Essay on Trouble In Mind

Submitted By Sarah-Vorsheck
Words: 321
Pages: 2

Sarah Vorsheck
Rot 6
One of the main internal conflicts each character faces in Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind is understanding the order of the world and their place in it. Throughout the play, each character opens up and makes these personal discoveries, even if they don’t like what they find. One character that particularly stands out is Manners. When he enters in the beginning of the show he is thoroughly convinced that he is going to make an impact on society’s racial issues by producing and directing a Broadway production with a ‘colored cast’, which could clearly jeopardize his reputation and career. His continuous claims of being unprejudiced were thrown at the audience so often that the sincerity of them starts to be reconsidered. This shows that Manners knows what is morally right, but he is ultimately trying to convince himself that he has this moral, unprejudiced mindset. During the second act when Wiletta retaliates against his script he cannot bring himself to even see her point of view, let alone consider making physical changes to it. When he is arguing with her, he has an epiphany that he subconsciously ended the play by having the mother turn the son in because he doesn’t feel as if his son would equal the same as the black son. He finally admits to not only himself, but the others as well, that he in fact doesn’t believe in equality as much as he originally portrayed. It is reveled in his monologue that he feels this way because within his own