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.
Themes
The Untenable Position and Role of Women in Society
Machinal portrays women as subjected to the often brutal, mechanical demands of society, a society created by men, for men. There are very few points in the play where we see women speak and be listened to. For example, the nurse in the maternity ward suggests that they don’t force the baby on Helen and the doctor snaps back, “I decide what’s better and better not here, Nurse!” (761-762). The only way for a woman to be free is to totally break with society. However, this total break seems impossible as well, as Helen’s attempt at doing so, by living outside the bounds of society through the act of murder, only serves to lead her back deeper into society’s bureaucracy and judgment. Be it the workplace, religion, the courtroom, or the bedroom, women are talked at and not listened to.
Jones manages to put all his employees in their place with just a few words. The doctor puts the nurse in her place. Jones treats Helen like a child, ignoring her every thought. The lawyers talk over Helen and simply mouth their lawyerly phrases. The priest prays without acknowledging Helen’s needs, and the barbers shave her head, despite her painful objections. While Jones is killed, there are seemingly no repercussions for his actions while alive, and Helen’s desperate last act to get out of her abusive relationship ultimately seals her own fate, thereby reinforcing the inescapable quality of the mechanized, patriarchal society in which she lives.
The Mechanical and Reductive Nature of the Everyday
In Machinal, nearly all aspects of existence are reduced to the generic mechanical. Characters are more greatly defined by the roles they play in their professional and social spheres, as opposed to having any sort of individualism. Aside from patriarchal brute George Jones, the only other named character is Helen, and she mentions her name mainly as an aside, as though this information were secondary to her role as worker and then wife. Characters talk not to but at each other, and most of the dialogue is syncopated chit-chat dominated by clichéd language. Treadwell’s use of the em-dash reinforces this syncopation or locomotion visually in the text, with these dashes working as a form of regulation and thereby dehumanizing both content and speaker.
While every character in Machinal is presented as reductive, the character of Helen’s mother provides an especially good example thereof. Here, Treadwell offers a character so disillusioned by the world she lives in that she has forgotten all of her dreams and decouples the idea of the love from the institution of marriage. Her incessant chiding of Helen, and her mandate that Helen marry Jones, illustrates that for Helen’s mother, life is about little more than survival; idealistic or romanticized notions, including love, can only get in the way of making proper, pragmatic decisions. In regard to her daughter, Helen’s mother is actually not wrong, as while Helen’s meeting with her lover does provide a brief respite from Helen’s loveless and dysfunctional marriage to Jones, the brief affair also dooms Helen, as she begins to concoct her plan to kill Jones, which will ultimately lead to her execution. The character of Helen’s mother, then, while leading a truly reductive existence, is also able to maintain a sort of societal homeostasis that Helen, in holding on to human/individualistic dreams and desires, cannot.
