36 pages • 1 hour read
William IngePicnic
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Class Disparity and the American Dream
After World War II, the golden age of American capitalism began, due in large part to government spending on infrastructure. With the growth of the middle class came a rise in consumerism and an emphasis on materialism as a core social value. The original understanding of the American Dream, as first articulated in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, was based on equal opportunity for all people to succeed to their highest potential regardless of the circumstances of their birth. The older generation of adults in the play, such as Flo and Helen, embody this attitude. They have experienced the extreme poverty of the Great Depression and then the rationing and lack of resources caused by World War II. Flo herself fought her way out of poverty with two young girls, attaining respectable, if modest, financial status. She sees Alan Seymour as a desirable husband for Madge because of his family’s wealth and the stability that wealth provides.
By contrast, Alan himself symbolizes the new version of the American Dream that emerged after World War II. After the housing shortages and destitution of the Depression, the American Dream became centered on home ownership and the financial means to outfit that home with modern material goods such as televisions and cars. The Cold War and the growing fear of communism also encouraged Americans to marry and have children in order to build a stronger American society.
Hal has been chasing the old version of the American Dream, trying to use his natural assets—his beauty—to become an actor and rise above the circumstances of his birth. Now, as a homeless drifter, he represents the opposite of the new American Dream, and he demonstrates that in this changed social structure, circumstances of birth have a large impact on one’s access to upward mobility. Alan has the financial resources to propel himself upward. Hal clings on from the bottom, and it takes the barest effort from Alan to undo his modest gains. However, Hal has so internalized the idea of the American Dream that his financial failures embarrass him in spite of his hard work. Those around him reinforce this belief; Flo calls him a tramp and assumes that he is dangerous because he is poor. This sort of prejudice makes it even more difficult to rise from humble birth.
Beauty and Its Value
Madge, who is constantly called beautiful, is the object of varying levels of envy from the other women in the play. They all see her beauty as valuable—a form of capital that is ephemeral but can secure a husband and a stable middle-class life. Flo sees Madge’s beauty as her ticket into a wealthy marriage and an easy life. Millie is jealous of her sister’s beauty and, although she pretends not to care, becomes extremely sensitive and upset when boys (and her sister) call her a goon. She believes that beauty makes Madge special and untouchable. Rosemary, who claims to have once been as beautiful as Madge, sees Madge’s beauty as a reminder of her own aging. She’s jealous and critical of Madge, not-so-secretly wishing that she could be like Madge again and make different choices.
Madge, however, sees beauty as empty and meaningless. She asks her mother, “What good is it to be pretty?” (14), and Flo explains, “Pretty things […] they’re like billboards telling us that life is good” (15). She envies Millie because Millie is intelligent and artistically talented, which she sees as substantive qualities. It hurts Madge’s feelings when Millie accuses her of being too “dumb” to graduate high school without using her looks to influence a male teacher. Madge nevertheless internalizes the idea that she is stupid and nothing but a pretty face. She even spends time staring into the mirror wondering whether she is real when she isn’t looking at herself—that is, whether her identity exists at all separate from her looks. Alan feeds this belief; he only loves her for her beauty and, when their relationship ends, cruelly comments that he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the rest of his life just staring at her.
Madge connects to Hal because Hal is also beautiful and understands what it means to feel alone and out of place anyway. They both know that beauty is never enough, and that others will objectify them for it. In his attempt to become a movie actor, Hal’s career was derailed because one feature, his teeth, were deemed imperfect. His choice was to give up or allow them to alter his body for cosmetic purposes. Perhaps the darkest aspect of beauty for both is its tendency to attract anger, violence, and unwanted sexual attention. They are both blamed for the jealousy or inappropriate desire of others, as if their appearance is provocation enough to justify poor treatment.
Women and Gender Expectations
For a woman in a small American town in the 1950s, opportunities are limited and expectations are strict. A gossip-fueled rumor mill and the imposition of social consequences for misbehavior enforce these standards of propriety with increasing severity as girls approach womanhood. As a teenage girl, Millie is still allowed to reject traditional femininity, although her tomboyishness attracts merciless teasing. At 16, however, Millie is on the cusp of adulthood. Millie wants to be an adult but is afraid of the awkwardness and embarrassment of learning how to be feminine, which is the only model of womanhood she has ever encountered. Becoming a woman therefore means abandoning the persona she has spent her childhood cultivating.
Madge represents the gender ideal. She is beautiful and graceful as well as passive and obedient. She is self-sacrificing, spending her morning in the kitchen instead of going swimming with the others. Madge wears pretty dresses, paints her nails, and knows how to dance. She dutifully preserves her virginity, and her reward for growing into the ideal of domestic womanhood is a future of cooking and cleaning for a wealthy husband and their eventual children. Millie may be jealous of Madge and the endless praise she receives, but neither sister is content with the idea of a domestic future. However, another facet of womanhood is endless competition with one another. Madge and Millie can’t confer and support each other because they are too resentful of the ways in which the other is “winning.”
Rosemary serves as an example of someone who has aged out of the feminine ideal. Like Madge, she was passive and waited for a man to marry her, but she ended up alone and in a life that she didn’t want. She became a different trope of womanhood: a “spinster” who resents Madge for still having her youth. For both Madge and Rosemary, seizing control of their lives therefore involves seizing control of their sexuality and sexual desires. By having sex, they are defying the social expectations that are holding them back and making them unhappy. They decide to choose their own futures instead of waiting for men to choose them. For Madge, this means stepping outside of the rigid domestic role that she has grown up learning. For Rosemary, marrying Howard is a way of grabbing onto the safety of proscribed gender roles and securing her place in small-town society.
