Su Madre

meadow

and on up into the sky.

Jim’s nickname for Laura, “Blue Roses,” itself signifies her affinity for the

natural—flowers—together with the transcendent—blue flowers, which do not

occur naturally and thus come to symbolize her yearning for both ideal or mystical

beauty and spiritual or romantic love. That beauty is also symbolized by Laura’s

favorite among the animals in her glass menagerie, the fabled, otherworldly unicorn,

as well as by the place where Laura has spent many of her afternoons, the

big “glass house” at the zoo called the Jewel Box, and by what she saw there:

tropical flowers, which could be said to come from another world, and which can

survive in St. Louis only by being placed in the artificial environment of a hothouse.

And that love comes to her, however fleetingly, in the person of her namer,

Jim O’Connor, who beatifies Laura by emphasizing what is special, even divine,

about her and downplaying her physical disability:

A little physical defect is what you have. Hardly noticeable even! . . .

You know what my strong advice to you is? Think of yourself as

superior in some way! [. . .] Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about

you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! . . .

Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! (99)

In this speech Jim adopts a Romantic-subjective view of human creation

as opposed to a naturalistic, deterministic, objective one—ironically so, because

he himself appears to be one of the common people with his freckle face, flat

or scant nose, and mundane job in the same shoe factory where Tom works,

and also because, in his aspiration to become a radio or television engineer,

he identifies himself with the utilitarian world of mathematics and machines.

Commoner though he may be, Jim O’Connor still idealizes rather than reifies

LauraWingfield by placing her on a pedestal and equating this young woman with

a blue rose. In so identifying Laura, Jim unwittingly recalls that widely recognized

Romantic symbol of longing for the infinite, of unrequited yearning for absolute

emotional and artistic fulfillment: the blue flower, drawn from the representative

novel of early (German) Romanticism, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen

(1802). This prose romance in two books is about the evolution of a young

poet of great potentiality—in this case, the legendary medieval poet and master

singer Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It chronicles his apprenticeship to his art and his

search for the archetypal symbol, the blue flower, which had appeared to him in a

dream.

78 ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews

For Heinrich, this flower comes to represent not only his artistic longing

but also his loving fiancée, who has mysteriously died by the time the second

book of the novel begins; this book, never finished by Novalis, was to have

shown Heinrich’s transformation into a poet, even as the first book depicted his

preparation for the artistic vocation. Similarly, The Glass Menagerie is about the

evolution of the poet Tom—a man in his early twenties who is not by accident

given by Jim the nickname of “Shakespeare,” one of the heroes of the Romantic

movement. The Glass Menagerie is also about Tom’s effort, through the art of this

play, both to find himself and to rediscover or memorialize his beloved sister, a

blue flower in human form.

Laura herself happens to think that “blue is wrong for—roses” (106), but Jim

insists that it is right for her because she’s pretty “in a very different way from

...