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Popular Culture Review
Williams incorporated this popular song to chastise the complacent generation
that looked for “compensation” in dance halls instead of world affairs. His
reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella, his
signature symbol carried to the appeasement meetings with Hitler in Munich in
September 1938, foreshadows rainy, threatening weather for the couples at the
Paradise Dance Hall. It wasn’t a dewy sunrise awash with romantic passion that
awaited Tom’s generation but, rather, the terror of war caused by Chamberlain’s
folding before Hitler’s demands.
“The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” resonates deeply on an
autobiographical level as well. When Tom describes the interior of the dance
hall, he emphasizes that “Sometimes the lights were turned out except for a large
glass sphere that hung from the ceiling. It would run slowly about and filter the
dusk with delicate rainbow colors” (179). That glass sphere, a trademark of
dance halls in the 1920s and 1930s, equivalent to strobe lights illuminating
dance clubs in the 1970s and 1980s, suggested illusory romance and happy
times, just as the descending glass ball in Times Square does every New Year’s
Eve. But, symbolically, the large Paradise glass sphere in Menagerie is
analogous to Laura’s smaller glass collection where she invested her time and
her hopes, her solipsistic dream world. Thus Tom links his sister’s menagerie to
the larger world of the Paradise Dance Hall, both promising the escape that Tom
himself sought. Yet the glass ball at the Paradise could not “filter the dusk” (the
hardships) any more than Laura’s glass collection could. Glass and hearts both
break in Menagerie.
But “Waiting for the Sunrise” suggests an WfV