perfectly content with being a good homemaker, wife, and mother. He is patronizing to Claire and does not understand what her work with the plants means to her. He dismisses her projects with comments such as, ‘‘Well, I don’t want to see it get you—it’s not important enough for that.’’ Harry does not understand Claire’s behavior at all and believes that she is suffering from hysteria.

Richard Demming
Richard Demming is a houseguest and friend of the Archer’s. He is known to his friends as Dick. Dick is an artist who produces abstract drawings. Many of the other characters in the play do not understand his artwork. Harry calls his drawings, ‘‘lines that don’t make anything.’’ Through his artwork, Dick too is breaking patterns by creating drawings with forms that people do not recognize. He is having an affair with Claire of which Harry is unaware at the start of the play. As an artist, Dick concentrates primarily on the visual aspects of things. For example, when Claire urges him to destroy the Edge Vine in act I, he resists because it is ‘‘interesting in form.’’ Dick loves Claire’s physicality, her exterior self, but he does not understand what is going on inside her. Dick dismisses Claire’s ramblings as ‘‘merely the excess of a particularly rich temperament.’’

Tom Edgeworthy
Tom is an old friend of Claire’s who is her closest confidant. Tom is into meditation and mystical practices and is somewhat of a poet and philosopher. Of all the men in Claire’s life, he is the most sensitive to her feelings. Tom tries to understand her torment, but he too ultimately fails. Tom is in love with Claire and has decided he must go away because he cannot have her love on his own terms. At the end of the play when he tries to pull Claire away with him, it is clear that he does not truly understand her either, and Claire sees this as the last straw. His inability to ‘‘meet Claire in her world’’ ultimately leads to the climax of the play. Of all of the characters, Tom’s speech patterns most closely resemble Claire’s with their sometimes stilted and disjointed meter. In this way, Glaspell symbolically indicates the chance for a connection between the two characters.

Elizabeth
Elizabeth is Claire’s daughter from her first marriage. She has been raised by her Aunt Adelaide and has not seen her mother for the past year. She is poised, graceful, and self-assured. Elizabeth tries very hard to ingratiate herself to her mother, but she is not able to get through to Claire at all. Claire rejects her because Elizabeth represents all of the things that keep women ‘‘locked in’’ to their traditional roles. Unlike Harry, Elizabeth recognizes that things are rapidly changing in society, although she is not a willing participant in the change. In the first act, she notes that, ‘‘I’m not going to teach or preach or be a stuffy person. But now that—values have shifted and such sensitive new things have been liberated in the world—.’’ Elizabeth is a product of her upbringing and is well-suited to fulfill the role that society expects of her.

Dr. Charlie Emmons
Dr. Emmons is a neurologist whom Harry enlists to try and help Claire. Dr. Emmons is a congenial man who tries his best to be non-threatening. He does not subscribe to the new Freudian theories of psychoanalysis that have been put forth. He holds on to the old belief that rest and isolation can help ‘‘cure’’ a hysterical patient, an idea that was common at the time the play takes place. Dr. Emmons has been brought to the house by Harry, who hopes he can find a way to help Claire revert back to her ‘‘normal’’ self.

Hattie
Hattie is the Archer’s maid. She is loyal to the family and gets very concerned whenever she feels something is amiss. When Hattie notices Mr. Archer talking heatedly with Mr. Demming, she becomes very upset and tries to get Anthony to intervene. She serves an important function at the beginning of act 3 when she reports what occurred the previous night and what she has witnessed during the conversation between Mr. Archer and Mr. Demming.