Characters haunted by their pasts. It's a common tool in all forms of drama, and in The Glass Menagerie it is placed front and centre by playwright Tennessee Williams, in what is to a great extent an autobiographical piece.
The play is often said to have five characters, one of them absent. Matriarch Amanda virtually lives in the past after being unceremoniously abandoned by her husband 16 years previously. Left alone to bring up her son and daughter in the difficult 1920s and 30s, Amanda yearns for her younger days when she had a line of "gentlemen callers" at the door, all courting her attentions. It must have been an exciting time in her youth, to have so much interest from and choice in men. The fact she chose her future husband, a man who turned out to be a huge disappointment to her, still haunts her, as she thinks back to the other men, the 'could-have-beens'.
