IV. Themes 

1. The Importance of Love

     Love is mentioned often in Our Town, and it is illustrated many times. The major characters all love one another, and as the play progresses you are given examples of different types of love. In Act I you see family love and friendship. Parents and children love each other and neighbors love each other, just as ideally they should. In Act II, you see romantic love, culminating in marriage, again as ideally it should. In Act III you see the kind of love that is perhaps hardest to understand, spiritual, selfless love, love that expects no return. 

2. The Continuity of Human Life 

     Over and over in the play you are reminded of the repetition of the cycle of Life (生命轮回). The play begins with the birth of twins in Polish town and ends with Emily's death in childbirth. Yet she leaves another child behind, a part of her, just as she goes to join her predecessors in the graveyard on the hill. 

3. The Beauty of Life

     You'll probably find Wilder's enthusiasm for life the most obvious theme in Our Town. He said that the play is "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." This theme seems the most important reason for the play's popularity. At the same time, it is responsible for most of the criticism that attacks the play as being overly sentimental. 

4. The Meaning of Life 

    Wilder is often considered a religious writer, and Our Town is considered by many to be a religious play. Can you see why? Consider how often churches are mentioned, how often you hear religious hymns being sung. Is this just one of the realistic details put into the play? Probably not. After all, there was probably a general store in a town like this, too, but Wilder doesn't mention one. 

      We mentioned the interpretation of the Stage Manager as God in The Characters section. You might also look at his speech at the beginning of Act III. "Everybody knows that something is eternal," he says. Wilder may not say what the meaning of life is, but he certainly seems to suggest that there is a meaning. 

5.The Universal VS. the Particular 

      Here you have to deal with a question about the nature of reality. In Our Town, Wilder seems to be forcing the reader or the audience to see the characters as representing human nature in general. Do you remember Rebecca's speech about her friend's letter, with the address giving her a place in the universe? Did you notice how often the words "hundreds" and "thousands" and "millions" are used in the play? These details suggest that the characters should be understood as part of a greater reality, as part of human existence, not just as part of Grover's Corners. Can you think of any other devices Wilder uses to give a larger context to the play? 

6. The Transience of Human Life 

    Although Wilder explores the stability of human traditions and the reassuring steadfastness of the natural environment, the individual human lives in Our Town are transient, influenced greatly by the rapid passage of time. The Stage Manager often notes that time seems to pass quickly for the people in the play. In light of the fact that humans are powerless to stem the advance of time, Wilder ponders whether human beings truly appreciate the precious nature of a transient life. Act I, which the Stage Manager entitles “Daily Life,” testifies to the artfulness and value of routine daily activity. Simple acts such as eating breakfast and feeding chickens become subjects of dramatic scenes, indicating the significance Wilder sees in such seemingly mundane events. Wilder juxtaposes this flurry of everyday activity with the characters’ inattentiveness to it. The characters are largely unaware of the details of their lives and tend to accept their circumstances passively. The Gibbs and Webb families rush through breakfast, and the children rush off to school, without much attention to one another. They, like most human beings, maintain the faulty assumption that they have an indefinite amount of time on Earth. Mrs. Gibbs refrains from insisting that her husband take her to Paris because she thinks there will always be time to convince him later.

     The dead souls in Act III emphasize this theme of transience, disapproving of and chastising the living for their “ignorance” and “blindness.” The dead even view George’s grief and prostration upon Emily’s grave as a pitiable waste of human time. Instead of grieving for the dead, they believe, the living should be enjoying the time they still have on Earth.

 

7. The Importance of Companionship

    Because birth and death seem inevitable, the most important stage of life is the middle one: the quest for companionship, friendship, and love. Humans have some degree of control over this aspect of life. Though they may not be fully aware of their doing so, the residents of Grover’s Corners constantly take time out of their days to connect with each other, whether through idle chat with the milkman or small talk with a neighbor. The most prominent interpersonal relationship in the play is a romance—the courtship and marriage of George and Emily—and Wilder suggests that love epitomizes human creativity and achievement in the face of the inevitable advance of time.

      From the beginning of Act I, the Stage Manager seeks to establish a relationship with the audience, which forges a tie between the people onstage and the audience offstage. Within the action of the play, we witness the milkman and the paperboy chatting with members of the Gibbs and Webb families as they deliver their goods. The children walk to and from school in groups or pairs. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, next-door neighbors, meet in their yards to talk. We glimpse Mr. and Mrs. Webb and Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs in private conversation. As Mrs. Gibbs articulates, “Tain’t natural to be lonesome.”

Even the play’s title—using the collective pronoun “our”—underscores the human desire for community. Many aspects of the play attest to the importance of community and companionship: the welcoming introduction from the Stage Manager; the audience participation, through the placement among the audience of actors within the audience who interact with those onstage; and the presence of numerous groups in the play, such as the choir, the wedding party, the funeral party, and the group of dead souls.

 

 

V. Questions for Discussion

1. How does the temporal structure of Our Town reflect and influence the main ideas of the play? 

 Our Town does not simply depict ordinary life in a small town, but engages deeper subject matter such as the influence of time on human lives. The three-act structure of the play reflects this focus by mirroring the stages of a human life: Act I begins with a birth in early morning and offers a glimpse of daily life in Grover’s Corners; Act II shows us courtship and an afternoon wedding; Act III culminates with death and the afterlife, and as the play ends, night has fallen. Although scenes of the evening do exist in other parts of the play, the play’s overarching structure begins with dawn and ends with dusk. Significantly, however, Wilder juxtaposes the momentum of individual lives with the unchanging nature of human existence. The play returns again and again to scenes that take place in the morning—the milkman delivering milk, the paperboy delivering the paper—indicating a timelessness and lack of change despite the passage of years. With a structural emphasis on stability, a single marriage becomes representative of many marriages, past, present, and future, and a single romance becomes representative of universal feelings of love.

2. What happens when Emily goes back and relives the past?

She is unable to bear it and returns to the cemetery. Living people tend to ignore the people and things around them, and the minutiae of life don't touch everyone. Emily finally cried out, "I can't, I can't go any further... How important and how beautiful life is! Take me back -- back to the mountains -- back to my tomb." . As Emily looks on, she laments her indifference to the beauty of so many things in life, and realizes how important the least important day is. Because she had not grasped life then, she found herself almost alien to her family and to life. Here, Wilder, through Emily's strong attachment to the world, emphasizes the supreme value of those eternal little things in ordinary life, and also warns people to cherish life, though it is plain, it is the only thing that cannot be redone.

      

VI. Famous Quotes

      "Good-by, Good-by, world.Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? -- every, every minute?"  (01:50:50)

    “再见了，这世界，再见了，格罗佛角小镇，再见吧，爸爸、妈妈，再见，闹钟……再见，妈妈的向日葵、各式佳肴和咖啡、新熨好的裙子、热水澡，还有睡眠和起床。啊，人世间，你太美好了!可惜无人知晓你的美好。有谁活着的时候可曾认识到生活的意义? --- 每一分、每一秒？”

      "Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know-- that's the happiest existence you wanted to go back and see." (01:53:47)

       "现在明白了吧!以前活着的时候，总是在无知中浑浑噩噩过活; 恣意作践别人……无视身边人的感情;大把大把浪费时间，像是可活一百万年; 总是自我为中心，沉湎于各种激情无法自拔。现在终于觉悟到: 你一心想要重温的生活便是最幸福的生存。”