Explain what The Glass Menagerie suggests about the human capacity for happiness.

In the beginning of Tennessee Williams's Expressionist
play, Glass Menagerie, the playwright
states,

The
scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic.  Memory takes a lot of poetic license. 
It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the
articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the
heart.

That memory is a key
element in this play is problematic because memory is in the heart, and it involves a
confrontation with the past in which one is not what one is now.  Thus, one often
creates illusions so that he/she can reconcile the past with the present.  This is the
case with Amanda, who reconstructs the past, creating wistful illusions of what has
really occurred or what will occur.  For instance, she often reflects on her gentleman
callers and how popular she was in order to feels a sense of having had happiness.  She
imagines Laura's marriage in an effort to effect happiness for Laura and contentment and
security for herself.  However, the nostalgia of Amanda for the past evinced in her
appearance in a dress of her youth indicates that Amanda has created an illusion and
thereby ignores the needs of her adult children.

Tom, too,
dwells in illusion, always going to the movies and dreaming of being a writer.  But,
rather than wistfully dreaming of the past like his mother, Tom dreams of the future. 
Yet, he cannot completely cut himself from the Wingfield tenement as he finds himself
looking toward it in the last scene;  therefore, his illusion is that of the future in
which he seeks happiness, but he is yet tied inextricably to the past and, thus,
prevented from acquiring this happiness.

For Laura, the
illusions are neither of the past and the future, but are, instead, the present, and
these are forced upon her. For, whenever she attempts to assert her independence and
achieve her own happiness, Amanda steps in and redirects her efforts.  One example is
the scene in which Amanda confronts Laura for not attending the Rubicund Business
College.  But, Laura does not want to attend; she tries to tell her mother how much
happier she was at the museum or the zoo, but Amanda will not listen.  Instead, her
mother makes arrangements for the gentleman caller and forces Laura to enter he dream of
security in her old age.

The Glass
Menagerie, a fragile collection of individuals, demonstrates how each
character's dream of success or happiness cannot be satisfied by the creation of an
illusion.  For, the characters own turbulent creative processes mask memory or the
future or even the present; thus they live without escape, without happiness, only with
illusion.  The final lines of Amanda are, indeed,
ironic,

"You don't know things anywhere!  You live
in a dream; you manufacture illusions.!"