Our Town is a play that tells the seemingly insignificant story of all small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners. The story focuses on two families of the town, the Gibbs and the Webbs, and how they live their lives. The writer of Our Town, Thornton Wilder, has said “The play is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Wilder’s attempt is exceptionally successful and conveys an important message about the significance of the smallest events in life.
One seemingly unimportant event of the play is the conversation George Gibbs and Emily Webb have while drinking ice-cream sodas in Mr. Morgan’s store. Before this, Emily had told George that he was being too self-absorbed recently. She apologizes,
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but George tells her not to and that he’s glad she said this as he needed to hear it. At the store, they both admit that they had been noticing and thinking of each other all the time. George tells Emily that he will not be attending State Agricultural College because he found the person he wanted to be with. He says “I think that’s just as important as college is, and even more so” (72). Emily tells George that she has been wanting to be with him for a while. After this, George walks Emily home. While this whole conversation may seem small and insubstantial, in the grand scheme of things it is a very important moment in the lives of these kids. This is the moment both George and Emily know they want to get married and spend the rest of their lives together. It leads them on to create a family of their own., further leading to the death of Emily. All of this, simply a result of talking over some ice-cream sodas, displaying the true importance of this apparently insubstantial moment in George and Emily’s lives. Emily’s death and revisiting of her twelfth birthday further demonstrates how the little things in life are valuable.
After Emily’s death, she arrives at the cemetery and joins the others who were buried there. Once here, Emily wishes to revisit a moment of her life. The others warn her not to, as it would be painful. The Stage Manager tells her it would be painful knowing what the living are not aware of, such as who dies and what becomes of everyone. Emily does not understand this and chooses to visit the day of her twelfth birthday. She returns to her twelfth birthday and everything was normal. Emily, for the first time, realizes her mother was once young. She experiences the rest of the day, receiving gifts, and tries to call out to her mother, saying “Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. I can’t look at everything hard enough”(105). No one hears anything she says. After realizing everything is moving too fast and she does not have time to appreciate everything, she says goodbye to all the small things she will miss, like clocks ticking and coffee, and returns to the cemetery. From this experience, Emily learned that everything in life is special. Only in death did Emily fully appreciate everything she had. This blatantly shows Wilder trying to convey the message that everyone should learn to appreciate the little things in …show more content…
life. The town of Grover’s Corners is small in the grand context of time and space.
This helps Wilder in achieving his goal in displaying the importance of life’s small events. In Act One, the Stage Manager has Professor Willard and Editor Webb report information to the audience about the town’s population, geography, religions, and political beliefs of the town. This serves the purpose of showing how ordinary Grover’s Corners is. Also in Act One, the Stage Manager discusses a time capsule the citizens of Grover’s Corners are putting together. In this time capsule they put newspapers, a Bible, a copy of the Constitution, and a copy of Shakespeare’s plays. The Stage Manager even throws in a copy of Our Town. The Stage Manager says “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” The time capsule is a way to build up the importance of the small events and aspects of daily life, demonstrating that people want certain things to be recorded and remembered forever. The inclusion of a copy of the play is a way for people to remember and appreciate daily life. Wilder is saying that everything included in the time capsule is an important part of life that should be remembered and appreciated, despite it all seeming very
trivial. In Our Town, Thornton Wilder tries to explain the importance of the seemingly insignificant aspects of life. By creating moments that seem inconsequential, he is able to display their true significance. Everything in life, even the smallest of things, should be treasured. Only in death does one truly learn to value all aspects of life. Our Town truly does “find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”
The theme of this play is centered around time; the value of the little time we have been given and how that time should be used to live for what is right and what truly matters.
The play teaches are very important lesson on being too cautious. When faced with a small problem like a power outage, the residents of a small town turn on each other. It shows how vulnerable and paranoid humans can be. At the end of the play, the narrator says that this is something that could happen among humans anywhere, it is not just confined to the ?Twilight Zone?. This is a departure from most other episodes, which end, ?only in the Twilight Zone?. This show, which broadcasted during the Cold War, is meant to demonstrate horrible things that could come from people being too paranoid and distrustful.
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.
Because the mother is living in a world of depression a dark wall has wrapped itself around her. Worrying solemnly about the life of her daughter, the mother is neglecting to appreciate the positive attributes her daughter is presenting. Emily is a gifted comedian, "Where does it come from, that comedy?" (p.159) being a comedian during the Great Depression is almost as rare as finding water during an extensive drought. If the mother wasn't as depressed she would be able to appreciate the comedy that Emily is passionate for. The mother's character is left in a state of helplessness reaching out beyond depression to view the comedian inside her daughter.
...s obsessive with keeping homer by her side forever. Miss Emily becomes mentally unstable and poisons homer. I do believe that the fatalities and changes she goes through have a greater effect on her emotions and actions than the townspeople and readers see without analyzing the story. Argiro states that, “The story is an allegory of misreading signifying backwardness, mystification and psychopathology…” (par.50). Miss Emily is misunderstood by the townspeople and is resistant to the changes around her as well in her life.
I believe Thornton Wilder’s purpose for writing this play is to show in a comical and serious way that mankind has always been on the edge of disaster and will probably always be. When writing this play Wilder wanted to represent the ongoing struggles of the human race. He wanted to focus on the situation of a family under successive devastations while sticking together. In this play the Antrobus family goes through ice, flood, ...
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.
From the beginning of Emily's life she is separated from those she needed most, and the mother's guilt tears at the seams of a dress barely wrinkled. Emily was only eight months old when her father left her and her mother. He found it easier to leave than to face the responsibilities of his family's needs. Their meager lifestyle and "wants" (Olsen 601) were more than he was ready to face. The mother regrettably left the child with the woman downstairs fro her so she could work to support them both. As her mother said, "She was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes" (601). Eventually it came to a point where Emily had to go to her father's family to live a couple times so her mother could try to stabilize her life. When the child returned home the mother had to place her in nursery school while she worked. The mother didn't want to put her in that school; she hated that nursery school. "It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be toge...
The pointedness of the play is created through a distinct plot path. The observer is lead through the story, seeing first how greatly Amanda Wingfield influences her children. Secondly, the play-goer notes how Tom Wingfield desperately struggles and writhes emotionally in his role of provider- he wants more than just to be at home, taking care of his all-too-reminiscent mother and emotionally stunted sister. Tom wants to get out from under his mother’s wing; his distinct ambitions prevent him from being comfortable with his station in life. Lastly, Laura struggles inside herself; doing battle against her shyness, Laura begins to unfurl a bit with Jim, but collapses once again after Jim announces his engagement and leaves her, again. Each character struggles and thrashes against their places in life, but none of them achieve true freedom. This plot attests to the fact that true change and freedom can only come through the saving power of God Almighty and Jesus Christ, and by letting go of the past.
Throughout the story, the narrator shows how Emily was holding on to the past when everybody else was moving forward in the present and she didn’t want to make changes. Even though there were many deaths that occurred throughout the story, Emily at no time accepted the fact that they actually died. She wasn’t willing to move forward into the future. As seen in the text:
The time frame of Miss Emily Grierson to her was the greatest time era, which was the "Old South';. How do we know that she wanted to stay in the time era of the "Old South'; is when the new generation moved into Jefferson and asked Emily for taxes. When they did this she ranted and raved that Colonel Sartoris has written her a letter in which relieves her of any taxes. She told the tax collectors "See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.'; The fact that the tax collectors could not see Colonel Sartoris is because Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years. Even the furniture that she had was not updated. Emily's parlor was furnished with heavy, leather-covered furniture that was cracked from not being used. She had been trapped in the ways "Old South';, and did not care to change as time went by.
In act one when the stage manager pulls Mr. Webb out of the play to talk with him on page 528, the lady in the box asks "Oh Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover's Corners?". Mr. Webb her, there isn't much culture the way she might think, but "... we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: We like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of the seasons..." These are the things that the people of Grover's Corners appreciate, the things we take for granted.
Emily’s isolation from the townspeople, throughout her life, would have had many negative effects on her psychological development. Her father had an inflated sense of pride; he perceived an exalted power in the value of his family name. He uses this pride to drive away all of Emily’s suitors, leaving her a spinster at age thirty. When he perishes, the narrator feels pity for Miss Emily, even attempting to rationalize the three days she refused to give up his body for burial, and her insistence that he was not dead. “Emily became an emotional orphan in search of the father who had been taken from her” (Scherting 400). Her father was the only relationship available to Emily, and with his death; she has nothing and no one. This makes her intentions to murder and cling to Homer’s body, an act of control because by committing the act in secrecy, no one can destroy her illusions and take Homer away from her like they did her
Living in Grover’s Corner can be an eye opener to wanting to modernize and live in the a world where new things happen to help instead of hinder, or it can be a lesson that teaches you how being close and doing things that your family approve can be a good quality in life. The Play “Our Town” lets you see the play in your own point of view. Either you can see living in a small community and not having much privacy as a good quality or you can think that being so close to your neighbors is a bad thing. Either way the play shows us that caring for each other and helping each other out is something you have to work on and become better. The play lets us know as long as we live our life as we want no one can take that from us.
An ironic ending is also foretold by the town’s setting being described as one of normalcy. The town square is described as being “between the post office and the bank;” every normal town has these buildings, which are essential for day-to-day functioning. The townspeople also establish a normal, comfortable setting for the story. The children are doing what all typical kids do, playing boisterously and gathering rocks. The woman of the town are doing what all stereotypical females do, “exchang[ing] bits of gossip.” The men are being average males by chatting about boring day-to-day tasks like “planting and rain, tractors and taxes.”