35 pages • 1 hour read
Sarah RuhlIn the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Electricity and Progress
Dr. Givings is positively enthralled by the idea of electricity. The play takes place only a few years after the invention of the lightbulb, and electricity is still a novel and potentially dangerous force. It is a symbol of human progress and innovation, particularly as they approach the turn of the century. For some of the characters, electricity is mysterious and too powerful. At the beginning of the play, Sabrina says that electric lights hurt her eyes. Similarly, Leo’s eyes are irritated by the electric lamp at first. He even speaks against electricity and the very nature of progress, exclaiming, “I’m afraid everyone goes around these days saying: I am a modern man, I am a modern woman, it’s the modern age, after all. But I detest modernity” (76). Leo finds electricity to be cold and passionless, but both Sabrina and Leo adapt to electric lights as their treatment continues.
Both Catherine and Sabrina speak with wonder about the way electricity will change their lives, from the way they light their homes to the way they cook their eggs. Their expectations for the possibilities of electricity are even grander than reality, as Sabrina mentions Edison’s invention to hear the final thoughts of those who are dying and suggests that one day, the fireflies will be electric as well. In the midst of the second industrial revolution and on the cusp of the turn of a new century, the potential for massive change in their everyday lives is immense. The invention of the electric vibrator, which the women find intimidating at first, is pivotal in changing the way the women think about their sexuality and their own bodies. Eventually, it allows the women to take charge of their own bodies and sexual pleasure.
The play also criticizes electricity and the electric vibrator as creating distance between people. The vibrator allows female sexual pleasure to be mechanized, and in a clinical setting, it is divorced from intimacy and desire. Leo compares the electric lamp, which provides the same result as candles by lighting the room but without the flame, to prostitution, which offers the same outcome of sexual gratification but without the passion. This is a particularly salient comparison since Leo has just paid for sexual release in a cold, clinical setting that was brought about through electricity. Leo romanticizes the inconsistent light provided by non-electrical means, comparing half-lit houses to unfinished paintings.
Hunger and the Body
In the Next Room is about characters who are hungry and cannot get what they are longing for. In a literal sense, Catherine’s baby is hungry, and she is powerless to provide for her. Catherine describes the experience of birth as a moment in which she felt that her child was ravenous, not just for milk but to devour her. She compares this feeling to Jesus and communion, and the idea of sacrificing her body to feed her child. Catherine feels that she has failed because she was unable to turn her body and blood into food. When Elizabeth feeds the baby, Lotty thrives, but Elizabeth is acutely aware that she is feeding Lotty the milk that should have been helping her own son to live and thrive. She sees milk not only as food that satisfies the baby’s hunger, but as a substance of life that is made from the blood she shared with her son. According to Elizabeth, the hunger for milk is pure and changes when the baby grows teeth and develops the hunger of an animal.
When Catherine is sad about hiring a wet nurse, Dr. Givings reassures his wife, “The body is blameless. Milk is without intention” (31). This statement connects to the sexual hunger that he works to satisfy in his practice. However, Dr. Givings understands these hungers for food and sex as mechanical needs, divorced from emotionality and moral responsibility. Catherine understands that both breastfeeding and sexual pleasure are tied to human connection, and although she can sneak into her husband’s office to give herself orgasms, she cannot replace the connection she wishes she had with her husband or the bonding that she feels she is losing with her baby. Catherine’s hunger for connection drives her throughout the play. Her loneliness is a type of starvation that she tries to satiate by starting a friendship with Sabrina and by falling for Leo. When Catherine complains about silent breakfasts with her husband, it becomes clear that Dr. Givings sees the meal as merely food while Catherine views breakfast as a shared moment of marital and familial connection.
Sex Versus Intimacy
The invention of the electric vibrator may revolutionize the female orgasm, but it also creates distance in terms of intimacy. Even in the clinical setting, Dr. Givings may feel that he can maintain emotional distance while stimulating patients with or without the vibrator, but manual stimulation still requires that he give something of himself through physical exertion. While the vibrator is more efficient in terms of rapidly inducing orgasm, Sabrina quickly demonstrates that sexual release is not the entire solution to her issues. After the first session, the vibrator is less effective than manual stimulation, especially when that stimulation is provided by Annie. As Sabrina’s health improves, it seems that the real treatment is her growing flirtation with Annie as well as her experimentation with Catherine. With these two women, Sabrina can talk openly about sexual pleasure in a way that she feels uncomfortable speaking to her husband.
The play shows that intimacy is about openness and vulnerability. In the operating theater, the patients are covered with a sheet to preserve their privacy, even while the doctor gives them sexual pleasure. Dr. Givings even talks about decidedly non-sexual topics while he does his work, such as Ben Franklin and the science of electricity, demonstrating that he firmly disconnects orgasm from sex and intimacy. The house is similarly separated, as sexual gratification takes place in the operating theater and intimacy is relegated to the living room. For instance, Annie brings Sabrina to orgasm in the doctor’s office and then kisses her in the living room. What becomes far more intimate than Dr. Givings’ work is Catherine’s experience of hearing Sabrina and Leo orgasm in the next room. Catherine makes her husband extremely uncomfortable when she causes the purposes for the two rooms to bleed into each other, as when she socializes with patients or kisses her husband while he attempts to administer treatment with the vibrator.
At first, when Catherine learns about her husband’s treatment method, she believes that she needs sexual satisfaction. What Catherine understands that her husband does not, however, is that sexual pleasure and intimacy are connected. Catherine longs for her marriage to include both. Throughout the play, Dr. Givings insists on keeping them separate in the name of science, but when he walks in on Leo painting Elizabeth and subsequently declares Leo cured, Dr. Givings shows that he is simply deeply uncomfortable with intimacy, emotion, and loss of control. Although Dr. Givings and Catherine clearly have a sex life—they have a child together, and early in the play, they nearly have sex in the living room—Dr. Givings insists on maintaining the illusion that his wife is chaste and sexless. He becomes frustrated with her open vulnerability and lack of discretion. At the end of the play, Catherine finally shows him that she needs him to be vulnerable as well. Outside, unprotected in the snow and away from the bright, sanitized glow of electric lights, Catherine sees her husband naked for the first time, and they finally explore intimacy and sex.
