The Skin of Our Teeth

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1942

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

The American Nuclear Family

Although the notion of the American nuclear family is most popularly associated with the postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s, it existed as an idealized structure as early as the late-18th century. The term originated in the mid-1920s and is derived from the word “nucleus,” referring to a core family group (as opposed to extended family), consisting of a father, a mother, and children, in which each member adheres to strict gender roles. In The Skin of Our Teeth, the prioritization of the nuclear family (and their maid) is how the Antrobuses survive through cataclysmic events. As the father, George takes on the role as the hard-working breadwinner, an upstanding and respected citizen whose job in the domestic sphere is to govern the family. Maggie, the matriarchal paradigm of the family, is often the hidden labor behind her husband’s successes, and she protects their children above all else. They expect their children to follow in their gender-appropriate footsteps to uphold the image of the perfect family, both to themselves and to society around them, even as society falls over and over in apocalyptic events. In the second act, when pairs of animals are loaded into the ark, the implication is that reproduction is mandatory as a condition of being allowed to survive. However, the play challenges the efficacy of the nuclear family as a regulatory ideal, particularly in terms of gender roles and restrictive norms of social propriety.

As a housewife, Maggie is responsible for the bulk of the parenting duties, which means maintaining the illusion of proper, well-behaved children, even for the sake of their father. The deep secret of their family is that Henry is a killer whose first victim was their other son. Such a crime is unthinkable for a reputable family, so the Antrobuses have made the absurd decision to pretend it never happened. Maggie is constantly correcting and intervening when her children are on the verge of improper behavior, snapping at Gladys to put down her dress or at Henry to put down the rock, but she protects him when he manages to slip away and kill anyways. On his behalf, Maggie pleads that murdering the neighbor boy in cold blood “was just a boyish impulse” (43). She is much stricter and more critical toward Gladys in her attempts to train her daughter to “be a lady” (23). Gladys’s sexual impulses, although significantly less harmful than Henry’s violent ones, have at least as much potential for scandal. Maggie is determined to assert that her children are still children, making Henry less culpable for his adult actions yet making Gladys more culpable for hers. In the third act, when Gladys appears with a baby, the most visible evidence that she has managed to follow through with her sexual urges, Sabina asks where he came from before catching herself and remembering that the question is inappropriate. Like Henry’s crimes, the origin of Gladys’s pregnancy becomes unspeakable.

In the third act, Maggie and George must deal with the fallout of how parenting their children as if they must remain perfectly respectable children has made them ill-prepared to become adults. Suppressing Gladys’s attempts to express sexuality rather than teaching her how to handle her urges has resulted in pregnancy, the very thing that Maggie was fighting to prevent. Henry, who has always escaped consequences for his violent behavior, has never learned to control his anger. When Sabina returns from the war, she reports, “[George] says that now that the war’s over we’ll all have to settle down and be perfect” (92), suggesting that the family will follow the same cycle of suppression and secrecy instead of acknowledging and dealing with their issues. When George comes home and finds Henry, he is ready to kill him for a moment and then decides that he wants to go back to pretending that Henry is a perfect son. Henry is insulted by his father infantilizing him by telling him to behave, and he insists on identifying himself as separate from the family, promising to leave and start his own lawless world. George finally parents him directly, identifying Henry’s childish selfishness and asking, “How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you’ve first put order in yourself?” (111). There is a tense moment of near violence that is ambiguously both theatrical and metatheatrical. They both admit that they aren’t in order, and they have both coped with emptiness within themselves. When the play begins again, it’s unclear whether the family will proceed exactly as before. However, the changes that occur during Act III hint at possible progress for humanity rather than just repetition.

The Color Red

The color red recurs as a conspicuous symbol of elements that threaten to corrupt the Antrobus family. Wilder’s use of red recalls the historical and biological significance of the color as one that both attracts and warns. It draws attention on a primal level as the color of blood and fire, and evidence of red pigmentation goes back to the Stone Ages. The cave paintings of Lascaux in France and Pinnacle Point in South Africa, dated as far back as 15,000 BCE, include red ochre. The color suggests aggression, power, and passion, and it is present in art throughout the entirety of human world history. It’s the most frequently used color on national flags. Even in the non-human animal kingdom, red has meaning, signifying, for instance, that a female baboon is in heat and ready for mating. Similarly, in humans, a red flush indicates a biological response to heat, embarrassment, and sexual arousal. In The Skin of Our Teeth, the stage directions describe Sabina in her first onstage appearance as “over-rouged” (7), announcing before she speaks that she is sexualized and perhaps trying too hard to simulate an attractive blush. When Gladys and Henry first enter from outside, Maggie tries to prepare them to behave extra properly to avoid upsetting their father after a long day. She panics at the sight of red on both of their faces. Henry’s forehead has the red scar of the mark of Cain, which she has tried unsuccessfully to scrub off, as it is a reminder that he killed his brother. Gladys is wearing makeup, signifying her burgeoning sexuality, which Maggie finds shameful. She hides Henry’s scar and anxiously scours the makeup from Gladys’s face before George can see it because she knows that George will fly into a rage at the sight of red, much like a bull in a matador’s arena.

For Henry/Cain, the color red is present not only in his scar but in reference to blood. In the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Cain is jealous and lures his brother into the field before killing him. The murder is premeditated, or in cold blood. Although the text doesn’t specify the murder weapon, Cain is frequently represented with a rock, which is also Henry’s weapon of choice. After the killing, God asks Cain about his brother’s whereabouts. Cain pretends not to know, and God replies, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened her mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Genesis 4:10-11). This curse means that no crops will grow from the ground for Cain, and he will spend his life wandering the earth. Near the end of the first act, Henry kills the neighbor boy with a rock, evoking the image of blood spilling onto white snow. Afterward, his scar turns a deep, strikingly visible red. The murder in the second act, at the beach, suggests the visual of blood on white sand. In Act III, in the rubble of Henry’s war, the stage directions describe that offstage, “some red Roman fire is burning” (91). The image of fire was warm and lifesaving in Act I, but it has become destructive and corrosive in evil hands.

Red also creates a link between Gladys’s adolescent awakenings and Sabina’s mature sexuality. Gladys’s rouged face must be cleaned, while Sabina’s does not, because Maggie is terrified that Gladys will follow down Sabina’s path rather than her own. In the second act, Sabina hides her red bathing suit and stockings under a blue jacket before she is ready to make her move on George. George is seemingly mesmerized by her, as are Henry and Gladys. When Gladys enters with her own red stockings, Maggie is mortified. She desperately hides them from George when Gladys can’t change in time, revealing them dramatically as the consequences of George allowing Sabina to tempt him away from the family. George blames Sabina, who denies culpability, but the shock leads him to decide that he can’t leave his wife and children out of fear that his family will be corrupted without him. Notably, Gladys has a baby while George is away at war, although the baby is viewed as a gift, which is different from how Gladys’s sexuality is treated. Sabina returns from war in the uniform of a Napoleonic camp follower, “begrimed reds and blues” (91). Once again, she is wearing red, but it’s filthy, and she tells the other women that she is sick of being kissed and touched, suggesting that too much affection at war has dampened her libido. Although Sabina continues to be irrevere0nt as always, when she tries to defend her right to take what she wants—pointedly, the same charge that George accuses of Henry—she is more open to selflessness.

The Antrobus Home

The first and third act take place in the living room of the Antrobuses’ “modern suburban home,” described by the announcer as, “a commodious seven-room house, conveniently situated near a public school, a Methodist church, and firehouse; it is right handy to an A and P” (6). The house reflects the ideation of the perfect suburban family, with school for the expected children, a church for respectability, and a grocery store so the mother can shop and cook. The slide show at the beginning shows a smiling family, and they even have a maid to make sure the house is always spotless. However, the home depicted in the play is vastly different from the announcer’s description. The family is fighting for survival and struggling for warmth, burning furniture to keep the fire going and stay alive.

Although Sabina frets that if George doesn’t make it home, the family will “have to move into a less desirable residence district” (8), the conveniences and luxuries of their upper middle class suburban home—the school, the church, the firehouse, the grocery store—are being crushed by a wall of ice. Sabina and Maggie are on high alert, employing the impractical security method of piling furniture against the door each time they hear a man’s voice, which is an ironic contrast to the notion of suburbia as safer than cities. Their closest neighbor from whom they can borrow fire is far enough away that the trip might mean freezing to death, even though one of the selling points of suburban life is familiar neighbors. Sabina, indignant at the conditions, threatens to quit her job more than once, ignoring the practicalities of finding a new position in a frozen world. She allows the fire to go out as if the fire isn’t the difference between life and death.

It is also made clear early in the play that the house is only a set. The wall nearly falls over, and scenic elements fly out during Sabina’s first monologue. She breaks character and addresses the audience, and the stage manager pokes his head through the scenery to urge her back on track. Therefore, the house, like the ideal family, is a multilayered illusion. It’s deliberately unrealistic, demonstrating the absurdity of suburban expectations. The house is also situated in a fictional town, Excelsior, New Jersey, which Wilder juxtaposes with the existing setting of Atlantic City in the second act, unsettling the play’s relationship to the real world. The family’s animals, Dolly the mammoth and Frederick the dinosaur, are pets who sneak into the house to curl up in the living room. However, Sabina is also expected to milk the mammoth, which means that they’re also livestock, another oddity in the context of the suburbs. As Miss Somerset, Sabina complains to the audience that the play makes no sense, and the playwright couldn’t decide where or when to set the play. This tells the audience that the home is more than a house. It symbolizes everywhere and all of time at once, but the characters also repeatedly describe that the home and family are American.

The house is a shelter for the family, a center to which they can return. In an ice age, the house and its one fire are the only things that save the Antrobuses from death, while those who left their homes behind are freezing in the streets. When George invites the refugees in, Sabina is upset about what she views as disreputable guests marring a respectable house. She breaks character again to grumble that the representation of starving, ragged refugees is an exaggeration, bothered that the play is implying that people should be willing to share their shelter with the needy. In the third act, the house has become a shelter over the heads of Maggie and Gladys in the cellar. Sabina, who has been a reluctant participant in the household thus far, especially when relegated to the kitchen, comes home rather than finding elsewhere to live. The walls are all askew, but she and Maggie right them again by pulling a rope, suggesting that the house can’t really be destroyed. Even Henry, who has tried to separate himself from his family, finds himself drawn back to the family home. He tries to assert his independence and his determination to leave home and create his own world, but when George challenges him as to why he came back, Henry admits angrily that he wanted to see home once more. Despite the atrocities that Henry has committed, regardless of his attempts to claim that he doesn’t belong there and has no home, home is where he is ultimately welcomed back.