Historical Context
The Glass Menagerie opened on December 26, 1944 at Chicago’s Civic
Theatre. Abroad, the Battle of the
Bulge (Dec. 16, 1944 - Jan 16, 1945) was taking place in southern Belgium.
Also known as the Battle of the Ardennes (because the fighting took place
in the Ardennes region of Belgium), this was the last German offensive.
It was termed “Battle of the Bulge” after the wedge shape that the
Germans had made into the Allied lines in the same region in 1940 -- although
the earlier fight was won by the Germans, and the later one won by the Allies.
There were a number of different kinds of literary responses to the war
and the postwar atmosphere. In
prose fiction, books like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead
(1948), and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions (1948) were realistic
ventures, dealing with topics like power, strategy, and militaristic ideology.
Other writers, like Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges became strong
influences on non-realist American postwar writing.
To many, it seemed like realism might not be able to capture to absurdity
and extremism of mid-century events like the dropping of the atom bomb.
These works emphasized innovations in form and language, and presented a
more “artificial” or deliberately contrived landscape than those conjured in
realist fiction.
Social realism remained a strong force in American fiction, though,
especially amongst Jewish writers who perhaps had a stronger stake in striving
for certain kinds of accuracy and verisimilitude.
Writers like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley and Isaac Bashevis
Singer came into their own during this period and offered fiction that directly
addressed questions of Jewish identity.
Black writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison wrote essays calling
for the realistic representation of the lives of minorities. Many consider Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to be
one of the most important novels of the postwar period. Ellison and Baldwin tackled such topics as religion,
sexuality, nationalism, and communism, to name a few -- issues that were coming
to a head after the war.
Alongside these prose movements, drama was coming into its own as an
anti-commercial force in American cultural life.
Perhaps following the prose innovations, drama too took on an
experimental edge. Eugene O’Neill
was perhaps the most famous of the early-to-mid-century playwrights. While Anna Christie(1921), Desire Under the Elms
(1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were all naturalistic works, The
Hairy Ape (1922) and The Emperor Jones (1920) made use of a kind of
German expressionism popularized between 1914 and 1924.
Williams would later pick up this expressionistic style and use it in The
Glass Menagerie, in which he aims not to represent “objective” reality,
but rather to somehow depict the subjective emotions of the characters.
This is done by eschewing fluid outward appearances and striving towards
exaggerated, distorted or jarring formal qualities. We can see this in the motions the actors make or the way in
which formal structures, such as lighting or sound, work in the play.
This style was meant to evoke the ecstasy or torment (to name just two
possible emotions) of the characters’ states of mind.
Expressionism was the dominant literary movement in Germany during and
directly after WWI, and conceived itself in opposition to smooth bourgeois
complacency, with its emphasis on outward appearance and material possessions.
For Williams, too, we might say, expressionism is a way of resisting the
easy flow of cinematic images, the way in which American popular culture lulls
its masses into thoughtlessness through easily digestible realistic
representations of bourgeois life.
