Criticism
The Women’s Suffrage movement finally delivered to women the right to vote on August 26, 1920, when Henry Burns cast the deciding vote that made Tennessee the thirty-sixth, and final, state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although this was a landmark movement in the Women’s Movement, the struggle for equality certainly did not end then. Women continued to be subjected to sexual discrimination, both professionally and personally. Sophie Treadwell wrote Machinal in the wake of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, understanding and foreshadowing the uphill struggle women still faced in the United States.
Machinal in particular spoke to the countless women forced to enter loveless marriages in order to survive in a world in which jobs were scarce for men and non-existent for women. During the years prior to and immediately following the Great Depression, women were forced into roles created by a male-dominated, oppressive social structure. Some women were lucky enough to find mutually loving relationships. Other women were willing to submit to their roles in exchange for financial stability. However, as is the case with Helen Jones, the tragic heroine of Treadwell’s Machinal, some women could not tolerate the lives that the patriarchal machine demanded of them. During the first half of the twentieth century, men dominated and operated this machine with their vast, pervasive control of economics, politics, and expression. Only rare, extraordinary women were able to shake free of this machine, making advances in the Women’s Movement.
Interestingly, though, Treadwell’s protagonist is not an example of the extraordinary woman of the Suffrage Movement or the later Women’s Liberation Movement. Instead, Treadwell challenges the patriarchal machine with not a unique, outspoken activist, but “an ordinary young woman, any woman.” Although Helen progresses within the system, changing roles from secretary to wife, wife to sexual partner, and sexual partner to mother, Treadwell does not let her “any woman” silently age into obscurity. Helen challenges the patriarchal machine with her madness and, ultimately, the murder of her husband. This deliberate decision to challenge a male-dominated society with an any woman dramatically empowers Treadwell’s message, instilling fear into men and their formidable machine, that all women—not a select few—can dramatically impact, change and destroy their husband’s lives.
In the beginning of Machinal , Treadwell depicts the first role of the patriarchal machine that Helen must fill. Helen works as a secretary in the office of George H. Jones. During this first episode, Helen and George have not wed and Helen feels that her work is stifling. Treadwell effectively creates a living, office-like machine in the first episode through her use of repetitious sounds, noises and voices. The office, although inhabited by humans, moves and sounds like a machine. At the helm is, of course, a man: George H. Jones. In the first episode, Treadwell makes it clear that George has asked for Helen’s hand in marriage. However, the young woman is confused by the proposition because she does not love her boss. Her mother, on the other hand, cannot understand Helen’s problem with marrying for financial stability. When Helen states that she wants to marry for love, her mother responds, “Love!—what does that amount to! Will it clothe you? Will it feed you? Will it pay the bills?” With this statement, Helen’s mother reveals the conundrum presented before Helen in the first episodes: her only escape from the hell that is her stifling job, is to step directly into the claustrophobia of a loveless, passionless marriage. Although Helen may change roles, she does not escape the patriarchal machine. She would still be...
(This entire section contains 1792 words.)
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controlled by the male-dominated society. As Barbara L. Bywaters writes inModern American Drama: The Female Canon,
Helen would be free of economic pressures if she marries her employer; on the other hand, she would be subordinate in every sense, legally, physically, emotionally, and economically, to a man she does not love or respect.
Sadly, Helen is propelled forward, under the prodding of her mother and the pressure of the machine, and marries George, submitting to her second role in society: wife.
The natural procession from marriage is, of course, into sex. However, in the case of Helen entering into a loveless marriage, the prospect of sexual intercourse with George is not only unpleasant, it is terrifying. In episode four, Helen and George are on their honeymoon. George, although not physically forceful, does pressure Helen into sexual intercourse telling her, “you got to relax little girl,” offering to help her take off her clothes, and remarking, “Say, what you got under there?” as he pinches her thigh. The end of this episode, with George successfully pressuring Helen into sex, paints a vile, unpleasant picture of what Helen becomes the moment she submits to her role as George’s sexual partner. The patriarchal machine first pressures Helen out of her financial instability to become a married, financially stable wife. Then, as it is considered natural for a husband and wife to engage in sexual intercourse, Helen is again pressured into sexual intercourse. This forced coitus is terrifying on two despicable levels. First of all, if the progression is traced, Helen ends up sleeping with George not out of love or for pleasure, but simply because it means her continued financial stability. Essentially, her sexual intercourse with George is a drawn-out form of prostitution. As if this were not enough, the forcible pressures of the patriarchal machine that propel a wife forward into her role as sexual partner clearly result in a form of rape. A rape occurs when sexual intercourse is carried out against a person’s will. Helen has no desire to engage in sexual intercourse with George and, although he does not physically force her into sex, the will and power of the patriarchal machine symbolically holds Helen in her place as her husband’s sexual partner.
Following the honeymoon, Treadwell jumps directly into Helen’s next role as mother. In what the patriarchal machine would generally consider a woman’s final role, Treadwell uses this end as a means to see into Helen’s madness. In the hospital, after giving birth to her daughter, Helen is at the apex of her own claustrophobia. She can barely speak, only shaking her head “no” when the doctor and nurse ask if she would like to breastfeed her baby. Helen is so repulsed by the finality of her life as a mother that she gags at the sight of her husband and finally screams to be left alone. At the end of this scene, Helen gives one of her long, disjointed diatribes in which she begs for death, questions God, and foreshadows the murder of her husband. These reoccurring monologues give a glimpse into Helen’s mind as she struggles against the machine and, ultimately, fails, repeatedly submitting to the pressures and roles that she is forced to fulfill. As Jerry Dickey states of Treadwell in his essay, “The ‘Real Lives’ of Sophie Treadwell,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, “While creating works that depict women as subjects of drama, Treadwell cannot yet envision them completely empowered or victorious, but she refuses to allow her audiences to feel comfortable with their defeat.” Helen is quite blatantly the subject of Machinal and she is not empowered because she still submits to the forces of the machine. Yet, Treadwell does not stop with Helen’s simple defeat at the hands of the machine; instead she forges further ahead, exposing Helen’s insanity and making the audience cringe with shame and repulsion at the social construct they willingly live within.
With the fate of her life seemingly confined to her final role as mother, Helen begins a restless, manic pursuit for an escape. In episodes five and six, Helen is introduced to a man, Dick Roe, who quickly becomes her lover. Roe represents Helen’s lost freedom and deceased hopes. He is good looking, well traveled and adventurous. However, Helen mistakes their brief, passionate tryst for true love and when Roe leaves, ending the affair, Helen is devastated. With his departure, Helen sees that she has once again submitted to the powers of the patriarchal machine. Where she thought she had found release, she had simply committed another submissive act: becoming Roe’s lover. She believed Roe would save her from her role in the loveless hell that was her life as wife, sexual partner and mother, only to be used for sexual pleasure and tossed back into the machine without a second glance.
In the final episodes of Machinal, Helen the any woman challenges the patriarchal system with one, last attempt to subvert the patriarchal machine. She decides that her only escape from the machine that has sentenced her to motherhood is to murder her husband. With George’s death, the ties that bind her to the patriarchal machine would be undone, leaving her free for the first time in her life. She would still have financial stability, but she would no longer be bound to the roles she forcibly accepted to originally secure her financial footing. Her final decision to murder George also secures her own insanity. Yet, it is as if Treadwell is asking, who would not go insane? Helen has withstood incredible physical and psychological restrictions; she was forced to remain in perpetually claustrophobic environments and endure countless rapes. Helen was never allowed the opportunity to explore her dreams, fulfill her hopes, or understand her own identity. She lived a perpetually stifled, restricted, confined and tortured life. However, as the play demands to expose, this is the life that every woman, any woman is expected to live. Thus, if any woman could be driven to the point of murder to challenge the patriarchal machine and free herself from its oppressive, male-dominated structure, then every ordinary man, any man, should fear, if not expect, a similar response. Treadwell finishes her play hoping to instill fear in the machine that “any ordinary young woman, any woman” could be willing, able and dedicated enough to struggle, fight, and possibly murder to escape oppression. With Machinal, Treadwell seems to be trying to telegraph this message to a younger generation, hoping that anything, even fear, will help stop the machine and free women from its roles, confines, and inequalities.
Source: Anthony Martinelli, Critical Essay on Machinal, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
