Mohammad Hasan
Mrs. Loux
English 8 P
24 January 2023
Universality
Our Town is a play that most people in the world can find relatable due to its sense of universality. Thornton Wilder, the author of Our Town, wrote this play so that it has components that make everyone feel a sense of nostalgia. One of these many universal components is life. Everyone lives and dies, as do the characters in Our Town, but in real life, people do not get a chance to look back at their life. In this way, the characters in Our Town have the chance to at least regret their lack of appreciation. Thronton Wilder intentionally makes the story like this so that the reader can vicariously regret their life as well and use this as a reminder to fully live their life. In particular, Thornton Wilder uses Emily Webb, Simon Stimson, and the Stage Manager to display the idea of appreciating life while living it.
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She was living life carelessly until she died. After she died, she started regretting things she didn’t pay attention to while alive. Emily says, “ They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?”(Wilder 96). Through this quote, she conveyed that humans, while they are alive, don’t appreciate things until they’re taken away because in this case you can take the little boxes and think of them as standards or normal things. By saying they are “shut up in these” means that they don’t think about doing things that would make them happy and instead focus on fitting the standards. This matters because Emily was also like that when she was alive, but death, which took away these everyday things, made her appreciate them and want to experience them again like most real humans. Real-living people are also pretty careless about their life until
Emily’s Mental Deterioration After getting over the initial shock of finding out that the mysterious woman that everyone was talking about was going to sleep each night with a decaying body next to her, it makes sense for the reader to question her mental state. If the reader took a closer look at the town’s description of her, they will realize that as time went on, Emily’s will power began to deteriorate. When she was young, she was the topic of everybody’s conversation, however, she did not let that bother her and walked down the streets with her head held high. Emily took over the old house after her father’s death and kept a few servants around to keep the house tidy, nonetheless, the outside of the house was not kept in the best of conditions.
These towns, each with its unique characteristics and inhabitants, serve as a microcosm of society. They reflect the diversity and complexity of human nature, with people who are flawed, kind, helpful, and accepting. Through their interactions with the people in these small towns, Emily and Sloan experience the power of human connection and kindness. They learn that true identity transcends labels and appearances, and it is the genuine connections and relationships that bring out the best in
Since Emily is so off from the world, this makes the understanding of what she is dealing with even harder. If she was more outspoken with the people of the town, rumors would have not grown about her, and caused even more
Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, is about a small, fictional town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners. It takes place in the year 1901. In the play, we see two families, the Gibbs family and the Webb family in which kids grow up, get married, and in turn, die. Time flies by in the life of the characters and before you know it they are all grown up. The two main characters, George and Emily, grow up together and get married.
Throughout Our Town, Wilder depicts
Also, from dying at such a young age, she never got to grow old with George and see her kids grow up, fall in love, and have children. Emily took what little time she had alive for granted and never really realized it until she passed
But we don’t know why Emily was the way she was or why she did what she did. Emily is like any woman or girl who feel insecure or not sure how she feels and is just confused on how to handle things going on in her life. Emily didn’t live the life like any other woman in her town. Being in the situation she was in was, what choices would you make? There are some things we can’t explain like why Emily kill Homer Barron and why she kept her father's corpse before letting anyone know that he was dead.
Emily is mentally separated from the townspeople, and is stuck in the time period of when she was once beautiful. Because of her isolation and her actions that followed, the people around her portray her as mentally ill. The isolation from society causes people to think of them differently. As for themselves, they become unknowing to what is happening outside their mental or physical separation and grow lonely and
Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938. The scenes in the play are allegedly taking place between 1901-1913. Many thematic elements of the play are timeless; they can be seen even in modern times. The change of characters, setting, time and similar aspects does nothing to change the plot and overall meaning of scenes in the play.
The previous lavishness of the “big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies…set on what had once been [the] most select street” (437) indicates that Emily came from a well-off family that was probably highly respected. The whiteness of the house can be taken to symbolize the innocence of her youth, and that as she got older her macabre habits manifested themselves and polluted that innocence, leaving the house dingy and tainted. The condition of the house when Emily dies is that of a worn down vestige to the past, “an eyesore among eyesores” (437), representing how the towns people saw her. She was a curiosity, a clandestine entity that could only be unraveled after her death when there was no one left to safe guard the dark secrets of her house. The house stands as a monument to a lost time and a testament to tradition that has no place in the modern era, much like Emily
Her mother is persuaded to send her to a covalent home and Emily had a difficult time there because they didn’t allow any of the girls to keep personal belongings or "love anyone" (Olsen). After Emily came back from the covalent home, she became distant and refused her mother's attempts of comfort. A bright spot in Emily's life is her gift in comedy. The biggest obstacle for Emily would be not believing that she is helpless to the hardships life has thrown at
Instead Wilder makes an effort to create characters who condemn small town life. By doing so Wilder emphasizes the imperfection that is found among every
She was alone, she was humiliated by the town, she had to hide away because she was not able to cope. In Tim O’Brien’s article he states, “After her death, Emily is reunited with the other members of her southern class …”, which means, in death, with the people she loved she will no longer be alone” (O’Brien
Just blind people” (Wilder 109). This shows that Emily realizes that it’s not only her who doesn’t appreciate life, but it’s everyone else. People just go day to day motions thinking “It’s just another day,” and it’s not positive. They don’t think about how happy that they should be that they have another day to live. Some people are not fortunate enough to live another
He can not handle all the trauma he went through and commits suicide to finally make them stop. Emily is not any different since she also suffers from depression. Due to being left alone all her life she became isolated to the point that, “she went out very little… people hardly saw her at all” (Faulkner 1). A key point in depression is isolation. The sadness she felt had accumulated to the point where she could no longer face people anymore.