First blog post, and it's about homework.

A kaleidoscope of broken glass and shattered memories create the forlorn script of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. The three main characters, Tom, Laura, and Amanda, are all curiously out of touch with their own reality and the play describes their wretched existence in the delusion of their stagnant idiosyncrasies.

Laura, in particular, is devoted to her collection of glass figurines. As a character, Laura is described as painfully shy, up to the point where her shyness actively interferes with her life and her interactions with other characters. Instead of getting a job and a husband, as Amanda urges her to do, Laura occupies herself with her glass menagerie. When Jim, the potential suitor, comes a-callin', Laura shyly shows him the prize of her collection--the glass unicorn.

Unicorns are symbolic of innocence and purity, and in this case, loneliness. Jim points out that unicorns are extinct in the modern world, much like Laura herself, who is unable to function outside of her glass menagerie. Laura expresses a wish that the unicorn wouldn't feel out of place with the regular horses in her collection. Later in the scene, the unicorn's horn breaks off. Jim, in the midst of hauling Laura up to dance, knocks into the table and the unicorn figure falls. Laura graciously accepts Jim's apology and tell him, "Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns..." The unicorn, symbolic of Laura herself, is beginning to assume an aspect of normalcy and "fitting in" with the herd.

Jim, caught up in the moment, kisses Laura, but then anticlimactically reveals that he is engaged to another girl. With that, Laura's hopes and dreams are irreparably shattered, much like the glass unicorn. She retreats back into her dream world and gives the broken unicorn to Jim as a souvenir. The unicorn, once a catalyst of Laura's peculiarity, has forever lost its appeal as an individual and is only a broken remnant of what it used to be.

In The Glass Menagerie, the tragedy of the gentleman caller shatters the dysfunctional family and Laura continues to slip further into her personal delusion. The glass unicorn not only represented Laura's oddities, but also her emotional frailty; when shattered, Laura's sense of reality and her attempts to assimilate into modern society cease to be.