In his book Mist the great religious Spanish writer
Unamuno creates a character, Augusto Perez, who,
through omniscient narration, turns to his maker (e.g.,
Unamuno) and cries: “Am I to die as a creature of fiction?”
Such is the cry of the characters in The Glass
Menagerie. The Christian author and Harvard Professor
Robert Coles laments that “we have the right to think
of ourselves, so rich in today’s America, as in jeopardy
sub specie aeternitatis, no matter the size and diversification
of his [sic] stock portfolio.” It seems, at times that
we are lost. “The sense of being lost, displaced, and
homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture,” Walter
Brueggemann writes. “The yearning to belong somewhere,
to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep
and moving pursuit.” This world does not provide what
the characters in these plays need. Harvard Divinity
School’s Dr. Forrest Church, now pastor in a Unitarian
Church in New York City, writes, “In our faith God is
not a given; God is a question . . . God is defined by us.
Our views are shaped and changed by our experiences.
We create a faith in which we can live and struggle to
live up to it . . . compared to lov[ing] a distant God
[who] has no allure.” From a Christian perspective,
Forrest captures the devastating essence of our modern
dilemma.
Tennessee Williams, among others, ushered in the
post-Christian age, which had its roots in the 1920s but
really rose to the forefront in the 1990s. The post-
Christian age is dominated by anxiety, irrationality, and
helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift,
unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice,
truth or reason. Consciousness itself is thus
“decentered”: no longer agent of action in the world,
but a function through which impersonal forces pass
and intersect. (Patricia Waugh in Gene Edward Veith,
Jr., Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary
Thought and Culture)
Enter now the post-Christian era of tentativeness,
of glass-fragile-figures—that glass menagerie which is
so much a part of modern America . . .
Of all Broadway plays, the remarkable The Glass
Menagerie, has some of the most powerful insights into
the human heart. It was Tennessee Williams’ first successful
play; it won the New York Critics’ Circle Award
as the best play of the 1944-45 Broadway season. Less
than three years later, A Streetcar Named Desire opened,
and it, too, captured the Critics’ Circle Award, also winning
the Pulitzer Prize.