Lily Smalls Character Analysis

This quote occurs in the beginning of the play, as First Voice and Second Voice introduce the audience to the play’s characters by leading them through the various townspeople’s dreams. Mae Rose Cottage, the 17-year-old daughter of Mrs. Rose Cottage, dreams of a fantastical romance, which is a common subject of many of the townspeople’s dreams—Captain Cat dreams of his deceased lover Rosie Probert, Lily Smalls dreams of a wealthy, exciting lover, and Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards dream of each other.

One notable element of Mae Rose Cottage’s dream is its sensuality: the teenager on the verge of adulthood isn’t just dreaming of romantic love—she’s dreaming of sexual intimacy. Mae so desires for her dream-lover to see her body that she removes not only her clothing, but “her pink-and-white skin,” as well. The sensual undercurrent of her dream is magnified by certain elements of its setting: it takes place in a hot “furnace,” which symbolically alludes to the flame of Mae’s desire. Mae seems uncertain about which scenic backdrop she prefers for her romantic rendezvous, but she eventually settles on a natural setting, “in a waterfall in a wood,” which symbolically evokes a free space, set apart from the constricting social norms she must adhere to when she is in town. Notably, the forested setting seems to resemble Milk Wood, where townspeople go to engage in lovers trysts, so Mae Rose’s dream reflects her longing to make a sexual encounter a reality and meet up with her own lover in Milk Wood.

In another example of nature imagery, Second Voice describes Mae Rose as she waits for her imagined lover “to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a brilliantined trout.” The description combines water and forest imagery, establishing that Mae Rose’s lover is a being of the freer, natural world. Humorously, it also shows how in Llareggub, a fishing village, nobody can truly escape the presence of the sea: it bleeds into every aspect of their life, dominating both their economy and their sex dreams. 

Though Mae’s dream draws on places that exist in her reality, such as Milk Wood, it’s also highly fantastical: the series of settings she lists as possible backdrops for her sexual encounter—“in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood”—evoke archetypal, idyllic places for a tryst to occur, places that Mae seems to have gotten from romance novels or love poems. Second Voice refers to Mae Rose’s imagined lover as “Mister Right,” implying that the man is an idealized, fantastical imagined person who fulfills all of Mae Rose’s physical and romantic desires, rather than a rendering of an actual lover Mae Rose might find in her real life, in Llareggub.

Mae more explicitly admits to having taken inspiration from fiction when she softly instructs her lover to “call [her] Dolores/Like they do in the stories.” Mae derives her fantastical idea of what romance should be from stories, which illustrates one of the play’s larger themes of how storytelling and narrative have the power to shape reality. Mae’s instruction for her lover to call her Dolores also seems to allude to a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs),” which addresses Dolores, “Our Lady of Pain,” who represents the mother goddess figure that appears across many pagan religions. Swinburne’s sensual poem is told from the perspective of a lover addressing Dolores and draws provocative similarities between Christianity and paganism, likening the pagan goddess to the Virgin Mary figure by employing Christian imagery in its description of Dolores, to whom the poet also attributes sadomasochistic tendencies. There are some sadomasochistic characteristics in Mae Rose’s dream, too, such as the rather violent description of her “peal[ing] off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace.”

Mae’s dream as it is represented in this passage is important in establishing the play’s frank treatment of sexuality, as well as nature’s function as a place that can embody the free, pagan world of prehistory that existed before Christianity’s influence shaped the social norms adhered to in town. It also shows how instrumental stories are in shaping characters’ perceptions of reality and their desires.