Example term paper on The Glass Menagerie:
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. In The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams uses many themes to develop the characters in the play. Disintegration of a family, loneliness, and illusion and reality are three of the many themes portrayed in The Glass Menagerie.

The Glass Menagerie is the story of a slow and remorseless destruction of a family. There is nothing melodramatic about this destruction. It is gradual, oblique and laced with pathos and humor, but it is inevitable. The Wingfields are trapped in a situation from which there is no exit. The father has deserted them, the daughter is crippled and painfully introverted, the son has been forced through circumstances into a job that is stifling all aspiration sin him, and the mother is desperately attempting to hold them all together by using every means of which she can think. The tragedy is that instead of helping and bringing the family closer together, her efforts only hurt and divides them. She alienates Tom by trying to push him on his job, and she harms Laura irrevocably by first trying to launch her on a business career and then by attempting to find her a husband. But the original conditions are not entirely of her making. She is as trapped as Laura and Tom, trapped I the final analysis by an existence which offers no possibility of self-fulfillment. The struggle of the Wingfields is a kind of rear guard action against a malignant and implacable fate(Nelson 18). (read full text…)