Our Town

Each act in Our Town shares a different lesson about the importance and sacredness of love and family for human beings. In the first act, “Daily Life,” the people of Grover’s Corners go about their everyday routines. The focus is placed on two families: the Gibbses and the Webbs. They live next door to each other and live parallel, juxtaposed lives. The wives are best friends, and George and Emily begin to fall in love with one another, although they do not realize it yet. Their lives are still heavily centered on growing up and family life. The Gibbs family is close-knit, strong, and stable. Doc Gibbs provides for the family, while Mrs Gibbs takes care of the house and children, and both George and Rebecca are healthy. The moments showcased in Act I are ordinary, such as having breakfast, being scolded for failing to do chores, and going for a romantic walk in the moonlight. However, these ordinary moments unite the characters as members of the same town, the same human species, and the same earth. “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds,” the hymn sung at church, repeats throughout the play. This hymn is written about the sacredness of love and marriage, which is also the title of the second act.

In the second act, George and Emily get married. The first half of the act depicts the morning before the wedding. George and Emily handle their nerves differently, with George eager to see his future bride and Emily sleeping in. When George tries to visit her, he is met instead by Mr Webb. He tries to ask his future father-in-law for some marriage advice, but he is shut down and told “never to ask for advice on personal matters” (65). Instead, George is left to navigate his unknown future without any help or guidance other than what he has observed in his parents growing up. Emily is also ignorant of adult life and marriage difficulties, and her mother knows this about her: “There’s something downright cruel about sending our girls out into marriage this way” (76). She does nothing to stop her daughter, though, knowing full well that there is nothing she can truly say to prepare her. The same hymn is sung at the wedding, and even though both George and Emily have a moment of hesitation, they follow through and get married. They are driven by some inner sense of obligation and continuity that they do not fully understand. The second act also includes a flashback scene when George and Emily realize they love each other. In that scene, Emily initially rebuffs George for being too arrogant and standoffish. George swears to change his ways, stating, “Once you’ve found a person that you’re fond of…and who’s fond of you, too” (71), that it is probably the most important thing in life. Emily agrees with him.

In the third act, Emily dies and immediately begins to slip away from her attachment to George and her family. George remains bound to her through the ties of love, grieving at her grave after the funeral. She looks down on him with pity and mild indifference, saying to Mrs Gibbs, “They don’t understand, do they?” (111). She refers here to the observation that living people do not realize death is a freeing and peaceful process, and there is no need to sob for the dead. The people in the graveyard all seem to be drifting further away from their lives and the people and things they loved, no longer bound to the tradition of love and marriage.