Grover's Corners In Our Town

Our Town is clearly a representation - and largely a celebration - of small-town American life. Nearly every character in the play love’s Grover's Corners, even as many of them acknowledge its small-mindedness and dullness. Its sleepy simplicity, in fact, is its major point of attraction for many characters. Dr. Gibbs, for instance, who refuses to travel, thus cultivates his ignorance of life outside of Grover's Corners in order to remain content within it; his son, too, decides not to go away to college because everything he could want is available at home. Of course this staunchly conservative position creates some of the major problems in the play. Mrs. Gibbs and her daughter have much interest in the outside world - Mrs. Gibbs would love to travel, and Rebecca innocently wonders about the moon and the larger world - and this desire to escape the confines of Grover's Corners puts them at odds with the homebodies in the family. This is like today’s society in how we have people who are dreamers and want to travel the world, yet we also have the “home-bodies” who are content with where they are and would like to keep it that way. Simon Stimson provides a more forceful negative example of the stifling effects of Grover's Corners: he turns to the bottle in order to escape the monotony of everyday life in the small town, while his "good Christian …show more content…
Our Town is one of the only works of literature that supports the opposite extreme: no one goes anywhere in the play, no one has an "adventure." The lesson that we learn is the need to be content with the traditional rhythms of life rather than go searching for something strange and exciting. Indeed, there is a vein of anti-exploration running through the text, reinforcing the old small-town motto that if you can't find your heart's desire in your own backyard, then it's probably not worth looking for