Small town life
One of the major themes in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is small town life. The reason
Wilder chooses small town life to depict human life in general is because such form of
community and the types of people that it produces are archetypical and universal in
many respects. Along those lines, Our Town is a metaphor for our world and the town of
Grover’s Corners is Wilder’s microcosm of human life in general.
The title is OUR Town, as oppossed to my town or their town. It automatically calls to
mind the sense of togetherness and of a tight-knit community. Each character of Our
Town is observed solely in the context of the community and is depersonalized. They
merely embody stereotypes of how a mother, a father, a daughter, a son or a milkman, for
that matter, commonly look like.
At the heart of small town life is the schedule according to which generations of its
citizens live. As the acts of the play indicate, the entire life happens in three main acts,
birth, marriage, and death. But what makes this monotonous cycle, this repetitive chain of
events remarkable is what comes in between.
Each character is prototypical and has a fixed role within the community:
Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb are typical small town women, devoted mothers and wives the only career they’ll ever have. They make sure their children and husbands are
properly fed, clothed and well-behaved, their only outlet is choir practise and they enjoy
an occasional gossip. When it comes to her children, Mrs. Webb puts their physical
health before mental, which we see when she remarks to Emily at breakfast: You know
the rule as well as I do, no books at table. I’d rather have my children healthy than
bright. Also, she is very down-to-earth and tries to instil modesty in her children, which
is evident when she refuses to indulge her teenage daughter when she asks her mother
whether she is pretty enough. With Mrs. Gibbs we see signs of untypical broadness of
perspective, when one morning she tells Mrs. Webb of her wish to travel to Paris, and
says: Once in your life, before you die, you ought to see a country where they don’t talk
and speak in English and don’t even want to. However, her plans fall through, because of
the small-mindedness of her husband, Dr Gibbs, who thinks that after seeing Europe,
Grover’s Corners might not be good enough for him. As a quintessential mother, she tries
to prolong her role as much as possible, which is noticeable in the scene when she
advises her soon-to-be-married son to take an unbrella with him and worries that his
young wife won’t be competent to take care of him.
Dr Gibbs and Mr. Webb are dutiful husbands and respectful members of the community.
Dr Gibbs is a house-calling general practitioner, the kind that every small town has. He
has a typical provincial scepticism of what is outside his back yard and as every true
American, he regards visiting Civil War battlefields a dream holiday. His neighbour, Mr
Webb is the editor of the local paper called Sentinell, and is also important as a recorder
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of the daily life in town. We see him as a caring husband in an awkward conversation
with George on the wedding day.
The most typical small town characters are George and Emily, who are central to the
play, since it is through these two that the life cycle is portrayed. They grow up together,
walk to school each day and communicate homework results through their windows.
They forge a strong bond over the years that culminates in love and marriage. This is a
typical small town situation, where almost everyone knows each other, and it is likely
that a boy marries his neighbour/high school sweetheart right after graduation.
George Gibbs is an all-American boy, a decent young man, a high school baseball star
who plans to attend the State Agricultural School and falls in love with his childhood
friend. The same narrow-mindedness, but also an endearing ability to be happy with what
you have that we see in Dr Gibbs, are also present in George. Namely, he gives up his
football career and college and chooses to marry Emily and start working on his farm at a
very young age. Also, typically provincial reasoning can be observed in George’s parents
when they decide to let George marry because they fear that college life and city would
get him into bad ways. He is not very ambitious, even though he is elected class
president, and he only wishes to settle on his farm with Emily. His loyalty and
humbleness are indictors of harmony that awaits him and Emily, despite his immaturity
and the cold feet he gets on his wedding day.
Emily Webb is an intelligent girl, an excellent student and a conscientious daughter. She
takes pride in her grades but does not have any particular professional ambitions, as was
usual for girls at that time. She is gentle, but self-assured and easily articulates her
opinion. Emily is elected secretary and treasurer of her high school class, and marries
George right after graduation. Nine years later, she dies in childbirth, and it is then that
she takes on the main role by conveying the main points of the play – transience of
human life and beauty of every day rituals that we fail to appreciate while we are alive.
The good girl and the good boy timidly proclaim their love for one another in a typical
American fashion - over a strawberry soda.
Grover’s Corners has its outsiders as well. Rebecca, George’s younger sister, ponders
about the moon and she places Grover’s Corners in a wider, universal context thinking
about what is beyond. But more noticeably, the misfit of the town is Simon Stimson, the
church organist and choirmaster, and the town drunk. Simon battles with alcoholism for
years, but rather than helping, the polite New Englanders of Grover’s Corners limit their
concern for him to gossip. Small town boundaries, lack of art and provincialism stifle him
and he eventually resorts to suicide. As such, he is also a typical character, since each
American small town has a black sheep who sticks out.
The play celebrates small town life, with all its simple pleasures and the touching beauty
of its small everyday rituals, but there are some points in the play where the author
criticizes the townspeople. For example, they’re concern for social injustice mostly
comes down to gossiping about who’s poor and who’s rich. They do not cultivate art, and
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the biggest cultural event of the town is some girls playing piano at a High School
Commencement. On the other hand, he remarks how the townspeople enjoy the sun
rising, birds and plants. Fulfilment is important, and not where you attain it. In addition,
the townspeople’s fear of changes is benevolently ridiculed when the stage manager
remarks: ‘And now they’re bringing in these automobiles, the best thing is to just stay
home.’
What is central to small town life are the relationships among people, hence the hymn
‘Blessed be the Tie that Binds’ that emphasizes this on several occasions in the play.
Although the love between George and Emily is the pivotal relationship in the play, many
other ties exist, too. From the beginning, we witness the milkman and the paperboy
chatting with members of the Gibbs and Webb families as they deliver their goods.
Constable Warren is very concerned for the people. The children walk to school and
study together. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, next-door neighbors, meet in their yards to
talk. We get a glimpse of the Gibbs’s and the Webbs’s conversing with one another. As
Mrs. Gibbs puts it, “Tain’t natural to be lonesome.” Companionship is the most
important aspect of human life that fulfils the period between life and death, and is
unconsciously nurtured by the townspeople all along.
Everything is repetitive in Grover’s Corners. For example, the names on the headstones
in the graveyard are the exact same names of the people living in the town today. This
continuity creates tradition of which all the citizens are proud of. The tradition gives them
a sense of stability and belonging. Even when they deem Grover’s Corners dull, we are
told that each character loves Grover’s Corners and that young people usually come back
to town after college. Every day is similar to the previous and life is a routine that
becomes a ritual. The train whistle announces the new day, Howie Newsome brings the
milk, Constable Warren patrols around the town, a Crowell boy delivers the newspaper
(his brother Si will follow in his footsteps), neighbours Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb see
their children off to school, their husbands go about their business and their children,
Emily and George go to school together. However, if we see this routine as boring,
maybe even mind numbing, toward the end of the play, along with Emily, we learn the
value of those small things that give life beauty and diversity and that we take for
granted. This routine turned ritual connects the individual to global, personal to entire
humanity. Just as the citizens of Grover's Corners sit down to dinner each night, so too
did their forefathers, but also the citizens of ancient Greece, and the citizens of the world
a thousand years from now. This is where the universality of Grover’s Corners lies.
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