Week three, Our Town – Thornton Wilder (1938)
According to Thornton Wilder’s nephew, Tappan Wilder, it is commonly believed that Our Town is staged at least once every night somewhere in the United States. In this mini-lecture, I want to explore what might make this play so popular, and investigate whether critics are right to call it a distinctly American play.
Social, historical, political, cultural, biographical contexts
1. Brief biography of Wilder.
2. Attacks on Wilder the novelist: Michael Gold’s socio-political criticism
§ Originally, Thornton Wilder was a novelist. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), about eighteenth-century Peruvian life, won him the Pulitzer Prize for the first time.
§ Other novels (about Rome and classical Greece) were not so successful, and in October 1930 a Marxist critic called Michael Gold wrote a scathing review of Wilder’s novel The Woman of Andros, calling him ‘The Prophet of the Genteel Christ’, and accusing him of being out of touch with social problems such as the financial crisis of 1929 and the Depression that had taken hold of the country.
§ Wilder had said that he wished to re-introduce a sense of religion to American literature, but Gold called this [SLIDE] “a pastel, pastiche, dilettante religion, without the true neurotic blood and fire, a daydream of homosexual figures in graceful gowns moving archaically among the lilies. It is Anglo-Catholicism, that last refuge of the American literary snob”. He accused Wilder of being concerned with ‘little lavender tragedies’.
§ Such criticism was not just supposed to criticise Wilder’s politics, but was clearly anti-homophobic in sentiment – lavender being a colour commonly associated with effeminacy from the 1920s onwards. Nevertheless, Gold’s writing was designed to expose a fundamental problem with American writing: that at a time of great economic hardship, of strikes and unrest amongst the workforce, work like Wilder’s did not address social problems. Gold and fellow critics believed that art had a social role to play.
§ Is Our Town a reaction? Wilder represented Gold in Our Town in the form of the ‘belligerent man at the back of the auditorium’ who challenges Mr. Webb in the first act. It is noticeable that having made his challenge, this man, whose question sounds as if it might have come straight out of an essay since it sounds artificial in contrast to Mr. Webb’s colloquialisms, disappears into the back of the theatre without waiting for an answer, as if he was more interested in making his voice heard than actually receiving an answer to his question.
§ In this staged conflict is Wilder’s challenge back at Gold – that in his obsession for a socially-relevant drama, Gold commits the same kind of sin of which he accused Wilder: being detached from the most basic choices, decisions and actions that make us what we are. So when Wilder and his actors show us – and knowledge of the showing is very important, both for theatrical reasons and for emotional ones – scenes where people are chatting to the milkman, or having a soda, or stringing beans together, he is drawing attention to those daily rituals and rhythms that identify an American life in an American community.
§ David Eldridge: ‘Our Town is escapist, but self-consciously and defiantly so, acknowledging the divisive issues of ethnic diversity, economic hardship and social injustice, but then deliberately dismissing them – in pointed rejection of the Left’s contentions that only writing about the immediate problems of the day could be significant.’ (American Culture in the 1930s, p.58.)
§ There are hints at engagement certainly: the Stage Manager says in Act I that the ‘Polish town’s across the tracks’ (p.6), and Professor Willard notes that the Native American blood has ‘now entirely disappeared’ (p.24).
§ Fact that it doesn’t engage, makes Our Town a different play on the course; a more subtle treatment of the time because it looks very specifically at one place in order to look much more generally at the same time.
§ Anne Fletcher: ‘Given the arduous decade of the 1930s, Our Town balances faith with existential alienation, and enjoins us to remain alive in the moment and to practice mindfulness of others.’ (Anne Fletcher, ‘Reading Across the 1930s’, in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. by David Krasner, p.122.)
3. What makes an American?
§ In 1950, Wilder gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, Wilder explained that [SLIDE] ‘Americans are abstract. They are disconnected. They have a relation, but it is to everywhere, to everybody, and to always. That is not new, but it is very un-European.’ Europeans have their own centuries of history. America’s ‘newness’ allows it to have this relation; extent of immigration; spreading out across the country; great diversity.
§ This relationship of the individual to past times and future times, to this country and to all countries is clearly explored in Our Town, particularly in the third act, but also in scenes like the one at the very end of the first act, where Rebecca tells George about the letter which her friend Jane Crofut received from her minister. The address on the envelope, placing Jane not just in relation to her family farm in Grover’s Corners, but also in relation to the Earth, the Universe, and the Mind of God, simultaneously suggests Jane’s importance and her relative unimportance, and sets up the way in which the dead quickly lose their connections to the living in the hope of achieving something eternal. Comfort for those who have suffered during the Depression? Or the idea that there have been depressions before and in the scheme of things this one doesn’t matter?
§ Likewise in Act III, STAGE MANAGER: […] Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.
§ Wilder uses the Stage Manager’s character to press his point: the dialect of a New Hampshire man is colloquial, even folksy: ‘take’m out and look at’m’, but his point is very serious. It is as if his crucial point is disguised in the language and appearance of the Stage Manager. An idea that reflects the point itself: we do not realise the value of human life. Yet this is not just folk wisdom: ‘for five thousand years’ suggests someone well-read and well aware of teachings from past, even classical tradition.
Wilder’s influences: European, modernist
Pirandello and Stein
§ Wilder claimed that Emily’s long speech in the final act was inspired by a passage in The Odyssey, and that the whole of that third act was an idea taken from Dante’s Purgatory. It is not surprising that Wilder should credit these sources, since they support his general claim about the play: that it deals with the specific or the small in order to refer to the universal. Thus he hopes to suggest literary connections between Our Town and the mythical characters and situations in Homer and Dante, not because he necessarily thinks that his play is as great a work of literature, but because he wants to suggest that this town and these people could be anywhere at any time, and have great importance in themselves.
§ In 1921, whilst staying in Rome to study archaeology, Wilder attended the premiere of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Teatro Valle. In that play we seem to be watching a director and his actors, rehearse a play, but the stage is then invaded by a family who insist that their own story be told. Pirandello’s demand that it should not be ‘the false truth of the stage but the positive, undeniable truth of life’ that is evident from the play clearly had an effect on Wilder and his concept of what a play should be, and this transferred into the stripped-down staging of Our Town, and the acknowledgement that the play was a theatrical presentation, a mirror designed to allow audience members to reflect upon their lives.
§ ‘Life imitated is life raised to a higher power’: what does Wilder mean by this?
§ Wilder was a friend of Gertrude Stein, the experimental modernist author of, amongst many other works, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, and Geographical History of America, which Wilder claimed had influenced his writing of the play. Stein argued that the play should be considered as a landscape, thus minimizing the importance of psychological depth in character and linear narrative. Instead, Stein emphasized the importance of language and playing with language, and the relationships that can exist merely by presenting characters in the same space and time on stage.
§ Wilder: ‘On the stage it is always now’. About that boy Joe Crowell: being plunged into the moment and having the death of someone presented to you is particularly poignant, especially since Joe has just left the stage. Presence is all.
§ This playing with time and space is typically modernist: through the Stage Manager, time is distorted. As soon as we are introduced to Doctor Gibbs, we hear about his death. (Act I.) Wilder picks key moments in history to focus in on the town: 1901/1904/1913 (and, briefly, 1899). Pre-car time; before Americans go off to fight – and die – in the First World War. As Christopher Bigsby points out, it is noticeable that the most significant events in Our Town (the marriage and Emily’s death) both occur off-stage.
§ Arthur Miller: ‘Wilder sees his characters in this play not primarily as personalities, as individuals, but as forces, and he individualizes them only enough to carry the freight, so to speak, of their roles as forces.’ (The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, p.79.)
§ Is this a reasonable comment?
5. Sentimentality and nostalgia
Critics like Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times, claimed that the play had [SLIDE] ‘escaped from the formal barrier of the modern theatre into the quintessence of acting, thought and speculation’, and that [b]y stripping the play of everything that is not essential, Mr. Wilder has given it a profound, strange, unworldly significance.’
Subsequent productions (and the first film version) have been criticised for the way in which they over-sentimentalise the play. According to Edward Albee, ‘Our Town is one of the toughest, saddest plays every written. Why is it always produced as hearts and flowers?’
Wilder was an intellectual artist. He drew on the great theatre traditions of Chinese and Japanese Noh drama, as well as classical literature and Dante as foundations for his work. But he also embraced European modernism, and if he does not – in his plays at least – seem to strive as urgently as O’Neill and the Provincetown Players for a distinctly American drama, he needs to be reclaimed from the sentimentalism which is often associated with his work, and regarded as an influential figure in the avant-garde theatre of the twentieth-century.
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