Small Town Life In The Play Our Town By Thornton Wilder

The play Our Town was written by Thornton Wilder in 1938, and has continued to be widely performed to this day. This play can be viewed as an allegory with both literal and symbolic levels of meaning. Small-town everyday life is an apparent literal meaning of Our Town. The play opens in the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, which has a population of merely 3,149, including the Postal District (23). The entire first act focuses on two families in Grover’s Corners, the Gibbses and the Webbs, as they go about their typical daily routines for a work and school day: getting dressed, preparing and eating breakfast, and leaving for another average day in their relatively repetitive lives. This theme of ordinary small-town life is made drastically apparent in the first act, with a very shallow level of symbolism.

These two young people are representative of the typical American couple of the time. Both George and Emily are very young. The date of their wedding is July 7th, 1904, immediately following their high school commencement ceremony (48). Emily’s mother, Myrtle Webb, is upset that her daughter will be leaving her home. She says. “there was Emily eating her breakfast as she’s done for seventeen years and now she’s going off to eat it in someone else’s house.” (76). During this time period many young people were wed when they were very young, sometimes even before they finished high school. Adding to their typical small-town lives, George and Emily followed the typical life path that nearly everyone did at the time of going to school then marrying and having children at quite a young age. The symbolic level of meaning is moderately deep, as it is not blatantly obvious that George and Emily represent the typical American