The Mound Builders: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Mound Builders" is a play centered around an archaeological expedition in southern Illinois, exploring the intricate relationships and conflicts among its major characters, all of whom are connected through their professional and personal lives. Professor August Howe, the diligent archaeologist leading the team, is portrayed as methodical yet emotionally detached, struggling with both his failing marriage and the implications of his work. His wife, Cynthia, is a photographer who supports his research but is emotionally cold and entangled in a dangerous affair with Chad Jasker, the landowner’s son. Chad is characterized as assertive and materialistic, motivated by wealth and status, which leads him to violently disrupt Howe's work and ultimately escalate the tension that culminates in tragedy.
D. K. Eriksen, Howe's sister, adds depth to the narrative with her struggles against alcoholism and her insightful commentary on the events. Meanwhile, Dr. Dan Loggins, Howe's ambitious assistant, represents youthful zeal but is blind to the personal undercurrents resulting from his relationships, particularly with his pregnant wife, Jean. Jean, a gynecologist, is depicted as intelligent and steadfast, caught in the turmoil created by Chad’s actions and the devastation of their shared dreams. Together, these characters embody themes of ambition, betrayal, and the impact of personal choices against the backdrop of significant historical remnants, culminating in a poignant exploration of loss and destruction.
The Mound Builders: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Lanford Wilson
First published: 1976
Genre: Play
Locale: Urbana and Blue Shoals, Illinois
Plot: Existentialism
Time: The 1970's
Professor August Howe, an archaeologist. A serious scientist, he is methodical, organized, industrious, and idealistic. At forty years of age, he is the leader of an archaeological expedition in the hills of southern Illinois that is about to un-earth significant remnants of ancient Indian civilization. Accustomed to quietly maintaining control, he creates the play's narrative framework by flashing slides on a screen and dictating instructions to his secretary, thus permitting flashbacks to the sequence of events from the previous summer in which he plays a major role. His consuming involvement in this work prevents him from attending to a disintegrating marriage, which fails even as his professional dreams do. He nurtures the belief that his work is more important than the livelihood of the landowners of the site and is stunned when that site is brutally destroyed; the play concludes with him wordless and directionless.
Cynthia Howe, his thirty-five-year-old wife, a photographer. The characters of Cynthia and of Jean Loggins are not as fully drawn as those of their husbands. What emerges in Cynthia is a woman who is physically cold toward her husband but who remains a helpmate in his research, documenting his excavations with her photographs. Her passions and preoccupations are drawn to the dangerous, hot-headed, younger Chad Jasker. Although Chad seems to have lost some interest in his affair with her, her loyalty to him is so strong that, after Chad has bulldozed the excavation site, she is motivated to destroy the last vestige of her husband's research project—the undeveloped roll of pictures in her camera.
D. K. (Delia) Eriksen, Howe's sister, thirty-eight years old. She is an invalid and a hypochondriac who has been in and out of institutions for treatment of her alcoholism. She has arrived for an indefinite stay with her brother at the farmhouse where he is lodging with his family and assistants during the dig. She is a published writer of some note (Dan had studied her work in college classes), but at the time of the play, she is unable to create. Her character adds color, interest, some humor, and some important introspection as she interacts with other characters. At the play's conclusion, she is the singular voice of strength and calm amid the grief, distraction, and death of the others.
Dr. Dan Loggins, an archaeologist and assistant to Howe. At the age of twenty-nine, his youth and vigor feed his hunger for success and fame in his fledgling career, at times at the expense of human relationships, though he and Chad do enjoy fishing and drinking together. Dan seems miffed that pregnant Jean does not join him in the use of alcohol and marijuana, though that refusal does not diminish his own consumption. Like Howe, his professional preoccupations blind him to personal matters. He seems ignorant of the fact that his wife—now unflaggingly faithful and pregnant with Dan's child—had been romantically involved with Chad the previous summer, and ignorant, too, of the subtle, if drunken, advances Chad now makes to him. In his death, Dan is a direct victim of Chad's violent revenge even as Chad is a victim of Dan's “blindness.”
Dr. Jean Loggins, Dan's twenty-five-year-old wife, a gynecologist. Jean is more likable than Cynthia and less eccentric than D. K. She is intelligent, knows her own mind, is loyal to her husband, and is anticipating the birth of their child. A professional woman, she responds to the intellectual interests and insights of D. K. She repulses Chad's lingering but insistent flirtations and is seriously mentally distracted at the demolition of the excavation site and the murder of her husband.
Chad Jasker, the landowner's son, twenty-five years old. He is assertive, philandering, opinionated, and materialistic. He and his father believe that their futures lie in the land they own, and they are certain that the development of that land, which will accompany the proposed interstate highway, will make them millionaires. What they do not know is that Howe and Loggins have used a 1954 law against defacing Indian monuments to have the highway rerouted to skirt the area. When Chad becomes aware of this (and of Jean's pregnancy, which shocks him as well), he brutally bulldozes their findings and the burial mounds, kills Dan, and commits suicide. He is thus the agent of the destruction of all important professional and personal enterprises in the play.