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Happy Journey Quotes Tumblr Cover Photos Wllpapepr Images In Hinid And sayings For Girls Taglog Pics Love

Happy Journey Quotes Biography

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First published as part of a collection of one-acts on November 5, 1931 and produced by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philalethis at the Yale University Theatre on November 25, 1931, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is a prime example of Thornton Wilder's studies of the American middle class family. In this play, we see a proto-typical American family, the Kirbys, as they undertake a proto- typical American family ritual: the car trip. At curtain's rise, the family prepares to visit Beulah, their "married daughter," (a phrase that the mother, Ma Kirby, uses frequently and with obvious pride) who lives in Camden. As they get ready to leave, each member of the family engages in routine last-minute preparations: Caroline, the younger daughter, says good-bye to her friends; Arthur, the son, looks for his lost hat; Elmer, the father, checks the car one last time; and Ma Kirby gives the neighbors instructions on how to look after the house while they are gone. Finally, they set off on their trip.

Although the Kirby family group might seem unexceptional, they are distinguished by the fact that they possess a resident Stage Manager, who, like Wilder's other Stage Managers, in Pullman Car Hiawatha and Our Town, orchestrates, discusses and participates in the play's events. He organizes their trip, providing commentary along the way and playing the various folk the Kirbys know or meet on their journey, a neighbor at one moment, a gas station attendant at another.

The Stage Manager helps reinforce our feeling that, in viewing this car trip, we are witnessing quintessential family life at its most daily moments. Even the trip itself appears uneventful. The family stops only twice: once to wait for a funeral procession to pass and once to stop at a gas station, making sure that they are headed in the right direction. During the journey, the two younger children chat and joke. The adolescent Arthur tests the limits of propriety, insensitively joking about his mother's close relationship with God. Ma, "outraged," asks Arthur to get out of the car but relents when her husband Elmer intervenes diplomatically. Yet in the general cheer of talk, food and song, leavened by such testiness, there are undertones of real distress: the Kirby's older son Harold has been killed in the war, and their daughter Beulah, whom they are going to visit, has been ill in the hospital.

At last, they arrive at Beulah's house. After the family members make their plans, Ma and Beulah are left to discuss the reason for the visit: the death, at birth, of Beulah's infant daughter, "not living even a few minutes." Ma is Beulah's solace, her strength and sustenance. Ma, who has herself lost a son, comforts her daughter, who has just lost a child. Ma is, for Beulah, for her family, and for us in the audience, the spirit of life and hope, knowing that family and God provide the bulwark we need to face life's tragedies. She is a living model of dealing with grief by meeting life's practical needs: eating, cleaning, and organizing life's trip. As the play ends, Ma gets the chicken from the oven, makes sure that there are ham and eggs for breakfast, and sings a hymn of comfort. The family has faced this sorrow as it has others. It will survive to meet other grief another day. Today, they are together.

Wilder uses the venerable metaphor of a family trip to represent our journey through life. The Kirby's trip is a small one, but it is filled with all that is important for American families. The family members are close, bantering, occasionally willful or distressed; they have experienced sadness and loss, but they live in the present. The journey has its short stops, to observe death, to take stock, and to make sure of its direction. But the journey continues to its destination, where a life has been lost, but family life goes on. The journey is happy because it continues. The play is comic in the root sense that life and community are affirmed; a death can not stop the on-going value of life.

Wilder saw Ma Kirby as the play's center and expressed concern that amateur productions might play her with too much sentimentality. She is, in Wilder's words, "a testimonial of homage to the average American mother who brings up her children as instinctively as a bird builds its nest and whose strength lies in the fact that whatever stresses arrive from the circumstances of life, she strives to maintain an atmosphere of forward-looking industry and readiness." He added, "We are in an age when men rally round an experienced and authoritative woman," most probably alluding to his own family and his own close relationship with his mother. Although father Elmer Kirby voices moderation and diplomacy, it is Ma Kirby who is the voice of family authority, bringing spiritual values into their lives and showing strength in times of adversity.

Wilder commented that Our Town, "is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The same may be said about Happy Journey, in which Wilder examines the importance of American family life, its joys and sadnesses, beginnings and ends. The Kirbys display an abiding good humor and cheer, but they have also faced enormous losses, first in their son's death, then in their granddaughter's. These tragedies are with us in every generation. The journey to Trenton and Camden is the metaphorical journey of all our lives, made up of the accumulation of small events and pleasures which give us the fortitude to face life's large and painful moments and go forward.

Surely, Wilder discouraged a sentimental interpretation of the last moments of the play to reinforce this point. Ma Kirby sings to keep family spirit alive in the present, acknowledging but not dwelling on past loss. We must move on; the alternative is unacceptable. As Ma Kirby says to her grieving daughter, "God thought best. We don't understand why. We just go on, honey, doin' our business." And in the next breath, "Well, now, what are we giving the men to eat tonight?"