The Fragile Home of a Precarious Girl: A Butlerian Study of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Part II

This section of the article consists of three analytic discussions (“Illusion,” “Unemployment,” “Absence of a Father Figure”) and further probes into social and cultural factors that make the protagonist of Williams’s play precarious in Butlerian sense of the term. This survey attributes five reasons to Laura’s precariousness, which also involve, and at times are generated or intensified by her mother, her brother, and her suitor. These precarity agencies, which are in one way or another interrelated, include gender (in a patriarchal society), lameness, pipe dreams, inability to work (in a capitalist milieu), and the absence of an authoritative and supportive man. Laura is a misfit both domestically and socially in the sense that physically, financially, and sexually, she fails to abide by the social norms set by the normative power which privileges men over women and those who can work and pay tax over those who cannot.