In the theater, no one drew the son as a prisoner better than Williams. The Glass Menagerie presents Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle who lives vicariously through her son Tom and her crippled daughter Laura. Amanda nags Tom about his chewing, his job, his reading habits. She is desperate, lonely, and suffocating. Tom’s final monologue is one of the saddest in drama: "For nowadays the world is lit by lightning... I did not tell [Mother] that I loved her. It was a long time ago." Here, the son escapes, but the escape is not liberation; it is exile. The mother is the home he cannot live in but cannot stop missing.
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