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Nostalgia: Relive the Lost An essay on The Glass Menagerie
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Nostalgia: Relive the Lost Dr. Fred Davis once wrote of the nostalgia phenomenon saying, “It leads us to search among remembrances of persons and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon persons and places of our present” (Davis, vii). Amanda Wingfield is a character whose entire being relies on this very definition of nostalgia and her past. Throughout the play, The Glass Menagerie, she is continuously searching for remembrances of her better days to reflect on with her children. The incessant theme of nostalgia in the Tennessee Williams’ play is significantly portrayed through Amanda’s continual flashbacks to the gentile southern lifestyle that she once wreaked of and is mirrored in the her expectations of her daughter, Laura Wingfield. Amanda’s yearning for the past, in reality, is quite credible. The audience is continuously reminded of the luxurious, plantation-like lifestyle that she once lived and the presumably less-than-fantastic life she now leads. She is a faded southern belle who has faced the reversal of social and economic fortune. Her flashbacks are an escape from the reality that she is a struggling single-mother with two unsuccessful children and a husband that ran out on her. Williams even describes her character as one of great confused vitality clinging frantically to another place and time; a place and time when Amanda’s future was bright and prosperous with gentlemen callers and “niggers” waiting for her every need (Williams, 437).
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