The Skin of Our Teeth

“We’ve rattled along, hot and cold, for some time now—[…] and my advice to you is not to inquire into why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate,—that’s my philosophy. Don’t forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by the skin of our teeth!”

Sabina’s reassurance to the audience is a nod to the real crisis that the United States survived only a few years before and an implicit recognition of the crisis that they’re enduring with World War II. Of course, her philosophy about enjoying whatever pleasures one can without thinking about them too deeply is characteristic of the mentality that allows Sabina to simply let the fire go out and nearly kill them all. However, at the end of the play, she demonstrates that the capacity to enjoy oneself and a night at the movies is just as essential to humanity as George and Maggie’s relentless work ethic.

“I don’t understand a word of this play,—Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth.”

The actor playing Sabina, Miss Somerset, has already delivered a rant about the incomprehensibility of the text. Reminding viewers that elements of the play are absurd gives them permission to accept the departure from realism and that some elements of the play can’t be clearly analyzed for symbolism and meaning.

“Always throwing up the sponge, Sabina. Always announcing your own death. But give you a new hat—or a plate of ice cream—or a ticket to the movies, and you want to live forever.”

Maggie’s admonishment of Sabina recalls the philosophy about ice cream Sabina professes in her opening monologue and foreshadows the movie ticket that will make her happy in the third act. These are metatheatrical elements that also allude to the cyclical structure of the play. Maggie is also chastising Sabina by rephrasing her ice cream philosophy as a problem. Sabina might live for the small pleasures she’s given, but she also doesn’t want to keep going when there are no novelties to enjoy.

“But it was I who encouraged Mr. Antrobus to make the alphabet. I’m sorry to say it, Mrs. Antrobus, but you’re not a beautiful woman, and you can never know what a man could do if he tried. It’s girls like I who inspire the multiplication table.”

Maggie demeans Sabina by implying that her only asset is her beauty, and that beauty isn’t enough to retain George’s interest. Sabina argues that beauty serves a purpose in the world. It seems frivolous as the ice descends, but in the second act, Sabina nearly lures George away. In the end, Sabina keeps ending up in the kitchen because Maggie’s practicality is more useful in the repeated crises that they face.

“The earth’s getting so silly no wonder the sun turns cold.”

The song at the end of the telegram excites Sabina and gives her the will to keep helping the family push forward. However, this moment shows the contrast between Maggie and Sabina’s approaches to life. Sabina is true to her suggestion to avoid asking why, but Maggie questions. She even asks the animals, but there is never any real explanation as to the reasons for the repetition of disasters. Therefore, crisis is an inevitable part of the experience of human life.

“I don’t know. After all, what does one do about anything? Just keep as warm as you can. And don’t let your wife and children see that you’re worried.”

Maggie maintains a policy of avoiding unpleasant discussions, especially in earshot of the children. Although the Antrobus family will survive, she admits that she has no real advice, and they are all simply improvising. Notably, she suggests that the Telegraph Boy maintain the illusion of confidence for the sake of his wife as well, although Maggie takes on the worry just as much as George.

“Why, George Antrobus, how can you say such a thing? You have the best family in the world.”

George becomes exasperated with his wife and family, as the conveeners are mocking him for bringing them along at all. Maggie’s indignant response ignores their homicidal son and unruly daughter, as well as the history of Sabina in their home as George’s mistress. Glossing over these issues keeps them from dealing with them and progressing.

“What’s the matter with a family, I’d like to know. What else have they got to offer?”

Maggie reacts angrily to the conveeners and their anti-family exclamations. The family unit is what allows the Antrobuses to continue surviving. The conveeners aren’t even considered when the family boards the boat, and in their fervent indulgence of pleasure in Atlantic City, they are only enjoying themselves (as George directed) rather than contributing to humanity through work, procreation, or the preservation of family.

“Listen, George: other people haven’t got feelings. Not in the same way that we have,—we who are presidents like you and prize-winners like me. […] The world was made for us. What’s life anyway? Except for two things, pleasure and power, what is life? Boredom! Foolishness. You know it is.”

Sabina’s argument as to why George shouldn’t feel guilty about leaving his wife explains her solipsistic world view. Much like Henry becomes the embodiment of evil in Act II, Sabina represents the embodiment of temptation and selfishness while she is trying to lure George away from Maggie. Ironically, as Miss Somerset, Sabina refuses to finish the scene because she is concerned about the feelings of her friend in the audience, but she obtusely and humorously repeats the lines of the scenes that she finds most offensive.

“You’re a fine woman, Maggie, but…but a man has to have his own life to lead in the world.”

George’s attempt to leave the family in Act II will echo in Act III when Henry tries to leave, asserting that he also plans to make his own way in the world. In the second act, George is the poorest version of himself as a leader, which is ironic as he has just been elected president. He tries to shirk his responsibilities and live for his own desires, but, as always, crisis interrupts.

“It’s a bottle. And in the bottle’s a letter. And in the letter is written all the things that a woman knows. It’s never been told to any man and it’s never been told to any woman, and if it finds its destination, a new time will come. We’re not what books and plays say we are. We’re not what advertisements say we are. We’re not in the movies and we’re not on the radio. We’re not what you’re all told and what you think we are. We’re ourselves. And if any man can find one of us he’ll learn why the whole universe was set in motion. And if any man harm any one of us, his soul—the only soul he’s god—had better be at the bottom of that ocean.”

Maggie throws her bottled message into the ocean, and the secrets of womanhood disappear into the water. In most of her dialogue, Maggie is relentlessly practical. In this moment, after her husband has said that he’s leaving, and her daughter has shown up in red stockings, Maggie asserts metatheatrically that women are far more complex than the mother/temptress dichotomy represented in the play. If the message is found, which seems unlikely, the secrets it contains about women will change the world. The secrets, like many things in Maggie and George’s life, can’t be spoken, even to pass them down from woman to woman. This suggests that Maggie is raising Gladys without the ability to share womanly wisdom, and perhaps that Wilder felt that women were mysterious as well and didn’t presume to explain them.

“Gracious sakes, all these things will be forgotten in a hundred years.”

Sabina tries to stop George from following Gladys after her angry outburst, but the irony of the statement is that the central family has been alive for thousands of years. The family also has a habit of deliberately forgetting their unseemly moments. Sabina’s wide view of history is both comforting and impractical because what will matter in 100 years is far less important to most mortals than what will matter in their lifetimes.

“Go back and climb on your roofs. Put rags in the cracks under your doors—Nothing will keep out the flood You’ve had your chance. You’ve had your day. You’ve failed. You’ve lost.”

The fortune teller taunts the conveeners as they panic in the face of the storm and beg to hear their fortunes. They embraced George’s advice to enjoy themselves, but to the detriment of taking their lives seriously. Their fate demonstrates that Sabina only makes it through this disaster because she shows humility to Maggie and begs her to let her come along. The conveeners have lost their chance to be significant in history.

“Mr. Antrobus’ll be here this afternoon. I just saw him downtown. Huuuuurry and put things in order. He says that now the war’s over we’ll all have to settle down and be perfect.”

The message that George conveys through Sabina is that he is ready to approach this latest rebuilding of the world with the same energy and optimism as always, and he is warning the family that he plans to exert the same impossible expectations on them. George’s quest for perfection pushes his family to put forth effort, but it also stops them from acknowledging and working through their own flaws instead of covering them up to avoid George’s wrath.

“Mr. Fitzpatrick, you let my father come to a rehearsal, and my father’s a Baptist minister, and he said that the author meant that—just like the hours and stars go by over our heads at night, in the same way the ideas and thoughts of the great men are in the air around us all the time and they’re working on us, even when we don’t know it.”

Ivy is the backstage maid for Miss Somerset, the actor who plays Sabina. When the actors are debating the meaning of the scene in which the philosophers are represented as the hours of the night, Miss Somerset/Sabina offers an analysis that doesn’t make sense, but Ivy comprehends the scene on a deeper level. In this explanation, Ivy is demonstrating what she is saying, which is that the significant philosophies of Western history don’t just belong to the educated and the elite. They’re deeper truths that are in the air all the time.

“Oh, Mrs. Antrobus, God forgive me but I enjoyed the war. Everybody’s at their best in wartime.”

Sabina’s attitude toward war is very different from her responses to the catastrophes in the first two acts, which she seemed to find tedious. She is excited by what she views as the heroic actions of men, romanticizing the battlefield as a place where ordinary men perform extraordinary deeds. By extension, she is also projecting a lens of optimism on the war that the audience is experiencing in 1942. The play encourages viewers to consider the war within the context of human history, leaving the theater with hope as to America and the world’s ability to survive yet another large-scale upheaval.

“The first thing to do is to burn up those old books; it’s the ideas he gets out of those old books that…that makes the whole world so you can’t live in it.”

Henry resents the knowledge and philosophy that his father is so adamant about protecting because it imposes a moralistic order that vilifies him for acting on his every desire and impulse. In the first act, George argues that Moses, as a judge, will be useful in rebuilding the world because their parenting isn’t enough to control Henry. George isn’t willing to allow the family to burn his books even to stay alive because he believes books are necessary to reestablish an ethical society. Henry hopes that destroying the books will destroy the ideas inscribed in them.

“There’s that old whine again. All you people think you’re not loved enough, nobody loves you. Well, you start being lovable and we’ll love you.”

Sabina doesn’t particularly like to take responsibility for her own actions, but she understands love as conditional and even transactional. Henry claims that no one loves him, and therefore he is justified in his anger and hatred. Sabina’s experience of love has been conditional based on how well she could hold George’s attention with her beauty and sexuality. Therefore, she sees Henry as not entitled to love but required to earn it. Of course, Maggie has offered Henry unconditional love by protecting him no matter what terrible things he does. His family accepts him back, even after everything that he has done.

“That’s all we do—always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again. […] All right. I’ll go on just out of habit, but I won’t believe in it.”

When Sabina returns from war, she expresses her exhilaration about battle and heroism, but just as the outside world quickly returns to normal, Sabina’s enthusiasm doesn’t last once the work begins. Going through the motions isn’t an option in something as significant as rebuilding the world, and Maggie gives a speech that snaps her back into committing to the effort.

“I’m not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours. I’m going a long way from here and make my own world that’s fit for a man to live in. Where a man can be free, and have a chance, and do what he wants to do in his own way.”

Henry has spent the last seven years at war trying to destroy his father’s construction of society, and he hasn’t been successful. He wants to construct his own so he can be a man rather than a child, as living in his parents’ world means continuing to be treated as a son and a boy. However, George points out that Henry’s idea of freedom is just taking what he wants, and he must internalize moral and ethical order before he can create any social order outside of himself.

“Yes, the ocean’s full of letters, along with the other things.”

While George has been away at war, the mail became unreliable and letters between the family stopped. His reference to the letters in the ocean recalls Maggie’s message in a bottle in the second act as well as the voices of those who were lost at war. The ocean contains those who drowned in Act II, people who died at sea, ships that have sunk, enslaved people who died on the middle passage, and many more things that have been permanently lost to humanity.

“When you’re at war you think about a better life, when you’re at peace you think about a more comfortable one. I’ve lost it. I feel sick and tired.”

George echoes Sabina’s assertion that people are at their best at wartime, also demonstrating that the valor and glory burn out and become distant when the war ends. Similarly, the country was experiencing a burst of patriotism and civic pride during World War II. The play warns that when the war ends, it will be tempting to make the same mistake that George made in Act II, when he told everyone to enjoy themselves. The country needs to keep their energy and idealism when peacetime returns.

“You’re a very nice man, Mr. Antrobus, but you’d have got on better in the world if you’d realized that dog-eat-dog was the rule in the beginning and always will be. And most of all now.”

Sabina’s argument is similar to Henry’s mentality of prioritizing himself and taking what he wants, recalling her claim in the second act that ordinary people don’t have real feelings. George would have an easier time if he followed the same philosophy, but as the patriarchal leader who is responsible for rebuilding society, he must do his best to live within the moral order that will serve humanity. When he tries to prioritize his desires in Atlantic City, the family nearly doesn’t survive together.