Inherit the Wind Response Paper
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee is a fictionalized account of the “Scopes Trial,” where a high school teacher was convicted for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to his sophomore class which went against the Tennessee Law in the 1920s. The play was published in 1955 during the age of “McCarthyism,” which was an age where people restrained themelves from expressing their thoughts and beliefs as they were scared of its repercussions. Even though, the Bertram Cates’s trial, which consumes most of the plot predominantly revolves around the evolutionist versus naturalist debate, I think that Lawrence and Lee intended their work to focus on the issue of censorship or the limiting of an individual’s freedom to think. With the use of thematic, rhetorical, theatrical and literary analysis, I endeavour to deconstruct the plot of Inherit the Wind to understand the play’s central purpose or motive.
The play contains its ideological layers mainly in the form of thematic conflicts, of which the predominant one is that of Fundamentalism versus Freedom of thought. Fundamentalism occupies most of the descriptive and narrative space of the script but the playwrights, Lawrence and Lee, effectively intersperse this with short episodes or impactful rhetoric, which bring up the idea of freedom of thought. The deepening juxtaposition of both these opposing ideologies makes the reader truly understand the essence of the conflict between them and gain the basis by which he or she would read the rest of the play. It is most clearly expressed in the court room scene, when Drummond, the defense counsel, asks Howard, a student of Bertram Cates, whether he believed in Darwin. When the boy responds that he hasn’t made up his mind, Drummond responds by establishing that the right to think freely was on trial. Drummond soon becomes the voice of the playwrights and his character is portrayed effectively to execute his objective and convey the ideas of Lawrence and Lee. On the other polar end, the fundamentalists, which are primarily represented by Reverend Brown, the famous prosecutor Brady and the mayor of Hillsboro are a conservative force that has prescribed for Hillsboro society how their minds should be made up. The most adamant creationists, Brady and Reverend Brown, occupy positions of authority at the top of the social order, and their primary motivation is to maintain this control over that social order. Darwinism like other progresses made in science question religious foundations and threaten the status of the creationist leaders. Brown, for instance, uses his extremist or triggering sermons to root out dissent in the Hillsboro community and within his own family. The obedience he demands of the community is the opposite of freedom. In contrast, the questioning that Cates practices—and encourages—promotes free thinking, which opens new paths to progress.
The rhetoric used in writing the dialogues for the play is consistent with Lawrence and Lee’s portrayal of Hillsboro’s backwardness, resistance to new ideas and the restrictive influence of religion that the town has succombed to.
I found the first lines of the play exchanged between Howard and Melinda to be deeply allegorical and almost prophetic of the play’s main conflict: fundamentalism versus freedom of thought. Melinda reacts to Howard in the same way that most of the people of Hillsboro react to Bert Cates—she becomes frightened and calls him sinful. Howard’s disrespect to Reverend Brown represent the threat these new ideas pose to Hillsboro’s conformist social order.
The introduction of Inherit the Wind clearly puts forth the claim that it would utilise the “sleepy, obscure country town” Hillsboro as a landscape, which would be “vigorously awakened” by the plot, which is painted by Lawrence and Lee. Having read the events and scenes that transpire in the process of this “awakening,” I realized the fluidity of the line between what is right and what is wrong and that neither is absolute: what is right can easily be proven to be wrong and what is wrong can be upheld as being right. In the world that we live in today, an end like what the play saw would warrant a gross judgement of it to be wrong. But, in Hillsboro, Brady’s victory and Cates’s conviction is representative how something that would be considered so wrong, today, became the word of the law then.