Williams tends to overwhelm us with symbols, apparently for their own sake, but in The Glass Menagerie the symbols are employed effectively as organic elements in his poetic concept. A simple listing of them would include such obvious ones as the Paradise Dance Hall, the fire escape, the father's photograph, "Blue Roses," the idea of the gentleman caller, and many others. But the one most often discussed is the glass unicorn from Laura's little menagerie. Williams's use of it reveals him at his poetic best, for the unicorn not only stands for something else but is used dramatically to symbolize a change in relationships between two of the characters. Generally, the glass menagerie, including the unicorn, portrays Laura, her fragility, her delicacy, her beauty, her unworldliness, and at the same time the unicorn in particular symbolizes her life-maintaining illusion, her idealized concept of Jim, the high-school hero. When Jim appears in person and the audience sees him as a sadly commonplace and frustrated human being, Laura still retains her illusions about him.
But when she entrusts the unicorn in his hands, she says, "Oh, be careful-if you breathe, it breaks!" And Jim says, "Unicorns, aren't they extinct in the modern world?" Then in the ecstasy of the dance he knocks the unicorn from the table and it breaks-loses its horn, the thing that made it different from the others. And Laura, foreshadowing her coming disillusionment with the discovery of Jim's engagement, says, "The horn was removed to make him feel less-freakish! ... Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones who don't have horns." Thus Jim, the unicorn, the unique hero, subsides into the normal, the ordinary, himself destroying the aura of distinctiveness which Laura gave him, destroying her illusion-and yet she seems to accept this catastrophe with resignation. The unicorn has vanished, yes; but she still has her glass menagerie and the escape offered by her ancient phonograph records.
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