Popular Dance Music in Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie
Music was essential to the success of Tennessee Williams’s Glass
Menagerie (1944). As he emphasized in his “Author’s Production Notes”,
music, like lighting and the screen devices announcing each scene, evoked the
nostalgic and the elegiac, the characteristics that made Menagerie a “memory
play” (132). As Williams’s persona, Tom Wingfield, speaking as the Narrator in
Menagerie, claims, “In memory everything seems to happen to music” (145).
The music in The Glass Menagerie thus becomes a part of the dramatic
metaphors that Tom’s memory generates. With music introducing or playing in
the background of so many scenes in The Glass Menagerie, Tom recalls the
events in St. Louis during the late 1930s when his mother, Amanda, and sister,
Laura, anxiously awaited the arrival of a Gentleman Caller whom, they hoped,
would marry Laura and deliver her from her dreary life. As he would do with the
Varsouviana (waltz music) in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Williams
included several popular musical scores from the 1920s and 1930s, or before, in
the Menagerie script, the most significant being the Glass Menagerie, or
Laura’s, theme, the “recurring tune . . . to give emotional emphasis to suitable
passages” (“Author’s Production Notes” 133).
Describing the kind of music that he thought would be appropriate for this
signature song, Williams pointed out that:
This tune is like circus music, not when you are on the
grounds or in the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when
you are at some distance and very likely thinking of
something else. It seems under those circumstances to
continue almost interminably as it weaves in and out of your
preoccupied consciousness; then it is the lightest, most
delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest. It
expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying
strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow. (133)
The sound of far away circus music—the “surface vivacity”—suggested
vanishing childhood and innocence, the world in which Laura lives. But at the
same time this carnival tune carried with it the “immutable and inexpressible
sorrow” that the Wingfield family suffers. This strain of popular music perfectly
evoked the conflicting emotions central to Williams’s memory play—its
dreamlike quality as well as its haunting pathos. Like Lara’s music, scored by
Maurice Jarre for Doctor Zhivago, the recurring theme music in Glass
Menagerie is a rich melody containing, paradoxically, both the promise and the
pain of desire.