American gothic: A contrarian view of Thornton Wilder's Our Town

While watching Our Town, it is easy to feel pressured to interpret the play as a sentimental valentine to small-town life. The play offers an idealized view of the relationships of a bygone era. The characters of the young lovers, George Gibb and Emily Webb, engage in the simple rituals of love and courtship over the course of Act I. When the two of them get cold feet on the day before the wedding, their gentle, firm, and supportive parents pressure them to go through with their union, and view their sense of foreboding as normal. When given the choice between traveling and giving her savings to George and Emily, Mrs. Gibb chooses to remain in Grover's Corners and gives her money to her son. The only great tragedy of the play seems to occur when Emily returns after death to replay one of the favorite days of her young life, one of her birthdays as a young girl. Emily realizes, witnessing the actions of the living, that no one appreciates life until life is gone. She laments that no one looks at one another, and really listens during the seemingly casual rituals of the precious day.

However, it is also possible to view the play as a tragedy: despite their ambitions (George wants to go to college), the pressures of society and the pull of unexplored sexuality cause George and Emily to enter into an overly hasty marriage. Emily dies in childbirth as a result of her naivete and unwillingness to explore alternative ways of life, despite her obvious intelligence and leadership skills at school. George is left to raise the couple's child alone. Death resembles a place of eternal regret, where the follies and inconsiderate nature of one's own life, and the life of loved ones, is eternally played out. And perhaps most tragically, Mrs. Gibbs' refusal to honor her own desires and choice to remain confined in a motherly role of self-sacrifice is lionized. "Blessed Be the Tie That Binds," sings the church choir at the beginning of the play, a song that may be meant to sound comforting, but in fact chills the soul.