Week 5 Question 5

In The Glass Menagerie gender roles are prominent. The play was written in 1944 and appears to take place in the thirties as the play mentions only The World War rather than World War One. Gender played a major role in households of the time, requiring men to provide for the families while women took care of the home and children. This play in particular exacerbated the roles of two of the main characters. Amanda, the mother and antagonist of the story, is attempting to manipulate her children into better supporting her. Jim, the son of Amanda and the protagonist of the play, is tasked with supporting his mother and his crippled sister. Amanda makes every effort to keep her son from becoming his father and abandoning the family, while Jim wants nothing more than an opportunity to live his own life. The play goes even further into the gender roles when Amanda repeatedly makes references to when she was younger and how woman and men behaved then, which was far more strictly gender controlled, in an effort to influence the behaviors of her children. The conflict of family loyalty and societal expectation versus the protagonists desire for personal freedom is the primary theme of The Glass Menagerie and speaks directly to the gender expectations of the times.