St. Louis

St. Louis is the urban setting of the Wingfield family’s precarious life and the place Tom leaves in pursuit of movement, yet cannot leave behind in memory. The play sets the city’s crowded apartment and economic pressures against Amanda’s idealized recollections of the Mississippi Delta, making St. Louis at once a physical home, a social landscape, and the point of departure for Tom’s enduring guilt.

Setting and Social Landscape

The Wingfield apartment occupies the rear of a vast, hive-like residential building in a lower-middle-class district. It faces an alley and is reached by a fire escape, which the play describes as an accidental poetic image of escape from a building perpetually burning with human desperation. The city is rendered not as an expansive panorama but through this compressed domestic space, where the family’s conflicts unfold amid limited privacy and few apparent routes out.

Tom’s account places St. Louis within a wider history of the 1930s. He contrasts the revolution in Spain and the destruction of Guernica with labor disturbances and confusion in American cities, including St. Louis and Chicago. This framing makes the family’s troubles part of a society unsettled by economic dissolution, while distinguishing national conditions from the household’s particular pressures.

The Family’s Life in the City

St. Louis is where the Wingfields’ financial dependence becomes tangible. Tom works at the Continental Shoemakers warehouse for sixty-five dollars a month, a job he experiences as incompatible with his ambitions. When Amanda challenges his decision to leave, she argues that his employment provides security for them all; Tom answers by describing the work as intolerable and pointing to his absent father’s photograph as evidence of the path he might follow. Their quarrel exposes how the family’s need for his wages constrains his wish to escape.

The household’s other difficulties are equally concrete. Amanda recalls that fifty dollars in tuition and her plans for Laura’s business education have been lost after Laura could not face the course. She fears that without a business career or marriage, Laura will be dependent on relatives and confined to an uncertain future. A light-bill notice, which Amanda reminds Tom she gave him several days earlier, brings the city’s ordinary expenses into the same domestic field as their larger anxieties.

A City Measured Against the Past

Amanda’s memories repeatedly carry the play away from St. Louis to her youth in Blue Mountain and the Mississippi Delta. She recalls seventeen gentlemen callers on one Sunday afternoon, prominent planter families, dances, and the expectation that she would marry a planter and live with servants. She names former suitors and recounts their later fortunes, marriages, and deaths, turning social status and romantic history into a vivid alternative to her present circumstances.

Her old yellowed voile dress, blue sash, and jonquils make that contrast visible when she dresses for the evening Jim is expected to visit. She recalls wearing the gown at a Governor’s Ball and when she met the children’s father, and remembers the spring when she became so preoccupied with jonquils that she filled every available vase. But the story ends not with a return to that life: she married a telephone-company worker, whose attachment to long-distance travel eventually left her not knowing where he was. Her performance of the past thus reveals both its enduring hold and the break between the life she expected and the St. Louis home she inhabits.

Departure and the City’s Afterlife

Tom’s departure gives St. Louis its decisive narrative role. He says that he was fired after writing a poem on a shoe-box lid, then left the city and descended the fire-escape steps for the last time. He followed his father’s example by traveling, trying to recover through movement what had been lost in distance. His later journeys do not resolve that loss: cities pass around him, while familiar music or transparent glass can suddenly bring Laura back to mind.

The play ends by joining Tom’s absence to the family’s continuing life in St. Louis. Through the imagined barrier of soundproof glass, Amanda comforts Laura; Laura raises her head and smiles, and then blows out the candles as Tom finishes speaking. The city is therefore not simply the place he escapes. It remains the setting of the farewell he remembers and the origin of the attachment that travel cannot extinguish.