Beyond the Glass Menagerie: Disability from Metaphor to Individual

In 2017, director Sam Gold premiered a controversial new production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), an acclaimed portrayal of the complex intersection of disability and Depression-era expectations. The controversy centered around the character of Laura, whose slight limp had been traditionally employed as a metaphorical representation of her social isolation. In Gold’s production, Laura was portrayed by an actor with muscular dystrophy whose highly visible disability shifted emphasis from metaphor to individual. As the director explained: Laura became a “subject” with a “voice” rather than an “object.” Disability as metaphor has a long history within the arts, serving to deepen our understanding of the human condition. Pieter Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568) is a well-known example. Conversely, metaphors have the potential to dehumanize those with disabilities by replacing their individuality with stereotypes. Tropes such as the “evil cripple” characterized in Superman’s first arch enemy Ultra-Humanite (1939) and the “aspirational figure” in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948) helped sustain a stigmatization of those who existed outside of what Erving Goffman considered the physically fit, white, male American “normal.” As the civil rights movement took hold and artists with disabilities, such as Alison Lapper, became more visible, they began to move beyond metaphor to create an informed language based upon individual experience. Still, disability metaphor remains an important tool for artists. Going forward, how might disability metaphor incorporate individuality while maintaining its reference to the wider human condition?