Machinery
The play opens with the cacophony of noises made by office machinery and equipment. Clacking keys of a typewriter, an adding machine tallying up numbers, buzzers, phones, file cabinet drawers opening and closing, papers being shuffled all establish the modern working world of the time. Finally, the office workers begin speaking, but not in dialogue. The adding clerk calls out random numbers, the filing clerk compiles an alphabetical list of subjects, the stenographer dictates a letter and every one of them speaks “in the monotonous voice of…monotonous thoughts.” All the various imagery presented in the opening scene coalesces to become the play’s central symbolic meaning that the age of machinery has not just mechanized the work that gets done, it has also mechanized the people doing that work. Stripped of a certain amount of their humanity in their job—the aspect of life that most defines a person—they have become the machinal of the title: mechanized humans. Not robots, still human, but not as human as what came before.
Hands
Hands become symbolic of gender inequality. Helen tells her mother than George fell in love with because of her hands and shortly afterward those hands slide into rubber gloves to wash the dishes. George loves Helen’s hands because their delicacy is a sign of femininity and purity which translates from the patriarchal into being signs of weakness and submission. Helen, by contrast, hates George’s hands to the point of being obsessed with their pudgy ugliness and the fact that “they press.” Later, another man who takes advantage of Helen will also compliment her hands.
“Below the Rio Grande”
Helen meets a man in a speakeasy who tells a story about having been kidnapped by bandits from whom he escaped by getting them drunk and hitting them over the head after filling up the empty bottle with stones. This is the moment that seduces Helen twice over: first she is seduced into going back to the man’s room for sex because she’s turned on by his dangerous qualities. She is also seduced by the idea of escaping her own imprisonment by fleeing to Mexico, but ultimately winds up admitting that “I’ll never get below the Rio Grande—I’ll never get out of here.”
The Water Lily
In the world of flower symbolism, the water lily has ancient links to representation of purity and innocence. It has also been attached as symbolic of both chastity and motherhood. In relation to purely masculine symbolism, the flower’s notorious long pistil carries associations of enhanced sexual energy. All of these together serve to make the water lily that Helen takes home from her lover’s apartment a profoundly ironic symbol not just because Helen herself corrupts its meaning, but also because it become the damning evidence which sends her to the electric chair.
The Electric Chair
In a story about how mechanized the world has become and how that world has developed into a patriarchy determined to dominate women, the fact that it all leads inexorably to the electric chair should perhaps not be surprising. Especially since the play was inspired by the real-life story of Ruth Snyder who execution by electric chair became notorious as the first that was ever filmed thanks to a hidden camera covertly brought in by a reporter. Since her entrance in the first scene, Helen has been portrayed as having an aversion to the machinery around her or coming into conflict with it. As such, the electric chair takes on greater symbolic significance as the ultimate machine which cannot be avoided; the ultimate machine of dehumanization.
