An atheistic God. An agnostic afterlife. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. A Thought Experiment.

An atheistic God. An agnostic afterlife.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

A Thought Experiment.

Burton Weltman

Emily: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

The Stage Manager: “The saints and poets, maybe.”

Our Town.  Thornton Wilder.

Prologue: A Haunted Town.

Our Town is a play by Thornton Wilder about life and death in a small New Hampshire town during the early 1900’s.  It was written in 1938 and reflects a sharp contrast between living in the two eras.  It is a haunting play that can be both comforting and discomforting.  It focusses on the friendship, courtship and marriage of two main characters, Emily and George.  In the closing scene, Emily dies and her ghost, after complaining that she had never realized the fullness of life while she was living, returns to her twelfth birthday party to try to experience and appreciate the whole of the event.  But it’s a disappointment, and Emily returns to her grave and to the process of becoming dead to the world.  

In the conventional interpretation of Our Town, Wilder is supposedly telling us to try to grasp and appreciate each moment of our lives before it is too late.  But I don’t think that’s the half of it, and I don’t think that this conventional interpretation can explain the persistent popularity of the play and the way it seems to haunt its viewers.  The purpose of this essay is to try to explain what I think Wilder was trying to say and what I think is the hold that his play has on us.    

Setting the Scene: The World in 1938.

It is 1938.  The world is in turmoil, overwhelmed with social, economic, political and cultural conflicts.  The only constant seems to be change, and that for the worse.  Just when the economy seemed to be reviving, the Great Depression has deepened again.  Nazism and fascism are entrenched in much of Europe and gaining footholds elsewhere.  The civil war between fascists and republicans in Spain, and Japan’s invasion of China, seem to be preludes to another world war.  Racism and antisemitism are rampant almost everywhere.  Anguish has become the norm.

Conventional nostrums about God and Heaven, that were taken as eternal verities by past generations, seem no longer to comfort many people.  Science and philosophy have seemingly removed God from the daily running of the universe and reduced Him to the role of set designer and organizer of a world that then runs itself.  Whatever people say they believe about God, He has for many people become only a Sunday observance, which is what Nietzsche meant when he declared near the turn of the twentieth century that God is dead.  God is no longer seen by most people as the director of the world but merely a stage manager. 

At the same time, science and psychology have been debunking the idea of a soul that somehow exists separately from a person’s body and that lives on after the body is dead.  Dreams of Heaven have dissolved for many people, and despair has become the order of their day.

In the midst of this dismal, dizzying, and distraught world, Wilder wondered in Our Town whether and how people can get a grasp on their lives.  Is there meaning in the universe?  What, if anything, can we make of life and death?  Our Town was an attempt to address these questions.  

Setting the Stage: Visiting Our Town.

Our Town is set in a sleepy New England town in the early twentieth century.  It focuses on the childhood friendship, adolescent romance, and happy marriage of its two main characters, Emily and George, and ends with Emily’s death.  There are only a few other characters in the play, the immediate family and friends of Emily and George.  The play portrays a simple and slow-paced world that is in sharp contrast with the world of 1938 in which it was written.[1] 

The play was an immediate success – Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for it – and it remains popular today, over eighty years later.  It has been filmed several times, repeatedly revived in theaters across the country, and frequently performed by high school theater classes.  Edward Albee has called it “the greatest American play ever written.” [2] 

The play’s popularity may be due in part to the fact that it is relatively simple to produce.  It requires only a small number of actors, most with very small parts, and a minimalist set, just some chairs, tables, trestles, and a stepladder.  But it is more than that.  The play has a haunting effect, and not only because ghosts play a role in it.  It has become a part of our cultural repertoire because it asks important questions about whether and how we can grasp our lives and find meaning in the whirl of the universe around us. 

Our Town is set between 1901 and 1913 and, significantly, ends just before the beginning of World War I in 1914.  World War I marked the dissolution of what has been called “the Long Peace” that existed between the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, and 1914.  The play is set during the calm before the storm that began with World War I and that was still raging in 1938.

Although many horrible things happened in the world during the nineteenth century, major wars were few and far between.  Wars were relatively small-scale affairs and mainly affected people who had the misfortune to live on the battlefields.  It was an era – the Victorian Era in England – when the world seemed to consist primarily of small-scale local societies in which people mainly did what their ancestors had done, and passed on their ways to their children.  It was a world of small towns and villages inhabited by small-scale farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen.  Nations and international relations – multinational commerce, culture and conflicts – existed, but had relatively little effect on most localities. 

From the vantage point of the industrialized, urbanized, centralized and international world of 1938, the era of the Long Peace could seem relatively bucolic.  That era came to a crashing end with World War I.  The war eradicated the security of once isolated localities.  The enormity of the death and destruction gave the lie to comforting beliefs of God and Heaven.  A so-called Lost Generation of physically and psychologically maimed soldiers emerged from the trenches in Europe.  A redrawn map of the world also emerged, based in large part on the vengeance of the victorious nations and inspiring revanchist motives of revenge in the losers.  The war and its aftermath created the dire circumstances that became the distraught world of 1938. 

In setting his play in a small town during the early 1900’s, Wilder was harkening back to an earlier time when things were seemingly slower, simpler and more civil, in contrast with the world of his present day.  It was a time when people could believe that God was in His Heaven and was keeping things well in the universe.  But Wilder’s is not a simple picture of the past and, as a result, the play can seem both comforting and discomforting.

On its surface, the play seems to pay nostalgic homage to a time and place where life was mellow and the living was relatively easy.  The action consists mainly of a small town’s daily routine that seems almost as eternal as the rising and setting of the sun and the changing of the seasons. Each day starts with deliveries by the milkman and the newspaper boy.  Then people get up, have breakfast and go off to work or school.  They greet each other in the street with an easy familiarity.  All is cordiality.  In the evening, they eat dinner and go to bed.  Although time passes, kids grow up, and adults grow older, the routine seems to stay the same. 

We in the audience are treated as though we are visitors to the town. Characters speak directly to us, telling us things about the history, geography, demography, and culture of the town.  They are genial and seem self-satisfied.  There is a Stage Manager who is a character in the play and is our tour guide to the town.  We are treated as guests and made to feel at home.  It is as though it is our town, and that seems comforting. 

But underneath and undermining this comforting routine, there are accidents, illnesses, and suicides.  Deaths abound and are all around.  This includes the death in childbirth of Emily, which comes as a shock to us in the audience as well as to her loved ones in the play.  Hopes are frequently crushed in the play and the best laid plans go awry.  When you look at what is happening behind the façade of ordinariness, the universe begins to feel like an uncertain proposition, even a scary place. 

In the last scene, we visit with the ghosts of dead people, including Emily, who are inhabiting their graves and gradually becoming spiritually as dead to the world as their bodies already are.  Theirs is a grim outlook on their past lives and on what may become of them in the future.  Reflecting on her past, Emily’s ghost cries out in dismay that she didn’t fulfill her life or appreciate it enough.  The play leaves us with questions about where is God?  What is Heaven?  Is this all there is?  The universe now seems like a mean and meaningless place.[3]

Comforting on the surface.  Discomforting underneath.  So, what is going on here?  What is Wilder trying to say?  What are we to think?

Thought Experiments and Theories of Relativity.

Our Town is, I think, a thought experiment.  A thought experiment is an imagined situation through which a hypothesis is dramatized for purposes of trying to predict its potential consequences.  It is a method of theorizing how something might turn out through mentally simplifying it and then thinking it through.  The key is to reduce a complex situation down to a small number of variables that can be mentally manipulated.  A thought experiment is useful when you have a problem for which you are unable to gather empirical evidence to solve it.  A requirement of a scientific thought experiment is that it be made public and be open to verification and refutation by others.  That is essentially what the play Our Town does.

Many important scientific theories have been originally based on thought experiments that were subsequently supported by empirical evidence.  Among these is Galileo’s Theory of the Relativity of Motion, which says that if two things are in relative motion to each other, you cannot say which one is moving and which is at rest.  There is no absolute frame of reference and no way to grasp absolutely the speed of the motion.

Einstein’s Special Theory of the Relativity of Motion was also initially a thought experiment.  It says, among other things, that the speed of light is the same for all no matter whether or not they are in relative motion to each other.  As with Galileo’s theory, there is no absolute frame of reference, except for the speed of light which is absolute and which moves faster than anything else in the universe.  Nothing else can move at the speed of light, and you cannot catch up to a beam of light.  It moves too fast to fathom.

Galileo and Einstein began by imagining these theories, supporting them with images and arguments.  Then they and other scientists were able to confirm the theories through empirical observations and experiments, so that they come down to us as established scientific principles.

Our Town can be seen as a thought experiment in the relativity of the motion of human life.  The play poses a hypothesis that if human life can be reduced to its basics, can be sufficiently slowed and simplified, people will be able to realize their potential and appreciate their lives.  They will, in turn, be able to grasp the past, hold on to the present, and project themselves into the future.   Wilder has seemingly dramatized this hypothesis in Our Town in hopes that we the audience may see how it plays out, and verify or refute his conclusions.

The conventional interpretation of Our Town is essentially a variation on the admonition carpe diem, seize the day.  In this view, Wilder is telling us to appreciate each moment of life as though it may be our last.  In this view, Emily’s problem is that she “never fully appreciated all she possessed until she lost it.”[4]  The implication is that Emily was somehow negligent in failing to realize during her life what she had when she had it, as are almost all of the rest of us. And the message of the play, in this interpretation, is for us to try harder to be more appreciative of life while we can.   

I don’t think this interpretation is satisfactory.  It begs the question of whether Wilder thinks people can properly appreciate their lives and, if so, how.  In the closing scene of the play, Emily’s ghost is sitting around with other ghosts in their respective graves waiting for something to happen.  It is a seemingly agnostic picture of the immediate afterlife.  The ghosts expect something to happen to them but they don’t know what or when.  They are all of them losing touch with their past lives and past selves, apparently sinking into amorphousness.  At that point, Emily’s ghost decides to go back to her early life in order to re-experience it and try to grasp the experience in its entirety. 

But Emily can’t experience even the simplest event in its entirety.  There is too much going on all around her, and it goes by too fast for her to grasp it.  As soon as she tries to focus on something in the present, it becomes the past.  She can’t hold it up or catch up with it.  “I can’t look at everything hard enough,” she complains, “It goes so fast.  We don’t have time to look at one another.”  She finds the experience intolerable, so she returns to her vigil with the other ghosts, waiting in their graves for they know not what.[5] 

This experience of Emily’s ghost seems to contradict the conventional interpretation of the play. Trying harder did not help Emily to appreciate her life.  Wilder’s thought experiment seems, in fact, to demonstrate the impossibility of appreciating even a single event in your life, let alone grasping the whole of it, no matter how hard you try to pay attention. 

This seems to be the case even when you place that person’s life in a simple setting, such as a sleepy small town, and when you imagine that life as a simple procession of childhood, adolescence and marriage.  No matter what the relative speed of life in the sleepy town of the early 1900’s as compared with the speed of life in the whirling world of 1938, life is too much and too fast to appreciate.  As such, the hypothesis of Wilder’s thought experiment in Our Town seems to fail.  Slowing down and simplifying life does not make it more comprehensible or meaningful.  So, is that it?  Is Wilder saying that we are doomed to incomprehensible and meaningless lives, and damned essentially to nothingness thereafter? 

But not so fast.  Both an “all is hopeless” interpretation of the play and the conventional “just try harder” interpretation leave out the person who I think is the most important character in the play and who, in my reading, is Wilder’s spokesperson.  And that is the Stage Manager.   

Atheism and Agnosticism: The Stage Manager.

The Stage Manager is literally the central character in the play.  Everything comes from him and revolves around him.  He opens the play and introduces us to the town.  He manages the play, not as script writer or director, but as facilitator.  He arranges the props for each scene, rearranging the tables, chairs and trestles to enable us to imagine various places in the town.  The actors then mime most of things they are supposedly encountering.  He also serves as a stand-in playing the roles of various persons in town who are adjuncts to the action, such as the drug store soda jerk and the minister who marries Emily and George, and he does this even as we still see him as the Stage Manager. 

For purposes of Wilder’s thought experiment, the Stage Manager seemingly represents the atheistic and agnostic beliefs about God and Heaven that had been on the rise in the early 1900’s and were in ascendance in 1938.  The philosopher Nietzsche had scandalized the western world in the late nineteenth century when he had proclaimed that God was dead.  What he meant by that was not actual deicide, but that most people acted as though He was not around.  It was, for example, no longer believed by most people, as it had been in the past, that God intervened in the daily operations of the universe, but instead that He had made the universe and then left it to run itself.  Likewise, most people did not make doing God’s will their daily concern, but rather made worldly success their daily concern, leaving Sundays to think about God and God’s will.

Ignoring God in this way, getting on with business without God as a focus, is literally what is meant by atheism and is what we see in Our Town.  Atheism does not mean antitheism or opposition to God as the word is commonly used today.  When you put an “a” in front of a word, you indicate an indifference to what the word stands for not an outright rejection of it.  Asocial means indifference to society, not antisocial opposition to society.  Apolitical means indifference to politics, not opposition to politics.  Amoral means indifference to morality, unlike immoral which means acting in opposition to morality.  It is a demonstration of the power of the religious powers-that-be that the word atheism, which literally means indifference to God, has come popularly to mean antitheism and opposition to God. 

The Stage Manager is the guardian angel of the play and seemingly a symbolic agent of God.  But he represents an atheistic vision of God and the idea that we cannot expect God’s personal intervention in our troubles, that is, that we have to get along in the world without a deus ex machina.  Reflecting an atheistic version of God, the Stage Manager puts things together in the play, arranges them, and keeps things moving, but without intervening in the outcomes.  His role is consistent with the instinctive feeling of people that the universe will continue to exist from moment to moment, rather than suddenly become a void of nothing.    

Consistent with his role as God’s agent, the Stage Manager seems to be omniscient and to know everything that has happened and will happen.  He acts as a tour guide for our visit to the town, talking to us, organizing what we see and hear, and commenting on the action.  He acts, in turn, as a spiritual advisor to the ghosts of the dead townspeople, particularly Emily.  But he does not control what people do or what happens, as when he advises Emily’s ghost not to revisit her past life but she does so anyway.  In sum, the Stage Manager seemingly represents the eviscerated atheistic form of God that was popularly envisioned in 1938.

The ghosts with whom the Stage Manager hobnobs at the end of the play seem to represent an agnostic view of an afterlife that was common in 1938.  This view is consistent with the fact that most people cannot conceive of a world without themselves in it.  They can intellectually believe that they will die, but cannot feel it.  At the same time, they cannot intellectually accept the traditional idea of an afterlife in Heaven.  So, they hang about in limbo, like the ghosts in the play, intellectually rejecting the traditional idea of an afterlife but emotionally feeling that there must be something after death, albeit they know not what.

So, is that it?  Is Wilder saying that we are all doomed like the ghosts in the play to meaningless lives followed by some sort of afterlife that is akin to nothingness?  If so, what can be the worth of life and death?  Does Wilder want to leave us in despair?  I think not.  Just as I do not think that the conventional interpretation of “try harder” is the blithe answer to the questions posed by the play, I do not think that despair is the answer.  I think, instead, that we are supposed to look to the worldly wisdom of the other-worldly Stage Manager for a possible answer.

The Moral of the Story: Saints and Poets.

When Emily’s ghost returns to her grave after having spent a very dismaying time re-experiencing her twelfth birthday, she tearfully asks the Stage Manager “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”  The Stage Manager at first replies “No,” but then adds “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”[6]  That, I think, is Wilder’s final judgment on the thought experiment he has tried to portray in this play. His experiment in trying to find meaning in everyday life has seemingly failed, but not entirely because it has pointed the way to a new experiment that we the audience can undertake.  We can try to be poets and saints.

Poets are artists who can grasp loads of experiences, emotions, and ideas in a single metaphor.  Or a novel.  Or a painting.  For artists, everything in life is material for their work, nothing is lost, all is saved and used.  Their lives are full of creation and their deaths leave behind a legacy of artistic works that live after them.  As Wilder has done with this play. 

Saints are activists who give their all for the sacred purpose of doing good in the world.  Social activists.  Environmental activists.  For them, everything in life is material for their work of enhancing the lives of others.  Their lives are full of good deeds and their deaths leave behind a legacy of good works that live after them.  As Wilder tried to do during his life.  

Live a purposeful life, aiming to be a poet or a saint or a bit of both, is, I think, the moral of Wilder’s story and the answer to his questions about the meaning of life and death.  It is not an easy answer.  Wilder seems to be saying that in our lives we are pushed and pulled between comfortable surfaces and uncomfortable depths, between the comfort of a meaningless life and the discomfort of struggling for meaning in life and a legacy in death. 

I think we are enthralled and haunted by the play because we get caught up in a dialectic of interpretations of its meaning that we apply to our own lives.  We go back and forth between comfortable thoughts, uncomfortable thoughts, and difficult thoughts.  The comfortable that we can be happy if we just try harder to enjoy every moment of our lives is invariably disrupted by the uncomfortable thought that a life full of unconnected moments is ephemeral and without meaning, which is followed in turn by the difficult thought that we must have a purpose in life to connect the moments and make them meaningful.  Round and around we go from thesis to antithesis to synthesis and back to thesis….

And, so, we return time and again to Our Town looking for a resolution to the conundrum.                                       

BW 4/21

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[1] Thornton Wilder.  Our Town: A Play in Three Acts.  New York: Harper &Row Publishers, 1957.

[2] Our Town.  Wikipedia.  Accessed 3/25/21.

[3] Wilder.  Ibid. P.91.

[4] The Official Website of the Thornton Wilder Family. thorntonwilder.com

[5] Wilder.  Ibid.  P.100.

[6] Wilder.  Ibid. P. 100.