Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie (1945). New York: New Directions, 1966.

Tennessee Williams's first major play and, as he writes, his quietest. It's also his lightest, a little story told in seven scenes of the Wingfield family, or what's left of it. The mother, Amanda, is living in a more palatable past of continuous gentleman callers, the days before she met the man who ran out on her and their two children: Tom, who runs out every night to "the movies" (which, this being Williams, is code for "seedy places in St. Louis where men can rendezvous with one another"); and Laura, who lives in a world of isolation, listening to the Victrola and fawning over her collection of glass figurines.

The play culminates in the arrival of Tom's co-worker—the gentleman caller Amanda's been waiting for—and it's here that Williams can't keep his love for symbolism from weighing the whole play down. Jim, the co-worker, starts to bring Laura out of her shell, and they begin to waltz around the sitting room to the music from a neighboring dancehall, only to run into the table (Laura's got a bit of a gimp leg) and knock over the glass unicorn Laura's just confessed is her favorite:

LAURA: [. . .] Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are. The traffic jars the shelves and things fall off them.

JIM: Still I'm awfully sorry that I was the cause.

LAURA [smiling]: I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

[They both laugh]

Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns. . . .

That's when we find out Jim's engaged, and the hornless unicorn is given new meaning. Get it? Can you see how the unicorn is a symbol for Laura's blah blah blah?

There's just something so inelegant about it, and I think the problem is that Laura is given nothing to attach to her character but her leg, the Victrola, and the menagerie. She doesn't even get a good monologue or soliloquy. This is supposedly the most autobiographical of Williams's plays, written to express his remorse for leaving a sister he had similar to Laura. But rather than leave us to weep over her unending tragedy, wouldn't it have been better to go deeper into her character such that she becomes human, rather than constantly shining heraldic beams of light on her such that she remains this mythic angel?

Make her a horse is what I'm saying. Everyone knows unicorns never existed.