The Waiting Room

Last week, I read with my peers a play called the Waiting Room. On the surface, it is essentially about three women in a waiting room trying to deal with their health problems in the hospital as well as outside of the hospital. However, it's really about how societies' perspective on beauty affects these three women and their health.
These three women are from different locations as well as different time periods. The first woman, Forgiveness from Heaven, is a Chinese woman from the eighteenth century with bound feet, a sign of beauty during that time. The second woman, Victoria Smoot, is from Victorian England with a tightly bound corset, in the effort to be beautiful. The final woman is Wanda, from modern New Jersey. She is the epitome of beauty in her society.
The author of the Waiting Room, Lisa Loomer, described how these women are received in their society as well as the health and beauty of the ideal woman according to that society. Forgiveness from Heaven is shown as ingenuous to everyone with an enduring smile. She is the waiting room because her wound feet caused the small toe on one of her feet to fall off. Her husband has many wives and Forgiveness always tries to win his affection above the other wives. According to what happened to Forgiveness in the play, we can say that beauty was how small the woman's feet were. We can also say that Chinese woman's rights during that time as well as feet health weren't very protected or cared about.
Victoria is very jittery, and visits the waiting room to get her ovaries removed. The reason why she is getting them removed is because she is trying to fix her hysteria. The reason why she thinks this will cure her hysteria is because her husband told her. Her husband seems to be the brain of the household. According to how Victoria was, a woman in Victorian England was beautiful if she had a corset on. Women were also kept very ignorant and controlled by their husbands. Since that was the way it was, mental health of women during that time was very bad. Wanda is described the way a beautiful and modern woman would be described, in terms of aesthetics. On the outside she is the modern image of beauty. The reason is because of the many plastic surgeries she has had. She is single and is looking for a man to marry and society is helping her find one. She has enormous breasts, an hourglass figure, and a pretty face. If a modern woman who lived in America looked like this, she was beautiful. However, if she looked like this, she would have most likely done something to her body like plastic surgery. She would be well received because she is beautiful but if she is ugly than society won't accept her as well.
There are two other characters I would like to talk about. One, Ken, is an FDA official, the other, Larry, a Vice president of a drug company. The purpose of showing these two characters was to show how the pharmaceutical industry can manipulate what the government can releases as safe medicine. The reason why I say this is because Larry got Ken to shut down a clinic that was making a drug that would steal the patent of a similar drug that Larry's company was making. Pharmaceutical companies often have strong ties with the FDA because of people like Larry and Ken.
The end of the play went like this. Wanda and Forgiveness are exchanging fairy tales and stories, but in reality they are exchanging their culture's ideas of beauty. Wanda is about to start another story from a fairy tale book, but stops. She begins to tell her own story. It was about how three sisters got a magician to make them look perfect. However, the magician's spell wore off. So the sisters broke all the mirrors in the kingdom, so the only way woman could now decide if they were beautiful or not was if they asked the sisters. The sisters would always reply," You're Beautiful." Eventually, woman accepted that the way they were now was already perfect, and the magician had run out of business. Suddenly every woman was now happy and living happily. Wanda then realizes that Forgiveness is asleep. This part is undefinable. When Forgiveness wakes up, she unwraps her feet and starts to dance.
All three of these women all grew in some way. When Victoria was leaving in the hospital, she asked her husband to get pack her books he" reluctantly takes the Cosmopolitan and starts to gather the books “she gains some freedom as now she is allowed to read books, which her husband did not allow. In the end, both Wanda and Forgiveness sort of evolve out of their societies' image of beauty. Forgiveness realizes this and " starts to unwrap her feet, as if unwrapping the bound years... first with the relief of the aging woman, then faster, with the joy of the bound five year old child." This symbolizes how she relinquishes her bound feet and embraces that she is already beautiful. She realized this because of Wanda’s story.
Wanda shows that she evolves with her story. The end of her story was, “It was like magic. Everybody got kissed, and the women who felt like it got married. And the ones who didn't got good jobs in the kingdom. And some of them got both! And everyone lived a whole lot happier ever after." When she realized where her story was going, she probably thought," I don't need to beautiful to be happy!", which the opposite is said many times in modern times. She must have realized," I am already beautiful."