14 May 2014
Analysis of “Our Town”
Thorton Wilder’s Our Town is a play set in the early 1900’s and was first performed without scenery. The opening of the play consist of the stage manager telling all about Grover’s Corner, which is the small town where the play takes place. Wilder’s intention was to make it sound like any small town in the United States.
Act I Daily Life
The stage manager starts out the play by telling us the date which is May 7, 1901. This alone will bring you back to a time where things are very different for people. He tells us a little about the town’s people, he mentions the paperboy whom will later die in World War 1. The state manager is telling us about this town and you have to imagine there was no scenery so everything you see will be in your head or imaginary. He paints a good picture and you can start to see the town. He points out places and house where people live and people themselves. There are two main families, The Webb’s and the Gibb’s. As the morning is starting to appear the stage manager starts introducing us to the characters and a little about them. The stage manager informs the audience that Mr. and Mrs. Gibb’s have died before this scene actually takes place.
Dr. Gibbs was busy that morning, he had just delivered twins. As Dr. Gibbs was on his way home he stops and talks to the paperboy, his name is Joe Cromwell. We find out that Joe is very talented and probably one of the smartest kids in school but that doesn’t really matter because he would die in the War. When Dr. Gibbs gets home that morning he is greeted by his wife with coffee. She doesn’t say much except that she would like him to talk to their son George about helping around the house more. The Webb’s li...
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...s is not directly explained but more by a person on stage with nothing more than words to get your imagination going and your brain thinking that this is all of us. Wilder wanted to take us there let us experience what he saw in his own small town. Life is very ordinary, when the time comes to do something extra ordinary then it should be taken. Dreams are something that everyone has, George and Emily both had them. They didn’t focus on them and instead they lived by what they knew, what was expected. If anything at all is taken from this play it would be to not let opportunity pass you by, it may be your only chance at it.
The life in “Our Town” is a reminder to everyone that life is a gift, it should be taken every day like it is your last. We all live in “Our Town”, there is nothing different about George and Emily’s life as there is in modern day.
The first half of the play concerns a celebration - twins Girlie Delaney and Dibs Hamilton are celebrating their 80th birthdays, and with the gathering of their families comes the eruption of simmering resentments and anxieties about the future of Dibs and Farley Hamilton's farm, Allandale. The second half starts with a funeral and portrays the shattering of the tenuous links that held the family together.
The story begins in “Catfish Row” a small coastal town based on the real town of Cabbage Row in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1920’s. The main protagonist of the story and leading man is Porgy, a disabled beggar man who is known for riding his goat cart around Charleston. Bess is the leading lady of the opera and is in an unhealthy relationship with Crown, a powerful, violent, alcoholic, short-tempered stevedore (dockworker). Act I starts with a lullaby being sang to a small baby by a young mother named Clara, as she sings the men of Catfish Row prepare for a crap game, prior to the game, Crown purchases whisky and Cocaine from the Sportin’ Life, the local drug dealer of the town, during the crap game, Crown who is very drunk kills a local man named Robbins, Crown flees Catfish Row and leaves Bess to fend for herself. Sportin’ Life who is attracted to Bess, he gives her cocaine and asks her to join him in New York, Bess refuses and is now alone, she has no where to go, she is rejected by all of the Catfish Row resident, all except for Porgy who takes her in. A funeral takes place for Robbins, Serena, Robbins’ wife acts very coldly towards Bess when she offers her donation to help pay for Robbins’s funeral cost until Bess explains that she is no longer with Crown, and now lives with Porgy. Soon after, a detective enters and tells Serena that if...
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1897 to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Wilder. In 1906, Amos Wilder was appointed American Consul General, and his family moved with him to Hong Kong. Thornton Wilder only lived in Hong Kong for 6 months, moved back to the United States with his mother, and then in 1911 rejoined his father in Shanghai for a year. Wilder attended Oberlin College for two years, moved with his family to New Haven, Connecticut, and entered Yale University. He wrote his first full-length play in 1920, which appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine. After receiving his B.A. at Yale, he traveled and taught French. In 1926, he received his M.A. in French Literature from Princeton. Thornton Wilder effectively illustrates the importance of life’s repetition in Our Town through the cycle of life, George and Emily’s love, and the playing of “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds.”
People always say how they would love to live in a small town. That they love the feeling of unity and being close with everyone in the city. In Our Town, Wilder (the author) infers to the fact that the town endures zero privacy (everyone knows everyone’s business), expectations, and people seem to be going through the motions of life, and he does not intend to idealize Grover’s Corners as an establishment of uncompromising brotherly love. Wilder makes a point to include in the play characters who criticize small town life, and Grover’s Corners specifically. I believe that Our Town is a criticism of small town life because there is no personal privacy and people go through life hoping to live up to everyone else’s expectations, missing life’s moments of happiness.
The characters inhabit their private realities in order to detach themselves from a world that confuses and alienates them. Laura, Amanda, Tom, and Jim prefer to immerse themselves in their narrow view of time rather than embrace the flow of time. Laura remains isolated as she has failed to find love. Amanda judges Laura as she imposes her own narrow expectations on her. Tom believes that he can escape reality and become inseparable from the imaginary worlds of movies. Jim's idealistic view of Laura suggests that he is out of touch with reality. The play demonstrates that the characters desire to escape reality due to their inability to live in the present and embrace the flow of
“The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.”- (Kazantzakis). The play Our Town, written by Thornton Wilder, takes place in the small town of Grover’s Corners. The residents of Grover’s Corners are content with their lives and do not mind the small town they are living in. Emily Webb, a girl living in Grover’s Corners does not think secondly about her life… until it is over. This play can be compared to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where men are kept prisoner until one man is able to escape. Only after escaping the cave, does the man realize how much better the life outside is, and truly understands that his previous life was a prison. Emily's crossing from life to death is a parallel to the the
The theme of Our Town is that people do not truly appreciate the little things in daily life. This theme is displayed throughout the entire play. It starts in the beginning with everybody just going through their daily life, occasionally just brushing stuff off or entirely not doing or appreciating most things. But as you progress through the story you begin to notice and squander on the thought that the people in the play do not care enough about what is truly important. By the end of this play you realize that almost everybody does not care enough for the little things as they should, instead they only worry about the future, incessantly worrying about things to come.
Have you ever stopped to realize life for what it truly means? Every day we go about our lives taking things for granted without even realizing the value in every moment we are given. Playwright Thornton Wilder portrays this message in the play Our Town and he does it using unorthodox theatrical approaches. By using the Stage Manager to break the “fourth-wall”, Wilder is able to have a stronger impact on those who are listening. Wilder also creates not only a seemingly boring town, but also extremely bland lives of flat characters. By doing this, he is able to emphasize events such as marriage, birth, and death with characters Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Through them, Wilder intentionally shows how beautiful life itself is, especially the seemingly insignificant moments. He uses the technique of manipulating time by rushing through each act as well as including
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
People who thinks of Thornton Wilder primarily in terms of his classic novella “Our Town,” The Bridge of San Luis Rey will seem like quite a switch. For one thing, he has switched countries; instead of middle America, he deals here with Peru. He has switched eras, moving from the twentieth century back to the eighteenth. He has also dealt with a much broader society than he did in “Our Town,” representing the lower classes and the aristocracy with equal ease. But despite these differences, his theme is much the same; life is short, our expectations can be snuffed out with the snap of a finger, and in the end all that remains of us is those we have loved.
The story takes place from an indefinite point in the future; the events of the play are framed by memories. Tom Wingfield usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues. Tom remembers the winter and spring of 1937 in their apartment in St. Louis. The play is sentimental and not realistic. The main characters in this play are Amanda Wingfield appears to be a faded southern belle that has delusions of grandeur, controlling, pushy, a bit overwhelming, and is stuck in the past and how things used to be. She has been abandoned by what I understood to be her husband and the father of her two children Laura and Tom. Laura is the daughter of Amanda and the older sister of Tom that is slightly impaired not only physically but mentally. She lets her limp make her self-conscious, insecure and fragile –from this she has isolated herself from the outside world only interacting with her mother who treats her like a child and is very forceful and pushy with her and her brother who tries to treat her like there is nothing wrong with her, but he too treats her as fragile minded little girl. Tom is the son of Amanda and the younger brother of Laura. Tom is the narrator and the protagonist of the play, yet he is also a character in it. He is a worker at a shoe warehouse to support his sister and mother and himself. He despises his job and secretly wants to pursue his dream of being a poet. He wants to get away from his mother and sister and live his own life, but he is trapped by his guilt and not wanting to leave his sister. He fears that is he leaves they won’t be able to sustain themselves in their apartment seeing as since their father abandoned his mother he has taken over the ro...
The theme of the play has to do with the way that life is an endless cycle. You're born, you have some happy times, you have some bad times, and then you die. As the years pass by, everything seems to change. But all in all there is little change. The sun always rises in the early morning, and sets in the evening. The seasons always rotate like they always have. The birds are always chirping. And there is always somebody that has life a little bit worse than your own.
One of the main symbols of the story is the setting. It takes place in a normal small town on a nice summer day. "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full summer day; the flowers were blooming profusely and the grass was richly green." (Jackson 347).This tricks the reader into a disturbingly unaware state,
The major events in the play, all develop around the memories of Tom Wingfield. The character, who takes care of his mother and sister, due to his father who left them at a young age. The next major event is when Jim who was a potential suitor for Amanda, comes and eats dinner with the family. Later on in the dinner, Amanda learns that her suitor Jim has girlfriend.
No one knows what tomorrow has in store for him and when he lives his life daily just to please another person, uncertainty magnifies itself. The lives of the characters are evidence of insecurity and uncertainty about who they are and what their purpose is in the world. Each character is searching for something outside of them to obtain happiness, chasing dreams and dismissing reality as best they can. The parties, the alcohol, and infidelity are all outlets that mask who they truly are and the fear that they really feel. They make special provisions to separate themselves from the lower classes and anyone who is unlike them. All the people in this town are suffering from the same enigmas.