"Choose a work of recognized literary merit in which a specific inanimate object (e.g., a seashell, a handkerchief, a painting) is important, and write an essay in which you show how two or three of the purposes the object serves are related to one another."
Possessions often reflect a person's character. Laura's glass menagerie, from the drama of the same title, helps define her; her fragility and the figures' delicate forms are easily comparable. The glass menagerie's purpose, however, runs deeper. It serves as a symbol of her escape into the ideal. This furthers the plays claim that Laura cannot survive outside of her small world.
Laura's unusual anxiety hinders her ability to function in the world. She was embarrassed of her typing on the first day of classes, and instead of returning the next day to improve her skill or talking to her mother about it, she avoids conflict and spends the days wandering about the park and zoo. Her behavior exhibits her detached nature. Jim, later, comments on her personality: "It's unusual to see a shy girl nowadays." She's delicate, like the glass. Laura's favorite figure in the menagerie is a unicorn. The unicorn is a metaphor for who she wishes to be- someone loved both despite and for her uniqueness. She frantically tries to keep distance between herself and these desires, terrified that she'll find they are impossible. When she realizes Jim is her old crush, she refuses to sit at the table, not wanting him to see her and either not recognize her or be disappointed by her, avoiding the situation, as with typing class. When she and Jim talk about high school, Jim is surprised by how self conscious about her leg brace she was. He kisses her, wanting her to have more self confidence. In a way, her ideal has been realized- Jim has shown her affection due to her standing out.
The dream is soon cracked. The unicorn falls off the table when she's caught up in dancing with Jim. Jim, in bumping the table, breaks the unicorn's horn off- the unicorn becomes, as Laura puts it, "just like the other horses." The fantasy ends, and they return to a reality where Jim has a fiance. A unicorn, her dream, cannot exist in reality.
The glass menagerie's function changed throughout the play. It begins by focusing her longing, accenting it by how often she played with and dusted the figures. Later, it illustrates the lack of sustainability her ideal holds. The glass menagerie, as a reflection of Laura's character, helps to clarify how Laura is seeing things.
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ReplyDeleteThis was a beautifully written essay!! I love the way you showed the shift in the unicorn's significance through the format of your essay, it was brilliant. The impossibility of indiviguality was a terrific interperetation; you really seem to understand the meaning of the unicorn to the work as a whole and explained it really well.
ReplyDeleteThere's just a couple of nit-picky things. In the first paragraph, there's a little too many commas and semi-colons. Try to seperate some of these clauses into shorter sentences and focus on plain style. (That being said for the rest of the essay your plain style was awesome, so...) Another thing I've noticed about your essays is you tend to have two body paragraphs. Here, I think that you could easily have three. Maybe talk about the menagerie symbolizing Laura's fragility, then make a new paragraph which talks about her special relasionship with the unicorn, and then the third like you have it, about the impossibility of Laura's dream. You sort of imply the argument that the play is making through Laura, but be sure to spell it out somewhere, maybe in the conclusion? The introduction was great, and really fit the format that Holmes was talking about. The first sentence is a little shaky though--I can't describe exactly why...Can possesions actually describe anything? I mean, in literature, possessions can SYMBOLIZE or REFLECT a persons character, but they can't actually DESCRIBE someone's character, you know what I mean? Sorry I'm being so incoherent! Other than that, this was a really well-written essay, definitely a high-scorer on an AP Exam. Great job!
This is a very good essay. For the most part, I think you do a really good job sticking to plain style (something I have trouble with). I am also impressed that you managed to remember and work in a quote, something Ms. Holmes has mentioned is important on the AP. The only thing I would suggest is to focus a little more on analysis and a little less on background. You talk A LOT about what happened between Jim and Laura in the story, and do not go into as much detail when describing what it all means. You begin to break up the large chunks of background when comparing Laura to the glass, but I would like to see a bit more. Otherwise, great job!
ReplyDeleteOkay, you're well on your way with this piece, but it's not quite there. When you end your thesis by saying that the menagerie serves "as a symbol of her escape into the ideal" and that this "furthers the play's claim that Laura cannot survive outside her small world," it doesn't sound at all like you are going to talk about the part of the play where the unicorn breaks--because it implies that you will end your discussion with Laura's escape into the ideal. But you have to see that if Laura=unicorn and the breaking if its horn=ordinariness, Laura has been irrevocably changed at that moment. Something has been forever taken away from her, and she can't ever exist in an idealized world again.
ReplyDeleteThe prompt asks you to clearly show how two purposes are related (and of course how this furthers meaning.) So a clearer thesis would be something like "The menagerie first emphasizes Laura's retreat into a fantasy world--and later demonstrates how, inevitably, the real world will always intrude upon and destroy even the most carefully constructed fantasy world. Williams' point, of course, is that...."
I disagree with your classmates that the first support paragraph is too long. It's the rest of the essay that's underdeveloped.