The Spanish Civil War as a Red Herring in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Through the Lens of Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s Las bicicletas son para el verano

 

 

A THESIS

Presented to

The Faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature

The Colorado College

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Bachelor of Arts

By

Samantha Rae Silverman

April 2019

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

​

            Tom Wingfield sits in on the fire escape of his first-floor St. Louis apartment. It is 1945, or at least that is when Tom begins telling The Glass Menagerie, a story of a recent past. An incredibly successful work of American theatre, The Glass Menagerie tells the story of a young man’s resentment of his over-bearing mother, Amanda, obsessed with her past beauty. His crippled sister, Laura, sits in the home tending to her collection of her glass animals, representing both Tom’s perceived world of stagnancy, as well as his sentimental connection to the world he came from. Fueled by fantasies of film, news of foreign conflict, and culturally entrenched notions of the American Dream, Tom wishes on the moon for a life beyond St. Louis: a life of adventure.

            This is Tom Wingfield’s dilemma. In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Tom is haunted by what he would define as indefinite, perpetual routine—contained by the walls of his apartment and warehouse job—that brings him no personal excitement, satisfaction, or fulfillment. He finds St. Louis and the people around him to be full of “shouting and confusion,” which is a phrase I will use throughout this paper to illustrate dissonance, a collective lack of purpose or direction, and a lack of agency over one’s external circumstance. For Tom, stagnancy and shouting and confusion lead him to dream of a world where both of these two things are resolved. For him, this image, ironically, takes shape of the Bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Tom’s mind is occupied by the voids he perceives in his life, and this paper will investigate the issues in how he tries to fill them.

            While many critics, directors, and readers alike have responded to Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, this particular reading of the text draws on Spanish recollection of its Civil War after Franco’s censorship was eradicated from Spanish popular media. There is a common debate of whether Tom Wingfield is a romantic hero or not, whether he is justified in leaving his family or not at the end of the play, or if he really escapes at all. While this paper addresses all of these arguments, I will attempt to take it a step further, and allow the prolific Spanish actor and playwright’s drama Las bicicletas son para el verano to respond to Tom’s specific idealization of the bombing of Guernica throughout The Glass Menagerie.

            It is not Tom’s need for escape that I argue is problematic, but rather what he believes his is running to: fetishizing the Spanish Civil War as a symbol of adventure and purposeful action.  Specifically, I will first present a reading of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, using his narrator—Tom’s—continued fascination with the bombing of Guernica as an entry point into his dissatisfaction with his present reality and delusions of the outside world. I will then introduce the character of Luisito in Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s Las bicicletas son para el verano to challenge Tom’s framework in positioning Guernica as a foil to his own situation. The two characters share more similarities in their relationships to their social contexts than they differ. For example, as Tom descends his fire escape nightly to escape to the movies, Luisito spends Las bicicletas asking his father for a bicycle, and reading fiction about foreign conflict and adventures. A war and socioeconomic crisis spanning two continents and dictating two nations’ trajectories, this analysis attempts to put both conflicts in conversation with one another via the medium of theatre.

            During the mid-1930s, both the United States and Spain were amidst great periods of strain and transition, although of different natures on the surface. In the American South, the Great Depression was nearing its close, as Francisco Franco’s regime staged a coup d’état over the Spanish republic. This conversation, however, had already begun during the first gunshots of the Spanish Civil War, not from Spain itself, but rather an intense reaction from the English-speaking West. This paper seeks to not only contextualize American perception and romanticization of the Spanish Civil War, but also give Spanish Civil War literature the chance to respond.

            Both Tom and Luisito’s senses of selves are intertwined with the worlds they grow up in, and their yearnings to escape these worlds are, in turn, key aspects to whom they are as characters. On the basis of historical context and Tom’s opening monologue that contrasts Guernica to post-Great Depression St. Louis, Luisito’s world seems in opposition to Tom’s. Luisito’s life was interrupted by bombing, and Tom’s daily routine consisted of going to his warehouse job, and coming home with money for his mother and sister, without feeling as though anything is actually happening to him. What Tom fails to understand about characters like Luisito, however, is that they have no direct contribution to the Spanish Civil War. At the conclusion of this paper, I will raise the question of whether Tom would have a moment of introspection if he were to have access to Luisito’s story, and the reality that the two of them both attempt to escape the present through art and depictions of foreign worlds.

            Ultimately, Tom is too tied to his own world, even before I prove this to be further illuminated by his understanding of the bombing of Guernica to not exist in the first place. In the end of the play, he admits this to the audience, “I tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful than I intended to be,” you being Laura, a representation of everything he will always be connected to in the life he tries to escape (Williams 96). In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Jacques Lacan presents the theory of the imago, something Tom is tied to throughout the play. Lacan explains, after one can recognize himself in the mirror, and “the image has been mastered and found empty, it rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment” (Lacan 1164). This—the imago, likeness, or statue—therefore, presents a feedback loop one develops with his sense of self in relation to what is projected back to him via his environment. Tom establishes himself as a dynamic outsider, fueled by the fact that nothing changes around him. His key personality traits of dissatisfaction and his nightly trips to the movies—which will be further discussed in later sections—are only critical in comparison to the environment he pushes back against. Tom’s whole sense of self is based on what he is not. He is not Amanda, urging him to solidify financial security for the three present members of his family. He is not Laura, afraid of the outside world beyond her glass menagerie. Defined by opposition, Tom is a dreamer, but Tom cannot be Tom, then, without St. Louis.

            Lacan continues, “the function of the imago […] is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality,” which, in this case, suggests Tom and Luisito’s sense of self to be inextricable from the world of the American Dream and the uncertainty of the Spanish Civil War, respectively (1165). Tom’s fascination with Guernica, is ironically rooted in his relationship with the Wingfield apartment and the warehouse. If Luisito’s Spanish Civil War is an account of what many actually experienced during the War, then Tom’s Guernica is reactionary. He cannot be a dreamer without a solidified present to define his sense of self around.

            If Tom is Tom because of how he feels in his city, home, and overall zeitgeist, then he will always feel an attachment to this formative aspect of his identity. I will return to this question at the end of the analysis, but if Lacan is correct in saying we form our identities based on how our environments reflect our image back to us, Tom can never escape what he is running from. Tom still, however, stops paying his family’s bills and leaves them in the dark, both literally and figuratively. This brings Tom’s potential for a successful escape into question even before Luisito has the chance to respond to Tom’s fantasy of Guernica. Luisito, like Tom, creates his romantic and idealistic personality in reaction to his external environment, as well. Just as this paper will investigate American perception of the Spanish Civil War, it will hypothesize how Fernando Fernán-Gómez would respond to Tom’s Guernica in his work, Las bicicletas son para el verano.

            In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield creates a hyperbolized depiction of the world outside of his St. Louis apartment and factory job. These adventures attempt to offset his dissatisfaction with his stagnant existence in the post-Great Depression South. Wishing for some greater action and purpose to infiltrate his external world, Tom’s desire for his own bombing of Guernica both perpetuates his desire for escape and his inability to ever be satisfied, as his desires are ungrounded. While Tom uses the Spanish Civil War as an ideal escape from the American South, Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s Las bicicletas son para el verano proves that Tom’s perception of “shouting and confusion” is more than just St. Louis, the warehouse, and his apartment; families like Luisito’s were as out of control as Southern working-class families in the 1930s. Tom and Luisito, ultimately, share similar means of both coping with their social milieu, as well as planning physical means to escape it. The difference is, in the Spanish Civil War—in Luisito’s world—every day could be a matter of life or death. Ultimately, when put in conversation with one another, Luisito proves Tom’s efforts of escape to be increasingly futile, as the place Tom is running to never really existed at all.