30 pages • 1 hour read
Sophie TreadwellMachinal
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Young Woman/The Woman/Helen
The young woman, whose name is Helen, is the central character of Machinal. She is both herself, specifically, constrained by the social norms of her age but desiring freedom and something more from life, and representative of all women of her era. She is “essentially soft and tender,” (167-68) but lives within a harsh, mechanical world that does not listen to her and provides few options for a path forward in life. We see her do her best to push back and refuse the nagging demands of her mother, her husband, and society in general, but these elements wear her down.
Helen sees her only chance at freedom as arriving to her through the murder of her husband—an idea put into motion when she goes on date with a murdererwhile she’s married. Helen is a prime example of Battered woman syndrome (BWS), in which a female kills their partner as a response to what is perceived as consistent and persisting abuse. BWS would not become a syndrome until the 1990s, some sixty years after Treadwell’s play first premiered. BWS is considered by some analysts as a sub-type of PTSD, and includes intense feelings of fear, loneliness, anger, and sadness, in addition to the inability to effectively communicate these feelings.
Treadwell overlaps the psychological/subjective with the sociological via Helen’s BWS. In her subjective life/experience, she suffers the familial pressure to marry from her mother and does so, marrying George Jones, who chronically psychologically abuses her. Through a wider sociological lens, Treadwell shows how damaging a woman’s limited choices are inside society’s machine. Humanity is so pressurized and freedom so limited that a violent reaction (murder) seems the only solution. Society’s response is executing Helen; her action of killing to escape the machine is also the machine’s response to her action.
George Jones
Jones manages the business where Helen works. Money drives him. He admonishes his team to “hew the line,” suggesting his belief that they must do for him, first and foremost, and cannot escape their roles in life. He believes he is powerful and important, and affirms society is patriarchal when he says, “All men are born free and entitled to the pursuit of happiness” (1255-1256). As such, he treats Helen, his wife, as if she were a child (and not a true adult, with adult access to the world), refusing to listen to her requests, lying to her, ignoring her fears, andforcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do, such as have a child. He represents the unbending, inhumane,and mechanical society in which the characters live, one in which only men can truly be free.
Helen’s Mother
Helen’s mother is as much a victim as her daughter, butunlike Helen (at least at the play’s outset),she has given up any dream she ever had and no longer even remembers them. She nags her daughter about everything from what she eats to getting married to the meaning and value of love. In addition, every view Helen expresses, her mother takes as a personal attack: “Nag! Just because I try to look out for you–nag! Just because I try to care for you–nag! Why, you haven’t sense enough to eat! What would become of you I’d like to know–if I didn’t nag!” (467-477) She disparages love and wants her daughter to marry Jones, even though Helen hates him,and disparages love.
The Lover
The lover is an outlaw who has come up from Mexico after having murdered two men. He is sitting in the bar with his friend, waiting for the friend’s lover and Helen to show up. We don’t get much of a sense of him except that he sees in Helen something special and strange: “You’re different from girls like that other one—any guy’ll do her. You’re different” (930).
His felonious actionsinspire Helen to develop her idea of escape via murder. While he is honest and frank, the lover does not promise her eternal love or say that he’ll stay with her. Further, Treadwell shows that this character has far more in common with Jones than he does Helen, as it’s the lover who ultimately provides evidence for the arrest of Helen, after she murders her husband, but escapes any sort of punishment after giving her up. While on the wrong side of the law, the criminal underworld is presented as just as patriarchal as the business world.
