Characters
- Amanda Wingfield
- A faded Southern belle abandoned by her husband who is trying to raise her two children under harsh financial conditions. Amanda yearns for the comforts from her youth and also longs for her children to have the same comforts, but her devotion to them has made her – as she admits at one point – to almost be "hateful" towards them.
- Tom Wingfield
- Amanda's son and Laura's younger brother. Tom works at a shoe warehouse to support his family but is frustrated by his job and aspires to be a poet. He escapes from reality through nightly trips to the movies and local bars. Tom feels both obligated toward yet burdened by his family. He feels he is grossly misunderstood by his mother.
- Laura Wingfield
- Amanda's daughter and Tom's older sister. A childhood illness has left her with a limp, and she has an inferiority complex that has caused her to be isolated from the outside world. She has created a world of her own symbolized by her collection of glass figurines.
- A Gentleman Caller
- An old high school acquaintance of Tom and Laura. Jim was a popular athlete during his days at Soldan High School and is now a shipping clerk at the same shoe warehouse in which Tom works.
- Mr. Wingfield
- Amanda's absentee husband and Laura and Tom’s father. Mr. Wingfield was a handsome man who worked for a telephone company and "fell in love with long distance", abandoning his family 16 years before the play's action. Although he doesn't appear onstage, Mr. Wingfield is frequently referred to by Amanda and his picture is prominently displayed in the Wingfields' living room.
Read more about this topic: The Glass Menagerie
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)