The main theme of this play is about a frustrated family who are deserted by the father and each character escapes his/her reality in a different way. Amanda Wingfield, she is the mother of Tom and Laura and often digresses back to memories of her former days on the southern plantation farm and her night with 17 gentleman callers. Laura, she is the crippled and very shy daughter of Amanda who keeps her hard pressed to finding a husband. Tom is also pressed by his mother to find his sister a gentleman caller, and to keep the job at the shoe factory to support the family. Jim OConnor is a friend of Tom from the factory who Tom invites to dinner and Amanda treats as Laura's first gentleman caller. "On those occasions they call me - Ell Diablo! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. Theyre going to blow us all sky-high some night! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers!" Tom says this to Amanda in a fit of rage. .
Laura has her own imaginary reality through her glass menagerie her private world, and the breaking of it .The unicorn is Laura's singularity, her return to reality, and her return to her retreat back into her world. . Another philosophy is that of escape. Tom tries to escape, and eventually does in the footsteps of his father. Laura is not seeking as hard to escape as Tom, although it would do her some good to escape her world and Amanda's. She comes close with Jim, but is devastated and regresses back into her world, probably deeper than she was before.
In order to characterize Antigone as a heroine , it is important to study Antigone's early childhood, which displays the origins of the characteristics found in her that make her a feminist. In Oedipus of Colonus, Sophocles illustrates these qualities that Antigone possesses. During the first twenty years of her life, Antigone spends her time secluded from society with her blind, exiled father, Oedipus.
