Tennessee Williams takes the aspects of reality, idealism and illusion and mixes them together in The Glass Menagerie. Reality is the technologically advancing, financially operated, and socially driven environment at which the world exists. While Jim O’Connor exemplifies these characteristics and represents reality in the play while each of the members of the Wingfield family are living in their own manufactured illusions to escape reality. Indeed, to survive in the tawdry confines of lower-middle working class St. Louis in the mid-1930s, the Wingfield's have to invest in their idealistic and/or delusional fantasies.
The economy of the 1930s is in shambles. The standards of living are low, and middle-class families struggle to get by. Most people live in a world of human desperation, just doing what it takes to make it through the day. In Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie these same struggles are portrayed. The lifestyle of the Wingfield family has decreased due to the economy and other hardships. The Wingfield family was deserted by the father and left to fend for themselves. The father's desertion can be blamed on society. What was a happy home has now turned into a home without a future. All of the Wingfields have t

Reality is the world in which all people interact together. It is driven by financial power and social interactions. The people who have the most power in the world are those who make the most money, who have the best paying jobs. In the world of reality, money is power and all should work hard to achieve both. At the time the story takes place, during the mid 1930’s, the majority in the population strongly believes in the American Dream, that in the end, all the hard work a person does throughout his life pays off. Another part of the achieving the dream is to share one’s wealth and help others to achieve their goals. Yet the journey that one has to take to achieve the American Dream is long, rugged, and has many twists and turns. Even though not many people succeed completely, or to the level they want to, others keep trying and keep the Dream going.

Indeed, the world of her youth has already vanished and her constant references to gentleman callers and jonquils in the dingy St. Louis apartment become agonizing. She clings frantically to the past, but she clings just as desperately to the present, to her family and in that respect she is as dependent as Laura. The only place that she can survive is within her past and her dreams of the future, and she desperately needs her family. She cannot face the harshness of reality; that her husband left her and her children alone to fend for themselves, that Tom can not stand her and plans on leaving, and that Laura has retreated into her glass menagerie.

This small movement signifies the retreat of Laura into a world of illusions she will never leave.

Opposite to Jim is Laura, who represents illusion. Laura Wingfield portrays a dependent female; whose crippled leg foreshadows the crippling of her emotions and her ability to communicate with people other than Tom and Amanda. She evades the characteristics of reality entirely through her imagination. Laura’s damaged leg began to haunt her throughout high school. Amanda would tell Laura that she just had “a little defect, hardly noticeable even” although Laura believed the students in her class heard the clumping, and “it sounded like thunder" to her. Both Amanda and Laura exaggerate her handicap, and it tore away her confidence in finding friends, making her very shy and unable to share a friendship with anyone for the exception of family. (Williams, 93) Williams uses symbolism to portray how Laura does not fit into the real world by giving her the nickname of “blue roses” and by having the unicorn—a species that does no