In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)

Catherine is the protagonist of the play and the central figure of the home in which the play is set. Catherine’s husband compares her to Madame Bovary, a literary figure who craved excitement and committed suicide because she believed it would be dramatic. However, Catherine’s struggles with her own insecurities and loneliness are not, as her husband characterizes them, overreaction or melodrama. She feels like a failure for her inability to produce enough milk to breastfeed as she has been taught to view successful motherhood as integral to her self-worth. Much to her husband’s embarrassment, Catherine does not censor herself or hide her feelings. She is inquisitive and asks questions that are inappropriate for an upper-class woman.

Catherine feels trapped and repressed in her house and her life, constantly begging others to stay with her, but Catherine isn’t simply looking to cheat on her husband or to make him jealous, as she demonstrates when she rejects Mr. Daldry’s advances. She sees Leo as someone who understands passion and could offer her an entirely different life. Catherine recognizes that her husband’s professional practice isn’t medicine but a poor replacement for intimacy.

At the beginning of the play, Sabrina is fragile, weakened by her sorrow and anxiety. Like Catherine, Sabrina is dissatisfied with her life and the marriage that is at the center of her life. Her inability to have children makes her feel incomplete as a woman. Her husband is cruel and intolerant of her pain. Through the treatment, Sabrina discovers that she harbors repressed homoerotic attractions to women. Over the course of the play, Sabrina grows stronger and less delicate. She opens up to Catherine and speaks unabashedly about sexual pleasure in ways that she could never bring herself to do with her husband.

As disappointed as Sabrina is in her marriage, however, she does not dream of escape the way Catherine does. Instead, Sabrina wonders if she could bring her own vibrator into her home so she can satisfy herself rather than looking elsewhere. When her flirtation with Annie finally leads to a kiss, Sabrina backs away and returns to her husband although she clearly finds Annie exciting, attractive, and uniquely able to provide her with sexual satisfaction. Sabrina characterizes the concept of hysteria as a diagnosis with textbook symptoms, demonstrating that hysteria isn’t a physical ailment at all but a mental illness that results from repression.

Mr. Daldry is as dissatisfied with his marriage as his wife, but he blames their issues on Sabrina for aging rather than remaining the vibrant teenager he married. He finds Sabrina’s sadness and anxiety to be tiresome, as if she exists to please him and is failing at her purpose. Mr. Daldry doesn’t seem to understand the desire his wife feels for motherhood, which he illustrates when he comments that having a wet nurse must be freeing for Catherine because she isn’t tied down to feeding the baby. Mr. Daldry is also oblivious, mistaking Catherine’s anxious energy for happiness, simplicity, and sexual availability.

Throughout most of the play, Annie is stoic and professional, following Dr. Givings’ lead in the operating theater. She obeys his orders and resists the temptation to try the vibrator on herself. Over time, though, Annie reveals bits of her life and personality. For instance, Annie is very intelligent and reads Greek fluently enough to be well-versed in Greek philosophy. She remains reticent when answering questions about her romantic life, claiming that she became a midwife as an alternative to becoming a mother, commenting that men don’t notice her, and telling Sabrina that she never married because she ran out of time. She is, however, very skilled at bringing a woman to orgasm. The kiss she shares with Sabrina and her emotional response to Sabrina’s rejection suggest that Annie is attracted to women. It is unclear whether Annie’s sexuality is as repressed as Sabrina’s, but it is certainly taboo and forbidden in the late 19th century.

Elizabeth is a Black woman who works as a housekeeper for the Daldrys and does not seem to have the power to say no when Mr. Daldry offers her up as a wet nurse. Her infant son died of cholera, likely due to insufficient water sanitation in poor areas. Although his death occurred so recently that she still produces milk, no one else in the play seems to consider that breastfeeding another child would be extremely painful for her. Without the trappings of upper-class propriety, Elizabeth shares an intimacy with her husband that the other women in the play do not have. She is allowed to feel sexual pleasure with her husband and is perplexed by Sabrina and Catherine’s inhibitions.

When Elizabeth quits her job as Lotty’s wet nurse, Catherine believes that she understands why Elizabeth’s husband would be jealous of another man seeing her breasts, but to Elizabeth, the painting is an act of intimacy by a man who has confessed his love to her. Since Elizabeth is a married woman and Leo is a White man, the situation is fraught with complexity. Furthermore, Elizabeth becomes attached to Lotty and needs to distance herself from a baby who doesn’t belong to her. During slavery, one of the myths used to justify separating Black women from their babies was that they did not love their children or that they did not feel pain. Elizabeth’s emotional journey directly defies this myth for characters who likely had very little understanding of African Americans.