed as a merchant sailor” (752), lights a cigarette and addresses the audience. Throughout the play, Tom functions as the narrator, “an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention as is convenient to his purposes” (752). Tom tells the audience that he is turning time back “to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind” (752). He describes the play as a “memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic” (753). Tom identifies himself as “the narrator of the play, and also a character in it” (753) along with his mother, Amanda, his sister, Laura, as well as a gentleman caller. Unlike the gentleman caller, the Wingfields live in a world that is separate from reality. Tom adds a fifth character, his father, who only appears in an enormous portrait over the mantel. The Wingfield patriarch “was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town” (753).