Alma, the tragic puritan of the play, is an unhappy girl trapped in the rigid ascetic standards of her religious extremism. She hesitates in facing her personal terrors and is crushed by the weight of her unconfessed desires.

It is no coincidence that Williams sets the play in the early twentieth century (1916) rather than in the time it was written: even in the supposed liberal America, the restraint and hypocrisy of the British Victorian era have stigmatized all Anglo-Saxons.

Thus, Alma is a characteristic example and victim of the pitiable dignity that pervades small closed societies, while she is simultaneously a harsh oppressor of her dreams and desires. Around her, an entire microcosm moves and acts within provincial languor, the trivial news, moderate joys, and pervasive sadness.

As a counterpart to Alma, there is the young doctor Buchanan, as alienated as he is alienating, the classic male of the American South, a sad product that lives and reproduces sad products.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]