Thornton Wilder Essay - UniversalEssays

Custom Writing Services

This sample Thornton Wilder Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our custom essay writing service.

Thornton Wilder was a student of the human condition. His plays in particular were concerned with both the timely and the timeless, and he most distinguished himself in the theater, although his first literary success was as a novelist. Wilder was the first major American playwright to discard realism in favor of a more modernist, experimental theatrical style. The full-length plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), and the one-act plays The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The Long Christmas Dinner, and Pullman Car Hiawatha, all published in 1931, influenced American playwrights from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to Edward Albee and John Guare.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Young Artist Encouraged by His Mother

Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. His father was the editor of The Wisconsin State Journal, and his mother was a devotee of world literature and music. When Wilder was nine years old, his father uprooted the family after being appointed consul general in Hong Kong, where he was responsible for representing the commercial interests of the United States in the region.

Wilder’s first exposure to theater occurred before he reached his teens. Isabella Wilder and the children had returned to the United States while Amos Wilder remained in Hong Kong. Living near the University of California in Berkeley, Wilder learned of a theater in need of extras for the chorus. Isabella encouraged her ten-year-old son’s participation by sewing costumes appropriate for his roles. Amos Wilder did not approve of such activities, but because he was thousands of miles away, Isabella had the greater influence upon Wilder’s development.

Travels Abroad and Early Success in Fiction

While studying at Oberlin College, Wilder’s love of world literature continued to grow, and his first publication as a creative writer came when some of his pieces appeared in the college literary magazine. However, he would produce his most ambitious writing project to date after enrolling at Yale University. The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), a four-act play, won him the Branford Brinton Award from the university.

Following a year abroad at the American Academy in Rome, Wilder returned to America in 1921 to take a position teaching French at the Lawrenceville School, a private preparatory academy in central New Jersey. During his time in Rome, Wilder had filled his notebooks with character sketches, which he first called ”Memoirs of a Roman Student” but subsequently rewrote as his first novel, The Cabala, published in 1926. The book was reviewed favorably and sold well enough that he was able to take a leave of absence and write a second novel: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. This work won Wilder the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes and made him a literary celebrity.

While teaching at the University of Chicago in 1930, Wilder was able to work on the more socially relevant The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931). Three of the plays in the piece display the kinds of theatrical experiments that would make Wilder famous. The Long Christmas Dinner takes place over ninety years, and the rapid passage of time is signified by actors donning white wigs and adjusting their delivery of lines and movement on the stage in accordance with their characters’ advancing age. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, Wilder makes use of a character identified as the Stage Manager who calls characters forth, dismisses them, and even prompts them with their lines. He also performs minor roles, and he and other characters address the audience directly about the purposes of the play. No scenery is used apart from chalk lines on the floor and pairs of chairs to represent the berths of a Pullman car. The last of these nonrealistic plays is The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

A Hit on Broadway and in London

In 1936 Wilder resigned from his teaching position to concentrate more on writing. This move resulted in the creation of his most celebrated work. The play Our Town dramatizes life in a small New England town around the turn of the century. The audience is introduced to the town, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and the two families that serve to represent the townsfolk, the Webbs and the Gibbses, by the Stage Manager, who addresses the audience and the actors directly, telling the latter which scenes to play. As in Pullman Car Hiawatha, the Stage Manager character acts some of the minor roles himself and frequently comments on the action. There was no set for the play aside from some chairs, tables, and ladders. Such abstract theatrical style was, for the most part, new to American theatergoers in 1938.

Wilder’s next play, The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), opened while Our Town was in the middle of its long run. However, The Merchant of Yonkers suffered the opposite fate of Our Town, and closed after only thirty-nine performances to almost unanimous derision by theater critics. Retitled The Matchmaker and staged by a new director, the play went on to run in London for nearly a year. The Match-maker was revived on Broadway in 1955, where it enjoyed the longest run of any Wilder play (486 performances). The Matchmaker tells the tale of Horace Vandergelder, a domineering, tight-fisted sixty-year-old businessman in conflict with Ambrose Kemper, a young artist who wants to marry Ermengarde, Vandergelder’s niece and ward. The play was adapted as a Broadway musical called Hello, Dolly! in 1964. A successful film version of the musical was released in 1969. The Matchmaker, unlike Our Town, is a lighthearted work of conventional realism. Wilder’s next play, The Skin of Our Teeth, was written at the time of the U.S. entry into World War II. Inspired by that harrowing global conflict, The Skin of Our Teeth is Wilder’s attempt to reassure his audience that although the human race is forever facing extinction, it ultimately survives each crisis, if only just barely. In each of the three acts Wilder dramatizes a different threat at different times in human history: a colossal glacier advances down the North American continent during the Ice Age; a great flood rises to wipe out decadent humankind, as in the Book of Genesis in the Bible; and a modern global war lasting years saps humanity of its will to live. Though not as frequently produced as Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth remains in the repertory of the professional and amateur American theater.

Troubled Times for the Writer and the World

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wilder’s writing was not going well, partly because of his postwar malaise and the death of his mother in 1946. After a brief return to teaching, The Merchant of Yonkers was successfully revived, as noted above, as The Matchmaker, and Wilder resolved to revisit the theater. The Alcestiad, an adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy Alcestis that Wilder had begun before the war, was retitled A Life in the Sun and staged at Edinburgh in 1955. Wilder mixed and matched characters and actions from Greek mythology to allegorize Christian doctrine and theology. The first production of The Alcestiad was universally condemned by critics as dull and heavy-handed.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Wilder worked on two cycles of one-act plays, ”The Seven Deadly Sins” and ”The Seven Ages of Man.” Taken as a whole, the eleven one-act plays differ radically from Wilder’s earlier plays, most strikingly in the darker tone created by characters who are bitter, cynical, resentful, and, in some cases, even criminal. ”The Seven Deadly Sins” and ”The Seven Ages of Man,” which turned out to be Wilder’s finale as a dramatist, portray an America that is, underneath its sunny surface, corrupted by materialism. Even more surprising is the suggestion that human nature itself is too divided, aggressive, and selfish to make lasting relationships. American playwright John Guare, in his introduction to volume 1 of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, suggests Wilder’s earlier optimism was dampened by the rising tension of the Cold War, particularly the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Renewed Optimism at Life’s End

In his final two literary efforts, the novels The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (1973), Wilder resurrected his faith in the gradual progress of the human race and his affirmation of America leading the way. The title character of the second novel, which is thinly disguised but also highly idealized autobiography, is nothing less than Christlike, as he heals the sick, raises the dead, saves marriages, and uncovers counterfeiters. Both novels stayed on the best-seller lists for a long time, and The Eighth Day won the National Book Award. In fact, during the last two decades of his life, Wilder received several honors and awards for his long career as a playwright, novelist, teacher, essayist, and literary scholar. Unfortunately, his health was beginning to fail, but his creativity never flagged. Even at the time of his death in 1975, Wilder was at work upon a sequel to his last novel.

Works in Literary Context

Epic Theater

Developed by German playwright, director, and essayist Bertolt Brecht during the early 1900’s, Epic Theater presents an artificial representation of reality. The intention of this theatrical movement was to force the audience to take an active role in interpreting the play, rather than merely viewing it as passive spectators. Brecht achieved this through techniques that constantly prevented the audience from forgetting that they were watching a play. Actors might abandon their characters to comment on the plot or address the crowd directly, a technique known as ”breaking the fourth wall” (the ”fourth wall” being the barrier between performance and audience). The influence of Epic Theater on Thornton Wilder is evident in such plays as The Long Christmas Dinner, in which actors only pantomimed eating and drinking rather than using props or real food to create a greater illusion of reality. Jumps in time and the symbolic birth and death set pieces also prevented the audience from forgetting that they were watching a play. The influence of Epic Theater is present in much of Wilder’s work, including Pullman Car Hiawatha, Our Town, and The Matchmaker.

The Cyclical Nature of Existence

Much of Wilder’s work views time as an ever-revolving wheel. The very structure of Our Town is cyclical, tracing the process of birth to death as Dr. Gibbs delivers twins at dawn in the opening scene, leading to the final scene in which death is addressed in the form of Emily’s nighttime funeral. By associating birth with day and death with night, Wilder is suggesting that the two are as natural and regular as the revolving hands of a clock. Life continues, the Earth keeps spinning on its axis. The Skin of Our Teeth also addresses this cyclical theme by showing that human beings are constantly faced with the possibility of their own extinction, but always manage to escape oblivion. Throughout history, potentially devastating threats to humankind seem to arise as regularly as the turning of centuries.

Works in Critical Context

Our Town

Although reviewers were at first highly critical of much of Wilder’s work, his reputation has grown considerably in subsequent years. For example, Wilder’s Our Town was enormously successful, running for 336 performances and winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama. But initial reviews by critics were mixed, both in regard to its mundane content and abstract form. Scholarly studies of Wilder and American drama have since acknowledged the importance of Our Town to the development of modern American theater, however. In a 2007 study of Our Town in The New York Times Book Review, Jeremy McCarter wrote that while Wilder may not be ”our greatest playwright, but if we really understand him, he seems by far the most essential: the homegrown writer who made the largest claims for the theater, who put its special capacities to better use than his contemporaries—or his successors.” The universal popularity of the play is evidenced by the many professional and amateur productions at home and abroad and by its remaining continuously in print.

The Matchmaker

Though Our Town is generally regarded as Wilder’s most artistically significant piece of work, The Matchmaker was his biggest crowd-pleaser, enjoying the longest Broadway run of any of his plays (486 performances). Despite its popularity, further evidenced by its adaptation into a very successful musical titled Hello Dolly!, the play’s initial run was a disaster. Under its original title The Merchant of Yonkers, the play closed after a mere thirty-nine performances. Critics largely blamed director Max Reinhardt, who approached the light comedy with heavy-handed execution. Today the play remains popular, but critical reaction is mixed. In Drama for Students, David Kelly wrote, ”The Matchmaker, which Wilder meant as an examination of theatrical conventions, reads like just another comedy of manners today, because modern audiences are more accustomed to satire that is sharper and more obvious”

References:

Ballet, Arthur H. ”Our Town” as a Classical Tragedy. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000.
Fergusson, Francis. Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder, and Eliot. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.
Cardullo, Bert. Whose Town Is It, Anyway? A Reconsideration of Thornton Wilder’s ”Our Town”. CLA Journal (September 1998): 71-86.
Erstein, Hap. ”Remarkable Our Town Dispenses Its Wisdom.” Washington Times (Nov. 23, 1990): p.1.
Kelly, David. ”Critical Essay on The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” Novels for Students 16 (2007): vol. 24.
Kelly, David. ”Critical Essay on The Matchmaker.” Drama for Students 16 (2003): vol. 16.
Kreger, Erika M. ”A discussion of The Skin of Our Teeth.” Drama for Students.
McCarter, Jeremy. ”’Our Town’-Great American Tragedy?” Contemporary Literary Criticism (Feb., 1959): 258-264.
Stephens, George D. ”’Our Town’-Great American Tragedy?” Modern Drama (February 1959): 258-264.