Symbols in "The Glass Menagerie" "The Glass Menagerie", "Blue Mountain", "The Fire Escape" and "The Unicorn" are symbols in the " Glass Menagerie" Discuss Williams use of these symbols Mirroring, the social and economic despair of the thirties in the U.S, "The Glass Menagerie" in nostalgia for a past world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love celebrates, above all, the human need to dream. Amanda Wingfield resents the poverty - stricken neighborhood in which she lives, so much so that she needs to escape mentally from it by invented romance and self-deception. Williams describes her as having "endurance and a kind of heroism, but she is also silly,