The characters not understanding that they have experienced an orgasm themselves shows the ignorance within the context and characters of the play. All of these references to Mrs. Daldry’s body and how she felt during the examination highlight an intense orgasm, and the audience is aware of that. The fact that a female orgasm was so novel that the women in the play didn’t even have a word to describe the sensation they experienced reiterates the lack of knowledge surrounding female sexuality at the time of the play. Mrs. Daldry could only explain her orgasm in medical terms because she didn’t know any other way of explaining it. By making her words appropriate for polite conversation, she was opening the discussion of her sexuality and inspiring others to do the same.
Dr. Givings felt the need to keep his words polite and professional with his own wife when first using the vibrator to experiment with her because his idea of a female orgasm was not fully understood and he worried her natural reactions were perverse. He stated his concerns saying, “This is what I feared. In a sick woman the device restores balance, but in a healthy woman it makes you excitable and perhaps even causes some perverse kind of onanism” (Ruhl 95). Mrs. Givings discovering