Analysis
Staging
The most unique aspect of the play’s staging is Treadwell’s use of auxiliary scenes. Throughout the play, short sketches unfold to the side of the primary action. In some cases, the sketches parallel the subject matter of the main action. For example, during a conversation about childbearing, a short sketch involving a crying infant occurs on the side. During the fifth episode, several dialogues unfold at once, evoking the ambience of a Prohibition-era speakeasy while also illustrating various manifestations of romantic relationships: a quartet of men and women engaging in extramarital affairs, a man seducing a boy, a man and woman discussing whether or not to get an abortion. This multi-scene effect allows Treadwell to produce a broader tapestry of experience.
Sounds
Treadwell includes numerous sounds in her stage directions. Between and during scenes, we hear steel-riveting machines, radios, telephones, telegraphs, music, and murmuring voices. These sounds draw us into both the outer and inner worlds of the play. On the external plane, the sounds evoke the chaotic moods and atmospheres of the city. Internally, the sounds often represent Helen’s hectic emotional state.
Historical Background
Treadwell wrote Machinal in 1928, a moment in American history that is notable for a number of reasons. In 1920 the women’s suffrage movement resulted in the vote for women, though the struggle for gender equality has continued ever since. The 1920s were also marked by Prohibition, an act by which alcohol was made illegal by the federal government, thus giving rise to speakeasies like the one in the play. Finally, the 1920s mark a high point in the rise of modernity. A steady influx into the cities of the US combined with an economic boom made for a frenzied decade.
Literary Style
Sophie Treadwell draws on colloquial speech in the crafting of her dialogue. Phrases like “S’all right” and “Hot dog!” create a realistic atmosphere, immersing the audience in 1920s America. Treadwell controls the pace in an intriguing manner. Many of the scenes are filled with rapid-fire dialogue, with storms of short phrases ringing from all directions. These frenetic passages place us in Helen’s shoes, evoking the confusion and overwhelming nature of modern life.
The Title
The play’s title, Machinal, derives from the French “machinal,” which in turn originates from the Latin “machinalis.” The word literally means “of or pertaining to machines.” The play certainly draws on this definition, with its vision of a mechanized, urban civilization. On a deeper level, “machinal” carries a suggestion of spiritlessness or dullness. It is this connotation that reaches at the play’s thematic core. Helen inhabits a fractious, spiritually bankrupt world. She longs for meaning, wondering whether there might be more to life than simply “going to work—coming home—going to work—coming home.” To Helen, the universe is “machinal,” seemingly comprised of a dull, routine clockwork. Spirit-charged images—namely, the full moon—appear to Helen and stir her longing, but she does not know how to recover meaning and depth in her life.
Scene changes
Treadwell employs a disorienting formal technique. Often the divisions between scenes cover long periods of time—sometimes years—and contain critical plot points. For example, as the second episode draws to a close, we are not sure whether Helen will marry George, or whether he will even propose to her. As the next episode opens, they are already married and on their honeymoon. The critical events take place away from our eyes. This is true of each of the play’s major events: the marriage, the seduction, the murder, and, finally, the execution. Treadwell’s restraint is powerful. We are stirred more by these events because we cannot...
(This entire section contains 632 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
see them. These moments activate our imagination, drawing us into a deeper engagement with the drama at hand.
The Play
Inspired by the notorious case of Ruth Snyder, an adulteress who died in the electric chair for the murder of her husband, Machinal is the personal tragedy of a gentle individual alien to a crowded, hard society. It is told in nine episodes in an expressionistic style, dramatized consistently from the viewpoint of the Young Woman. Each episode depicts a phase in the Young Woman’s life, usually a situation in which a woman is supposed to be fulfilled. In only one phase does the Young Woman find companionship, peace, freedom, happiness, beauty, or meaning: That particular episode leads to her killing her husband and ultimately to her own death.
The play opens in a business office where typical office employees work to the incessant noise of their adding machines and typewriters, vocalize their working procedures, and in staccato, repeat themselves as well as office gossip. Through the gossip, the audience learns that the Young Woman lives with her mother and has no social life but that the Boss is “sweet” on her. The Young Woman distinguishes herself from the office regimentation by being late to work. She explains that she had to escape the airless crowd of the subway and walk in fresh air. The Boss proposes marriage, but the Young Woman is repelled by his touch. Although the other girls approve of marrying for security, the Telephone Girl tells the Young Woman to avoid that double bed. In soliloquy the Young Woman presents a hypothetical scenario that involves marriage, babies, exhaustion, and the search for real companionship with “somebody.”
The Young Woman has no fulfillment in work or in her parental home. The second episode, accompanied by counterpointing offstage dialogue in other apartments, reveals the Young Woman’s unsatisfying relationship with her mother, a nag who accepts the status quo of women even though she is a dependent widow whose chief entertainment is the daily garbage collection. The Young Woman agonizes over the convention that women must marry. She tells her mother of her revulsion for her boss and about her longing for love, but the two women cannot communicate well on this topic. In exchange for financial security, the mother is quite willing for the daughter to contract a loveless marriage with a decent man, and the Boss is a “Vice-President—of course he’s decent.”
Eventually the Young Woman marries the Boss. In the grim “Honeymoon” episode, the Young Woman is panicky. Although her new husband is not cruel, he is vulgar. Bragging about the hotel room that costs “twelve bucks a day” and repeating crude jokes, he is insensitive to her reticence about undressing but is prudish about keeping the curtains closed when his bride is trying to get a breath of fresh air. The scene darkens on the Young Woman’s appearance in a nightgown, crying for her mother or “somebody.” It is clear that this is not the happiest day of her life.
The Young Woman does not find fulfillment in motherhood either. The “Maternal” episode takes place to the machine sounds of construction on a new wing of a maternity hospital. The Young Woman find herself deeply afflicted with postpartum depression, a manifestation of her bound yet disconnected state of being. She gags on her husband’s flowers and his self-satisfied paternity. The male obstetrician tells her how she should, or must, feel, and, unfeeling himself, prescribes insult for illness: If she cannot retain a liquid diet, she must be hand-fed solids. In her concluding, free-association soliloquy, she recalls memories of a pet dog whose pups were drowned and moves on to identify an unlovable God with her husband and the Virgin Mary with herself. She refuses to submit ever again—to her husband, to God, to future maternity, to this present child.
In the fifth episode, the Young Woman, in pursuit of pleasure, has come to a speakeasy with the Telephone Girl. Though the whole scene is permeated with male ascendency—an older homosexual enticing a mere boy, a man persuading a young woman into an abortion, the “free spirited” Telephone Girl servicing a married man for an hour or two before he goes home—the Young Woman and her blind date are not sullied. Her date, the First Man, a vagabond just returned from Mexico with a tale of having killed two bandits with a bottle of pebbles, proclaims the doctrine that a man must be free. For the first time the Young Woman is called by her name, Helen. For the first time, someone, concerned with her feelings, asks her “You like me—don’t you, kid?”
There is no coarseness in the lover’s room. For a moment, freed from submission to the duties of life, the woman gives herself freely. The First Man’s honesty about his restless longing to be free (“I’ll have to be moving on again, kid—someday, you know”) makes the moment more precious. The lovers talk about childhood and travel in space. They know each other. Yet night ends their afternoon dream. A streetlight throws shadowy bars across the floor. Sophie Treadwell’s stage directions indicate that Helen’s departure is to be idealized. Voluptuous, protected, and nurturing, she is Woman, the Eternal Feminine. The First Man gives her a lily in a pot of pebbles.
The contrast of the fifth episode to the sixth is great. Helen has not settled into resignation or consolation in her nuclear family. At home on a typical evening, her overbearing husband still suffocates her. Her reading of an advertisement for precious stones and his reading of a revolution in Mexico trigger memories and inspire her with a means of escape: murdering her husband.
Prosecuted at her trial by both the prosecutor and the judge, Helen holds to her story of her husband’s murder by intruders until the prosecutor introduces her lover’s deposition, identifying the pebbles from the lily pot as part of her weapon. Helen confesses and begins “to moan—suddenly—as though the realization of the enormity of her isolation had just come upon her. It is a sound of desolation, of agony, of human woe.”
As she goes to execution, Helen refuses the consolation of patriarchal pieties but understands a black prisoner’s crying out toward God in a spiritual. She will not repent her moment of freedom and soaring with her lover but she does regret that she and her mother never really knew each other. She begs for more time to know her own daughter and to teach her about life but refuses to submit even to the barbers who must forcibly shave patches of her hair to place electrodes. Her last words “Somebody! Somebody” leave the audience wondering: Are the words a cry of self-pity or a cry for someone to teach her child?
Dramatic Devices
Treadwell’s play is characteristic of expressionist drama. For instance, her characters are types, not automata or caricatures. The dialogue, though repetitive and clichéd, typical of extreme expressionism, often catches the rhythm, even the brokenness, of common speech. The speech and the characters re-create the effect of regimentation that capitalism and mechanization have wrought upon them and thus also contribute to the dramatization of the protagonist’s impressions of her society.
The one-box set (at times two-box), with minor adjustments from episode to episode, creates the claustrophobic feeling of Helen’s world. Crucial scenes from six years are played fluidly, separated by darkness but linked by sounds that fill the darkness, contributing to Helen’s feeling of unrelieved tension. Cacophony of machine noise is never raised to the wild roar that characterizes many expressionistic plays. It is instead intended to create a background atmosphere of mechanized life surrounding the heroine even as background dialogue in some scenes echoes or counterpoints her thoughts.
Helen as a heroine is a type, but as her unconscious is revealed through free-association soliloquies, as her commonplace experiences are dramatized from her viewpoint, and as her wishes and memories are revealed onstage, the audience sees in the type an individual struggling for rebirth.
Historical Context
The Snyder-Gray Murder Trial
In the spring of 1927, Treadwell attended the infamous trial of Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray. Although she wasn't officially covering the trial as a journalist, her experiences in the courtroom inspired her play, Machinal. Ruth Snyder, a seemingly innocent housewife from Long Island, and her lover, portrayed as a bumbling accomplice, captured immense public interest. The trial was extensively covered by hundreds of reporters, generating daily headlines. The intense media coverage persisted until the defendants were executed by the electric chair in January 1928. Ruth Snyder's execution marked her as the first woman executed in New York State in the twentieth century.
Albert Snyder, Ruth’s husband, was discovered beaten, drugged with chloroform, and strangled in his bed on March 20, 1927. When police arrived, Ruth was found bound and gagged outside their daughter’s room. She claimed that a tall man had attacked her, causing her to faint and remain unconscious for at least five hours. However, police grew suspicious when they found Ruth’s jewelry hidden under a mattress. Despite the house appearing ransacked, it was odd that the thief left the jewelry behind. Additionally, Ruth’s lack of concern for her husband upon regaining consciousness further aroused suspicion. After nearly twenty hours of interrogation, Ruth confessed that she and her lover, Gray, had murdered her husband. Later, she changed her story, asserting that while she participated, Gray was the mastermind behind the murder.
The sensational trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray captivated the American public. Alongside the 180 reporters assigned to cover the case, around 1,500 people attended the trial daily. Although Treadwell wasn't assigned to report on the trial, she frequently observed the proceedings. For the first time in history, microphones and speakers were installed so everyone in the courtroom could hear the testimonies. Ruth faced an all-male jury, and many female reporters and intellectuals of the time believed she was at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, they were correct. The prosecution and even Gray’s defense attorney leveraged the all-male jury to their advantage. The prosecution argued that Snyder killed her husband to escape an unhappy marriage, not an abusive one. This argument instilled fear in the male jurors, making them wonder if other wives might commit similar crimes. The jury quickly convicted Ruth Snyder, sentencing her to death in the electric chair.
Literary Style
The Tragic Heroine
Though the storyline of Machinal might portray Helen Jones as a villain, her character is actually intended to be a tragic heroine. The play is crafted with intense anger. Helen Jones, along with other women, is condemned to navigate the barren wasteland of a male-dominated society. Remember, this is an expressionistic play, designed to evoke emotion and feeling rather than realism. Therefore, interpreting this play through a realistic lens would inevitably lead to Helen's condemnation to death by electric chair and label her as a villain. However, from an expressionistic perspective, Helen emerges as a heroine, battling male oppression on behalf of all women. Helen does not kill her husband out of malice; she is driven to it out of desperation. At the moment of the murder, it becomes apparent that, in certain situations, some wives might find it necessary to kill their husbands. With her final, unsuccessful attempt to break free from the constraints of a male-dominated society, Helen transforms into a tragic heroine.
Episodes
Structure plays a vital role in all forms of expressionism, and Treadwell’s Machinal is no exception. In this play, Treadwell abandons the conventional dramatic structure of acts and scenes, opting instead for nine episodes. Each episode is aptly titled to reflect its setting or mood, with the number of episodes symbolizing the nine months of pregnancy.
Each episode’s title serves as a framework for Treadwell’s commentary on a woman’s role in a male-dominated society. In “Episode I To Business,” Machinal begins in the office of the George H. Jones Company. The scene is alive with busy office workers and a symphony of office noises. Despite the office setting, the dialogue centers around Helen and her upcoming marriage to George H. Jones. Treadwell names the episode “To Business,” yet the conversation diverges from business matters. This title is more reflective of Treadwell’s intention to reveal her themes to the audience than of the episode’s actual content. Through the title of the first episode and the nine-episode structure of Machinal, Treadwell signals her intent to critique the male-dominated society of the 1920s. The subsequent episodes are equally well-titled—At Home, Honeymoon, Maternal, Prohibited, Intimate, Domestic, The Law, and finally, A Machine. The ninth and final episode not only mirrors the nine months of pregnancy and a woman’s role as a mother, but also comments on the inescapable reality of a woman’s position in society. The title—A Machine—specifically refers to Helen’s encounter with the electric chair.
However, Treadwell delves into a much deeper commentary. By concluding the nine episodes with “A Machine,” she underscores a woman’s role as merely a part of the male-dominated societal mechanism. The play spans nine episodes, mirroring the nine months of gestation; the final episode is titled “A Machine,” symbolizing a woman's societal role of childbearing—essentially being a machine within the patriarchal framework. Treadwell's dramatic structure is remarkably effective. Machinal is both powerful and thought-provoking, even when analyzed from a distance with an unconventional breakdown of the typical dramatic structure.
Compare and Contrast
1920s: Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Today: Women from diverse backgrounds train as commercial, military, and private pilots, flying globally for companies, governments, and private individuals.
1920s: The inaugural scheduled television broadcast occurs in New York City.
Today: Numerous television programs air continuously through cable and satellite connections. Shows are broadcast in multiple languages from a multitude of networks, reaching audiences worldwide.
1920s: The most notorious U.S. stock market crash transpires, plunging the world into an economic crisis.
Today: The global economy remains fragile, susceptible to disruptions from war, resource shortages, or unemployment.
1920s: Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini commence their ascent to power in their respective nations, setting the stage for World War II.
Today: Amid significant political unrest worldwide, the United States is engaged in a contentious war in Iraq.
Media Adaptations
In 1954, a television adaptation of Machinal was created and broadcast in the United States.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Bywaters, Barbara L., “Marriage, Madness, and Murder in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal,” in Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter, Associated University Presses, 1990, pp. 97–110.
Dickey, Jerry, “The ‘Real Lives’ of Sophie Treadwell: Expressionism and the Feminist Aesthetic in Machinal and For Saxophone,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, University of Georgia Press, 1997, pp. 176–84.
Tancheva, Kornelia, “Sophie Treadwell’s Play Machinal: Strategies of Reception and Interpretation,” in Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity, edited by Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb, Praeger, 2003.
Treadwell, Sophie, Machinal, Nick Hern Books, 1993.
Further Reading
Dickey, Jerry, Sophie Treadwell: A Research and Production Sourcebook, Greenwood Press, 1997.
This book details Sophie Treadwell’s accomplishments, providing a career and biographical overview, comprehensive plot summaries of her plays, criticism, and an annotated bibliography.
Jones, Jennifer, “In Defense of the Woman: Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, Fall 1994.
Jones explores the connections between Machinal and the Snyder-Gray murder case of 1927.
Kuhns, David F., German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Kuhns investigates the highly stylized, anti-realistic approaches of symbolic acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921.
Styan, J. L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Vol. 3, Expressionism and Epic Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
This book examines expressionism from German to American playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Sean O’Casey.