The Age of Miracles and The Glass Menagerie

Passage: “Meanwhile my soccer team practiced mostly as usual, and my mother’s drama students continued to rehearse their production of Macbeth. All across the country, events like these were held as planned. Shows had to go on. We clung to anything previously scheduled. To cancel seemed immoral, or it might mean we’d given up or lost hope” (Walker 104).

Significance:

Julia describes the tenacious hold everyone has on adapting and what tactics they will use to continue on with their existences.

Although the public just found out about this unfortunate event, they are deciding to carry on with what is already programmed.

To be able to keep sane, preserving routines help control outrages.

Not yet obtaining realism.

Karen Thompson Walker’s novel gives a view on how the country, North America, is hooked into their own reality in a way and is aspiring to stay with their “flow.”

Schedules and plans are made to keep everything intact and organized. Without them there would be a sense of chaos everywhere we go.

This considers how insubstantial we would all be if there wasn’t something we could hang onto i.e., a clock.

Passage: “At school, we dissected frogs, we ran the mile, our spines were checked for scoliosis. Soccer season stretched into January because of all the games we’d canceled in the fall. But I’d lost interest in the sport. What was the point anymore? What did it matter?” (Walker 220).

Significance:

After the discovery, the story suggests as if everyone wanted to keep everything little thing under control, but now it seems as if dismissing the fact is making it worse. Especially for those who are younger and/or do not apprehend with what is happening.

It suggests as if everyone is just going on with their personal lives with no worries.

Julia’s doubt of those who are investigating the subject at hand is growing stronger and stronger.

She is starting to give up and is question everything.

To Julia, nothing appeared as important and her persistence was beginning to fade.

In the middle of the novel, people are starting to lose hope in the scientists and their advances on figuring out what is going wrong with their planet.

Passage: “My mother says I spend too much time thinking about the past. We should look ahead, she says, to the time that’s left but the past is long, and the future is short. As I write this account, one ordinary life, our days have stretched to the lengths of weeks, and it’s hard to say which times are most hazardous now: the weeks of freezing darkness or the light” (Walker 388).

Significance:

The past is something that you can’t help but consider at certain times.

Julia’s past made a colossal impact on her life.

As a result of this affect, Julia had to mature instantaneously and ultimately did not have the finest adolescence because of this.

What the general assumed was going to be a temporary dilemma, turned out to be everlasting.

Passage: “The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance” (Williams xix).

Significance:

This play is meant to capture the audience’s attention and give the people something they can relate to or something that they are familiar with.

Tennessee Williams wanted to represent the realistic part of a family or of life in general.

Playwright Tennessee Williams also wanted to give an idea of what life was like in America during his time using during his time by using the literary genre, southern gothic and memories.

Passage: Laura: Now it is just like all the other horses

Jim: It’s lost its.

Laura: Horn! It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.

Jim: You’ll never forgive me. I bet that that was your favorite piece of glass.

Laura: I don’t have favorites much. It’s no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are. The traffic jars the shelves and things fall off them.

Jim: Still I’m awfully sorry that I was the cause.

Laura [smiling]: I’ll just imagine he has an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

[They both laugh.]

Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns…

(Williams 86).

Significance:

This represents how much Laura wants to be like the others in a metaphor of her being the unicorn and everyone else being the horses.

She realizes that if she gets rid of her horn or her disability in her case, she could become like the others and not stand out from the crowd.

Laura has a true complication of in grasping onto the real world.

Laura believes that her limp is keeping her from being with others who are not like her.

This could also show how alike Laura and the glass unicorn are.

They both do not fit into crowds and are both fragile.

Passage: Tom: I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me all together by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! (Williams 97).

Significance:

It seems as if he can find a piece of Laura everywhere he goes and cannot escape his former home.

This quote could also imply what Tom is feeling after leaving his mom and sister as his dad did once before.

The memory of Laura gives the impression that Tom must be slowly regretting his departure.