Escape to the Glass Menagerie In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, none of the characters are able to live in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old gramophone records. Amanda is haunted by living in her past. Tom escapes into his world of poetry and film. Jim also returns to his past and remembers the days when he was a hero. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old gramophone records. Even when it seems like Laura is finally overcoming her shyness and hypersensitivity around Jim, she immediately goes back to playing the Victrola once he tells her he's engaged. He is unable to face the truth, so he returns to his fantasy world of discs and glass figurines. Laura can only experience a brief moment in reality. Amanda is haunted by her past as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of that "one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain" when she received seventeen gentlemen (Williams 32). The reader cannot even be sure that this actually happened. Yet it is clear that, despite its possible falsity, Amanda has come to believe it. He refuses to acknowledge that his daughter is paralyzed and calls her handicap “a small flaw, barely perceptible” (Williams 45). Only for brief moments does he admit that his daughter is "paralyzed" and then he resorts to denial again. It doesn't perceive anything realistic. She believes that this gentleman she calls, Jim, will be the man to save Laura and she hasn't even met him yet. When Laura is nervous about the gentleman calling her, she tells Laura, "You couldn't be content just sitting at home," because ... middle of paper ... the main characters in this play are so warped and their lives so distorted and perverted by fantasies that each is left with only broken fragments of what might have been' (Davis 205). Works Cited Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Land Publishing, Inc., 1987. Davis, Joseph K. “Landscapes of the Displaced Mind in Williams's The Glass Menagerie.” Tennessee Williams: a tribute. Ed. Jac Tharpe.Hattiesburg: Heritage Printers, Inc., 1977. 192-206.Scanlan, Tom. "Family and Psyche in the Glass Menagerie." 20th century interpretations of the glass menagerie. Ed. R.B. Parker. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983. 96-108. Williams, Tennessee. "The Glass Menagerie." Concise anthology of American literature. Ed. George McMichael. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985. 2112-2156