The symbolism of the menagerie in The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, depicts three separate characters, their dreams, and the harsh reality that face in a modern world. The Glass Menagerie chronicles the lost dreams of a Southern family and their desperate struggle to escape reality. Williams' use of symbols adds depth to the game. The glass menagerie itself is a symbol that Williams uses to represent the broken lives of Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield and their inability to live in the present. The glass menagerie symbolizes Amanda Wingfield's overwhelming need to hold on to her past and her satisfied fear of being alone. . Amanda so resents the poor neighborhood she lives in that she needs to mentally escape from it through invented romance and self-deception. Williams describes her as having "endurance and a kind of heroism, but she is also foolish, snobbish, sometimes cruel, and sometimes pathetic in her well-intentioned mistakes" (Williams 1865). Abandoned by her husband, Amanda consoles herself with memories of her earlier, more gracious southern life in Blue Mountain, when she was pursued by "gentlemen who call." Amanda is desperate for her daughter Laura, a husband, the kind of gentleman she wanted, who would not abandon her. "Well, in the South we had so many servants. They're gone, they're gone. All vestiges of a gracious life! They're completely gone! I wasn't prepared for what the future brought me." (Williams 1893). He places his illusions on his reluctant children, lives in the past with claims to glory. Laura's collection of glass animals represents her hypersensitive nature and fragility. The glass menagerie is... middle of paper... little glass animals have come to represent in my memory all the softer emotions that belong to the memory of things past. They represented all the tender things that give relief" (Williams 64). They retreat into their separate worlds to escape the harshness of life. Amanda, Laura, and Tom are unable to live in the present. Mirroring the social and economic desperation in the United States, The Glass Menagerie is nostalgia for a bygone world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love, celebrating, above all, the human need to dream. Works cited and consulted: Crandall, George The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams: Greenwood, 1996.Martin, Robert.Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (Critical Essays on American Literature): Simon and Schuster, 1997.Williams, Tennessee "The Glass Menagerie: Random House"., 1985.