"Quite a Moon!": The Archetypal Feminine in Our Town

Only through suffering and death, however, does this enlightenment come to Emily. This epiphany is witnessed in her poignant exclamation while revisiting life, which explicitly conveys the central idea of the play. When she goes back to relive her twelfth birthday, she says, "Just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another" and questions, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every moment?" (62). Both of these statements are relevant to the feminine sense of time. Ulanov says that the feminine time is "of the moment; it is time as kairos rather than chronos," in which "one feels the authority of the present moment, feels its fullness and its decisiveness, feels freed from anxiety over the past or over future expectations" (177). This way of viewing time focuses on quality instead of quantity, and paradoxically, appreciating the moment as finite is actually the right path to savoring the universal, the eternal. Time flies silently in Our Town, as can be seen from the stage manager's comments: "You're twenty one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! You're seventy [...] and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you" (38). But Mrs. Webb believes "breakfast is just as good as any other meal" (11) and what is important is that you eat every meal well and enjoy every moment of living. It is no accident that Rebecca, while watching the moon with her brother George, asks whether the moon is shining over other places (27) and later mentions a peculiar letter:

Rebecca: I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the addtess was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.

George: What's funny about that?

Rebecca: But listen, it's not finished: the United States of Ametica; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God - that's what it said on the envelope. (28-9)

Grover's Corners is thus construed to be a microcosm of all times and all places, where human beings will be inspired to the feminine wisdom and enlightenment as long as they live in agreement with the moon-time.

Our Town, therefore, ingeniously displays the serene and yet powerful feminine force represented by the archetypal moon. According to Rex Burbank, in Our Town, "Wilder accomplished what he and Gertrude Stein conceived to be the main achievement of the literary masterpiece - the use of the materials of human nature to portray the eternal and universal residing in the collective 'human mind'" (83). The materials and devices planned "for the benefit of the 'group mind' have within them the seeds of a larger meaning" (78), which exhibits the archetypal feminine. This idea is epitomized by the central symbol of the moon in such qualities as fertility and feminine wisdom.