Laura becomes uncomfortable. Didn't Laura ever like a boy? Amanda wants to know. Once, in high school, a boy named Jim, says Laura. He used to call her Blue Roses after she recovered from an attack of pleurosis. Six years ago he was engaged; he's probably married now.
Nevertheless, this topic revitalizes Amanda. She declares that Laura will end up married to "some nice man." Laura reminds her mother, apologetically, that she is crippled. Amanda won't hear of it and insists that her daughter never use that word. She might have a slight disadvantage, but she must cultivate charm instead. That's one thing her father had in spades.
Commentary .
With Tom's direct address to the audience, the play identifies itself as a play. It declares that it knows it is a work of art, of artifice. And it identifies the bias inherent in its vision: the memory of Tom, with all the distortions, colorings, and subconscious guesswork of memory. Tom's monologue is ironic, sarcastic, to further distance himself from the action of the play. That was a different time, he is saying; this is now. Yet, as Tom admits at the play's conclusion, he has never been able to escape this time as it is preserved in his memory. The sarcasm and humorous irony are defenses, checks against a drowning wave of nostalgia or remorse.
Williams's production notes and stage directions emphasize the striving for what Williams described as a "new plastic theater." Realism, he felt, had run its course; it offered, like the magician, "illusion that has the appearance of truth." Williams sought the opposite in The Glass Menagerie: truth disguised as illusion. To this end, the play employs expressionistic sets and visual and audio effects, coupled with Tom's ironic commentary on these same production values. Both the illusion and the awareness of the illusion pervade the play, and symbolism calls attention to itself or is pointed out by Tom.
In one obvious sense, the truth behind the illusion is autobiographical.
