Winnie in the Hole
Winnie starts out halfway buried in the dirt and by Act Two she is up to her neck. This progression suggests imagery associated with slow burial, suffocation, and entropy. The symbolism points to Winnie being suffocated by marital expectations, the burial of her dreams and the inevitable breakdown of the very properties of her independence.
The Ant
One of the most complex uses of imagery in the play is one of the simplest. Winnie spots an emmet carrying what looks like a white ball in its arms. Willie informs her that the “ball” are its eggs. He then says the word “formication” and when Winnie asks what he said he repeats it. This entire exchange could not take more than two minutes at most to be played out, yet its imagery is abundant with potential significance. In the first place, the word “emmet” to describe an ant peaked in the first decade of the 20th century and so it hints at a time frame. The fact that she does not recognize the “ball” as eggs strongly hints at that Winnie was not maternal and did not wish to produce children. Willie’s word likely seems to most audience members a mispronunciation of “fornication” which ties in with Winnie’s feelings toward children, but it also creates imagery by itself: “formication” is the word which describes the phantom sensation of insects seeming to be crawling on. Combined with the similarity to “fornication” and the egg sack imagery, this all comes together to produce an idea in the mind that just the idea of having children might produce an unpleasant sensation for Winnie.
The Bell
Pavlov famously used a bell to condition dogs to respond to the expectation of food by salivating even when there was no food: just the sound of the bell would initiate the act of salivating in the dogs. The sound of the bell has much the same effect on Winnie. She responds to the ringing of the bell by opening her or closing her eyes on cue in addition to its control over when she sleeps and when she wakes. This imagery has tremendous symbolic meaning depending on controlling interpretation of what the play means.
Dressed to Kill
Aside from the obvious, the most striking visual image in the play occurs just before it concludes. Up to that point, Willie has most been little more disembodied anatomical parts and then suddenly he appears not just in full figure, but fully decked out in clothing appropriate for an Edwardian wedding. Or, perhaps, a funeral. What the audience won’t know, but the reader of the text will is that the playwright gives a very specific description in the stage directions of the mode of dress in which Willie shockingly appears: “Dressed to kill.”
