Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Stages of Life
The division of the play’s narrative action into three
acts reflects Wilder’s division of human life into three parts:
birth, love and marriage, and death. The play opens at the dawn
of a new day with a literal birth: at the very beginning of Act
I, we learn that Dr. Gibbs has just delivered twins. Act II details
George and Emily’s courtship and marriage. Act III features a funeral
and delves into the possibilities of an afterlife. The overall arc
of the story carries the audience from the beginning of life to
its end. Our observation of the lives of the Gibbs and Webb families,
condensed into a few short hours, leads us to realize that the human
experience, while multifaceted, is nevertheless brief and precious.
Indeed, Wilder demonstrates how quickly the characters proceed from
stage to stage. George and Emily marry in Act II, but they appear
just as nervous and childish as they do in Act I. The second stage
of life has snuck up on them. This intermingling of the stages of
life recurs later, when the second stage of Emily’s life, her marriage,
is suddenly cut short when she dies in childbirth.
Natural Cycles
While Our Town spans the course of many
years, from 1899 through 1913, it also collapses its events into
the span of one day. It opens with a morning scene and ends with
a nighttime scene: Act I begins just before dawn, and Act III ends
at 11 P.M. The play also metaphorically spans
the course of a human life, tracing the path from birth in Dr. Gibbs’s
delivery of twins in the opening scene, to death in Emily’s funeral
in the final scene. The span of a life parallels the span of the
day: birth is related to dawn, and death is related to night. Wilder’s
attention to natural cycles highlights his themes of the transience
of life and the power of time. While a single human life comprises
only one finite revolution from birth to death, the world continues
to spin, mothers continue to give birth, and human beings continue
to exist as just one part of the universe.
Morning
Morning scenes are prominent in each of the play’s three
acts: Act I depicts the ordinary morning activities of the townspeople,
Act II portrays the Gibbs and Webb families on the morning of Emily
and George’s wedding, and Act III includes Emily’s return to the
morning of her twelfth birthday. Despite differences in context
and circumstance, each morning scene appears strikingly similar
to the others, which emphasizes the lack of change in Grover’s Corners.
In each of the three scenes, Howie Newsome delivers milk and a Crowell
boy delivers newspapers. Yet while stability is clearly a feature
of life in the town, Wilder shows that it often leads to indifference. Because
each day appears more or less the same as the previous one, the
townspeople fail to observe or appreciate the subtle, life-affirming
peculiarities each day brings.
Wilder treats each of the three mornings differently,
which highlights the subtle differences between them. He presents
the first morning as merely an average day, but as foreign observers,
we appreciate the novelty of the experience. On the morning of the wedding,
Wilder shows how impending events disturb the morning rituals and
create a unique experience. Lastly, Wilder presents the morning
of Emily’s twelfth birthday through the eyes of her dead soul, a
perspective that gives the morning a truly extraordinary and beautiful
transience. Wilder implies that though mundane routines and events
may generally be repetitive, the details are what make life interesting
and deserve attention.
The Manipulation of Time
Events do not progress chronologically in Our
Town. The Stage Manager has the ability to cue scenes whenever
he wishes, and can call up previous moments in the lives of the
characters at will. The most prominent of these manipulations of
time are the flashbacks to Mr. Morgan’s soda fountain and to Emily’s
twelfth birthday. Wilder explicitly shuffles the flow of time within
the play to engage, please, and inform his audience in three ways.
First, Wilder uses the lack of chronological order to engage his
audience by overturning their expectations of the theater. As opposed
to showing us the progression of a day, or of a life, Wilder shows
us disparate moments, reordering them in a way that best reflects
his—and the Stage Manager’s—philosophical themes. Second, the Stage
Manager’s informal treatment of the flow of time adds to the play’s
pleasing conversational tone. The Stage Manager’s desire to flash
back to George and Emily’s first date at the drugstore makes him
seem just as curious about the origins of the couple’s relationship
as we are. Third, by including flashbacks within a linear narrative,
Wilder reminds the audience how swiftly time passes. The characters
spend precious time flashing back in their own minds, appreciating
past moments in retrospect rather than recognizing the value of moments
as they occur in the present.
