Mothers, Daughters, and Other Natural Disasters

I found the characters of Mrs. Peachum and Polly to be hysterically funny in their dysfunctional nature, in that the character of Mrs. Peachum is a overbearing women who believes she's always right and bitterly realistic, contemptuous of her daughter. In contrast, Polly is naive, rash, and frankly very stupid her absolute belief that the world will go on as she wants with no belief in anything but what she thinks of as reality. Both women are set up as doppelgangers to each other obviously to serve the plot of social satyr in that the bitterly realistic older woman is a product of her upbringing a rough neighborhood and the need for self preservation is held as paramount where as Polly is a product of her naivety and narrow minded idealism. The social satyr in accordance to Polly is that she is a product of the ideology of the modern idea that if you want something your entitled too it simply because you want it and you can have it, a far cry from the older generation. The two ideals cause chaos throughout the play for all parties, a way of showing that the need for wisdom and a firm handle on your impulsiveness of youth needs to be tempered with a firm knowledge of wisdom and grounded sense of realistic expectation.