Chapter Four
From Symbol, Allegory to Emblem
This chapter will examine the linguistic transfiguration of Williams’s modern
myth in the light of the Benjaminian interpretation of three patterns of expression
in the Trauerspiel: symbol, allegory and emblem. Myth and symbol have been
intertwined since ancient times. The word “myth” comes from the Greek word
mythos, meaning story, and it is translated as “Plot” in Aristotle’s Poetics (circa
335-323 B.C.), the first treatise in the history of dramatic criticism. According to
Aristotle, tragedy requires the proper structure of the Plot: tragedy is an imitation
of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude, and Plot
requires a whole, which must have a beginning, a middle and an end to produce
an organic unity (721). Classical works of art not only emphasize unity in
structure but also in idea, as in the union of universal and particular, of beauty and
the divine. Coming from the Platonic background of Aristotle, we also have the
idea that in the tragic drama as in a sculpture or epic poem, harmony and
proportion are idealized in the symbolic structure of the work. Myth is therefore
dependent on the symbol to attain completeness both in structure and meaning.
For Aristotle classical tragedy must achieve a unity of six elements: Plot,
Character, Thought, Diction, Song, and Spectacle. Diction is language: it has to
do with the expression of the meaning in words and the metrical arrangement of
the words (719-20). Diction stipulates a certain rules and norms according to
different genres and people of different social status. Poetry is the main form of
diction (language) in tragedy, with its rhymes, meters, and other regulations. But
in post-classical ages tragedy became freer from rigid metrical forms. Rather than
poetry, prose became the major medium to delineate more “modern” heroes,
together with many literary- rhetorical conventions for the purpose of conveying
double, multiple, complex and ambiguous meanings. Therefore, the form of the
symbol was no longer sufficient to convey the complexity and multi-layered
fabric of the modern era. The impasse of the symbol marks the birth of allegory,
which appeared most clearly in the later middle ages and Renaissance in, for
instance, English “morality plays” such as Everyman and allegorical religious
novels such as Pilgrim’s Progress.
1The Symbol
Since ancient times, the symbol has been employed as an effective tool to
help readers understand the author’s deeper and more abstract meanings. Williams
was very concerned with the use of symbology in his dramatic art. He describes
his primary purpose in creating dramas as the “necessary trick of rising above the
singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import…. I have been
trying to learn how to perform this trick and make it truthful.” (qtd. in Jackson 23)
Some other American playwrights employed a symbology dependent on European
sources, such as Eugene O’Neill’s early work Marco Millions (1923-25).
Williams had certain advantages as a Southerner. The rich southern symbolism is
tied to an intricate complex of political, cultural and economic factors, which had
greatly enriched the language of the arts in the South. This Southern aesthetics
provided Williams with a basic linguistic structure equivalent to the primary
stages of Greek tragedy. The socio-politico-religious “ground” and life struggle
can thus be interpreted by his theatrical art in a complex symbolic language (25).
For Walter Benjamin, the symbol is for Greek tragedy what the allegory is
for baroque tragedy. In Benjamin’s viewpoint, the symbol pursues a classical
totality which can never be actually reached but only represented by the
imagination. Only through the imagination can an unmediated tribe or nation
construct a symbol
2to express “the absolute” in and of itself and unite beauty to
the divine in an unbroken whole (Wolin 64/67). In the world of myth, the symbol
speaks of the unity between man and gods, form and idea, and reaches the perfect
realm of the true, the good and the beautiful. Beauty, which is expressed only via
appearance or illusion, is transient and fated to fade. As to truth and goodness, the
symbol assumes the meaning into its hidden interior in the mythical instant. The
visual image of the symbol incarnates and embodies the idea. In the beautiful
illusion, the appearance is the essence, the form is the content. Truth, goodness
and beauty are three in one contained in the symbol as a whole. The symbol, the
primary form of myth, is a concrete image in the work of art, representing man’s
sacred, messianic and innocent unity with gods. Benjamin is strongly influenced
by the classical philosophical background from Plato, e.g. on Beauty in the
Symposium.
However, the German Baroque drama is rooted in history. The immediate
political-social problems cannot be delineated by the symbol, which lacks a
dialectics between extremes so that the idea it manifests is distorted and limited in
depth. Hence, Benjamin concludes that in the philosophy of art, classicism
develops its profane and speculative counterpart of the symbol—the allegory.
Since the symbol is the mouthpiece of harmony and totality while the allegory is
that of ruin and discontinuity, the conflict between the earlier and the later form is
profound and bitter (Origin 160-61).
Williams wrote in the “Preface to Camino Real,” “I say that symbols are
nothing but the natural speech of drama.” He insisted that:
We all have in our conscious and unconscious minds a great vocabulary
of images, and I think all human communication is based on these
images as are our dreams; and a symbol in a play has only one
legitimate purpose, which is to say a thing more directly and simply and
beautifully than it could be said in words (66).
The playwright thus aims to create beautiful objects—symbols—to directly and
effectively represent something deeply rooted in our souls. These images, which
bear the characteristics of clarity, brevity, beauty, and transience, are the
fundamental elements in his contemporary myth. In the play, there a number of
symbols articulating the Wingfields’ dreams and illusions, such as the glass
menagerie, the gentleman caller and the motion picture. The symbols constitute
their myth in a world in which they don’t fit. As we have mentioned, the unicorn
is unique, beautiful and powerful. But when the image of the unicorn is made of
glass, it is fragile, vulnerable and illusionary. The glass unicorn portrays Laura’s fragility, delicacy, beauty, unworldliness, and at the same time her life-
maintaining illusion (Durham 62). The glass unicorn can never be real. Laura is
supposed to be as pure and delicate as the unicorn. But she is crippled, physically
and emotionally. She cannot handle the hardships that life accompanies, so she
shuns away from realities, and fancies a world of her own; even this world is
transient and illusionary.
Amanda’s “dream” lies in her memories. No matter how she patronizes the
glories in the past, her southern myth is fading away. Her present existence is but
a deserted and humiliated mother striving for survivals. So, her decencies and
Puritan reservations gives way to constant nagging and demands on her children.
She is a person of the past, but paradoxically, she also believes in the future as she
always declares, “Rise and Shine” to Tom and Laura as the morning call. The
mother wishes them success and good fortune, and does a lot of things to prepare
for, such as her investments for Laura’s career and marriage. She travels between
the worlds of the past and future. Yet, Amanda lives by no means at the present.
Her existence in the past, present and future is in split. Jim the gentleman caller is
the personification of her myths of the South and the myth of the future. His past
achievements in high school and “slow development” parallel those of the
declining South. On the other hand, his dream of self-promotion and prosperity
embodies the future-oriented “American dream.” Yet this future dream is based
only on empty slogans:
“Because I believe in the future of television! I want to be ready to go right
up along with it. . . . I’m planning to get in on the ground floor. Oh, I’ve
already made the right connections. All that remains now is for the
industry itself to get under way—full steam! You know, knowledge—
Zzzzppp! Money—Zzzzzzpp! POWER! Wham! That’s the cycle
democracy is built on!” (Williams 1: 222)
In addition to the glass symbol and the gentleman caller, which refer to
Laura’s and Amanda’s dreams, their imagined organic wholeness and dignified
but then and fragile gentility, Durham points out that the motion picture serves as
another symbol, one which determines the overall structure of the play. The
motion picture is the sign of Tom, signifying his escape, dream and nostalgia. The
protagonist escapes the warehouse and the apartment into his fantasy world of
adventures by means of the movies. He says to Jim, “People go to the movies
instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures
for everybody in America…. It’s our turn now, to go to the South Sea Island—to
make a safari—to be exotic, far-off!” (201) He looks forward to run away the
family to join the marine life; ironically, when his dream of the future comes true,
he cannot stop looking backwards to his past. Williams portrays his story in terms
of the motion picture as well. We see the entire action through Tom’s
consciousness with the structure and rhythmic flow of the scenes like those of the
motion pictures. The screen device resembles subtitles on the silent film, and
Williams utilizes close-ups, focusing his spotlight on individuals or objects, such
as the father’s photograph (Durham 66). Tom the Narrator says, “The play is
memory…. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not
realistic.” (Williams I: 145)
While Walter Benjamin’s philosophical-historical perspective lets us see the
discrepancy between illusion and reality, Roland Barthes’s semiotic and political
analysis of myth helps us to comprehend the social and cultural background of
The Glass Menagerie. Similar with Benjamin, Barthes redefines myth as a
delusion, which seems natural but needs unmasking. Semiotics is employed as a
point of departure to explore the nature of myth
3. A myth is a story about
superhuman being of a prehistoric age. But the word “myth” can also mean a
fictitious, unproven or illusory thing. Barthes calls these messages myths, partly in
virtue of the etymology of ‘myth’ (the Greek muthos, speech, therefore ‘message’),
and partly because many of these messages are myths in another sense,
mystifications (Moriarty 19). Barthes reinforces that myth is a type of speech, a
system of communication and a form which is invented to imply numerous
illuminations in the cosmos. In a boarder sense, myth can be every language.
There are two semiological systems in myth. What myth attempts to signify in the
first system is called the language-object. And myth itself is metalanguage, the
second-order meaning. People use the second system to discuss the first system.
Thus, myth is ambiguous; it is both meaning and form, full and empty (110-15).
Myth is a type of speech. And its second function is mystification. There is
two-stage logic in Mythologies: the simple meaning of myth indicates the
ideological imposition. As we have discussed, myth is both meaning and form,
metalanguage and the signifier of the language-object. Namely, a mythical story is
read into some substance, custom, and attitude that seems to carry its meaning to
practical use, to the operation of socio-economic structures hidden behind
4. For
Barthes, the task of the mythologist is not to denunciate such ideological positions,
but to analyze how the messages are constituted (Moriarty 21-22). Therefore, an
identical myth would have different significations due to various political
purposes. Barthes stands at the tradition of “demystification
5”, which he hopes to
have deconstructural results. Analyzing myths, he argued in 1953, ‘is the only
effective way for an intellectual to take political action’ (qtd. in Culler 29).
At the beginning of Williams’s career, he had announced that his interest in
social problems was as great as his interest in the theater. He attempted to weave
social messages into his plays. He was deeply concerned with the problems of
language, the construction of symbolic forms, to express his synthetic myth on his
days (Bigsby, Modern 33). The Wingfield symbols represent their alienation and
maladjustment in society. The unicorn, the gentleman caller and the motion
picture extend from myths in antiquity, American region, and modern technology.
They are representatives from different time and space, expressing the universal
catastrophes that human beings encounter. Amanda, Laura and Tom are
archetypes of certain qualities and attitudes of men in crisis. They are characters
in the modern allegory searching for salvation. Williams uses the symbols to carry
the universal meaning, but at the same time he knows very well the need to apply
other techniques to acquire more truths. Hence, he puts all the transcendental
meaning that the symbols carry in jeopardy for the purpose of poising his myth
into the realm of allegory.
The Allegory as Form
The study of myth launches Benjamin’s and Barthes’s cultural analysis.
Benjamin reflects on myth, critiques the German tragic drama and gives us a
glimpse of “profane illumination,” whereas Barthes redefines myth as a delusion,
one which seems natural but needs unmasking. Although they have different
approaches to myth, they are both concerned about the function of history and
investigate the relationship between the form and meaning or form and Idea in
myth.
The form has much to do with “the origin” in Benjamin’s study of the Origin
of the German Tragic Drama, which is not entirely distinct from Greek tragedy but related to it in the rhythm of origination. The notion of “Origin” is worth
rethinking. Although Benjamin calls the category of origin historical, his concern
with it is philosophical in his “Epistemo-Critical Prologue.” Origin does not imply
the becoming of something, but rather its coming-to-be and passing-away
6. The
action of the Origin is not simply to bring something new and different into being,
but rather to “restore,” to “reproduce.” In the following passage, the dialectic of
the Origin makes it “historical” rather than “logical:”
There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the
form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until
it is revealed and fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not,
therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is
related to their history and their subsequent development (Origin 45-46).
The origin cannot represent the Idea fully, but its repetitive quality, the
repetition of difference, is able to manifest part of Idea. Its form is derived from
the Origin and presented to us with all “the repetition of differences.” Drawing on
Leibniz’s idea that the sum of monads shine out the truth
7, Benjamin indicates:
“Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements’ being seen as
points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time
redeemed.” The repetitive form of Origin is to Benjamin like that of shooting star,
which he elevates to the status of an allegorical emblem, the constellation as a
meaningful arrangement of truth (34-35). And in the modern myth as Benjamin
conceives it we seem to have a synthesis of the symbol and the allegory, the
symbolic meaning of Greek tragedy combined with the seed of German tragedy’s
allegorical significance.
Barthes on the other hand claims that myth is both the meaning and the form.
He also argues that the form impoverishes the meaning because history
appropriates myth to refer to something else. The distortion and the abuse of myth
make one believe that the meaning is going to die, but it is a prolonged death. The
meaning loses its value but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will
draw its nourishment. Thus, the form must constantly be able to be rooted again in
the meaning. As time goes by, the meaning will be for the form like a momentary
reserve of history. In Barthes’ theory, then, the form of myth is not a symbol
because history “drains out” or depletes this form, which becomes absorbed by
the concept. Myth in this sense is historical and intentional (118). In his view
myth does not stand still in time but constantly flows in the stream of history.
Myth corrupts everything, losing its symbolic meaning. Myth turns into a
speaking corpse
8in the kingdom of allegory.
As to Menagerie, Williams deciphers a series of myths as forms, which he
roots in the modern alienated mind and petty-bourgeois milieu. There are then, in
my view, two keys to understanding the forms of Williams’s myths: the Barthean
author’s appropriation of myth to fit the contemporary world and the Benjaminian
myth as dialectical image of Origin as coming-to-be and passing- away, as both
developing historical image and trans-historical archetype.
Take the central myth, the unicorn, as an example. The “archetype” of the
unicorn is shy, pure, alienated and magical. The ancient descriptions of it come
from Western Europe and the Near East. Williams adopts the beautiful image of
the mythical animal to signify his beloved sister Rose and Laura in the play to
intensify their timid nature and their power of imagination, which materialism is
short of and intolerable of. Moreover, he attaches the fragile quality of the glass to
the unicorn to portray their vulnerability and blemished characters. In Williams’s
version of “the Lady and the unicorn
9,” Laura becomes the double; she is both
prey and lure as Jim’s role. As a metaphorical unicorn Laura is trapped by Jim, the
lady figure in the legend. She has lost her innocence and illusions, for which the
broken horn of the glass unicorn stands. On the other hand, she is the bait of
Amanda to attract Jim, though it does not work. Jim is enchanted by her delicate
and romantic world for a while, but he still withdraws to the world he belongs to.
The southern norm to get a gentleman caller is outmoded and fails in the
industrial and commercial society. Furthermore, a Christian symbolism is put into
the unicorn myth with a twist. If we see Laura as a virgin who lures the unicorn,
Jim is the mysterious animal with magic power, a Christ figure. He nonetheless
fails to play the role of savior of/for the Wingfield family. He does not assure
them of a hopeful future. Thus, the symbol of the unicorn in the play is a
“developing” one manifests the whole meaning of the play.
The Meaning of the Allegory
Benjamin takes the basic characteristic of allegory to be ambiguity,
multiplicity of meaning. Ambiguity is always the opposite of clarity and unity of
meaning (Origin 177). From the baroque standpoint, to see allegory as an
evolution of the symbol is a more modern perspective. For Benjamin, “symbols
become very flexible forms for the ideas of the poetic imagination. All this is, of
course, part of an intensive preparation for allegory.” (223) Only with the
allegorical insight can one interpret the broken images of modern ambiguity and
multiplicity of meaning(s). Whereas the symbol is the very incarnation of the idea,
the allegory signifies a general concept or an idea which is “something outside
itself.” The allegorical representation holds an idea which is different from itself.
It separates the visual being from the meaning
10. And it provides a dark
background against which the bright world of the symbol might stand out. The
allegory restores the symbol and it is supplanted by the more effusive legend, thus
pointing to truth (161-65).
For Benjamin, truth—Idea
11—is perceived by the hero in his melancholy
gaze. “In the field of allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune. Its
beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The
false appearance of totality is extinguished.” (176) The tragic hero’s melancholy
gaze on the ruins of the surrounding world at the moment of his death is
simultaneously the process of allegorical construction. This hero brings “together
[…] discrete and meaningless fragments into a new whole”: this is how he
“discovers the meaning.” The subjectivity of the hero reaches a zenith in the
supreme act of allegorical creation. Thus, man’s prehistoric subjection to nature
has given rise to the nature of human existence and the historicity of the
individual. This is the allegorical way of seeing (165-66), and a transformation
from the “material content” into “truth content,” from “sign” to “rhetoric.” The
object is reversed from symbol to emblem, and as emblem it becomes a key to the
realm of hidden knowledge—the Idea.
Williams’s myth is a representation of the life of man in his time. As Jackson
observes, his myth is by no means an organic form because it is not a fabric
surfacing from the great natural structures evolved through world religions and
popular myths, like the myth of the American legendary cowboy. It is gathered
from the fragments of multiple perspectives. Man is in crisis and in search of a
means of reconciliation with reality (Jackson 32). Williams, in The Glass
Menagerie, creates symbols so filled with meanings that they embody the
personal experience and correlatives of modern everyman. In this sense,
Williams’s play is a modern allegory, a world of his South, in which a culture
caught at a moment of precarious balance, and characters caught at the moment
when personal dreams and myths are under pressure. The shock of change
brought about in a form of a neurotic recoil, central to his work (Bigsby,
Twentieth-Century 17).
Benjamin claims that in the symbol destruction is idealized and nature is
revealed in the light of redemption, while in the allegory, the observer is
confronted with history as a petrified and primordial landscape (Origin 34-35). In
the play, the reader expects a reconciliation between the Wingfield family and
society. The gentleman caller could have been an intermediary, bringing them
change and hope. He could have appeased Amanda’s anxiety, released Tom’s
burden and married Laura. When Jim breaks the horn of the unicorn, Williams
makes the reader believes that it’s an operation to normalize both the peculiar
animal and the girl. But Williams does not offer such a resolution. Jim withdraws
from Laura’s world, and he inadvertently and utterly destroys all of the
Wingfields’ dreams. Without the hope of the gentleman caller, the family is no
longer held as a whole. Feeling he has been wronged, Tom goes off in a fit of
pique. Amanda and Laura have nowhere to go. It’s possible for Amanda and
Laura to receive their illumination at the desperate moment. They are not
redeemed through a transcendental unity with nature, but rather through the
allegorical insight into mythical substance. As the hero confronts the guilty world,
the world fallen from grace, only the knowledge of allegory ultimately helps
him/her to arrest or suspend the sense of bottomless despair and transform the
heap of fragments into something meaningful. Williams portrays such wisdom in
Amanda through her tragic gestures and melancholy gaze at the environment,
especially at the husband’s picture. Subjectivity, like an angel falling into depths,
is brought back by allegories, and is held fast in heaven, in God, by “ponderactión
misteriosa
12.” (Benjamin, Origin 235)
While the Benjaminian redemption is based on the melancholy gaze of the
hero upon death, for Barthes the only “redemption” might lie in our ability to
demythologize, since Barthes regards myth as a place where meaning is lost:
myth-making is an act of appropriation and thus, in effect, of distortion,
displacement of the original meaning through placing it within a new form. And
the poetic images in Menagerie are not simple metaphors but are full of symbolic
implications, thus they are “allegorical” in the modern sense, multiplicities or
constellations of meaning (Benjamin), and also distortions or displacements of
meaning (Barthes) to present Tennessee Williams’s “redemption.” Since early in
his career, Williams had seen himself as a radical, creating plays for a political
theatre group in St Louis. The villains were industrialists—war profiteers, prison
officials and so on. Hidden behind these was a political and economic system that
encouraged corruption and broke individuals on the rack of private profit. His
radicalism was to urge for the individual to be left alone from the pressure of
public event. He could never forget the cruelties which left the individual a victim
of a system resistant to human needs (Bigsby, Modern 35-36).
In the play, Tom Wingfield reverses time to the “quaint” period of the thirties,
when the political disorders after the First World War have pervaded the world,
and when the Depression has destroyed the prosperous version of America, “In
Spain there was a revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In
Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes
pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint
Louis… This is the social background of the play.” (I: 145) In the world full of
“shouting and confusion,” the play seems to suggest the end of a particular model
of America and of individual character. For example, Laura Wingfield stands as a
paradigm of the culture of which she is a part. The world of modernity, the dance
hall and the typewriter, is outside of her experience. She retreats to a world of
myth, symbolized by the glass unicorn (Bigsby, Modern 31-32). The myth of the
unicorn is a sort of metalanguage to signify the language-object, to represent the
circumstances in which Southern style and grace have dissolved under industrial
materialism. Laura’s attempt to catch the organic nature of “truth, life, or reality”
by an act of imaginative transformation is denied by the determining realities.
Tom’s opening speech, thus, is an implicit attack on America. The battle in Spain
was aimed to construct a new future, but for Williams’s rhetoric, it was not a
battle that Tom was fitted to join (Bigsby, Twentieth-Century 47). Williams’s
myth-making presents truth out of confusion and illusion, just as it extracts the
“emblem” of the (broken) unicorn from its (individual) symbolic and (multiple)
allegorical senses.
The Emblem
In daily life, the emblem is a synonym for the symbol without causing any
confusion. Nevertheless, a symbol substitutes one thing for another in a less
concrete fashion. By contrast, an emblem crystallizes some abstraction in more
concrete, usually visual terms. In literature, an emblem usually consists of a
pictorial image that epitomizes the “concept” of a moral lesion or an allegory
13.
Interestingly, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s theories of myth both emphasize the
emblem of “death” (the death-figure) in their allegorical interpretations. Benjamin
focuses on the image of the baroque corpse—the dead body of the hero—while
Barthes foregrounds that of the “speaking corpse” of myth with its meaning
stripped away.
Benjamin particularly discusses the function of the emblem in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama to impel the allegory into the sphere of theology and ethics.
He quotes from Greuzer:
In the same period allegory among the Germans, because of the
seriousness of their national character, took a more ethical direction.
With the advances of the Reformation the symbolic inevitably lost its
importance as an expression of religious mysteries…The ancient love of
the visual expressed itself…in symbolic representation of a moral and
political kind. Indeed allegory now had even to make manifest the
newly discovered truth. This is the allegorical way to see the world
14(168).
In his theory of allegory, Benjamin deliberately blurs subject, object and
theological ground (Bernd 125, 127). The synthetic unity is a methodological one,
and Benjamin believes that the allegorical form cannot be fully understood
without the aid of the higher domain of theology: “this is no μετάβασιςεις άλλο
γένος [transition to a different subject];” (216) Instead, a critical understanding of
the Trauerspiel requires a “crossing of the borders” through allegorical
construction in order to obtain new possibilities of meaning.
The baroque corpse is an emblem that contains the image of redemption. But
before theology reveals itself, the corpse must complete a few more dialectical
reversals. Upon his death, the hero’s melancholy contemplation acquires the
power of tragic prophecy. Yet “knowledge, not action, is the most characteristic
mode of existence of evil.” The hero, the allegorist, is not alone; he is
accompanied by the presence not of God but of Satan. What tempt him are the
illusion of freedom from fate, the illusion of independence from his community,
and the illusion of infinity in the empty abyss of evil. The theology of evil is
derived from the fall of Satan. “The absolute spirituality, which is what Satan
means, destroys itself in its emancipation from what is sacred […]. The purely
material and this absolute spiritual are the poles of the satanic realm; and the
consciousness is their illusory synthesis, in which the genuine synthesis, that of
life, is imitated.” The knowledge of demons, which the melancholy mind now
possesses, seems to lead back to myth, which is characterized by its
changelessness (Benjamin, Origin 230).
Pensky notes that Benjamin reveals a breathtaking reversal, a shattering
synthesis in his view of allegorical contemplation (130):
As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would
the allegorical intention fall from emblem to emblem down to the
dizziness of its bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the most
extreme of them, it had so to turn about that all its darkness, vainglory
and godlessness seems to be nothing but self-delusion. For it is to
misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we make a distinction between
the store of images, in which this about-turn into salvation and
redemption takes place, and that grim store which signifies death and
damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction in
which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the
limit set upon allegorical contemplation, rather than its ideal quality
(Benjamin, Origin 232).
In this “about-turn,” allegory sees through the phantasmagoria of objects which
deny the void in which they are represented. Thus the intention does not rest in
the contemplation of bones but leaps forward to the idea of resurrection (232-33).
The dialectics of Benjamin is a process moving through thesis and antithesis to
synthesis, from symbol and allegory to emblem. The materiality of nature
transforms the whole, a heap of ruins, into a constellation that hints at reunion
with God. Benjamin stresses the necessity of the dark cycle of man’s suffering
and the need for salvation, which requires the melancholy gaze and the tragic
prophecy if the hero is to turn upward from the bottomless chasm to redeem
mankind.
The Glass Menagerie then can be read, via Benjamin, as a sort of Christian
myth that focuses on man’s suffering and the need for illumination. Many critics
have noted the religious messages that Williams intends to carry. In 1961, Signi
Falk had noticed the Christian elements in the play, and raised them to a poetic
level. He pointed out that the final scene closes on a symbolic and even sacred
note. The playwright here mixes romantic love with religion: he refers to Laura’s
face as an altar, speaks of the holy candles being snuffed out, and describes the
altar of her face as having a look of desolation (50-51). Roger B. Stein (1964)
drew an analogy between Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller, and the Savior. He
points out that Jim comes as the Savior to this Friday night supper. His arrival is
marked by the coming of rain, but the hopes of fertility and renewal which this
might suggest are soon dashed. In addition, the failure of electric power after
dinner suggests the dark future of the Wingfields. Amanda’s joking question is,
“Where was Moses when the lights went off
15?” This suggests another Savior
who would lead his people from the desert into the Promised Land. But the
answer to her question is “In the dark” (19-20), hinting that God Him has turned
away and dwells in some other corner of the universe. He has left the world to its
own inhuman savagery.
These critics regard the ending as pessimistic, but in the Benjaminian reading
we might say it is a “heroic” ending inasmuch as Williams suggests the
intransigent, relentless courage of the two heroines, their possible regaining of a
self-identical subjectivity. Through the rite of the theater Williams transforms his
symbols and allegories to emblems, so that his characters might after all represent
something solid and permanent. The glass unicorn is a symbol of Laura’s morbid
shyness and overly delicate imagination, but at the end it loses its horn, implying
Laura’s lost innocence. Her initial imaginary world is shattered. What she
perceives now is not a whole but only bleak fragments: “There is a look of almost
infinite desolation. Jim glances at her uneasily
16.”
The glass unicorn without its horn is a souvenir of Laura and Jim’s encounter,
the border-crossing of the two worlds which they represent. Laura is hurt by Jim’s
touch as the unicorn breaks its horn. Jim’s disclosure of his engagement destroys
her chance for further contact with the outer world. Thus, in its fall the unicorn
removes its veil, takes on an allegorical form, and brings the young heroine it
represents to the vertiginous abyss of the knowledge of evil. As Benjamin says,
“For it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we make a distinction
between the store of images, in which this about-turn into salvation and
redemption takes place, and that grim store which signifies death and damnation.”
Through Laura’s allegorical contemplation, the “death” of the unicorn is the
“birth” of the horse. “Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the
ones that don’t have horns
17….” The glass unicorn resurrects and transforms into
a horse. It is sent to Jim as a keepsake and as a witness of Laura’s transformation.
Even in her frustration, Laura bravely smiles twice in the final scene; she smiles
at Jim when she gives the unicorn to him, and she smiles at Amanda after Tom
forsakes the family. Now she has compassion for and acceptance of the ordinary
world, understanding and forgiving Jim’s and Tom’s failures. By the time of the
final frozen “mute-scene” with her mother—itself an “emblematic” scene—the
broken unicorn has come to possess a fully emblematic significance.
Notes
1
From 1954 to 1956, Roland Barthes wrote monthly essays called “Mythologies of the Month” for Les Lettres nouvelles. Later, the articles were compiled in the book entitled, Mythologies, which reflects the contemporary French life of Barthes’ day. The concluding part, “Myth Today,” serves as the theoretical basis of the whole book.
2
In Allegory and Trauerspiel, quoting from Greuzer, Walter Benjamin claims that a symbol requires clarity, brevity, grace and beauty. (Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Vőlker, besonders der Griechen, I. Theil, 2., vőllig umgearb. Ausg., Leipzig, Darmstadt, 1819, pp. 66/67.)
3
Since myth is the study of speech, it belongs to the science of signs under the name of semiology, whose founder is Saussure and which postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified. The signifier (sound-image) points to the signified (concept).
4
For example, common sense would say wrestling is a sport. But Barthes asserts
it is a spectacle (Barthes 15). Wrestling is of course a sport; if we compare
wrestling to boxing, however, we find out they have different mythical meanings.
Their cultural differences distinguish them one from the other. We would not confuse wrestling with boxing because of a certain features. Indeed wrestling is a
“spectacle” rather than a “contest.” The myth of wrestling now refers to a complex set of cultural conventions—the language-object.
5
Demythologization means stripping away the illusory “mythic” meanings of a myth that has a primarily political purpose. The reader of a myth should thus pay attention to how the myth is constructed.
6
What Benjamin seeks to articulate is not the form of cognitive investigation, but rather a form of interpretation. Origin is thus not merely directed towards the future, but backward toward the past for revisiting, reinventing and retelling.
7
Origin is a part which constitutes the whole. Benjamin is influenced by Leibniz’s idea in Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), “Every monad can represent the whole universe […]. Every monad has its zone of clarity.”
8
It is a speaking corpse because the form of myth remains, while its meaning passes away. Benjamin and Barthes both use death-imagery to elucidate allegory:
the former has the dead hero’s body, the latter has the speaking corpse. As we have seen, the limited power of the symbol gives birth to the allegory. Myth has its second life in the form of allegory, where metaphor becomes more intricate and signifies multiple meanings.
9
Compare with the original version in Chapter Two.
10
Therefore, according to Benjamin, allegory originates the study of the enigmatic hieroglyphs.
11
Benjamin uses the term “Idea” instead of the term “meaning” because he emphasizes “eternity” more than “this life.” Idea, the word Benjamin and Kant borrow from Plato, means a Truth which belongs not to this world but to eternity.
12
Ponderactión misteriosa is the intervention of God in the work of art.
13
This definition is quoted from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem.
14
Creuzer, op. cit., pp. 227/228.
15
Williams. The Glass Menagerie. 207.
16
Ibid., 230.
17
