Inherit the Wind

Rachel’s Quest for independence




I think Rachel was looking for the ways for her independence and willing to protect Bert during the trial. Rachel believed that Bert was innocent.


Rachel was in love with Bert, she knew that Bert was not a criminal and she wanted him to confess the court and the town’s people that he had done wrong, and it was all a joke and he was sorry for that. Rachel said to Bert, “Bert, why don’t you tell `em it was all a joke? Tell `em you didn’t mean to break a law, and you won’t do it again.” This clearly shows that she was worried about him and wanted to help him. But she knew that what he had done was bad. And she was also quite sure that he would not win the trial against the mayor. Her father was a powerful man. The townspeople liked him and appreciated what he had done and was doing for them.


Rachel soon found that she could not convince him to confess because he did not believe that he had done something wrong. As all he had told the pupils were the quotations from the book Hunter’s Civic Biology and from Chapter 17, Darwin’s origin of species. He learned from the books, “That man was not stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living comes from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days.” All this shows that his thoughts and ideas were based on scientific facts, but her father only trusted the Bible. Rachel has been always scared of her father. When she was little she used to have bad dreams. She would come to him at night looking for comfort, but he would just yell at her and tell her to go back to sleep. This shows that since her childhood she had never known any comfort from her father and he had always been cruel to her.


In court, when she was under oath, she was asked a lot of questions. Her answers from one side she tried to tell the truth from one side, and from the other she was to protect. Bert she...