Week 4 Discussion Questions

The Glass Menagerie

Consider the issue of loyalty, one that certainly arises in The Glass Menagerie. The saying “blood is thicker than water”, cliched as it may be, has a place here. How does the play treat this old adage? Does it support it?Reject it? Simply explore it? Be sure to use textual examples to support your point.

One of the questions in the text asks whether the play is realistic or exaggerated. “Adjusting” to the time period in question (obviously, certain things wouldn’t appear realistic to us, now, but could/might have been then), discuss this question. It’s possible you find some parts realistic and others heightened for dramatic effect.

“Critics are divided over Williams’s motivation in this play. Is he trying to get rid of Laura’s memory (based on his sister Rose who went mad and whom Williams deserted), or is he replaying the traumatic leaving?” If you are invested in authorial intent, this is a good question for you.

“Daddy”

This is an “easy” one to analyze from a psychological vantage point (if we were focusing on psychological criticism, as we will be in the near future), we have some excellent material here. What conflict does Plath raise in the poem? How is it solved? (For this and other questions, you may assume Plath’s poem is personal. However, the details of the poem differ quite a bit from documented biographical realities, so bear this in mind).

Plath uses quite a few instances of symbolism here – comparing herself to a Jew under Hitler’s regime, the tongue “stuck in a barb wire snare” (Line 26), (“The boot in the face” (Line 49), “And a love of the rack and the screw” (Line 66). Obviously, the similes and metaphors she uses are quite dark, most connected to the reality of the common Jewish prisoner in Hitler’s Germany. What do you make of this kind of symbolism? Why do you think Plath is so heavy-handed here? If you like studying literary elements to better understand a work, this is a good question for you.

The critic Mary Lynn Broe refers several times to the collective unconscious, a term that will pop up for us in psychological criticism. (I never, never refer students to Wikipedia – please don’t ever use it as a source in a paper. However, this definition is actually a fairly good one). What do you think of this idea? Do you think Broe is correct in associating Plath’s poem with this concept?

In Steven Gould Axelrod’s piece “From Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure for Words” , the scholar quotes Plath herself, her introduced her poem to the BBC: “Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex (an unconscious libidinal desire for the father and subsequent antogonist feelings toward the mother) Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it” (qtd. in Schilb and Clifford). What do you think of Plath’s interpretation of her poem? If this is her intended meaning, what do you identify in the poem as support for this reading?

“My Papa’s Waltz”

Readers of “My Papa’s Waltz” interpret the poem very differently; some see it as a tender moment; others view it as antagonist at best. Use the images in the poem to define it as a tender moment between father and son or, alternately, one marked by fear/antagonism/hostility.

Consider the use of the word “waltzed” throughout. Does Roethke depend on a traditional, literal definition of the word (denotation) or an implied, perhaps more symbolic meaning (connotation)? This kind of close textual analysis, without any external contextualizing, is the stuff of New Criticism


“Forgiving My Father”
Characterize the father in Lucille Clifton’s verse – who was he? What habits/values/beliefs/shortcomings do you identify? (Use the text to explain your ideas).
Clifton uses “financial” metaphors and images throughout. How do these work? (Each use, of course, does not literally refer to the father’s money management).
A conflict somewhat similar to Plath’s is here raised – what is it? Does the poem “resolve” this tension by its conclusion? Explain. (This, too, is the hallmark of New Criticism; New Critics identify all worth literature as made up of various tensions (often a main or “central” tension that, they say, are resolved, thus forming an “organic unity”).