Themes

Marriage and Career Aspirations

The major conflict of the play stems from Ben Stark's desire to leave his general dental practice and to specialize as an orthodontist. Stark's wife, Belle, persuades him to forego his dream and to be content with his mediocre but dependable general practice. While Stark agrees to Belle's demands at the very beginning of the play, the ramifications of this decision are felt throughout it. Although Stark capitulates to Belle's wishes, he feels confined and stifled by his present position. As a way to escape this feeling, Stark carries out a brief affair with his secretary, Cleo. Stark's attempt to deal with his professional disappointments through an extramarital affair highlights one of the central themes of the play — the effects of marriage on a man's career aspirations. In a conversation about the effects of marriage, Stark's father-in-law, Prince, tells him that Belle's mother had "a housewife's conception of life" and that her limited view eroded his own ambitions, "drip, drip, the matrimonial waters go, and a man wears away." Prince believes that Belle is having a similar effect on Stark. "You graduated first in your class," he tells him, "you played tennis, you were full of life and plans. Look, you don't even resent me now." Odets insists repeatedly that this winnowing away of ambition is the fault of the woman in a marriage. Stark tells Frenchy, for example, "a man would be an idealist to want a honeymoon all his life." Frenchy replies, "No, he'd be a woman. A man can't be both lover and banker, enchanter and provider. But the girls want those combined talents." Therefore, the pressures on a man — both in marriage and in business — seem to leave him trapped between competing expectations. Frenchy avoids these twinned pressures altogether by eschewing romantic relationships and living alone. While Frenchy rejects romantic relationships, he is also the only male character who shows any consideration for the woman's position. "In this day of stresses I don't see much normal life, myself included," he tells Stark. Frenchy alone seems to understand that the economic pressure to provide for a family often makes a man shortchange his wife. "The woman's not a wife," he says, "She's the dependent of a salesman who can't make sales and is ashamed to tell her so, of a federal project worker or a Cooper, a dentist the free exercise of love, I figure, gets harder every day." These comments introduce one of the play's other central themes, the economic pressures of the Great Depression.

Economics and the Great Depression

While Rocket to the Moon may be less explicitly political than Odets's earlier plays, the effects of the economic pressures brought about by the Great Depression and the increasingly consumer-oriented nature of the American economy are central to the play. The influence of the Great Depression on the characters in the play can be seen most clearly in Cooper. A veteran of World War I, Cooper struggles to make ends meet because his dental practice is failing, and the economic demands of supporting a family exceed his income. By making Cooper a veteran, Odets is commenting on the contrast between the optimism of the post-war years and the realities facing many Americans after the crash of 1929. The depression is referred to explicitly on a number of occasions. For example, Frenchy reminds Stark that he is providing discounts to W.P.A. workers. Moreover, as Frenchy's earlier remark that a woman is less a wife than the dependent of a salesman or a federal project worker makes clear, the Great Depression had a profoundly negative effect on the securities traditionally assumed to go along with marriage.

Artistic Aspirations and Constraints

While he was working on the play, Odets was experiencing his own relationship troubles; his marriage was shortly to come to an end. Because of this, a number of critics have suggested that the play is as much about the constraints placed on artistic aspirations by marriage and other pressures as it is about the themes discussed above. This claim is perhaps best exemplified in Prince's statement to Stark that if he had not been married he could have been "one of the greatest actors in the world." Instead, he is "an old man who missed his boat," a man who has "disappeared in the corner, with the dust, under the rug." Indeed, many of the play's characters have artistic aspirations: Cleo wants to be a dancer, Willy Wax is a choreographer, and Stark retreats into Shakespeare on a number of occasions. Given the weight of examples such as these, there can be little doubt that, however much it was motivated by his own personal life, Odets clearly uses the theme of artistic exploration as a metaphor for the debilitating effects of marriage on a man's ambitions.