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- Tom asks her not to expect too much of Laura. He reminds Amanda that Laura is crippled, socially odd, and lives in a fantasy world. To outsiders who do not love her as family, Tom insists, Laura must seem peculiar. Amanda begs him not to use words like “crippled” and “peculiar” and asserts that Laura is strange in a good way.
www.sparknotes.com/lit/menagerie/section4/The Glass Menagerie Scene Five Summary & Analysis - SparkNotes
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Amanda and Laura clear the table after dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his disheveled appearance and his smoking habits. Tom steps onto the fire-escape landing and addresses the audience, describing what he remembers about the area where he grew up.
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A bell tolls five times as Tom returns home. He has been drinking. After painstakingly extracting his key from a jumble of cast-off items in his pockets, he drops it into a crack on the fire-escape landing. Laura hears him fumbling about and opens the door. He tells her that he has been at the movies for most of the night and also to a magic show, ...
Tom is impatient to get to work, but Amanda holds him back to talk about her worry over Lauras future. Amanda has tried to integrate Laura into the rest of the world by enrolling her in business college and taking her to Young Peoples League meetings at church, but nothing has worked. Laura is unable to speak to people outside her family and spends...
For the first production of The Glass Menagerie, the composer Paul Bowles wrote a musical theme entitled The Glass Menagerie. This music plays when Amanda discusses Laura at the breakfast table with Tom and at other crucial moments involving Laura. The title and timing of the music equate Laura with her glass animals. Like the objects that she love...
Amanda is convinced that Jim will be smitten with Laura. When Tom tries to tame Amanda’s expectations, reminding her that Laura is shy, crippled, and different from other girls, Amanda brushes his doubts aside, refusing to hear that Laura is peculiar.
Tom delivers his passionate closing monologue from the fire-escape landing as Amanda inaudibly comforts Laura inside the apartment and then withdraws to her room. Tom explains that he was fired soon after from the warehouse for writing a poem on a shoebox lid and that he then left the family.
Amanda tells Tom that they have to make “plans and provisions” for Laura. She knows that he has received a letter from the merchant marines and that he is eager to go, and she tells him that he reminds her more and more of his and Laura’s father, who abandoned them suddenly and with no explanation.
Laura asks Tom to apologize to Amanda for their argument of the preceding evening. Amanda sends Laura to the store for butter and tells her to charge it even though Laura has qualms about charging anything else.
In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield does not allow either Tom or Laura herself to call Laura “crippled.” At one point, she tells Laura that she is not crippled.
