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Accepted: 21 March 2024

First Online: 29 May 2024

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: The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

: No ethical approval is required for this article.

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: ¹All references to <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> will be from the 2016 Worldview edition (edited by Payal Nagpal).² New American Stagecraft was a scenographic movement that used ideas from European modernism for American theater practiced by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, among others.³ While scholarly attention has been given to touch, sensory experience or habit in literature and drama (see Abbie Garrington, <i>Haptic Modernism</i>, James Krasner’s <i>Home Bodies</i>, Joe Moshenska’s <i>Feeling Pleasures</i>, among others), they tend to overlook the specific subject of fidgeting.⁴ Lauren Berlant (2011, 1) argues that “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” She calls this optimism “stupid” in its “faith that adjustment to certain forms or practices of living and thinking—for example, the prospect of class mobility, the romantic narrative, normalcy, nationality, or a better sexual identity—will secure one’s happiness” (126).⁵ Here, I am paraphrasing the famous refrain (“I would prefer not to”) by Melville’s character Bartleby, whose resistance to the work imperative can be read as a precursor to Laura’s (Melville 1948, 24).⁶ Bigsby (1997, 32) explains Williams’s qualms with “the Cinderella story, with its account of moving from rags to riches, as a primary and destructive American myth, for it is the fate of his characters, and particularly those in his first Broadway success, to miss life’s party, to be left with no more than the ashes of a once-burning fire.”⁷ Discussing the intersection between disabled and queer positionalities, gender discourses, and anti-work politics, Chen, Khúc, and Kim (2023, 3) ask, “What political traction does the refusal of work hold for those who have typically been refused as workers?”⁸ Mao argues that despite high modernism’s (specifically Bloomsbury’s) resistance to the “commodification of the aesthetic,” their practice is nonetheless marked by certain guilt and justification of nonparticipation in the “production imperative.” He further points out that despite a deep mistrust of the imperative of production, modernists found it “as profoundly suspect as seductive” (Mao 1998, 21).⁹ This is reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s (1979) argument that the act of naming has traditionally been “a male prerogative.”¹⁰ I am using Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist ideas of the endless deferral of meaning of a sign and the modernist deconstruction of the transcendental signified to highlight the men’s aspirations that parallel this deconstruction (see Derrida 1982).¹¹ While critics like Bigsby, Kent, and Levy hold that the play is a vivid story of Laura’s wasted life, Andrzejewski, Cardullo, and Gupta identify resistant possibilities of the end.