Miss Myfanwy Price Character Analysis

This quote occurs in the beginning of the play, at night, as First Voice and Second Voice guide the audience through Llareggub, introducing them to many of the play’s characters by inviting them to bear witness to the sleeping townspeople’s dreams.

Here, First Voice and Second Voice bring the reader to the home of Miss Myfanwy Price, Llareggub’s “dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,” as she dreams about “her lover,” Mr. Mog Edwards, the town draper, who is “tall as the town clock tower, Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle breasted.” The language Second Voice uses here doesn’t hold back in its full, graphic depiction of Mog Edwards’ physically attractive features. Second Voice puts himself in the mind of Myfanwy Price in his description, portraying Mog as he appears to Myfanwy, who is engaged in a romance with him.

When Second Voice continues, describing the way Mog’s eyes, “like blowlamps,” are “scooping low over [Myfanwy’s] loving hotwaterbottled body,” they make clear that Myfanwy’s interest in Mog isn’t exclusively romantic: she desires him sexually, and desires for him to find her desirable, as well. Second Voice’s frank depiction of Myfanwy’s sexual interest in Mog is comical—“lonely” and tucked into her bed beside a hot water bottle, Myfanwy hardly appears like the sexually desirable creature she wants Mog to see her as. In addition to its humor, this passage also introduces the audience to the play’s frank, open treatment of physical intimacy and human sexuality. Many of the characters in Under Milk Wood engage in or desire to have sex and be seen as sexual creatures, and the play approaches these desires honestly and without judgment.

Another important aspect of the play’s treatment of intimacy is the way it shows how complex and nuanced relationships with others can be. Though Myfanwy loves and desires Mog, her interactions with him at this point in the play are limited to dreams and fantasy alone: she has yet to act on her romantic feelings in person and, as the audience ultimately learns, never manages to do so, nor has any plans to do so in the future, despite the fact that Mog, too, desires Myfanwy. Myfanwy and Mog’s unrealized romance shows how difficult it is to make oneself vulnerable and connect with others, perhaps, and how often opportunities to connect pass people by when they fail to act on them.