From its first page, the script is rich in symbolic detail open to many interpretations. The "mansion of Victorian Gothic style" immediately connects the play with Southern Gothic literature, with which it shares many characteristics. Sebastian's "jungle-garden," with its "violent" colours and noises of "beasts, serpents, and birds ... of savage nature" introduces the images of predation that punctuate much of the play's dialogue. These have been interpreted variously as implying the violence latent in Sebastian himself; depicting modernity's vain attempts to "contain" its atavistic impulses; and standing for a bleak "Darwinian" vision of the world, equating "the primeval past and the ostensibly civilised present."