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It's been nearly three years since I had to read the Tenessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie, and last night a question came back to me, nagging me as I was trying to go to sleep. In the character introduction, Amanda Wingfield is attributed this descriptive sentance: "She is not paranoid, but her life is paranoia."

I've always had a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around that seemingly paradoxical phrase. I understand the reason why paranoia might be attributed to her. After all, she has great hopes for her daughter, underlined with great fears. However, I still seem to have some trouble with this deliniation.

For anyone who has read this play, how did you interpret this phrase?

Hmm... I think it was a phrase that was meant to sound deep, but in reality is nonsensical. It does not seem impossible to me that a writer likes the sound of a certain sentence and knows that they can get away with using it, regardless of how pointless or impossible it might obviously be as a statement in, say, a textbook. Truth be told, I thought A Streetcar Named Desire was a good play, but this one was just incomprehensibly annoying. I have never wanted to beat my own brains out like when I had to read this... thing.

Literature stuff goes in OT, excepting Fanfics.

I'm with Pick. Some things are designed solely to sound cool, and to get a certain jist across. Without reading into it too heavily, we have associated Amanda with the word "paranoia." That's pretty much it.

Trying to make sense of that is like trying to make sense of: "It was the most rational irrational act she had ever commited. It was as shocking as it was predictable, and as enigmatic as it was cliched. She was like that sometimes." You can't. But ideally, it sounds cool.

The main reason why I'm not so sure about your inclination is that this is also a play script. Unless there was another authoratative script for use in actual productions, I would think that these character descriptions would be used as a means to convey aspects of their backgrounds and personalities to the actors playing the roles. By putting a nonsensical "it sounds really cool but means nothing" phrase into a character description, the author would be inconveniancing, if not completely confusing the actors.

Perhaps it means that though her acts are those which are all geared toward ends which would normally be considered paranoid, their cause is not actual paranoia?

Remember Amanda's story about entertaining 17 gentlemen callers in an evening? Amanda constantly waxed poet about her life on the plantation in the South, as part of escapism from living a shitty life in St. Louis (in the same way Laura's glass figurines are her escape). Amanda isn't a paranoid woman, but part of her escape from the reality of her life is to be Southern (note the capital S), to constantly look over your shoulder and to be proper and this and that. Further, her life revolves around not breaking the illusion she's built up around herself about her glorious past, which involves a fair bit of paranoia.

She's not really paranoid, but that's just the way life is for her.

Or something like that.