Let’s Take a Trip Down to the Barn, Y’all!

Benny—[Too excited to be surprised.] To hell with that! Say, listen, Aunt Emmer, he’s hung himself—Uncle Caleb—in the barn—he’s dead!

As to not broach a bunch of topics vaguely, I thought it would be worthwhile to zero in on a singular peculiarity in the landscape of this wholly peculiar play: the not-so-happy ending.

We are continually reminded of Emma’s storybook notions in the first act. Her “clumsy marble-topped” coffee table is adorned with a Bible and a few books that look suspiciously like cheap novels. To boot, Harriet Williams, an emblem of the archetypal married woman at the time, belittles Emma’s moral ideals, persisting, “Story book notions, that’s the trouble with you Emmer! You’re getting’ to think that you’re better’n the rest of us.” So, in storybook fashion, we find that by the end of Act I both Emma and Caleb have made grand storybook commitments, the former swearing to die an old maid and the latter promising thirty years of persistent fidelity.

Time passes and, as it turns out, these commitments remain unfulfilled. To make matters worse, the suspension of these commitments has an almost corrosive effect on Emma, and she is now a “withered, scrawny woman,” ostensibly much older looking than a fifty year old should appear. For Caleb, on the other hand, there’s still some hope. At one point, he remarks, “Seems to me, Emmer, thirty o’ the best years of a man’s life ought to be proof enough to you to make you forget—that one slip o’ mine.” However, to make a long story short, Emma denies his proposal once again, informs him of her and Benny’s plans to get married, and Caleb, who most likely recognizes that he has wasted the past thirty years of his life, hangs himself in the barn.

So, without further ado, here are some questions that might help us reflect on this series of unfortunate events:

1) What do you think of Emma’s thirty-year commitment to the single life? And Caleb’s thirty years of waiting? Did either of them gain anything, learn anything from that lengthy hiatus?

2) After Caleb hangs himself, Emma sets on finding her own barn. What does she mean by this? Here are a few possibilities: Is she too going to kill herself? Is she merely looking for her own narrative conclusion, so to speak, a fitting end to this abrupt tragic spiral?

3) Who was the protagonist of this play? Was there even a protagonist?

-J.C.