Tennessee Williams"s play The Glass Menagerie describes harsh realities faced by people in a modern world, those who live in the past (Amanda) and those who cannot keep up with the present (Laura), as well as those who wish to escape into the future (Tom). The Glass Menagerie also describes lost dreams of the Wingfield family, and their (and Amanda"s in particular) desperate struggle to escape reality. The symbols in this play reflect the characters" emotional states. For example, while Laura's fragile glass animals represent her fragile emotions and low self-esteem, Amanda's old yellow dress represents the faded, once glorious youth she wishes she could relive (and seeks in vain to relive through Laura). .

             Laura, Tom"s slightly crippled sister, lives in the dreamlike state inside the family apartment. The apartment"s dreamlike, unreal atmosphere, chock full of symbols of the past, like pictures of Laura and Tom"s long absent father, provides Laura with a place where she can dream, and thereby continue to escape reality. Amanda, who is even more frozen in the past, chooses to reminisce rapturously about her youth, a time when "gentleman callers" would come, on Sundays, to court her. "All of my gentleman callers were sons of planters, and so, of course, I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants," (p.64) Amanda tells their dinner guest Jim, explaining to him why she is not "domestic." This, however, is also why Amanda cannot settle into the real world of today, is stuck living instead in an illusory one. .

             Amanda inhabits a world somewhere between imagination and reality. Without her illusions, however, Amanda likely would not be able to cope at all, since she would then need to face the realities of her unexceptional life today. For a woman whose greatest glories are in the past, though, to face up to reality is not at all appealing.