In Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, he presents two characters who are married to each other. The wife, Winnie, chatters throughout the play, but the husband, Willie, generally speaks only in one-word answers. Their relationship seems to reflect a worn out marriage, in that neither of them seems to feel any passion for the other one. Their patterns of speech mirror their roles in the relationship. Winnie focuses on small, trivial things but unconvincingly claims that they are having happy times. Willie barely responds, and seems more of an object of Winnie’s attention than a real person.
When the play opens, it seems odd that Winnie is buried in a mound. The obvious question that arises is what this mound is supposed to represent. Although many interpretations are possible, the mound could easily represent the entire institution of marriage. No description or explanation is given as to how Winnie came to be in the mound. However, just like her marriage, she is trapped within it with no real prospect for escape.
At the time the play was written, questions about the value of marriage and the traditional roles of men and women were being raised. For many women, marriage was something they desired passionately until they were actually married, and then reality set in. Marriage in and of itself is not exciting, not glamorous, and not especially interesting. Women were expected to focus their entire lives on making their husbands happy, with little thought to doing anything for themselves. They were also expected to be happy about their role in marriage. Men, on the other hand, were expected to hold jobs and interact with other adults. When they came home at the end of day’s work, they could count on their wives’ having prepared a meal, taken care of laundry, housework and other mundane things, and being available for sex when desired. Looking at that version of marriage from a 21st century perspective, marriage seems like prison for the wife and boring for the husband.
It is hardly surprising that if a wife has no other adult to talk to, she would obsess over talking to her husband and attempting to interact with him. However, if he routinely ignores her, she would continue to go through the motions even without feeling the same intensity that she had previously. When Winnie says, “Say it is a long time now, Willie, since I saw you” (Beckett 50), she can mean that both literally and figuratively. It may have been a long time since she saw his physical body, but it can also be a long time since he was emotionally present in the marriage. Based on the scarcity of his comments in the play, Willie could be a toy or robot that has been programmed to make a little conversation. Nothing he says reveals any major commitment to Winnie or to the marriage. Winnie goes on to say, “I say I used to think that I would learn to talk alone” (Beckett 50). This comment reveals her insight that even though technically she and Willie continue to have conversations, to have a dialogue, in essence their marriage is now simply a monologue. She speaks; Willie makes noncommittal noises.
In addition to the difference in the quantity of their speech, differences exist in their outlook. Despite being trapped in the mound, Winnie seems at least somewhat optimistic. She frequently comments that today will be another happy day. Even during the second act of the play, when she has sunk deeper into the mound, she does not express fear. She simply accepts her condition. During the first act, when she rummages around for things in her purse, she uses those things to remind her of her established routine. She does express a hope that maybe one day she will be free of the mound, but it is hard to determine if she means that perhaps she will escape the mound while she is still alive or if she thinks she will ultimately escape it when she dies.
Willie, on the other hand, seems a little morbid. He reads the newspaper, apparently focusing on obituaries. He contributes virtually nothing substantive to the attempts at conversation. During any given conversation with Winnie, Willie’s comments mostly consist of him saying “Yes” (Beckett 26, 34) or other short responses repeatedly until Winnie nags him into one or two more words. He makes a point of staying out of her sight. He does not engage in any romantic activities with her; presumably he uses his reading material for sexual gratification. At the end of the play, when he approaches Winnie, it is hard to say if he is really going to her, or if he is going to get the revolver she has and shoot her.
The tragic aspect of this play is not so much that Winnie is trapped in a mound, but that the one-sided conversation she has with Willie could be lifted almost verbatim from any marriage at some point. When two people cease to become invested in a relationship, they simply repeat the same thoughts and words over and over again, as both Winnie and Willie do. The state of their marriage contrasts sharply with the setting of the play, which is absurd in the extreme. While it may not be possible to know exactly why Beckett used the very banal sounds from a typical marriage set against the complete weirdness of the stage set, one can speculate that he wanted that contrast so that the audience would focus on the perfectly ordinary (the marriage that is old and tired) against the backdrop of something horrific, a woman buried alive in a mound. As mentioned earlier, when someone sees a woman buried in a mound on stage in a play, the obvious question is what the mound is supposed to represent. By having the marriage itself seem typical, Beckett focuses the attention of the audience on the wife’s predicament. Simply put, she is trapped. She is psychologically trapped in a marriage that fulfills neither her nor her husband; she is physically trapped in a mound that is sucking her further in every day. She possesses the means to escape in one way, in that she has the revolver; she could simply end her existence. But she makes no attempt, it seems, to do anything else such as try to dig herself out of the mound.
As the audience watches her trapped in this mound, most would question how she came to be there and why there is no real attempt at escape. Nowhere in the play does she explain how this happened. This very lack of explanation just makes the audience wonder more if she was put into the mound, or if she voluntarily placed herself in it and got someone else to pile it up around her. Her motivations are not clear. Is she punishing herself for something she did previously? Is the never-ending sunlight, with its heat, part of some slow-motion self-immolation? When she says, “Fear no more the heat of the sun” (Beckett 26), even though the comment is directed at Willie, she may well be talking to herself. At the rate she is sinking into the mound, she will reach death soon unless someone rescues her, and Willie seems to be too wrapped up in himself to bother. Winnie summarizes the state of their marriage when she says, “There is so little one can say, one says it all. And no truth in it anywhere” (Beckett 51). Their marriage is no longer a real union of two people, but a fiction.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days, a Play by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Print.
