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Nostalgia Relive the Lost
Dr. Fred Davis once wrote of the nostalgia phenomenon saying, "It leads us to search among remembrances of persons and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon persons and places of our present" (Davis, vii). Amanda Wingfield is a character whose entire being relies on this very definition of nostalgia and her past. Throughout the play, The Glass Menagerie, she is continuously searching for remembrances of her better days to reflect on with her children. The incessant theme of nostalgia in the Tennessee Williams' play is significantly portrayed through Amanda's continual flashbacks to the gentile southern lifestyle that she once wreaked of and is mirrored in the her expectations of her daughter, Laura Wingfield.
Amanda's yearning for the past, in reality, is quite credible. The audience is continuously reminded of the luxurious, plantation-like lifestyle that she once lived and the presumably less-than-fantastic life she now leads. She is a faded southern belle who has faced the reversal of social and economic fortune. Her flashbacks are an escape from the reality that she is a struggling single-mother with two unsuccessful children and a husband that ran out on her. Williams even describes her character as one of great confused vitality clinging frantically to another place and time; a place and time when Amanda's future was bright and prosperous with gentlemen callers and "niggers" waiting for her every need (Williams, 47). The flashback to the day at Blue Mountain has obviously been told numerous times by the outcries of her children when she begins the story. The details are meticulous first names, last names, jobs, and current statuses of almost all seventeen gentleman callers are recollected. By reliving the story over and over again, the possibilities of an alternative lifestyle are able to be fantasized in her head. It is almost as though she can go back for one imaginary moment and change the course of the past. According to Dr. Fred Davis, author of the book "Yearning for Yesterday" this would be considered am extreme case of nostalgia, due to the fact that she yearns for the past because she is currently unhappy with the present (Davis, 4).As in Amanda's case, nostalgia "... Reassures us of the past happiness and accomplishment and as it were, in the bank of our memory, it simultaneously bestows upon us a certain current worth, however much present circumstances may obscure it or make it suspect," (Davis, 4). Amanda realizes that she picked the wrong gentleman caller of the seventeen from that day at Blue Mountain, but regardless tries to justify her decision to herself and her children. She says, "Hadley Stevenson who was drowned in Moon Lake...Bates was shot through the stomach. Died in an ambulance on the way to Memphis," (Williams, 441). Yet, she still thinks that the widows were better off than her because at5 least their husbands left them money, land, or some kind of tangible item, whereas hers left her nothing but a postcard. At this point in the play the audience sees that she is truly unhappy with the path her life has taken. It is when she tries to live her past through her own daughter that her case of nostalgia becomes a family issue and not just a personal issue.
"Resume your seat, little sister," Amanda tells Laura, "I want to you to stay fresh and pretty forgentleman callers!"(Williams, 440). A statement or a pathetic plea from mother to daughter, I believe the latter of the two. Laura is in her early twenties and has yet to have to have one gentleman caller come to the house, but Amanda neglects the truth and everyday hopes for a gentleman caller to come rescue her daughter back into reality and save Amanda's own stability as a mother. To relive her own 'old south' past in her daughter is on the verge of caring and psychotic. Davis declares this is because, "Discontinuities of too great a magnitude can only give rise to chaos or psychosis; and it is precisely these states that nostalgia in its sometimes charming, sometimes pathetic way aims to arm us against it," (Davis, 50).Amanda's intense nostalgia for a bygone word may have something to do with the fact that neither she nor her children have managed to succeed in the more modern world in which they now live (Lichtenstein). Because of Laura's failures at Business School Amanda has to resort to the only type of success that she knows, flirting with men. Amanda's perceptions of what is socially appropriate for her daughter are skewed by the fact that none of the family members have been able to succeed in the day and age that no longer entails gentleman callers, guest suppers, and lemonade with dessert.
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Overall, Amanda Wingfield means well for herself and her children. It is that she is trapped within her own thoughts of nostalgia to point that she begins live them out some twenty years later.
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