STUDENT 1
Student
Mrs. Johnson
September 11, 2013
The glass unicorn represents what holds Tom back, his socially inept sister Laura and
how he feels like he must take care of her because she is unable to do so herself.
(Williams 73-82)
This scene shows that it is Laura who doubts herself. When her mother offers ideas for
Laura’s future she laughs and reaches for her glass figurines because she is so entwined
in her glass menagerie and believes she has no future beyond it. The glass represents
Laura’s fragility and disability. She relies on her glass menagerie like she relies on her
disability to avoid becoming her own person. She is like her beloved unicorn because she
lets what makes her different define her like the unicorn and its horn.
STUDENT 2
Laura is so distraught by her glass breaking she cannot even pick it up. This shows how
attached she is to her menagerie and how fragile she is since she reacted so strongly just
to glass falling. As this is filtered through Tom’s memory we can see why he feels the
need to stay. He sees his sister as so weak and fragile she can’t even bring herself to pick
up glass and he must do this for her, like everything else he does. Tom is the one who
works and pays the bills because Laura is too socially inept to work in an environment
with other people as shown
(Williams 75-78) she was too nervous at the Business college to be around people and
too afraid to tell her mother even after months of not going and catching colds from her
walks around the city. Even when it affected her health she could not bring herself to
confront people.
Tom knew this was what was holding him back so he purposely brought someone into
Laura’s life to help break her out of her fragile meek and socially inept shell, the only boy
she ever liked, Jim O’Conner. Laura knew Jim in high school and Jim would call Laura
Blue Roses after a misunderstanding. This connects Laura to two impossible creatures the
unicorn and the genetically impossible blue roses reinforcing the idea that Laura is an
oddity and it is Jim that both connects her to the impossible; Blue Roses, being the only
man she loved therefore not allowing her to move on to see marriage as an option, and
breaking her away from that and into the possible. This is shown in
STUDENT 3
(Williams 75-10 )as they dance Laura realizes her disability did not inhibit her from
dancing with Jim and she loses her connection to the Unicorn, her disability did not
define her. She is not an oddity anymore. Laura’s disconnect from the fragility and
defining disability of the glass unicorn is shown in her lines after the glass unicorn breaks
especially;
...Glass breaks so easily no matter how careful you are…(Williams 96-97)
I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel lessfreakish! [they both laugh] now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones
that don’t have horns. (Williams 5-10)
STUDENT 4
The first line is a stark contrast from earlier in the play where she is extremely distraught
over broken glass figurines and cannot bring herself to pick up the pieces of her beloved
menagerie.
The second line makes a parallel from the unicorn and Laura who both can now fit in
with the other people around them without being blatantly obvious they do not belong.
(Williams 45-56)
This is a defining moment for Laura who has just been giving very uncomfortable and
disappointing news, but instead of retreating to her glass unicorn response (fragile, letting
her disability define her) she physically gives up the unicorn. She gives it to Jim as a
souvenir, a reminder of how he helped her, of how he was the only one who could help
her break the horn off of her life. Jim gave her the nickname Blue Roses the oddity that
defined her even before she began the menagerie, the man she admired and may have
even loved, someone she wanted to emulate but believed she couldn’t until he came back
along and showed her she could, that she was not her disability, until he broke the
unicorn and took it away from her.
STUDENT 5