Because Wine in the Wilderness shows a female protagonist, Tommy, asserting her autonomy in opposition to an unjust socio-sexual hierarchy, the play can be considered a feminist drama. Analysis of the agent-scene ratio reveals the play's affinity to a particular philosophic school: idealism. Because Tommy's achievement of autonomy is emphasized, the play is idealistic, showing the triumph of the individual spirit.

The depiction of scene, the unjust socio-sexual hierarchy, is unusual in Wine in the Wilderness. The socio-sexual hierarchy in which man is "mounter" and woman is "mounted" is not the norm in the society of the play, but rather is the ideal toward which the characters believe they should strive. The problem with the black sub-culture, Bill and Cynthia believe, is that it is a matriarchy in which woman is mounter, thereby depriving black men of their masculine role.

But Tommy disagrees with this depiction of...