The Concept of the Southern Lady in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1945)

This paper examines the concept of the South Lady as depicted by Williams in his play The Glass Menagerie (1945). Historically, the concept of the belle, genteel lady was first introduced to America by the English colonists and it remained popular across America through the late nineteenth century and beyond. Because of the expansive plantations system, the easy attainment of wealth, and gracious life, the concept of wealthy women is merely decorative; lovely, lily-white ladies of leisure. The traits that have been primarily associated with the idealized antebellum southern lady are gentility, kindness, sweetness, purity, commitment to family, fragility and attention to physical appearance. The image of the South as it stands in Williams‟ plays is composed of two main parts: a background in which he depicts the old, legendary and graceful South, and a foreground which projects the New South exposed to the vulgarizing effects of modern industrial civilization. Williams shows in particular the tension between the two images and the resultant consequences in terms of man‟s sense of alienation. Williams presents the New South as a deforming culture in which the delicate, refined descendants of the Old South become maladjusted, and exposed to the dehumanizing effects of modern civilization. As southern lady images, Laura and Amanda in The Glass Menagerie become maladjusted misfits in contemporary society. Their fragility becomes weakness and feebleness in a world grown very callous for graciousness. The stress in Williams' play is a result of the wide gap between the reality of the Lady's environment and her great expectations: Amanda, with her children, is caught between expectations derived from a more genteel past and a comparatively sordid present. Being unable to find the kind of psychological tranquility she sought in her present circumstances, which are unlikely, moreover, to change, Amana escapes to relief in the memories of her idealized past. Amanda and Laura are left at the end of the play in complete darkness, a stage business through which, Williams stresses the destruction of all helpless, genteel creatures in a brutal modern south. Thus, the cultural image of the southern Lady is doomed to frustration and disorientation in the modern brutish south. There is no paradise in The Glass Menagerie except for Paradise Dance Hall with its hot swing music. Laura's gentleman caller, who has been expected for a long time, is not a gentleman Saviour who may endow her sterile life with significance