36 pages • 1 hour read
Athol FugardThe Road to Mecca
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Helen’s “Mecca”
The clearest symbol in The Road to Mecca is Helen’s home, which she refers to as her “Mecca.” It “attempt[s] to use as much light and color as humanly possible” (1) and includes an outdoor sculpture garden filled with Helen’s sculptures of Wise Men and animals pointed toward the East. As Helen frequently asserts throughout the play, her “Mecca” is a reflection of her true self, and her life’s purpose is its creation. Helen tells Elsa about her home: “This is what I really am. […] Nothing, not even my name or my face, is me as much as those Wise Men and their camels traveling to the East, or the light and glitter in this room” (24).
Helen’s “Mecca” is the physical manifestation of her radiant personality as well as her Eastern faith. More importantly, it represents her freedom and independence from her conservative South African community, in that she has personally transcended its conventions and limitations by physically creating a new world of her own.
Candles and Darkness/Light
Helen’s mental state throughout the play is represented through notions of darkness and light, particularly as manifested through the candles in her home. Light and candles are shown to be of particular importance to Helen from the first act. Recalling their first meeting, Elsa remembers Helen telling her, “Never light a candle carelessly, and be sure you know what you’re doing when you blow one out,” and that “light is a miracle […] which even the most ordinary human being can make happen” (22).
Helen’s candle-filled home and the light it creates represents the sense of joy and personal fulfillment that she gets through her home; as she tells Marius, she “play[s] with [light] like children with a magical toy” (68). Helen says, “This is my world and I have banished darkness from it” (68). This idea of darkness is Helen’s way of referring to her depression and the suicidal thoughts that she alludes to in her letter to Elsa. When Elsa asks what Helen was writing about, she responds, “Darkness, Elsa! Darkness!” and says that there’s a Darkness “inside me, Elsa…it’s got inside me at last and I can’t light candles there” (37). By the end of the play, Helen acknowledges that this sense of darkness is necessary now that she’s finished her life’s purpose and must finish out her fate, with darkness and blowing the candles out now representing death and her potentially imminent suicide. Helen explains, “I was wrong to think I could banish darkness. […] Just as I taught myself how to light candles, and what that means, I must teach myself now how to blow them out…and what that means” (75).
Helen’s Act II monologue about the night she first began to create her Mecca describes the origins behind her assigning meaning to light and darkness. She talks about the damaging effect of Marius’s closing her curtains after her late husband’s funeral and how she sat with a candle, waiting for the darkness when it went out. But instead of “allowing the darkness to defeat it, that small, uncertain little light seemed to find its courage again” (66-68)—prompting Helen’s own spiritual awakening and emotional revival through the creation of her Mecca.
The Woman on the Road
The African woman whom Elsa picks up on the side of the road with her baby comes up repeatedly throughout the play; as Elsa says, “she won’t leave me alone” (72). Most obviously, the woman represents South Africa’s apartheid-era racial inequality and social injustice, as she’s been kicked out of her home after her husband’s death and is walking through the Karoo in search of a better life. She also represents Elsa and Helen’s comparative privilege in society, despite the personal troubles they face. Unlike Helen, who created a new, independent life for herself through her “Mecca,” Elsa tells Helen, “There’s no Mecca waiting for her at the end of that road” (72).
The woman and her baby also represent to Elsa the domesticity that she herself doesn’t have, telling Helen that the baby “could have been mine” (72) as she grieves her recent abortion. The woman’s precarious situation in life and struggle also seems to reflect the “helplessness” (73) that Elsa feels, both in her own personal life—her activism for racial equality and inability to help that woman and others like her—and with Helen, as Elsa fights throughout the play to try and save Helen from her seemingly inevitable decline.
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By Athol Fugard
