Discuss what Mecca symbolizes to Helen in the play.

For Helen, Mecca is a place created by her inspiration and her imagination. It is a place in which she finds spiritual fulfillment after she is liberated from a more traditional church—as a result of her husband's death fifteen years before the play begins. She seems to have been forced into a loveless marriage and compelled to attend religious services that felt, to her, like "a terrible, terrible lie." After her husband's death, she is set free; she can follow her inspiration. She says that the picture of her first sculpture came to her, and she "just had to go to work immediately while it was still fresh in [her] mind," and this is why she missed church that first Sunday. Following that day, Helen walked away from all the things that did not inspire her—her role as a widow, the church, a community of people who began to judge her—and moved toward what did: her art. For her, then, Mecca is the light that drove out the darkness that threatened to consume her. Instead of being consumed by darkness, she began to produce light, multiplying it again and again. When she describes Mecca, "she is radiantly alive with her vision." To describe her as "radiant" implies that she, herself, seems to produce light. Mecca, then, is freedom, creativity, and personal fulfillment.

Helen has created her own Mecca—her elaborate sculpture garden—in this story, and it is symbolic of a few things. Helen enjoys making the sculptures. It is her way of coping, relaxing, and showing her own personal freedom. That freedom is a two part freedom. The first part is simply the fact that the sculpture garden is her way of expressing her own personal creativity; she sculpts what she likes and what she feels needs to be sculpted at that time. However, the entire garden is symbolic on a religious level as well. The entire garden is facing toward the East. It's facing the real Mecca. This doesn't mean that Helen has broken from the Christian church in her area to become a Muslim. It is symbolic of her break from the Christian church to follow her own personal desires. The garden is symbolic of artistic freedom, but it is also symbolic of Helen's religious freedom. Elsa does a nice job of explaining this to Marius at one point.

"Those statues out there are monsters. And they are that for the simple reason that they express Helen's freedom. Yes, I never thought it was a word you would like. I'm sure it ranks as a cardinal sin in these parts. A free woman! God forgive us!"