The Leap, a tragic puritan of love, is an unhappy girl trapped in the rigid ascetic standards of her religious exaggeration. She hesitates in the face of confronting her personal fears and is crushed by the weight of her unconfessed desires. It is no coincidence that Williams places the work in the early twentieth century (1916) and not in the era in which it was written: even in the supposed liberal America, the self-control and hypocrisy of the British Victorian era has marked all Anglo-Saxons. Thus, Alma is a characteristic example and victim of the pitiful dignity that governs small closed societies, while at the same time being a harsh persecutor of her dreams and desires. Around her, a whole microcosm moves and acts within the provincial stagnation, the insignificant news, the mediocre joys, and the pervasive sadness. The opposite of Alma is the young doctor Buchanan, alienated as much as alienating, the classic male of the American South, a sad product that lives and reproduces sad products.