The Skin of Our Teeth

Maggie is George’s wife and the matriarch of the family. She represents Eve from the Book of Genesis, the embodiment of domestic motherhood throughout the course of history, and an everywoman for 1942 American audiences who were adjusting to the era of Rosie the Riveter.

Maggie’s realm is the domestic sphere, but she is not the proverbial Angel of the House. She is stern and tough, ready to walk through deadly ice to bring fire back to her family and determined to protect her children at all costs. Sabina describes her mothering style as that of a tigress, and Maggie agrees unabashedly when Sabina accuses her of being willing to see everyone dead for the sake of her children. She is particularly protective of Henry, formerly known as Cain, although she lives with the dissonance of fiercely loving a son who once killed another son whom she also fiercely loved. The topic of Cain and Abel is forbidden, but Maggie’s raw grief is just beneath the surface, exposed when Moses mentions her second son. She defends Henry when he kills a neighbor boy, calling it a “boyish impulse” (43).

In the second act, she makes it clear that she loves her son unconditionally, even without pretending that he never killed his brother, when she calls him Cain to bring him aboard the boat. Maggie scolds him for being violent, but she always sees him as her child, even feeding and soothing him after he becomes the enemy of the world. Conversely, Maggie is much more critical of Gladys, placing much higher expectations of proper behavior on her daughter than she does for her son. Her differing attitudes toward her children comment on how boys and girls are valued differently, and how boys are taught privilege and entitlement. As a wife and mother, Maggie has endured infidelity, the disrespect of her husband and children, and times of terrible leanness and struggle, but her only priority is to “Save the Family” (54), no matter what she must sacrifice.

Henry, who Sabina describes as “a real, clean-cut American boy” (9), is George and Maggie’s son. He is also Cain; after he murdered his brother Abel, his name was changed to cover up the painful and shameful incident. However, he can’t erase the mark of Cain from his forehead, and his teachers still slip and call him by his original name, particularly when he isn’t behaving. Henry also can’t sublimate his violent nature, and although his mother struggles to watch and redirect him when he picks up a rock, he inevitably escapes her attention at times and kills more people. In biblical traditions, Cain is considered the world’s first murderer. Out of jealousy, he killed his brother with a rock, buried him, and then lied when God asked where Abel was. As punishment, Cain was exiled from his family and cursed to wander the earth alone; the mark of Cain was meant as merciful protection from someone killing him.

However, Henry’s parents refuse to banish their son. They change his name instead, and Maggie fights to keep him with the family. Henry/Cain symbolizes the evil of mankind, especially as it manifests in unnecessary violence and killing. At the climax of the play, as Henry confronts his father, Wilder specifies that Henry is the manifestation of evil in that moment and not simply a misguided or confused boy acting out his pain. Even after Henry has become the enemy and the evil of the world, Maggie welcomes him back with food and a soft place to sleep. Henry’s character represents the evil in human nature, which resides not simply in the cold and unlovable monsters of the world but within humans who might have mothers who love them. Henry’s parents keep him, even though banishment could mean keeping evil at bay for all of humanity. In the third act, Henry has a moment of growth and awareness, as he recognizes an emptiness inside of himself that he attributes to childhood abuse (which Sabina refutes). George admits that he also has an emptiness, suggesting that evil can fill these spaces in any person.

Gladys is George and Maggie’s daughter. Her parents pressure her to be a paragon of a proper young lady: to dress modestly, to always mind her posture and suck in her stomach, and to act like her father’s perfect, innocent little girl. However, Gladys is of a new generation of women whose role in the world is expanding during the war. Sabina describes her as a girl who will one day make a good wife for a man, but Gladys is already beginning her quiet rebellion for the freedom to control her own body and explore her sexuality. No matter how her mother criticizes her and demands that she stop lifting her dress in front of others or frantically wipes the makeup off her face before her father sees, Gladys persists and shows up in red stockings. Notably, Gladys admires Sabina when she sees her in the second act, and Sabina also wears a full face of makeup and sexy red clothing, suggesting that Gladys’s development is influenced by both her mother and Sabina.

Gladys is constantly underestimated and infantilized by those around her, and she is much smarter than her family credits. From her descriptions, she seems like a star student at school, and when the rising storm pushes George to load animals onto the boat, Gladys leaps into action and helps him. As much as her parents force her into the idealized mold of a young, eternally prepubescent girl, Gladys grows up. She breaks the archetype of the American nuclear family by having a child (of unknown origins) and entering the newest post-apocalyptic world as a single mother. Gladys has given birth in dire circumstances, laboring in a cellar while a war rages around them. Her priority becomes her baby’s well-being, and her baby becomes a symbol of the persistence of human reproduction and life.

Sabina, who was brought into the Antrobus house as George’s beautiful young mistress, has been relegated to the role of the maid at the start of the play. Maggie mentions George “rap[ing] [Sabina] home from her Sabine hills” (14), a reference to the Rape of the Sabine Women, which was a historical event in the 8th century BCE in which Romans, led by Romulus, the king and founder of Ancient Rome, kidnapped about 30 women and brought them back to Rome, which was suffering a shortage of women. Note that the word “rape” in this instance doesn’t refer to sexual assault but abduction, and the now-misleading word choice was the result of translation differences. The Sabine women were then offered marriage, which meant a place of honor as a Roman wife, civil rights, and sharing in the ownership of their husband’s property. Additionally, the children they birthed would be free citizens. Similarly, George promised Sabina that he would make her his wife. For a while, she was treated like a queen, but eventually, she was demoted to the family servant. Sabina brags that she is the inspiration for George’s innovations because she is beautiful, and Maggie is not. She takes an interest in the alphabet and his other inventions, finding the right words to flatter George in the second act to lure him away from his marriage, but she does not succeed.

Sabina represents temptation and momentary pleasure. She tries to seduce George after he chooses her as the winner in a beauty contest. She is fickle and tries to quit her job while an ice age descends, only to recant when she is pleased by a telegram. The actor playing Sabina, Miss Somerset, is congruently capricious, breaking character when she wants to complain or skip a scene and expressing annoyance at having to act in a play that she doesn’t understand and therefore hates. The stage manager attempts to fire Miss Somerset at one point, but like Sabina, she is a permanent fixture in the Antrobus family narrative. The name “Lily” is an allusion to Lilith, who, according to some religious mythology, was Adam’s first wife. According to some interpretations, Lilith is referenced in Genesis II:27, in which “God created man in his own image, […] male and female created he them.” Unlike Eve, who was made from Adam’s rib, Lilith was created from the same material as Adam. Thus, as an incarnation of Lilith, Sabina is more willful and refuses the subservience of female gender roles. At the end of the play, she grows to adopt a more civic-minded attitude, agreeing to give up the bouillon cubes to share if the family can see her for who she is.

The stage manager, Mr. Fitzpatrick, is part of the play’s metatheatricality, as his interjections and interventions remind the audience that they are watching a play. The role of the stage manager during the run of a theatrical production is to act as the behind-the-scenes authority over the performance, ensuring that all technical and human elements are smooth and consistent. At first, Mr. Fitzpatrick tries to remain hidden and maintain the play’s illusion of reality while keeping the performance on track. However, Sabina/Miss Somerset’s interruptions of the play require him to come onstage and negotiate her increasing mutinies. He attempts to exercise his power but is powerless unless the actors cooperate. Mr. Fitzpatrick even tries to fire Miss Somerset and replace her with the understudy mid-performance, which would shift the play’s reality, but she demonstrates that the performance has a life of its own. Miss Somerset can’t be fired any more than Sabina can be left by the family to freeze or drown. In the third act, the actors who became too sick to perform push the play off the rails. Mr. Fitzpatrick describes what the final spectacle would have been, displacing the illusion of musical planets and philosophers with crew members in their street clothes. Of course, the metatheatricality of the play involves the paradox of maintaining the illusion of a production in which the illusion is perpetually disrupted.

At the end of the first act, as the family faces potentially freezing to death or being crushed by a wall of ice, George invites a crowd of refugees to share in their shelter and meager resources. Maggie is unhappy with the notion of spreading what they have so thinly because her priority is always her children. However, George is invested in the continuation of humanity beyond survival, including the preservation of human culture and philosophy. The refugees include Moses, Homer, the nine Greek muses, and presumably more significant figures from human history. Like George’s books after the war, the refugees are a bit worse for wear, but the ideas they contain are what make them significant. Maggie agrees reluctantly to the usefulness of a doctor but doubts the necessity of a judge and a group of entertainers, which is ironic in a play that acknowledges that the characters are played by actors.

George points out that they might need a judge to deal with Henry because they can’t control him on their own. Maggie relents because, as she says, George has the final word as the man of the house. However, their exchange shows that Maggie believes that the family can continue indefinitely, even as an isolated unit, and George believes that life isn’t worthwhile without social/communal structures and ideas that are larger than individuality. Sabina/Miss Somerset becomes upset when she realizes the meaning of the refugees in the play is the significance of helping those who are desperate, insisting that most people aren’t freezing or starving. Considering that the country has just scraped through the Great Depression, and Miss Somerset herself admitted that she took this job because she was living on very little food, this observation implies that Sabina/Miss Somerset prefers to tell herself that she doesn’t need to do more for others.

Esmeralda is a fortune teller who practices her trade on the Atlantic City boardwalk. She tosses fortunes out to those who pass by, telling people who ignore her how they will suffer hardship or what will cause their death. She addresses the audience and purports that an unspecified spectator will die suddenly in a year, breaking the fourth wall like Miss Somerset but without breaking character. Esmeralda asserts that telling the future is easy, as anyone can see what will happen to someone by looking at their face. She believes it’s impossible to tell someone’s past, and most people are kept awake by their questions about what happened to their youth or what their lives have meant. Her claim is absurd in the most literal interpretation, particularly as she hands out specific predictions, but in a larger sense, hardships and death are guaranteed as a consequence of living.

The Antrobus family, like the rest of humanity, will endure enormous disasters and times of prosperity. Esmeralda’s presence as a fortune teller is ironic, as she is telling the future to a town full of people who are about to drown in a flood. When Sabina asks for her future, she simply laughs because Sabina will survive, but her fate is cyclical. Every time she sets her sights on a loftier future, it does not work out. Esmeralda is the one who tells George to load the animals and his family onto the boat, mocking the conveeners who mocked her for missing their chance to survive. Individual human existence is short, but, she suggests, humanity is in for the long haul.

In the first act, the family pets are a baby mammoth named Dolly and a baby dinosaur named Frederick. Of course, humans didn’t coexist with dinosaurs, and their presence as pets in the play—particularly ones that speak and act like small human children—sets up the play’s absurdity and highlights how historical and prehistorical time have been collapsed. Even Sabina/Miss Somerset gripes that the play makes no sense when Maggie asks her about milking the mammoth. Maggie forces George to send the dinosaur and mammoth out to become extinct, a poignant if ridiculous moment, because they will grow up to be too large to live safely alongside humans.

In the second act, the enormous variety of animals have formed orders by individual species, and humans are simply another equal order. George, although he is the president of the human division of the Order of Mammals, is perplexed when he notices the delegates from other species gathering to watch his address, seemingly unable to grasp that the animals present have equal sentience and intelligence. However, like the scene with the dinosaur and mammoth in the previous act, it comes down to George’s actions to save the species from the flood, establishing that humans have power over animals, whether or not it’s deserved.

The humans who are convening in Atlantic City serve as a sort of Greek chorus speaking for a version of humanity that is reveling on the eve of the apocalypse. In the biblical story of the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis, God decides to flood the earth and wipe out humanity because the people fell into corruption. The conveeners cheer at George’s motto, “Enjoy Yourselves” (54). They gamble in the bingo hall and indulge in the Turkish baths. They hurl insults at the fortune teller, calling her a “kill-joy” (59), as they are disinterested in thinking about anything but their present pleasures. They lustfully mob Sabina to vie for her attentions. They heckle George for bringing his wife and family, taunting him for being “domesticated” (69) and, therefore, unable to partake in the revelry. Although they receive warnings about the storm, they jeer at the notion of taking precautions, as that would require giving up their carefree festivities. However, when the storm arrives and they are facing death, they are suddenly terrified; the fortune teller mocks them in return because it is too late to save themselves.