In the following essay, Levy explores the significance of mirrors as a symbol for superficial appearances and fragile self-image in The Glass Menagerie.

In the following essay, Reynolds discusses the significance of modern technology in The Glass Menagerie, which he views as a commentary on progress and the effect of technology on the individual and society.

The final image in The Glass Menagerie is that of Laura, alone, illuminated by the candles which, for all that they are the Gentleman Caller's "favorite kind of light," will bring no warmth to the girl…. The quiet, almost sentimental quality of that final speech, of the play as a whole, masks the fact that Menagerie ends with the starkest picture of loneliness in the Williams canon. The heroines who follow tend to have more Amanda than Laura in them. The specter of separateness h...

Today [The Glass Menagerie] seems to stand as squarely in [an exhausted] realistic tradition as if it were a small-town Beaux Arts bank building. Although it is often praised for its lyricism and delicate fragility, Menagerie now looks glued together with self-pity, soft at the core, less a tragedy than an overexquisite lace-doily melodrama. What has kept Menagerie being produced year after year—aside from its people-pleasing sentimentality and safely low-key lyricism—are its well-turned-out r...