According to poet Ted Hughes, every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. Art is ‘the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it’ (Gourevitch 2008). While we should not assume that any text simply reworks its writer’s personal experiences, the Wingfield clan in The Glass Menagerie — Amanda, Tom, Laura and their absent patriarch — are undeniably based on members of Tennessee Williams’ own family.
Williams loved his diva-esque dominant mother, Edwina, and gentle elder sister, Rose, and got on well with his younger brother, Dakin. However, he loathed his hard-drinking bullying father, Cornelius, who — just as Williams began to taste some success as a writer — forced him to leave university to work in a shoe factory. Not long afterwards, Williams’ mental health broke down, and it took him some time to recover. Psychological trauma and family dysfunction were part of his life as well as his art.
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