Essay Questions

What is the significance of the play opening with the image of Mae at her ironing board?

Scene 1 opens with very sparse but meaningful stage directions for Mae. She is at the ironing board, and she is unkempt. She will return to the ironing board in several later scenes throughout the play and a particularly essential moment in the play occurs when Henry gives her the gift of a tube of lipstick. When Henry produces a mirror, it is clear that Mae is familiar enough with cosmetics to know how to use it. She applies the lipstick and then puckers for a kiss and there the scene ends. The next scene opens with Mae placing the lipstick and the mirror on the mantelpiece before immediately starting to read from her textbook. Mae knows what lipstick is, but this sequence indicates she has little actual use for it. By contrast, she not only knows what the ironing board is for but returns to it again and again. The ironing board is a traditional symbol of patriarchal oppression of women because it was primarily used by women not pressing the work clothes of men. Likewise, lipstick is used by women, but primarily for the purpose of pleasing men. That Mae recognizes the need for the ironing board but dismisses the necessity for lipstick is not just commentary on the oppression of her circumstances, but her recognition of that oppression and, what’s more, her identification of the oppressor. The gift of the lipstick is directly related to the second piece of information provided in those stage directions for Scene 1. Lloyd is an oppressor who doesn’t care how she looks as long as she meets his needs. Henry, on the other hand, does not just want Mae to meet his needs, he is demanding that she look good while doing so.

What is the play saying about the consequences of poverty?

The very opening description of the setting in the printed script conveys the magnitude of the stage of poverty in which the characters exist. The set is described as a wooden shack sitting atop a mound of earth. Things to do not get any more optimistic from that point on. The physical setting on the stage conveys a literal world of profound poverty. That literal poverty is then relentlessly reproduced as intellectual poverty and emotional poverty as the narrative plays. The characters are placed in juxtaposition to each other to create a visceral connection between the economic disadvantage of ignorance. Lloyd is intellectually vacuous, lacking even a curiosity to learn. Henry is emotionally deficient, illuminating how poverty can stimulate an emotional hunger that is not properly. The only one of the three who seems to be endowed with any internal capacity and desire to overcome the disadvantage of poverty is Mae, but she is also victimized by the reality that even within the lowest social strata, patriarchy must be overcome before anything else.

How is mud situated as the tragically central metaphor of life for these three characters?

The title of the play establishes the significance that mud will represent in the narrative. The description of the set as a shack situated on a mound of earth is a constant literal reminder of the symbolism. The very fact that the audience does not need this literal reminder is part of the point. Mud as a metaphor is intentionally overplayed to the point of overkill. It is not just literally part of the world in which the characters live, it is also constantly referenced. Mae’s most intense monologue in the first half of the play is literally nothing but mud imagery in which the word itself is reiterated multiple times. The metaphorical aspect of mud is even subtly reflected in the very structure of the separation of the action into short acts which usually end up not very from where they started. Mud is a metaphor describing the state of non-movement of these characters trapped in their world with no way out as if literally stuck in deep mud, incapable of anything other than small steps which take forever to make.