The Visit

At the beginning of the play, Ill is the most popular person in Guellen. By virtue of his past relationship with Claire, he is expected to orchestrate the saving of the town, and he is even tapped to become the next Mayor when the current one retires in the spring. His memory vastly minimizes the harm he did to Claire, vaguely describing the end of their relationship as life tearing them apart, even claiming that by choosing not to marry Claire, he had sacrificed his own happiness for her sake. But Claire reminds him that he married a girl whose family had money and a General Store, and when they are before the rest of the townspeople, she reveals how he paid two men to perjure themselves when she got pregnant, so he could skirt taking responsibility as the father. To Ill, what he did was a youthful mistake, but his actions destroyed Claire’s life and likely led to the death of the child, who was forcibly separated from her mother at birth. Ill has had the good will of Guellen and a stellar reputation for decades, while she was ejected and forgotten until she had money to offer. As the protagonist, Ill is the opposite of the typical Aristotelian tragic hero. Not only is he far from a king or a god, but also he is weak and average. His gratitude for the townspeople’s support is short-lived, as he has the poor luck that his youthful sins—as opposed to the countless others that are undoubtedly unexplored—are separating the town from a substantial amount of money. The town turns against him, and even his family is counting their blood money. Ill finally accepts his fate when he realizes how badly he hurt Claire and feels remorse for his actions for the first time. Still, he forces the town to vote to condemn him, refusing to kill himself and let them off the moral hook for executing him.

The Mayor of Guellen is a politician who is reaching the end of his political career. The town has (seemingly inexplicably) failed on his watch while the rest of the country flourished, and Claire’s visit is his last chance to save the town and go out as a hero. Like the Schoolmaster, the Policeman, the Doctor, and others, he has no name and is defined by his vocation and function in the town. Even his family only appears for political purposes in a futile attempt to impress Claire. Ill may believe that the Mayor is his friend or on his side, but the Mayor’s only identity in the play is as a political entity. Therefore, Humanism is, to the Mayor, a political tool rather than a deeply held philosophy. At the end of Act I, he proudly and publicly declares that the town believes in Humanism and would never choose money over human life. The crowd cheers, and Ill is relieved and proud, but being a good politician means making the popular decision, not the morally right one. His constituency wants to receive Claire’s money while continuing to feel like good people. Therefore, the Mayor works to spin Claire’s demand for extrajudicial execution as legitimate justice. He tries to keep his (and the town’s) hands clean, or to at least maintain the illusion of clean hands. He even asks Ill to spare the town’s conscience by killing himself and calls Ill selfish for refusing. After Ill is murdered, the Mayor immediately spins his death as a heart attack from joy, revising history and undoubtedly shaping the event as it will appear in Guellen’s historical record, where the town can lie to themselves and continue pretending to uphold Humanist values.

The Schoolmaster is the voice of education in Guellen. He has read philosophy and history, and “Humanism” is more than a word to him. He knows that there is no intellectually honest way to claim Humanism and also kill Ill for money. As the town’s knowledge holder, he ought to be its conscience and reason, because the pursuit of academic truth should be incorruptible. When the Schoolmaster first sees Claire, he recognizes her as more than a rich old lady to be wooed into giving up her money, and instead as a terrifying and irresistible force. The Schoolmaster is the only Guellen citizen who is tortured by the moral and ethical compromise that the town is preparing to make, and he even goes with the town Doctor to try to negotiate with Claire to provide her help without requiring murder (naturally, murder would violate the Doctor’s ethics as well). But education and power do not typically go hand in hand. The Schoolmaster knows the truth, but his voice only has power if people choose to listen. And the Schoolmaster is also subject to financial desperation. He begins to drink to silence the moral voice of his conscience, placating himself with expensive gin that he buys on credit from the Ills’ General Store, fully aware that he is indulging in blood money like the rest of the town. In a desperate attempt to stop the town from following through, the Schoolmaster tries to speak up and expose everything to the journalists, hoping that the judgment of the wider world might force them all to stop. But Ill interrupts him, having decided to accept responsibility for his cruelty to Claire and how that cruelty destroyed her life. The Schoolmaster admits to Ill that he is afraid because he knows that not only will the townspeople kill Ill, but he will participate. He is scared for himself and the murderer he is becoming, and he is also frightened because he is certain that accountability will come for him one day for his selfish transgression, just as Claire came for Ill.

The Policeman demonstrates that the legal and justice systems are not equivalent to morality. Like everyone else in town, the Policeman is poor. He complains to the Mayor and the Schoolteacher that it’s “not much fun patrolling in this dump” (26), suggesting that wealthy citizenry is what would make his job worthwhile. Claire asks him if he is able to look the other way sometimes, and he agrees that he does. Later, when Claire offers the town a million pounds for Ill’s life, the Policeman’s job was to arrest her for committing such a blatant crime in front of everyone in Guellen. But the Policeman is a mercenary, and arresting Claire would mean forgoing a very lucrative payday. He could even arrest whoever carries out the murder, but actively protecting Ill isn’t in his own best interest. The Policeman shows that laws are written and interpreted by humans, and that those laws can be bent for the sake of corruption.

In the second act, as Ill becomes aware of the townspeople’s spending their bounty money on credit, he goes to the Mayor, the Policeman, and finally the Priest for help. The Mayor and the Policeman turn him away, denying that he needs help and suggesting that Claire has more right to demand Ill’s arrest than vice versa. They both serve the town and their own interests, which makes them unsurprisingly corruptible. But the Priest is supposed to serve a higher power, a god of a religion that has specifically forbidden murder. The Priest attempts to direct Ill’s concerns and attention to his own soul rather than to the expected sin of his murder. Like the Mayor and the Policeman, the Priest tries to remain neutral so he can profit from someone else’s sin. When Ill hears that the church has replaced the bell that they sold, he realizes that the Priest is corruptible too. But the Priest has an attack of conscience, begging Ill to leave town. None of the townspeople are strong enough to resist the temptation of a million pounds, not because they are evil, but because they are weak and desperate. He pleads with Ill to take away the temptation. At the end of the play, the Priest begins to speak and sermonize before Ill is killed, but Ill stops him, not comforted by hypocritical words.

Claire arrives in Guellen with her seventh husband and leaves with her ninth, and the text states that they can all be played by the same actor, adding evidence that Claire sees them as interchangeable. She claims that all her marriages are happy, however short-lived, and her husbands do seem happy until they are dismissed (always offstage). Although she marries men who are rich and powerful in their own right—a tobacco baron, a German movie star, and a Nobel-prize winner during the course of the play—she is so rich and powerful that she is able to dehumanize them and treat them as possessions. She takes away their names and gives them new ones that rhyme with the names she has given her servants. Husbands VII-IX are Moby, Hoby, and Zoby. When she divorces them, sometimes immediately after the wedding, she absorbs their fortunes. Claire tells Ill that husbands are “for display purposes” (86), and she is uncomfortable with her ninth husband’s desire to be useful. The only husband who has an individual identity is her first. She speaks fondly of him, if not lovingly, and she still uses his name after eight more marriages. Her husbands are like dogs, obeying even ridiculous commands.