Author: guinyard juwan j.

The Glass Menagerie Review

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is about a family of 3 who live in an apartment in St.Louis in 1937. With the story being set in only one location, the set was the living room, dining area, and a fire escape as the apartment faces an alley. The set only changes slightly in the second act  as a gentleman caller arrives for dinner.

There are only 4 characters in the entire play, the mother Amanda Wingfield has kind of a charismatic character to her. She can be likeable at times and be funny, but because she holds on to her old memories she can be cruel to her children Tom and Laura when it comes to the what she expects from them. Laura Wingfield is crippled due to a illness as a child leaving her left leg shorter than her right. She is a shy girl who doesn’t really live in reality. Tom is also the narrator while being a bad son and turns out to be an untrusting brother.

Overall, the play has interesting characters that you could either feel bad for, or just come to not like. There isn’t really much to the story, I think it’s more about how you feel about the characters especially at the end. It’s worth a see or now a read.

Embodied Virtuality

Having an intelligent robot be able to always learn and never make a mental error illustrates how they don’t have a mind or body. As humans, we have the ability to separate the mind and the body, but also have them work in tandem. Katherine Hayles’ How We Become Posthuman claims that there is no embodiment as this allows information to be free and not constricted by society. We should be able to feel and determine different emotions based on the situation and environment presented because it’s natural to us. Once we sense that things are now being forced upon us and has lost the naturalbility of the moment, we fight for it to be changed back. Ash in the episode “Be Right Back” in the show Black Mirror, and the wives from the movie Stepford Wives have their minds mimicked and placed into machines so that they have now lost their individuality. These characters represent embodied virtuality because they have become something that is sustainable but in the end isn’t real.

Ash in Black Mirror is brought back in a messed up way through technological advances by his wife Martha to take the pain away. The thing that wears the skin of Ash is something that nether has a body or mind because it’s a robot that doesn’t learn but is programmed to know everything. His mind wasn’t able to control itself in the way Martha wanted and expected Ash to make the same snark remarks towards her and feel emotion in specific situations. In Hayles piece, she quotes Political scientist C.B Macpherson about possessive individualism saying “The human essence is freedom from the wills of others and freedom is a function of possession”(Hayles 3). Ash doesn’t have ability to make Martha feel the way she did when he was actually there on an emotional level.

In terms of gender, I don’t think there is much to it when it comes to Ash and Martha because it is the human aspect that is taken away, making her unable the grieve normally. In Stepford Wives on the other hand, It has all to do with gender roles because they physically took away their individualism so that a mans view of a women can be shaped and manipulated for their own personal gain.

 

A shift in Control

We see in chapter 11 that androids have taken over an office building and have started a fake police operation. Even with Rick and Resch knowing Garland is an android, they don’t execute him immediately. Garland is able to get the drop on Rick and but ultimately gets shot in the head. Resch can’t get over that “For three years I’ve been working under the direction of androids” (Dick 137). Really Resch is just overthinking the idea because Rick tells him that “According to Garland, a bunch of them came to earth together and that it’s only been three months” (Dick 137). Later in chapter 13 when Pris is telling Isidore that more androids are coming to earth, it’s telling me that the androids will be able to outsmart the humans by blending in with them. We see that it’s starting to become more difficult for the bounty hunters to do their jobs.

With the androids showing more human like characteristics, do you think we will see Rick move further away from his duties, and if so what will be his next chapter? Also what is the possibility that the androids will come together and plan some sort of extreme plan against the humans?