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.
Preface-Episode 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
The Preface, which opens the first episode, is broken into four parts: “The Plot,”“The Plan,”“The Hope,” and “Scenically.” As Treadwell explains, the plot is simply the story of a woman who murders her husband. The Plan defines Treadwell’s idea for the play. She wants to describe the “different phases of [Helen’s] life,” (165), none of which afford Helenany peace. The woman herself contrasts the harsh, mechanical reality of her life. Treadwell lays out how the development of the story, in nine episodes, echoes this mechanized reality. She finds freedom and peace only in breaching the marriage contract and breaking the laws that bind her. Treadwell explains the unusual use of language as an attempt to catch the rhythm of common city speech and the ambient sounds as “inherently emotional” (167).
Episode 1 Summary: “To Business”
The machines necessary to a business office are the first things we see and hear: the clacking of the adding machine, the shuffling of papers, the keys of typewriters, telephone bells. The characters are revealed next, working at their machines and talking about their jobs. For example, the adding-machine man says random numbers, snippets of telephone-operator talk waft across the stage, and the filing clerk yells out, “What’s the matter with Q?” (271).
The conversation is rapid fire and goes back and forth between the workers, who have a sort of dialogue in their machine-likemanner of speaking. At first, the conversations seem rambling, but narrow to why the young female protagonist (who will reveal her name as Helen in Episode 5) is late, before moving on to what they believe will be her marriage to the head of the business, Mr. George Jones. Helen finally arrives, talking vaguely about needing fresh air and the subway train. The other workers tell her Mr. Jones wants her to take a letter and she folds into herself, apparently not wanting to. She flinches when Jones puts his hand on her shoulder.
Preface-Episode 1 Analysis
The Preface and Episode 1 introduce the reader and audienceto all the structural and literary building blocks of Machinal. The offstage sounds and voices, the nameless characters, and the power struggles all appear in these two introductory pieces.
The Preface and Episode One also introduce the key themes of the play and the unusual (for the time) style of narrative. The lack of identifying names, the merging of the characters’ language with machine sounds, the repetition of what they’re saying, and the clichés the characters use remove humanity from the workers and effectively place them at the will of machines, while making them machine-like themselves. The repetitive dialogue underlines the mechanized and stultifying nature of this life for them.
The young woman’s soliloquy at the end of Episode 1 makes clear the path facing most women of that time: get married, have babies, and rely on a husband for financial well-being. Freedom, love and meaningful work are not part of the picture.
