SOURCE: "The Failure of Technology in The Glass Menagerie," in Modern Drama, Vol. 34, No. 4, December, 1991, pp. 522-27.

In the following essay, Reynolds discusses the significance of modern technology in The Glass Menagerie, which he views as a commentary on progress and the effect of technology on the individual and society.

Laura's fragile collection of glass animals gives Tennessee Williams's play its name and a central symbol with both an esthetic and a personal focus. But the play is punctuated with another set of references, an array of ordinary products of twentieth-century technology, that expands its significance beyond the personal even as it illuminates the narrow lives of its protagonists.

Williams introduces The Glass Menagerie through a context of social upheaval—war already in Spain, imminent in Europe; labor unrest in American cities. Tom's opening narrative announcing the "social background of the play" sounds like a manifesto of both...