Recently I reviewed the play “Inherit the Wind.” Rachel was a character that really interested me, so I did a character analysis, of sorts, on her.
Rachel Brown was Cates’s faithful supporter and tried to help him, though at first she was misguided and tried to talk him out of his stance. In the beginning, she urged him to admit that he was wrong and apologize. Eventually, however, she was called to the witness stand and started to realize what the trial was really about: man’s right to think, even if what he/she thought didn’t conform to the beliefs of society. In the end, Rachel understood that ideas should be allowed to grow even if they turned out to be wrong. Rachel went from thinking that Cates was wrong to agreeing with him.
At first, Rachel attempted to convince Cates to give up and just apologize. She wanted things to be the same as they had been before and didn’t understand why Cates was so determined to stand up for his ideas. She just wanted everything to be normal again. Despite their disagreement, though, she stayed loyal to him and didn’t want him to be prosecuted.
Afterwards, Rachel was called up to testify against Cates. It was then that she finally realized the impact of the trial and understood that it wasn’t just about Cates believing in Evolution instead of the Bible; it was about Cates’s right to think and believe in what he chose to. She was unwilling to testify against Cates and ended up petrified on the witness stand.
Finally, Rachel read Darwin. Though she didn’t understand it, she still understood that ideas were just ideas and could be either right or wrong; the person who had come up with them wasn’t bad just because the idea was wrong. She even said, “A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside of you, part of you dies, too!” She understood the case that Drummond had been pressing and decided to leave her father.
Through the drama “Inherit the Wind,” Rachel changed from a confused young woman who wanted Cates to apologize and say he was wrong to someone who understood that ideas were important and had left her father. At first, she wanted Cates to apologize. Later, when she was asked to testify, she realized the trial’s impact. Finally, she understood the importance of ideas and that people had to think because it was what made them different. Clearly, Rachel became a very different person throughout the drama, but always supported Cates.
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