Quote 1
howard:
What’re yuh skeered of? You was a worm once!
melinda:
(Shocked) I wasn’t neither.
howard: You was
so! When the whole world was covered with water, there was nothin’
but worms and blobs of jelly. And you and your whole family was
worms!
A play intimately concerned with the
nature of education, Inherit the Wind begins with
an appropriate image of two young, inarticulate children discussing
a controversial modern theory. Their argument is a miniature form
of the play’s central conflicts: creationism versus evolutionism
and religious orthodoxy versus freedom of thought. Melinda reacts
to Howard in the same way that most of the people of Hillsboro react
to Bert Cates—she becomes frightened and calls him sinful. Although
Howard’s grip on evolutionary theory is rudimentary at best, the
new ideas to which Cates has exposed him clearly excite Howard.
Howard’s pronouncements humorously equate humans—specifically Melinda
and her family—with monkeys and worms. His disrespect for Melinda’s
father points to the threat these ideas pose to the social order
of a town like Hillsboro.
