DRAMA for Students
National Advisory Board Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian, Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode Island. Certified teacher, Rhode Island. Member of the New England Library Association, Rhode Island Library Association, and the Rhode Island Educational Media Association. Christopher Maloney: Head Reference Librarian, Ocean City Free Public Library, Ocean City, New Jersey. Member of the American Library Association and the New Jersey Library Association. Board member of the South Jersey Library Cooperative. Kathleen Preston:Head of Reference, New City Library, New City, New York. Member of the American Library Association. Received B.A. and M.L.S. from University of Albany. Patricia Sarles: Library Media Specialist, Canarsie
High School, Brooklyn, New York. Expert Guide in Biography/Memoir for the website About.com (http://biography.about.com). Author of short stories and book reviews. Received B.A., M.A. (anthropology), and M.L.S. from Rutgers University. Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, grades 10–12, Solomon High School, Solomon, Kansas. Received B.S. from Kansas State University; M.A. from Fort Hays State University. Barbara Wencl: Library Media Specialist, Como Park Senior High School, St. Paul, Minnesota. Teacher of secondary social studies and history, St. Paul, Minnesota. Received B.S. and M.Ed. from University of Minnesota; received media certification from University of Wisconsin. Educator and media specialist with over 30 years experience.
DRAMA for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas
Volume 17 David Galens, Project Editor Foreword by Carole L. Hamilton
Drama for Students, Volume 17
Project Editor David Galens
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Table of Contents GUEST FOREWORD
“The Study of Drama” Carole L. Hamilton . . . . . . . . . vii INTRODUCTION
. . . . . . . . . . ix
LITERARY CHRONOLOGY . . . . . . . xiii
. . . . . . . . xv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . xix
84, CHARING CROSS ROAD
Helene Hanff . . . . . . . . . . .
1
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI
John Webster . . . . . . . . . . . 20 ELECTRA
Hugo von Hofmannsthal . . . . . . . 44 GOLDEN BOY
Clifford Odets . . . . . . . . . . . 75 JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE
August Wilson . . . . . . . . . .
100
MISS LULU BETT
Zona Gale
. . . . . . . . . . .
126
ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Tennessee Williams . . . . . . . .
160
OVERTONES
Alice Gerstenberg
. . . . . . . .
181
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THE PETRIFIED FOREST
Robert E. Sherwood
. . . . . . . . 192
THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG
Wendy Wasserstein
. . . . . . . . 211
THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES
Frank D. Gilroy . . . . . . . . . . 231 SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO
Dore Schary . . . . . . . . . . . 251 THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE
William Saroyan . . . . . . . . . . 274 . . . . 301
GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS
CUMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX . . 335 NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX
. . . 341
SUBJECT/THEME INDEX . . . . . . . 345
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The Study of Drama We study drama in order to learn what meaning others have made of life, to comprehend what it takes to produce a work of art, and to glean some understanding of ourselves. Drama produces in a separate, aesthetic world, a moment of being for the audience to experience, while maintaining the detachment of a reflective observer. Drama is a representational art, a visible and audible narrative presenting virtual, fictional characters within a virtual, fictional universe. Dramatic realizations may pretend to approximate reality or else stubbornly defy, distort, and deform reality into an artistic statement. From this separate universe that is obviously not “real life” we expect a valid reflection upon reality, yet drama never is mistaken for reality—the methods of theater are integral to its form and meaning. Theater is art, and art’s appeal lies in its ability both to approximate life and to depart from it. For in intruding its distorted version of life into our consciousness, art gives us a new perspective and appreciation of life and reality. Although all aesthetic experiences perform this service, theater does it most effectively by creating a separate, cohesive universe that freely acknowledges its status as an art form. And what is the purpose of the aesthetic universe of drama? The potential answers to such a question are nearly as many and varied as there are plays written, performed, and enjoyed. Dramatic texts can be problems posed, answers asserted, or
moments portrayed. Dramas (tragedies as well as comedies) may serve strictly “to ease the anguish of a torturing hour” (as stated in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream)—to divert and entertain–or aspire to move the viewer to action with social issues. Whether to entertain or to instruct, affirm or influence, pacify or shock, dramatic art wraps us in the spell of its imaginary world for the length of the work and then dispenses us back to the real world, entertained, purged, as Aristotle said, of pity and fear, and edified—or at least weary enough to sleep peacefully. It is commonly thought that theater, being an art of performance, must be experienced—seen—in order to be appreciated fully. However, to view a production of a dramatic text is to be limited to a single interpretation of that text—all other interpretations are for the moment closed off, inaccessible. In the process of producing a play, the director, stage designer, and performers interpret and transform the script into a work of art that always departs in some measure from the author’s original conception. Novelist and critic Umberto Eco, in his The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Indiana University Press, 1979), explained, “In short, we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work may admit.”
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Thus Laurence Olivier’s coldly formal and neurotic film presentation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (in which he played the title character as well as directed) shows marked differences from subsequent adaptations. While Olivier’s Hamlet is clearly entangled in a Freudian relationship with his mother Gertrude, he would be incapable of shushing her with the impassioned kiss that Mel Gibson’s mercurial Hamlet (in director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film) does. Although each of performances rings true to Shakespeare’s text, each is also a mutually exclusive work of art. Also important to consider are the time periods in which each of these films was produced: Olivier made his film in 1948, a time in which overt references to sexuality (especially incest) were frowned upon. Gibson and Zeffirelli made their film in a culture more relaxed and comfortable with these issues. Just as actors and directors can influence the presentation of drama, so too can the time period of the production affect what the audience will see. A play script is an open text from which an infinity of specific realizations may be derived. Dramatic scripts that are more open to interpretive creativity (such as those of Ntozake Shange and Tomson Highway) actually require the creative improvisation of the production troupe in order to complete the text. Even the most prescriptive scripts (those of Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, and Robert Bolt, for example), can never fully control the actualization of live performance, and circumstantial events, including the attitude and receptivity of the audience, make every performance a unique event. Thus, while it is important to view a production of a dramatic piece, if one wants to understand a drama fully it is equally important to read the original dramatic text. The reader of a dramatic text or script is not limited by either the specific interpretation of a given production or by the unstoppable action of a moving spectacle. The reader of a dramatic text may
discover the nuances of the play’s language, structure, and events at their own pace. Yet studied alone, the author’s blueprint for artistic production does not tell the whole story of a play’s life and significance. One also needs to assess the play’s critical reviews to discover how it resonated to cultural themes at the time of its debut and how the shifting tides of cultural interest have revised its interpretation and impact on audiences. And to do this, one needs to know a little about the culture of the times which produced the play as well as the author who penned it. Drama for Students supplies this material in a useful compendium for the student of dramatic theater. Covering a range of dramatic works that span from 442 BC to the 1990s, this book focuses on significant theatrical works whose themes and form transcend the uncertainty of dramatic fads. These are plays that have proven to be both memorable and teachable. Drama for Students seeks to enhance appreciation of these dramatic texts by providing scholarly materials written with the secondary and college/university student in mind. It provides for each play a concise summary of the plot and characters as well as a detailed explanation of its themes. In addition, background material on the historical context of the play, its critical reception, and the author’s life help the student to understand the work’s position in the chronicle of dramatic history. For each play entry a new work of scholarly criticism is also included, as well as segments of other significant critical works for handy reference. A thorough bibliography provides a starting point for further research. This series offers comprehensive educational resources for students of drama. Drama for Students is a vital book for dramatic interpretation and a valuable addition to any reference library. Source: Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Indiana University Press, 1979.
Carole L. Hamilton Author and Instructor of English Cary Academy Cary, North Carolina
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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Drama for Students (DfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying dramas by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s “For Students” literature line, DfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific plays. While each volume contains entries on “classic” dramas frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary plays, including works by multicultural, international, and women playwrights. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the play and the work’s author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in a drama; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character’s role in the drama as well as discussion about that character’s relationship to other characters in the play; analysis of important themes in the drama; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the play. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the play itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work.
This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the drama was written to modern Western culture, a critical essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the play. A unique feature of DfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each drama, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each play, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on each drama.
Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of DfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; textbooks on teaching dramas; a College Board survey of plays commonly studied in high schools; a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) survey of plays commonly studied in high schools; St. James Press’s International Dictionary of Theatre; and Arthur Applebee’s 1993 study Literature in the Secondary School: Studies of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States.
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Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as from educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of “classic” dramas (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary dramas for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women playwrights. Our advisory board members—educational professionals— helped pare down the list for each volume. If a work was not selected for the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in DfS focuses on one play. Each entry heading lists the full name of the play, the author’s name, and the date of the play’s publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: • Introduction: a brief overview of the drama which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. • Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the drama in question. • Plot Summary: a description of the major events in the play. Subheads demarcate the play’s various acts or scenes. • Characters: an alphabetical listing of major characters in the play. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character’s role in the play, as well as discussion of the character’s actions, relationships, and possible motivation. Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the Stage Manager in Our Town—the character is listed as “The Stage Manager” and alphabetized as “Stage Manager.” If a character’s first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by the name. Variant names are also included for each character. Thus, the nickname “Babe” would head the listing for a character in Crimes of the Heart, but below that listing would
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be her less-mentioned married name “Rebecca Botrelle.” • Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the play. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. • Style: this section addresses important style elements of the drama, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. • Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the play was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the play is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the play is set is also included. Each section is broken down with helpful subheads. • Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the play, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older plays, this section includes a history of how the drama was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent plays, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. • Criticism: an essay commissioned by DfS which specifically deals with the play and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). • Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material used in compiling the entry, with full bibliographical information. • Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. It includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation.
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In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: • Media Adaptations: if available, a list of important film and television adaptations of the play, including source information. The list may also include such variations on the work as audio recordings, musical adaptations, and other stage interpretations. • Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the play. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. • Compare and Contrast: an “at-a-glance” comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the drama was written, the time or place the play was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. • What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured play or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.
Other Features DfS includes “The Study of Drama,” a foreword by Carole Hamilton, an educator and author who specializes in dramatic works. This essay examines the basis for drama in societies and what drives people to study such work. The essay also discusses how Drama for Students can help teachers show students how to enrich their own reading/ viewing experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the DfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the DfS series by nationality and ethnicity.
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A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. Each entry may include illustrations, including photo of the author, stills from stage productions, and stills from film adaptations, if available.
Citing Drama for Students When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Drama for Students may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from DfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section: “Our Town.” Drama for Students. Eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 227–30.
When quoting the specially commissioned essay from DfS (usually the first piece under the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be used: Fiero, John. Critical Essay on Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Drama for Students. Eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 247–49.
When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of DfS, the following form may be used: Rich, Frank. “Theatre: A Mamet Play, Glengarry Glen Ross.” New York Theatre Critics’ Review Vol. 45, No. 4 (March 5, 1984), 5–7; excerpted and reprinted in Drama for Students, Vol. 2, eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 51–53.
When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of DfS, the following form may be used: Kerr, Walter. “The Miracle Worker,” in The Theatre in Spite of Itself. Simon & Schuster, 1963. 255–57; excerpted and reprinted in Drama for Students, Vol. 2, eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 123–24.
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We Welcome Your Suggestions The editor of Drama for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest dramas to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via Email at:
[email protected] Or write to the editor at: Editor, Drama for Students The Gale Group 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331–3535
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Literary Chronology 1580: John Webster is born in London, England, probably in 1579 or 1580. Like most of the facts about Webster’s life, his birthdate is not recorded in any documents. 1623: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is published. 1634: John Webster dies. Though no records of his death have been found, references to Webster in the work of other writers seem to indicate that he died no later than late 1634. 1874: Hugo von Hofmannsthal is born on February 1 in Vienna, Austria. 1874: Zona Gale is born on August 26 in Portage, Wisconsin, a small-town setting to which she frequently returns in her novels and plays. 1885: Alice Gerstenberg is born on August 2 in Chicago, Illinois. 1896: Robert Emmet Sherwood is born in New Rochelle, New York.
1908: William Saroyan (also known as Sirak Goryan) is born on August 31 in Fresno, California. 1911: Tennessee Williams (born Thomas Lanier Williams) is born on March 26 in Columbus, Mississippi. 1915: Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones is first produced. 1916: Helene Hanff is born on April 15 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1920: Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett is published. 1921: Zona Gale is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Miss Lulu Bett. 1925: Frank D. Gilroy is born on October 13 in the Bronx, New York. 1929: Hugo von Hofmannsthal dies from a heart attack on July 15 at his home in Rodaun, near Vienna, Austria. 1935: Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest is first performed. 1937: Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy is published.
1903: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Electra is first performed.
1938: Zona Gale dies of pneumonia on December 27 in Chicago.
1905: Dore Schary is born on August 31 in Newark, New Jersey.
1939: William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life is first produced.
1906: Clifford Odets is born on July 18 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1940: William Saroyan is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Time of Your Life.
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1945: August Wilson (born Frederick August Kittel) is born on April 27 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1970: Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road is published.
1950: Wendy Wasserstein is born on October 8 in Brooklyn, New York.
1972: Alice Gerstenberg dies on July 28 in Chicago.
1955: Robert E. Sherwood dies from a heart attack in New York City. 1957: Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending is first produced. 1958: Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello is first produced. 1963: Clifford Odets dies on August 14 in Los Angeles.
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1980: Dore Schary dies from cancer on July 7 in New York City. 1981: William Saroyan dies from cancer on May 18 in Fresno, California. He is cremated, with half his ashes interred in Fresno and the other half in Armenia. 1983: Tennessee Williams dies on February 24, when he chokes on a medicine bottle lid in a New York City hotel. 1986: August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is first produced.
1964: Frank D. Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses is first produced.
1993: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig is published.
1965: Frank D. Gilroy is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Subject Was Roses.
1997: Helene Hanff dies from pneumonia on April 9 in New York City.
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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Drama for Students (DfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN DfS, VOLUME 17, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: CLA Journal, v. XL, June, 1997. Reproduced by permission.—Midwest Quarterly, v. XXVI, Winter, 1985. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Drama, v. 2, May, 1959; v. XIX, March, 1976; v. XXI, September, 1978; v. XXIX, March, 1986. Copyright © 1959, 1967, 1976, 1978, University of Toronto, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. Reproduced by permission.—New York, v. 25, November 2, 1992. Reproduced by permission.— Newsweek, v. CXX, November 2, 1992. Reproduced by permission.—PMLA, v. 100, March, 1985.
Reproduced by permission.—Publishers Weekly, v. 228, August 2, 1985. Reproduced by permission. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN DfS, VOLUME 17, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Clurman, Harold. From an introduction to Six Plays of Clifford Odets. The Modern Library, 1939. Copyright, 1933, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, by Clifford Odets. © 1979 by Harold Clurman. From Waiting For Lefty and Other Plays by Clifford Odets. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.—Gassner, John. From Dramatic Soundings: Evaluations and Retractions Culled from 30 Years of Dramatic Criticism. Edited by Glenn Loney. Crown Publishers, Inc., 1968. © 1968 by Mollie Gassner. Reproduced by permission.—Groman, George. From “Clifford Odets and the Creative Imagination,” in Critical Essays on Clifford Odets. Edited by Gabriel Miller. G. K. Hall & Co., 1991. The Gale Group.—Krutch, Joseph Wood. From “Comedy,” in The American Drama since 1918. George Braziller, Inc., 1957. Copyright © 1939, 1957 by Joseph Wood Krutch. Reproduced by permission of George Braziller, Inc.—Morton, Richard. From “The Duchess of Malfi: Overview,” in Reference Guide to English Literature, Second Edition. Edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick. St. James Press, 1991. The Gale Group.—Schroeder, Patricia R. From “Realism and Feminism in the Progressive Era,” in The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic
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Realism. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Reproduced by permission of Associated University Presses.—Simonson, Harold P. From Zona Gale. Twayne Publishers, 1962. Copyright © 1962 by Twayne Publishers, Inc. Reproduced by permission. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN DfS, VOLUME 17, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Albertson, Jack, (left) playfully boxing with Martin Sheen in an army uniform in the 1968 movie version of the play “The Subject Was Roses,” written by Frank D. Gilroy, film directed by Ulu Grosbard, movie still. The Kobal Collection / MGM. Reproduced by permission.—Bellamy, Ralph, and Greer Garson in the movie “Sunrise at Campobello” which portrays the life of Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, September 16, 1960, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Bellamy, Ralph, and Mary Fickett (unidentified young woman in center) as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1958 Broadway play “Sunrise at Campobello,” New York City, 1958, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Cater, John, as Krupp (smoking, feet up on chair) and Daniel Massey as Joe (wearing pinstriped vest and pants) in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1983 production of “The Time of Your Life,” written by William Saroyan, performed at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 1983, photograph. Donald Cooper © Photostage. Reproduced by permission.—Cobb, Lee J., flanked by Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden in the 1939 movie “Golden Boy,” directed by Rouben Mamoulian, movie still. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.— Cover illustration of “The Playbill,” for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” showing African American man and child holding hands, written by August Wilson, directed by Lloyd Richards, performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, beginning March 27, 1988. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Cover of Playbill for “The Sisters Rosensweig,” written by Wendy Wasserstein, directed by Daniel Sullivan, performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, May, 1993, photograph. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Dailey, Irene, as the Mother and Martin Sheen as the Son in the play “The Subject Was Roses,” by Frank D. Gilroy, New York City, 1965, photograph. AP/ Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—
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Davis, Bette, and Leslie Howard in the movie “The Petrified Forest,” directed by Archie Mayo, 1936, movie still. The Kobal Collection / Warner Bros. Reproduced by permission.—de Baer, Jean, and Anne Bancroft (right) in the movie “Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road,” directed by David Jones, 1987, movie still The Kobal Collection / Columbia. Reproduced by permission.—Gale, Zona, photograph. © Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.—Gilroy, Frank, 1979, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Hanff, Helene, the author of “84 Charing Cross Road,” c. March 22, 1987, photograph. © Chris George/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, photograph.—Massey, Daniel, as Joe and Zoe Wanamaker as Kitty Duval, scene from a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Time of Your Life,” written by William Saroyan, directed by Howard Davies, photograph. © Donald Cooper/ Photostage. Reproduced by permission.—Mirren, Helen, as Duchess, with Bob Hoskins in a theatrical production of “Duchess of Malfi,” photograph. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Muethel, Lola, (left to right) as Lady Torrance, Hannes Riesenberger as Val, and Johanna Wichmann as Carol, in the German production of the play “Orpheus Descending,” written by Tennessee Williams, Frankfurt, Germany, January 30, 1958, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Odets, Clifford, photograph. AP/ Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.— Osborne, John, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Palmer, Felicity, (left) as Klytemnestra and Janet Hardy as Elektra, in the Welsh National Opera production of “Elektra” by Richard Strauss, September 19, 1992, photograph. Donald Cooper © Photostage. Reproduced by permission.—Redgrave, Vanessa, and Kevin Anderson embracing in the 1990 television movie version of Tennessee Williams’ play “Orpheus Descending,” directed by Peter Hall, movie still. The Kobal Collection / Turner Pictures / Nederlander Film / Heinila, Erik. Reproduced by permission.— Saroyan, William, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Scene from “Golden Boy,” by Clifford Odets, photograph. Theatre Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Reproduced by permission.—Scene from the 1953 production of Richard Strauss’ opera “Elektra” in Covent Garden, London, England, May 13, 1953, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Schary, Dore, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.— Sherwood, Robert E., (sitting backwards in chair,
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arms crossed), photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Title page / cast list in “Playbill,” for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” written by August Wilson, directed by Lloyd Richards, performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, beginning March 27, 1988, photograph. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Title page listing cast, etc., in Playbill for the play “The Sisters Rosensweig,” written by Wendy Wasserstein, directed by Daniel Sullivan, performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, May 1993, photograph. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Title page of “The Playbill” for the play “The Petrified Forest,” written by Robert E. Sher-
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wood, starring Leslie Howard, performed at The Broadhurst Theatre, New York, beginning June 24, 1935, photograph. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Walter, Harriet, as the Duchess, flanked by two unidentified actors, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “The Duchess of Malfi,” 1989 or 1990, photograph. Donald Cooper © Photostage. Reproduced by permission.—Wasserstein, Wendy, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Williams, Tennessee, photograph. UPI/ Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.— Wilson, August, Lloyd Richards, New York City, 1990, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.
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Contributors Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentiethcentury literature. Entries on Electra, Orpheus Descending, and The Subject Was Roses. Original essays on Electra, Orpheus Descending, and The Subject Was Roses. Cynthia Bily: Bily teaches writing and literature at Adrian College. Entry on The Duchess of Malfi. Original essay on The Duchess of Malfi. Allison Leigh DeFrees: DeFrees has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia as well as a law degree from the University of Texas, and she is a published writer and an editor. Original essays on The Sisters Rosensweig, The Subject Was Roses, and Sunrise at Campobello. Beth Kattelman: Kattelman holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Ohio State University. Entry on Overtones. Original essay on Overtones. David Kelly: Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College. Entry on The Petrified Forest. Original essay on The Petrified Forest. Rena Korb: Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. Entry on Miss Lulu Bett. Original essay on Miss Lulu Bett.
Laura Kryhoski: Kryhoski is currently working as a freelance writer. She has taught English literature in addition to English as a second language overseas. Entries on 84, Charing Cross Road, The Sisters Rosensweig, and Sunrise at Campobello. Original essays on 84, Charing Cross Road, The Sisters Rosensweig, and Sunrise at Campobello. Kevin O’Sullivan: O’Sullivan writes for both film and stage. Original essay on Orpheus Descending. Doreen Piano: Piano is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. Original essay on 84, Charing Cross Road. Ryan D. Poquette: Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. Entries on Golden Boy and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Original essays on Golden Boy and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Susan Sanderson: Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. Entry on The Time of Your Life. Original essay on The Time of Your Life. Scott Trudell: Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Original essays on The Subject Was Roses and Sunrise at Campobello.
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84, Charing Cross Road 84, Charing Cross Road, published in 1970, is constructed from a collection of correspondence between the author and a London bookseller, Frank Doel. The relationship began as Hanff delved into the work of a professor at Cambridge University. Professor ‘‘Q,’’ as he is called, became the catalyst for Hanff’s letter writing. Her admiration for the professor fueled her pursuit of classic literature, resulting in the inquiries comprising this work. 84, Charing Cross Road spans a twenty-year period, incidentally chronicling events abroad, such as Winston Churchill’s 1951 election in London and the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination in 1960.
HELENE HANFF 1970
This story thematically touches on the ideas of lack and sufficiency, whether it be Helene’s bibliomania (obsession for books) or a black-market trade of eggs for a pair of pantyhose in London. It is a story of beginnings and endings as represented by each letter, from date to signature. The power of language figures prominently, presenting the challenge of inference in the white space of the text as Helene waits breathlessly for her next letter to arrive. Finally, it is a story of appearances for exactly the same reason: the only information the reader has is based on a series of letters, hardly the means by which one can accurately infer much about the characters. Despite what seem to be shortcomings, the appeal of this mysterious plot is what serves to entice and delight the reader’s imagination.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PLOT SUMMARY
Helene Hanff was born April 15, 1916, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although she attended Temple University for one year, she did not pursue a degree. Critics attribute the bulk of her literary background to her penchant for books. In her work entitled Q’s Legacy, she speaks of the professor whose reading recommendations became the foundation for her literary education. A self-taught classicist, Hanff was a screenwriter and author. She was first employed as a manuscript reader for Paramount Pictures, and then accepted a position as a television scriptwriter for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
Correspondence, October 5, 1949 to November 1, 1950
The author’s work is largely comprised of publications for children and young adults, constituting a collection of historical works for a young audience. However, she is perhaps most recognized for her work addressing adult audiences. 84, Charing Cross Road is her greatest achievement in this regard, in terms of the notoriety she received from it. Published in 1970, the success of the work made subsequent adaptations for film and stage possible. 84, Charing Cross Road chronicles twenty years of Hanff’s life as a writer through her correspondence with the employees at a London-based antiquarian bookstore, Marks & Co. Hanff’s experience as a playwright is attributable to professional activity with the Theater Guild. She is the author of thirty scripts for television’s Hallmark Hall of Fame and Matinee Theater, and contributed to eight United States Army training films. Other television work includes a writing stint with the program The Adventures of Ellery Queen. Her awards include a CBS grant-in-aid for work on historic scripts for television. She has also contributed to magazines such as Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Reader’s Digest. Other career highlights include her monthly ‘‘Women’s Hour’’ broadcasts over BBC radio, as recalled in Letter from New York, her 1992 book which contains excerpts from the program. Hanff’s contribution to the radio show characterizes her love for New York, as shared in upbeat anecdotes and other random observations of her community. After a long and fruitful career, Hanff died of pneumonia April 9, 1997, in New York City.
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Helene Hanff is responding to an advertisement for a bookseller specializing in out-of-print books. Knowing nothing of Marks & Co. in London, she encloses a list of ‘‘her most pressing problems’’: copies of secondhand books she cannot find, and a request that they must be clean copies costing no more than $5.00. The books arrive safely, and with the help of a neighbor in Helene’s New York apartment building, Helene is able to determine the cost in dollars per British pound. ‘‘Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written,’’ says Helene in a letter to Marks & Co. upon receipt of a Bible, complaining that the Church of England has tinkered with the Vulgate Latin. To justify her disappointment, she recites her own family tree, recalling a Catholic sister-in-law, Presbyterian cousins, and others in her family and their religious persuasions. She encloses four dollar bills, despite the bookseller’s request to be ‘‘safe,’’ in addition to her request for an additional item. In another instance, Helene communicates her great enthusiasm for a Roman battle she happens on in a book she received from the store. She shares her delight in secondhand books, for precisely the reason that they have a tendency to fall open to what for her are often beloved passages. Taking comfort in a friendly copy of one of Hazlitt’s books, she notes delightfully, ‘‘[Hazlitt’s book] opened to ‘I hate to read new books!’’’ In the same letter, Helene writes that she has learned in a communication from a Marks & Co. employee that the occupants of the shop have been rationed to small amounts of meat and eggs, as have Londoners in general, to help with the war effort. Out of pity, Helene decides to send the booksellers at Charing Cross a six-pound ham. Later Frank Doel responds to Helene’s kindness, expressing his gratitude and calling the food parcel something ‘‘we either never see or can only be had through the black market.’’ In March, Helene addresses Frank with complaints that he is slow to fill her book requests. She expresses her disappointment in not having received several books for Lent, as well as the fact that she is forced to scribble in the margins of books thereby risking her library card in the process.
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Exasperated, she adds, ‘‘I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia.’’ Cecily, another store employee, cannot help her curiosity, disclosing to Helene that she has been ‘‘dying to slip in a little note’’ with Helene’s bills from the bookseller. Although Frank is not stuffy, Cecily admits that he looks upon Helene as ‘‘his private correspondent.’’ She requests a snapshot of Helene and speculates as to her appearance. Cecily imagines her to be ‘‘young and very sophisticated,’’ while others err on the side of ‘‘studious-looking.’’ Helene’s description of herself is anything but flattering. She is admittedly ‘‘so unstudious,’’ having not attended college, and claims to favor a ‘‘Broadway panhandler’’ in appearance. Anticipating future travel, Helene asks Cecily to tell her about London. Sharing what she herself knows about London, she adds that a newspaperman confided in her that tourists go to London with preconceived notions. ‘‘I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: ‘Then it’s there.’’’
Correspondence, February 2, 1951 to December 17, 1952 Helene is touched by the book of Elizabethan poems with pages edged in gold, sent from all at Marks & Co., in addition to letters sent from employees Megan Wells, Bill Humphries, and Frank Doel in a show of appreciation for her generosity. She downplays the food parcel she sent on Easter with ‘‘greetings from America—faithless friend that she is, pouring millions into rebuilding Japan and Germany while letting England starve’’ in the postwar 1950s. Another moment reveals an exasperated Helene who cannot believe her beloved bookseller would send her a book of excerpts from Pepys Diary rather than the entire work, telling Frank ‘‘I could just spit.’’ Frank responds apologetically, with much greater enthusiasm than he has demonstrated in the past. He assures Helene that there will be better times in the future for London, in anticipation of Winston Churchill’s re-election. ‘‘You dizzy me,’’ says Helene out of guilt for her sudden outburst over Pepys Diary. In a letter to Maxie, aka Maxine, Helene requests that her friend purchase four pairs of nylons for the girls working at the bookseller and also for Frank’s wife, after receiving a letter from Nora
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Helene Hanff
Doel. In her correspondence, Nora had shared the value of trading a tin of dried eggs for the stockings. Helene tells Maxie that, despite her desire to visit England and her beloved bookseller, she feels more comfortable writing ‘‘the most outrageous letters from a safe 3,000 miles away.’’ Helene also responds to Nora and Frank’s acquisition of their first car, an extremely difficult commodity to come by new or, in this case, used. She shares her hardships with Frank, those of purging overflowing bookshelves and the cost of having her teeth capped. In her last letter in 1952, she admits to the uneven exchange of holiday gifts. ‘‘You’ll eat yours up in a week. . . . I’ll have mine till the day I die.’’ Helene thrills in the idea that her scribblings in pale pencil will be discovered by ‘‘some book lover yet unborn.’’
Correspondence, May 3, 1953 to May 8, 1960 In 1953 Cecily tells Helene she should forget the care packages and save for a trip to London in 1955. In 1955, in a letter to Frank, Helene inquires whether Cecily is still in Iraq. ‘‘Do you mean to sit there and tell me you’ve been publishing these mammoth catalogues all these years and this is the first time you ever bothered to send me one?’’
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exclaims Helene in the same letter. She sends the letter along with a prayer request for the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series. ‘‘Will you tell Megan Wells she is out of her cotton picking mind,’’ says Helene of a Marks & Co. employee’s choice to move to South Africa. Changes are also afoot for the writer, whose eviction notice from her New York brownstone has pushed her to acquire ‘‘a real apartment with real furniture’’ and ‘‘wall-to-wall carpeting,’’ although it means postponing her anticipated trip to London. ‘‘All this and the Dodgers disintegrating before my very eyes,’’ she says of the entire affair. Frank comforts Helene after hearing her television shows have moved to Hollywood. Five months later, Helene shares that she has won a $5,000 grant from CBS to write American history dramatizations. She kids with Frank, telling him that her first script will involve New York under seven years of British occupation, ‘‘and I marvel at how I rise above it to address you in friendly and forgiving fashion, your behavior over here from 1776 to 1783 was simply filthy.’’
Correspondence, ‘‘Sunday Night and a hell of a way to start 1960’’ to October 1969 Helene is struck enough by a giant Modern Library book given to her as a Christmas gift to devote a considerable amount of time corresponding with Frank about the work on New Year’s Day. She considers the pairing of the works of John Donne and William Blake into one volume an absurdity. In the end, says Helene, ‘‘I’m being driven clear up the wall, Frankie, you have got to help me.’’ With only a $1,500 book advance for the next six months, Helene must watch her finances. ‘‘So I can’t buy any books’’ she says, opting to visit the Society Library for a copy of Memoirs of the Duke de Saint-Simon, only to find herself short on time to finish it. When she suggests Frank buy it to hold on reserve until a later date, Frank insists on sending six volumes to her without payment. ‘‘Your credit will always be good at Marks & Co.,’’ he tells Helene. ‘‘Enclosed-please-God-please-find a $10 bill,’’ says Helene to Frank, who cannot bear to have Memoirs without paying something toward it. In a brief story about a dinner meeting with her editor from Harper’s, Helene talks about her dramatization of Walter Savage Landor’s Aesop and Rhodope
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for Hallmark. Two hours before the program airs, she is dismayed to find a photo of a sculpture in the New York Times. The caption read ‘‘Rhodope, the most famous prostitute in Greece’’—a fact she never knew while writing the show for the family program. Her editor, reveals Helene, was impatient rather than sympathetic. ‘‘You see how it is, Frankie,’’ writes Helene, ‘‘you’re the only soul alive who understands me.’’ On January 8, 1969, Helene is informed of Frank’s death. He was unexpectedly rushed to the hospital for a ruptured appendix and died a week later. A letter from Nora followed some twenty-one days afterward. His wife pays him a glowing tribute, and admits her now growing awareness of his talents as letters and acknowledgements continue to reach her. The only other admission Nora makes is that she has always been envious of Helene’s writing ability and of Helene and Frank’s relationship. When Maxine says she is going to London and asks Helene if she would like to go, Helene shares that she almost wept when asked if she would consider going, provided she had the fare. She decides that maybe it is best she did not go after having dreamt about it for so many years. Speaking to the mysteries of the England of English literature, she says, ‘‘maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Looking around the rug one thing’s for sure: it’s here.’’ The work ends with the epilogue, a letter from one of Frank’s daughters giving Helene permission to publish her letters with Marks & Co. in book form.
CHARACTERS Frank Doel A consummate salesperson, Frank Doel is knowledgeable to a fault on the vast array of books available at Marks & Co. and elsewhere, demonstrating a keen awareness of possible works of interest to Helene and of their availability and care. Upon his death, his wife Nora speaks of many in the book trade who felt Frank was knowledgeable and ‘‘imparted his knowledge with kindness to all and sundry.’’ Mentioned in the beginning only as ‘‘FPD,’’ the efficient, polite reserve of Frank Doel softens over years of correspondence with Helene. In a later, decidedly more personal letter, Frank address-
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es the letter ‘‘Dear Helene,’’ pointing out in parentheses no less, that he does not care about the files anymore and goes on to share freely with Helene on a deeper level.’’ His importance in the novel in relation to Helene cannot be under-emphasized. Frank undisputedly shares Helene’s love of books and it is in this obvious reverence for the medium as well as his job as a bookseller that he quickly becomes Helene’s champion. Demonstrating patience, kindness and understanding only draws Helene out more and in this way she forms a dependence on Frank she may not so easily find in relations with others.
Nora Doel Loving, devoted, supportive wife and mother, Nora Doel corresponds with Helene in light of the kindness bestowed upon Nora’s husband Frank and those employed by Marks & Co. She is somewhat timid in her reserve, writing Helene only after having found the perfect excuse to do so: providing the name and address of a woman Helene wishes to contact. Nora also shares the difficulties both herself, and by extension, the members of Helene’s extended family at Marks & Co., are encountering in obtaining basic goods. When Nora expresses the value of a tin of eggs in procuring a pair of women’s hose, or the rare sight of meat at the London market, for example, Helene sees and responds to not only the needs of Nora for such items but to those of the bookstore. Decidedly less articulate than Frank or Helene, her curiosity about her husband’s female customer becomes obvious by the end of the story. She admits that she was very jealous of Helene ‘‘as Frank enjoyed [Helene’s] letters and they or some were so like his sense of humor.’’ Nora also acknowledges similar feelings regarding Helene’s writing ability. It is with equal candor that Nora shares the source of her insecurities with her husband’s correspondant. She describes her husband and herself as a pair of extreme opposites: ‘‘he so kind and gentle and me with my Irish background always fighting for my rights.’’ In this manner Nora functions in the play to round out Frank as a character on a more personal level. She shares intimate details about her husband, his family, and home life as well as his character quirks. Through Nora it is revealed that Frank is the father of three daughters, a ‘‘ready made’’ daughter from his first relationship and two from his union with Nora. She also provides snapshots of Frank to Helene, sharing her husband’s need to put a good foot forward with Helene as
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • 84, Charing Cross Road was adapted as a fulllength film, directed by David Hugh Jones and starring Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, and Judi Dench for Columbia Tri-Star in 1987. It is available from Columbia Tri-Star on DVD and VHS.
expressed by his dissatisfaction for the photos. ‘‘Frank says none of them do him justice, he is much better looking,’’ says Nora of the pictures.
Cecily Farr The first Marks & Co. employee outside of Frank Doel to attempt to correspond with Helene, daring Cecily Farr does so without what she feels is the necessary permission, and in a much more intimate and personal way than Frank. Cecily’s letters reflect her young, vibrant enthusiasm; in anticipating Helene’s curiosity she mirrors her own. She shares with Helene intimate details of a personal life yet to be disclosed by Frank, preempting her description with ‘‘if you’re curious about Frank,’’ then providing information about his marital status and his looks. Of her own curiosity, Cecily admits, ‘‘I’ve been dying to slip in a little note and [Frank] might not think it quite proper of me.’’ A military wife, Cecily remains a correspondent of Helene’s until Cecily joins her husband on a military base in Iraq.
Helene Hanff Eccentric and reclusive Helene Hanff, known as h.h. by her closest friends, is a bibliomaniac (a person with a preoccupation for acquiring and owning books) and looks to Marks & Co. to satisfy her habit. Professor Quiller-Couch, or ‘‘Q,’’ is responsible for Helene’s obsession. When describing herself to Cecily, Helene remarks that she is ‘‘so unstudious she never went to college,’’ and claims she is ‘‘about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler.’’
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In expressing her desire for certain reading materials, she is often childish in her demands though she feigns humor or claims to press the bookseller in jest, despite the obvious effects such demands may have on Frank. ‘‘Poor Frank, I give him such a hard time, I’m always bawling him out for something,’’ says Helene. Claiming to be ‘‘only teasing,’’ she still knows Frank will take her seriously. She further shares, ‘‘I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I did it.’’ Her concern is apparent by the nature of her comment, one she apparently wishes will reach the ears of Frank, the target of her sarcasm. Helene’s behavior towards Frank, as expressed in her communications, is not a function of her own self-absorption, but rather her obsessive need to surround herself with books. Books are a means of self-expression, and their appearance and contents also serve to soothe her. Because they are such an entrenched part of her life, the books seem to take on lives of their own, as personified in the text of her letters. When a book by M. De Tocqueville arrives, Helene refers to the author’s words and work in a letter to Frank, stating, ‘‘he sits around looking smug because everything he said is true,’’ as regards her feelings of politics in America. As demanding as Helene may be, she is also quite generous and kind, and receptive to the warmth of strangers as expressed in her correspondence to others involved directly with Marks & Co. She openly shares with Cecily her less-than-glamorous lifestyle in New York, devoid of the romantic notions Cecily offers. In another moment, a letter from Nora inspires a perceptive Helene to send several pairs of nylons not only to Frank’s wife, but to the other women at the shop, in response to the hardships rationing presents Nora and the others. In the same letter, the reader discovers via Nora’s letter that Helene has inquired after the address of a woman in an effort to express her thanks for a tablecloth. The author has her eccentricities, however, and they tend to come out particularly in her love of classic books. Helene fancies herself to be a Miniver Cheevy, a character in a poem who distrusts anything modern in favor of more chivalrous moments in history, when knights defended castles and princes married princesses. Her struggle with change comes out in some particularly telling moments, when she expresses angst over one work or another’s technical merits. She devotes an entire letter to Frank, for example, on the problem inherent in combining the
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works of John Donne and William Blake into one text, a discovery with nightmarish possibilities in her eyes. These and other impressions give the text its thematic underpinning.
Bill Humphries An associate at Marks & Co., Bill Humphries is mentioned throughout the text and actually corresponds with Helene from time to time in a show of appreciation for her generosity.
Maxine Maxine, or Maxie as she is addressed in letters to her friend, is Helene’s close friend and confidant. By the nature of their correspondence, it is assumed that the reader is able to get a clearer glimpse of Helene’s true nature. It is with Maxine that Helene shares her insecurities concerning a trip to London. It is also Maxine who becomes Helene’s eyes and ears on a trip to see the writer’s friends at Charing Cross road. The main function of the character is to illuminate a side of Helene not apparent in her communications with others, thus giving such communications the added dimension needed to put them into a richer context.
THEMES Language and Meaning The premise of the work is that through select letters the author is able to construct the story of the deep relationship forged between herself and the bookseller she has come to know on both a professional and personal level. Therefore, the idea of communication as a deep personal expression is a key factor in discovering the story behind the correspondence. There is a meaning behind the language that gives the story its emotive power. Nora, for example, admits she is a terrible writer, and by her admission has realized some meaning is lost in the text of her letters. In contrast, language and meaning forge the bond between Frank and Helene. It is the glue keeping their relationship together, so powerful that Helene is afraid to actually meet Frank and others in person for fear of losing the credibility and power she has forged in writing. By way of literary illusion as well as writing ability, Helene connects with Frank in a way others, like Nora, may not.
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The advent of the computer age caused many to question the efficacy of books. Trace the advent of computers in America and their impact on popular opinion regarding the future of books. How does Helene Hanff’s correspondence reflect such trends?
• In one of Helene’s letters she includes an excerpt from Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ to express her feelings about change. Read the entire poem in consideration of Helene’s views. Providing specific textual evidence for your assertions, make a case for Helene’s choice of poetry she employs to describe herself.
• In Nora Doel’s correspondence (and similar letters from other characters), she shares the impact of rationing on London in the 1950s, thankful for Helene’s care parcels. Research and write an essay about the economic climate of London in the 1950s as compared with that of the United States. Considering the quality of life in London during this time, how profound of an impact do you believe Helene’s gifts had on Nora and others associated with Marks & Co.?
• Although Helene does not visit London by the story’s end, she does eventually take a trip to Marks & Co. By creating a series of letters, writing them as if they were shared between Maxine (Helene’s friend in New York) and Helene, write a fictitious account of the trip. Keep in mind Helene’s obsession for the England of English literature. What sorts of places would she visit during her stay? With whom would Helene stay?
In a letter to Frank, Helene also demonstrates the significance words carry. In looking for an apartment she discovers what she considers to be distasteful violations of the English language. ‘‘Rents do not make sense,’’ she states, ‘‘and prices do not sit around being reasonable.’’ She concludes that she goes through life ‘‘watching the English language being raped before me face.’’ In this instance and others, she also uses a literary reference to Edward Arlington Robinson to express her feelings of dismay.
now off rations and even nylons are available in all the better shops,’’ it is safe to assume that London has made a transition for the better. Likewise when Frank reports to Helene he has lost touch with Cecily, the reader knows it marks the end of any subsequent communication between Cecily and Helene.
Beginning and Ending The work is based on a series of letters, and therefore, on beginnings and endings. The events of the story are recalled in relational time, either in response letters preceding letters, or as historical documents by date. The beginnings and endings are made implicit in specific life events or transitions, marked by career, personal relationship, environment, or history. For example, when Cecily instructs Helene to stop sending care packages because ‘‘everything is
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On a more tragic note, the death of Frank marks the end of many things for Helene—including a long friendship and her plans to visit England—and the beginning of others. Helene has managed to put together a book of correspondence for publication, and in so doing has sparked a relationship with one of Frank’s daughters.
Lack and Sufficiency Through communication of their needs and wants, the characters explore the idea of lack verses sufficiency. Often times the communication is subtle, a hint or request rather than a demand for something, or may simply be the author’s personal expression of a sense of deprivation. Such expressions set the tone for the work in terms of both
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history and characterization. As characters make their needs and wants known, the reader is able to make value judgments on the personalities represented in the work. When Helene does not get a response to her letter of inquiry, or does not receive a particular book she has requested, her responses are impetuous or fueled by sudden energy, action, or emotion, suggesting impulsiveness, impatience, or thoughtlessness of character. Telling Frank it will be a long, cold winter, she suddenly exclaims, ‘‘and I need reading matter, now don’t start sitting around, go find me some books.’’ Other expressions of lack and sufficiency serve as historical records of postwar London. After sending care parcels of meat and dried egg, for example, Helene is informed by Nora that a bit of dried egg is valuable in an exchange for pantyhose. In consequence, Helene responds to Nora’s need for female accessories by supplying not only Nora, but three other women in the shop, with nylon hose.
Appearances and Reality Letter writing is based somewhat on artifice; it is an expression of self on paper, a persona that leaves much white space to imagine the person behind the words, their appearance, their personality, and their life. The characters of the novel are able to summon imagination, to express themselves with reserve or candor, leaving very strong, lasting impressions of people they would fancy themselves to be in a personal encounter. Cecily first contacts Helene because her curiosity about the writer—how she looks and so forth— has peaked her interest to the degree that any consequence due to such contact is mitigated by a sheer need to satisfy her imagination. When Nora writes Helene, she encloses carefully selected photos of her husband, but is quick to point out Frank’s displeasure with the way he appears in them. In another instance, when Helene complains of neglect from Frank and others at the bookseller, she is often surprised with news of a death or illness, and dismisses her notions that the store was intentionally choosing to overlook her. Finally, it is Helene’s anticipated trip to London that figures prominently in the work. She shares in several instances that she prefers her writing persona, believing that what looks good on paper would not become reality in a personal encounter with her friends at the bookseller. Admitting the comfort she finds in her long distance relationship,
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she tells Maxine all may be compromised otherwise. For Helene, writing letters from 3,000 miles away is safe. Imagining a trip to the bookseller, she adds, ‘‘I’ll probably walk in there one day and walk right out again without telling them who I am.’’
STYLE Antihero The central character in the work, Helene, lacks traditional heroic qualities, particularly courage and personal fortitude. Although she provides the employees at Marks & Co. with some wonderful gifts, such presents do come with a bit of a price, particularly for Frank. When Helene is slow to receive a book, she often becomes demanding and temperamental with him. Although she admits to Cecily she is joking with Frank, she also owns up to the idea that he may take her seriously regardless of her intentions, and her joking becomes part of such demands by design. She also embraces her eccentricities, sharing she wears moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks in reaction to her ill-heated ‘‘hovel’’ of an apartment. Most apparent, however, is her view of the world, which seems to be shaped in large part by the books in which she is interested. Helene favors classic works over contemporary ones, a tendency in sync with her view of the world. At one point, for example, she concurs with a poet in reaction to her editor, who becomes agitated with her interest in old English books. In response, she recites a passage from Edward Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, identifying with another antihero who shuns modernity in favor of ‘‘the days of old.’’
Chronicle The text unfolds in a series of letters acting as a record of the events occurring in the lives of both Helene and those characters related to Marks & Co. The action unfolds chronologically by individually dated letter rather than by event. For example, when Helene complains of neglect to Frank, it is only in his response to her letter that she discovers Nora has been sick and in need of Frank’s attention. The letters also serve somewhat as a twenty-year historical chronicle, from 1949 to 1969. As a result, the reader becomes privy to such information as the impact of rations on postwar London, the re-elec-
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tion of Winston Churchill in 1951, the Brooklyn Dodger’s bid for the 1955 World Series, and the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign.
Motif The recurring motif (image or theme) that occurs throughout the text is Helene’s repeated request for used books. Although she forges deep bonds with those working at Marks & Co., Helene’s overriding desire is to find a particular published work; all of her correspondence, apart from some personal bits of information here and there, is related to this endeavor. This device is used to demonstrate the strong relationship Helene has formed with books, and by extension, the written word. Her need for books brings her closer to the employees of Marks & Co. Books also form the basis for both work and recreation for Helene. The book motif is also exemplified in the foundation of the story: a collection of letters Helene has been given permission to put in book form.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Churchill’s Conservative Government In 1951 Winston Churchill succeeded Clement Attlee as prime minister, signaling an end to the Labor government and a victory for the Conservatives. The new leader immediately asserted England’s need to economize on foreign spending, including restrictions on food and British tourism. In Hanff’s work, for example, the value of receiving a food parcel of meat from Helene was enormous, with the imposed meat ration set at less than twenty cents per person per week. At the same time, both the Labor government and the Conservative government pushed for increased arms spending in the billions, in reaction to both the Korean campaign and a perceived threat of communism. Two international disputes figured prominently in British politics. The first was with Iran, when the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was expelled from Iran in 1951, resulting in a blatant breach of contract. The company owned the largest oil refinery in the world on the Persian Gulf, with the British government holding a controlling interest. This conflict between nations explains character Cecily’s move to the Persian Gulf to be with her husband, a member of the military stationed there. Another conflict arose with Egypt over its attempts to force the country out of the Suez Canal zone and the
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Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. With forty-four percent ownership of the canal’s French operating company, the British refused to budge, believing the region would be of great strategic import in a conflict with the Soviets. Churchill had many political objectives in 1951, including the denationalization of the steel industry in response to an overwhelming public outcry. The government was also active in the affairs of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an anti-communist military alliance formed by eleven Western nations, including the United States.
Baseball in America When Helene asks Frank to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, she is responding to a banner year for the team in 1955, when that October they earned baseball’s highest honor by winning the World Series, while also defeating their rivals, the New York Yankees. The Dodgers had previously won the National League pennant seven times without going on to win the Series; hence the Brooklyn adage, ‘‘wait till next year.’’ The 1955 Series went the full seven games before the Brooklyn victory became a reality. During 1955 major league baseball experienced an overall increase in attendance of 688,265 people. With respect to the American League, Milwaukee was the clear leader in attendance, attracting a crowd of 2,005,836 fans in 1955. American League highlights for 1955 included outstanding performances by Mickey Mantle, hitting thirtyseven homeruns for the year, and Al Kaline, the Detroit Tiger outfielder, who at twenty years of age become the youngest player ever to win a batting championship, with a .340 average that year.
The Democratic Comeback ‘‘I belong to a Democratic club,’’ says Helene, ‘‘[I] read a couple of newspaper stories about the presidential hopefuls—Stevenson, Humphrey, Kennedy, Stassen, Nixon.’’ In 1959 the Democrats came up with an elaborate plan to take control of the White House from the Republican Party. Four U.S. Senators were considered chief contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, including John F. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Adlai E. Stevenson was also favored but personally rejected the idea. Of all of the candidates, John F. Kennedy would realize the greatest success. He spoke of his Catholicism openly and felt the subject of religion in general a
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1950s: Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party is re-elected in the general election in England, signaling an end to the Labor government. Today: In power since 1997, the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is reelected in June 2001. • 1950s: Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitches a no-hit, no-run game for the first time in World Series history, against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Today: In 2000 the New York Yankees and the New York Mets play each other in the first World Series between two New York teams since 1956. • 1950s: President Eisenhower suffers a heart attack in September 1955, opening up the possibility for Democrats to recapture the presidency. Today: Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore loses the 2000 presidential election to George
target for political debate. He also won the support of many with his views on labor-reform legislation. Both factors were cited as contributing to his successful victory against Eisenhower in 1960.
The Feminine Mystique Women of the early 1960s were experiencing burgeoning intellectual liberation on college campuses across America, and from this time of great expansion in the feminist movement came the work of freelance magazine journalist Betty Friedan. Her work was born out of her research of former Smith College classmates, to whom Friedan sent questionnaires to follow-up on their post-college lives. What she discovered was that these middle- and uppermiddle-class women were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the role for which society had typecast them, that of wife and mother. Friedan called these women victims of the ‘‘feminine mystique,’’ or the belief that for a woman to step outside of the role of
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W. Bush in one of the most closely contested elections in the history of the United States. • 1950s: The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) is the first company authorized by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to transmit color television programming. Today: Television consumers are no longer limited to the traditional major network offerings (NBC, CBS, and ABC). People can choose from direct TV, digital cable, and other options providing access to hundreds of channels. • 1950s: The Library Services Act extends public library services to several million residents, with forty-eight states awarded services, including librarians and bookmobiles, in new areas. Today: With the advent of electronic books and hand-held computers capable of downloading and storing printed materials, the future of printed books is debated.
wife and mother was unnatural, if not dangerous. The book opened up a realm of possibilities for women, who up until this point had been afraid to voice their dissatisfaction with the status quo. The popularity of the book was only part of Friedan’s contribution to the feminist movement. In 1966 the author founded the National Organization for Women (NOW).
CRITICAL OVERVIEW 84, Charing Cross Road is the best-known of Hanff’s four titles published specifically for an adult audience. The work exemplifies an economic and literate prose style, Hanff’s hallmarks that have been traditionally celebrated by critics. Many critics, however, find the appeal of Hanff’s memoir to be a function of its Victorian charm. For example, Tho-
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mas Lask, in a New York Times review, praised the work for its nineteenth-century response to the encroachments of a twentieth-century computerized society. Lask adds that the book is ‘‘an emollient for the spirit and the sheath for the exposed nerve.’’ Other critics cite Hanff’s keen sense of wit as a contributing factor to the success of the text; a quality recognized consistently by critics with respect to her other works. 84, Charing Cross Road gained critical acclaim and was subsequently adapted for film, television, and the stage. Stanley Kauffman’s review in the New Republic did not give these adaptations high marks, however. Calling Hanff’s work ‘‘a hopeless candidate for the screen,’’ Kauffman believes it to be ‘‘almost equally hopeless for the stage,’’ although already dramatized by James Roose-Evans. The problems Kaufmann cites with the work relate to the medium in which they are presented: a series of letters. Kaufmann’s concern is that much has to be inferred from the white space of this collection of correspondence in order to create a more cohesive work, thus the work runs the risk of creative compromise in adaptations.
CRITICISM Laura Kryhoski Kryhoski is currently working as a freelance writer. She has taught English literature in addition to English as a second language overseas. In this essay, Kryhoski considers some of the ambiguities inherent in a literary work constructed solely from Hanff’s personal correspondence. Critics have commented on the elusiveness of the text of 84, Charing Cross Road in its translation onto screen or stage. What makes the work particularly beguiling for the reader (and for the screenwriter or playwright) is the ambiguous characterization of Helene and others, as well as of the specific events of the text, as influenced by its presentation as a bundle of letters. The choppiness of the correspondence leaves more open to interpretation than would the structure of a more traditional novel. Considering the inconsistencies in Helene’s character, as well as the overall structure of the work, it is easy to see the story’s power to stir the reader’s imagination. Subsequently, there is a danger inherent in accepting any one interpretation of the work, or in
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assuming that it is conclusively a true representation of the author’s life. The characterization of Helene is ambiguous at best. At the outset of the novel, her correspondence is polite enough, witty enough, and acceptable enough to be considered well within the norm of letterwriting etiquette. As time goes on, however, Helene’s demeanor changes, giving the impression that one is seeing a side of the writer that is more intimate and therefore more accurate than that which has been previously observed. In the first few months of correspondence with Frank, Helene is congenial in her request to Frank to translate his prices for her on specific items in an effort to pay him properly. Conscious of the slight burden she puts on Frank, Helene explains, ‘‘I don’t add too well in plain American, I haven’t a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic.’’ She also closes the letter rather wittily, writing of Frank’s last letter (in which he addressed her as ‘‘Dear Madam’’): ‘‘I hope that ‘madam’ doesn’t mean over there what it does over here.’’ In just a month’s time, however, Helene’s tone has completely changed, although Frank Doel’s has not. Responding to his professional reserve, Helene fires at him of her latest purchase, exclaiming, ‘‘What kind of a black protestant Bible is this?’’ She insults the Church of England, claiming that they have ‘‘loused up the most beautiful prose ever written.’’ Simply stating ‘‘the hell with it,’’ Helene finally concedes to the idea of using her Latin teacher’s Vulgate until Frank can find her a suitable copy. The writer comes off as a loose canon in her rather dramatic reaction to the receipt of an unwanted book. This response is particularly surprising because of the seeming liberties Helene takes with the bookseller in a relatively short time, such that her relationship with Marks & Co. might be jeopardized. From previous letters, the frazzled response of the writer is based solely on what seems to be an absurd dependence on books rather than on any prior experience with Frank. She has no reason to believe her request will go unheard, that the bookseller will be less than sympathetic to her plight, or that Frank will not satisfactorily address the problem. The reader’s assumptions of Helene based on this response could indeed be shortsighted. The tenor of further responses seem to be fairly consistent with the outburst in which Helene engages early in the story, a knife-edged sort of moodiness indica-
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Jean de Baer and Anne Bancroft in the 1987 film adaptation of 84 Charing Cross Road, directed by David Jones
tive of someone prone to temperamental flares. However, her correspondence with other members of Marks & Co. bear witness to a different image of Helene, that of the witty prankster. She does not react to Cecily’s intrusion into her personal life in the same manner she does with Frank’s seemingly harmless mistakes, but is instead chummy in her conversations with the inquisitive Marks & Co. employee. Helene willingly offers details about her life, such as her unflattering appearance, her occupation, and her living space. She is particularly pointed in sharing her feelings for Frank. Relating to Cecily the heap of abuse directed at him, Helene tells her that she purposely gives Frank a difficult time of it. ‘‘I’m always bawling him out for something,’’ Helene says, ‘‘I’m only teasing, but I know he’ll take me seriously. I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I did it. In this light, Helene knowingly tells Cecily of her pranks with Frank with the intention of reaching him. Cecily cannot help but be in the thick of things, and Helene is banking on this fact. She realizes that Frank may eventually be put off by her impetuousness or impulsive outbursts expressed in her letters. But at some point one wonders as to the sincerity of the admission. Based on subsequent responses, it is
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as if Helene is seeking permission to continue behaving in what she knows to be an unacceptable fashion, without regard for Frank. Although this may seem a bit thin-skinned a view—and although Frank seems to take subsequent outbursts in the true spirit one is to assume, at least according to Helene, that they are given—there is still an edge to her correspondence that creates an interesting picture of the author. She continually makes childish demands of Frank, of his time, and duly responds to disappointment with a flare for the dramatic. But what seems to be behind such behavior is her obsession with the written word, particularly fitting for a writer whose profession puts a great value on wordsmiths. For instance, Helene devotes an entire letter to Frank on the merits of her latest acquisition, a ‘‘Giant Modern Library book.’’ Her discourse on the subject continues for a page or two, at one point pleading with Frank for help, concluding with her retirement to bed, where she will ‘‘have hideous nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage and Abridged.’’ What seems to be painfully clear is that the narrator is perhaps unreliable in her perceptions. Wit seems to walk a fine line with the author’s
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • The Library of Helene Hanff, by Helene Hanff and edited by Stephen Pastore, was published in 1998. The work is a warm and personal biography of the author, further illuminating her correspondence with the bookseller at Charing Cross. It provides the reader with valuable insight into Hanff’s collection of books, and by extension, her life. • Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Company, by Lynn Tillman, was published in 1999. An account of what has been called one of the most interesting bookstores in New York City, the work covers not only the opening and closing of the shop, but the life of the young woman who founded and ran it. In addition to a forward by Woody Allen, the book
bibliomania, or obsessive book-collecting habits. Her concerns for the future can be taken as a humorous affront or the product of deeper insecurities. But all are hard to infer with any certainty, even by the text’s conclusion. Correspondence with Maxine reveals yet another dimension to the communication between Frank, his coworkers at Marks & Co., and Helene. Helene candidly admits to Maxine her fear of meeting her friends at Charing Cross Road based on the persona she has put forward in her letters. Stating that she may not ‘‘have the nerve,’’ Helene shares that she writes considerably more outrageous letters than she would if it were not for the safety of a 3,000 mile expanse between New York and London. ‘‘I’ll probably walk in there one day and walk right out again without telling them who I am,’’ claims Helene. This is where Helene makes an impact on her audience at Marks & Co., and by extension, her world. She admittedly hides behind the elusiveness of letter writing to avoid intimate contact with those at the bookseller, making empty promises that she will indeed visit London. Yet the reader is privy
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also includes shared recollections of Books & Co. by authors and other New York notables. • Bookends: Two Women, One Enduring Friendship, by Madeline B. Stern and Leona G. Rostenberg, was published in 2001. The memoirs of two rare-book dealers and lifelong friends, the work chronicles the lives of two single Jewish-American women, and their struggles and successes against the backdrop of the twentieth century. • Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding, was published in 1999. This novel is a warm, humorous look into the private life of a thirty-something publishing professional, as related in a series of diary entries. Bridget Jones is on a quest to quit smoking, lose weight, and find her own sense of inner peace.
early on to information that she will not make the trip. Who is to say the reliability of the text, by extension, is not consistent with Helene’s own behavior and characterization of herself and the events around her? To say, then, that the author truly opens her life up to interpretation is subjective at best. The omission of various letters is intimated in the sparseness of the collection during specific time periods, and by the choppy progression of letters, noted in the intentional omission of responses logically linking one to the next. In this regard the work becomes truly one of fiction, based mainly on inferences of the reader as to particular details of the text. Relying on these letters, then, the reader finds him- or herself on a slippery slope, blindly relying on the discourse of an unreliable narrator. Structurally the work also lends itself to various interpretations. Letters are rather temporary documents, momentary recollections suspended in time that may or may not truly reflect the writer behind them. A skilled writer may actually make their presence felt within the context of the correspondence. There is inherent danger, however, in
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Source: Laura Kryhoski, Critical Essay on 84, Charing Cross Road, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
FROM PREVIOUS LETTERS, THE FRAZZLED RESPONSE OF THE WRITER IS BASED SOLELY ON WHAT SEEMS TO BE AN ABSURD DEPENDENCE ON BOOKS RATHER
Doreen Piano Piano is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, Piano explores a writer’s emotional and intellectual attachment to books as represented by her correspondence to a bookseller at an antiquarian bookshop in London.
THAN ON ANY PRIOR EXPERIENCE WITH FRANK.’’
guessing the nature of a person or a particular event or events based solely on such correspondence. Nora aptly demonstrates this to Helene, admitting she does not put the most impressive foot forward in her correspondence due to rather poor writing ability. Personality, then, is lost in the translation, as is additional information about the lives of the characters occurring in the white space of the work. The white space referred to in literature is that open or blank expanse created by gaps in time and plot unaccounted for by the text, literally the blank page. It is in this space that one must infer or make connections in the text as to the motivations of specific characters, or the impact of particular events on the story. The packaging by the author of a bundle of letters leaves quite a bit to the reader in terms of interpretation. Considering the task, it is understandable that critics the likes of Stanley Kauffman have pondered the logistics of the text only to conclude that the work does not lend itself to adaptation for stage or screen. It is a work based purely on perceptions rather being driven by plot. To try to translate any one reader’s experience with the text into another form, then, to universalize the experience for the reader, is perhaps doing both Hanff and the fans of 84, Charing Cross Road a great disservice. The power of the work lies within the imagination of the reader who happens on it at a particular moment. This idea seems to gel quite well with Helene Hanff’s own feelings on London travel. She shares aptly, ‘‘I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for.’’ Of the existence of the England of English literature, the author concludes, ‘‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Looking around the rug one thing’s for sure: it’s here.’’
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Published in 1970, 84, Charing Cross Road by writer Helene Hanff is an unusual memoir that reveals the author’s love not only of books but also her passion for letter writing and, on a deeper note, human communication. The story centers around a series of letters written by Helene Hanff, a New York writer, to the bookseller Frank Doel, who works at the antiquarian bookstore Marks & Co., located for many years at 84, Charing Cross Road in central London. Beginning in 1949, the letters cover twenty years of correspondence, ending in 1969 with the death of Frank Doel, who has over the years provided Helene with an extraordinary number of used books ranging from the Socratic dialogues to nineteenth-century classics like Pride and Prejudice. Yet more than simply a business exchange or monetary transaction, the correspondence between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel shows how cultural difference and geographic distance cannot inhibit friendships from developing, particularly when both correspondents share a love of books. In addition, their trans-Atlantic friendship can be seen as a continuance of the congenial relations forged during World War II between the United States and Great Britain. 84, Charing Cross Road is made up of a series of letters in chronological order that convey a deepening intimacy and affection between the two main correspondents, Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. What is most striking while reading the letters is how very different these two people are. Right at the onset of their correspondence, the reader gets an immediate sense of two very different personalities emerging. On the one hand, Helene is direct, personal, and expressive. Her humor surfaces in the second letter where she writes as an afterward, ‘‘I hope ‘madam’ doesn’t mean over there what it does here,’’ referring to Frank’s form of address despite Helene signing her name ‘‘Helene Hanff (Miss).’’ Although very little detail is given in terms of physical description, class background, or education, the reader is able to envision Helene as a typical New Yorker. She is quick to speak (or write) her mind about the
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books she is receiving, whether it is praising the beauty and condition of the books or castigating their contents. For example, in the letter dated November 18, 1949, she begins her letter with a question in capital letters, ‘‘WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?,’’ thus revealing her dismay at receiving a bible that does not meet her expectations. Whereas Helene’s letters are often emotive, her outrage usually conveyed through the use of capital letters, Frank’s letters are formal and direct, practically to the point of being anonymous and impersonal. This anonymity is seen in the way he signs his letters using his initials, FPD. From the tone of his letters, he is acting as one who conducts business should act, which is polite but distant. One can imagine Frank being quite alarmed at receiving some of Helene’s letters, yet his responses hardly ever reveal that she has said something that may offend. He is the quintessential British gentleman, or at least he seems to be. Although Helene Hanff and Frank Doel could not be more dissimilar, Helene’s warm abrasive wit and generosity eventually breaks down the cool exterior that Doel exudes at the beginning of their correspondence. Her references to dental work, her badgering comments to Frank for not doing his job, and her joy at receiving books she loves all contribute to establishing a more intimate relationship not only with Frank but also with many of the staffers at the bookstore. Even more so, Helene’s generosity in sending care packages reveals a sensitivity to the conditions of post-WWII England. Because a good portion of the letters are written when England’s population was on government food rations and where basic goods like eggs were a luxury, affordable only to the most economically well-off, Helene’s care packages make her a hit among the staff and Frank Doel’s family. In fact, after she sends the staff a ham for Christmas in 1949, Frank begins to sign his name Frank Doel instead of FPD. Other staff members also then begin to write her letters. Her correspondence eventually extends to Frank’s wife and later, when they are grown, to his children. In these letters, Helene is able to get a more in-depth portrait of Frank as well as the England that he represents to her. In return for the gifts of hosiery and foodstuffs, Helene receives a number of beautiful antiquarian books and a handmade Irish linen tablecloth made by a neighbor of Frank’s. In addition, Helene is offered free room and board whenever she decides to visit England by both the Doel family and others at Marks & Co. This cultural exchange reveals on a
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WHEREAS HELENE’S LETTERS ARE OFTEN EMOTIVE, HER OUTRAGE USUALLY CONVEYED THROUGH THE USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS, FRANK’S LETTERS ARE FORMAL AND DIRECT, PRACTICALLY TO THE POINT OF BEING ANONYMOUS AND IMPERSONAL.’’
more personal scale the ties that have developed between Great Britain and the United States and contributes in a small way to the rebuilding of England’s infrastructure, many of its cities having been destroyed by German bombing campaigns. As Helene herself notes in a letter to the whole staff, ‘‘I send you greetings from America—faithless friend that she is, pouring millions into rebuilding Japan and Germany while letting England starve.’’ Thus, these gifts are an extension of her personal investment in English culture, especially its literature. Even more than being war allies, it is Helene’s love of books and passion for Western literature that fuels her passion for maintaining relations with people she has not met. The correspondence, while divulging personal information, especially in Helene’s letters, is primarily focused on keeping Helene well-stocked in many of the canonical works of literature and more obscure items such as musical scores. Her references to reading and receiving books from Marks & Co. take up a good portion of the contents of her letters. In her brash demands for books to be hunted down is a zest for reading great literature. In fact, her drive to acquire quality books is a way for her to develop a repartee with Frank. A letter, dated February 9, 1952, is a particularly noteworthy example of not only her desire to read the literary classics especially when they are bound in beautifully made books, but also her reliance on Frank to find what she is searching for. Addressed to ‘‘SLOTH,’’ the letter reveals Helene’s despair of not having anything substantive to read. ‘‘I could ROT over here before you’d send me anything to read. i oughtta run straight down to brentano’s which i would if anything i wanted was in print.’’ She ends the letter, ‘‘MISS Hanff to you. (I’m
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Helene only to my FRIENDS),’’ acknowledging not only Frank’s inability to fill her book requests but also his unceasing formality, even after three years of correspondence and the many care packages she has sent. Moreover, by reading books by England’s finest writers and being in touch with the staff at Marks & Co., Helene begins to envision an England that most likely exists only in her imagination. Despite her many letters that claim she will be in England soon, Helene never ends up going. On the surface, it seems like a monetary problem. As a struggling writer, Helene’s income is unpredictable, and what she does earn seems to go to her dentist. Later, after she begins making more money, she moves into a bigger and better flat. Yet, as the years go by, there seems to be something else more at stake in her not going. By the end of the correspondence, it is evident that Helene will never go. Physically being there is impertinent as for the past twenty years Helene has been imagining England through the books she has. As she says in her last letter dated April 11, 1969, years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he nodded and said, ‘It’s there.’ Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. Looking around the rug one thing’s for sure: it’s here.
For Helen, 84, Charing Cross Road is part of a world that she prefers to keep isolated from the material world of actual people and places. Instead, the bookshop and its occupants is contained within the books she buys as well as a product of her imagination. In the end, 84, Charing Cross Road is an homage to a place never visited and people never seen, only imagined. In her letters, Helene’s passion for reading spills over to her passion for all things British that results in making deep connections to a number of people from Frank Doel to his fellow workers and family. It is not surprising that Frank’s wife, Nora, writes Helene about her husband passing away since they have exchanged letters as well as gifts over the years. Nora even admits that she has been jealous of Helene because ‘‘Frank so enjoyed your letters and they or some were so like his sense of humour.’’ Thus, she makes clear that two people who appear to be so different on the surface are actually quite similar. Although Helene will probably never make it to England, she realizes that she
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does not need to go to wonder at its marvels. Rather, the marvels are imbedded in both her memory and the books she has received over the years. Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on 84, Charing Cross Road, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Sybil Steinberg In the following interview, Steinberg discusses with Hanff her method of self-education and the impact of writing in her life. The frustrated actress in Helene Hanff, well documented in her autobiographical chronicles: 84, Charing Cross Road, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Underfoot in Show Business, and in her latest work, Q’s Legacy, out this month from Little, Brown (Fiction Forecasts, June 14), gives a bravura performance to raise the curtain on our interview. A pixie with moxie, Hanff takes center-stage in her one-room Manhattan apartment to deliver a mock excoriation of PW and her interviewer in particular. ‘‘I am infuriated that Publishers Weekly is interviewing me,’’ she begins, and goes on to explain that she had no sooner finished writing an article, fashioned especially for PW, about ‘‘how one gets to be a walking ad’’ for one’s publishers, when we called to request this interview, thus precluding the purchase of her opus. It is, she says, her tart tongue in cheek, just one more example of how an author’s precarious financial state is undermined by even the hands that should feed it. The zam-bang opening and antic humor are characteristic of Hanff, who in her latest book again relates the adventures that transformed her life. ‘‘At an age when most executives are considering early retirement, I was a failed playwright, a television writer who was unwilling to follow the industry to Hollywood, a writer of children’s books no one was publishing any more,’’ she says. Within the next decade, the play adapted from her most popular book was a hit in London and went on to be featured in repertory theaters all over the world, a plaque carrying her name is prominently displayed at the site of the bookstore she made famous in London’s Charing Cross Road, she is the recipient of adulatory fan mail, and she has finally achieved an income above the poverty level. In Q’s Legacy, Hanff pays tribute to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cambridge scholar whose books she used to educate herself when she could not afford to go to college during the Depression. Inspired by ‘‘Q,’’ who ‘‘brought English literature into my
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life,’’ Hanff embarked on a writing career that, to hear her tell it, has had more downs than ups. As she reveals in Q’s Legacy with insouciant candor, for every successful book she has written, several others have ended up in the incinerator. ‘‘I have not only started bad books, I have finished them!’’ she announces with gusto. ‘‘André Deutsch [Hanff’s London publisher] once said, ‘If you wrote the phone book, we’d have to publish it because you have such a big following in London.’ I then wrote three phone books, and he wouldn’t publish any of them because he had the sense to know they were bad books. I didn’t know, or I never would have finished them.’’ Hanff ruefully describes some of the books she has thrown away. One was a guidebook resulting from a one-week, government tourist office-sponsored tour of Israel in which she and six other travel writers were ‘‘imprisoned in a bus for six days, twoand-one-half of them spent in Tel Aviv. We never got out of the bus except in a group with our tour guide, whom we nicknamed Brunhilde. Now you know that you’re never going to get a book out of six days on a bus.’’ Next was a book on dogs, a subject she was told could not miss. ‘‘I happen to be goofy about dogs. So I strung together 150 doggy anecdotes. It was dreadful.’’ ‘‘The third we do not discuss,’’ she announces in a lugubrious voice, and discusses it anyway. ‘‘I wrote it for the first time in 1963 at my editor Gene [Genevieve] Young’s suggestion. It was terrible, and we dropped it down the incinerator. I wrote it for the second time in 1968. Ditto. I wrote it for the third time in 1975. Ditto. Ask me what I’m going to spend ’85 and ’86 doing! I think I’ve finally found the right approach. Of course, it may go down the incinerator like its three predecessors. But I’m hopeful.’’ The books that have made it to publication and earned Hanff a legion of devoted readers all relate the story of her life. She has learned, she says, that she can only write about things that have happened to her. ‘‘You’d be amazed how many ways you can tell the same autobiography. I’ve never written anything else, though I never told the whole story in any of them. But each time Gene Young read the first draft of my books, she called and said, ‘You’ve left yourself out of it.’ It took me just ages to get up the nerve to start with me. So this time, when I first
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THE BOOKS THAT HAVE MADE IT TO PUBLICATION AND EARNED HANFF A LEGION OF DEVOTED READERS ALL RELATE THE STORY OF HER LIFE.’’
had the horrible suspicion I was about to fall down the same rat hole again, I tacked up a sign over my typewriter: ‘You’ve left yourself out of it!’ In Q’s Legacy, line one, page one begins with me. Because I finally realized that unless it was a story about my life—in which scads of other people are involved, of course—it would be a bust again.’’ While Hanff may put herself into her books, her self-deprecatory comments about her appearance should not be taken seriously. At various points in Q’s Legacy she calls herself ‘‘plain and mousy,’’ ‘‘small, round-shouldered,’’ ‘‘nearsighted, awkward and clumsy,’’ ‘‘easy and assured on paper, but awkward and stiff in person.’’ In reality, she is a gamine with a monk’s haircut and a friendly, energetic, offhand manner. Shoeless, her trim figure clad in corduroy slacks and a cotton blouse with turned-up sleeves, she could be a peppy teenager. She chops out her conversation in a flagrant Philadelphia accent animated by colloquialisms and delivered in what she calls her ‘‘gin baritone,’’ but which is most probably attributable to the cigarettes she smokes. Her mocking self-put-downs tend to endear Hanff to her readers, many of whom feel that they know her and behave in a proprietary fashion. In Q’s Legacy, Hanff acknowledges that she is a ‘‘cult author’’ and describes the numerous favors that fans ask of her, from autographing books and mailing them out as gifts, to phoning her in the middle of the night to chat. She answers every fan letter she receives. ‘‘I’m a very chummy type,’’ she declares. ‘‘I have never written ‘Thank you so much for your letter,’ because that would take longer than just writing off the top of my head. But when I’m writing 50 thank-you notes, each of the 50 recipients is getting just one and they think I’m their best friend. I, of course, forget what I’ve said almost immediately.’’
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Sometimes the ramifications of a long-forgotten letter get Hanff in temporary difficulties. Replying to a fan who wrote that he had been tempted to purloin the Marks & Co. sign that once hung outside the bookstore at 84, Charing Cross Road, she scribbled, ‘‘Why didn’t you?’’ and thought no more of the incident. When the fan called some months later and announced triumphantly that he had acquired the sign for her, she was at first nonplussed and then delighted; the handsome silver-and-black nameplate now hangs on the wall in the alcove where shelves hold the treasured volumes she bought from Marks & Co. and the dog-eared texts by Q, the nucleus of her collection and the inspiration for her later purchases. According to Hanff, every week brings phone calls from people who have just discovered her books, have seen or are acting in the play adapted from 84, Charing Cross Road. ‘‘People phone and they apologize for disturbing me. I say, ‘Listen, honey, if I didn’t want to talk to you, my number wouldn’t be listed.’ Then they get loose. Or they begin, ‘Miss Hanff, you don’t know me.’ They’re stiff. So I jump in. I say, ‘Oh you obviously read books; so I know you.’’’ Many callers express appreciation of Hanff’s guidebook to New York, titled The Apple of My Eye. They would be surprised to know that the book marked a low point in the author’s life. According to Hanff, Doubleday commissioned the guide for $7500, a sum so low that her agent Flora Roberts even contributed her fee, adding another $750 to Hanff’s meager earnings. Living on the half of the fee advanced to her during the six months it took to research the book, Hanff says she was ‘‘flat broke the whole time. A friend and I took 13 day trips touring New York. We did it on the cheap. I could only buy us one decent lunch; the rest of the time we ate in cafeterias. We had ferry fares, museum charges, car fares. But when I turned in an itemized expense account for $138, Doubleday wouldn’t pay it! They said it would have to come out of my advance.’’ This is one of the incidents that have caused Hanff to take a dim view of the author’s lot. Another was the fate of her book Underfoot in Show Business, which ‘‘crept out during the New York newspaper strike in 1962 and promptly died.’’ When Little, Brown reissued the book in 1980, Gene Young sent letters to newspapers and booksellers explaining that it had not been reviewed the first
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time around and asking them to treat it as a new book. ‘‘So what happened? Every reviewer said, ‘This is an old book,’ and didn’t review it. Every bookseller said, ‘This is an old book,’ and stuck it up in the balcony.’’ Despite her bad luck in this case, Hanff knows herself incomparably fortunate in her relationship with Young, whom she followed from Harper & Row to Lippincott to Little, Brown. ‘‘I hope she stays at Little, Brown,’’ she says somewhat wistfully. ‘‘They do the most beautiful job. Their editors care. Their copy editor is wonderful. And their printers are meticulous.’’ Hanff ‘‘thanks God’’ for Young, who is supportive, but not falsely encouraging. ‘‘You send your book to Gene, and she calls you the next day and says, ‘I read it, I don’t like it.’ You know where you are instantly. No kid gloves. No smooth, ad agency-ese. None of that. But when she does like it, you know it immediately. I depend on that.’’ Hanff also thanks the deity for James RooseEvans, who adapted 84, Charing Cross Road for the stage. She confesses herself ‘‘speechless’’ at the royalties she receives, as she was when she discovered herself the toast of London at the play’s premiere. Equally astonishing to her is that Samuel French purchased the play and made it available to theatre groups around the world, most of whom seem to have contacted her one way or another. She was taken aback however, by a letter from a young Scottish actress who said she had been quite relieved to learn that Hanff was still alive. Her royalty payments still make Hanff feel somewhat guilty, since she regards these profits as money she did not actually earn. Having fended off the wolf at the door so frequently, she is almost fanatic about managing her finances on the pay-asyou-go plan. ‘‘The one drawback about being a writer is that you never know in any month where the rent is coming from six months from then,’’ she says earnestly. ‘‘That’s why I never buy anything on time.’’ Only the experience of being stranded in the Minneapolis airport sans money or her ticket, which mysteriously disappeared, she says, between the airport door and the check-in counter, convinced her to apply for a credit card, which then lay dormant for a long time before she could convince herself it was not wicked to use it. She is equally compulsive in her attitude toward her readers, who, she is determined, must get
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their money’s worth from her books. ‘‘I worry a helluva lot more about my readers than I do about reviewers,’’ she says. ‘‘I have nightmares that they’ll run out and get the new book and be disappointed. I’d die rather than let them down.’’
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It is an old-fashioned attitude, but then Hanff is somewhat of an anachronism in the contemporary world. Having taken Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch as her personal mentor, and having been introduced in his books to Izaak Walton, Shakespeare and Milton, she is high on the merits of a literary education, particularly as preparation for a writing career. ‘‘Of course you must choose your models sensibly,’’ she says. ‘‘I love John Henry Newman to death, but he doesn’t write American English. Fortunately I had Q’s lectures, which kept me from going off the deep end.’’
Frankel, Haskel, Review of 84, Charing Cross Road, in Saturday Review, November 7, 1970, p. 38.
Asked whether her method of self-education would seem feasible to young people these days, she answers, ‘‘I think the people who still want to are the people who have to. There are still kids growing up in slums, with a terrible need to write, who, knowing that college is beyond them, will go to libraries and read anything they can get their hands on. They will be just as dependent on libraries as I was. The ethnics may have changed—these kids are not lower middle class, they are underclass—but the need for knowledge still exists and especially the need for immersion in good writing.’’ Hanff cites James Baldwin, a writer she very much admires, as a master of English prose learned primarily from the Bible. As for herself, she would do it all over again, Hanff says. ‘‘I don’t think I had a choice. I wouldn’t have half-starved if I could have helped it. But if writing is the only thing you want to do, and the only thing you know how to do, you do it.’’ Sometimes her reliance on her own life experiences for material gives her anxious moments, she confesses. ‘‘One thing about the books I write, ideas for them are not going to fly in the window,’’ she observes. ‘‘The thing I must do is dig back into my own past, and at my age, I have to go back plenty. I may not have had a busy life, but it’s been long, that’s a blessing.’’ Momentarily serious, Hanff then responds in characteristic fashion to our expression of relief that she still has material to draw on. ‘‘Relieves you, honey,’’ she cackles, ‘‘it gives me a nervous tic!’’ Source: Sybil Steinberg, ‘‘PW Interviews: Helene Hanff,’’ in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 228, No. 5, August 2, 1985, pp. 70–71.
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Axelrod, Alan, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Twentieth Century History, Alpha Books, 1999, pp. 255–365.
Kauffman, Stanley, Review of 84, Charing Cross Road, in New Republic, February 23, 1987, p. 24. Lask, Thomas, Review of 84, Charing Cross Road, in New York Times, September 11, 1970.
FURTHER READING Basbanes, Nicholas A., A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, Henry Holt & Company, 1995. Bibliomania, or the passion to collect books, is celebrated in this historical account of book collecting which begins 2,200 years ago in Alexandria. The work also includes more contemporary stories of book junkies, some driven to criminal acts to sustain their habit. ———, Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture, HarperCollins, 2001. Basbanes focuses on the book culture, talking with obsessed readers about their enduring passion for books. The work is a profile of librarians, writers, readers, booksellers, and the like, all dedicated book enthusiasts. Hanff, Helene, Q’s Legacy, Penguin, 1986. This work offers insight into the creation of 84, Charing Cross Road. In it, Hanff recalls her discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don. Under ‘‘Q’s’’ guidance (a recommended list of reading), Hanff begins to order books from Marks & Co., the small bookseller at Charing Cross Road, by letter— correspondence that ultimately forms the basis for 84, Charing Cross Road. Jenkins, Roy, Churchill: A Biography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Jenkins relays the story of Winston Churchill, one of the greatest figures in English politics, while providing a great historical account of British politics. The author of the work is a former Labor member of the House of Commons.
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The Duchess of Malfi JOHN WEBSTER 1623
John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was written in 1613 or 1614, and had at least two successful productions in London before it was published in 1623 under the title The Tragedy of the Duchesse of Malfy. Generally considered to be Webster’s masterpiece, it tells the story of a young widow who marries against the wishes of her powerful brothers, setting off a storm of revenge. The startling violence, the unbelievable plot twists, the mysterious motives of the brothers, and the calm strength of the Duchess have made The Duchess of Malfi a subject for fierce debate for hundreds of years. Critics and reviewers have loved or hated the play, with equal fervor. The Duchess’s story is based on actual events that took place in Italy in the early sixteenth century. Webster freely borrowed elements of his story from several sources, including William Painter’s popular collection of stories, The Palace of Pleasure (1566–1567), and Sir Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia (1590), and also borrowed dramatic elements from the Revenge Tragedy tradition, but he adapted the source materials to suit his own themes and dramatic purpose. The Duchess of Malfi is widely available in high school and college anthologies. It is also available separately as a Dover Thrift edition and collected in The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays (1998), part of the Oxford World Classics series.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY John Webster was born in London, England, probably in 1579 or 1580. Like most of the facts about Webster’s life, his birthdate is not recorded in any documents that survive to this day; scholars estimate his birthdate by extrapolating from existing records of his parents’ marriage in 1577. It is known that his father was also named John and that the father earned a good living as a coachmaker, but the name and background of Webster’s mother is not known. It is likely that Webster attended the prestigious Merchant Taylors’ School, an institution established for children of members of the Company of Merchant Taylors. There, he would have received a solid basic education, which included exposure to literature in Latin and English, and he would have participated in musical and dramatic performances. Although the play itself has been lost, there is evidence that Webster was part of a group that was paid in 1602 for writing Caesar’s Fall. This play, written on commission, is the earliest known work to which Webster contributed. Webster would continue to collaborate with other playwrights, including Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Michael Drayton, for much of his career. Most of these plays were written for performance by particular theatrical companies. They were intended to be popular successes, not texts for study, and the successful playwright was able to produce histories, comedies, tragedies—whatever the market demanded. In or near 1605, Webster married a woman named Sara Peniall. Their first son, also named John, was baptized in 1606, and several other children followed. Webster was apparently able to support his family through his writing. Webster’s two most important plays were both written by him alone: The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (published 1623, but written in 1613 or 1614). Both draw heavily on the Italian tradition of sensation and tragedy, which was popular at the time. Webster also wrote prose ‘‘character’’ sketches, a ceremonial pageant, and various odes and verses, none of which is as important today as his plays. Over his career, Webster wrote approximately ten plays in collaboration and at least four individually. During his lifetime, he was wellknown as a playwright and as a visible member of London’s upper middle class. Webster’s last known play, Appius and Virginia, was produced in London in 1634. Though no
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records of his death have been found, references to Webster in the work of other writers seem to indicate that he died no later than late 1634.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The Duchess of Malfi is divided into five acts, each comprising several scenes. In the three scenes of act 1, the major characters and conflicts are introduced. The setting is the Italian city of Amalfi in the sixteenth century, in the audience chamber or ‘‘presence’’ of the widowed Duchess. Antonio, the Duchess’s steward, talks with his friend Delio as they observe the others who pass through the chamber. The first to enter are the Cardinal and Bosola. Although Bosola has recently been released after serving seven years for a murder he committed at the behest of the Cardinal, the Cardinal is cold to him and will not acknowledge his debt. Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria, enters with his entourage. Ferdinand learns that Antonio has proven himself the best at a knightly competition, and he congratulates Antonio for his prowess and for his eloquent speech. When the Cardinal reenters with the Duchess, Antonio gives Delio his impression of the three siblings: the Cardinal is jealous and vengeful, Ferdinand is ‘‘perverse and turbulent,’’ and the Duchess is sweet and noble. Ferdinand asks the Duchess to accept Bosola as a servant, and she agrees; in fact, the brothers have hired Bosola to spy on the Duchess. The two brothers warn the Duchess not to remarry, and she promises that she will not. However, as soon as they leave her chamber, she summons Antonio and the two perform a private marriage ceremony, with the Duchess’s trusted servant Cariola as witness.
Act 2 The second act, which has five scenes, begins several months later, as the Duchess is about to give birth to a child. Her marriage to Antonio is still secret, and she has concealed her pregnancy by wearing loose clothing. Bosola, however, suspects that she is pregnant and tries to trap her by giving her a present of apricots. When she devours them hungrily and then vomits, he has confirmation of the
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pregnancy but does not reveal what he knows. The incident sends the Duchess into labor, and she is rushed to her chamber.
with expected fury. The Cardinal decides to contact the authorities at Ancona and have the Duchess and her family banished.
To avoid suspicion that the Duchess is giving birth, a ruse is invented: it is announced that jewels have been stolen, and everyone must stay in his or her room while a search is conducted. The Duchess delivers a healthy son, and when Cariola tells Antonio the good news, he prepares a set of calculations based on astrology to determine the baby’s future. Meanwhile, Bosola sneaks out to the courtyard beneath the Duchess’s window and hears her crying out. Antonio finds him there, and they argue about Bosola having left his room. As he leaves Bosola, Antonio accidentally drops the paper on which he has written his astrological notes, and Bosola retrieves it, discovering that a baby has been born to the Duchess—a baby who will have a short life. Bosola knows that Antonio is in on the secret but does not consider that a man of Antonio’s social class could be the father.
At the Shrine of Our Lady of Loretto, the Duchess and Antonio review their situation. Bosola brings a letter from Ferdinand calling for Antonio’s death, and Antonio and the Duchess say goodbye again. They know that this will be their final parting. Antonio takes their oldest son and flees to Milan. The Duchess is arrested by Bosola, in disguise, and taken by guards to her palace.
In Rome, the Cardinal meets in his chamber with Julia, his mistress. Delio arrives and propositions Julia, but she refuses him. In another part of the Cardinal’s palace, Ferdinand has received a letter from Bosola, telling him of the baby’s birth. The Cardinal and Ferdinand discuss their sister’s betrayal, and Ferdinand’s rage takes him to the brink of insanity.
Act 3 Several years pass before the five scenes in act 3 take place. The Duchess has given birth to two more children, but her marriage is still a secret, and Bosola still has not discovered the identity of the father. Ferdinand, finally stirred to action, arrives at the Duchess’s palace to confront her. To play an affectionate joke on her, Antonio and Cariola step out of the room while the Duchess is talking to herself in the mirror, and Ferdinand comes into the room at the same moment. He accuses her of shaming the family with her promiscuity, and although she tells him that she is married, he vows never to look at her again. Afraid of Ferdinand’s anger, the Duchess sends Antonio to safety by pretending that he has stolen money and been banished. Tenderly, the couple say goodbye to each other, planning to reunite in Ancona. In her grief, the Duchess confides in Bosola, telling him everything. Bosola plots to entrap the Duchess and Antonio. He speeds to Rome to tell what he knows and find his reward, and the brothers respond
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Act 4 Act 4, with its two scenes set in the Duchess’s chambers, moves quickly. Trying to drive her to despair so that she will be damned as well as killed, Ferdinand arranges for a series of horrors. He visits the Duchess in a darkened room (because he has vowed never to see her again) and places in her hand a dead man’s hand that she will assume to be Antonio’s. He shows her wax figures that look like the bodies of Antonio and the three children. He arranges for eight madmen to scream outside her window. Through it all, the Duchess maintains her quiet nobility, saying ‘‘I am Duchess of Malfi still,’’ and Bosola begins to feel a grudging respect for her. Finally, Bosola brings two executioners to the Duchess’s chamber, and they strangle her. She faces her death with dignity. Cariola is also strangled, though she resists her death with all her energy. Off stage, the two younger children are strangled. When Ferdinand sees his dead sister, he has a dramatic change of heart, and rather than rewarding Bosola, he blames him for the murders.
Act 5 The action of the five scenes of act 5 is also rapid. Four days after the events in act 4, the Cardinal has had all of Antonio’s property seized. Antonio decides to visit the Cardinal and attempt a reconciliation. Ferdinand’s madness has increased, and he has been seen digging up bodies in the cemetery and carrying a man’s leg over his shoulder. Bosola arrives in Milan, and he and the Cardinal try to determine what the other knows. The Cardinal pretends that he does not know the Duchess is dead, so that he will not seem to have been involved in the murder, but Bosola persuades Julia to find out the truth. The Cardinal confesses to Julia that he has had his sister killed, but then he immediately kills Julia with a poisoned book.
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Outside the Cardinal’s home, Antonio and Delio speak with a ghostly echo that comes from the Duchess’s grave. Bosola vows to protect Antonio from harm, but he accidentally kills Antonio with his sword, mistaking him for the Cardinal, who has promised to kill Bosola. In the final scene, an anguished Bosola kills the Cardinal’s servant and stabs the Cardinal. Ferdinand rushes in and stabs Bosola and the Cardinal. Bosola stabs Ferdinand. As they all lie dead, Delio enters with Antonio’s son and calls for a unified effort to support the young man as the new Duke.
CHARACTERS Antonio Bologna Antonio is the steward, or the manager, of the Duchess of Malfi’s palace. He is good with a horse and a lance, and he is widely known to be honest— so honest that the Cardinal rejects a suggestion that Antonio be hired to spy on the Duchess. He is also a good judge of character, delivering to his friend, Delio, insightful descriptions of the others as they appear. He is in awe of the Duchess, because of her beauty and her disposition, and humbly accepts her proposal of marriage without regard for the wealth he will obtain by marrying her. In fact, he agrees to keep the marriage secret, and so he gains no power or prestige from it. After he is married, Antonio is less sharply drawn, but the glimpses given of him do not fulfill the promise of act 1. He loses the paper on which he has calculated the baby’s future. He follows the Duchess’s plans for avoiding capture, making no suggestions himself. Finally, he is killed as he walks to the Cardinal’s door to ask for a reconciliation. Still, he is a good man, and the Duchess clearly loves and trusts him until the end.
Daniel de Bosola Bosola is the Duchess’s Provisor of Horse. As the play opens, he has just been released from imprisonment because of ‘‘a notorious murder’’ the Cardinal hired him to commit. Now, he is employed by Ferdinand, who arranges his position with the Duchess so he can spy on her and prevent her from marrying. In many ways, Bosola is the most complex character in the play, and the only one whose thinking and personality change from beginning to
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • The Duchess of Malfi was produced for television in 1972 by the BBC. The 123-minute VHS cassette, featuring performances by Eileen Atkins, Michael Bryant, and Gary Bond, is distributed by Time-Life Video. • The BBC produced an audio recording of the play in 1980, starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scolfield. This production runs on three audiocassettes, and is distributed by Audio-Forum. • An older audio version originally issued on record albums, but since 1972 distributed on three audiocassettes, is also available from Caedmon. It features Barbara Jefford as the Duchess, and includes a booklet with biographical information and essays on the play. • In 1962, Caedmon issued a recording of excerpts from the play read by the British poet Dylan Thomas, well known for his wonderful speaking voice. The recording is available from Caedmon on one audiocassette.
end. Antonio predicts this change at the beginning, when he comments that Bosola is ‘‘very valiant,’’ but worries that his melancholy will ‘‘poison all his goodness.’’ In fact, Bosola is capable of great evil. He spies on the Duchess (though he is unable in three years to discover that Antonio is the Duchess’s husband), supervises her murder and the murder of her children and of Cariola, accidentally kills Antonio, and deliberately kills the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and a servant. As he observes the nobility of the Duchess and Antonio in facing death and also sees that committing heinous acts for the Cardinal and Ferdinand does not win him gratitude or financial reward, he begins to question his belief that it is better ‘‘To appear a true servant, than an honest man.’’ But, when the ‘‘stars’’ drive Bosola to kill Antonio, whom he has resolved to protect, he concludes that all human endeavor and human goodness are meaningless.
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The Cardinal The Cardinal is the brother of the Duchess and Ferdinand, as cold and calculating as Ferdinand is excitable. He is a high-ranking official in the Roman Catholic Church, but he does not live the life of a Christian saint: he has a mistress; he hires spies and murderers; and, he does not seem to have any religious duties or religious thought. As Antonio explains to Delio, ‘‘where he is jealous of any man, he lays worse plots for them than ever was imposed on Hercules, for he strews in his way flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters.’’ The Cardinal is the quiet force behind the plotting against the Duchess. It is his idea to hire Bosola to spy on her, but even Bosola does not know of the Cardinal’s involvement. When Bosola has killed the Duchess, the Cardinal pretends to have no knowledge of the crime. He shares Ferdinand’s desire that the Duchess not marry, and Ferdinand’s anger when she bears a child, but he ‘‘can be angry / Without this rupture’’ of ‘‘intemperate noise.’’ He demonstrates no love or loyalty, treating with startling coldness Bosola, who killed and was punished in his employment, and Julia, who is his mistress, and the Duchess and Ferdinand, who are his siblings. His motives for tormenting his sister are not clear. He does not want her money or her love, and he is incapable of feeling humiliation or shame. He does not care for his reputation or legacy; his final words are ‘‘now, I pray, let me / Be laid by, and never thought of.’’
Cariola Cariola is the trustworthy servant of the Duchess, privy to all of the Duchess’s secrets. Cariola witnesses the marriage between the Duchess and Antonio, helps deliver the Duchess’s children, and is with the Duchess when the Duchess dies. In her own death, she is not as noble as the Duchess, but kicks and screams and tries to escape. Throughout the play, she is more cautious than the Duchess, thinking that marrying Antonio is ‘‘madness,’’ and fearing that the trick of a false pilgrimage will prove unlucky.
Delio Delio is a courtier and a friend of Antonio. His main role in the story is to provide a sounding board for Antonio. Delio’s curiosity about the court gives Antonio the opportunity to speak aloud about the characters of the Duchess, her brothers, and Bosola
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in the way an omniscient narrator might in a novel. Delio is also the friend in whom Antonio confides the secrets of his marriage and the births of his children; like Cariola, Delio guards the secrets carefully. Delio has no direct connection with any of the siblings, and he does not directly participate in their plots and deaths. He is the faithful friend, always standing by to help Antonio when he is needed. In a scene in act 2, Delio comes to Rome and makes advances to Julia, who rebuffs him. Their interaction affects nothing else in the play, and the two never meet again. Delio speaks the last words in the play, when he enters ‘‘too late’’ with Antonio’s oldest son after his parents have been killed. He urges the survivors to help the young man gain his inheritance and proclaims, ‘‘Integrity of life is fame’s best friend, / Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.’’
The Duchess of Malfi The Duchess of Malfi is the sister of the Cardinal and the twin sister of Ferdinand. She is never referred to by name throughout the play, but only by the labels that describe her roles as sister, duchess, and wife. As the play opens, she is a widow, but still in the bloom of youth. (According to Webster’s source materials, the real duchess was a girl of twelve years old when she was married to a much older man; she became a widow when she was twenty.) Although her brothers forbid her to marry again, and she promises to obey them, she longs for a husband. Secretly, she asks her steward Antonio to marry her, and they perform a private marriage ceremony. Afraid of her brothers’ anger, the Duchess manages to keep her marriage a secret for years, even through the birth of three children. When the brothers do learn of the children, she flees with Antonio but is captured and murdered. Early in the play, Antonio describes her as a woman whose speech is ‘‘full of rapture,’’ who has a ‘‘sweet countenance,’’ who lives a life of ‘‘noble virtue.’’ Although her sweet nobility casts no spell over her brothers, her every word and action support Antonio’s judgment of her, and her subjects love and respect her. She is clever, able to match her brothers’ wit in her exchanges with them, and able to quickly craft intricate plots for escape. She is affectionate with her husband, children, and servant, showing a tenderness that is far beyond the capabilities of the Cardinal and Ferdinand. And she
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is dignified in the face of her brothers’ torments, stating even at the worst of it, ‘‘I am Duchess of Malfi still.’’ Some critics have commented that the Duchess deserves death because of her rashness in marrying beneath her station, but most reject that notion, agreeing that there is nothing in the play to indicate that Webster found fault with the marriage of Antonio and the Duchess. What happens to her is not her fault, but the result of living in a ‘‘gloomy world.’’
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Julia Julia is the wife of an old nobleman and is the Cardinal’s mistress. While she is staying with the Cardinal, she is propositioned by Delio, whom she refuses; she also tries to seduce Bosola. Ironically, the Cardinal kills her by tricking her into kissing a poisoned book, while she is swearing to keep his secret.
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Ferdinand Ferdinand, the Duke of Calbria, is the twin brother of the Duchess, younger than her by a few minutes. He is as emotional as his brother the Cardinal is icy, and his response to the idea of his sister marrying is beyond all bounds. Ferdinand’s motivation has always been a central question for critics of this play, and many critics have seen incestuous feelings in his rage. Whatever the cause, when he learns that his sister has given birth to a child, he declares her a whore and ‘‘a sister damn’d,’’ creates a mental picture of her ‘‘in the shameful act of sin,’’ and imagines burning her and her lover in a coal pit with no vent, so that ‘‘their curs’d smoke might not ascend to heaven,’’ or boiling her child into a soup and serving it to the father. As with other characters, Antonio’s early description of Ferdinand proves insightful. Antonio tells Delio that Ferdinand has ‘‘a most perverse, and turbulent nature.’’ Even the Cardinal wonders whether Ferdinand is ‘‘stark mad,’’ and after brooding over his sister’s betrayal for a time, Ferdinand does approach insanity. After he has had the Duchess killed and sees her lying dead, he regrets that he ordered Bosola, ‘‘when I was distracted of my wits, / Go kill my dearest friend,’’ but there has been no hint previously that he and the Duchess shared any closeness. The realization of what he has done pushes Ferdinand over the edge into insanity, perhaps even to the point of imagining that he is a werewolf. He is found in the graveyard digging up dead bodies and is seen ‘‘with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder; and he howl’d fearfull, / Said he was a wolf.’’ Ferdinand is not seen again until the last scene, when he charges in on the Cardinal and Bosola, and stabs them both. Bosola stabs him in return, and just before Ferdinand dies, he ‘‘seems to come to himself,’’ saying, ‘‘Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.’’
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Fate and Belief Considering that one of the main characters of The Duchess of Malfi is a Cardinal, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Roman Catholic Church, there is a surprising lack of reference to God in the play. The characters do not turn to God for help in trouble, and they do not seek forgiveness when they come to believe they have acted wrongly. The only certainty in life is death, and there is no promise here of an afterlife. The world of The Duchess of Malfi is controlled not by God, but by fate. Ferdinand is the character most conscious of his religion, but his Christianity is not a religion of love but one of vengeance, not of forgiveness but of damnation. In act 2, in his anger at learning of the Duchess’s child, Ferdinand’s first instinct is to call her ‘‘a sister damn’d.’’ Naming wild punishments he would like to administer to her, he declares that he would like to have the Duchess and the unknown father of the child ‘‘burnt in a coal-pit’’ with no vents, so that ‘‘their curs’d smoke might not ascend to heaven.’’ In act 4, he brings a series of horrors to the Duchess to drive her to despair, so that she will renounce God and be sent to hell when he has her murdered. Ferdinand is so clearly insane, that his understanding of religion must be seen as a product of rage, not of religious teaching. Other characters turn elsewhere for their understanding of the world. Antonio learns by astrological calculation that his first child will have a ‘‘short life’’ and a ‘‘violent death.’’ The Cardinal, whose lavish lifestyle and mistress would seem to distance him from the teachings of his church, does not suggest that the Duchess pray for guidance if she finds herself tempted to remarry, but advises that ‘‘your own discretion / Must now be your director.’’ Cariola warns the Duchess not to use a false religious pilgrimage to fool her brothers, but the Duchess rejects the warning, calling Cariola ‘‘a supersti-
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research another influential Renaissance text, Machiavelli’s The Prince (1517), which describes the qualities of the ideal ruler. To what extent is the Cardinal an embodiment of these qualities? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such a ruler? • Some critics have said that in creating the Duchess of Malfi, Webster was praising Queen Elizabeth I, who had died in 1603, ten years before the play was written. In what ways were Elizabeth I and King James I different? Why might Webster have preferred a ruler like Elizabeth I? • London’s Globe Theatre, one of the theaters where The Duchess of Malfi was performed, has been reconstructed with historical accuracy. Research the ways in which the type of theater, and the conventions about casting a play, would have made a performance of the play seen in
tious fool.’’ Although she faces her death on her knees to more easily pass through heaven’s gates, there is no real sense of faith in her last speeches. Of all the characters, it is Bosola who most changes during the play, and whose psychology is revealed the most clearly. As he watches the conduct of the three siblings, he comes to a new understanding of the differences between a good servant and a good man, and he grows in respect for the honesty of Antonio and the dignity of the Duchess. If anyone were going to turn to God in the end, it would be Bosola, but he does not. Instead, when he realizes that he has accidentally killed Antonio, he utters the line that expresses the world view for the entire play: ‘‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded / Which way please them.’’
Appearances and Reality Repeated throughout The Duchess of Malfi is the idea that people cannot be trusted, that things are not as they appear. People, both the essentially good
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London in 1613 different from performances staged in important theaters today. • Compare the Duchess’s situation at the beginning of the play with the social conventions observed by British nobility today. How free, for example, are members of the Royal Family to marry whomever they wish, regardless of class distinctions or other considerations? How much pressure might one’s family exert over one’s choice of a spouse? • The Duchess of Malfi is set in sixteenth century Italy, but written for a seventeenth century English audience. Given the broadest outline of the Duchess’s story, what adaptations would a playwright have to make to set the story in twentyfirst-century United States? How might American cultural values change the outcome of the story?
people and the villains, disguise their bodies and their motives. In act 1, several instances of pretending and concealing occur to set the tone for the rest of the play: the Cardinal pretends to have no interest in Bosola; Bosola is hired to spy on the Duchess, pretending only to tend her horses; the Duchess pretends to have no interest in marriage; Cariola hides behind the arras without Antonio’s knowledge and promises the Duchess that she will ‘‘conceal this secret from the world / As warily as those that trade in poison / Keep poison from their children.’’ Antonio, who is known for his honesty, agrees to keep the marriage a secret. The Duchess complains that women of wealth and stature cannot be honest about their feelings, but are ‘‘forc’d to express our violent passions / In riddles, and in dreams, and leave the path / Of simple virtue, which was never made / To seem the thing it is not.’’ Further incidents of deception and disguise occur throughout the play. The Duchess and Antonio invent stories to conceal the birth of their first child and their plans to escape to Ancona. Ferdinand
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brings the Duchess a dead man’s hand that he knows she will take for Antonio’s and shows her wax figures that look like her husband and children. Bosola visits the imprisoned Duchess in disguise, appearing as an old man and a bellman. Even Bosola’s one kindness to the Duchess is a deception, as he tells the dying Duchess that her husband is alive and reconciled with her brothers. The Cardinal kills Julia (with whom he has been having an affair without her husband’s knowledge) by giving her a poison disguised as a holy book, not knowing that Julia has deceived him by hiding Bosola behind the door. The Cardinal, Bosola, and Ferdinand die without anyone coming to save them, because the Cardinal has lied to keep the servants from entering his chambers. Although none of these deceptions brings about its desired end, the characters turn again and again to secrecy and disguise to solve their problems, as though they know no other way to move in the world. It is not an optimistic picture, as Bosola realizes just before he dies: ‘‘O, this gloomy world! / In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, / Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!’’ If the world is steered not by God but by uncaring stars, and if men and women cannot trust their own perceptions to steer through it, it is a gloomy world, indeed.
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The nine Senecan tragedies have several features in common: a five-act structure; a theme of revenge; long-suffering nobles; trustworthy female companions; ghosts; gruesome violence inspired by lust, incest, and vengeance; the death of children; and a chorus that comments on the action and describes the violent acts, which happen offstage. During the Elizabethan period, playwrights began to present the violence on stage in response to demands from audiences, who were accustomed to public executions and other forms of public violence. To Seneca’s ingredients, they added a hero who is called upon but unwilling to seek revenge, actual or feigned insanity, and an emphasis on schemes and secrets. Clearly, many of these elements are present in The Duchess of Malfi, but it varies from the conventions in important ways. The revenge tragedy has a hero whose honor has been wronged (often it is a son avenging his father); in this play, the brothers seek revenge on the Duchess, who has done them no harm. The Duchess is surely the hero of the play named for her, and yet she does not seek or win vengeance for the harm done to her. The fact that she is killed in act 4 (and does not die in the act of winning revenge) deflects attention away from her as the center of the action and moves the play out of the category of revenge tragedy. The motive for the actions of the two brothers is unclear, but revenge— whatever they may think themselves—is not at the heart of it.
Blank Verse Revenge Tragedy Between 1542 and 1642 in England, many dramatists looked back to early Latin writers for their models. In particular, one group of English Renaissance plays, later called Revenge Tragedies, was based on the tragedies written by the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca, who lived from 4 B.C. to A.D. 65. Seneca’s tragedies employed a set of conventional characters and plot devices that these Renaissance writers found appealing, and at the end of the sixteenth century, English plays imitating Seneca began to appear. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote two plays, Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) and Hamlet (c. 1601) that are generally considered to be revenge tragedies. Although The Duchess of Malfi is often labeled a revenge tragedy, it is more accurate to say that it was strongly influenced by the movement, but that Webster uses revenge tragedy conventions to create a different kind of play.
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Many of the lines spoken by the characters in The Duchess of Malfi are written in a poetic form called blank verse. Blank verse is the name given to unrhymed lines of ten syllables each, accented on the even-numbered syllables, though lines need not be in perfectly regular iambic pentameter (the name given to lines constructed in this way) for the poetry to be labeled blank verse. For example, Ferdinand at one point wishes he were a wild storm ‘‘That I might toss her palace ‘bout her ears, / Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads.’’ Each of these lines has exactly ten syllables, and the underlying pulse or stress felt as one reads the lines naturally gives a slight accent on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables of each line. If every line were so regular, however, the speeches would develop a singsong rhythm that would be unnatural and distracting, so the poet’s task is to write lines that are near enough to the regular pattern but with enough variety that different characters speak dif-
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ferently, and different tones can be heard. In fact, very few lines in The Duchess of Malfi are regular ten-syllable lines; most have more or fewer syllables or stresses in different places, as in the line ‘‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded.’’ Not all of the lines in The Duchess of Malfi are written in verse. Antonio speaks in prose with Bosola and with Ferdinand before Antonio marries the Duchess, and the eight madmen speak in prose. The Duchess and Bosola speak in prose while he is disguised as the tomb-maker, but they shift to verse when he declares his intention to kill her. The blank verse is thought to convey solemnity and nobility, and all of the important speeches by important people are in blank verse. (An interesting use of this idea is Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, in which Prince Hal speaks in prose when he is with his friends in the tavern and speaks in blank verse when he is with the King or on the battlefield.) Using blank verse for tragedy was a convention for Elizabethan dramatists. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), was also the first English drama written in blank verse, in a deliberate attempt to echo in English the regular rhythms of Senecan tragedy, written in Latin. Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare brought the form to its greatest heights with their writing some thirty or forty years later. A generation after these two, Webster and his contemporaries were still writing tragedies in blank verse, though never as well. Webster frequently ends a scene with two rhyming lines, called a couplet. The rhyme catches the audience’s ear, making the last lines of a scene slightly more noticeable and giving a finished quality, rather like a period at the end of a sentence. Within fifty years after the publication of The Duchess of Malfi, most English poetic drama was written entirely in couplets.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Renaissance The term ‘‘Renaissance’’ means ‘‘rebirth,’’ and the period known as the Renaissance was a time of new beginnings in Europe, an emergence from the Middle Ages. The Renaissance brought with it new ways of thinking about science, religion, philosophy, and art. During the earlier medieval period, Europeans had come to think of themselves as
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insignificant creatures subject to and inferior to divine beings. When some Italian scholars began to read ancient Latin and Greek texts that had been ignored for centuries, they began to look for ways to combine contemporary Christian thought with the classical belief in human capabilities. This belief in what is now called Renaissance humanism drove a new passion for celebrating human endeavor and potential. The ideal ‘‘Renaissance man’’ would be talented in science, mathematics, poetry, art, and athletics. As an intellectual movement, the Renaissance touched every aspect of life. Science and exploration proliferated. Political theorists attempted to apply the best features of classical thought, and religious reformers asserted the rights of the common person to have direct access to Biblical texts. There was a new passion for reading classical literature in the original Greek and Latin and for incorporating classical mythology into literature and art. New forms emerged, based on classical forms, as the revenge tragedy grew out of the study of Senecan tragedy. Literature, including drama, moved beyond its role as an outgrowth of the church and turned to stories that celebrated or decried human capabilities. Of course, there was no particular day on which the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began. The transformation happened over many years and did not affect every country at the same time. Generally, the Renaissance is said to have begun in Italy during the fourteenth century and to have reached England about a century later. The height of the English Renaissance was during the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Webster’s career comes at the end of this period, and The Duchess of Malfi shows many traces of its creation during this period. The Duchess’s insistence that she be allowed to make individual choices, the secular tone of the play, the five-act structure and blank verse, the allusions to classical mythology, and the Cardinal’s many references to new technology and science all point to the play as coming from the Renaissance. One aspect of Renaissance literature that may strike readers in the twenty-first century as peculiar is the notion of imitation. Greek and Roman students frequently copied from models to create their own compositions, and the Renaissance writers adopted this technique. The basic story of the Duchess of Malfi, for example, is a true story that occurred in Italy around 1510. The story was adapted
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • Early Seventeenth Century: King James I is ruler of England and Scotland. He has come to the throne through inheritance and divine right and is the sole ruler of the country. Today: Queen Elizabeth II is Queen of England. She inherited the throne from her father, but her duties are primarily ceremonial. The country is ruled by a Parliamentary government. • Early Seventeenth Century: The mental illness called melancholia is thought to be caused by an excess of black bile in the body. Some people deliberately take on the characteristics of melancholia, because it is thought to be a disease that affects great minds. Bosola may be one of these. Today: Depression is a widespread disorder, thought to be caused by a chemical imbalance. In technologically advanced countries, antidepressant medications are widely used. • Early Seventeenth Century: Most noble women
in Italian in a sixteenth-century novella, and in English in William Painter’s collection of stories, The Palace of Pleasure and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Webster used incidents from all of these sources—sometimes using lines and phrases word for word—in creating his own play. He also kept a journal throughout his career, jotting down scraps of poetry and quotations he found interesting. He drew freely from this journal in writing his plays, inserting lines where they fit pleasingly. This was not considered plagiarism but a sensible way to draw on the learning of those who had come before.
Jacobean Age The period within the Renaissance when England was ruled by King James I is known as the Jacobean period, from the Latin form of the name James. James I ruled from the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 until his own death in 1625, and although he was not a beloved king, the years of his reign saw a
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do not marry for love. Like the Duchess, they may be joined in arranged marriages with older men while they are very young. Even if widowed, they are not free to remarry or to make choices about their property without male guidance. Today: While social pressures may prevent members of the upper classes from marrying those of the lower classes, there are no legal divisions between the classes. English women may marry whomever they wish and control their own property. • Early Seventeenth Century: All that is required for a marriage to be legally binding in England is that a man and woman declare themselves to be husband and wife. Witnesses and written documents are not required. Today: Marriages must be performed by an official certified by the state to do so.
great period of English drama. William Shakespeare, for example, began his career before James came to the throne, but his greatest and most mature work was produced during the Jacobean age. Webster also produced his best work during these years, as did many other important dramatists. James’s rule was guided by the strength of his religious convictions. He was a member of the Church of England, and it was under his direction that the King James Bible was produced. James also believed devoutly in the divine right of kings, or the idea that kings and queens are accountable only to God, and that the system of inheriting the monarchy was created by God. Because the Church of England was the official religion of the monarch and of the country, religion and politics were intertwined in a way that is not the same in England today. The divine right of kings gave James power, while the Roman Catholic idea of a pope chosen by God opposed that power. To protect his stature, James
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dealt severely with those who believed differently, including Puritans (who eventually began to leave England for the New World), Catholics (who are portrayed with irreverence in Webster’s character of the Cardinal), and Jews (who are treated with casual disrespect in The Duchess of Malfi and other popular works of literature from the period).
CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Duchess of Malfi is considered one of Webster’s two greatest works and one of the canonical works of Jacobean drama. It is also roundly criticized as being weak, confusing, and illogical. In his thorough overview of more than three centuries of criticism, John Webster and His Critics 1617–1964, Don D. Moore writes that there may be no one other than Webster ‘‘whose plays have received a more varied reception and whose critics have been so divided among themselves on whether the writer was due praise or excoriation.’’ In Webster’s own time, The Duchess of Malfi sold enough tickets to be profitable, and the publication of the play in 1623 was accompanied by verses from other playwrights who seem to have found the play worthy of praise. From the second half of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth, the play was seldom performed and there was no extended criticism of it. Criticism of the nineteenth century tended more toward appreciation than study, and Webster was alternately praised for his overall effect or reviled for specific flaws in logic or ideology. Much of this criticism was based on performances, rather than on scrutiny of the text. Academic criticism, beginning in the late nineteenth century, focused at first on uncovering the sources for Webster’s understanding of the Duchess’s story. In the twentieth century, dozens of critics have written about the play. William Archer, writing a 1920 article for Nineteenth Century, is typical of those who have found the play lacking. Inspired to examine the play closely after seeing a production, Archer found it ‘‘three hours of coarse and sanguinary melodrama’’ and pronounced it ‘‘fundamentally bad.’’ With unblinking honesty, Archer points out several bits of inconsistency and illogic in the play, including the son of the Duchess and her first husband, who is mentioned only once in the play and then forgotten. Inga-Stina Ekeblad, on the other hand, explains in an article in Review of English Studies that Webster, ‘‘though he often leaves us in
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confusion,’’ does achieve in this play a fusion of convention and realism, ‘‘creating something structurally new and vital.’’ Psychological questions about the play have been raised by several critics. What is Ferdinand’s motive for tormenting his sister? Sheryl Craig believes that the answer lies in the fact that the Duchess and Ferdinand are twins. She explains in an article in Publications of the Missouri Philological Association that for Renaissance audiences, the siblings would have resembled biblical twins, whose ‘‘conflicts with each other are symbolic of their conflicts with God; one twin is the chosen one, God’s elect, and the other twin is the outsider.’’ Much more common is the opinion expressed by James Calderwood in Essays in Criticism, that within Ferdinand’s actions are ‘‘unmistakable suggestions of incestuous jealousy.’’ Calderwood finds that when Ferdinand becomes aware of his own sinful desires, he becomes a ‘‘physician-priest-executioner who seeks the purgation of his own tainted blood in the purging of hers.’’ Another central question that has engaged critics grows out of that fact that the title character dies in act 4. Is the Duchess really the main character of the play and, if so, what is the play about? Charles Hallett and Elaine Hallett, in The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, write that the play is a drama of initiation, much like Hamlet, and that the Duchess is at the heart of it: ‘‘The test she must pass is whether she will remain the woman she was, once she sees what the world is.’’ Kimberly Turner examines the play as a critique of the female ruler within the context of Renaissance patriarchy in an article in the Ben Jonson Journal, and finds that Webster creates a new kind of female hero who ‘‘participates actively in her own life.’’
CRITICISM Cynthia Bily Bily teaches writing and literature at Adrian College. In this essay, Bily examines Webster’s manipulation of the five-act structure in his play. When John Webster sat down to write The Duchess of Malfi, he had several goals in mind. He was a professional playwright, trying to earn a living and support a large family by writing plays that people would pay to see. To achieve that goal, he needed a
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Harriet Walter, as the Duchess in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Duchess of Malfi
fascinating story with enough intrigue and violence to appeal to his audience. He wanted, as all artists do, to earn a reputation for quality. Although he was writing plays to be performed on the London stage during his lifetime (he never could have dreamed that five hundred years later scholars would be studying the texts of his plays in libraries and classrooms—without even seeing them performed), he shared the awareness of his age that art is a continuum, that the literature of one period influences, and is influenced by, the literature of other times. As a serious writer, he followed literary convention, finding the idea for his story from early sixteenth-century Italy via a late sixteenth-century English collection of stories, and finding the structure for his play in first century Rome. Although the idea of ‘‘imitation,’’ or borrowing ideas and even phrases from earlier models, might strike the modern reader as hack work, simple cobbling together of other people’s ideas, the task Webster faced was quite difficult. He had before him two or three versions of the story of one Giovanna, who in 1490 at the age of twelve married a man who would later become Duke of Amalfi and leave her a widow at twenty. At least one of these retellings was in English prose; one may have been in
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Italian. To create the play as he envisioned it, Webster had to follow the general arc of the true story, which some of his audience would have read in William Painter’s collection The Palace of Pleasure, turn narrative into drama, create dialogue and render it in blank verse, and shape the whole thing into the five-act structure that he had inherited from the Roman philosopher Seneca. Webster saw The Duchess of Malfi as a tragedy, and in Renaissance England, a tragedy called for Seneca’s five acts. The idea of following a pattern in creating art may be counterintuitive, but it is actually quite common. Anyone who has been to a lot of movies knows about the plot that runs ‘‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’’ Even audiences who could not articulate the pattern are subconsciously aware of it—they know what to expect, and part of the pleasure in watching the film is in seeing the old story unfold in a new way. Many romance novels are written with strict formulas that dictate how many chapters the book will run, which chapter will include the heroine’s first meeting with her dream man, and so on. Epics from the Iliad and the Odyssey to The Call of the Wild and Star Wars follow the same arc. We like pattern, we expect it, and we rely on it to help us make sense of complexity.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • The White Devil, published in 1612, is Webster’s other well-known play. Like The Duchess of Malfi, it is based on a true story of Italian nobles. Using elements of the revenge tragedy, it depicts diabolical brothers punishing and avenging their sisters.
play, more closely resembles The Duchess of Malfi in its horrific violence. Seldom performed, it has a cycle of vengeance that includes murder, rape, the cutting off of a character’s tongue and hands, and the baking of murdered children into a pie that is served to their mother.
• William Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c. 1601) is arguably his most famous play. Although it ends, like The Duchess of Malfi, with dead bodies strewn across the stage, its focus is on the philosophical and psychological development of the title character.
• A good introduction to the period in which The Duchess of Malfi is set is J. H. Plumb’s The Italian Renaissance, published in a revised edition in 2001. The first half of the book is an historical overview of the economic and social conditions that led to the Renaissance; the second half includes brief biographies of important figures by different scholars.
• Titus Andronicus (c. 1590), another Shakespeare
The idea that a drama might be divided into five parts actually came from Aristotle, a Greek philosopher in the third century B.C.. Four hundred years later, the Roman playwright Seneca refined Aristotle’s ideas and wrote nine tragedies in five acts, each act having a particular function in the drama. Elizabethan playwrights knew Seneca’s plays and used them as a model for their own work, and Webster is among those whose own tragedies follow Seneca’s pattern of Exposition, Complication, Climax, Resolution, and Catastrophe. Or do they? In Seneca’s plan, the first act presents the Exposition, or the background information an audience needs to understand the play. This act will introduce the characters, establish the setting, and hint at the conflicts to come. This is clearly what happens in act 1 of The Duchess of Malfi. We meet Antonio, Delio, Bosola, the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and the Duchess. Because a drama typically does not have a narrator who steps in to interpret characters for the audience, Webster creates reasons for the characters to talk about each other. Delio asks Antonio ‘‘to make me the partaker of the natures / Of some of your great courtiers,’’ and Antonio obliges by standing off to the side and commenting on the personalities of Bosola and the three siblings.
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Likewise, the Cardinal and Ferdinand talk about Antonio, so it is established early on that Antonio’s ‘‘nature is too honest.’’ Lines such as ‘‘I knew this fellow seven years in the galleys / For a notorious murder’’ and ‘‘Here comes the great Calabrian duke’’ serve the purpose of conveying information to help the audience make sense of what will come. Setting is established beginning in the first line, when Delio says, ‘‘You are welcome to your country, dear Antonio—/ You have been long in France.’’ Throughout the act, there are references to Naples, Milan, the sea coast, and other locations in Italy. The central conflict is set in motion when the Cardinal and Ferdinand order the Duchess to remain unmarried, and she defies them by marrying Antonio. When the first act ends, the audience has gotten everything expected from the Exposition. Act 2, according to Seneca, should present the Complication, sometimes called the Rising Action. In this section, the forces that will be opposed gather together and intersect—that is, they become complicated. In the second act of The Duchess of Malfi the Duchess gives birth to the first child of her marriage to Antonio, Bosola’s suspicions are raised and then confirmed, Bosola shares the knowledge of the birth with Ferdinand and the Cardinal, and
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Ferdinand begins his descent into madness. With the Duchess and Antonio on one side, and Bosola, the Cardinal and Ferdinand gathered on the other, the action pauses, as on the night before a great battle. In fact, the action pauses for several years, while the Duchess gives birth to two more children and Bosola tries to determine who their father is. Seneca placed the Climax, the turning point and the moment of the highest emotional response, in act 3. In The Duchess of Malfi, act 3 presents the sweetly touching scene with Antonio and the Duchess in the bed chamber, immediately followed by Ferdinand’s sudden appearance. Coming at the center of the play, the scene between the Duchess and Antonio is the last moment of happiness they will share; from this point on, there is a steady progression of sorrow and torment until both are dead. The rapid juxtaposition of the Duchess’s happiness with her husband and conflict with her brother takes the audience on a rapidly shifting roller coaster of emotion, rather like the ‘‘whirlwind’’ that takes Ferdinand away. This is followed by a tender parting as Antonio flees, the Duchess’s innocent sharing of her secret with Bosola, another tearful parting, and the Duchess’s arrest. Act 4 presents the Resolution of the conflict, sometimes called the Falling Action. As the hero ascended in stature through act 2, the hero descends through act 4. Act 5 is the Catastrophe, or the conclusion. Typically, the hero of a tragedy dies in act 5, often accompanied by more deaths. Here The Duchess of Malfi seems to break from the five-act structure of Seneca. The Duchess does not decline in any significant way through act 4. In the face of unspeakable torment, she remains dignified and noble, ‘‘the Duchess of Malfi still.’’ She does not die bravely, a result of her tragic flaw, in act 5, because she has already died in act 4. (In addition, it would seem to be a perversion of the notion of tragic flaw to find one in the Duchess, whose only error seems to have been in marrying for love.) What might this mean? How can the hero die in act 4? If she does, what is act 5 for? What if the play is not really about the Duchess after all? Some critics have identified Bosola as the only character in The Duchess of Malfi who undergoes any psychological growth or change. Could he be the real hero of the play? What would the five-act structure look like if one foregrounded Bosola instead of the Duchess? Act 1 presents the Exposition. The audience is introduced to the characters and setting, but they pay perhaps more attention to Bosola’s situation.
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SHE DOES NOT DIE BRAVELY, A RESULT OF HER TRAGIC FLAW, IN ACT 5, BECAUSE SHE HAS ALREADY DIED IN ACT 4. . . . WHAT MIGHT THIS MEAN? HOW CAN THE HERO DIE IN ACT 4? IF SHE DOES, WHAT IS ACT 5 FOR?’’
He has just returned from seven years in prison for a murder he committed for the Cardinal. The Cardinal shows Bosola no gratitude but secretly arranges for him to be hired by Ferdinand to spy on the Duchess. Act 1 ends with Bosola in position, poised for action. Act 2 is the Complication, or the Rising Action. After at least nine months of fruitless spying, Bosola suspects and confirms a pregnancy through a combination of his own wiles (the apricot trick) and good fortune (Antonio’s dropping the paper). Bosola’s star is certainly rising. His letter to Ferdinand shows that he has done his job well, and Bosola might well expect a reward for his success. However, the letter to Ferdinand ironically ‘‘hath put him out of his wits,’’ driving Ferdinand’s attention far away from his faithful servant. In act 3, the audience finds a turning point and a strong emotional response. Bosola begins to turn away from Ferdinand and finds himself speaking admiringly of Antonio. When the Duchess sends Antonio away for supposedly stealing from her, Bosola scolds her for not seeing Antonio’s true value: ‘‘Both his virtue and form deserv’d a far better fortune.’’ Learning that the Duchess and Antonio are married, he wonders ‘‘can this ambitious age / Have so much goodness in’t?’’ It is his highest moment. One admires the eloquence with which he celebrates virtue, but his path from this point is a steady descent. The next time the audience sees him, he is himself again, arresting the Duchess and speaking ill of Antonio’s humble birth. Act 4 finds Bosola in Resolution or Falling Action. Trying to drive the Duchess to despair, he turns to despair himself and cannot even face her without a disguise. He continues to do Ferdinand’s bidding, bringing the madmen and supervising the
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murders of the Duchess, the children, and Cariola, but his heart is not in it. At the end of the act, he realizes that Ferdinand has no intention of paying him for his evil work. He has chosen poorly, misread the world, lived a life in which he ‘‘rather sought / To appear a true servant, than an honest man.’’ Now, he sees the flaw (the tragic flaw) in his thinking, and says ‘‘I am angry with myself, now that I wake.’’ In act 5, the spiraling descent continues, until Bosola has killed Antonio, a servant, the Cardinal, and Ferdinand, and until he dies himself. Of all the characters, he is the only one whose thinking has changed in fundamental ways through the play, the only one who has changed his situation through his own actions, the only one who has learned. He is the one who obtains revenge in the end, just before dying: ‘‘Revenge, for the Duchess of Malfi, murdered,’’ for Antonio, for Julia, ‘‘and lastly, for myself, / That was an actor in the main of all.’’ Bosola is a good candidate for hero of The Duchess of Malfi.
At every turn in this dark action, the characters identify their fears, their rage, or their despair in language startling in its specific physical immediacy and its general moral pessimism: ‘‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded/ Which way please them.’’ The events and the language—equally painful—mark Webster’s characteristic awareness of human impotence before evil and malignant fate.
Source: Cynthia Bily, Critical Essay on The Duchess of Malfi, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Some theatrical problems have been noted. The crucial moment of the Duchess’s banishment is relegated to part of a dumb show. Act V, subsequent to the Duchess’s death, may seem anti-climactic: a hectic series of accidents and random killings.
Richard Morton In the following essay, Morton examines how the language in The Duchess of Malfi contributes to the play’s emotional intensity and dramatic power. The Duchess of Malfi’s emotional power and theatrical potency, first defined by Charles Lamb and A.C. Swinburne, derives from its persuasive dramatic realism and its tirelessly intelligent and complex poetry. The plot follows an account in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567) based on true events in early 16th-century Italy. Two powerful brothers, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and the Cardinal, are determined that their widowed sister, the Duchess, shall not remarry. They set Bosola, a malcontent courtier, to spy on her. She secretly marries her steward, Antonio Bologna, and bears him several children. Bosola betrays her and, on instructions, imprisons her, torments her with false news of Antonio’s death and with a grisly display of mad folk, and finally has her killed, together with two of her children and her maid Cariola. Ferdinand, repentant after the fact, runs mad. In a grim final sequence of confusion and revenge, Ferdinand, the Cardinal, Bosola, and Antonio die, and it is left to the Duchess’s young son to restore an orderly society.
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Critics have observed many ambiguities and inconsistencies. There is no convincing reason for the brothers’ prohibition of the Duchess’s remarriage, nor do they justify her murder as an appropriate consequence of her actions. That a marriage and the birth of three children should remain secret is highly unlikely. A child of the Duchess’s first marriage is mentioned, then ignored. An elaborately presented horoscope does not come true. Antonio and the Duchess flee in different directions for no clear reason.
But such inconsistencies may be validated; Webster’s realism depends on his recognition that his characters’ intense emotions create around them, as if by passionate magnetism, a field of irrational behaviour and fatal consequence. Ferdinand’s sexually explicit ravings against his sister—‘‘Are you stark mad?’’ asks the Cardinal—his extravagant grief and his collapse into lycanthropia cannot be rationally explained, but Webster’s language gives his actions a potent, frightening plausibility. The malcontent Bosola is ambiguous; a reputedly skilled intelligencer who cannot solve the simple mystery of the Duchess’s marriage and who finally stabs Antonio by mistake, he is consciencestricken and ashamed, even while he undertakes the brutal murders. Yet his ceaseless and insightful selfanalysis is convincing and even extenuating. The events of Act V may be seen not as anticlimactic, but as the unavoidable results of Machiavellian policies which, after the Duchess’s murder, must be played out in a sequence of lesser acts— ignoble, grotesque, but still inevitable. Webster finds an apt symbol of inflexible fate when an ‘‘ECHO from the Duchess’ grave’’ prompts Antonio and his friend Delio by ironic repetition.
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Webster is dramatising an historical event which English audiences would believe only possible in the intolerant and disorderly society of 16th-century Italy, with its dissolute churchmen, corrupt courtiers, and crazed nobility. The opening contrasts the court of Italy with that of France, where the ‘‘judicious king’’ has sought to ‘‘reduce both state and people/To a fix’d order.’’ Two pilgrims, the only outsiders in the play, express their opinions with equally judicious balance:
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AT EVERY TURN IN THIS DARK ACTION, THE CHARACTERS IDENTIFY THEIR FEARS, THEIR RAGE, OR THEIR DESPAIR IN LANGUAGE STARTLING IN ITS SPECIFIC PHYSICAL IMMEDIACY AND ITS
Here’s a strange turn of state! Who would have thought So great a lady would have match’d herself Unto so mean a person? yet the cardinal Bears himself much too cruel.
Their comments remind the audience that a world does exist outside the malevolent environment of the action. The obvious lapse of time in the Duchess’s marriage between the scenes similarly draws attention to a period of presumed tranquillity and domestic love. The moment at which chaos and horror descend on the Duchess and Antonio is precisely marked. Antonio and Cariola tiptoe from the Duchess’s bedroom, leaving her alone. As she continues talking, Ferdinand enters solus, showing her a poinard when, thinking Antonio is silent behind her, she queries, ‘‘Have you lost your tongue?’’ The Duchess’s instant recognition that the inevitable discovery has come to pass is brilliantly expressed: Tis welcome: For know, whether I am doom’d to live or die. I can do both like a prince.
GENERAL MORAL PESSIMISM. . . .’’
‘‘Love mix’t with fear is sweetest.’’ She can organise Antonio’s escape with good sense and dispatch, but is trapped by her thoughtless and misplaced trust in Bosola. She meets her torments and death with grandeur—‘‘I am Duchess of Malfi still.’’ Some critics have suggested that these inconsistencies are flaws in characterisation. By turns deceitful and impassioned, playful and fearful, practical and naive, haughty and petulant, her character may indeed not be consistent, but her frailties and strengths are recognisably human responses to the terrible world into which she is thrust. Source: Richard Morton, ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi: Overview,’’ in Reference Guide to English Literature, 2d ed., Vol. 3, edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 1557–58.
These contrasts between an attainable harmony in a time or a place outside the confines of the tragic setting and the necessary chaos within that setting, are mirrored by the contrasts in the Duchess’s character. She begins the play by assuring her brothers that she will never remarry, but without a pause in the action proceeds to the dangerous wooing of Antonio: ‘‘If all my royal kindred/Lay in my way unto this marriage,/I’d make them my low footsteps.’’ Recognising her ‘‘dangerous venture,’’ she undertakes, ‘‘through frights, and threat’nings,’’ the commitment which Cariola sees as a ‘‘fearful madness.’’ Though full of ‘‘noble virtue’’ and a model of sweet and pious behaviour, her ‘‘tetchiness and most vulturous eating of the apricocks’’ when pregnant are hardly evidences of nobility. After the birth of three children, she still lies to Ferdinand: ‘‘when I choose/A husband, I will marry for your honour.’’ Moments later, in conversation with Antonio and Cariola, she is ‘‘merry,’’ holding that
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FURTHER READING Bloom, Harold, ed., Elizabethan Dramatists, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House, 1986. This collection of critical essays includes two essays about The Duchess of Malfi as well as essays about Webster’s most important contemporaries. In ‘‘Tragical Satire in The Duchess of Malfi,’’ Alvin B. Kernan describes Bosola as the ideal, and one of the last, of the Elizabethan satirists. G. Wilson Knight contributes an essay called simply ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ which examines image clusters in the play. Boklund, Gunnar, ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi’’: Sources, Themes, Characters, Harvard University Press, 1962. Boklund traces Webster’s sources for the story of the Duchess, pointing out the places where Webster deviates from these sources to make the story his own. The characterization of Antonio as humble but honest, for example, is Webster’s invention.
SOURCES Archer, William, ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ edited by Norman Rabkin, Prentice-Hall, 1968, p. 14, originally published in Nineteenth Century, Vol. 87, 1920, pp. 126–32. Calderwood, James L., ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi: Styles of Ceremony,’’ in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ edited by Norman Rabkin, Prentice-Hall, 1968, pp. 79, 82, originally published in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, 1962, pp. 133–47. Craig, Sheryl, ‘‘‘She and I were twins’: Double Identity in The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in Publications of the Missouri Philological Association, Vol. 19, 1994, p. 21. Ekeblad, Inga-Stina, ‘‘The ‘Impure Art’ of John Webster,’’ in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ edited by Norman Rabkin, Prentice-Hall, 1968, p. 50, originally published in Review of English Studies, Vol. 9, 1958, pp. 253–67. Hallett, Charles A., and Elaine S. Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, University of Nebraska Press, 1980, p. 286. Moore, Don D., John Webster and His Critics 1617–1964, Louisiana State University Press, 1966, p. ix. Turner, Kimberly A., ‘‘The Complexity of Webster’s Duchess,’’ in the Ben Jonson Journal, Vol. 7, 2000, p. 400.
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Knight, G. Wilson, ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in Elizabethan Dramatists, edited by Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 85–107. Knight offers a close reading of the clusters of images and symbols in the play and argues that the coherence of the play is not to be found in the logical structure of the plot but in the non-rational resonance of the imagery. Rabkin, Norman, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘The Duchess of Malfi,’’ Prentice-Hall, 1968. This collection touches on the major critical questions about the play in ten critical essays, or ‘‘Interpretations,’’ and fourteen brief excerpts, or ‘‘View Points,’’ by scholars including T. S. Eliot and Northrup Frye. Thomson, Leslie, ‘‘Fortune and Virtue in The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in Comparative Drama, Vol. 33, No. 4, 1999–2000, pp. 474–94. Thomson compares the play with medieval and Renaissance iconography illustrating the relationships between fortune, love, and death. She shows how the relationships between the Duchess (fortune) and Antonio (love) are derived from earlier morality plays and emblem books. Winston, Mathew, ‘‘Gendered Nostalgia in The Duchess of Malfi,’’ in The Renaissance Papers, 1998, pp. 103–13. Winston sees in the play the longing of Webster and his contemporaries for Queen Elizabeth I, who had been dead for a decade when The Duchess of Malfi was first performed. The Duchess’s death in act 4 is part of Webster’s overall plan, which is to show in act 5 how the world decays when she is gone.
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Electra HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 1903
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Electra, which was first performed in Germany in 1903 (German title, Elektra) and published in English translation in 1908, is available in the volume, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Three Plays, translated by Alfred Schwartz (Wayne State University Press, 1966). This volume is currently out of print. Electra is a free adaptation of the play of the same name by the ancient Greek dramatist, Sophocles. The story focuses on the consequences of the murder of Agamemnon. Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae who was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus upon his return from the Trojan War. The play takes place ten years after the slaying. Agamemnon’s daughter Electra still mourns her beloved father’s death and obsessively anticipates the moment when she will avenge him by killing her mother. The revenge comes when Electra’s brother Orestes returns from exile and kills both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Electra is a study in mental disturbance and obsession. It uses the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, which had been published only a few years before von Hofmannsthal wrote the play. Electra also employs powerful, lurid imagery that gives vivid insight into the disturbed minds of Electra and Clytemnestra, and it moves singlemindedly to its violent conclusion. Although rarely performed today, the play has become famous be-
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cause von Hofmannsthal adapted it as the libretto for German composer Richard Strauss’s thrilling opera, Elektra (1909).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Dramatist, poet, novelist, and essayist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal was born on February 1, 1874, in Vienna, Austria. He was the only son of Hugo August (a bank director) and Anna Maria von Hofmannsthal. Von Hofmannsthal attended the Wiener Akademisches Gymnasium, where he wrote his first poetry, drama, and essays. He was considered a precocious talent. After graduating in 1892, he entered law school at the University of Vienna, but dropped out in 1894 to join the military. Returning to the same school a year later, he studied for four years, receiving a Ph.D. in Romance philology in 1899. By that time, he had already established himself as a writer, much admired by prominent men of letters in Austria and Germany. He helped to form the Jung Wien (Young Vienna), a group of writers who rejected naturalism in literature and adopted the principles of the French Symbolist tradition. Von Hofmannsthal’s work is often divided into three periods. The earliest phase lasted from about 1890 to the turn of the century. It consisted mainly of poetry and lyric drama, including such works as Der Tod des Tizian (1901; trans. The Death of Titian, 1914), and Der Thor und der Tod (1900; trans. Death and the Fool, 1913). The second period, from about 1900 to the beginning of World War I, was a transitional one. Von Hofmannsthal placed less emphasis on the precept of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ that had characterized his earlier works and developed a deeper regard for human issues and concerns. It was during this period that he wrote Elektra (1904; trans. Electra, 1908), a free adaptation of the play by Sophocles. Shortly after this, von Hofmannsthal’s twenty-three year working relationship with German composer Richard Strauss began. With von Hofmannsthal as his librettist, Strauss composed six operas: Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die agyptische Helena (1928), and Arabella (1933). To this period of von Hofmannsthal’s work also belongs his play Jedermann (1911; trans. Everyman, 1917). From 1914 to 1917, von Hofmannsthal served in the military, as a translator and courier.
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Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Von Hofmannsthal’s final creative period produced several comedies and the morality plays written for the Salzburg Festival, which he helped to found. The most notable works from this period are the comedy Der Schwierige (1921; trans. The Difficult Man, 1963), and the two versions of Der Turm (first version 1925; second version, 1927, both of which premiered in 1928; trans. The Tower, 1963). Hofmannsthal married Gertrud Schlesinger in 1901. They had three children, Christiane, Raimund, and Franz. On July 15, 1929, Hofmannsthal died of a heart attack at his home in Rodaun, near Vienna, Austria.
PLOT SUMMARY Electra begins in the inner courtyard of Clytemnestra’s palace. A group of women servants, with their matron overseers, are gathered around a well. As the servants draw water, they discuss what has become of Electra, and one says that it is the time of day when she howls loudly for her dead father. Electra appears. As all the servants turn to look at her, she goes back into hiding, holding one arm in front of her face. The servants discuss how Electra
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has been abusive towards them and one servant describes how she answered Electra back with insults of her own. It also transpires from the servants’ talk that Electra is ill-treated in the house. She is beaten and made to eat with the dogs. No one in the house can endure the terrible look on her face. But the fifth servant, a young girl, speaks up in support of Electra as a royal princess. As the servants and matrons go inside, Electra reappears. She is still grieving for her father, Agamemnon. She describes how Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus killed him while he was in the bath. Crying out that she wants to see him, she appeals to him not to leave her alone. She tells him that his day of vengeance will come. His murderers and all their servants, even their horses and dogs, will be slaughtered. When this is done, she, Orestes, and Chrysothemis will dance around their father’s grave. Chrysothemis enters. She tells Electra that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are planning to throw her, Electra, into a dark dungeon. Electra responds by telling her sister not to listen in on Clytemnestra’s conversations. She should just sit and wait for judgment to come upon the murderers. Chrysothemis responds that she is frightened and cannot sit still. She wants to get out of the house, live a normal life and bear children. She says that no one profits from their continuing anguish and Orestes will not return. She just wants to forget the past and feels that she could do so if only she could escape from the palace. But Electra says she cannot forget and is scornful of her sister’s words. Chrysothemis bursts into tears. Then she tells Electra that she should hide because Clytemnestra is coming and she has been complaining of bad dreams. Electra boasts that it is she who has sent the nightmare, which is of her mother’s own death at the hands of Orestes. Chrysothemis rushes out and Clytemnestra enters. She is pale and trembles with anger, and her clothing is covered with jewels and charms. Electra gives her mother the impression that she is in a pleasant mood, so Clytemnestra says she wishes to speak to her. Electra reproaches her angrily and says it grieves her to see Aegisthus wearing the robes of her dead father. Clytemnestra retorts that she will not listen, but then she seems to have a change of heart and tells her confidante and trainbearer to leave. Clytemnestra then asks her daughter if she knows how she could be relieved of her bad dreams— by performance of a ritual sacrifice, for example.
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Clytemnestra declares that she is rotting inside. Her torment is so great that she no longer knows who she is. Electra gives broad hints about who the victim of the sacrifice should be, but Clytemnestra does not understand what she is saying. She insists on knowing the name of the victim and the rite she would need to perform. Electra gives only cryptic answers and keeps bringing the subject back to Agamemnon’s murder. Eventually, Clytemnestra tells her to be silent about it. When Electra mentions Orestes, her brother who was sent away, Clytemnestra trembles. Electra believes her mother is afraid because she knows that Orestes is alive and will return to carry out vengeance. Clytemnestra continues to insist that Electra tell her the name of the victim and the rites that are to be performed. She threatens to imprison Electra in chains and starve her if she refuses. Electra responds with more wild and fiery words about the coming vengeance. She describes her mother’s terror as the avenger is about to strike. At this point, when Clytemnestra is full of fear, her confidante enters and whispers something in her ear. Clytemnestra’s expression changes from fear to evil triumph, and as she runs back into the house, the reason for her sudden joy becomes clear. Chrysothemis enters, crying out that Orestes is dead. Electra refuses to believe the news. Chrysothemis wants to question the messengers to find out the details of Orestes’ death, but Electra simply insists that now, she and her sister must carry out the vengeance and do so that very night. Chrysothemis does not understand at first, and then is speechless when Electra explains what her plans are. Chrysothemis protests that Electra is mad, but Electra grabs her and tells her she must help in the killing because she is physically strong. Horrified, Chrysothemis just wants to get away from the house. But, Electra, assuming that her sister will do what she is told, says that from now on she will be her devoted servant, even slave. She insists that Chrysothemis must do the deed and that there is no way out for her. Then, she will be free and able to marry and bear the children that she desires. Chrysothemis frees herself from Electra’s grasp and runs off, saying that she cannot do the killing. Electra resolves to do it herself, alone. Orestes enters, but neither he nor Electra recognize each other. Orestes questions her about who she is and says he has come to convey to the mistress of the house the details of Orestes’s death, which he witnessed. Electra tells him to get out of her sight and she falls once more to expressing the misery of
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her life. Then after Orestes again asks who she is, Electra speaks her name. At first, Orestes does not believe it is her because she looks so different from the gracious sister he remembers. Orestes then declares that Orestes is still alive, and Electra demands to know where he is. She assumes he must be in danger. When a servant rushes in and kneels before Orestes and kisses his feet, Electra finally realizes who the visitor is. Orestes says that he has come to avenge their father’s death; the gods have imposed the deed on him and he has no choice. He will do it quickly. Orestes’ tutor enters and after a moment of confusion, Electra recognizes him. She says that now she can believe that Orestes really has returned. Orestes and the tutor go inside where they know Clytemnestra is. Electra remains alone in suspense. A piercing cry comes from Clytemnestra and is quickly followed by a second cry. The servants realize that something is going on although they do not know what. Aegisthus arrives and Electra bows down before him. He says he wants to see the messengers who brought news of Orestes’s death. Electra assures him that Orestes is indeed dead. As they move to the house, she dances around him. Aegisthus enters the house and shortly afterwards begins to shout for help, saying that he is being murdered. Pandemonium breaks out. Chrysothemis reports that all the members of the household who hated Aegisthus are kissing Orestes’s feet. She says that fights broke out between those who loathed their master and those who supported him. Many dead bodies are lying in the courtyards. Electra is overwhelmed and at first cannot rise to her feet. Then she manages to rise and dances a wild dance. After ordering everyone else to dance too, she falls insensible to the floor and lies there rigid. Chrysothemis pounds on the door of the house calling for Orestes.
CHARACTERS Aegisthus Aegisthus is the lover of Clytemnestra, and together they killed Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemnon. Aegisthus is presented as a weak man and a bully. One of the servants says that he beats Electra. Electra refers to him as a woman, and speaks sarcastically of ‘‘that brave murderer.’’
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Aegisthus appears only near the end of the play and is murdered by Orestes as soon as he goes into the house.
Chrysothemis Chrysothemis is Electra’s younger sister. She is a gentler spirit than Electra and unlike her sister, she is not obsessed by the murder of her father. She is, however, deeply disturbed by her current situation. Frightened and confused by day and night, she cannot remain still and runs from room to room. She feels as if she is lost to herself and blames Electra for the fact that they are both confined to the palace. If Electra were not so unmanageable, Chrysothemis says, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus would let them out of what she calls their prison. She longs to escape so that she can lead a normal life. Her great desire is to marry and bear children, but she is conscious that she is no longer young and life is slipping by. She is frightened when Electra discloses her scheme of vengeance and refuses to take part in it, even though Electra, who has the more dominating personality, tries to force her into compliance.
Clytemnestra Clytemnestra is the mother of Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes. With her lover, Aegisthus, she murdered her husband Agamemnon after he returned from the Trojan War. Clytemnestra, who is pale and wears a scarlet robe, is tormented by guilt, even though she cannot remember anything about the murder of her husband. The incident was so traumatic that she has repressed all memory of it. Now, her relationship with Aegisthus appears to have turned sour and she feels she is sinking into chaos, enduring a kind of living death. At night, before she goes to sleep, a dreadful feeling creeps over her. She does not know what it is, ‘‘and yet / it is so terrible that my soul / wishes it were hanged and every limb of mine longs for death.’’ Then when she sleeps, she has terrible nightmares, and she wonders why the gods are inflicting such torments upon her. During the day, she can hardly keep her eyes open, sometimes she feels giddy and she leans on her confidante for support. Her attendants give her contradictory diagnoses about what ails her. Some believe she has a diseased liver; others say that demons are sucking her blood. Clytemnestra is determined to put an end to her nightmares, and adorns herself with jewels and
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charms to ward off the evil influences. She also believes that if she performs the correct ritual sacrifice, the gods will release her from her pain. All in all, Clytemnestra is a fearsome figure, and her servants, as well as Chrysothemis, are afraid of her. She ill-treats Electra, subjecting her to whippings and humiliations. But Electra seems to be the only one who is not intimidated by her.
The Confidante Clytemnestra’s attendant, the confidante, dresses in dark violet and carries an ivory staff adorned with jewels. Clytemnestra supports herself on the confidante’s arm and takes advice from her constantly. When Electra appears to be speaking reasonably to Clytemnestra, her confidante warns her that Electra does not mean what she says. But this time, Clytemnestra rejects the confidante’s words.
The Cook The cook makes only one brief appearance. He talks with the young manservant and also warns Electra and Chrysothemis that Orestes is dead and they must be careful or they will be next.
Electra Electra is the daughter of Clytemnestra, the sister of Chrysothemis and Orestes. She is completely obsessed with avenging the death of her father, Agamemnon. Every day at sunset, she mourns him. The memory of the murder and her desire for revenge obliterates everything else in her mind and heart. Electra used to be beautiful, quiet and gracious, but the torments of grief, her lust for vengeance, and the ill-treatment she has suffered has affected her appearance. Her eyes look frightful because of her lack of sleep and her stare is ferocious. She is dressed in rags with bare arms and legs. Because of Clytemnestra’s enmity, Electra has been fed with scraps, whipped, and threatened with imprisonment and chains. But none of this deflects her from her purpose, and she longs for the time when she can kill her mother and Aegisthus. She then plans to perform a victory dance around her father’s grave. After she hears the false report of Orestes’ death, Electra tries to persuade her sister Chrysothemis to assist in the murder, but Chrysothemis refuses. Ironically, at the climax of the play, it is not Electra but Orestes who does the killing. Electra seems to be full of words but incapable of deeds. Her mental torment has resulted in a
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serious warping of her personality, in which passion and hysteria convince her that the fulfillment of her entire being rests solely on the performance of one bloody act of vengeance.
Matron The matron supervises the servants as they draw water from the well. She is as hostile to Electra as well as most of the servants and reminds them that Electra spat at them and said their children were cursed simply because they had been born in the same house where the murder took place.
Orestes Orestes is the son of Clytemnestra and the brother of Electra and Chrysothemis. After the murder of Agamemnon, when he was still a boy, he was sent away from the palace. Clytemnestra believes that he is feeble-witted and will not return, although she trembles when his name is mentioned. Electra believes that Clytemnestra paid in gold to have Orestes murdered, but she does not believe he is dead, even when his death is reported by the messengers. When Orestes does return to the palace with his tutor, he does not disclose his identity. He meets Electra, but he has been gone so long the two do not recognize each other. Orestes pretends that he is visiting to confirm the death of Orestes, but when he is recognized by a servant, the truth comes out. After this, Orestes does not hesitate to carry out the vengeance that he believes is his duty, killing Clytemnestra and then Aegisthus.
The Trainbearer Clytemnestra’s trainbearer is a yellow figure with black hair. She resembles an Egyptian woman and also is like an upright snake. She speaks only briefly but hisses when she does.
Tutor Orestes’ tutor, a vigorous old man with flashing eyes, accompanies Orestes when he returns to the royal palace. When Electra recognizes him, she realizes that the man with him must indeed be Orestes. It is the tutor who tells Orestes that Aegisthus is not at home and it is time to strike Clytemnestra.
Women Servants The women servants appear at the beginning of the play, when they draw water from a well. They all describe how unpleasant Electra has become. But
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one very young servant defends Electra, and says that the others are not worthy of breathing the same air as the princess.
A Young Servant A young manservant rides out to inform Aegisthus that Orestes is dead, and also to escort him home. He is coarse and impatient and insults the other servants.
dragging of animals, a muted scolding, a quickly stifled scream, the whistling sound of a whip, a recovering and staggering onward.
Who then could argue with the idea that Clytemnestra’s autocratic and cruel reign is an open, festering sore (to use an image that fits the mood of the play) and that justice demands its removal?
Obsession and Fulfillment of the Self
THEMES Justice and Vengeance The play embodies the idea of retributive justice, of blood for blood. An act of wrongdoing can be put right only by a similar act carried out against the original perpetrator. The sole focus of the play is therefore on vengeance and nothing distracts from this theme: the killing of Agamemnon has created a wound that will not heal; it has perverted the natural order of things, which must be put right. Although the situation would appear to be complicated by the fact that one of the intended victims is the mother of the avengers, this in fact, makes little difference, other than to ratchet up the intensity of the drama. The question of whether the killing is morally justifiable is not debated; it is presented through the character of Electra as self-evidently the case. In this, von Hofmannsthal simplified his source, for in Sophocles’ play Electra, Clytemnestra explains why she killed her husband, citing Agamemnon’s sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia. She claims to have justice on her side. Von Hofmannsthal, however, gives Clytemnestra no such moments to offer her case. She is presented as a mentally ill woman who cannot even remember the murder she committed. Furthermore, in von Hofmannsthal’s version, the audience is encouraged to automatically take Electra’s side by showing much more directly than Sophocles the kind of evil that flourishes in the royal palace. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, having attained power by an act of brutality, maintain it in similar fashion. The servant girl who expresses support of Electra is hauled off and whipped offstage, and Clytemnestra’s entrance is accompanied by a chilling stage direction that leaves no doubt about the prevalence in the house of cruelty and perversity: A hurried procession passes the glaringly lit up windows clanking and shuffling by: it is a tugging and
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In Sophocles’ Electra, Electra is a hard and embittered figure, but she presents her case rationally. Von Hofmannsthal’s Electra is a woman obsessed by one thing and one thing only which she expresses in the most lurid terms imaginable. She can think of nothing other than her father’s death (which took place ten years previously) and she eagerly anticipates the moment when she will wreak vengeance on her mother. There is simply no space in Electra’s mind for anything other than this. Her very first speech, for example, is a fifty-seven line monologue addressed directly to her father as Electra looks down at the ground. Electra’s tragedy is that, unlike her sister Chrysothemis, she is unable to forget. She is doomed to remember. And in that act of remembrance, everything else that she once was is obliterated. As she says to Orestes, ‘‘Look, I am / nothing at all. All that I was I have / had to surrender.’’ She lives, she says, but at the same time she does not live. She no longer has a self. Her life has in a sense become an impersonal one in that it has been subordinated to keeping the account of what has been done and what remains to be done in the future. However, the loss of her personal life is, paradoxically, the fulfillment of her being (at least in her own eyes). Her purpose has become larger than herself: she must carry out the will of the gods, obey the law of guilt and retribution and that alone justifies her existence. When it is done, she has no reason to go on living, no reason to speak another word. She must simply be silent and dance.
STYLE Imagery There are a few recurring images or motifs in the play that vividly bring out its themes. The first set of images relates to animals. The images convey the idea that in the world of the play, human life has
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Read Sophocles’ Electra and describe some of the similarities and differences between that play and von Hofmannsthal’s version. How do the two dramatists differ in their portrayals of Electra and Clytemnestra?
of retributive justice, in which members of the victim’s family are permitted to execute the murderer. Is it fair to call this a ‘‘primitive’’ approach to crime and punishment and to regard our own system as superior?
• In your experience, what is the best way to deal with bad memories from the past? Write a paragraph or two about a situation that has troubled you deeply and how you have come to terms with it.
• In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus encounters Agamemnon in the underworld and Agamemnon tells his story. Read this account, which can be found about two-thirds through Book 11, and then imagine that you are also able to journey into Hades, where you encounter not Agamemnon but Clytemnestra. What might Clytemnestra say to explain her actions and also what happened to her in the end?
• What is meant by the modern idea of the rule of law? How does that concept differ from the concept of retributive justice, as shown in Electra? A few societies today still adhere to versions
lost its dignity and has descended to an inferior level of creation. The light of reason and of love has been snuffed out. The animal imagery appears throughout the play. On Electra’s first appearance, before she even speaks, the stage direction states that she ‘‘bounds back like an animal into its hiding place.’’ Other actions of Electra suggest that of an animal. A servant reports that she once broke into howls and threw herself into a corner. Late in the play, she digs in the ground ‘‘like an animal’’ to find the axe with which to kill Clytemnestra. The servants compare her to a wild cat; her fingers are likened to claws. Clytemnestra speaks of her, using the impersonal pronoun, in serpent imagery: ‘‘How it rears up with swelling neck / and darts its tongue at me!’’ Electra uses similar imagery herself. She refers to the servants as ‘‘flies,’’ and Clytemnestra’s attendants as ‘‘reptiles.’’ (The stage directions state that the trainbearer resembles an ‘‘upright snake.’’) She says that she is feeding a vulture in her body and she also compares herself to a dog snapping at the heels of its prey. The same imagery is applied to other characters. Clytemnestra speaks of Chrysothemis as
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running away ‘‘like a frightened dog’’; Chrysothemis howls ‘‘loudly like a wounded animal’’; and Clytemnestra imagines Orestes sprawling in the yard with the dogs, unable to ‘‘tell man and beast apart.’’ There is one brief moment when the dramatist uses the same imagery to completely different effect, as when Orestes recalls his sister before the murder blighted their lives: ‘‘animals steal timidly around her dwelling / and nestle against her robe when she goes by.’’ This gentle, almost pastoral image suggests the former natural order of things, before murder disrupted it. But now humans have become like animals. Another recurring batch of images centers around blood. This imagery reinforces the main theme of vengeance, since that can only be accomplished through the shedding of blood. Electra’s first speech, for example, is saturated with this kind of imagery. She addresses her dead father and envisions the moment when revenge has been accomplished by her and her two siblings: we three, when all this is done and purple tents have been raised by the haze of the blood which the sun sucks upward to itself, then
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we, your blood, will dance around your grave.
The word blood in this passage has two meanings: the blood that is shed by Clytemnestra and the ties of kinship the three avengers have with their murdered father. Blood and animal imagery combine in Electra’s words of scorn to the servants. The matron reports that Electra said nothing is as accursed ‘‘as children which, like animals, slithering about / in blood on the stairs, we have conceived and born / here in this house.’’ There are also recurring references to the eyes— the organ that can behold such terrible deeds as a wife’s murder of her husband, and that can communicate to another what lies in the depth of the soul. Linked to this are the many references to looking or gazing. This suggests the meeting of one pair of eyes with another, which for the principle characters may be almost impossible to endure. No one, not even Clytemnestra or Aegisthus, can endure the intense gaze of Electra, for example, and Orestes cannot bear to look into his mother’s eyes before he kills her.
Staging and Lighting The staging and lighting work to reinforce the themes of the play. According to von Hofmannsthal, the set should convey a sense of claustrophobia, narrowness, and enclosure, giving the feeling that there is no escape. In addition to the royal palace and the lowly buildings that house the servants, there is to the right an enormous fig tree. Its appearance may well be grotesque with gnarled, intertwined branches all twisted up and distorted. This well suggests the idea of a family bound together by blood but twisted into unnatural shapes and relationships. The fig tree also helps to create an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding. The stage direction when Electra is about to give her first speech reveals the symbolic importance of this element of the staging: ‘‘She is alone with the patches of red light which fall like bloodstains from the branches of the fig tree.’’ This shows that the drama begins in the early evening, as the sun sets. In the lighting effects, light and dark alternate. When Clytemnestra enters, she is accompanied by glaring light from torches, but her confrontation with Electra takes place only by a faint light coming from the house, which from time to time falls on the
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two women. It is in a shadowy, dark world that they converse. Light returns when the false news is brought of Orestes’s death. The stage directions read: ‘‘the courtyard becomes bright with lights and a red-yellow glare floods the walls.’’ This conveys at once Clytemnestra’s moment of apparent triumph and the sinister nature of it. Then, it is dark again until the arrival of Orestes, who enters from the courtyard door, ‘‘his figure set off in black against the last gleam of light.’’ In other words, Orestes is a ray of light from the outside world that has managed to penetrate the palace and can therefore resolve the situation. At the end of the play, the stage is lit up with torches—a thousand of them, according to Chrysothemis—to show that the dark evil has been exorcised.
Theatrical Conventions The play observes the three unities of time, place, and action. This was a concept of dramatic structure that derived in part from Aristotle and was completed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The unities require that the actions represented by the play take place over a period of not more than one day, at a single location, with all the action focusing on a single plot. There are no subplots, comic characters or other diversions. The play also observes the convention of Greek drama that violent acts are reported rather than being shown directly on stage. For this reason, the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus is not shown directly.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Turn of the Century Vienna In the 1890s, the dominant mood in von Hofmannsthal’s hometown of Vienna, the capital of the great Habsburg Empire, was that of uncertainty. It was clear to many that the Habsburg monarchy, and the social, cultural and political order that it represented, was entering a crisis period and that its future could not be assured. The liberalism that had prevailed in the politics of the Habsburg Empire from the 1860s was virtually over by 1900. In its place arose reactionary and anti-Semitic forces—a development that worried von Hofmannsthal.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1900s: In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg develops a new approach to composing classical music. He turns away from traditional harmony and melody and develops music that no longer functions in an identifiable key. It becomes known as atonal music. The nature of his work, being revolutionary, is often misunderstood by the public. Today: Schoenberg’s music, along with that of his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, has long had a place in the contemporary classical repertoire. Atonal works are no longer as shocking to audiences as they were in Schoenberg’s early days. The ‘‘twelve tone’’ method that he invented continues to influence contemporary composers. • 1900s: Sigmund Freud publishes his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he applies the method of psychoanalysis to dreams. It becomes one of the most influential books of the century. Freud’s central ideas are that dreams express the disguised wishes of the subconscious. It is in this book that he first names and describes the Oedipus complex (the son’s desire to kill the father and marry the mother). Today: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is still valued as a pioneering work that opened up
But, far from depressing the city’s literary and artistic culture, the coming political disintegration seemed, on the contrary, to encourage it. The period from 1890 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 produced an unprecedented flowering of Vienna’s artistic and intellectual life. There was a spirit of innovation and experiment in the air, of new ways of thinking and creating. This new spirit bore fruit in the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg; the poetry and drama of von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke (whom von Hofmannsthal met in 1899); the cultural criticism of Karl Kraus; the art of Gustav Klimt and the Secession movement; the
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an entire new field of study. Freud’s thought has been modified and expanded by his followers and interpreters. However, he also has his critics. Many are skeptical that Freud did, in fact, explain the functioning of the unconscious. The argument is that he went too far in his generalizations, based on a small sample of patients and focused too much on repressed sexual desires as an explanation of the contents of the unconscious. • 1900s: The Vienna Circle begins discussions in 1907. This is a group made up of sociologists, mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers. Their work proves central to the development of a philosophical approach known as logical positivism, which rejects traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Logical positivism is concerned with the analysis of scientific knowledge, according to the ‘‘verification principle.’’ This principle states that a non-analytic sentence must be empirically testable if it is to possess any meaning. Today: Contemporary philosophy owes much to logical positivism, as can be seen in the attention given to the analysis of scientific thought. In the United States, much of this influence is due to the fact that many logical positivists emigrated from Europe to America during the middle of the twentieth century.
Vienna Circle of the logical positivist philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein; and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, whose famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900. (Von Hofmannsthal owned a copy of Freud’s book.) This golden age of Viennese culture came to an abrupt end when war enveloped Europe. In the aftermath of World War I, the map of Europe was redrawn. The Habsburg Empire and the social order that it represented no longer existed. What was left was the small country of Austria. Von Hofmannsthal,
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who during the war had served in the Habsburg war ministry in Vienna, found himself having to adapt to a different world. He was deeply disappointed by the collapse of the old order.
Art for Art’s Sake The Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century, centered in France but had an influence throughout Europe, adopted the slogan, ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The idea was that the only purpose of art was to embody beauty and perfection, which was its own justification. Art needed to have no utilitarian or social value. It was enough that it existed. Many poets of the aesthetic movement, which included the young von Hofmannsthal in the 1890s, felt that their purpose in life was to pursue beauty in a life devoted to art.
that Iphigenia had vanished, a story that she refused to believe. The incident aroused her undying hatred of Agamemnon. When Agamemnon was fighting at Troy, Thyestes’ son Aegisthus seduced Clytemnestra. In addition to her distress over Iphigenia, Clytemnestra may have heard reports that Agamemnon was bringing home the Trojan princess Cassandra as a concubine. When Agamemnon returned from Troy, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed him, as well as the two sons that Cassandra had born him. Clytemnestra also killed Cassandra. Orestes would also have been killed had not Electra or some other member of the house managed to send him away to the court of Strophius, king of Phocis.
The Aesthetic Movement also led to a movement known as the Decadence or the fin de siècle (end of the century). Decadent writers lauded art over nature, and explored in their works deviant or bizarre subject matter. They were opposed to accepted social standards in morality and sexual behavior. A typical work of the Decadence was Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1893), which is notable for its sexual perversity and lurid, violent climax. Von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra has some decadent elements in common with Wilde’s play.
After Orestes attained manhood, Apollo told him at Delphi that it was his duty to kill both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. With his friend Pylades, Orestes returned to his former home, made himself known to his sister Electra, and carried out his act of revenge. The Furies (spirits who punished those guilty of crimes against their own family) pursued Orestes and drove him mad. Orestes wandered to Delphi to consult Apollo, who had ordered him to commit the murders, and Apollo sent him to Athens, where he was tried and acquitted by a jury.
The House of Atreus in Greek Mythology
Orestes and Electra are principal characters in The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, two plays by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. They are also the subjects of Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Electra and Orestes.
Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae. He was a son of Atreus, who had a long-running quarrel with Thyestes. Agamemnon killed a son of Thyestes who was married to Clytemnestra. He also killed their baby and took Clytemnestra as his wife. Clytemnestra bore Agamemnon four children: Iphigenia, Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes. When Clytemnestra’s sister, Helen, was abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris, Agamemnon raised a Greek force to win her back. But he angered the goddess Artemis, who used her power over the weather to prevent the departure of the Greek fleet. The only way Artemis could be appeased was through the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Telling Clytemnestra that Iphigenia was to be married to Achilles, Agamemnon arranged for the girl to be sent to Aulis to be sacrificed. At the last moment, Artemis placed a stag on the altar instead of Iphigenia and took Iphigenia with her to be her priestess. Clytemnestra was told
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW The initial production of Electra, which premiered on October 30, 1903, in Berlin, was von Hofmannsthal’s first major theatrical success. Within four days, three editions of the book were sold out, and twenty-two German theaters expressed an interest in producing the play. Critics were divided, however. Von Hofmannsthal wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law that some were enthusiastic, others hostile. Those who passed negative judgments thought that the play did not measure up to the dignified calm that they believed was part of the ancient Greek spirit. They argued
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are killed in which Electra sings that she is the fire of life. Von Hofmannsthal is today recognized as one of the finest librettists in operatic history. The play, however, still continues to occupy the attention of scholars, whose arguments tend to reflect the same critical debate that was sparked by the play’s first production. In 1938, E. M. Butler wrote that the Freudian elements seriously damaged the play, which she referred to as ‘‘turgid spiritual melodrama’’ (quoted in Michael Hamburger’s introduction to von Hofmannsthal’s Selected Plays and Libretti). But other modern critics have found the Freudian elements in the play, such as Electra’s fixation on her father and the idea of repressed memory as applied to Clytemnestra, to be fruitful ground for examination. Critics have also contrasted von Hofmannsthal’s play with the play by Sophocles on which it is loosely based.
A scene from Richard Strauss’s 1953 opera production, Elektra
CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey
that the modernization of Sophocles’ play to incorporate psychological theories had made Electra into a savage character. In addition, Electra’s relationship with her sister was condemned because of its erotic, lesbian overtones. Other critics thought that the modernization was legitimate, given the popularity and importance of Freud’s psychological theories. These critics tended to focus on the concept of ‘‘hysteria,’’ as defined by Freud, and as seen in the characters Electra and Clytemnestra. For some years, Electra continued to be regularly performed by many theater companies. It was even performed in Japanese. Today, however, performances of the play are rare events. It is now known chiefly as the libretto of Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra (1909), which is part of the standard operatic repertoire. Strauss had seen the original production of the play in Berlin and asked von Hofmannsthal to create a libretto from it that he could set to music. Von Hofmannsthal made some changes to the original play to fit the demands of the operatic form. He reduced the length of the monologues and expanded the scene between Electra and Orestes. He also gave Electra an ecstatic duet with Chrysothemis, after Clytemnestra and Aegisthus
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Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the psychological elements of the play with emphasis on Freudian psychoanalysis. ‘‘My main incentive is not to let bygone ages be wholly dead, and to make people feel that what is remote and alien is closely related to themselves.’’ So wrote von Hofmannsthal (quoted in Robert Mark’s article in Opera News) of his adaptations of Greek tragedies. He certainly set himself quite a task. Appreciating such a grim, bleak, violent play as Electra requires a leap of imagination into a world very different from our own. Perhaps a comparison with a more familiar revenge tragedy, Hamlet, might be helpful. There are many similarities between the two plays. Like Electra, Hamlet has had a dearly loved father murdered and must, by the code of his society, avenge his death. Like Electra, Hamlet must kill a relative (although Hamlet must kill his uncle, not his mother, to do so). Hamlet’s mind, like Electra’s, is placed under enormous strain by the Herculean task imposed upon him. And like Electra, Hamlet develops a revulsion against all sexuality because his mother is having sexual relations with a criminal usurper.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Von Hofmannsthal’s The Cavalier of the Rose (1912) is the English translation of his libretto for Strauss’s famous comic opera, Der Rosenkavalier. Unlike many opera librettos, it is also excellent literature in its own right and can be read and enjoyed quite independently of Strauss’s music. • Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy of plays made up of Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted, is loosely based on Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia. It is set at the end of the American Civil War and uses Freudian psychology to explain the motivations of the characters. Lavinia Mannon is the Electra character who, along with her brother, must avenge the death of their father, who was murdered by their mother.
The ancient Greek tragedians who dramatized the Agamemnon-Orestes-Electra myth were deeply concerned with the question of justice. The final play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy entirely concerns Orestes’s guilt or innocence. After being pursued by the Furies, Orestes is finally acquitted by the goddess Athena, and the long cycle of violence is brought to an end. Sophocles also, in his play Electra, appears to have believed that the killing of Clytemnestra and her lover was justified, a view also emphatically presented by Homer in the Odyssey. Von Hofmannsthal does not have the same interest as Aeschylus in examining the issue of justice from all sides. He does not seem to bring the justice of Electra’s vengeance into question, although it could be argued that the abrupt ending of the play is suggestive, as Chrysothemis bangs on the door calling for Orestes but receives no reply. Perhaps already the Furies are pursuing him. Von Hofmannsthal’s approach to the myth is a different one entirely. As befits a man writing in Vienna at the time that Freud was delving into the uncharted waters of the subconscious, von
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• Euripides’ play, Iphigenia in Aulis (available in Euripides IV: Four Tragedies, 1968), takes as its subject the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the event that aroused Clytemnestra’s undying hatred for her husband Agamemnon. • The Poet and the Countess: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Correspondence with Countess Ottonie Degenfeld, edited by Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld (2000) contains the correspondence between von Hofmannsthal and his close friend, Ottonie Degenfeld. The letters span a period of twenty years (1909–1929) and give a fine picture of von Hofmannsthal’s emotional life as well as insight into the kind of lives people led during that period. It is also clear that von Hofmannsthal was very much in love with his correspondent.
Hofmannsthal is concerned more with psychology than ethics or morality. It is as if he takes the smooth textures of the ancient dramas and asks himself, what is really going on in the subconscious depths of these characters’ minds? What has been the psychological effect on them of the killing of Agamemnon? That the effect has been traumatic and devastating on at least three of the main characters— Clytemnestra, Electra and Chrysothemis—is obvious. The one moment in which the terrible destructive act—the killing of Agamemnon—took place has in effect frozen time for Clytemnestra and Electra. They cannot get beyond that moment and its consequences. Their lives are like dammed up rivers where the pressure continues to build but there is no way of releasing it. They are locked in a deadly struggle that is destroying them both. Interestingly, the few positive, life-affirming images in the play are of flowing water. These are supplied by Chrysothemis, who has reacted to the tragedy that has enveloped her family quite differently than Electra. That is not to say that she is not
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ELECTRA BADGERS HER MOTHER AGAIN AND AGAIN ABOUT THE ORIGINAL DEED, TRYING LIKE A PSYCHOANALYST TO GET THE BURIED MEMORY TO COME TO LIGHT.’’
deeply distressed. She is. She tells Electra that she is terrified; she runs from room to room as if a voice were calling her; she cannot find relief even in tears. But unlike Electra, she is not fixated on the past. She wants to be part of the world of becoming, the natural cycle of growth and change. She wants to fulfill her role as a woman and give birth to a child. She wants life to flow freely again, out of the deathgrip that holds her mother and sister immobile in a nightmare past that consumes their present and offers them no future. Chrysothemis uses the image of cleansing water to express her desire to be free of the past: ‘‘I will wash my body / in every water; I will plunge deep down / into every water; I will wash each part of me.’’ Disturbed, frightened and desperate she may be, but Chrysothemis represents the hope that whatever the past, life will flow once more and new births will ease the memory of old deaths. Electra herself, in her second long dialogue with her sister, recognizes that Chrysothemis is the one who still has energetic life flowing through her. She contrasts Chrysothemis’ youthfulness and physical strength, which ‘‘flows like cool / pent-up water from the rock’’ (the water image again) with her own wasted body, her ‘‘wretched withered arms.’’ Chrysothemis, of course, is unwilling to go along with what her sister wants her to do. She blames Electra for their joint imprisonment, and simply wants Electra to change her attitude. But that is like asking her to alter the laws of her being, to be a different person entirely. It is not going to happen. And Chrysothemis’ willingness to ‘‘move on with her life’’ (as the modern phrase has it), although attractive on the surface, is in fact not really a solution to the problem. It leaves the impasse between Clytemnestra and Electra in place.
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How does von Hofmannsthal tackle this thorny situation? How can that moment of ‘‘frozen time’’ that holds Clytemnestra and Electra in its grip be melted? As Lorna Martens has pointed out in her article, ‘‘The Theme of the Repressed Memory in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,’’ he turned for inspiration to Freud. In particular, he read Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud’s theory was that traumatic events are repressed by the conscious mind. The memories do not disappear but become lodged in the unconscious mind, from where they create neurotic symptoms in the personality. It is clear that Clytemnestra is suffering from repressed memory because she cannot recall the moment of the murder. This is how she describes that moment to Electra: There he stood of whom you always talk, there he stood and here stood I and Aegisthus, and from eye to eye our glances met: so it had not happened yet! and then your father’s dying look altered so slowly and horribly, but still fastened to mine—and then it had happened: there is no space in between! Now it was before, and then it was past—in between I did nothing.
As Martens points out, it is Electra who represents the memory of the act of murder that Clytemnestra is repressing. Since the memory of this awful act is now stuck in Clytemnestra’s unconscious mind, it is having an insidious, poisonous effect on her whole being. She knows that something is wrong. ‘‘I rot inside,’’ says Clytemnestra, and this accounts for the symptoms of hysteria which she exhibits. These symptoms include hallucinations— Clytemnestra has hallucinations of Electra as a snake—nightmares, and the loss of the ability to use language at vital moments. In Clytemnestra’s long speech to Electra when they are alone together, for example, Clytemnestra complains that she can find no words to answer Aegisthus when he mocks her. She reaches for the words, but they are not there. Also, according to Martens, Clytemnestra’s entry, in which she supports herself on a stick and can hardly keep her eyes open, suggests a condition of ‘‘hysterical paralysis.’’ Taken as a whole, Clytemnestra’s symptoms of hysteria, which also include confusion and dizziness, make her resemble one of Freud’s most famous patients, a woman named Anna O.
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Martens notes that Electra also has symptoms of hysteria, and also resembles Anna O. This can be seen especially in her excessive attachment to a dead, beloved father, her preoccupation with reliving the past, and the fact that both the fictional character and real-life psychiatric patient experience symptoms of the disorder daily at sunset (this is the time each day when Electra mourns her father and relives the murder). It is a sign of how von Hofmannsthal’s symbolic meanings overlap that Electra, herself resembling a hysteric, also resembles the psychoanalyst. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the analyst keeps probing and investigating the psyche of the patient until the memory of the original trauma is uncovered. This, in theory anyway, frees the patient from the trauma’s grip. This is why Clytemnestra senses that Electra, who keeps tormenting her, also has the ability to cure her. And Electra badgers her mother again and again about the original deed, trying like a psychoanalyst to get the buried memory to come to light. This is also symbolized both verbally and visually by Electra’s feverish digging for the axe that killed Agamemnon. Interestingly, Freud sometimes used the analogy of an archeological dig to convey the work of the psychoanalyst, who has to dig through all the layers of the mind to discover the basic structures that have made it what it is. Such is the basic Freudian approach to the play, and there is no doubt that it digs deeply into von Hofmannsthal’s intended meanings. Whether, either in the early 1900s or now, a hundred years later, it fulfills von Hofmannsthal’s goal of making ‘‘people feel that what is remote and alien is closely related to themselves’’ is another matter. Perhaps the answer, in spite of the extreme nature of the subject matter, is yes. Methods of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have proliferated since Freud’s day, but many of them still work on the same premise. The theory is that if some traumatic event or process that has been pushed back into the unconscious mind is brought to conscious awareness, it will automatically lose its power to produce neurosis in the personality. That which is known, and can be contemplated in the light of day, is less powerful than that which lurks undetected and unknown. The trauma can be anything from, say, sexual abuse as a child to something perhaps less serious, such as how the family dynamic—the relationship between the parents and their relationship with the children—operated to create the problem that is being addressed by the therapist.
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This kind of intervention by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist might be thought of as the ‘‘Electra solution’’ to psychic disturbance, if Electra is viewed in her role as the preserver of memory. It is the solution she tries to force on Clytemnestra: face the monster and he will lose his fangs. An alternative, less attractive, attitude to inner turmoil might be Electra in her role as hysteric, endlessly and morbidly dwelling on the traumatic events of the past. A third possibility might be thought of as the ‘‘Chrysothemis solution’’: get immersed in life and make the best of things, perhaps with the attitude that ‘‘it all happened a long time ago.’’ A fourth possibility of course is Orestes’ solution. He wastes little time on words and simply takes action to get the job done. These four different approaches might be thought of as confront, brood, forget, act. Of such stuff is the drama of life made. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Electra, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Martin Mueller In the following essay excerpt, Mueller explores the influence of both Greek and contemporary drama on Hofmannsthal’s Electra. Electra was Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s first major success on the public stage. The play was first performed at Max Reinhardt’s Little Theatre in Berlin on October 30, 1903. On November 10, Hofmannsthal wrote to his brother-in-law that it had had a great success with three editions out of print, twenty-two adoptions by public stages, and a noisy reception from the press, partly enthusiastic, partly hostile. Electra kept its place in the repertoire. Some years later, Hofmannsthal authorized a Japanese club to perform it in Japanese and casually referred to performances of his play on ‘‘hundreds of stages.’’ Today, Electra survives chiefly in a cut and slightly altered form as the libretto of Strauss’s opera. Electra was not Hofmannsthal’s first or only stab at Greek tragedy. A decade earlier, the nineteen-year-old student had tried his hand at Euripides’ Alcestis. A little more than a translation and a little less than a new version, this play presents a very lyrical and decorous Euripides, with the buffoonery of Heracles toned down, and some poetic fin-de-siècle additions about the deep relationships of life and death. Electra marked the beginning of several years’ preoccupation with Greek myths. It was followed by Oedipus and the Sphinx and a translation of Oedipus Rex, which Hofmannsthal at one time considered parts of a trilogy to be rounded
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BUT THE EIGHTEEN-YEAROLD ADMITTED IN A CHARMING LETTER TO MARIE HERZFELD . . .‘MY EDUCATION IS RATHER DILETTANTISH AND UNEVEN.’ TEN YEARS LATER, THIS STATEMENT WAS PROBABLY EVEN MORE ACCURATE, AT LEAST AS REGARDS HOFMANNSTHAL’S CLASSICAL LEARNING. AND HIS RELIANCE ON STANDARD TRANSLATIONS IS EVIDENT IN HIS PLAYS.’’
off by a one-act play on the old Oedipus. There are quite systematic sketches for a drama on Pentheus, as well as less elaborate sketches for plays on Leda and the Swan, Jupiter and Semele, and King Kandaules. Hofmannsthal returned to Greek mythology again in two of his opera libretti: Ariadne auf Naxos and Die ägyptische Helena. One should not, however, overestimate the rigor or coherence of Hofmannsthal’s interest in Greek tragedy and mythology. He learned Greek at the Gymnasium and was by all accounts a phenomenally gifted and precocious student. References to volumes of Pindar, Herodotus, and Sophocles in his correspondence show that he continued to read Greek literature in the original after leaving school. But he was not a Greek scholar like Milton or Racine. He was familiar with some of the fashionable scholarship and criticism of his day, notably Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde’s Psyche, and Bachofen’s work on matriarchy, and he associated this reading with the newfangled work of Freud and Breuer on repression, hysteria, and the unconscious. But the eighteen-year-old admitted in a charming letter to Marie Herzfeld: ‘‘meine Bildung ist ein bißchen dilettantenhaft unauseglichen’’ [my education is rather dilettantish and uneven]. Ten years later, this statement was probably even more accurate, at least as regards Hofmannsthal’s classical learning. And his reliance on standard translations is evident in his plays.
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While Hofmannsthal was pursuing things Greek, he was also dabbling in several other traditions. Wolfgang Nehring has recently shown that in the early years of the twentieth century, Hofmannsthal tried to find his way as a dramatist by imitating whatever struck his fancy. Them were the Greek subjects, but there were also Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, the medieval Everyman, and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. And Oedipus and the Sphinx, far from being an unmediated return to ancient myth, was inspired by a play on the same topic by Joséphin Peladan, a contemporary French writer. The provenance of models suggests an eclectic and indeed haphazard procedure. On the other hand, all of Hofmannsthal’s plays from that period are dominated by an obsessive concern with the question of identity and its relationship to sexuality and action. In a letter to Hermann Bahr, he describes his current work on Calderón’s Life Is a Dream in a phrase that characterizes his entire work during that time: he is concerned ‘‘in die tiefsten Tiefen des zweifelhaften Höhlenkönigreiches ‘Ich’ hinabzusteigen und dort das Nicht-mehr-ich oder die Welt zu finden’’ [to descend into the lowest depths of the dubious cave kingdom ‘I’ and to find there the no-longer-I or the world]. The combination of narrow thematic range with a very eclectic choice of models raises some doubts about the usefulness of exploring the relationship of text and subtext in Hofmannsthal’s case. But a close examination reveals that Hofmannsthal was a very good reader and that he chose his models with a keen eye for resemblances between their thematic range and his interests. The title page of Hofmannsthal’s Electra identifies the play as: ‘‘Tragódie in einem Aufzug frei nach Sophokles.’’ In a letter to Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Hofmannsthal called it ‘‘eine freie, sehr freie Bearbeitung der ‘Elektra’ des Sophokles’’ [a free, very free adaptation of Sophocles’ ‘Electra’]. The play, however, is more accurately seen as a version of three very different plays. Its immediate theatre history relates it closely to Oscar Wilde’s Salome. At the thematic level, the play is a polemical attack on Goethe’s Iphigenie. The relationship with Sophocles exist superficially at the level of action; the thematic relationship is mediated through both Salome and Iphigenie. Electra was especially written for Gertrud Eysoldt, who had starred in over 200 performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in the same theatre and,
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according to the contemporary critic Paul Goldmann, ‘‘specialized in perverted women.’’ Hofmannsthal had seen Eysoldt in Gorky’s Lower Depths, and it was at her urging and Max Reinhardt’s that he sat down to carry out plans for the Electra drama that had been on his mind for some time. The plan to write an Electra play dates to 1901: . . . My point of departure was the character of Electra, as I well remember. I read the Sophoclean play in the garden and in the forest, in the fall of 1901. The line from ‘‘Iphigenia’’ came to mind where it says: ‘‘Electra with her fiery tongue,’’ and as I walked I fantasized about the figure of Electra, not without some pleasure in the contrast to the ‘‘devilishly humane’’ atmosphere of Iphigenia. The similarity and contrast with Hamlet also went through my mind.
In a diary entry of 17 July 1904, Hofmannsthal gave a very similar account: . . . The first idea came in early September 1901. I was reading ‘‘Richard III’’ and Sophocles’ ‘‘Electra’’ in order to learn some things for ‘‘Pompilia.’’ Immediately the figure of Electra was transformed. The ending was also there at once: that she cannot go on living, that, once the blow has fallen, her life and entrails must rush from her, just as life and entrails together with the fertilizing sting rush from the drone once it has impregnated the queen. The resemblance and contrast to Hamlet were striking. As for style, I thought of doing something opposite from ‘‘Iphigenia,’’ something that would not fit the description: ‘‘this hellenizing product appeared to me on rereading devilishly humane.’’
This statement clearly understates the similarities and the influence of Wilde’s play. Hofmannsthal wrote his play for the Little Theatre in full knowledge that Electra would be played by Gertrud Eysoldt, who was famous for her Salome, and he saw Eysoldt in Gorky’s Lower Depths while working on his play. The German theatrical history of Salome stands squarely behind Hofmannsthal’s play. Wilde’s play changes the biblical narrative in important ways. First, Salome is motivated by her own passion for John and acts out of the love/hatred of a rejected woman. Second, Salome is killed at the end. Finally, Wilde elaborates the biblical motif of Salome’s dance and gives it an explicitly bloody setting: HEROD Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet! ‘Tis well! ‘Tis well! Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees . . . No, no, she is going to dance on blood! There is blood spilt on the ground. She must not dance on blood. It were an evil omen. HERODIAS What is it to thee if she dance on blood? Thou hast waded deep enough in it. . . HEROD What is it to me? Ah! look at the moon! she has become red. She has become red as blood. Ah! the prophet prophesied truly. He prophesied that the moon would become as blood. Did he not prophesy it? All of ye heard him prophesying it. And now the moon has become as blood. Do ye not see it?
Letters written in 1901 and 1902 continue to refer to plans for this drama, but it was not until the encounter with Eysoldt and Reinhardt that Hoffmansthal sat down to write the play.
Thus, Wilde’s play places a heroine within a complex of themes and motifs that involves sexual frustration, blood, dance, and death. The crazed heroine’s fatal dance of death at the moment of triumph has no precedent in Sophocles’ play, but it is quite obvious that she conflates central motifs of Wilde’s play.
Electra and Salome
Electra and Iphigenie auf Tauris
Salome and Electra are now associated in our minds as Strauss operas. But Hofmannsthal was skittish about the relationship of his play to Wilde’s. Strauss apparently became interested in Hofmannsthal’s play after seeing a production of it at the Little Theatre in Berlin. When Strauss worried that the two plays might be too similar, Hofmannsthal in a letter disputed his argument: ‘‘Es sind zwei Einakter, jeder hat einen Frauennamen, beide spielen im Altertum und beide wurden in Berlin von der Eysoldt kreiert: ich glaube, darauf läuft die ganze Ähnlichkeit hinaus’’ [They are both one-act plays, each is named after a woman, both are set in antiquity, and both were premièred in Berlin by Eysoldt; I think that is all there is to the resemblances.]
For the German bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, the exiled Iphigenia, ‘‘seeking the land of the Greeks with her soul,’’ was the great paradigm of neoclassical hellenism, and as such mediated the understanding of Greece as a vision of beauty and serenity. Goethe himself had his doubts about the play. In a letter to Schiller, he spoke of his ‘‘hellenizing drama’’ as ‘‘devilishly humane.’’ In his later autobiography, he drew attention to the ‘‘dark and terrifying elements’’ in the background of his play. Goethe’s younger contemporary Heinrich von Kleist had responded to these elements in a play modeled on the Bacchae, in which he opposed to Iphigenia’s Apollonian triumph the Dionysiac and destructive frenzy of Penthesilea.
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A very similar protest motivates Hofmannsthal’s Electra. The deliberate and provocative contrast with Iphigenia was part of the original conception of his protagonist. The point is so obvious at critics have ignored it and have not traced the precise and detailed manner in which the contrast is developed. One might begin with Hofmannsthal’s memory of Goethe’s phrase about Electra with her fiery tongue, which occurs in Orestes’ narrative of the matricide: . . . Orestes made himself known to Electra; She fanned the fire of revenge in him Which in his mother’s sacred presence had Died down to embers. Silently she led Him to the place at which his father died And where an old, faint trace of wantonly Spilled blood still stained the frequently washed floor With ominous and palely faded streaks. She there described for him with tongue of fire Each circumstance of that outrageous deed, She forced upon him there that ancient dagger Which had in Tantalus’s house raged grimly, And Clytemnestra died by her son’s hand.
The passage contains several motifs that Hofmannsthal develops in detail. None of the ancient versions specifies Orestes’ weapon. Goethe resorts to the Gothic motif of a cursed weapon that links the generational sequence of crimes. ‘‘[T]hat ancient dagger/Which had in Tantalus’s house raged grimly’’ becomes in Hofmannsthal’s drama Clytaemnestra’s ax, which Electra guards for her brother’s use. More interesting is the phrase: And where an old, faint trace of wantonly Spilled blood still stained the frequently washed floor With ominous and palely faded streaks.
The faint trace of blood may be seen as an image of the distance between Goethe’s play and the violence of his sources. Hofmannsthal’s play, on the other hand, swims in blood. The deliberate contrast with Goethe is apparent in the opening scene, where a group of maidservants viciously gossip about Electra. They indignantly repeat her accusations, including this one: . . . to wash with water and with more and more fresh-drawn water the everlasting blood of murder off the floors—
That is a memory, via Macbeth, of the Goethean passage. It may also be seen as a return to the theme of blood in the Oresteia, especially to the carpet scene of the Agamemnon, in which the stage is metaphorically transformed into an ocean of blood. The distinctive aspect of blood in Electra, however,
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is its compulsive association with sexuality, and as we shall see, this association is part of Hofmannsthal’s provocative challenge to Goethe. The opening scene of Electra shows us a group of women on a darkly lit stage. When Electra enters, the stage direction specifies: ‘‘sie ist allein mit den Flecken roten Lichtes, die aus den Zweigen des Feigenbaumes schräg über den Boden und auf die Mauern fallen, wie Blutflecke’’ [she is alone with the patches of red light which fall like bloodstains from the branches of the fig tree obliquely across the ground and upon the walls]. We see the courtyard of an oriental palace, but it is also a red-light district. Sex and violence come together in the image of the maidservants conceiving children on the blood-drenched steps of the palace, in the ambiguous groaning behind closed doors, and in Electra’s laconic description of the world around her: ‘‘sie kreißen oder sic morden’’ [they give birth or kill]. That such lurid color is part of fin-de-siècle decadence in the manner of Salome requires no further comment. But it is also the answer to Goethe’s explicitly asexual construction of classical Greece. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists who wrote plays on subjects of Greek tragedy were usually dissatisfied with the limited and unsentimental treatment of love in their sources, and for this reason they would add erotic subplots. Opposition to the indiscriminate use of such subplots led to the demand for a ‘‘tragédie sans l’amour.’’ Racine, who in his Phèdre had given the great portrayal of a woman destroyed by passion, wrote such a play in his Athalie, a scriptural drama written for performance by girls in a convent school. The play was very famous in the eighteenth century because it employed ancient dramaturgy with a strict avoidance of any erotic motif. Goethe in his Iphigenie auf Tauris took the ideal of the ‘‘tragedy without love’’ one step farther and made it the subject of the play itself. In several eighteenthcentury versions of the subject, Iphigenia fends off the advances of unwelcome suitors. Goethe follows this motif when in the first act of his play Iphigenia turns down a marriage proposal from King Thoas. But in Goethe’s play alone, this denial is a rejection of marriage as such. To the great tragic heroines destroyed by passion in ancient tragedy, whether Phaedra, Medea, or Dido, Goethe opposed Iphigenia, the saint and sister who rescues Orestes from his madness. The madness of Orestes, however, had been reinterpreted by Racine in sexual terms: the Oreste of Andromaque is mad because Hermione
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does not return his passion. Thus, the psychological reintegration of Goethe’s Orestes through the healing power of his sister is itself a psychosexual drama, albeit of a peculiar kind. The saintly humanity of its moral vision rests on a vow of chastity. The ancient playwrights derived the name ‘‘Electra’’ from ‘‘a-lektron,’’ ‘‘without bed.’’ The daughters of the ‘‘overbedded’’ Clytaemnestra are both unbedded, and in a peculiar fashion Electra, no less than Iphigenie auf Tauris, is a ‘‘tragédie sans l’amour.’’ But to the voluntary renunciation of Iphigenia, Hofmannsthal opposes the enforced frustration of Electra. The risqué elements of the play, including Electra’s lesbian attack on her sister and the memories of incestuous rape by the ghost of the father, directly parallel the relationship of Goethe’s Iphigenia with her father and brother. Iphigenia dwells on the memory of her happy childhood, at the center of which stands the identification of her father as a thoroughly good man. Electra is haunted by the overbearing presence and demand for revenge of a ghoulish father, who visits her at night and ‘‘der mich zwang alles zu wissen, wie es zwischen Mann und Weib zugeht’’ [forced me to know all that goes on between man and woman]— an anti-Goethean move by an inhabitant of turn-ofthe-century Vienna. The same is true of the relationship between Electra and Chrysothemis. The sister’s selfless and chaste love becomes the paradigm for the relationship of man and woman in Goethe’s play. Electra’s sisterly love is of a different kind, and surely we are meant to hear Goethe when Electra woos Chrysothemis with the words: . . . From now on I will be your sister as I have never been your sister before!
The intensely and self-consciously claustrophobic atmosphere of Electra is also part of the attack on the neoclassical subtext. In his ‘‘Scenic Instructions,’’ Hofmannsthal gave ‘‘Enge, Unentfliehbarkeit, Abgeschlossenheit’’ [ narrowness, lack of escapes, enclosedness] as the characteristic features of the setting; and in a letter written shortly after the première, he complained of the play’s ‘‘compulsive claustrophobia and terrible lack of light.’’ Hofmannsthal’s claustrophobic spaces are generally metaphors of the womb. The cave is the favored image. In Oedipus and the Sphinx, the oracle warning Laius against a son takes this form:. . . Let the king be on his guard and stand at his wife’s bed
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armed and with a naked sword as if at the cave from which his worst enemy is lurking to burst forth.
Images of this kind are obsessive during Hofmannsthal’s works of this period, and sometimes they are involuntarily funny, as in his sketches to a Pentheus drama: . . . A symbolic motif: that Pentheus does not know his own palace; not the vault, not the grotto, not the subterranean ponds, not the shaft that leads into the mountain through a hatch door, (he stands over it and calls down: Mother, Mother!)—Cadmus scorns him for it.
In Electra, the cave image appears prominently in a passage in which Electra reacts with disgust to her sister’s desire for a normal life as wife and mother: . . . Fie, the woman who thinks of it, who calls it by name! To be the cave the murderer enjoys after the murder; to play the beast giving, pleasure to the fouler beast.
The setting of Electra in fact consists of a regress of claustrophobic spaces: the palace, the rooms within the palace, Clytaemnestra’s womb are arranged like a set of Chinese boxes. Movement within this space is never free of terror: the one servant who admires Electra is pushed through the door into the palace and whipped, and the sound of whips accompanies the procession that surrounds Clytaemnestra’s arrival. Flight and chase are also prominent motifs. Twice in the play, Electra envisages the circumstances of Clytaemnestra’s death, and on both occasions her death involves a chase. The first time, she thinks of Orestes chasing Clytaemnestra through the basement of the palace to the deepest pit where the ghost of Agamemnon resides. In the second vision, Electra tells Clytaemnestra how Orestes will chase her and how (in circumstances not unlike Pyrrhus’s hesitation) she will be suspended in nameless terror until Orestes drops his ax. Although the association in Hofmannsthal’s Electra of claustrophobic fear with sexuality is well motivated in terms of his other works from that period, the systematic opposition to the spatial imagination of Iphigenie auf Tauris is highly significant. Goethe’s asexual drama occurs in a setting that stresses openness and release. The play’s opening lines establish the dominant sense of space: Heraus in eure Schatten, rege Wipfel Des alten, heilgen, dichtbelaubten Haines, . . .
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Enclosure here is benign: moving out of the temple, Iphigenia enters not the open and sunny plain, but the shadowy space of a grove. The play is familiar with terrifying enclosure, the ‘‘iron band’’ that a god forged around the brows of the family of Atreus, the ‘‘klanglos-dumpfe Höhlenreich der Nacht’’ [the soundless dull cave kingdom of night], where Orestes stores the memories of his horrible deed, the prison of his madness. But when at the end of the third act he is cured by his sister, the world lies before him as an open and sunny plain after a thunderstorm, and claustrophobic spaces are evoked only to be banished: . . . To Tartarus pass the Eumenides, I hear their going, and they close behind them The doors of bronze with far-receding thunder.
Iphigenia returns once more to the claustrophobic vision of bondage at the end of the fourth act, when in the Parzenlied she conjures up the world of past violence and dwells on the image of Tantalus as the ‘‘exiled ancestor in nocturnal caves’’. But the play moves away from this vision to end in release and liberation. The sense of space that governs Goethe’s play appears in the stage directions of nineteenth-century versions of Greek tragedy with which Hofmannsthal was familiar. In his ‘‘Scenic Instructions,’’ Hofmannsthal expressly forbids ‘‘jene Sälen, jene breiten Treppenstufen, all jene antikisierenden Banalitäten, welche mehr geeignet sind, zu ernüchtern als suggestiv zul wirken’’ [those columns, those broad steps, all those hellenizing banalities more suited to sobering up the spectator than to having a suggestive effect]. The space of Electra is far from such visions of openness. Just as Hofmannsthal resexualized Goethe’s asexual drama, so he foregrounded the claustrophobic terror lurking in its background.
Hofmannsthal and the Sophoclean Electra The Sophoclean Electra departs in significant ways from the versions of Aeschylus and Euripides, and as we shall see, it is precisely these departures that Hofmannsthal engages in his version. Although different in all other respects, Aeschylus and Euripides each place the matricide at the dramaturgical and moral center of the play. In both plays, Orestes pretends to be the messenger of his own death and gains entrance into the palace with this disguise. In both plays, the recognition between brother and sister occurs before Orestes carries out his plan.
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Recognition and disguise are subsidiary features in a plot that moves toward the realization of the horror of matricide as its central event. At first sight, the Sophoclean play shows an almost perverse lack of interest in the problematical nature of matricide, as the playwright pursues the question: what would happen if Electra heard the false news of her brother’s death before learning the truth about him? The instrumental motifs of disguise and recognition catch the dramatist’s attention, and matricide is relegated to the status of a traditional and uncomplicated donnée. This switch of priorities gives its distinctive shape to the Sophoclean drama, which unfolds as the fluctuating sequence of Electra’s hope and despair. When her sister, Chrysothemis, tells her about the mother’s ominous dreams, Electra is elated and gathers confidence for the ensuing confrontation with Clytaemnestra in which she savagely demolishes her mother’s claim to have killed Agamemnon out of just revenge. She triumphs, and a humiliated Clytaemnestra performs her rites and prayers culminating in an unspoken wish. As if in response to that silent prayer, the messenger arrives with the news of Orestes’ death. Through his psychologically intricate management of the triangular dialogue situation, Sophocles reinforces the effect of Electra’s disillusionment. The messenger addresses Clytaemnestra, but the dramatist wants the audience to attend to Electra’s response. Three times Electra seeks to establish herself as the proper audience; three times Clytaemnestra tells the messenger to ignore her. His elaborate account of Orestes’ death—much the longest messenger report in Greek tragedy—has, from the poet’s perspective, its proper listener in the forgotten Electra, the neglected mourner among an official audience who take little trouble to conceal their satisfaction. With an almost sadistic pleasure in his dramaturgical skill, Sophocles adds three twists to the isolation of Electra. First, Chrysothemis returns from the father’s grave with the news of the signs of Orestes’ return that she found there. She is right but Electra now ‘‘knows better,’’ and the signs only deepen her despair. Second, Electra fails to persuade her sister to become an accomplice in carrying out Orestes’ task: when Chrysothemis leaves, Electra has lost her sister as well as her brother. Third, in the play’s most famous scene—an occasion for virtuoso display by Hellenistic actors—the disguised Orestes carries the urn with his own ashes to the palace, evidence of the truth of his story. He
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encounters Electra, and once agains she becomes the recipient of a message not intended for her. Slowly Orestes recognizes the identity of this halfcrazed woman, and the grief he has unwittingly inflicted on his sister begins to dawn on him. She asks to hold the urn, but when he sees the passionate devotion with which she clings to him in this residual form, he cannot continue in his course of deception. He takes the urn away from her in a moment that is for her the ultimate and most gratuitous form of deprivation. Out of this moment the recognition arises, and the play moves swiftly toward its conclusion. From this description of the play, it may appear as if the drama of recognition had emancipated itself from the drama of matricide. But a moment late in the play reestablishes the connection. Electra, standing guard at the door to the palace, hears her mother’s death scream and exclaims: ‘‘Strike again if you have the strength.’’ The line is famous and problematical. Seventeenth-century critics found it difficult to reconcile this unrestrained outburst of fierce hatred with their notions of appropriate behavior for a princess. Corneille in his second Discours blamed Electra for ‘‘l’inhumanité dont elle encourage son frère à ce parricide’’ and considered it incompatible with her character as a ‘‘vertueuse opprimée’’; and Racine wrote in the margins of his copy of Sophocles: ‘‘Ce vers est un peu cruel pour une fille; mais c’est une fille depuis longtemps enragée contre sa mère.’’ Adapters of the play devised ingenious solutions, such as transferring the sentence to Clytaemnestra, in whose mouth it expresses the defiance of the hardened criminal even at the point of death. The scandalized neoclassical critic is usually a good guide to interpretative cruxes, even though his own solutions may fail to persuade. The discrepancy between Electra’s unquestioned nobility and the ferocity of her ‘‘[s]trike again’’ is a cardinal fact about the Sophoclean play. Its plot makes visible the psychological cost of the protagonist’s dedication. Through the drama of recognition, the warped ruins of Electra’s noble self become starkly apparent. At the same time, it becomes evident that Sophocles’ drama has been all along the tragedy of a protagonist shaped and distorted by the burden of revenge on the mother. Aeschylus’s Electra is forgotten after the recognition; the Euripidean character becomes an accessory to the matricide. The Sophoclean Electra is posted outside the palace and becomes a vicarious
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participant by witnessing the event in her imagination. In the context of available dramaturgical options, this Sophoclean decision is significant: the deed that Electra need not do because of Orestes’ timely arrival is also a deed that she cannot do. It is part of her fate to be incapacitated for action. A look at Sophocles’earlier Antigone illustrates the point. Antigone is, like Electra, a play in which the heroine fulfills her destiny in unswerving devotion to a kinsman. In both plays, the heroine’s inflexible resolve is underscored through contrast with her sister’s pragmatic accommodation. But here the resemblances stop. Antigone does her deed and dies for it, but she suffers no diminution or distortion in her being. Within the narrow limits Greek tragedy establishes as the appropriate sphere of action for a woman, we are meant to think of her as going beyond a woman’s courage; but her act, far from unwomanly, is the very paradigm of sisterly devotion. And her suffering and isolation, however intense, are short in duration: she becomes Antigone and fulfills her fate in the short space between her brother’s death and her own suicide. Hence, the peculiar bloom or freshness of her tragedy to which Hegel responded so strongly. By contrast a savage deficiency marks Electra at the moment of her ‘‘[s]trike again.’’ She does not do the deed that she had long anticipated, but time has corroded and stunted her. Although Hofmannsthal follows the skeletal action of the Sophoclean play, he has very little interest in the drama of recognition, which he manages in a much simpler fashion by introducing motifs from The Odyssey and the Euripidean version. But he is keenly interested in the theme of the protagonist’s incapacitation for action to which the drama of recognition leads in the Sophoclean version. His heroine utters the obligatory ‘‘[s]trike again,’’ but that moment is upstaged by an innovation in which the theme of her radical ability to act finds much more explicit expression. When after the recognition scene Orestes declares his intention to act speedily, she celebrates action as the ‘‘bed of rest for the soul’’ and contrasts the impotent and corrosive emotions of love and hatred with the fulfillment of those who act: . . . only he is blessed who is coming to do his deed! And blessed who may touch him and who digs up the ax for him out of the earth and who holds the torch for him and who opens the door for him, blessed is he who may listen at the door.
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But when Orestes is summoned by his mentor to enter the palace, she forgets to give him the ax that she had preserved for him during her waiting, and she is overwhelmed by despair at the fact: . . . ELECTRA alone, in terrible suspense. She runs to and fro in a single straight line in front of the door, with lowered head, like a captive animal in its cage. Suddenly she stands still and says I could not give him the ax! They have gone, and I could not give him the ax. There are no gods in heaven!
This emphatic moment of failure climaxes the play’s pervasive concern with distorted relationships between self and action. In one of his diary entries, Hofmannsthal lists action, work, and the child as instruments of social integration; speaks of ‘‘transformation’’ and ‘‘self-abandonment’’ in action and then alludes to his ‘‘ironic’’ treatment of the relationship of self and action in Electra. The three women in the play are differently crippled in their capacities for action as the result of Agamemnon’s murder. In the case of Chrysothemis, the maternal sense of time as growth and fulfillment has given way to barren waste, and she watches with fascinated horror the useless passage of her own life: . . . For it is not water which is rushing by, and it is not yarn which is rolling off, rolling off the spool; it is I, I!
For Clytaemnestra, the finality of the crime has destroyed any relationship between self and action: . . . And we, we ourselves! And our deeds! Deeds! We and deeds! What odd words! For am I still the same who has done the deed? And if so! Done! Done! Done!
She is not hypocritical when she remembers nothing about the deed itself: . . . Now it was before, and then it was past—in between I did nothing.
But she is terrified by the consequences of what she can no longer remember: . . . Is it then possible to perish, alive, like a rotting carcass? Can one waste away and not be sick? Go to wrack, with waking senses, like a robe eaten up by moths?
In some respects, an even more powerful account of her dissolving self appears in the stage direction that describes the arrival of Clytaemnestra and her train: . . .
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A hurried procession passes the glaringly litup windows, clanking and shuffling by: it is a tugging and dragging of animals, a muted scolding, a quickly stifled scream, the whistling sound of a whip, a recovering and staggering onward. In her despair, she tries to establish herself through rituals: there is a right way of doing everything, and if everything is done rightly, the chaos at the center is overcome: . . . There are rites. There must be proper rites for everything. How one pronounces a word, and a sentence, much depends on that. Also on the hour. And whether one is full, or fasting.
Compulsive repetition also governs the life of Electra. The worship of her father has become a ritual for her: in the very opening lines of the play, the time is given as ‘‘her hour, her time of day when she howls for her father.’’ She is fiercely absorbed by the memory of the past and her imaginary anticipation of revenge, thoughts which occupy a much greater proportion of the play than they do in the Sophoclean version. But if Hofmannsthal designs for Electra a special participation in the deed, the guardianship of the ax, he introduces the motif only to mark her failure: in the end she does not give her brother the ax that he does not, in any event, need. Hofmannsthal’s disabled Electra is an interpretation of the Sophoclean character in light of Hamlet and Iphigenia. The Hamletesque dimensions of Electra’s failure to give Orestes her ax are obvious. But there is also a systematic opposition to Iphigenia. In her decisive soliloquy, Goethe’s heroine asks: ‘‘Hat denn zur unerhörten Tat der Mann allein das Recht?’’ [Do men alone, then, have the right to do unheard-of feats?]; and through her decision to tell the truth, she commits an act that defines her and integrates the society around her. Iphigenia acts and, no less than Antigone, does so in a manner peculiarly appropriate to her sense of self as a woman. Electra’s compulsive and futile activity of digging up the ax marks the distance from the achieved act celebrated at the crisis of Goethe’s play. The heroine’s death is certainly in keeping with Hofmannsthal’s portrayal of Electra’s incapacitated self. What appears as a major departure from the traditional plot also renders explicit the problematical state of the heroine that is implicit in the Sophoclean version. One may well argue that Electra’s death is the most ‘‘Sophoclean’’ feature of Hofmannsthal’s version, and that it radicalized tendencies in the ancient version that its author was
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prevented from pursuing by the conventions of his craft. It was beyond the freedom of the ancient playwright to change outcomes dictated by tradition, and in the tradition Electra survived. But playwrights sometimes elaborated their plots in such a manner as to render the traditional outcome questionable or meaningless. The deus ex machina was the favorite device for turning a modernized plot to its preestablished ending. In a number of Euripidean plays, the discrepancy between plot and outcome becomes a source of ironic effect. What the deus ex machina establishes is so obviously not a solution that the audience are invited to envisage conclusions that follow more logically from the course of events. A deus ex machina of this kind appears in Philoctetes, a play that has many affinities with the Sophoclean Electra. In both plays, time and hatred have violently twisted the noble but inflexible constitutions of the protagonists so violently that one may ask whether these figures are no longer or all too much themselves? Can one imagine a return to normal life for either of them? In the Philoctetes, the obstinate and self-absorbed protagonist refuses to travel the path that will bring victory to the Greeks and glory to himself because he cannot do so without benefiting his enemies. The satisfaction of his hatred has come to dominate everything else, and only the appearance of Heracles, once the hero’s mentor and now a paradigm of suffering and transfiguration, frees the hero from both physical and mental anguish. It takes a leap of faith to follow this ending. The Electra simply ends without saying anything whatever about the future of the heroine. To kill the heroine, as Hofmannsthal does, is to take the plot of the Sophoclean play to its radical conclusion and develop it in the other direction from that of the Philoctetes. Twentieth-century German scholars have promptly and with some justice read Hofmannsthal’s ending into Sophocles’ play Thus, Schadewaldt calls Electra’s ‘‘[s]trike again’’ ‘‘virtually her own death cry.’’ In the Ariadne letter, one of his most important interpretative statements about Electra, Hofmannsthal draws out the thematic implications of Electra’s death. He dwells on the paradox that one cannot live without changing and forgetting, but that all human dignity is inextricably linked to memory and loyalty. Electra is for him the paradigm of a figure identified, petrified, and destroyed by loyalty; and he compares the opposition of Electra and Chrysothemis with its gentler reenactment in the figures of Ariadne and Zerbinetta. The paradoxical nature of loyalty
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forms an important link between Hofmannsthal’s and Sophocles’ versions of the Electra myth. Dignity and nobility are defining features of the Sophoclean protagonist, as they are not of the Aeschylean and Euripidean Electra figures. Nobility is not the first thing that comes to mind in Hofmannsthal’s lurid portrayal of his heroine, whom he likes to show in the postures of a caged and wild animal. But in an important moment in the play’s opening scene, one of the maids defies the malicious gossip of the others and expresses her enthusiastic admiration for Electra: . . . There is nothing in the world that is nobler than she. She lies in rags stretched out on the threshold, but there is no one, Shouting there is no one in this house who can endure her look!
The Sophoclean Electra sacrifices her life by transforming it into a stylized memorial for her murdered father. In her ignoble environment, such a memorial can only take the external form of humiliation—just as in Philoctetes, true nobility hides in the protagonist’s rags and cave rather than in the public world of the Trojan War. But Electra is not Cordelia, and the playwright dwells on the savage and self-enclosed aspect of nobility under such conditions. Hofmannsthal pushes this theme further. The death of his Electra resolves the final state of the protagonist in the opposite direction of the Philoctetes. The transfigured Heracles calls Philoctetes back to health, fame, and an active life. Electra’s death spells out the consequences of such a protagonist’s life in a world without miracles. As Hofmannsthal puts it in a late diary entry, she is destroyed by the content of her life, like a jar by the water that turns to ice inside it: ‘‘Electra is no longer Electra, because she dedicated herself to being only and nothing but Electra’’. But ambiguities remain. Does Electra’s death confirm or transcend the destructive petrification of her all too loyal self? The text need not give a definitive answer to such a question. In fact, it does not, and Hofmannsthal’s own remarks about the play are also ambivalent. In the text of the play—as opposed to the libretto of the opera—Electra remains an outsider at the moment of triumph just as she had been at the moment of retribution. The parallels are precise. Electra fails to give Orestes the ax and is absent from the place of execution. After the death of Aegisthus, the inside of the house turns into a place of orgiastic celebration. Electra, however, remains outside. When Chrysothemis asks her
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whether she does not hear the music, Electra answers that she hears it because the music and entire festival emanate from inside her. But an ocean weighs on her limbs so that she cannot move. Implored again by Chrysothemis, she remains standing: . . . stops, looks at her fixedly Be silent and dance. All must approach! Here join behind me! I bear the burden of happiness, and I dance before you. For him who is happy as we, it behooves him to do only this: to be silent and dance! She takes a few more steps of the tensest triumph and collapses.
Her words speak of happiness and dance, but the stage directions about her gesture and movements confirm self-enclosure and petrification. Moreover, her final moments are far from the triumphal dance she had envisaged in her opening soliloquy. In the diary entry about the genesis of the play, Hofmannsthal compares the death of Electra to that of a drone. The comparison balances waste and destruction against fertilization, and it supports a positive reading of Electra’s death as a moment of fulfillment. On the other hand, in a letter written shortly after the première, Hofmannsthal distances himself from the play’s ‘‘intolerable’’ claustrophobia and looks forward to release in a projected but never written play about ‘‘Orestes in Delphi.’’ The ending of the opera partly resolves the ambiguities of the play in the direction of transfiguration or at least consolation. The change is largely governed by the conventions of the genre. The dramatic soprano cannot ‘‘[b]e silent and dance.’’ In the additional words that Hofmannsthal provided for the composer, the operatic Electra becomes a cousin of Isolde and Brünnhilde, and sings: . . . Whoever looks at me must receive death or expire in love. Ai! Love kills, but nobody lives without knowing love.
In the Ariadne letter, Hofmannsthal’s interpretation of his earlier work is shaped by his turn to comedy and the theme of transformation. Thus, Ariadne is an Electra who only appears to die, and in retrospect Electra becomes her forerunner: The immeasurable depths of one’s own nature, our ties to something unnamable and eternal, so near us in our childhood or before our birth, can close up from the inside into a permanent painful rigor: shortly before death, we sense that they may open again;
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something of this kind, barely sayable, announces itself in the minutes that precede the death of Electra.
Whether this is the Electra of the play or of the opera remains unanswered. Source: Martin Mueller, ‘‘Hofmannsthal’s Electra and Its Dramatic Models,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, March 1986, pp. 71–91.
Robert W. Corrigan In the following essay, Corrigan examines Hofmannsthal’s ideas on characterization, specifically how he shapes his characters toward defining moments. As an Artist Hugo Von Hofmannsthal was always violent in his reaction against materialism in philosophy and naturalism in art. Even as a young man, living in the morally debilitated pre-World War I city of Vienna, Hofmannsthal saw the limitations of an art which was committed to an external view of reality. Naturalism in the drama, with its convention of environmental credibility, from the time of Hebbel, Becque, Hauptmann, and Ibsen (up to The Wild Duck) had tended to show life as it existed on the surface; it was all too often sociological in its orientation and failed to capture the multiple complexities of man’s inner life. It was because of this very ordinariness, this exaction of truth to life, that Hofmannsthal turned to Symbolism, the shrine of all the disenchanted young poets and dramatists of his time. The symbolists’ ideal at that time was a poetry of ‘‘Stimmung.’’ Their poetry was often exotic and usually esoteric, but so long as it was inward and cultured, and avoided contamination with the rawness and crudities of the external social milieu of the time, it served the symbolists’ purposes. Their aim was to recapture that musical intensity which is present to some degree in all art, but which was completely lost in the arid and sterile atmosphere of the sociological plays and novels. Walter Pater was the leading critic and spokesman of this movement in its rebellion against naturalism. His dictum about all the arts ‘‘aspiring towards the conditions of music’’ sprang from his sensitive diagnosis of the condition of art at that time, and it became the credo of many artists. Hofmannsthal was one of them. Like Strindberg, he was moved by the music of Debussy and influenced by the paintings of Gauguin and Van Gogh. In a similar way the symbolist poets, particularly Mallarmé, Valery, and Stefan George influenced the young Viennese playwright. Hofmannsthal came to believe, under these influ-
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Felicity Palmer, as Clytemnestra, and Janet Hardy as Elektra, in the 1992 Welsh National Opera production of Elektra
ences, that human experience is so complex that words can never express and explain it; that life can only be approached obliquely by the indirect method of symbols. As a result, Hofmannsthal rejected most of Ibsen’s drama as too exact and precise for symbols and sought in his own plays to achieve the lyrical suggestiveness of music. Hofmannsthal’s early lyric dramas fit very well into this atmosphere of ‘‘Stimmung.’’ But all too often critics have mistakenly held that symbolism is the predominant characteristic of his drama and that his plays, therefore, are more lyrical than dramatic.
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This is a mistake, for Hofmannsthal thought of the theater primarily in dramatic and not symbolical terms. By the turn of the century he had realized that although symbols could be used to heighten and deepen the implications of naturalistic drama, they also led to an ambiguity, an abstractness, and an allusiveness which the theater could not control and express. In this connection one is reminded of Hedwig’s word to her mother at the end of the second act of The Wild Duck: GINA: Wasn’t that queer talk about wanting to be a dog?
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THUS, THE FUNCTION OF THE THEATER, HOFMANNSTHAL BELIEVED, IS TO SHOW THAT SUBLIME AND TRUE MOMENT IN A MAN’S LIFE WHEN THE MOTIVATING PASSION-POWER OF HIS EXISTENCE IS EXPRESSED.’’
HEDWIG: Do you know, mother, I believe he [Gregers] meant something quite different by that. GINA: Why, what should he mean? HEDWIG: Oh, I don’t know; but it seemed to me he meant something different from what he said—all the time.
If what Hedwig says is true, if everything that is explicit really means something else, then the drama either loses touch with reality or it becomes so diffuse that it can communicate only in a private and personal way rather than in the communal way that the theater requires. It is for this reason, despite his lyrical tendencies and the fact that he was strongly influenced by the symbolist ideals of verse, that Hofmannsthal ultimately broke with many writers of his generation who included a social art like the theater in the world they rejected. After Death and the Fool (1893), in which he repudiates the aestheticism of the symbolists, Hofmannsthal’s work is a continuing effort to achieve a theatrical form which would combine the symbolists’ rich and colorful language with an action that was dramatically rather than lyrically conceived. In his quest for a new dramatic form Hofmannsthal was never attracted to naturalism. In fact, in his Book of Friends, a collection of aphorisms from his notebooks, he defined the weakness of naturalistic writers with great clarity. ‘‘Naturalism distorts Nature because by copying the surface it has to neglect the wealth of inner relatedness—Nature’s real mysterium.’’ Hofmannsthal more fully describes his attitude toward objective reality as it affects the theater in a brief essay entitled ‘‘The Theater as Illusion.’’ The principal thought expounded in this essay is not that the external world is ‘‘unreal’’ in
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any Platonic sense, but that it is, while real enough, too insipid, too uninspiring, too barren to be portrayed on the stage. This attitude toward the theater had already been strongly advanced by Strindberg. The Swedish dramatist, in advocating ‘‘sensational naturalism,’’ believed the playwright should dramatize those moments of greatest crisis and tumult in people’s lives in order to see how such people really acted. In his Preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg writes: ‘‘Misunderstood naturalism believed that art consists in reproducing a piece of nature in a natural way. But, the greater naturalism seeks out the points where great battles take place.’’ By using only the moments of ‘‘crisis’’ in the lives of his characters as his dramatic material, Strindberg’s naturalistic plays were filled with sensational episodes. But this is a sensationalism of convention. Certainly, Strindberg and Hofmannsthal would be the first to admit that all the events which take place in The Father or Electra could never occur in the twenty-four hour period covered in each play. It is by packing in these events that the playwright is able to show that ‘‘inner relatedness’’ which is ‘‘Nature’s real mysterium.’’ Both Strindberg and Hofmannsthal were merely concerned with those mysterious forces which drive people, even to destruction, than they were with the events that these people experienced. The result is a drama of great concentration and apparent horror. But how else can the horror of dislocated people be shown? There may be other ways, certainly Chekhov used different but equally effective techniques, but none has had a greater effect on the modern theater than the technique of Strindberg and Hofmannsthal. Their influence is due to the fact that they expressed a reality which could not be denied. With this concept of theater in general, Hofmannsthal, of necessity, manifests very definite views concerning the function of character in his drama. An understanding of this conception of character will help to untangle the complicated and tortured people of his first mature and probably finest play, Electra. In an essay written in the form of a conversation, entitled ‘‘On Characters in Novels and Plays’’ (1902), Hofmannsthal discussed the kind of characters he believed belonged in the drama. Since this essay was written shortly before he began the writing of Electra it provides many valuable insights to how we should understand the complex characters in that play. Some excerpts: B. Characters in the theater are nothing but contrapuntal necessities. The stage character is a contraction of the
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real one . . . I don’t see people, I see destinies. The power of the erotic for him who is the slave of love. The power of weakness for the weak. The power of glory for the ambitious. No, not just love, just weakness, just glory; but the love by which man is enslaved, his individual weakness, his specific glory. H. What! You want to set such narrow, such sad limits to your genius? The atmosphere of existences consuming themselves pathologically, the hideous, blind, devouring mania—are these the sinister and constricted subjects you want to choose instead of plunging into the colorful variety of human life. B. I don’t know what you call ‘‘pathological’’; but I know that every human existence worthy of presentation consumes itself, and that to maintain this flame it absorbs out of the whole world nothing but the elements expedient to its burning. Yes, the world which I’ve fetched forth from my brain is peopled with madmen. . . My creatures are obsessed by their fixed ideas, are incapable of seeing anything in the world which they themselves do not project into it with their feverish eyes. But they are so, because they are human. For them experiences do not exist, because there is no such thing as experience; because the inner core of man is a fire consuming itself.
From this passage it is clear that Hofmannsthal conceived of character in drama as a complex of conflicting and contrapuntal foils which will reveal, in the midst of life’s greatest catastrophe, what its destiny, over and above the actions of the here and now, really is. Since Hofmannsthal was concerned with showing those passionate powers which are the greatest realities in human beings, he had to conceive a dramatic context in which his characters and their actions could collide in such a way as to reflect or express that power which motivates both the character and the action. Thus, the function of the theater, Hofmannsthal believed, is to show that sublime and true moment in a man’s life when the motivating passion-power of his existence is expressed. To Hofmannsthal this moment is more real than any external reality. To many critics, including the imaginary critic in Hofmannsthal’s ‘‘Conversation,’’ this necessitates creating characters who appear to be pathological cases. The playwright agrees; for he knows that in life, although the process may be slower and less apparent, man is ultimately destroyed by that very passion which gives him the power to live. It is that moment when man’s motivating passion-power drives him to the conflict of life and death that must be captured in the drama. When viewed in this way we see that Hofmannsthal’s Electra is more than a depraved and wild beast. In the conflict of what she says and what
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she does, the playwright is able to present that which is most real in Electra: her Destiny. He dramatizes that consuming and passionate power of vengeance which destroys every attribute of Electra’s womanhood, and, as the play ends, kills not only Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, but herself as well. We may complain that she is a mad woman, but she is real; and if, Hofmannsthal seems to say, we could each know our own reality, we too would be thought of as mad. Hofmannsthal’s plays may be filled with demons, but they are demons who reveal, at the moment they are consumed, man’s destiny. It is this sensational quality inherent in Hofmannsthal’s conception of character together with the impact made on him by modern painting, especially the works of Van Gogh, which accounts for the stark theatricality of his work. Upon reading Electra, one discovers that Hofmannsthal has endowed each element of the dramatic production with rich and contrasting colors. Hofmannsthal helps us here, for not only has he given explicit stage directions, but he also published a fuller account of his ideas concerning the play’s production in a short essay published at the printing of the play. In the beginning of this essay entitled ‘‘Szenische Verschriften Elektra,’’ we find the following injunction: Shun any suggestion of Hellenic architecture! This avoidance of classic Greek symmetry in theater design is then carried over and consistently applied to all the other stage properties, props, costumes, even affecting the attitude and behavior of the characters themselves. In place of the Attic peninsula, the stage represents an Oriental potentate’s back courtyard, where are located the hovels that house the slaves. One senses that within the enclosure an atmosphere of bleak despair prevails. It is like a cage with no possibility of flight.
Hofmannsthal is equally exact in his expressionistic description of the lighting. It is planned in such a way as to contrast the two predominant tones of the play: the black of the House of Atreus and the red of the blood which has flowed in the past and will flow again. Electra ‘‘comes out of the house. She is alone with the red flickerings of light which fall through the branches of the fig trees and drop like blood stains on the ground and on the dark walls.’’ The color of the light is used to symbolize the density of the play’s central character. It is like a Wagnerian motif; large patches of crimson are immediately associated with Electra; they grow more intense and actually glow when she makes her initial entrance and begins her monologue.
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As the sun disappears from the horizon, Electra and her sister are in the shades of dusk. The pall-like quality of their existence is thus expressed and it becomes increasingly more painful as torch-lights within the palace shine out through the barred windows, casting flickering striped shadows across the girls’ prison. As Clytemnestra enters, in a procession of a thousand lights, we are not only aware of Clytemnestra’s great need of light, but we are even more conscious of the great darkness that surrounds Electra. Clytemnestra, the queen with phantasmagoric nightmares, cannot stand the dark and, as Electra gradually forces her into a living nightmare the lights disappear until ‘‘only a faint light falls from inside the house across the inner court, and casts bars of shadow over the figures of the two women.’’ This is the only link to Clytemnestra’s protective yet destructive palace. The powerful agon between Clytemnestra and Electra is played in the eerie shadows of this light. Just as Clytemnestra is about to go insane and that light is flickering out, she is saved and her first reaction is to call for ‘‘Lights!’’ Then: Serving women with torches come out and station themselves behind Clytemnestra. She beckons more lights! More come out and station themselves behind her, so that the court is full of light, and a red-gold glare floods the walls. Now the features of Clytemnestra slowly change, and their shuddering tension relaxes in an evil triumph. She lets the message be whispered to her again, without taking her eyes off Electra. Then the Waiting Woman lifts her staff, and, leaning on both, hurriedly, eagerly, catching up her robe from the step, she runs into the house. The servant women with lights follow her, as if pursued.
Electra is left in a ‘‘Cimmerian gloom,’’ a portentous darkness. Electra remains in this gloom until the revenge is completed. When all the women run out into the court with their bright torches, Electra begins her dance of death in this light of flickering red and gold. The lights symbolize net only the triumph of Electra’s vengeance, but in their burning heat they are expressive of that consuming fire within Electra which destroys her at the moment of victory. Hofmannsthal describes the costumes with the same care. Electra and the slave women are miserably clad in the threadbare rags of the most menial slave. Clytemnestra wears a scarlet dress. Here is not the Queen of Argos, but a barbaric ruler from some oriental past. She is ‘‘bedecked all over with
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precious stones and talismans. Her arms are covered by bracelets, her fingers glitter with rings.’’ She leans on an ivory staff encrusted with precious stones. Her two ladies-in-waiting are no less striking in this procession of exotic grandeur. The one is dressed in dark violet; and the other, like a snake of the Nile, is clad in yellow, her hair pulled back in Egyptian style. As Hofmannsthal tells us: ‘‘These three women must be taken as a unit, a brilliant antithesis to the impoverished-appearing Princess.’’ The playwright has conceived of the play in theatrical terms. Coming as he did at the beginning of the Twentieth Century Hofmannsthal was faced with the problem of how to express and communicate his feelings about human destiny in a fragmented theater. His answer was two-fold: to return to Greek mythology in an attempt to find a universal situation (a method so often used in contemporary French drama); and to seek a theatrical unity by blending all of the elements of stage production into his dramatic conception. It is here that we see Van Gogh’s profound effect upon Hofmannsthal; not only visually, but structurally as well. We see in the Electra the intensity and contrast (the use of bright colors, particularly red and yellow, sharply contrasted with black) which characterizes Van Gogh’s painting. Hofmannsthal intends his play to be lighted and costumed in a very definite way and without these effects his play will suffer greatly. To some literary purists this is the failure of the play; for it does not stand on its own feet. Hofmannsthal would admit that his drama needs the stage directions, but he would insist that only a total theatrical production can bring that unity of expression which, as Wagner advocated before him, the dramatist needs if he is to communicate in any meaningful way to his audience. In short, Hofmannsthal’s theatrical sense is an essential element of his drama; he has made everyhing count: color, lighting, props, costuming. The very physical appearance of the characters is so deeply symbolic that every feature, each trait, the slightest gesture has its meaning, its relationship to all the other traits, features, and gestures. Nothing is wasted here; everything is utilized with the utmost economy, to heighten an effect here or diminish a detail there. Deliberately departing from the spirit of classical antiquity, the poet has in his profound attention to detail created so perfect and flawless a stage effect to harmonize with the characters and the plot that a definite harmony and unity almost in the Hellenic sense are the result.
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A fuller understanding of how all of these elements of Hofmannsthal’s dramaturgy are fused can best be demonstrated by a more detailed analysis of the play. The opening scene of the play is one of indirect exposition. The setting is the courtyard of the palace, but it is suggestive of a cage for wild animals. From the slave-women we discover that this is the dwelling place of Electra and that her behavior is much like that of a wild cat. She ‘‘howls’’ nightly for her father and when we see her for the first time her actions are those of an animal. From the very beginning Hofmannsthal’s heroine is presented as a pathological case. Electra is left alone; but her loneliness is of a different kind than that found in Greek dramatizations of the myth. In her passion for a bloody revenge she is beyond the pale of human relationships. A wild animal cannot exist with people in society. Unlike Sophocles’ Electra, who is alone because she stands for a course of action which demands more than anyone else is capable of giving; unlike a Euripidean heroine, who is alone because she is not accepted, Hofmannsthal’s Electra is alone because her driving destiny for vengeance has destroyed all her humanity and the society which surrounds her cannot tolerate her. Her monologue is a primitive ritual. This ceremonial invocation of her father occurs daily. We are reminded of those primitive savages who attempt to control reality by ritualistic means. She goes into her trance and the ghost of Agamemnon returns. The significance of the first part of the monologue is two-fold. Not only does Electra believe that she can control reality ritualistically, but as she calls for the bloody death of all those associated with the murderers in addition to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, we become aware that vengeance has taken such a hold on Electra that it is more real than she. It is not the revenge of a murdered father, but an all-consuming vengeance which includes everyone. The whole household is to be sacrificed so Agamemnon may resume his regal role in the other world. The ceremony is about to end, and like the close of all primitive rites, the clairvoyant Electra breaks into a dance of death. She sees herself, Chrysothemis, and Orestes joyfully dancing in the bloody haze that exudes from the many corpses. Their horrible victory dance ironically prefigures her own dance of death. Her sister enters calling for her. Chrysothemis’ reaction is one of fear; Electra has become a wild animal even to her own family. Hofmannsthal’s intention is greatly different than that of his Greek
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predecessors. Chrysothemis is not the weak-kneed sister; she sees that Electra has destroyed herself and would destroy all others about her because of something which has only dubious value. We learn in this scene that Hofmannsthal is not primarily interested in justice; he is showing what happens to people whose destiny is revenge. Agamemnon’s death and the need for revenge of that death has long since been forgotten except as the excuse which feeds Electra’s revengeful spirit. Chrysothemis has discovered the plot to imprison Electra and has come to warn her sister. In Electra’s reply we learn why Hofmannsthal has introduced the warning. It is not to heighten our sympathy for Electra, nor is it to prompt Electra to action. In her rejection of Chrysothemis, she states her own position: Do not prowl about. Sit on the ground, like me, and wish for death. And judgment upon her and upon him.
These lines are remarkable for they could only be spoken by someone in the witch-doctor era of humanity’s evolution. The dramatist has shown here an amazing familiarity with primitive thought and practice, for what most characterizes the savage mind is its unshakeable conviction that it can impose changes and modify phenomena in the concrete world through the exercise of will and the practice of magic ritual (mimicry). That this is what Hofmannsthal intended is made incontrovertible when Electra learns that Clytemnestra has had a horrible nightmare that Orestes had come and strangled her. Electra shouts: It is I, I, that have sent him to her. From my breast I sent the dream to her.
As Electra goes on, trance-like, describing the ghastly dream that she has envisioned, it is realized with the entrance of Clytemnestra. With this entrance Hofmannsthal has pulled all of the theatrical stops: the colorful procession, the torches, the slashing whips, and the muffled cries of the slaves. He has used every theatrical technique available in order to create a peak of emotional tension which will control the mother-daughter scene. Clytemnestra’s opening speech shows in another way how different Hofmannsthal’s intentions are from those of his Greek predecessors. When Clytemnestra says: What do you want? See it now, how it rears Its swollen neck and darts its tongue at me! See what I have let loose in my own house.
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If she could only kill me with her eyes!
We see that Hofmannsthal has transferred the snake image of the Greek versions from Orestes to Electra, and as Electra writhes in the courtyard it becomes clear that the dream image has been given human embodiment. It is more evidence that Hofmannsthal was intent upon showing the animal destiny of his heroine who is consumed with the fire of revenge. The witch-doctor quality of Electra’s character is further emphasized by the mystical cure which Clymnestra seeks, and which Electra offers. The importance of this scene is once again to contrast Hofmannsthal’s dramatic conception with that of his predecessors. In all of the Greek versions of the theme great pains are taken to show the similarity between Electra and her mother; that Electra, too, is capable of taking justice into her own hands and thus bring upon herself the same guilt and fear as that suffered by her mother. The purpose of this scene, the longest of the play, is also to show the similarity of the daughter to her mother; but it is a similarity of an entirely different nature. In terms of their outward actions and language the two women are different. They are alike in that they are driven to destruction by a great passion that is their destiny. Just as Electra’s humanity is destroyed by her passion for vengeance, so too has Clytemnestra, who is described as a walking corpse, been destroyed by her all-consuming guilt and fear. Hofmannsthal has realized his idea of character as destiny most clearly in this scene of paradoxically contrasting similarity.
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The following scene between Chrysothemis and Electra is the second crucial scene in the play. Electra, determined to do the murder alone now that she believes Orestes is dead, asks her sister to help her. She is refused. The purpose of the scene is not to contrast Electra heroically determined to act for what she believes is more important than living, with Chrysothemis pathetically clinging to life at all costs (as in Sophocles). Rather Hofmannsthal uses it to show the effects of destiny upon Electra as it consumes her; this is best achieved by contrasting Electra with a girl who is not a coward, but who is repulsed by an existence which has no other aim than a constant brooding for revenge. As the destiny of revenge consumes Electra it destroys her as a woman. Her attitude toward sex is distorted by her continuing belief that her mother’s relationship with Aegisthus is adulterous. As a result all normal sexuality is obscene and guiltridden. Yet her denial of sex as the result of this aversion has caused her to be obsessed with it. Her language is highly charged with sexual images and all that she does has a sexual referent. The effect of this sexual denial, combined with her perverted and obsessive attitude toward love, has been to create in her marked lesbian tendencies which become overt in this scene: You! For you are strong. (Close to her.) How strong you are! To you Have virgin nights given strength. How lithe and slim Your loins are. You can slip through every cranny, Creep through the window. Let me feel your arms; How cool and strong they are! What arms they are I feel when thus you thrust me back with them. Could you not stifle one with their embrace? Could you not clasp one to your cool firm breast With both your arms until one suffocated? There is such strength about you everywhere. It streams like cool close water from a rock, It flows in a great flood with all your hair Down your strong shoulders.
As the scene develops, Electra’s destiny is seen to be the stronger of the two. With speeches of great rhetorical lyricism, Electra literally forces her mother up against the wall and is moving in, like the wild animal she has become, for the kill, when a messenger comes out to tell of Orestes’ feigned death. Clytemnestra is saved, for the moment, and in her salvation Hofmannsthal foreshadows the tragic irony of the play’s conclusion. Electra’s destiny will overcome that of her mother, as it has in this scene, but Electra will be deprived then as she is now, of joining in the final kill.
Hofmannsthal, a master in his use of primitive psychological phenomena, creates here a scene which vividly shows us how completely his heroine has been destroyed as a woman by her passion for vengeance.
The next scene moves rapidly. The almost comic banter of the cook and the two servants is a much needed lessening of the tension which Hofmannsthal has created. Its purpose, however, is not totally comic, since even in their banter these servants give us another view of those conditions which have helped to mould Electra’s destiny.
Chrysothemis, as we have pointed out, cannot accept Electra’s endless cries for vengeance. She is aware, as the Sophoclean counterpart is not, that the destiny of revenge has had a dehumanizing effect upon her sister and she cannot accept it for herself. Chrysothemis is motivated by more normal human instincts; she desires marriage and the pleasures and
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fruits of such a union. She has the capacity to care and feel for others (most clearly seen, in contrast to her sister, in her reaction to the report of Orestes’ death) and must reject that destiny which withers all human feelings. But Hofmannsthal is not asking us to sympathize with Chrysothemis, attractive as she is. Hofmannsthal’s intention is to show the reality of Electra’s destiny and the destructive effects that it has on her humanity. The function of Chrysothemis in this scene is to put into sharper focus the dehumanizing process which is taking place in Electra’s character. Left alone Electra plans to carry out the murders by herself. Like the wild animal which we know she is, she begins to dig in the earth, like a dog for a bone, for the battle-ax which had been used to murder her father. It is while she is digging for the means to achieve, almost ritualistically, the purification of the House of Atreus, that she is discovered by her brother. The recognition scene, although similar in construction to Sophocles’, has lost much of its traditional importance. Hofmannsthal stresses three elements. First, he heightens Orestes’ horror at what has happened to Electra over the years while he has been absent, in order to drive home with finality the process of dehumanization which has taken place in the heroine. Second, as Electra concludes her description of the horrors of being caged in the palace for years, she says: ‘‘Speak to me, speak! Why your whole body trembles.’’ Orestes replies: My body? Let it tremble. Do you not think That he would tremble otherwise than this Could he but guess the way I mean to send him?
The significance of this speech (hardly noticed by most critics) is to state explicitly Hofmannsthal’s belief that one’s physical being is separate from that force which drives human action. Third, Hofmannsthal makes it clear that the gods do not demand vengeance. This radical change in the tradition underscores the fact that there is no motivation for the revenge except that Electra must have revenge. We really do not know why Orestes has come and what motivates his acceptance of the duty to wreak vengeance on the slayers of his father. There is only an intentional vagueness. Since Hofmannsthal is concerned with showing the destiny of revenge in Electra, and not with the ethical problems which result from matricide and murder, revenge for the sake of revenge is motivation enough for the play’s external action. It is only when we see the play as an expression of Hofmannsthal’s con-
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cept of the reality of destiny that this apparent ‘‘motiveless malignancy’’ dues not cause trouble in the interpretation of the play. From this point on the play moves quickly to its conclusion. Orestes enters the house, and while he is preparing for the murders, Electra paces back and forth ‘‘before the door with bowed head, like a wild beast in its edge.’’ Suddenly she remembers the battle-ax. This is the final irony of her destiny. In her excitement at seeing her brother she forgot to give him the ax. Both murders are successfully accomplished without a struggle. At the moment of Aegisthus’ death there begins a gigantic demonstration in which the entire populace, Chrysothemis included, participates. The echoing noise from the demonstrators swells into a mighty roar and the flickering beams cast by a thousand torches accompany this crescendo. In the midst of all the commotion one person appears motionless, unable to join the throng: Electra. Then with superhuman effort she rises and plunges into a weird, unrestrained dance. But Electra is no longer of this world; her mission on earth is fulfilled, and she no longer has a will to live. She whirls on and on until exhausted, she falls into a lifeless heap. The prophetic vow to her mother has been consummated. This final moment, one of great theatrical power, is symbolic of Hofmannsthal’s conception of the character of Electra. It is the dance that earlier in the play gave Electra ritual control over her hated captors; and yet, as the play ends, she is controlled by the dance to the point of death. The dance is symbolic of the victory of her destiny of vengeance; and yet it is her defeat. It is fulfillment which is empty. The dance, in its orgiastic quality, is symbolic of a kind of sexual realization, but the fruit of that realization is destruction. This is the ‘‘sublime and true moment’’ of Electra’s life; this is the moment when her destiny, that passion and power which has sustained her through all the years of hardship, destroys her. Electra is that incendiary figure whose spark ignites Orestes to action. But the fire, like the dance, her chief weapons against her enemies, could only be turned in upon herself once they have done their work and her enemies are no more. Hofmannsthal realizes his intention that the drama ‘‘must capture that moment when man is destroyed by the very passion which gives him life!’’ What is the tragedy? The more obvious answer is that Electra was engaged in a struggle that proved futile; Electra sacrificed all that she was as a human being for nothing. This futility is symbolized by the
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fact that Orestes succeeded without the aid of the battle-axe Electra had so carefully buried for this sacred moment. Electra failed to share even symbolically in the fulfillment of her life’s dream. These ironies, however, are but symbols of the greater tragedy. The tragedy of Hofmannsthal’s Electra is that men are destroyed by the very forces which give them life. Hofmannsthal used the Electra theme in a new way. He was not concerned with justice, with selfrealization and rebirth through suffering, nor with the helplessness of the human situation. He gave this traditional theme new life, by using it to express the tortured reality of human existence in a time when man could not live by any other means than by those passions which so moulded his life as to become its destructive destiny. Source: Robert W. Corrigan, ‘‘Character as Destiny in Hofmannsthal’s Electra,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 22, No. 1, May 1959, pp. 17–28.
SOURCES Aeschylus, Oresteia, translated and with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore, University of Chicago Press, 1953. Broch, Hermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1860–1920, translated, edited and with an introduction by Michael P. Steinberg, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Doswald, Herman K., ‘‘Nonverbal Expression in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,’’ in the Germanic Review, Vol. 44, 1969, pp. 199–210. Martens, Lorna, ‘‘The Theme of the Repressed Memory in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,’’ in the German Quarterly, Vol. 60, No.1, Winter 1987, pp. 38–51. Marx, Robert, ‘‘Act Two,’’ in Opera News, Vol. 63, No. 9, March 1999, p. 18. McMullen, Sally, ‘‘From the Armchair to the Stage: Hofmannsthal’s Elektra in Its Theatrical Context,’’ in the Modern Language Review, Vol. 80, No. 3, July 1985, pp. 637–51. Mueller, Martin, ‘‘Hofmannsthal’s Electra and Its Dramatic Models,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 29, No. 1, March 1986, pp. 71–91. Sophocles, Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, University of Chicago Press, 1957.
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von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, Selected Plays and Libretti, edited and introduced by Michael Hamburger, Pantheon Books, 1963, p. xxxiii. ———, Three Plays: Death and the Fool, Electra, The Tower, translated and with an introduction by Alfred Schwarz, Wayne State University Press, 1966.
FURTHER READING Bangerter, Lowell, A., Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Frederick Ungar, 1977. This concise book is probably the best introduction in English to the entire range of Hofmannsthal’s work in all genres. Bennet, Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theatres of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 1988. In this advanced study, Bennet focuses on von Hofmannsthal’s poetic, philosophical and ethical concerns. It includes discussion of the role of literature in society and von Hofmannsthal’s search for a response to the problem of the historical development of culture. Bremer, Jan Maarten, ‘‘A Daughter Fatally Blocked: Von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,’’ in Fathers and Mothers in Literature, edited by Henk Hillenaar and Walter Schonau, Rodopi, 1994, pp. 113–21. This brief article offers a comparison between the Electra of Sophocles and that of von Hofmannsthal. Bremer argues that von Hofmannsthal was more skilled in portraying the pathology of the human mind. Michael, Nancy C., Elektra and Her Sisters: Three Female Characters in Schnitzler, Freud, and Hofmannsthal, Peter Lang, 2001. Michael explores the connections between literary censorship and the political repression of women in works by Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Electra), all written between 1900 and 1905. Ward, Philip Marshall, ‘‘Hofmannsthal, Elektra and the Representation of Women’s Behaviour through Myth,’’ in German Life and Letters, Vol. 53, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 37–55. Ward suggests that Electra is von Hofmannsthal’s portrait of a woman who transgresses the socially acceptable bounds of female behavior. This is shown by her negative attitude to motherhood, inappropriate sexuality, free flow of words, and practice of staring (ladylike behavior demanded a lowering of the eyes and no inappropriate eye contact).
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Golden Boy Golden Boy was Clifford Odets’s most successful theatrical production. First published in 1937 in the United States, the play was a dramatic departure from Odets’s previous plays—social dramas that had propelled the playwright to instant stardom. Unlike these early plays, which many later critics dismissed as propaganda pieces, Golden Boy focused more on personal issues. Odets has stated in interviews that he wrote the play as a deliberate attempt to create a hit. It was his intention to use the profits from the play’s production to help support the Group Theatre, the famous theatre that had produced his first plays and where most of his friends still acted. The play was written after Odets returned from a screenwriting job in Hollywood, a position that drew criticism from those who had pinned their hopes on Odets as a social reformer. In fact, many critics have noted that the struggle that Joe Bonaparte, Odets’s protagonist, faces in Golden Boy mirrors the struggle that Odets himself faced.
CLIFFORD ODETS 1937
While Odets was torn between Hollywood and the New York theatre scene, Joe is torn between the high-pressure, big-money business of boxing and his dream of becoming a violinist. Joe’s dilemma is complicated when he finds somebody who is willing to sponsor him as a boxer and risks injuring his hands—a fatal blow to his career as a violinist. Although Joe receives advice from his father, a lovable Italian man, the strongest influences in the play turn out to be his managers as well as Lorna, the girlfriend of one of his managers—with whom he
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falls in love. While there are no direct references to Hollywood, some critics have surmised that Odets’s story was an attempt to snub Hollywood in his drama, something that he did more overtly with his 1949 play, The Big Knife. Golden Boy spawned a movie and a musical, both of which combined with the play to make a lasting impression. A current copy of the play is available in Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, published by Grove Press in 1993.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia. Odets’s father, Louis, was a printer who owned his own printing plant by the time Odets was twelve. Odets’s father also eventually owned a lucrative advertising agency. When Odets quit high school in 1923 to pursue poetry and then acting, his father was infuriated. However, he eventually gave his permission for Odets to try to be an actor. During the next seven years, Odets acted in a number of roles, but was not very successful, although in 1929 he was hired as an understudy for Spencer Tracy in Warren F. Lawrence’s Conflict. Another member of the play’s cast introduced Odets to the Theatre Guild, which in turn led him to the Group Theatre, which he joined in 1930. As a starving artist and a witness to the effects of the Great Depression, Odets, like others, searched for a solution to the country’s ills. In 1934, Odets briefly joined the American Communist Party, although he left eight months later. In 1935, Odets and the Group Theatre produced the playwright’s first play, Waiting for Lefty, a fiery one-act play that detailed the horrors ordinary union workers faced. The play, which used the 1934 New York City cab strike as its setting, advocated striking and its passion quickly won over critics and audiences, which made Odets a star overnight. Following this success, Odets and the Group Theatre produced another social drama, Awake and Sing! also in 1935. However, after his next two plays, Till the Day I Die and Paradise Lost (both produced in 1935), failed to generate the same kind of success, Odets accepted a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Although he has publicly stated that this decision was a move to make more money to support the Group Theatre, it was viewed by many as a desertion from the social cause. In fact, in his next play Golden Boy (1937), the protagonist, Joe, must decide between art and material success, and many
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critics cited Odets’s own struggle with this issue. Following Golden Boy, Odets wrote several more plays, most of which were not successful. Although Odets was widely regarded in his early career as the greatest American playwright since Eugene O’Neill, Odets’s works rarely earned the major awards that O’Neill’s did. However, Odets was awarded a New Theatre League Award and the Yale Drama Prize in 1935, both for Waiting for Lefty. In addition, he received an Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1961. Odets died on August 14, 1963, in Los Angeles.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Golden Boy opens in the Broadway office of fight manager, Tom Moody. Moody fights with his girlfriend, Lorna Moon, over the fact that Moody has not yet divorced his wife and married Lorna. A boy comes in and tells Moody that his fighter, Mr. Kaplan, has broken his hand and cannot fight his opponent, the Baltimore Chocolate Drop, that night. The boy, Joe Bonaparte, offers to fight instead. Moody laughs at the idea at first, but is desperate for another boxer, and so he agrees to it.
Act 1, Scene 2 Later that night, at the Bonaparte home, Joe’s father, Mr. Bonaparte, sits at the table with his Jewish friend, Mr. Carp, and his son-in-law, Siggie. Mr. Bonaparte refuses to buy Siggie a taxicab, but later shows Mr. Carp the expensive violin that he plans on giving to Joe for his twenty-first birthday the next day. Frank Bonaparte, Mr. Bonaparte’s oldest son and a labor organizer, sees an article in the paper that talks about Joe’s fight. Joe comes in and says that he may take a break from music to fight some more and make some real money. He is ashamed of his poverty and sees fighting as the answer to his problems. As a result, Mr. Bonaparte holds back from giving Joe his birthday present.
Act 1, Scene 3 Two months later, Moody, his partner Roxy Gottlieb, Joe’s trainer, Tokio, and Lorna sit in Moody’s office, discussing the fact that Joe is holding back in the ring, a situation that is killing Joe’s popularity as a boxer. Lorna leaves and Mr.
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Bonaparte comes in, revealing the fact that Joe is afraid to hurt his hands because it will destroy his chances at a music career. The men try to appeal to Joe to give up his dream of being a musician and to embrace boxing, but Joe is unsure. Later, Moody explains the situation to Lorna, who says she will coerce Joe into fighting.
Act 1, Scene 4 A few nights later, Joe and Lorna sit on a park bench, talking. Joe is defensive of his differences, including his crossed eyes, and wishes that he could use his music to get even with the people who have made fun of him in the past. Lorna seizes on this as a way to promote the fighting lifestyle, by saying he can take out his aggressions on other people. Joe tries to analyze Lorna and talk about her affair with Moody, but she is violently opposed to his questions. Joe talks about how he really wants a fast sports car, and Lorna says that if he fights he will get the money to buy one. Joe agrees to fight.
Act 1, Scene 5 One week later, Joe and Lorna are at the Bonaparte home. While Joe packs a suitcase for his Midwest fighting tour, Lorna drinks heavily, and talks to Siggie, Anna, and Mr. Bonaparte about her hurtful past. Mr. Bonaparte asks Lorna to watch out for Joe, and to help him find his true path in life. When Joe is leaving, Mr. Bonaparte tries to give him the violin that he bought for him. Joe briefly plays the instrument, but then tells his father to return it. Joe asks his father for his blessing on his boxing career, but Mr. Bonaparte refuses and tells him to be careful for his hands.
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because Moody needs her and because she feels sorry for him. When Joe keeps pushing, asking her what she gets out of the relationship, she tells him how Moody rescued her from poverty. She says that she wants peace and quiet, not love, because she has been hurt by love before. However, Joe persists, and she confesses her love for him saying that she will break off her relationship with Moody.
Act 2, Scene 3 Act 2, Scene 1 Six months later, Moody, Roxy, Lorna, and Tokio watch Joe as he trains in the gym, and note that Joe is still occasionally distracted by memories of his music. Eddie Fuseli, a renowned gambler and gangster, comes in and says he wants to help manage Joe. Moody refuses at first, until they leave it up to Joe, who agrees to let Fuseli help manage him as long as Fuseli does not interfere in his personal life as the others have. Later, Moody worries that Joe is getting too hard to manage and encourages Lorna to seduce Joe away from fast cars and his old life.
In Moody’s office the next day, Lorna is restless, and they argue. Moody tells Lorna that his wife is granting him a divorce and that he can finally marry Lorna. Moody says that he does not like the way that Joe looks at Lorna, and they argue some more. Lorna suggests that she is going to leave him, but changes her mind when she sees that her leaving would destroy Moody. Joe and Fuseli walk into the office and catch Moody and Lorna kissing. Joe argues with Moody and Fuseli threatens Moody to leave Joe alone. Joe says that Lorna loves him, but Lorna professes her love for Moody. Joe and Fuseli leave and Lorna confesses to Tom that she loves Joe.
Act 2, Scene 2 A few nights later, Joe and Lorna sit in the park again. Joe confesses his love for Lorna, and encourages her to leave Moody. Lorna says that she cannot
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Act 2, Scene 4 Six weeks later in the dressing room before the Lombardo fight, Mr. Bonaparte and a number of
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others come and go, distracting Joe. Fuseli helps to clear out the room and leaves Joe alone with Tokio, who preps Joe for the fight. Although Joe is frustrated from the visits at first, he eventually starts shadow boxing, full of energy. Joe leaves to fight Lombardo, just as Pepper White, another boxer, comes back from winning his fight. Mr. Bonaparte comes back into the dressing room and sees Pepper’s deformed knuckles. He realizes that if Joe continues, his hands will be useless for anything except fighting. Joe comes in from his fight and reveals that he has broken his hand—signaling his total conversion into a fighter.
CHARACTERS Anna Anna is Joe’s sister and Siggie’s wife. Anna’s marriage is filled with love and devotion, and she and her husband frequently get into spirited fights. Anna plays the maternal role for Joe, in place of their deceased mother. When Joe is leaving for his first fighting tour, Anna helps him pack and instructs him on what types of clothes he needs to buy in the city.
Barker Act 3, Scene 1 Six months later Joe is in Moody’s office with Moody, Roxy, Tokio and two sports writers, one of whom is turned off by Joe’s cocky attitude. The other writer congratulates Moody on his engagement to Lorna, which is news to Joe. When Joe is alone, Lorna comes in and they soon start to argue. She accuses him of turning into a killer like Fuseli. Lorna leaves and Fuseli comes in. The two are dressed almost alike, another sign that Joe has succumbed to a materialistic lifestyle. Joe tries to leave his boxing career, but changes his mind when Fuseli threatens him.
Act 3, Scene 2 The next day, Lorna waits in Joe’s dressing room while he is fighting the Chocolate Drop. Fuseli comes in and tells her to leave town, since she is distracting Joe. Joe comes in from his fight and stops Fuseli from drawing his gun on Lorna. Joe soon finds out that his win against the Chocolate Drop has killed the boxer. Although Joe’s management focuses on the fact that it was a clean fight and Joe does not have to worry about being prosecuted, Joe is horrified that he has killed a man. Lorna decides to leave Moody. She and Joe flee the city in his sports car.
Act 3, Scene 3 At the Bonaparte home, Fuseli, Moody, Roxy, and Joe’s family wait for Joe to arrive, while Joe’s management celebrates Joe’s win. They are not sympathetic to the death of the boxer, but are stunned when they find out from a phone call that their prized possession, Joe, has died in a car crash. Moody is especially distraught over the loss of Lorna. The play ends with Mr. Bonaparte preparing to go claim Joe’s body and bring it home.
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Barker is the manager of the Baltimore Chocolate Drop and is distraught when Joe kills his boxer.
Frank Bonaparte Frank Bonaparte is Joe’s older brother and a labor union representative for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. His role in fighting for what he believes in sharply contrasts with Joe’s choice to fight for money.
Joe Bonaparte Joe Bonaparte, known only as ‘‘Boy’’ in the first part of the first scene, is a talented violinist, who trades his musical dream for the chance to pursue a life of fame and fortune in boxing. In the beginning the fight promoter, Moody, loses his best fighter, Kaplan, on the day of a fight when Kaplan breaks his hand on Joe’s elbow. Joe lobbies to take Kaplan’s place, and is proud when he is not knocked out, although his family, particularly his father, is distraught when Joe says he is considering a fighting career. Joe continues to box, but he is torn between the violin and boxing, a fact that is evident in the ring—where he is noticeably pulling his punches to protect his hands. When Joe’s father reveals this fact to Joe’s managers, Moody and Roxy, and his trainer, Tokio, the three try to manipulate Joe into giving up his dreams of music. When this fails, Moody sends his girlfriend, Lorna Moon, to try to seduce Joe away from his old life. Joe, smitten with Lorna and craving the rich lifestyle of a boxer, reluctantly agrees. He rapidly improves his fighting technique, to the delight of his managers and the horror of his father. However, since Joe alienates his family, he rarely sees his father. When he does see him, Mr. Bonaparte is a constant reminder of Joe’s old life. Because of this, Eddie Fuseli, a gambler, gangster, and one of Joe’s new managers, tells Mr. Bonaparte
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Golden Boy was adapted as a film in 1939 by Columbia Pictures. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, the film features William Holden as Joe Bonaparte and Barbara Stanwyck as Lorna Moon. It is available on video from Columbia Tristar Home Video. • In 1964, Golden Boy was adapted as a Broadway musical, and ran for more than five hundred performances. The musical was produced by Hillard Elkins and starred Sammy Davis Jr.—an African-American actor—in the role of Joe Bonaparte, a racial change in Joe’s character that altered the plot line of the original play signifi-
to leave Joe’s dressing room before a fight. Nevertheless, when Joe breaks his hand during a fight, a sign that he is now committed to his boxing career, Mr. Bonaparte is there to see it. Joe’s immersion into the world of boxing is swift after this, and it is not long before he has exchanged his shy, sensitive personality for a cocky attitude and a murderous hate. This hate is fueled both by his childhood— where he was picked on a lot for his flamboyant name and crossed eyes—and by his scorned love for Lorna Moon. Joe spends money on materialistic possessions like a sports car, and begins to dress like Fuseli. When he tries to leave the boxing life, Fuseli threatens him. However, after Joe accidentally kills the Baltimore Chocolate Drop in the ring, he realizes that he is not the man he used to be. Lorna, engaged to Moody but now claiming her love for Joe, says they can start life fresh, and she and Joe speed away into the night in his sports car. Both are killed in a car accident.
Mr. Bonaparte Mr. Bonaparte is Joe’s Italian father, whom Joe alienates when he starts to get famous because of his boxing career. Mr. Bonaparte is a cheery old man who is hard to upset. He lives his life by values learned in his native Italy, which stress integrity and
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cantly. The musical version of the play addressed several racial issues, including interracial relationships. In addition, the production featured one of the first racially integrated casts on Broadway and an African-American music conductor—George Rhodes. The book of the musical was written by Odets and William Gibson and was published by Samuel French in 1965, although it is currently out of print. The music was composed by Charles Strouse with lyrics by Lee Adams. An original cast recording was released on compact disc in 1999, and is available from Razor & Tie.
following one’s nature. His distinctive Italian accent is a constant reminder of his origins. He believes that Joe is meant to be a great violinist, and encourages his son to follow this path. When the play starts, Mr. Bonaparte refuses to buy his son-inlaw a taxicab, but gladly spends twelve hundred dollars, on a new violin for Joe’s birthday. When Mr. Bonaparte finds out that Joe is thinking of leaving his music career to fight, he holds off on giving Joe his present, although he eventually does. Joe, after playing the violin briefly, makes his decision to fight and gives the violin back to his father. Joe’s actions upset the normally unflappable Mr. Bonaparte, who refuses to give Joe his blessing to fight. Mr. Bonaparte asks Lorna Moon to watch out for Joe, and to give him an update on whether Joe is planning on giving up music totally. As Joe progresses in his boxing career, he alienates his entire family, including his father, who eventually comes to see one of Joe’s boxing matches. He sadly gives Joe his blessing to fight. When Mr. Bonaparte sees the broken and deformed knuckles of another boxer in the dressing room, he realizes that if Joe’s hands get hurt, he will never be able to go back to his music career. Shortly after that, Joe breaks a hand. When Joe kills the Baltimore Chocolate Drop, he is worried what his father will think. Although his
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father is sad for the dead boxer, he is even more distraught when he finds out Joe has died in a car accident. However, he pulls himself together to go claim his son’s dead body and bring it home.
Boy See Joe Bonaparte
Mr. Carp
Roxy Gottlieb
Mr. Carp is Mr. Bonaparte’s pessimistic friend, who often backs up his gloomy statements with quotes from the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Mr. Carp thinks all professional sports are pointless. His pessimism is sharply contrasted with Mr. Bonaparte’s optimism. Joe gets some of his education by reading Mr. Carp’s encyclopedia.
Roxy Gottlieb is one of the partners who manages Joe. In the beginning, Roxy, like Moody and the others, does not believe that Joe will ever be a great fighter, but they are desperate and take Joe on anyway. When Moody, Roxy, and Tokio are trying to discreetly persuade Joe into giving up music for boxing, Roxy is the one who gives away the fact that they are trying to manipulate Joe. Although Roxy likes the money that Joe is bringing in, he along with Moody, is very disparaging about Joe whenever Joe does not do what they want. He is worried that Joe’s purchase of a fast car is a dangerous risk, and this proves to be right when Joe dies in a car accident at the end of the play.
Drake Drake is one of two sports writers whom Moody has Joe talk to the night before his fight with the Chocolate Drop. Unlike Lewis, the other sports writer, Drake is disgusted by Joe’s cockiness.
Driscoll Driscoll is the person who comes into the dressing room to examine Joe’s gloves for tampering, after Joe kills the Chocolate Drop in his second fight with the boxer.
Eddie Fuseli Eddie Fuseli is a notorious, homosexual Italian gangster, who is heavily involved in gambling, and who buys a piece of Joe’s management. Although Joe’s other managers, Tom Moody and Roxy Gottlieb, do not want to sell any of their share to Fuseli, they are intimidated by his violent reputation. Also, when Fuseli says to leave it up to Joe to decide who is going to manage him, Joe is indifferent, and Fuseli takes this as his cue to force his way into the partnership. When Fuseli first introduces himself to Joe, he invokes their shared Italian heritage and says that he wants to see Joe with the championship title. He says that he does not care about money, and just wants to help Joe out, which he can do with his good connections. However, the day before Joe is getting ready to fight the Chocolate Drop, Joe expresses his desire to leave the boxing life. At this point, Fuseli loses his tender demeanor with Joe and threatens him, saying that he owes a lot to Fuseli. In addition, in the same conversation, Joe watches as Fuseli calmly places thousands of dollars worth of bets on Joe, through different bookies, thus proving his desire for mone-
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tary gain. At this point, although Joe is having thoughts about leaving the boxing business, he has become too much a part of the materialistic side of it, to the point where he has started dressing like Fuseli. The gangster displays his violent side on several occasions, most notably when anybody tries to disrupt Joe’s concentration before a fight.
Lewis Lewis is one of two sports writers whom Moody has Joe talk to the night before his fight with the Chocolate Drop, and is one of the few who admires Joe’s cockiness. Lewis is also the one who mentions Moody’s upcoming wedding to Lorna, which is news to Joe.
Mickey Mickey is Pepper White’s manager, who tries to discourage Pepper from pursuing his affair with a married woman.
Tom Moody Tom Moody is Joe’s initial fight manager and the fiancé of Lorna Moon. Moody is a man in his forties who used to manage all of the great professional boxers. He is distraught when he hears from Joe the day of a fight that Moody’s best boxer, Kaplan, has broken his hand while training with Joe. Moody is even more disturbed when Joe pressures him to let Joe fight in Kaplan’s place, but is happy when Joe is not knocked out. However, after several fights, Moody realizes that Joe is holding back in the ring by pulling his punches. When Joe’s father tells Moody that it is because Joe is a violinist and is afraid of hurting his hands, Moody is happy again, thinking that he can manipulate Joe into giving up his dream of being a musician. Like the other
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managers, Moody sees Joe as an object to be obtained and used. To this end, he instructs his girlfriend, Lorna Moon, to seduce Joe away from his old life and into the boxing life. This works, and Joe steadily devotes himself to boxing, in the process developing a cocky attitude. This does not sit well with Moody, who starts to wish Joe would lose a fight, even though it would cut into Moody’s profits. At the same time, Moody is forced to give up some of his profits when Eddie Fuseli, a gambler and gangster, coerces Moody into selling a share of Joe’s management. Lorna’s seductions work all too well on Joe, who falls in love with her. Although Lorna feels the same about Joe and says that she will tell Moody she is leaving him, she cannot do it at first. Moody is a desperate man and tells Lorna that he would be lost without her. Lorna is struck by this vulnerability and renounces her intention to leave Moody, although she later tells Moody that she loves Joe. Lorna’s inability to leave Moody enrages Joe, and the love triangle creates much animosity between Joe and Moody. At one point, Moody is so sick of Joe that he offers to sell his entire management portion to Fuseli, although he does not end up doing this. The fight with the Baltimore Chocolate Drop is the night before Moody’s planned wedding to Lorna, who dies with Joe in a car accident.
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However, Lorna is torn by her decision, and confesses her love for Joe to Moody, after Joe is not around to hear it. This fact does not impede Moody’s engagement to Lorna, an event that further enrages Joe. From this point on, most conversations between Joe and Lorna are heated, and Lorna is the one who tells Joe that he is turning into a killer, which turns out to be a prophetic line when Joe kills the Chocolate Drop. Fuseli sees the effect that Lorna is having on Joe and tries to keep her away from him. In the end, however, Lorna is the only one who understands the pain that Joe is going through after killing a man. They leave together in Joe’s car and drive into the night, intending to leave their respective lives behind. However, Lorna and Joe are killed in a car accident in the process.
Siggie Siggie is Joe’s brother-in-law and Anna’s husband. Although he pleads with his father-in-law, Mr. Bonaparte, to buy him a taxicab, Mr. Bonaparte will not. Siggie is frustrated because he wants to open his own taxicab business instead of driving a cab for a company, where he will never make enough money to get ahead in life. He has a passionate relationship with his wife Anna, and the two although sometimes combative, are very loving.
Tokio Lorna Moon Lorna Moon is Tom Moody’s fiancée, although she is in love with Joe. When Joe first introduces himself to Moody and tries to get Moody to let him fight for him, Lorna encourages Joe to keep pressuring Moody. Although Lorna is very perceptive, Moody and his partners are very chauvinistic to her, often kicking her out of the office when she tries to give her opinion. However, once Moody realizes that Joe is struggling with his decision to give up the violin, Moody appeals to Lorna to use her feminine charms to seduce Joe away from his home life and musical dreams. Although Lorna starts out trying to do just this, she eventually falls in love with Joe. However, when she sees what her leaving would do to Moody, she fails to acknowledge her love for Joe, a fact that inspires hate in Joe, which he uses to win in the boxing ring. Lorna has come from a bad home life, where her father beat her mother repeatedly and her mother committed suicide. As a result, Lorna drinks heavily on many occasions. When she meets Moody, he helps pull her out of poverty, a fact that influences her decision to scorn Joe and stay with Moody.
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Tokio is Joe’s trainer, and is one of the few people outside of Joe’s family who shows genuine concern for Joe’s feelings. When Moody and Roxy are trying to get down on Joe for pulling his punches, Tokio defends Joe, saying that he is developing into a great boxer. Tokio uses soothing language in the dressing room to calm Joe down, and is generally the most relaxed out of all of the men involved in the handling of Joe. As such, Joe claims that Tokio is one of the only people who understands him.
Pepper White Pepper White is a boxer who tries to pick a fight with Joe in their shared dressing room. Pepper is eight years older than Joe—old for a boxer—and is not very smart. This fact is evidenced by the argument that erupts with his manager when he thinks the twelve hundred dollars the manager has promised him is lower than the thousand dollars he usually collects for a fight. Pepper shows Mr. Bonaparte his busted knuckles, and Mr. Bonaparte realizes that if Joe continues boxing, his hands will be useless for music. Pepper is having an affair with a married woman.
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The Great Depression is the most devastating economic collapse that has hit the United States thus far, although the current downturn has been compared to it in some ways. Research the various economic theories that attempt to explain both the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the recent stock market drop that helped lead the country into recession. Explain either the similarities or the differences between the two economic collapses, using your research and any necessary visuals such as charts and graphs to support your claims. • Research the history of unions, and identify the very first independent labor union that was formed in America. Write a biography about one of the people who helped to start this union, and describe this union’s initial mission statement or goals. • Research the life of Joe Louis, the famous boxer from the 1930s. Compare Louis’s life story with
THEMES The Arts versus Materialism When the play starts out, Joe is a talented musician whose dream is to play beautiful violin music. To this end, Joe’s father, Mr. Bonaparte, secretly buys a very expensive violin for his son’s birthday. Mr. Bonaparte’s friend, Mr. Carp, plays the pessimist asking: ‘‘could a boy make a living playing this instrument in our competitive civilization today?’’ Mr. Bonaparte’s response illustrates the idea that art and financial success do not always go hand in hand: ‘‘Don’t expect for Joe to be a millionaire. He don’t need it, to be millionaire.’’ However, Joe has other plans. When he announces to his family that he is going to fight, he says it is for money: ‘‘I’m good—I went out to earn some money and I earned! I had a professional fight tonight— maybe I’ll have some more.’’ But the decision is not this easy for Joe. Although he does become a boxer,
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the life story of Joe Bonaparte in the story. Using examples from the story and from Louis’s life, explain how Odets might have used Louis as a model for Bonaparte. • As part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt helped find or create work for actors, musicians, writers, and other artists, each of which had a separate program devoted to their needs. Research these programs, and pick one that interests you. List the artists and works that came out of this movement, and discuss how they either did or did not make a lasting impression on the arts and on society. • In the play, Joe demonstrates a talent for both boxing and music, which some critics say is unrealistic. Find a famous athlete from history who possessed both an athletic and an artistic skill. Discuss how this person used both of his or her skills.
he holds back during his first several fights, afraid to hurt his hands and forever lose music as a possible career. When Mr. Bonaparte goes to visit Joe’s managers to find out how he is doing, Roxy tells him of their intentions: ‘‘We want to make your boy famous—a millionaire, but he won’t let us—won’t cooperate.’’ This phrase, ‘‘a millionaire,’’ echoes Mr. Bonaparte’s earlier comment to Mr. Carp. Once the managers find out from Mr. Bonaparte that Joe is afraid to break his hands for fear of not playing the violin again, they step up pressure on him and Lorna tries to talk Joe into fighting. Joe, seduced in part by the idea of fast cars and other material possessions, decides to fight. However, when Joe asks his father for his blessing to fight, Mr. Bonaparte does not give it and says ‘‘Be careful fora your hands!’’ Yet in the end, Joe’s hands are injured. In the fourth scene of the second act, Joe is in the dressing room with his father after a fight. ‘‘Better cut it off,’’ Joe tells his trainer, indicating
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that his hand is broken. Joe is proud of his broken hand, which signals his total conversion into the fighting life, and says, ‘‘Hallelujah!! It’s the beginning of the world!’’ With a broken hand, Joe will no longer have the dexterity in his fingers necessary to play the violin.
tions note the following: ‘‘Completely enraged and out of control, EDDIE half brings his gun out from under his left armpit.’’ If Joe had not stopped him, he might have killed Lorna.
Although Joe accepts this fact with glee, later he regrets his decision. He tries to leave the boxing world before his last fight, but Fuseli stops him with a threat. However, after he kills the Baltimore Chocolate Drop in the ring, Joe realizes that he has strayed far from his original artistic intentions. In the dressing room after the fight, Joe tells Lorna: ‘‘Lorna, I see what I did. I murdered myself, too!’’ Although Lorna suggests that he give up the fighting business and ‘‘go back to your music,’’ Joe is distraught: ‘‘But my hands are ruined. I’ll never play again!’’ Lorna and Joe try to escape in his fast car, but the car, a symbol of the materialism that killed the artistic boy inside him, now literally kills Joe and Lorna when they get in a car accident. There is no going back on Joe’s decision to abandon his music career.
Besides money and possessions, Joe also chooses to fight out of shame. He is ashamed about being poor, but his shame goes deeper than that. Joe is cross-eyed, a fact that he is embarrassed about and one which other characters mention constantly. When Moody does not want to let Joe fight in the beginning, he says: ‘‘You’re brash, you’re fresh, you’re callow—and you’re cock-eyed! In fact, you’re an insult to my whole nature!’’ When Moody later laughs at Joe because of his eyes, Joe tells him ‘‘I don’t like it. . . . I don’t want you to do it,’’ and grabs Moody as if he is going to hit him. Joe’s crosseyed condition is immediately plastered in the headlines of the newspapers after his fight, as Frank notes: ‘‘Flash: Chocolate Drop fails to K.O. new cock-eyed wonder.’’ This undue attention to Joe’s eyes has plagued him since he was a kid, as he notes to Lorna: ‘‘People have hurt my feelings for years. I never forget.’’ Joe’s eyes are not the only thing that have made him feel ashamed over the years. As he notes to Lorna, ‘‘Even my name was special— Bonaparte.’’ This flamboyant name plagues Joe, because it reminds people of the famous French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte. Several people make fun of this name including Drake, one of the newspaper reporters, who says: ‘‘Bonaparte, I’ll watch for Waterloo with more than interest!’’ a reference to the famous battle that Napoleon lost.
Violence The play is saturated with violence. In addition to the obvious references during the preparation for the boxing matches, and the deaths of both Joe and the Chocolate Drop, Odets includes several other episodes of violence. In the third scene of the first act, Roxy notes that Joe has been pulling his punches in the ring, and that the crowd does not like him as a result. Says Roxy: ‘‘He’s a clever boy, that Bonaparte, and speedy—but he’s first-class lousy in the shipping department!’’ The crowd likes to see brutality, not technique or fancy footwork, and when Joe does not deliver this to them, they do not like him. However, later in the play, after Joe has transformed himself into a brutal boxer, the stage directions note during his fight that ‘‘The roar of THE CROWD mounts up and calls for a kill.’’ In addition to the boxing crowds, violence is expressed in other ways. Siggie and his wife, Anna, beat each other; Frank, Joe’s brother, gets injured in a labor strike; and Fuseli, a notorious gangster, threatens violence often, as when he warns Moody not to pick on Joe: ‘‘It would be funny if your arms got broke.’’ Later in the play, Joe tells Fuseli that ‘‘You use me like a gun!’’ another reference to Fuseli’s violent tendencies. When Fuseli thinks Lorna is distracting Joe and making him lose a fight, he tries to kick her out of Joe’s dressing room. When she does not move quick enough, the stage direc-
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Shame
STYLE Social Drama Odets earned his fame through the social dramas of his early career which openly advocated that the masses fight for their rights by participating in strikes or other protests. Although later plays like Golden Boy are not as overt in their references, some critics still consider these plays social dramas, in part because they share the same spirit as the earlier plays. For example, in Golden Boy, Joe is afraid of poverty, a common social problem during the 1930s, the depression years when the play takes place. When Joe is explaining his reasons for wanting to fight, he tells his father: ‘‘Do you think I like this feeling of no possessions?’’ Joe sees boxing as a
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much more promising way to get out of the poverty in which he and his family live, and as a result is willing to sacrifice his dream of music. This tragic decision underscores the plight of the working class, which often has no choice but to follow money and not dreams. The play has other references to social issues, such as the problems between labor unions and industry management. Frank, Joe’s brother, is an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), who must leave often to help settle disputes between striking workers and their management. As Frank notes when he is first introduced, ‘‘There’s hell down there in tex-tiles,’’ referring to a strike that is happening in a textile company in the South. In the last scene of the play, the stage directions note that Frank sits with ‘‘a bandage around his head. ‘‘Later in the scene, after Fuseli mentions it, Siggie, Frank’s brother-in-law, tells Fuseli that ‘‘They gave it to him in a strike.’’ The ‘‘They’’ is most likely referring to hired thugs, police, or the National Guard, all groups that were called in to break up strikes, with violence, if necessary. Odets’s use of these images and dialogue is a clear indication that he is trying to send a social message about the labor problems in his time.
Language Critics have often commented on Odets’s command of language. In most of his plays, characters speak in realistic, distinct ways. This play is no different. The most distinctive use of language is the Italian accent and halted speech of Joe’s father, Mr. Bonaparte. From the moment Joe’s father is introduced, the stage directions indicate that he ‘‘talks with an Italian accent.’’ In addition to this, his speech is often shortened from that used in normal English, such as when he says, ‘‘I don’t go in taxicab business.’’ Normally, somebody speaking English would say, ‘‘I don’t want to go into the taxicab business.’’ Mr. Bonaparte also tends to add extra letters onto some of his words, and uses word constructions in different ways. For example, in another example from the same scene, Mr. Bonaparte says ‘‘I don’t expects for Joe to drive taxi.’’ Once again, the extra ‘‘s’’ on the end of the word ‘‘expect,’’ coupled with the use of the word, ‘‘for,’’ in an awkward way, gives Joe’s father a distinctive, foreign style of speech, even without the accent. While others in the play outside of Joe’s family make fun of Mr. Bonaparte’s speech, his language is important. It serves as a vivid reminder of the old world values of Italy, which contrast sharply with
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the capitalistic values of America. In addition to Mr. Bonaparte, Odets manipulates language in other ways, such as the gangster-style street talk of Fuseli.
Foreshadowing In the play, Odets makes use of some very overt foreshadowing techniques which plant clues that tip the reader off to what may happen in the future. The foreshadowing shows up most clearly in two deaths— Joe and the Baltimore Chocolate Drop. In the very first scene, Moody talks to Lorna about ‘‘Cy Webster who got himself killed in a big, red Stutz.’’ The reference to the dead boxer on its own may not let the reader know that Joe is going to die, but it is backed up by several other references. In the fourth scene of the first act, Joe goes on at length to Lorna about how he wants a fast car, saying that: ‘‘Those cars are poison in my blood,’’ and ‘‘Gee, I like to stroke that gas!’’ In addition to this, there are several other references to fast cars, speeding, and the danger that is involved, most of which are said by Joe’s managers. Says Moody: ‘‘But you and your speeding worries me!’’ As a result of these and other references, Joe’s death by an automobile accident in his fast car should come as no surprise since the thought of that ending has been built up in the reader’s mind from the beginning of the play. The other major death in the play, the death of the Chocolate Drop in the boxing ring, is also foreshadowed, although not as overtly as Joe’s death. The play itself builds on its violence, getting increasingly more brutal as it goes on. This is an indication that the ultimate example of violence, killing, may be coming. However, Fuseli also offers a direct reference to murder in the fourth scene of the second act, when he tells Joe to: ‘‘Go out there and kill Lombardo! Send him out to Woodlawn! Tear his skull off!’’ These references to death and burial foreshadow the eventual death of the Chocolate Drop, whom Joe kills at the end of the play.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Great Depression Although the exact causes of the Great Depression are still debated, most historians agree that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 helped to usher in this huge economic downturn. However, as the country began to sink financially, President Herbert Hoover, along with many others, thought that the crisis was
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1930s: The Great Depression begins shortly after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and continues throughout the 1930s, shattering the financial lives of many Americans. Today: America is experiencing a recession, which many believe is caused by the crashing of overinflated stocks, mainly in Internet-related businesses. Many Americans lose their retirement or other savings after their investments in these stocks are lost or depleted. • 1930s: Roosevelt’s New Deal programs are meant as a temporary means of assistance to get American citizens back on their feet. While Roosevelt believes in helping individuals through federal
temporary. Unfortunately, the situation only got worse. This fact, coupled with Hoover’s unyielding stance in not providing federal public aid to individuals, meant that an increasing number of individuals and families were losing their jobs. Starvation became a real issue, and crowds of men would gather around the backs of restaurants, fighting over food scraps in the garbage. The suicide rate steadily rose, and millions of families left their homes to try to find work. In many cases these migrant families would set up shelters on vacant lots in other cities and towns; groups of these shelters came to be known as Hoovervilles.
Boxing in the 1930s Many people sought relief from the horrors of everyday life in the depression through escapist activities like going to the movies or sporting events, when they could afford them. In such depressed times, sports franchises had to come up with increasingly more sensational events to get people to watch their matches. This was especially true with boxing which at the time was second in popularity only to baseball. In 1935, Joe Louis, a young African-American boxer who had stormed through the amateur ranks, signed a large contract—signal-
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aid, he places his focus on aid that keeps people working, so that people can regain their selfsufficiency. Today: Welfare programs, one of the legacies of the New Deal, have largely been abandoned. Many people who have come to depend on welfare benefits are forced to enter the workforce. • 1930s: During the Depression years, many people try to temporarily forget the miseries of their daily reality by attending movies, sporting events, and other forms of escapist entertainment. Today: Reality television shows like CBS’s phenomenally successful Survivor, spawn a huge revolution in television programming.
ing a new era of wealth for boxers. Louis energized the professional boxing scene as he fought his way to become the world heavyweight champion in 1937. Louis, also known as the Brown Bomber, had real crowd appeal, and his fights helped to sell many tickets. In 1938, in a symbolic match against Max Schmeling of Germany—a member of the Nazi Party—Louis won in front of eighty thousand fans at Yankee Stadium.
Roosevelt and the New Deal While people tried to escape their problems through movies and sporting events, however, the nation’s economy continued to plummet. By 1933, the country was faced with an unusually high unemployment rate of nearly twenty-five percent. On March 4, 1933, with the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American people had new hope. Roosevelt, who had campaigned and won on the promise to help build America’s economy and get people jobs, had a big job to do, and he wasted no time. In his first three months of office, dubbed the Hundred Days by the newspapers, Roosevelt worked with Congress to pass an unprecedented amount of legislation. This legislation was designed to help shore up and rebuild the nation’s
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weakened economy and work force. The wealth of programs that resulted from this legislation was collectively known as the New Deal.
Roosevelt and the Labor Issue One of the areas that Roosevelt had a particular interest in was labor, and several of his early legislative acts addressed the problems of both putting people to work and making sure they were treated fairly. Through the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), Roosevelt guaranteed collective bargaining for employees, which led to the establishment of unions in many industries. Although unions had been around in the past, they were often controlled by business and therefore not always committed to representing workers’ rights. As part of the NIRA, Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which tried to stabilize prices and wages. However, in 1935 the NIRA was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and the NRA was disbanded. When this happened, the NRA safeguards, particularly minimum wages and maximum hours for workers, were largely ignored by businesses once again.
Labor Unrest These two issues, wages and hours, took center stage in the labor movement in the 1930s. Labor unions, which had been steadily increasing in political and bargaining power throughout the decade, began to clash more frequently with industry. Many new union members were recent immigrants, who had already seen discrimination both in their workplace and in society, so they were primed for a fight. However, the unions themselves were experiencing some division. In 1934 and 1935, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a controlling body for many of the older unions—which were organized by skill or craft—was forced to recognize many of the newer unions—which were organized by industry or workplace. As a result, the AFL set up the Committee for Industrial Organization to address the needs of these industry workers. However, the Committee chose to split off on its own and form a new organization, eventually known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the play, Joe’s brother, Frank, is a union organizer for the CIO. Still, despite this division between AFL and CIO, the major conflict was between the unions and industry management. In the mid-1930s, this conflict often took the form of strikes, where workers would refuse to work until their demands were met. These workers would often march around the out-
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side of their company, holding up picket signs. A common retaliation from the company was to hire temporary replacement workers, known as scabs, to help keep the company running. As a result, the most effective strike was the sit-down strike, in which workers would take over a company and barricade themselves inside, preventing scabs from coming in to replace them. Although these strikes— ultimately ruled unconstitutional—often led to violence between the strikers, industry management, hired thugs, police, and even the National Guard, they were extremely effective at getting management to settle contracts. In 1938, as part of the second wave of reform programs known as the Second New Deal, Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established federal guidelines for the two hot issues—minimum wages and maximum hours.
The Onset of World War II Debate still rages today on how much Roosevelt’s sweeping reforms actually helped to end the depression. Most historians agree that, while these programs did help put some people back to work and shore up the economy—as well as establish many important agencies—it was the onset of World War II in Europe in 1939 that caused the economy to boom once again. As the massive wartime production effort swept through America, many of the unemployed found jobs once again, and the Great Depression was over.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Odets’s earliest politically charged plays like Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Awake and Sing! (1935), performed by the now famous Group Theatre, propelled Odets to overnight stardom. These two plays were well received by most critics for the gritty portrayal of what life was like for Americans during the Great Depression. In fact, many critics had high hopes for Odets’s career as a social playwright. Golden Boy signaled the start of the next phase of Odets’s career, where he wrote plays that focused less on social criticism and more on psychology and personal relationships. Michael J. Mendelsohn, in his 1969 book, Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist, notes this change, stating that: ‘‘In thus directing attention toward his central character, Odets considerably narrows his earlier focus.’’ Golden Boy received mixed reviews from the critics when it
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Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Stanwyck, and William Holden in the 1939 film adaptation of Golden Boy, directed by Rouben Mamoulian
debuted on Broadway in 1937. In his 1937 review in the Nation, critic Joseph Wood Krutch notes that: ‘‘There are moments when ‘Golden Boy’ seems near to greatness; there are others when it trembles on the edge of merely strident melodrama.’’ Likewise, in her 1938 review in Theatre Arts Monthly, Edith J. R. Isaacs notes of Odets that: ‘‘He has, moreover, that gift of rhythmic speech which is the mark of the more-than-one play author,’’ but says further that this is a gift that ‘‘Odets has not yet quite under control.’’ Much of the criticism of the play centered around Odets’s personal life. Golden Boy was the first play that Odets wrote after returning from a Hollywood screenwriting job. Critics made much of Odets’s decision to leave the New York theatre scene for Hollywood, which many saw as going against his earlier stance of protesting large, corporate organizations such as movie studios. However, Odets’s move was financial, not political. He hoped to be able to support the Group Theatre—the independent theatre company that had produced his earlier plays—through his Hollywood salary. In fact, in ‘‘How a Playwright Triumphs,’’ a 1966 Harper’s Magazine article by Odets that was adapted from a 1961 interview, the playwright notes that this
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was particularly the case for Golden Boy, a fact that disturbed Odets. Says the playwright: ‘‘it seemed to me to be really immoral to write a play for money.’’ Because of this, critics have associated the main theme of Golden Boy—the struggle to choose between art and materialism—with Odets’s own struggles as an artist. In 1963, Catharine Hughes notes in her Commonweal article that, ‘‘As much as the Joe Bonaparte of that play, he was constantly seeking to reconcile two worlds.’’ And in 1970, Allan Lewis writes in his American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre: ‘‘Odets seemed troubled by success and his desertion of a cause. Golden Boy is his own story, raising the question of whether art and commerce mix.’’ Some critics even posed the idea that Odets’s play, while on the surface a play about a young man’s choice between music and boxing, was really an indictment of Hollywood. Says Gerald Peary in his article for the Winter 1986/1987 issue of Sight and Sound: ‘‘In Golden Boy, Odets, the insider, thumbed his nose at Hollywood.’’ Peary says that Odets expected his readers to recognize Bonaparte’s meteoric rise to the top as the structure of a formulaic Hollywood movie, but notes that the play had a twist. Says Peary: ‘‘Odets mocked Hollywood with
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the downbeat off-screen deaths of Joe and Lorna, as intentionally unmotivated as the most tacked-on studio ending.’’ In his 1962 book, Clifford Odets, R. Baird Shuman, like many critics, notes that ‘‘the author’s Hollywood experience shows itself in the pat plot and characterization of the play.’’ Shuman also notes that many critics have questioned the very premise of the story, asking ‘‘whether it is believable that a man with the sensitive hands of a violinist, could, in reality, become a successful boxer.’’ Still, most critics had at least some good things to say about the work, which became Odets’s biggest commercial success. In its first run, Golden Boy played for 250 performances. In addition, Odets sold the movie rights for the play to Hollywood for $75,000, a move that allowed him to continue to provide financial support to the Group Theatre, at least for a time. However, while revivals of the play have been popular with audiences, critics have continued to offer mixed criticism, and many have focused on Odets’s earliest plays, labeling them as propaganda pieces. As William W. Demastes notes in the entry on Odets in his 1995 book, American Playwrights, 1880–1945: A Research and Production Sourcebook, the challenge is to look past this: ‘‘Current Odets scholarship needs to continue directing itself to seeing Odets as more than a firebrand of the 1930s.’’ There is some evidence that, in recent years, critics have followed Demastes’s advice, and Odets has once again been praised as an important playwright.
CRITICISM Ryan D. Poquette Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Odets’s use of violence and speed to set the stage for Joe’s fateful end in Golden Boy. In Odets’s Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte is a musician who decides to abandon his dream of music for fame and fortune in boxing. Even though Joe transforms himself into a killer, literally beating a man to death in the boxing ring, the sensitive, musical side of Joe cannot live with this fact. In the end, Joe’s newfound lifestyle of speed and violence leads to his death as he tries to escape his life in the boxing business in a fast car and crashes as a result.
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Odets’s play is built to reflect and inspire this violent and speedy end to Joe’s life. In fact, speed and violence act as twin turbines in the play. Once Joe has chosen to try the boxing life, these two forces propel him toward his fateful end. The play’s structure itself reveals the emphasis on speed in the work. The play consists of twelve scenes total, with five in the first act, four in the second act, and three in the third act. With this decreasing number of scenes in the play, the pace of Golden Boy gets faster from act to act. The speed of the play is helped even further by the use of fade-outs, a type of transition between scenes or acts that works by fading the light until it is dark, as opposed to lowering the stage’s curtain. The fade-out is a cinematic convention that creates a quicker transition between scenes or acts. Though the action only fades out for a short period of time, many of the scenes in the play jump forward in time by weeks or months when the light comes back on. This dizzying rush of time helps give the play its urgent quality. Even Joe’s decision to become a boxer is a quick one. Although he has been learning how to fight ‘‘These past two years, all over the city—in the gyms,’’ Joe makes the decision to fight in Kaplan’s place very quickly. When Kaplan is out with ‘‘a busted mitt’’ from hitting Joe’s elbow, Joe immediately comes to see Moody. Both Joe and his family note the speed of this change. Says Joe, ‘‘Tomorrow’s my birthday! I change my life!’’ Mr. Bonaparte, who is not used to moving this fast asks Joe: ‘‘Justa like that?’’ And his brother, Frank, asks him, ‘‘And what do you do with music?’’ Joe has trained his whole life to be a musician, so this drastic change appears sudden to his family. From this point on, Joe’s life is lived at breakneck speed. His decisions come fast and furious and the changes in Joe’s character are equally quick. As the reader learns from the scene 3, which is two months later, Joe is having a problem with pulling his punches because he is afraid of hurting his hands. Because of this, Moody, Roxy, and Tokio try to convince him to give up the idea of being a musician and focus on boxing. When this does not work, Lorna says she will try, and has a long talk with Joe in the park. Although Joe is reluctant at first, he feels trapped by his desire for speed, the type created by large sports cars. He decides to give up his music career in part because ‘‘Those cars are poison in my blood.’’ Says Joe, ‘‘When you sit in a car and speed you’re looking down at the world. Speed, speed, everything is speed.’’
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • In Golden Boy, Joe gives up his dreams of music to enter the brutal world of boxing. Today, violence in boxing sometimes extends outside the ring, as in the case of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, now an ex-convict. In Blood Season: Mike Tyson and the World of Boxing (1996), Phil Berger, a former boxing correspondent for the New York Times, uses Tyson’s violent story to examine the current state of boxing. Berger’s book gives a candid look at the boxers, promoters, and businessmen who help the business thrive today. • Following the recent reforms in the welfare system, millions were forced to get unskilled jobs. In an experiment to see whether or not women could survive on these low wages, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich left her middle-class life and put herself in their place. Her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, chronicles her attempts to get different lowpaying jobs, find places to live, and above all, survive. • In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, originally published in 1954, a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island during World War II are forced to survive on their own, without the aid of adults or the conveniences of civilization. In the process, many of the boys revert back to their primal instincts, with violent and murderous consequences. • In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, originally published in 1959, an African-American family in urban Chicago struggles to pull itself out of poverty. Conflicts arise—from the family and from society—when the family makes plans to use the leftover money from their dead father’s insurance policy to buy a house in a white suburb. Hansberry was the first AfricanAmerican woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
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• Odets used the events of the 1934 New York City cab strike to stage his one-act play Waiting for Lefty (1935). In the play, the taxi drivers’ union gathers in a meeting hall to discuss whether or not to strike, in the process sharing their stories of desperate poverty. A fast-moving play, it is also considered by many critics to be Odets’s most angry production. • In Odets’s play The Big Knife (1949), Charlie Castle, a movie actor, desperately attempts to leave the corruption of Hollywood for his former life in the New York theater. However, Castle is a part of the Hollywood system, and he finds that it is not always easy to leave. • Mr. Bonaparte’s friend, Mr. Carp, is a pessimist who frequently quotes the ideas of German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Many of the philosopher’s key ideas are contained in his twovolume collection, The World as Will and Idea, first published in Germany in 1819. • In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a depression-era family, the Joads, struggle to maintain their dignity in spite of crushing and desperate poverty. Although the Joads leave their home in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to go to California, where they are told that life is better, their situation only gets worse. Steinbeck’s novel of social protest captures the despair that many families in America felt during the Great Depression. • First published in 1970, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression chronicles the 1930s through the eyes of the people who lived it. Over the span of three decades, Terkel interviewed a wide cross-section of America to gather the firsthand accounts of the depression for his book. Interviewees include the young and old, politicians, gangsters, and sharecroppers.
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HE KNOWS THAT HE HAS PASSED A POINT OF NO RETURN. HIS HANDS ARE BUSTED AND UNFIT FOR MUSIC, HIS MORALITY HAS BEEN STAINED AND HE HAS NO DESIRE TO FIGHT ANYMORE. THE ONLY OPTION LEFT IS TO FLEE. . . .’’
Following his decision to not pull his punches, Joe’s life speeds up considerably in the second act. He goes on a road trip to gain some necessary fighting experience, gets hooked up with a third person to manage him (Fuseli), pledges his love to Lorna and then is cruelly turned down by Lorna in front of Moody. Each successive event alienates Joe a little more from his true nature (and his family), and speeds up the play. The third act is even quicker as the play builds to its climax. Violence also plays a huge role in the play. The play starts on a violent note, as Moody and Lorna are in the middle of an argument in Moody’s office. The first line of the play is an exclamation from Moody: ‘‘Pack up your clothes and go! Go! Who the hell’s stopping you?’’ From this first line, the audience can tell they are in for a heated scene, and the argumentative dialogue that follows quickly draws the audience into the play. While Lorna says, ‘‘I feel like a tramp and I don’t like it,’’ referring to the fact that she wants Moody to leave his wife for her, she nevertheless does not have the strength to leave Moody. This idea of wanting to leave but feeling trapped or unable to go is an important precursor to Joe’s own feeling of entrapment by Moody and the others. Like Joe, Lorna is stuck in her dependency on Moody and the boxing business that supports them. The only alternative is to try life on her own—a scary thought during the depression. From this fight, which eventually subsides into loving talk and caresses, the scene progresses to Joe’s entrance, which is sudden and unannounced. Joe does not even knock, a fact that Moody notes and which annoys Moody. Moody’s annoyance stimulates another argument, this time between Joe—who asks Moody to let him fight—and Moody, who is irate at the fact that Joe keeps using his first
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name. ‘‘And who the hell are you to call me Tom? Are we acquainted?’’ Moody, although cordial enough to Joe when he thinks he can use him, is nevertheless quick to threaten him at the end of the scene, when he says, ‘‘Call me Tom again and I’ll break your neck!!’’ Violence is a way of life for many of the characters in the play, especially those who pursue a life in the boxing business. Since the majority of actual boxing matches take place off screen, Odets focuses the violence on the industry itself—specifically the conflicts that happen among the many handlers who are in charge of a boxing star. As the play goes on and Joe gets more and more entrenched in the lifestyle, the amount of violence in his life increases. Joe’s own violent streak has always been there, built up since his childhood, as he indicates when he tells Lorna that people ‘‘have hurt my feelings for years.’’ Although he is a musician, violence appeals to him as a way of fighting back against his past, and he openly says, ‘‘If music shot bullets I’d like it better.’’ Mr. Bonaparte notes in the fourth scene of the second act that Joe’s ‘‘gotta wild wolf inside—eat him up!’’ And in the same scene, Joe lunges at Pepper White, a boxer who taunts him with the phrase, ‘‘Where’d you ever read about a cock-eye champ?’’ The resulting fight that breaks out among Joe, Pepper, and their two trainers is short, mainly because at that instant, Fuseli walks in. As Odets notes, ‘‘The fighting magically stops on the second. ’’ The character of Fuseli is an interesting person for his extreme display of anger and violence, which has a large effect on Joe. When he first comes into the gymnasium, Roxy notes how he met Fuseli: ‘‘I remember this Eddie Fuseli when he came back from the war with a gun. He’s still got the gun and he still gives me goose pimples!’’ Fuseli is a very combative character, and one who becomes more so as the play continues on. When Joe and Moody get into a fight, Fuseli warns Moody, ‘‘You could get cut up in little pieces,’’ among other threats. As Joe gets immersed more and more in the world of boxing, he tells Moody that ‘‘Eddie’s the only one here who understands me.’’ As the stage directions note later in the play when Fuseli walks into Moody’s office, ‘‘He and Joe are dressed almost identically.’’ Through the help of the gangster, and because of his own loss of identity, Joe has started dressing like Fuseli. Joe is no longer the sensitive musician. Lorna notes this in the same scene: ‘‘When did you look in the mirror last? Getting to be a killer! You’re getting to be like Fuseli!’’
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Lorna’s words resonate with Joe, and he is in a bad mood when Fuseli starts talking about his upcoming fight, saying that it is going to be good. ‘‘How do you know?’’ Joe asks. This sparks a heated conversation between Fuseli and Joe, in which Joe talks about wanting to do other things besides boxing. Fuseli threatens him, saying that ‘‘You’re in this up to your neck. You owe me a lot— I don’t like you to forget. You better be on your toes when you step in that ring tomorrow night.’’ Joe realizes that if he tries to leave, Fuseli will kill him. This threat of violence pushes him into his last fight, with the Chocolate Drop and Joe wins it. He tries to be happy at first, and easily talks about the fight in the dressing room afterwards. Says Joe, ‘‘I gave him the fury of a lifetime in that final punch!’’ However, Joe soon learns that this is more true than he realized—he has killed the Chocolate Drop with his ‘‘final punch.’’ With this event, Joe drops the macho persona that he had developed as a boxer and goes back to being a sensitive artist who cares about his family’s input. ‘‘What will my father say when he hears I murdered a man?’’ he asks Lorna. Unfortunately, there is nothing that Joe can do about this. He knows that he has passed a point of no return. His hands are busted and unfit for music, his morality has been stained, and he has no desire to fight anymore. The only option left is to flee, and he and Lorna do this in his sports car. However, the twin forces of speed and violence that have propelled Joe to the point of murder do not stop now. In their attempt to get away from the violence, the speed of the sports car kills Joe and Lorna. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Golden Boy, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
George L. Groman In the following excerpt, Groman examines Odets’s reflections on the various writers who were his inspiration. Clifford Odets, for all of his adult life as a playwright and screenwriter, marveled at the gift of creativity, finding inspiration when that gift seemed within his grasp and enduring depression when it seemed beyond reach. His own experience operated as both a resource and an obstacle as he sought to resolve a number of personal crises—as a son whose father viewed his early acting and writing efforts with contempt, as a lover and husband whose stormy relationships ended in failure and bitterness,
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and as a creative artist whose need for privacy and discipline conflicted again and again with the temptations and demands of a public life and reputation. Yet whatever his own circumstances, Odets consistently sought fulfillment as a writer, viewing the creative act with reverence and continuing attention and finding in the efforts of others inspiration as well as validation for his own creative identity. Even as a boy, Odets was drawn to writers of powerful imagination whose heroes struggled with questions of identity and self-realization through social action or artistic effort. As a teenager Odets read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a book to which he would invariably return and comment on with great affection. Indeed, in his 1940 journal, he called Hugo ‘‘the rich love of my boyhood days’’ and went on to describe Les Misérables as ‘‘the most profound art experience I have ever had.’’ The French author, as Odets noted, influenced him in ways that were to affect his later life as a writer and political activist: ‘‘Hugo . . . inspired me, made me aspire; I wanted to be a good and noble man, longed to do heroic deeds with my bare hands, thirsted to be kind to people, particularly the weak and humble and oppressed. From Hugo I had my first feeling of social consciousness. He did not make me a romantic, but he heightened in me that romanticism which I already had. I loved him and love him still, that mother (sic) of my literary heart.’’ For a boy entering adolescence, Hugo’s clear division of right and wrong, his demarcation of heroes and villains, and the endless pursuits of the relentless Inspector Javert must have met the young Odets’s need for suspense and adventure. More important, ultimately, was Hugo’s gallery of characters who were capable of heroism and sacrifice— the saintly Bishop of Digne, whose every action is devoted to those in need; Fantine, who sells her hair and even her teeth, hoping to preserve the life of her daughter; the young radical and romantic Marius Pontmercy, who gives up an inheritance on political principle; and the hero of heroes, the solitary convict Jean Valjean, who benefits from the Bishop’s generosity and repays him by pursuing a life of good works despite enormous personal sacrifice. Odets was to continue his search for mentors of powerful and wide-ranging vision, and in the American writers [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and [Walt] Whitman he found new inspiration and direction. As he wrote to Harold Clurman in 1932, it was the business-oriented Louis Odets, the writer’s father,
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ODET’S SEARCH FOR HEROIC MODELS EXTENDED TO THE MUSICAL WORLD AS WELL AS TO LITERATURE, AND IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN HE FOUND A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION THAT WAS TO LAST UNTIL HIS DEATH.’’
who first encouraged him to consider Emerson seriously. Margaret Brenman-Gibson quotes from this letter, in which Odets recalls his father leaving in his room ‘‘two volumes of a peculiar edition of Emerson ‘made for business men.’ In a gaily mocking account of this . . . (Odets) says, ‘The devils quote and underline on every page glorious trumpet sounding maxims about success. They make Emerson the first Bruce Barton of his country. But I am reading with a clear brain and no interest in success.’ Emerson is ‘certainly the wisest American.’’’ Reflecting further on Emerson’s importance to him, Odets wrote in his 1932 journal, ‘‘I am glad that Emerson lived before I did. He has made life a richer thing for many (sic) of us. That is the function of all great men: that they reveal to us natural truths, ourselves and a realization of ourselves.’’ Writing again in the same journal, he reflected on Emerson in a way that seemed to echo Hugo: ‘‘Emerson says somewhere that heroes are bred only in times of danger. I would add great artists are too bred in such times. Now I see the world is drifting into such times. I am waiting to see what heroes and artists will spring from the people.’’ Although Odets would come to share Emerson’s belief that people are not fundamentally bad, he commented that few could or would rise to Emerson’s call for ‘‘uncorrupted behavior.’’ That he continued to brood over this loss of Emerson’s faith in his fellow humans is amply demonstrated in his plays and elsewhere. Even near the end of his life, in a telecast interview, he would remember ‘‘what Emerson called ‘uncorrupted behavior’’’ as a quality ‘‘with which all children are born . . . when nothing outside of yourself influences you, when
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you are in command of yourself with honor, without dishonesty, without lie, when you grasp and deal, and are permitted to deal, with exactly what’s in front of you, in terms of your best human instincts.’’ To be sure, Odets could and did find many calls for ‘‘uncorrupted behavior’’ in Emerson’s work and that of other writers but what he seems to have valued most in Emerson was his belief in the range of human potentialities despite the limitations of time, place, accident, or fate. It was Emerson who had emphasized in ‘‘Circles’’ that ‘‘there are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile,’’ and in ‘‘Fate’’ that nature, rather than being limited to destructiveness, ‘‘solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.’’ In ‘‘Circles’’ Emerson remarked that ‘‘the use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.’’ Such statements were meant to clear the way to new horizons and did so for Odets and countless others. Like Hugo and Emerson, Walt Whitman assumed heroic proportions for Odets, who even kept a plaster cast of the poet in his room. In 1940 he bought first editions of November Boughs and Drum Taps, as well as a collection of Whitman’s letters to his mother. In 1947, when Odets’s only son was born, he named him Walt Whitman Odets. If the large-scale models of Emerson and Whitman were encouraging, Odets nevertheless understood that American life might bring forth artists of quite different scope and temperament. In conversations with the composer Aaron Copland at Dover Furnace, the Group Theatre’s summer retreat, Odets came to grips with this issue. He noted that ‘‘today the artists are not big, full, epic, and Aaron shows what I mean. They squeeze art out a thousandth of an inch at a time, and that is what their art, for the most part, lacks: bigness, vitality and health and swing and lust and charity . . .’’ Odets concludes by asserting, ‘‘there I go to Whitman again. Of course that’s what we need, men of Whitman’s size.’’ In another entry in the 1932 journal, Odets suggests that Whitman ‘‘roars in your ears all the time. When you swing your arms and the muscles flex, they are Whitman’s muscles too.’’ Elsewhere Odets celebrates not only the strength that may come with well-being but also the sexuality and autoeroticism that made Whitman famous and, in the nineteenth century, generally disreputable: ‘‘I think with love o (sic) Whitman’s lines, something
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like, ‘Oh the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness (sic) and sexuality of it and the great goodness and clarity of it.’ And I myself feel that way with love for people and the earth and women and dark nights and being together and close to naked women, naked as I am naked.’’ Eventually, Odets’s excitement and passion would cool—a result of hard living, many personal and professional disappointments and, simply, aging. However, it may be that Whitman’s imagery linked to a sense of purpose remained embedded in the playwright’s consciousness, as suggested by a passage written a year before his death: ‘‘The whole fabric of my creative life I have built a room in which every corner there is a cobweb. They have mostly been swept away and I must begin again, spinning out of myself (italics mine) the dust and ‘shroudness’ of that room with its belaced and silent corners.’’ The passage brings to mind Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider involved in the act of creation, launching forth ‘‘filament, filament, filament, out of itself.’’ Like the spider, the narrator’s soul in the second verse of Whitman’s poem (now personified) sends out ‘‘gossamer thread’’ to ‘‘catch somewhere,’’ thereby hoping to end a pattern of isolation. If Odets, like the spider and soul of the poem, sought to reach out to others, he seemed also to be settling old scores here, undergoing a ritualistic purgation in a rather stifling atmosphere and, in doing so, readying himself for the task of creation, which Whitman’s spider image so powerfully evokes. Odet’s search for heroic models extended to the musical world as well as to literature, and in the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven he found a source of inspiration that was to last until his death. Odets listened to Beethoven’s music frequently and intensively, wrote on Beethoven’s importance as a creative artist and man of his time, and would sometimes self-consciously compare and contrast Beethoven’s problems and solutions with his own. In his early attempts at fiction and drama, Odets used the maimed musician or composer as a central figure. Indeed, in his unproduced play Victory he carefully modeled the hero, Louis Brant, on Beethoven himself. In later years in Hollywood, Odets also planned a screenplay on the composer’s life, but the project was never completed. Beethoven’s early poverty, his difficult social relationships (often with women), and his dedication to his art (despite hearing problems and eventual deafness) greatly moved Odets. And in looking at W. J. Turner’s biography of the composer, which
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Odets read while writing Victory, he would find one acquaintance of Beethoven remarking of him ‘‘that he loved his art more than any woman’’ and ‘‘that he could not love any woman who did not know how to value his art.’’ Later, as Beethoven’s hearing problems increased in severity and further isolated him, the composer thought of suicide but desisted, ‘‘art alone’’ restraining his hand. At other times he wrote of seizing ‘‘fate by the throat’’ to reach his goals. Clearly, for Odets, Beethoven was a truly courageous man and artist despite his personal difficulties. Odets, in commenting on Beethoven’s music, found the Eroica Symphony ‘‘an awesome and terrible piece of work’ and his fourth piano concerto a composition in which the ‘‘characters of the orchestra never for a moment stop their exuberant conversation.’’ As for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, he noted, one must ‘‘be virgin of heart and spirit to write it. Beethoven did not lose the innocence,’’ though ordinary mortals give it up simply ‘‘to survive.’’ Odets’s descriptions, quoted here, underscore the intensity of his feelings about Beethoven and sometimes suggest Emersonian parallels. They also indicate the kind of close thematic connections between music and literature the writer would make in his plays and films. As Odets struggled with form, so did the Old Master, but Beethoven triumphed again and again. As Odets put it, ‘‘every time he found a form for his content he simultaneously found that his content had progressed in depth and a new form was necessary—a very Tantalus of life! He, however, had the hardheadedness to see it through to the bitter end—he obviously died looking for a new form— and he died having pushed music to a level which before had never been attained nor has yet been equalled. Great unhappy man!’’ Finally, in Beethoven, Odets found a paradigm for the quintessential Romantic—a superman for all season—one who is ‘‘amazed, impressed, delighted, and enraged by the caprices of life.’’ As Odets noted further, ‘‘It is the romantic who cries out that he is out of harmony with life—by which he means that life is not in harmony with his vision of it, the way he saw it as a youth with moral and idealistic hunger to mix his hands in it and live fully and deeply. The classic art is to accept life, the romantic to reject it as it is and attempt to make it over as he wants it to be.’’ The man and his method were for Odets a means of perception, a symbol of hope, and possibly a basis for social action and change.
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When we turn to Odets’s own work, however, we find a curious paradox. The heroic models have disappeared, and in their place the protagonists of his plays respond at a primal level to a brutal, selfserving world; either they are (or become) corrupt or they are overwhelmed by an environment over which they have little or no control. Indeed, the America that Odets lived in and responded to was far different from the private and idealized world about which he wrote with such intensity and even affection and that he later abandoned with such regret. In Waiting for Lefty, Odets’s first-produced and perhaps most well-known play, there is a rousing call for strike action by the rank and file of a taxi union after much indecision and argument. However, Lefty, the guiding spirit of the union, has already been murdered by unknown assailants, and even the ringing call to action at the end of the play suggests martyrdom as well as the benefits of solidarity. As Agate, one of the rallying strikers, puts it, ‘‘HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE’E STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS. WORKERS OF THE WORLD . . . OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We’ll die for what is right! put fruit trees where our ashes are!’’ (My italics.) In Awake, and Sing!, Odets’s Depression-era play centered on an American-Jewish family in the Bronx, the Marxist Grandfather Jacob is ineffectual even in his own family and ends his life by suicide. His grandson Ralph Berger, who surrenders the insurance money Jacob had left him at his mother’s insistence, will in all likelihood have little influence in times to come. As a number of critics have suggested, his optimism strikes a false note as he faces the future without a clear sense of purpose, training, or money. Indeed, as more than one character comes to understand, despite arguments to the contrary, life is ‘‘printed on dollar bills.’’ The wellto-do Uncle Morty, a dress manufacturer, will continue to have the respect of Ralph’s mother Bessie, he will continue to oppose strike action vigorously and probably successfully, and he will lead a personal life without personal responsibilities, sleeping with showroom models and seeking other creature comforts. Moe Axelrod, the World War One veteran and ex-bootlegger, has by the end of the play convinced Bessie’s daughter Hennie to abandon her much-abused husband and infant to seek a life of pleasure with him. To be sure, arguments for social or family responsibility may be found in this often
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moving play, but the resolution nevertheless seems to suggest a definition of success devoid of commitment or love. In Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte, a violinist turned boxer, does become a hero for his time, defined by physical strength and a willingness to incapacitate or destroy his opponents in the prize ring. Although he has read the encyclopedia from cover to cover (perhaps fulfilling Ralph Berger’s quest for learning) and ‘‘practiced his fiddle for ten years,’’ the private world he has created is no longer sufficient for him. It cannot offer him the sense of power or perhaps the ability to dominate others for which he yearns. Indeed, he is seduced by the monied world that surrounds the prize arena and by the temptations offered by the gangster Eddie Fuseli, who seeks to remold the Golden Boy and turn him into a fighting machine—careless of others, indifferent to love, and irrevocably cut off from family ties and memories of the past. As the reborn Joe aggressively puts it, ‘‘When a bullet sings through the air it has no past—only a future—like me.’’ Joe returns to his dressing room after what is to be his last fight, and his trainer, Tokio, notices that one eye is badly battered, symbolic of Joe’s impairment of vision on a number of levels. The triumphant fighter learns that he has killed his opponent in the ring, and he must confront the implications of the disaster. In rejecting a personal integrity, he has betrayed his moral and spiritual center, and at the end of the play he dies, an apparent suicide. His personal tragedy is an awareness of the vacuity his life has become. He is trapped in a world that he himself has made, rejecting his father’s simple but encompassing OldWorld Italian version of what his personal struggle must lead to: fulfillment of a dream predicated on the yells of a mob over ten rounds, the quick buck, and tabloid headlines forgotten at a glance. Both The Big Knife and The Country Girl are plays that show the failure of art and artists destroyed by a world that demands too much, too fast, too soon. In The Big Knife, Charlie Castle has given up a promising career in the theater and a somewhat vague belief in political and social action to become one of Hollywood’s big stars. Like Joe Bonaparte or perhaps Odets himself, Charlie is plagued by the idea that he has betrayed his considerable talent in exchange for money and stardom. Early in the play, he argues that the theater is ‘‘a bleeding stump. Even stars have to wait years for a decent play.’’ Now in the movie business, he cannot afford ‘‘acute attacks of integrity.’’ In a succession of films, he reflects ‘‘the average in one way or another’’ or is at
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best ‘‘the warrior of the forlorn hope.’’ As Hank Teagle, a family friend, puts it, ‘‘Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul. America is full of it.’’ Like Joe Bonaparte, Charlie understands only too well what he has become. He remarks that he has become an imitation of his old self, and young new actors now imitate—or parody—the imitation. However, it is Marion Castle, Charlie’s estranged wife, who most emphatically reminds Charlie of his self-betrayal, warning that he acts against his own nature. She says to him, ‘‘Your passion of the heart has become a passion of the appetite. Despite your best intentions, you’re a horror.’’ Indeed, Charlie has taken a downward path. He is on the way to becoming an alcoholic, he has been unfaithful to his wife, and he has avoided prosecution for an accident that occurred during an evening of drunken driving by allowing a studio employee to confess in his place and serve a prison term. Only when the studio management obliquely threatens to murder the woman companion turned blackmailer who was with him on the evening of the accident does Charlie assert himself by preventing a new crime. However, despite his one moment of decency, Charlie is lost. He has, over Marion’s objections, signed a new contract with the studio moguls who have by turns enticed and threatened him. Too weak to face a loss of status, poverty, and the unstable life of the theater, perversely attracted by the life he has been leading, and yet filled with selfloathing, Charlie takes his own life. Marion, his wife, leaves with Hank Teagle, the writer who has been faithful to his principles and whom Charlie had called his Horatio. Indeed, it is Teagle who will tell Charlie’s story to the world—the tale of a man who was certainly not a Hamlet in depth or breadth, one who could understand and even dream but who could not change himself or the world, which paradoxically offered him so much and so little. In The Country Girl, a play better structured and developed than The Big Knife, Broadway director Bernie Dodd is ready to take a chance on a new play starring a has been, an older actor named Frank Elgin. Dodd is ‘‘in love with art’’ and tells Elgin’s wife Georgie that although he could ‘‘make a fortune in films,’’ he intends to continue in the theater, where important work can still be done. Elgin’s brilliant performances in two mediocre plays, based on his intuitive understanding of character and situation, had long ago inspired Dodd and now lead him to believe that the old actor can excel again. However, there are real problems. Elgin is weak and
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self-indulgent, he is an alcoholic, he is a liar, he needs constant reassurance, and like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, he needs desperately to be well liked. As the play develops, Bernie Dodd and Georgie struggle with each other and with Frank. Each of the three seeks personal fulfillment, but finally the play becomes the all-consuming and all-important issue. Frank Elgin does succeed (with the help of the two closest to him) in rising to his full stature as an actor. He vindicates Bernie’s judgment and justifies (or necessitates) Georgie’s remaining with him—after years of failure and disappointment. In this play about theater life, Frank Elgin’s transgressions are forgiven in the name of art and artistry. Bernie discovers that Frank has lied about his wife’s past. He has told Bernie that Georgie was once Miss America (possibly to enhance his own prestige), that she is an alcoholic, and that she is a depressive who has attempted suicide. Georgie learns that Frank has lied about her (his lies are partially based on a play in which he once appeared) and observes that he has begun to drink again. When the producer (Phil Cook), Bernie Dodd, and others in the company find out, there is turmoil, but there are no lasting repercussions. Because of Bernie’s belief in Frank Elgin’s talent, the actor is to continue in the play. Frank himself is simply following an old pattern. He has for much of his adult life drunk steadily, taken pills, and lied to relieve the pressures on him. When his and Georgie’s only child dies, when he loses much of his money in producing a play, and when he begins to fail as an actor, the old remedies are close at hand. The conflict between the easy indulgence of the moment and the stern realities of working in a creative but uncertain world— with its quick rewards and even quicker condemnations—leads to the kind of disintegration Odets so often sought to depict. In this play, as in The Big Knife, intuitive understanding, talent, and artistry bring some forms of self-fulfillment and recognition, but are by themselves no protection against weakness or personal loss. In The Big Knife, Charlie Castle finds suicide the only way out. Frank Elgin is successful at the end of The Country Girl, but one suspects that his future success will depend on the continued availability of the long-suffering wife who mothers him, on directors and producers who excuse his frequent lapses, on unending applause, and on total self-involvement and selfdelusion. Odets, then, in his work revealed his fascination with the world of art and his belief that art may enhance our understanding of the human condition,
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though it cannot alter the environment or our responses to it. The romantic vision that Odets pursued so intensely in a personal way might seem ennobling or heroic, but in a world of shrunken values and failed personal lives, it offers only a sense, a resonance, of what might have been. Indeed, the romantic stance—as Odets portrayed it in the America of his time—was collateral to be called in, leaving only a shell without substance. Despite the excitements of the conflict, Odets’s vision of the truth was profoundly pessimistic. That he portrayed it as he did often showed courage as well as artistry. Source: George L. Groman, ‘‘Clifford Odets and the Creative Imagination,’’ in Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, edited by Gabriel Miller, G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, pp. 97–105.
Harold Clurman In the following essay, Clurman explores the allegorical nature of Golden Boy. Golden Boy has already been praised as a good show, common-sense entertainment, and effective melodrama. It has also been blamed for betraying Hollywood influence in its use of terse, typical situations, story motifs which resemble that of either popular fiction or movies, and possibly too in its use of an environment (the prize-fight world) that somehow seems unworthy of the serious purpose professed by its author. There has been, in addition, almost universal admiration for many separate scenes and long passages of brilliant dialogue. What has not been discussed very fully, however, is the total significance of these diverse elements, the meaning that their configuration within one framework might have. And it is this meaning, both in relation to the American scene and to Clifford Odets’ work and progress within it, that might be most valuable to examine. An early draft of Golden Boy bore the designation ‘‘a modern allegory.’’ An allegory, I take it, is an extremely simple but boldly outlined tale in which a series of images is used to suggest a meaning of a more general, and usually a moral, nature. The good allegory will hold one’s interest by the sheer directness or vividness of its story, the suggested meaning of which may occur to us only in retrospect, or which may be so organically imbedded in the structure of the story that in absorbing the story details we are almost automatically and spontaneously aware of their meaning. The allegory, in other words, deals in symbols that are so pointed
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and unmistakable that they transform themselves easily into the truth that their author hopes to express. Whether or not Clifford Odets has chosen the happiest symbols in Golden Boy it is a fact that his intention was to convey such a truth, and to convey it in terms that would not only avoid preachment, but entertain us by the mere raciness of its presentation. The story of this play is not so much the story of a prize-fighter as the picture of a great fight—a fight in which we are all involved, whatever our profession or craft. What the golden boy of this allegory is fighting for is a place in the world as an individual; what he wants is to free his ego from the scorn that attaches to ‘‘nobodies’’ in a society in which every activity is viewed in the light of a competition. He wants success not simply for the soft life—automobiles, etc.—which he talks about, but because the acclaim that goes with it promises him acceptance by the world, peace with it, safety from becoming the victim that it makes of the poor, the alien, the unnoticed minorities. To achieve this success, he must exploit an accidental attribute of his make-up, a mere skill, and abandon the development of his real self. It so happens that Odets thought of embodying this fight for achievement in terms of the fight business. For it is obvious on reflection that though the use of the prize-fight world is central to the play’s plot, in the playwright’s larger intention it may be considered almost incidental. . . . Further than that, to dramatize the conflict between what a man might be and what he becomes, the author has conceived a youth who is essentially an artist in a modest, unspectacular way. The hero is a violinist; and the fiddle in this allegory is employed as the symbolic antithesis of the fighting game. The play tells the story then of an artist, or even more generally of a sensitive human being, growing up in a world where personal achievement is measured in terms of that kind of sensational success that our newspapers, our mania for publicity slogans, indeed our whole large-scale production psychology make into almost the only kind of success we can recognize. To tell this story two worlds are mirrored in the swiftest, barest terms: the artists’ world with its humble pleasures, its small but basic contentments, and the business world with its fundamental uncertainty, hysteria, indifference to and impatience with human problems as such, its inevitable ruthlessness, its ultimate killer tendencies.
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The home scenes with their funny lines, their petty ‘‘philosophical’’ disputes between the two old cronies, their healthy naïveté and even their vulgarity are not haphazardly designed to show off the author’s faculty for salty speech or clever characterization. They are part of a pattern to illustrate both the sweet human earthiness that the hero leaves for the hard world where success is made, and the slight shabbiness which makes the hero look upon his background as an almost shameful world— futile, unglamorous, lamentably unaware of the advantages it is missing. What happens to the boy when he makes the compromise with his true nature? Odets’ allegory proceeds to show that the boy becomes a commodity, something that can be bought and sold, maneuvered, that he who begins by trying to beat the competitive world by playing its game becomes himself a thing possessed. Odets’ hero is literally taken over by a whole ring of exploiters: agents, managers, merchants and middlemen of every description, including the criminal racketeer. And it is most characteristic of the situation that while the hero tries to use these people for his own ends he despises them, while they who are to a large extent dependent on him resent the intrusion of any of his personal problems into their business considerations. Beyond this, the activity involved in performing his new task—fighting his way to ‘‘fame and fortune’’—finally incapacitates him from ever doing his true work or going back to his old and real self. In realistic terms, he breaks his hands in a fight so that he no longer can hope to play the violin which once meant so much to him. And when he has become a fighter a certain coarseness develops in him, a certain despair. He is denatured to the point of becoming a killer, figuratively and, thanks to a ring accident, literally. In the interim, he has fallen in love, hoping, by a romantic attachment to a woman equally lost in the hurly-burly of the success world, to solve his inner dilemma. But he is a defeated man. He has nothing to live by now. Both worlds are closed to him, and he must die. It is necessary to repeat the bare features of the story to show the particular scheme, at once ideological and narrative, that gives the play its basic form. If we analyze it even further we shall find that the choice and placement of almost every character fit into this scheme. Take, for example, the momentary presence of the older brother Frank, the C.I.O. organizer. What is his significance here? His wounded head, his quiet retort ‘‘I fight,’’ his sure-
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A scene from a stage production of Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets
ness, are all minute indications that there is nothing abhorrent to the author in the thought of physical struggle as such, but that for people like his hero to have a world in which they might ultimately feel at home in being what they are and to have honor in such a world as well, it is necessary for the Franks to exist and fight. Our hero fights as a lone ego; Frank fights, as he says, together with and for millions of others. Frank is a free man; our hero is destroyed. If there is any Hollywood influence in this play beyond the mere quick action and stock figures employed, it must be in the fact that in an important sense Hollywood and what it represents have provided the play with its inner theme, its true subject matter. So many artists today stand in relation to Hollywood as our hero in relation to his double career. From this point of view Golden Boy might be regarded as Clifford Odets’ most subjective play. Yet with this deeply and subtly subjective material, Odets has attempted to write his most objective play—a play that would stand on its own feet, so to speak, as a good show, a fast-moving story, a popular money-making piece. He has tried, in short, to bridge the gap between his own inner problems and the need he feels, like his hero and all
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Source: Harold Clurman, ‘‘Golden Boy,’’ in Six Plays of Clifford Odets, Modern Library, 1939, pp. 429–33.
THE ALLEGORY, IN OTHER WORDS, DEALS IN SYMBOLS THAT ARE SO POINTED AND UNMISTAKABLE THAT THEY TRANSFORM THEMSELVES EASILY INTO THE TRUTH THAT THEIR AUTHOR HOPES TO EXPRESS.’’
SOURCES Demastes, William W., ‘‘Clifford Odets (1906–1963),’’ in American Playwrights, 1880–1945, Greenwood Press, 1995, p. 318. Hughes, Catharine, ‘‘Odets: The Price of Success,’’ in Commonweal, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 21, September 20, 1963, pp. 558–60. Isaacs, Edith J. R., ‘‘When Good Men Get Together,’’ in Theatre Arts Monthly, Vol. XXII, No. 1, January 1938, pp. 11–13.
of us in the audience, to make ‘‘fame and fortune.’’ In his own work, he has tried to reconcile the fiddle and the fist; he has tried to yield himself a positive result out of a contradiction that kills his hero. He has done this by making the whole thing into a morality which would instruct and read us all a lesson (himself and his audience) even while it amused. The strength and weakness of the play lie in this fusion of elements, admirable in intention, more varied in effect than in any of his former plays, but still imperfect as a whole. The strength of the present play is shown by its definite audience impact in the theatre; its imperfection comes from a certain lack of concreteness in details of plot and character—an objective flaw due to his mere nodding acquaintance with most of the play’s locale, and from an insistence on certain character touches that mislead rather than clarify, such as the reference to the hero’s eyes—a subjective flaw due to a reliance on a personal interpretation where a social one is required. It must be pointed out in conclusion that the technical problem for a playwright—the problem of making himself completely articulate as well as sound—increases with the depth and richness of his material. The content of Clifford Odets’ talent is greater than that of any young playwright in America today, and the line of his development must necessarily be arduous and complex. In certain instances, pat advice is more flattering to the critic than helpful to the writer. With Clifford Odets, we should simply be grateful for each of the endeavors that mark his progress. Golden Boy a step ahead in the career of one of the few American playwrights who can be discussed as an artist.
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Krutch, Joseph Wood, ‘‘Two Legends,’’ in the Nation, Vol. 145, No. 20, November 13, 1937, pp. 539–40. Lewis, Allan, ‘‘The Survivors of the Depression—Hellman, Odets, Shaw,’’ in his American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre, rev. ed., Crown, 1970, pp. 99–115. Mendelsohn, Michael J., Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1969, p. 44. Odets, Clifford, Golden Boy, in Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, Grove Press, 1993. ———, ‘‘How a Playwright Triumphs,’’ in Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 233, No. 1396, September 1966, pp. 64–70, 73–74. Peary, Gerald, ‘‘Odets of Hollywood,’’ in Sight and Sound, Vol. 56, No. 1, Winter 1986–1987, pp. 59–63. Shuman, R. Baird, Clifford Odets, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962, pp. 80, 83.
FURTHER READING Erem, Suzan, Labor Pains: Inside America’s New Union Movement, Monthly Review Press, 2001. In this book, Erem, a labor organizer, gives an insider’s view of the struggles that both organizers and union members face today. In addition to fighting for better wages and working conditions, Erem details the internal struggles that take place. Horne, Gerald, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists, University of Texas Press, 2001. Horne examines the often overlooked story of the Hollywood studio strikes that made headlines in the 1940s. The book details the studios’ attempts to thwart the rise of independent unions, which the studios often discredited with Communist labels. However, this was just one aspect of a multifaceted affair, and Horne gives a thorough overview of all sides, using an abundance of historical documents to back up his assertions.
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Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, Oxford History of the United States series, Vol. 9, Oxford University Press, 2001. Kennedy, a Stanford University history professor, chronicles the years during the Great Depression and World War II, at times posing theses that directly contradict established views. This accessible, comprehensive study relies on an extensive number of both published accounts and primary sources to recreate this formative period in America’s history. Morreale, Ben, and Robert Carola, Italian Americans: The Immigrant Experience, Immigrant Experience series, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 2000. This book gives a thorough overview of how Italian Americans first came to America and what their experience has been like in the years since. The book also discusses how Italian Americans have helped to influence American culture, and features notable Italian-American entertainers, businessmen, and sports stars. The book is lavishly illustrated with more than two hundred color and black-and-white photographs that help bring the immigrant experience to life.
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Ruiz, Vicki L., Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950, University of New Mexico Press, 1987. This book gives the story of several women in southern California in the 1930s and 1940s, who banded together to establish effective labor unions in the seasonal canning industry. Eventually, these women were able to negotiate contracts with benefits like maternity leave, paid vacations, and company-provided day care. Waldvogel, Merikay, Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking & the Great Depression, Rutledge Hill Press, 1990. Waldvogel explores quiltmaking during the depression, when groups of women would meet to quilt, discuss their hardships, and share tips for surviving. Despite the hardships discussed, however, the quilts of this era were vibrant and beautiful, embodying the hope that many had for better times. The book includes a number of photos of the quilts from this period.
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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone AUGUST WILSON 1986
August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, first produced in 1986 by the Yale Repertory Theatre, was published in the United States in 1988. The play was inspired both by the 1978 Romare Bearden artwork, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, and the blues song, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.’’ The song, which was recorded by legendary blues artist, W. C. Handy, was first sung by many estranged black women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and sons to Joe Turner—a plantation owner who illegally enslaved blacks in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the third play in Wilson’s ten-play historical cycle, in which the playwright is chronicling the African-American experience in the twentieth century by devoting a play to each decade. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone represents the 1910s. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans’ search for their cultural identity, following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s, in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald’s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors, and moved on to self-sufficiency. A
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copy of the play can be found in August Wilson: Three Plays, published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1994.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Wilson was born as Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wilson’s white German father largely deserted the family shortly after the playwright was born, and Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson Kittel, was forced to support her large family by working a number of cleaning jobs. Daisy married David Bedford, an AfricanAmerican man, when Wilson was an adolescent. Bedford moved the family to a mostly white suburb, where they experienced extreme racial intimidation. Although Daisy encouraged the playwright and his five siblings to pursue an education, the racist treatment he received in the formal school system encouraged Wilson to drop out as a teenager. Instead, Wilson educated himself in his local library, focusing mainly on black writers. In 1965, at the age of twenty, Wilson moved into a rooming house with a group of black intellectuals, and began publishing his poetry in several small periodicals. Wilson was profoundly affected by the Black Power movement in the 1960s, and cofounded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater in Pittsburgh in 1968 to show his support. The theater, which was in operation until 1978, provided a medium for Wilson and others to raise awareness of African-American culture and issues. In 1978, Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he wrote his first play, Jitney, which was first produced in 1982. Set in a Pittsburgh taxi station, the play was successful in his local theater. In 1984, however, Wilson’s drama reached Broadway with the production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which Wilson revised with the help of Lloyd Richards, a Broadway director who would collaborate with Wilson on many of his plays. The play was the first of Wilson’s ambitious, ten-play historical cycle. In this group of plays, Wilson announced that he would chronicle the African American experience in the twentieth century, providing one play for each decade. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, first produced in 1986, is the third play in this series, and examines life in the 1910s, when many African Americans were migrating north. His latest play is King Hedley II, which was produced on Broadway in 2001.
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August Wilson (on left)
For a professional dramatic career that has spanned only two decades, Wilson has amassed an impressive number of awards from the dramatic community. Chief among these are the Pulitzer Prizes that Wilson won for Fences (1986) and The Piano Lesson (1990). Wilson is the only African-American playwright who has won two Pulitzer Prizes. Wilson also won an Antoinette Perry (‘‘Tony’’) Award for best play for Fences in 1987.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opens, Seth is complaining to his wife Bertha about Bynum, a tenant in their Pittsburgh boardinghouse who kills pigeons for his African rituals. Seth and Bertha also talk about Seth’s night job at the steel mill, and his third job as a tinsmith, making items out of the sheet metal sold to him by the white peddler, Rutherford Selig. Seth would go into the tinsmithing business by himself, but cannot get approved for a loan unless he signs over their boardinghouse, which he refuses to do.
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Selig stops by for his weekly Saturday business visit, buys some pots from Seth and puts in an order for some dustpans. Bynum asks Selig about the shiny man that he paid Selig—a people finder—to find for him. Selig asks Bynum for a better description, and Bynum tells him about the strange man, who gave him the vision in which he acquired the power of the Binding Song. Bynum is now able to bind people together, so that they can find each other if they are separated. Selig leaves. Jeremy, a young tenant, comes in and tells everybody how the police locked him up so they could steal money from him. Herald Loomis and his daughter, Zonia, arrive and rent a room from Seth. Herald is looking for his wife, Martha, and Bynum tells him that he should talk to Selig on his next Saturday visit. Seth shows Herald to his room. Bynum encourages Jeremy to take his guitar to the nightly contest at Seefus’s bar, a black gambling house, but Jeremy is leery of contests, after a bad experience with a white contest sponsor. Seth comes in and says that Herald must be looking for Martha Pentecost, a woman he knows, because Zonia resembles her. However, Seth will not tell Herald this, because he does not trust Herald. Mattie Campbell, a young woman, stops by to talk to Bynum and ask him to bind her old boyfriend, Jack Carper, to her. Bynum says that Carper is bound to somebody else, and that Mattie should move on, although he gives Mattie a small good luck charm to put under her pillow. Jeremy asks Mattie out on a date, and she reluctantly agrees. Outside, Zonia plays in the yard and meets Reuben, the boy next door. Zonia tells him that they are searching for her mother, who ran away when a man named Joe Turner did something to her father. Reuben says that his only other friend, Eugene, died, and that, against Eugene’s dying wish, Reuben keeps Eugene’s pigeons in captivity, selling the pigeons to Bynum to use in his African rituals.
Act 1, Scene 2 The next Saturday morning, Bertha and Seth argue about Herald. Seth does not trust him, since he does not work, and thinks he might be a thief. Bertha, however, gives Herald the benefit of the doubt. They talk about Bynum’s past, then recall how Martha came to see Bynum several years ago, distraught that she could not find her little girl. Selig shows up for his weekly visit, and Seth sells him the dustpans that he has made. Herald hires Selig to find his wife, and Selig explains that his family has been
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involved in the people-finding business for a long time, first as slave transporters, then as slave bounty hunters. Now, after the slaves have been freed, he helps black people find lost family members. Selig leaves, and Bertha says that Selig can only ‘‘find’’ people who have hitched a ride on his wagon. Herald is unshaken in his faith, however, and says that Selig will find Martha by the next Saturday.
Act 1, Scene 3 The next morning, Seth talks to Bynum about the fact that he is still unable to get a loan to start his own tinsmithing business. Jeremy pays for Mattie to move in with him at the boardinghouse. Jeremy likes Mattie because she is pretty and treats him well, and Bynum lectures Jeremy, saying that he has to learn to appreciate everything that a woman can offer, besides the physical relationship. Just then, Molly Cunningham, an extremely attractive woman, stops by to see Seth. Molly has missed her Sunday train, and rents a room for a week. Jeremy is smitten.
Act 1, Scene 4 Later that evening, everybody except Herald sits around the dinner table. Seth pulls out a harmonica and everybody starts to ‘‘juba,’’ an Africanstyle song and dance that mentions the name of the Holy Ghost. Herald enters in a rage, and tells them that the Holy Ghost is going to burn them up and attempts to mock their ritual dance. In the process, he has a vision, and Bynum guides him through it. Herald imagines that he is looking out on an ocean, where bones—representing his ancestors who died on slave ships—walk on the water and then sink. Herald’s vision continues, and the bones become living Africans, lying immobile on the American shore, unable to stand up for themselves under the repression of slavery. Near the end of the vision, Herald himself feels as if he is lying there with the others, and he panics when he realizes that he is not able to stand up.
Act 2, Scene 1 The next morning, Seth tries to kick Herald out, but Herald refuses to leave until Saturday. Mattie leaves for work, and Molly says that she refuses to work, and that she does not need any men or any children. Jeremy comes in, saying that he got fired when he refused to pay a white man an extortion fee to keep his job. Jeremy decides to leave Mattie and run away with Molly.
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Act 2, Scene 2 On Monday evening, Bynum and Seth sit and play dominoes, and Bynum sings the song, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.’’ Herald comes in and tells Bynum to stop it. Bynum tells Herald that he knows that Joe Turner enslaved him, because Herald has lost his song. Herald breaks down and tells the story of his enslavement, and asks Bynum why Turner would want him. Bynum says that Turner was hoping to steal Herald’s song, but could not, because Herald forgot it in captivity.
Act 2, Scene 3 The next morning, Herald and Mattie talk about his vision. They talk about their respective mates who left them, and Herald becomes interested in Mattie. He suggests that they get together, and tries to hold her, but finds that he has forgotten how to touch, another consequence of losing his identity as a slave for Joe Turner.
Act 2, Scene 4 The next morning, Zonia and Reuben play in the yard, and Reuben tells Zonia that a ghost told him to release Eugene’s pigeons. Reuben is sad that Zonia will be leaving Saturday with her father, and he says that he will marry her when they grow up. Reuben kisses her and says that he will come looking for her some day.
Act 2, Scene 5 On Saturday morning, Herald and Zonia prepare to leave and Herald tells Mattie that a man would be lucky to find her. Selig arrives, with Martha Pentecost, Herald’s wife. Herald and Martha swap their stories, and Herald gives Zonia back to her mother. Martha tells Herald that he should look to Jesus for his salvation, but Herald denies Christianity, saying that Jesus has done nothing for him but bring him pain. Martha tells him that the blood of the lamb will make him clean, but Herald slashes himself across the chest with his knife, wiping his own blood on his face. Herald realizes that he has set himself free with this act of selfreliance and leaves the boardinghouse a new man, having found his song, his identity, once again. Mattie rushes after Herald, presumably to start a relationship with him and Bynum realizes that he has found his shiny man.
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CHARACTERS Mattie Campbell Mattie Campbell is one of Seth’s tenants, who wants nothing more than to get married and have children, and who chases Herald at the end of the play. When she first comes to Seth’s boardinghouse, Mattie, a twenty-six-year old woman, is seeking out Bynum’s help. She is hoping the conjurer can bind her old boyfriend, Jack Carper, to her so that he will not leave again. Mattie had two babies with Carper, but they both died and he thinks she is cursed. However, Bynum says that she and Carper are not meant to be together. Although Mattie is desperate and ends up living with Jeremy, he leaves her, too. At the end of the play, Mattie realizes that she and Herald would make a good match and rushes to catch up with him when he leaves.
Molly Cunningham Molly is one of Seth’s tenants who desires nothing more than to be independent, and who ends up with Jeremy. Molly, an extremely attractive twenty-six-year old woman, comes to see Seth about a room when she misses her train. Jeremy, who immediately falls in love with her, eventually asks if she will accompany him on the road. She is hesitant at first, but does agree as long as he does not expect her to work, does not try to buy her, and does not take her South.
Jeremy Furlow Jeremy Furlow is one of Seth’s tenants, who ends up with Molly. Jeremy is a young, impulsive man in his twenties who does not want to be tied down to a needy woman or a place. Jeremy is illegally held in jail by the local police when they are on the lookout for stray black men from whom to extort money. Although he works on a road crew for a while, Jeremy gets fired when he refuses to pay an employment fee to one of the white men. He would rather earn money by gambling and playing his guitar in contests. Although he stays with Mattie for a little while, Molly attracts him, and he ends up leaving Mattie to travel around the country with Molly.
Bertha Holly Bertha Holly is Seth’s wife, who offers advice to many of the tenants at their Pittsburgh boardinghouse. Bertha has been married to Seth for twentyseven years, and has learned to deal with her husband’s prickly nature. While Seth is extremely
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critical of many people, Bertha generally gives people the benefit of the doubt. Bertha is in charge of the cooking and cleaning at the boardinghouse, while Seth collects the rent and works two side jobs. Although Bertha is a Christian woman, she also performs other rituals. Although the play does not indicate whether Bertha and Seth have any children, she does adopt a maternal role for many of her tenants. For example, when Jeremy leaves Mattie to run away with Molly, Bertha tells Mattie that she is better off without him. When Herald leaves the boardinghouse, and is nice to Mattie in the process, it is Bertha who implies that Mattie and Herald might make a good match.
Seth Holly Seth Holly is Bertha’s husband and the owner of the Pittsburgh boardinghouse where the play is set. Unlike his open-minded wife, Seth is a suspicious man, and is constantly on the lookout for anything that could make his boardinghouse seem less than respectable. When he hears that Jeremy has been arrested for drinking, he is quick to confront him. When Herald causes a disturbance during a Sunday night juba dance, Seth threatens to throw him out the next morning. Seth was born a free black man and cannot understand and does not sympathize with the many Southern blacks who have wandered up to the American north following the abolition of slavery. Seth inherited the boardinghouse from his father, who also taught Seth how to be a tinsmith. In addition to his night job at a steel mill, Seth buys sheet metal from Selig, a white peddler, and then makes items out of the metal, selling them back to Selig. Since Selig provides the materials and sells the items, he makes a bigger profit than Seth does. Seth knows this, and would like to go into business for himself, but nobody will give him a loan unless he signs over his boardinghouse. As the boardinghouse is his only security, Seth refuses to do this. Seth is initially suspicious of Bynum, the African rootworker, who kills pigeons in Seth’s yard for his African rituals. Seth notes that Bynum is like many other Southern blacks, who wander on the road most of their life before finally settling down like Bynum has. As much as he does not understand or accept Bynum’s conjuring, however, when Herald first arrives at the boardinghouse, Seth likes him even less. Although Seth knows Martha Pentecost, Herald’s wife, he chooses not to tell Herald where Martha is because he does not believe that Herald could be married to a respectable woman like Mar-
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tha. At one point, Seth thinks that Herald might be a church thief since somebody spots Seth hanging around an old church but refusing to go inside. While Seth keeps tabs on Herald, he tells Bertha that he does not like to get involved in other people’s business, and so will not tell Martha where Herald is, even though he knows that Martha is looking for Zonia. Even after Herald and his daughter have left and are standing on the street corner, Seth keeps a suspicious eye on him.
Herald Loomis Herald Loomis is a former deacon who was illegally enslaved by Joe Turner, an experience that made him lose his song or identity. One day, Herald tried to stop some black men from gambling and all of the men, including him, were illegally snatched up by Joe Turner, the brother of the Tennessee governor, to work on his plantation for seven years. When Herald was released, he went to his motherin-law’s house, where he found his daughter, Zonia, but not his wife, Martha. Herald and Zonia walked north for four years, searching for Martha. At Seth’s boardinghouse, he hires Selig to find Martha. In the meantime, however, Herald, who is noticeably angry, causes a major disturbance in the boardinghouse. When all of the tenants are performing a juba—an African-style song and dance that invokes the name of the Holy Ghost—Herald tries to mock it by unzipping his pants while speaking in tongues. However, this act inspires Herald to have a vision, in which he imagines that he is looking back on his African ancestors who were transported to America, where they were forced into slavery. Bynum guides Herald through the vision. Seth threatens to kick Herald out for causing the disturbance, but Herald stands his ground. When Bynum sings the song, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’’ Herald opens up about his slave experience. Herald does not understand why Joe Turner would want him, until Bynum says that Turner wanted to steal Herald’s song and make it his own. Because of this, Herald has subconsciously forgotten his song. Herald shows interest in Mattie, but realizes that he has forgotten how to touch—another consequence of his captivity. When Selig brings Martha to the boardinghouse, she and Herald reunite. They swap their stories, and then Herald passes Zonia on to Martha. Although Martha encourages Herald to look to Jesus Christ and the blood of the lamb for salvation, Herald uses a knife to slash his chest and draw his own blood which he wipes on his face. He
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realizes that with this act of self-reliance he is free and leaves to start his life over. Mattie rushes after him.
Martha Loomis Martha Loomis is Herald’s wife, who has been separated from him for eleven years since Herald was illegally enslaved by Joe Turner. When Herald was captured, Martha was unable to work their Tennessee farm by herself and was evicted by their landlord. After she and Zonia lived at Martha’s mother’s house for five years, Martha assumed that Herald was dead and moved on with her life. Martha moves north to avoid racial persecution, and leaves Zonia behind at her mother’s house, intending to pick her up in a few months. However, Herald is released while Martha is up north, and Herald goes to pick up Zonia. Herald and Zonia search for Martha, while Martha searches for Zonia. Martha stays at Seth’s boardinghouse briefly where Bynum binds Zonia to Martha, so that they can find each other someday. By the time Martha and Herald reunite, her name has changed to Martha Pentecost. She has also gotten more involved in religion, and tries unsuccessfully to convince Herald to look to Jesus Christ for his salvation. At the end of the play, Zonia goes to live with Martha.
Zonia Loomis Zonia Loomis is the daughter of Herald and Martha, who has been traveling with her father in search of Martha for four years. Zonia helps Bertha in the kitchen to help pay for her board. Zonia meets Reuben, the boy next door, and agrees to be his girl. At the end of the play, Bynum reveals that when he first met Martha, he bound Zonia to her, so that Martha would eventually find her daughter. Zonia reluctantly leaves Herald to go with Martha in the end.
Martha Pentecost See Martha Loomis
Reuben Scott Reuben Scott is the boy next door who befriends Zonia and tells her he will marry her someday. Reuben used to have a friend named Eugene, who died. Reuben keeps Eugene’s pigeons in captivity, selling them to Bynum to use in his rituals. However, after a ghost appears and tells Reuben to honor Eugene’s wish, Reuben lets them go.
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Rutherford Selig Rutherford Selig is a white peddler and people finder who finds Martha Loomis and brings her to Herald. Selig is the only white character in the play. He stops by the boardinghouse every Saturday to sell sheet metal to Seth and put in orders for the items that he needs made out of the metal. Since Selig makes a profit on both the sheet metal and the items that he buys from Seth, he makes more money than Seth does. In addition to his peddling, Selig is a people finder, who charges one dollar to find somebody. As he lets the others know, his family has been finding people for a long time, first as slave transporters, then as slave bounty hunters, and now, after the slaves have been freed, as a lost-person service—helping reunite families. Selig writes down the names of every one of his customers, and he cross-references this list when he is hired to search for a specific person. However, Bertha believes that Selig can only ‘‘find’’ people who have previously hitched a ride on his peddling cart. Despite this fact, Herald is confident that Selig will find his wife, Martha, and Selig does.
Bynum Walker Bynum Walker, an older resident of the boardinghouse, is an African rootworker, a conjurer who has the power of the Binding Song, which he uses to bind Zonia to her mother, Martha. Bynum received his binding power as the result of a vision he had on the road when he used to travel. A strange man came up to him and offered to show Bynum the Secret of Life. During Bynum’s vision, the strange man began to shine. Bynum’s father appeared as a guide, telling him that if he ever saw a shiny man again, he would know that his song has been accepted. When Bynum came out of his vision, he had the power of the Binding Song, and was able to bind people together so that if they became separated they would be able to find each other. This is how he has gotten the name Bynum, which sounds like ‘‘bind ’em.’’ Ever since he had this vision, Bynum has been searching for another shiny man and he pays Selig, the people finder, to try to find his shiny man for him. Like Bertha, Bynum helps provide advice to various tenants. He advises Mattie to move on from her old boyfriend, and gives her a good luck charm. He tries to counsel Jeremy on the many virtues of women, but Jeremy ignores his advice and runs off with Molly. Bynum also acts as a spiritual guide to Herald. When Herald has a vision of his African ancestors during a juba dance, Bynum helps guide Herald through it. Also, when Herald reacts badly to
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Bynum’s singing of the song, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’’ Bynum realizes that Herald has been enslaved by this notorious man. Bynum gets Herald to tell his story, and tells Herald that Joe Turner captured Herald because he was trying to steal his song—his identity. However, Bynum lets Herald know that when Herald was captured, he forgot his song so that Turner could not steal it. Bynum is the one who lets Herald know that he is bound to his song and that he only needs to sing it to be free. At the end of the play after Herald has slashed himself and found his identity again, Bynum tells Herald that he is shining. Bynum has found another shiny man.
THEMES Identity The primary theme in the play is the search for identity. Although Herald Loomis believes he is searching for his lost wife, Martha, the African conjurer, Bynum, lets him know that Herald is really searching for his song or identity. Herald has forgotten his song as a result of his seven-year enslavement by Joe Turner, a notorious Tennessee plantation owner that illegally enslaved free African Americans to work for him. Bynum tells Herald that Turner captured him, not just to work on his plantation, but to try to steal Herald’s song. Says Bynum: ‘‘Now he’s got you bound up to where you can’t sing your own song. Couldn’t sing it them seven years ‘cause you was afraid he would snatch it from under you.’’ Herald’s plight is representative of many African Americans in this time period who felt cut off from their African heritage as a result of the crippling effects of slavery. The various characters in the play represent a cross-section of the different options that are open to African Americans trying to find their identities. At one extreme there are people like Seth, an African-American man who was born free in the North. Seth devotes his life to making money, embracing capitalism like many other American businessmen. When Selig tries to overcharge him for some inferior materials, Seth lets him know that he is not going to be fooled. Says Seth: ‘‘Don’t come talking that twenty-five cent stuff to me over no low-grade sheet metal.’’ In addition, Seth can do math quickly in his head, he demands payment in advance from his tenants, and he is shocked when Jeremy quits his job after refusing to pay an extor-
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tion fee. Says Seth: ‘‘What kind of sense it make to get fired from a job where you making eight dollars a week and all it cost you is fifty cents. That’s seven dollars and fifty cents profit!’’ Seth is also very disparaging toward his African heritage, calling the African rituals that Bynum performs ‘‘old mumbo jumbo nonsense.’’ Bynum represents the other extreme, people who attempt to maintain a tight hold on their African heritage. An African rootworker, or conjurer, Bynum has the ‘‘Binding Song,’’ a power that binds people together so that they can find each other. At one point in the play, Herald says that Bynum is ‘‘one of them bones people,’’ referencing Herald’s vision of his African ancestors. In between these two extremes, there are people like Bertha, a Christian woman who also performs traditional African rituals. Says Bertha to Seth: ‘‘It don’t hurt none. I can’t say if it help . . . but it don’t hurt none.’’ Some, like Mattie, choose to find their identities in motherhood, searching for a man to make them complete, while others, like Molly, choose to live the single life.
Migration When Bynum first meets Herald and asks him where he and his daughter are coming from, Herald says, ‘‘Come from all over. Whicheverway the road take us that’s the way we go.’’ This was true for many African Americans at the time. Later, Bynum refers to one of the causes of this mass migration, when he is discussing the individual situation of Herald. Says Bynum: ‘‘See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it . . . till he find out he’s got it with him all the time.’’ Herald wanders, unknowingly searching for his identity. However, Herald is not the only character who wanders in the play. Bynum has wandered his whole life, and Seth notes that this is a common trend: ‘‘I done seen a hundred niggers like him. He’s one of them fellows never could stay in one place. He was wandering all around the country till he got old and settled here.’’ This migratory trend has been passed down to the new generation. Jeremy, one of the younger tenants, does not care when he loses his job. As he tells Seth: ‘‘There’s a big road out there. I can get my guitar and always find me another place to stay. I ain’t planning on staying in one place for too long noway.’’ He lives with Mattie for a while, but feels tied down. When he finds Molly, a fellow traveler, he thinks he will be happy with her, and tries to encourage her to come with him. Says Jeremy:
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and choose one of the major legal cases that it has won. Examine the background for this case, and discuss the effects that the legal victory had on the lives of African Americans. Write a short description of what life might be like today for African Americans if this case had not been won. • In the play, Jeremy is jailed without cause and fired from his job when he refuses to be extorted. Research modern forms of discrimination against African Americans and other minorities in America and compare these to the discrimination endured by Jeremy and others in the play. Also, discuss what ongoing efforts are being made to fight discrimination in America. • Research the history of slavery, and choose another nation, besides African nations, that has
‘‘Don’t you wanna travel around and look at some places with Jeremy? With a woman like you beside him, a man can make it nice in the world.’’ Likewise, Mattie keeps searching for her lost man, Jack Carper, whom she thinks will make her whole once again. Still, she notes that this strategy is not working for her, saying that ‘‘I ain’t never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over.’’ The trend of searching for a lost mate continues even with the youngest generation, as demonstrated by the two children, Reuben and Zonia. When Reuben finds out that Zonia is leaving, he tells her that she is his girl, and says: ‘‘When I get grown, I come looking for you.’’
Racial Exploitation and Discrimination Throughout the play, the African-American characters are exploited or discriminated against in various ways by white people. In the American South, this was fairly common at the time and some, like Martha, left to avoid intense racial discrimination. When Herald finally catches up with Martha,
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been subjected to widespread slavery. Write a journal entry from the perspective of a slave in this other nation. • Research the cultural and social climate in Pittsburgh in 1911, including the statistics that concern African Americans. Compare this information to modern-day Pittsburgh and discuss the economic, social, and cultural changes that have taken place in the city. • America is often referred to as either a mixing bowl—in which various cultures exist together but are separated by their differences—or a melting pot—in which these separate cultures are blended together to create one increasingly similar, multicultural identity. Research the current state of multiculturalism in America and decide whether you think the nation is best defined as a mixing bowl or a melting pot.
she explains why she migrated to Pennsylvania. Says Martha: ‘‘Reverend Tolliver wanted to move the church up North ‘cause of all the trouble the colored folks was having down there.’’ However, discrimination and exploitation also happened in the . Jeremy gives two examples where this happens to him. Jeremy relates an example where some white policemen came up to him and one of his co-workers, after they had just bought a drink. Says Jeremy: ‘‘Asked us if we was working. We told them we was putting in the road over yonder and that it was our payday.’’ However, even though Jeremy and his co-worker have a valid occupation, the police still ‘‘snatched hold of us to get that two dollars.’’ The local police use their power to steal money from any black men that they find on the street, even if they are not vagrants. Later in the play, Jeremy is the victim of extortion. As he notes to Seth and Molly, at Jeremy’s job, a white man goes ‘‘around to all the colored making them give him fifty cents to keep hold to their jobs.’’ Jeremy refuses to pay, is fired, and notes the unfair-
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ness of the white man’s actions: ‘‘He go around to all the colored and he got ten dollars extra. That’s more than I make for a whole week.’’ Even Selig, who is a business associate of Seth’s and who is welcomed in the boardinghouse with free food, comes from a family that has exploited African Americans. As Selig notes, ‘‘My great-granddaddy used to bring Nigras across the ocean on ships.’’ In addition, Selig’s father ‘‘used to find runaway slaves for the plantation bosses.’’ Selig’s people-finding business, on the other hand, is viewed as a positive endeavor by most of his African-American customers. However, this business is itself built upon the businesses of his forefathers, because if there had not been any slavery, there would not be a mass of dislocated African Americans trying to find their families. Selig himself notes this to Herald: ‘‘After Abraham Lincoln give you all Nigras your freedom papers and with you all looking all over for each other . . . we started finding Nigras for Nigras.’’
STYLE African American Drama Wilson is considered to be one of the premier African-American dramatists, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a prime example of African American drama—plays that generally depict the struggle African Americans have faced in the United States. Wilson’s play is the third in his series of historical plays, each of which is meant to represent a decade from the twentieth century from an African-American point of view. In this case, the play depicts the 1910s, a time when many African Americans were migrating to the northern states to find work, as Seth notes in the beginning: ‘‘Word get out they need men to work in the mill and put in these roads . . . and niggers drop everything and head North looking for freedom.’’ African-American dramas often have mostly black characters, just as in this play, where Selig is the only white character who appears on stage. African American dramas also often rely on urban settings, and often feature the urban poor, as this play does. With the exception of Selig, everybody who comes to Seth’s boardinghouse struggles to survive. Even Seth, a landowner who has a boardinghouse and two side jobs, cannot make enough money to go into business for himself and
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get ahead in life. Says Seth: ‘‘I can’t get nowhere working for Mr. Olowski and selling Selig five or six pots on the side.’’
Setting The play takes place in a boardinghouse, a confined location that provides a common meeting place for several distinct characters. By limiting the action to the boardinghouse and its yard, Wilson does not need to spend any extra time establishing several different locations. As a result, Wilson is able to examine the various characters in greater depth in a shorter period of time than plays with several locations. The actual location of the boardinghouse is important, too. Pittsburgh was one of the key Northern cities that many African Americans migrated to from the South, and so was a symbol of the freedom that blacks expected to find in the North. As Wilson notes in his preface, entitled ‘‘The Play,’’ these ‘‘sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves’’ come to the city ‘‘carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope.’’ However, as Seth notes, the idea of northern prosperity was not realized by many blacks, because whites often competed for these jobs, and whites were generally favored over blacks. Says Seth: ‘‘White fellows coming from all over the world. White fellow come over and in six months got more than what I got.’’
Metaphor A metaphor is an implied meaning or significance of a word or object that is different than the original meaning. In the play, Wilson uses many metaphors, the chief one being the search for one’s song, or identity. Says Bynum to Herald: ‘‘Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is.’’ Bynum does not mean that Herald has literally forgotten how to sing a song that he used to know. Instead, the song is a metaphor for Herald’s identity, and the AfricanAmerican cultural identity in general. Since this identity is derived from Herald’s African past, in which music plays a large part, the metaphor becomes very fitting—and resonates with audience members if they are aware of this well-documented connection. The search to regain this song, by Herald and others, introduces several other metaphors into the play. For example, the boardinghouse, which is technically just a building, becomes a place of healing for many of the tenants, who are searching to fix their lives. Characters like Bertha
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and Bynum help to underscore this idea, since they both help to guide these wandering, searching souls in various ways. When Jeremy leaves Mattie, Bertha helps Mattie, by telling her not to worry about love, which will find its way to her in time. Says Bertha: ‘‘Trying to figure it out don’t do nothing but give you a troubled mind. Don’t no man want a woman with a troubled mind.’’ Most of the metaphors in the play link in some way to the idea of identity. Other metaphors include the idea of the shiny man, a man that signifies African-American independence. Bynum meets a strange man on the road when he is younger, and this man has Bynum hold out his hands. He has Bynum rub their hands together, and when Bynum looks at their combined hands, he sees that ‘‘they got blood on them.’’ The man tells Bynum to ‘‘take and rub it all over me . . . say that was a way of cleaning myself.’’ This act causes Bynum to have a vision, in which life is magnified and the strange man starts ‘‘shining like new money.’’ Although this collection of ideas might be confusing to an audience member when it appears in the first scene, the significance makes more sense at the end of the play. When Herald hears from his wife, Martha, that he should ‘‘be washed with the blood of the lamb,’’ he tells her, ‘‘I can bleed for myself.’’ After slashing himself across the chest with his knife, Herald wipes his blood on his face, just as Bynum did with the shiny man. This act frees Herald from his past, and as Bynum notes, causes Herald to shine ‘‘like new money!’’ The man that Bynum met on the road was an independent black man, someone who had found his song and was self-sufficient, with no chains to the past. To Bynum, therefore, this man shone, just as Herald is now shining, ‘‘Having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency,’’ as Wilson notes in the stage directions.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Joe Turner As one of the plays in his ten-play historical cycle, chronicling the African-American experience in the twentieth century, Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is an overtly historical play. In this case, the play concerns what life was like for African Americans in the 1910s. Although slavery was technically illegal at this point, the notorious Joe Turner ignored the law and illegally impressed African Americans into slavery for seven years on
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his plantation. Says Herald, ‘‘Kept everybody seven years. He’d go out hunting and bring back forty men at a time.’’ Actually, the name, ‘‘Joe Turner,’’ is incorrect, historically speaking. Although the W. C. Handy song that Wilson bases his play on was called, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’’ the actual man that the song referred to was named ‘‘Joe Turney,’’ the brother of Tennessee governor Pete Turney. This discrepancy is rarely mentioned by critics, most of whom still refer to the man as ‘‘Turner.’’ Part of the reason for this oversight may come from the fact that, with the exception of Wilson’s play and Handy’s song, Turner’s exploits are often overlooked. Says Jay Plum in his 1993 African American Review article, ‘‘Although the chain gang affected the personal lives of many African Americans, traditional histories of the United States make little or no mention of the phenomenon.’’
Peonage In addition to Turney’s blatant disregard for the law, another form of slavery existed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century— peonage, or debt slavery. Although the federal government outlawed the practice of peonage with the 1867 Peonage Abolition Act, southern states still passed a number of laws that allowed African Americans to be fooled into signing contracts that committed them to debt slavery. Some of these contracts were disguised as good opportunities to work off a debt or court fine. In these cases, a landowner would offer to pay an African American’s debt, in exchange for having the man work the debt off on the landowner’s farm. However, this was often a trap, because many landowners would simply charge the unwitting slave more room and board than he could pay for, effectively keeping the slave in perpetual debt and bonding him to the landowner forever. Eventually, the ban on peonage was enforced, although the first conviction of a landowner engaged in the act of peonage did not happen until 1901; and the defendant was later pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1911, when the play takes place, peonage was still widely practiced, despite a Supreme Court ruling the same year that declared state peonage laws unconstitutional.
The Great Migration Even when African Americans were not coerced into slavery, many of them worked in slavelike conditions, especially in the South. Many newly freed slaves, unable to find work elsewhere, were forced to work Southern lands as sharecroppers, or
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • Late 1900s/Early 1910s: Jack Johnson becomes the first black man to hold the world heavyweight boxing championship title in 1908. When he successfully defends his title in 1910, race riots break out in the United States. 1980s: African Americans riot in Liberty City, Florida, following the acquittal of police officers accused of killing an unarmed black man. Today: The largest protest of police brutality in New York’s history occurs after police officers shoot forty-one bullets at Amadou Diallo, a black immigrant. • Late 1900s/Early 1910s: Many African Americans are denied their freedom when they are impressed into slavery by the influential Tennessee plantation owner, Joe Turney, whose exploits are memorialized in the blues song, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.’’ Other blacks face severe segregation and discrimination. 1980s: Tensions escalate between South Africa’s black majority and the white South African leadership, in part due to the government’s longtime practice of racial segregation and repression— known as apartheid. Through apartheid, the white
tenant farmers. Slaves who became sharecroppers would generally lease a portion of a landowner’s cropland, farming it and giving a portion of the crop—or the money earned from selling the crop— to the landowner. However, while blacks were now paid for their efforts, it was rarely enough to survive. In the play, Herald and Martha are sharecroppers, until he is abducted by Joe Turner. When Herald is released, he recounts how he tried to return to his life. Says Herald: ‘‘I made it back to Henry Thompson’s place where me and Martha was sharecropping and Martha’s gone. She taken my little girl and left her with her mama and took off North.’’ When Herald decides to take Zonia and go up North to find Martha, he joins many other African Americans who were also hitting the road,
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minority passes laws that restrict the rights of non-whites, including denying blacks the right to vote. Both the United Kingdom and the United States institute a selective number of economic sanctions against South Africa, in protest of its racial policies. Today: Following the first all-race national elections in 1994, South Africa’s government now features a black majority and a permanent, nonracial constitution. • Late 1900s/Early 1910s: W. E. B. Du Bois helps found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with the help of Jane Addams and John Dewey, two concerned white activists. Du Bois is one of the most influential public figures of his day. 1980s: The Reverend Jesse Jackson runs for the Democratic presidential nomination twice and wins a significant amount of support each time from both blacks and whites. Today: General Colin Powell is the United States Secretary of State under President George W. Bush and is the first African American to hold this position.
for a variety of reasons. In her 1995 book, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Sandra G. Shannon discusses this massive northward movement of African Americans, known as the Great Migration. Says Shannon: ‘‘The historical context out of which the play evolves includes a backdrop of frustrated sharecroppers; hundreds of unemployed, unskilled laborers; countless broken families; and a pervasive rumor of a better life up North.’’ This northward movement of American Americans was one of many such migrations that happened during the twentieth century, as many moved from the rural South to Northern cities. Herald Loomis’s migration in the early twentieth century directly preceded a much larger movement, called the ‘‘Great Migration,’’ which took place during World War I.
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W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP The beginning of the twentieth century also witnessed the rise of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most important figures in African-American history. Du Bois, who received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1896, took America by storm when he published his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. In the book, Du Bois publicly denounced the policy of Booker T. Washington—an influential black leader who encouraged African Americans to put up with discrimination from whites, and to concentrate their energies instead on educating themselves. Du Bois’s attack on Washington created a split in African-American political support. Conservatives aligned themselves with Washington, while more radical members followed Du Bois. In 1905, Du Bois led a group of almost thirty African Americans in secret to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where they founded the Niagara Movement. Although this organization—which was effectively set up to oppose Washington’s conservative policies—never gained a massive following, it did provide a forum to discuss civil rights issues. In 1909, the Niagara Movement, under the direction of Du Bois, merged with a group of concerned whites, to create the interracial organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Since 1909, the NAACP has been extremely influential, especially in a legal sense, in the fight to promote equal civil rights for African Americans.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone debuted on Broadway in 1988, it received overall good praise from the critics. However, not all audiences responded as well. As Peter Wolfe notes in his 1999 book, August Wilson, ‘‘Playgoers comfortable enough with the African retentions built into Wilson’s two earlier plays recoiled from the ethnicity of Joe Turner.’’ The play has enjoyed a strong critical reputation since then, with the majority of critics focusing on the main idea of the play, African Americans’ search to find their identity. Says Sandra G. Shannon, in her 1995 book, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, ‘‘The theme of finding one’s song, which permeates Joe Turner, is simultaneously a personal and collective ambition for Wilson and for all of black America.’’ In addition, critics have also noted the two main influences of the play, the 1978 Romare Bearden
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Playbill cover from the 1988 theatrical production Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City
painting, entitled Millhand’s Lunch Bucket, and the historical person of Joe Turney. Although most critics have failed to recognize that ‘‘Joe Turner’’ is an incorrect name, Wolfe says, ‘‘The difference in the names of the blacks’ captor, though small, deserves a look.’’ Wolfe notes that: The mistake evokes the famous Kansas City blues singer Big Joe Turner (1911–1985) in a play that not only relies heavily upon music but also includes, in Jeremy Furlow, a blues guitarist in its cast.
Other critics discuss Wilson’s portrayal of women in his plays, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Although Wilson himself has said many times that he does not focus on women in his works, Shannon, in her 1994 essay, ‘‘The Ground on Which I Stand: August Wilson’s Perspective on African American Women,’’ disagrees. Says Shannon, ‘‘Despite Wilson’s grounding in a decidedly male frame of reference, his portrayals of African American women cover as wide a range as do those of his men.’’ Many critics notice the combination of African and Christian ideas in the play. In her 1995 book, August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey, Kim Pereira notes of Bertha that her ‘‘strength
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derives from a blend of two religious traditions perfectly synthesized in her abundant spirit.’’ However, Pereira also notes that, by the end of the play, Wilson has demonstrated through the character of Herald ‘‘that the path to the true destinies of black people begins in their African roots: only when they embrace their African identities completely will they really be free.’’
play. Says Bogumil, ‘‘some of the characters’ names exemplify their internal and external struggles.’’ Bogumil is one of many critics who note that in the case of Bynum, his last name, Walker, underscores Bynum’s former status as one of the migratory African Americans, who walked around the country, aimlessly searching for an identity. Seth remarks on Bynum’s migratory nature: ‘‘I done seen a hundred niggers like him. He’s one of them fellows never could stay in one place. He was wandering all around the country till he got old and settled here.’’
CRITICISM
Bynum is not the only character whose name is deliberately intended to signify a purpose or greater meaning. Herald Loomis’s first name is also very distinctive, because of its spelling. Normally, the name Herald would be spelled, ‘‘Harold.’’ The use of the more unusual spelling draws attention to the name and leads to the interpretation of Herald as a literal herald—somebody who announces something. In this case, Herald’s transformation in the play announces a new era of black awareness. Herald is able to transcend his painful slave past by reconnecting with his African heritage. In the process, he becomes a shiny man—the metaphor that Wilson uses in this play to signify a self-sufficient African-American person.
Ryan D. Poquette Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette analyzes the significance of names in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. At one point in Wilson’s play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the boy who lives next door to the boardinghouse, Reuben Scott, questions the meaning of the name of Herald’s daughter, Zonia, saying, ‘‘What kind of name is that?’’ Although the name Zonia does not have a traditional translation, this focus on names is representative of Wilson’s technique in the play, where names play an important role. When playwrights choose names for their characters, the choice sometimes helps to influence the story or underscore a message that the playwright wishes to get across. In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the emphasis on names is both overt and subtle. Wilson uses both specific names and the general concept of naming to underscore the main theme of the search for an AfricanAmerican identity. Several characters in the play have distinctive names that invite attention. This is first noticeable with Bynum Walker in the first scene, where Bynum refers to the vision that he had when he was younger. During the vision, Bynum is granted the gift of ‘‘the Binding Song,’’ his own personal song, which gives him the power to bind people together, making it easier for wanderers to find their lost family members. As Bynum notes, ‘‘Been binding people ever since. That’s why they call me Bynum. Just like glue I sticks people together.’’ Bynum is not the character’s real name, but it is one that he has adopted since it symbolizes his purpose in life. In her 1999 book, Understanding August Wilson, Mary L. Bogumil notes the significance of names in the
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As Peter Wolfe notes in his 1999 book, August Wilson, Wilson himself has talked about the significance of Herald’s name. Says Wolfe, ‘‘When asked by a theater critic from the New York Post about the origins of Loomis’s name, Wilson said, ‘Herald, because he’s a herald. Loomis because he’s luminous.’’’ However, since this is theater, where many people hear the name before they read it, the phonetic sound of the name, ‘‘Harold,’’ is just as important as the spelling. Harold is a name that, in most cultures, means a warrior, somebody who is a strong fighter. This is an appropriate designation for Herald, since the play concerns his ability to embrace the painful collective past of African Americans, find the strength to ‘‘stand up,’’ and move on. Martha, Herald’s wife, also has a distinctive last name, in this case the new name of Pentecost. The Pentecost is a Christian feast that is held to celebrate the Holy Spirit’s descent to the apostles. This extremely religious last name serves two purposes. First, it indicates that the Martha that Herald knew is dead, a fact that Martha indicates when she tells Herald that she waited five years for him before moving on with her life. Says Martha: ‘‘I killed you in my heart. I buried you. I mourned you. And then I picked up what was left and went on to make life
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • In Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America (1996), editors Herb Boyd and Robert L. Allen have collected an impressive number and variety of writings by African-American men. The book features more than one hundred entries of fiction and nonfiction works, including slave narratives, autobiographies and biographies, essays, poems, and short stories. Some works are excerpted, while others are reproduced in full. The book also features some previously unpublished writings. • W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most vocal African-American leaders in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. A prolific writer, he also produced several sociological studies that illuminated the African-American experience. One of the first of these, The Philadelphia Negro: A Special Study, first published in 1899, offers an in-depth examination of African-American life in Philadelphia at the end of the nineteenth century. The book featured groundbreaking techniques in urban ethnography, social history, and the use of statistics and is today considered a classic work of social science literature. • Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, originally published in 1903, was not well received by white audiences, largely due to the book’s depiction of the unfair treatment of African Americans. In addition, Du Bois shocked both whites and blacks when he publicly announced in the book that he was opposed to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, a prominent African-American man who was willing to put up with racism—in exchange for promises from white leaders to help educate blacks. • In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Herald searches for his song, or identity, throughout the play. In Velma Maia Thomas’s No Man Can Hinder Me: The Journey from Slavery to Emancipation through Song (2001), the author explores the African tradition of music and its many variations in the United States. The lavishly illustrated book is accompanied by a compact disc,
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which includes eighteen representative songs— many of which are sung by the author. • Critics have compared Wilson’s play to Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Beloved, which was first published in 1987. Sethe, the main character in the novel, is a former slave, who has escaped to Ohio. However, like Herald Loomis, she is initially unable to bury her past, which includes the loss of her family. This novel can be a tough read, employing extended metaphors and other complex literary techniques, but it is well worth the effort. • Wilson’s drama is also compared to the plays of Eugene O’Neill, one of the few other American playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes. Like Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946) features a diverse group of characters who collect in one setting to discuss their hopes and dreams. However, in O’Neill’s play, the characters inhabit a barroom, not a boardinghouse. This play is considered by many critics to be one of O’Neill’s best works. • Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Fences, was first published in 1986. The play is the second work in the playwright’s ten-play historical cycle, which seeks to chronicle the AfricanAmerican experience in the decades of the twentieth century. Set in the 1950s, Fences details the conflict between Troy Maxson—a former baseball player who was denied the opportunity to play in the major leagues because of his race— and his son, Cory, who is offered a college football scholarship. • Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), was the play that made him famous and was the first play that he wrote in his ten-play historical cycle. Set in the 1920s, the play features the reallife historical figure of Ma Rainey, one of the first successful female blues singers, although the action primarily focuses on the conflict among Rainey’s black, male band members. The play takes place in a single afternoon at a recording studio, where frustrations created by racial exploitation manifest themselves in a violent climax.
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SELIG DOES NOT HAVE A LIST TO HELP HERALD FIND HIS AFRICAN ANCESTORS, MANY OF WHOM DIED NAMELESS ON SLAVE SHIPS THAT WERE BROUGHT TO AMERICA. TO CONNECT WITH HIS AFRICAN HERITAGE, HERALD MUST RELY ON BYNUM, AN AFRICAN CONJURER.’’
without you.’’ Just as Martha’s name invokes the name of the Holy Ghost, it also implies the death of both her marriage and her former identity. As Anne Fleche notes in her 1994 essay, ‘‘The History Lesson: Authenticity and Anachronism in August Wilson’s Plays,’’ ‘‘when Martha shows up she’s like a ghost (her new name is ‘Pentecost’), and it’s too late for her and Loomis.’’ In addition to underscoring the death of Martha’s old identity, her last name sets her up as Herald’s main opponent, and sets up Christianity as the main opponent of African Americans who are in search of their own identity. In the play, Herald denounces Christianity, starting with his interruption of the juba dance which mentions the Holy Ghost. Says Herald to the others, ‘‘You singing for the Holy Ghost to come? What he gonna do, huh? He gonna come with tongues of fire to burn up your woolly heads?’’ When Martha arrives at the end of the play, she tries to get Herald to embrace Christianity, and quotes Bible passages to support the idea that Jesus Christ will save Herald. However, Herald’s response indicates that he is not interested in salvation in the next life; he wants equality in this life, and does not think he will get it from the white man’s god. Says Herald: ‘‘Great big old white man . . . your Mr. Jesus Christ. Standing there with a whip in one hand and tote board in another, and them niggers swimming in a sea of cotton.’’ Since Christianity supported slavery, Herald cannot bring himself to follow it. In fact, his final act denounces the belief that Christ bled for humanity’s sins. Martha tells Herald that he must ‘‘be washed with the blood of the lamb.’’ This idea of blood inspires Herald to use his own blood to wash himself clean,
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and he slashes his chest in an act that both defies Martha’s Christianity and affirms Herald’s belief in himself. Bynum, Herald, and Martha all have names that have overt meanings. In other cases, the meanings of the names are subtler. For example, Jeremy Furlow is a wanderer, like Bynum, and like many others of his time. If one ignores the spelling of Jeremy’s last name and pronounces it as ‘‘furlough,’’ the name is given added meaning. A furlough is a leave of absence. This fits with Jeremy’s nature, since he would rather leave any situation that intrudes on his lifestyle. Life is a constant vacation for Jeremy, who would rather live a life of wandering than settle down with a job and a family. When Jeremy gets fired from his job, he is happy, because he does not want to be tied down. He proposes that he and Molly travel together, but Molly notes that Jeremy is with Mattie. Says Jeremy, ‘‘I was just keeping her company ‘cause she lonely. You ain’t the lonely kind. You the kind that know what she want and how to get it.’’ As Jeremy indicates to Molly, the hedonistic or pleasure-seeking lifestyle— something that Molly is used to—appeals to him. Says Jeremy, ‘‘I need a woman like you to travel around with.’’ Other character names that have subtle meanings include Seth and Bertha Holly, whose last name has two meanings. First, a holly is a type of shrub. In a play where many of the characters travel around searching for their identities, the Holly’s boardinghouse becomes a place for them to get their bearings, and in some cases, guidance. Like a shrub, the Hollys have set down roots, and their stability and immobility is a sharp contrast to the migratory nature of the others. Traditionally, holly is also another word for holy, which once again underscores the religious nature of the play and the desire for Seth, especially, to live a holy, respectable life. When Herald first comes to Seth’s boardinghouse, looking for Martha, Seth does not believe that he could be married to Martha. Says Seth: ‘‘Martha’s a good Christian woman. This fellow here look like he owe the devil a day’s work and he’s trying to figure out how he gonna pay him.’’ In the case of Mattie Campbell and Molly Cunningham, the emphasis on their names is not in their meaning, but in their construction. Both women have the initials M. C., a significant coincidence, especially since they are both twenty-six. As Wolfe notes, ‘‘Being the same age and having the same
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initials makes them, if not alter egos, then possible directions for one another.’’ Mattie is devoting her life to becoming a housewife and mother while Molly is just the opposite—she prefers to pursue a life of independence. Wilson’s emphasis on names goes beyond literal translations of the names of specific characters. The idea of naming in general also serves to underscore the cultural search that many African Americans were undergoing at this time, when characters like Herald were searching for a true identity, a name to call their own. Wilson further emphasizes this idea through the character of Rutherford Selig, the People Finder. Selig, a white man, is able to help people like Herald find living relatives. Selig writes down the names of every customer, and refers to this list of names whenever he is trying to help somebody ‘‘find’’ a lost loved one. Also, as Bertha notes, Selig adds to his lists by including the names of blacks who travel with him: ‘‘They wait till he get ready to go, then they hitch a ride on his wagon. Then he charge folks a dollar to tell them where he took them.’’ While this list of names works when Selig is searching for a specific person, it fails him when he tries to search for Bynum’s ‘‘shiny man.’’ Bynum first saw the shiny man during the vision in which he acquired his binding talent. The shiny man represents any independent black man who has embraced his cultural heritage and forged a new, self-sufficient identity. As Bynum relates to the others, during his vision, Bynum’s father had told him that if he saw another shiny man before his death: ‘‘I would know that my song had been accepted and worked its full power in the world and I could lay down and die a happy man.’’ Ever since, Bynum—like other African Americans—has been searching for the shiny man. Since the shiny man has no specific identity that is recognizable to white men like Selig, the people finder is unable to find him. Says Selig to Bynum: ‘‘Well, I done told you I can’t find nobody without a name.’’ In addition, Selig does not have a list to help Herald find his African ancestors, many of whom died nameless on slave ships that were brought to America. To connect with his African heritage, Herald must rely on Bynum, an African conjurer. Likewise, Bynum must rely on Herald, not Selig, to find his shiny man for him. By tapping into their shared African heritage, Bynum helps guide Herald through his transformation into the shiny man, at which point, Bynum’s search is over. By extension, Wilson informs his African-American
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Playbill cast list from the 1988 stage production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, directed by Lloyd Richards
audience that if they follow the path of Herald and Bynum and work together to embrace their African past, their search for a concrete identity could be over, too. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Douglas Anderson In the following essay, Anderson explores how Wilson’s play illustrates that ‘‘in reclaiming the self by recovering the past, the individual becomes capable of constructing a future.’’ A character in August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone tells a story about how he was ‘‘cure[d]’’ of playing in guitar contests. Called out to play his guitar for an unspecified prize offered by a white man, Wilson’s character does his best to demonstrate his skill against his two black opponents until he realizes that the white man is tone deaf and cannot distinguish the quality of each man’s music. All three players finally substitute volume for skill, and the white judge, unable to declare a
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winner, pronounces ‘‘all three . . . the best guitar player’’ and divides a paltry prize of twenty-five cents between the contestants with a ‘‘penny on the side.’’ The anecdote related by Wilson’s character serves as a reminder that white efforts to understand the products of black cultures can be attended by arrogance and insensitivity, a tendency to hear one essential black voice speaking of a single black experience. White readers of Wilson’s play should want to avoid both the arrogance of the tone-deaf white man who assumes that economic and social privilege qualify him to judge a black culture, and his insensitivity to the different voices within that culture. This insensitivity, as the anecdote makes clear, always renders the same leveling judgment, a judgment of unimportance or non-worth. The anecdote and Wilson’s play as a whole, however, are not primarily about an insensitive, indifferent or hostile white society but about the process of recovering and recreating black voices after the white judge has turned individual music into noise. The premise of the play, and the focus of my argument about the play, is that this recovery and re-creation can only occur with the recognition that Joe Turner, the personification of white oppression of African Americans, has ‘‘come and gone.’’ Joe Turner is part of a past that, acknowledged and appropriated for the self, loses its power to determine the future. Consigning Joe Turner to the past does not mean naively believing that white oppression is at an end. Wilson’s play depicts ongoing efforts by white society to deflect and misdirect black progress toward community and individual identity. But if white oppression extends into the present, its power to diminish or impugn the self is denied when the history of that oppression is confronted and countered with the collective and personal memory that grounds identity. In reclaiming the self by recovering the past, the individual becomes capable of constructing a future. A play about recovering the past and leaving it behind, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone appropriately treats a transitional phase in African-American history: the Great Migration. Over a period of twenty years, from 1910 to 1930, some one and a half million African Americans, a sixth of the nation’s black population, left rural and urban areas of the South for industrial cities of the North—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and the city that is the setting for August Wilson’s play, Pittsburgh.
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What the migrants left behind, what they hoped to find and what kind of life greeted them in the North are questions of fact that historians of this period generally agree on. The migrants left racial violence, segregation, and disfranchisements in the South. They also left a Southern economy hurt by a boll weevil invasion that reduced cotton yields, low cotton prices, and a pattern of Northern investment that turned the South into a dependent colony with a shrinking labor market. They were drawn to the North by the promise of higher wages and after 1916, by the employment possibilities created when World War I stopped the flow of European immigrant labor. In leaving for the industrialized cities of the North, the migrants hoped to find not only higher wages but also economic and political equality, educational opportunities, and social justice. What the migrants found in the North was something less: voting rights that did not translate into political power, discriminatory hiring and promotion practices that kept them at the bottom of the employment ladder, segregated and substandard housing and education. Some gains were made in economic well-being, political rights, and opportunities in education. But, as James Grossman suggests in Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration, ‘‘the dreams embodied in the Great Migration eventually collapsed under the weight of continued racial oppression and the failure of industrial capitalism to distribute its prosperity as broadly as the migrants expected.’’ In Carole Marks’s succinct summary in Farewell—We’re Good and Gone, reality never matched the dream of the Great Migration.’’ Though Grossman and Marks agree about many of the facts surrounding the Great Migration and though both find that the migration achieved little in the way of concrete economic, social and political gains, they do not agree about the meaning of this mass movement of people, particularly its meaning for those who made the journey. For Marks, the Great Migration was a drama in which the migrants themselves were ‘‘minor actors.’’ The real stars of this drama were economic forces: the declining Southern economy, the need of Northern industrialists for cheap and expendable labor after World War I ended European immigration and, at the most abstract level, an economic order in which developed, capital-rich cores draw natural resources and cheap labor from undeveloped peripheries. Though the migrants created many of their own lines of communication and institutional supports for the move, labor agents were pivotal in inducing them to
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leave, and ‘‘much of the mobilization of the migration was orchestrated in the board rooms of Northern industrial enterprises.’’ In a review essay of Marks’s and Grossman’s books [‘‘The Beginnings of a Renaissance: Black Migration, the Industrial Order, and the Search for Power,’’ Journal of Urban History, May, 1991], Earl Lewis observes that Marks’s claim for the primacy of economic forces will be disconcerting to ‘‘social historians who have dared to understand how African Americans empowered themselves during the industrial age. As one of these social historians, James Grossman rejects historical accounts that portray migrants as objects of economic and social forces and suggests that we can better understand the Great Migration by viewing it ‘‘as a conscious and meaningful act rather than as a historical imperative.’’ This act, Grossman suggests, grew out of migrants’ consciousness of their identity as black Americans and their willingness to adapt and recreate that identity in a new urban, industrial context. The same pride in racial heritage and identity that Marcus Garvey drew on in the twenties, he suggests, was central to the ‘‘ideology of the Great Migration.’’ By migrating to industrialized cities of the North, black Southerners affirmed their power to make themselves, just as they had proved their freedom through spatial mobility of a more limited kind following emancipation. As a ‘‘second emancipation,’’ the Great Migration represented a break with the past but also its preservation and adaptation. Though migration entailed the abandonment of a long-standing ideal of land ownership as the route to independence and the ability to recast the self as industrial worker and city dweller, ‘‘the migrants,’’ as Grossman puts it, ‘‘did not leave their cultural baggage at the train station.’’ This cultural heritage informed the decision to migrate and the migrants’ response to the institutions and social forms that they found in the North, at the same time that it changed that environment and was changed by it, a mutual reshaping evident, Grossman suggests, in ‘‘the aromas of southern cooking . . .; the sounds of New Orleans jazz and Mississippi blues; styles of worship; patterns of speech . . .’’ However, not all differences of cultural heritage or of interest were reconciled in quite so harmonious a way, and in focusing on the Great Migration as a historical process in which African Americans asserted a common heritage and identity, Grossman does not assume a monolithic African-American culture. As Lewis points out in his
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THOUGH WILSON’S CHARACTERS SEEK AN INDIVIDUAL ‘SONG’ THAT WILL GUIDE THEM ALONG THE ROAD INTO THE FUTURE, THEY ARE ENABLED TO RECOVER THIS SONG ONLY THROUGH RECOVERY OF A COLLECTIVE AS WELL AS A PERSONAL PAST. RECOVERY OF ONE’S SONG, HOWEVER, IS NOT EASY. . . .’’
review of Land of Hope, Grossman recognizes the interethnic conflicts that frequently marked relations between the ‘‘Old Settlers’’ and the new arrivals, conflicts generated by differences of class as well as region and that were often manifested as the fear that the newcomer’s rural lack of sophistication in dress, manner, or religious expression would injure community image. In spite of these differences, however, migrants and the established black community shared a sense of ethnic identity which synthesized much of the experience of both groups and redefined African-American cultural identity both North and South. It is as a process of cultural self-creation that Grossman sees the Great Migration’s chief significance and promise. Viewed from the perspective of subjects recreating themselves, from ‘‘forward’’ rather than ‘‘backward,’’ the Great Migration, he suggests, was not a failure, for in this singular reversal of the historian’s perspective, we see the migrants not as the objects of historical forces and the histories written about them but as agents in their own history. Grossman’s analysis of the Great Migration as a process in which African Americans drew on the past to remake themselves is close to August Wilson’s dramatic interpretation of the migration in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Like Grossman, Wilson see[s] the Great Migration not merely as a demographic or geographical shift but a historical transition to a new identity, and in his play the image of movement, of traveling the roads, serves as an apt
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metaphor for the search for self. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone presents this search as both personal and collective. Though Wilson’s characters seek an individual ‘‘song’’ that will guide them along the road into the future, they are enabled to recover this song only through recovery of a collective as well as a personal past. Recovery of one’s song, however, is not easy, and, as Jeremy’s anecdote of the guitar contest suggests, that song is in continual danger from the effects of white racism.
who is somewhat scornful of what he witnesses. A skilled craftsman and a property owner, a practical man accustomed to dealing in the materials of his craft and the economic realities of running a boarding house and resisting exploitation in his work life, Seth is prone to see the ritual performed by Bynum as ‘‘mumbo jumbo nonsense,’’ as something not quite civilized. Watching a ritual in which Bynum kills a pigeon and pours some of its blood into a cup, Seth speculates: ‘‘I believe he drink that blood.’’
Before I go to look more closely at what the search for self or ‘‘song’’ entails, I think it is important to understand something of the conditions and the world in which Wilson portrays that search. The world depicted in Wilson’s drama consists of material and spiritual parts or aspects which must be brought into meaningful synthesis, a synthesis in which each is informed by or exists through the other. The search for self or ‘‘song’’ can be viewed as a personal version of this broader task of creating a world in which the spiritual and the material infuse one another. Or, again, since Wilson suggests the individuals, couples and communities can be worlds of their own, the two tasks are substantially the same task. Recovering the unique self of one’s song is also the creation of a world in which the material and spiritual are in harmony.
Bertha’s immediate reproach to her husband for this fantasy suggests that Bynum is not so far outside social norms as Seth likes to believe:
Both interdependence of the material and the spiritual and the need to bring them into fuller relation are suggested in the opening scene of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The setting for this scene and for the rest of the play is a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911. When the play opens, the owner of this boardinghouse, Seth Holly, is watching one of his tenants, a ‘‘rootworker’’ or shaman named Bynum, perform a religious ritual or rite. Seth reports the progress of this ritual to his wife, Bertha, while she cooks breakfast and they exchange comments about Seth’s work in a Pittsburgh steel mill and his efforts to get a loan to finance a small shop for the manufacture of pots and pans. The staging of this scene, dialogue, and characterization suggests that the material and spiritual aspects of the world are in intimate contact but somehow not fully integrated. On the one hand, the staging dramatizes separation. The material world of everyday concerns, of seeking business loans and baking biscuits, is located inside the boardinghouse, where it can be directly witnessed by the audience. The spiritual realm is outside and offstage, accessible to the audience only through Seth’s description of it. This description, moreover, is made by a man
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‘‘Seth Holly, what is wrong with you this morning? . . . You know Bynum don’t be drinking no pigeon blood.’’ ‘‘I don’t know what he do.’’ ‘‘Well, watch him, then. He’s gonna dig a little hole and bury that pigeon. Then he’s gonna pray over that blood . . . pour it on top . . . mark out his circle and come on into the house.’’
Yet Bynum does function as a foil for Seth. Described in the play’s notes as a man ‘‘lost in a world of his own making and [able] to swallow any adversity or interferences with his grand design,’’ Bynum represents a spiritual world that is antagonistic to the material and practical one, but different from and somewhat indifferent to it. This indifference and the potential for tension between Bynum’s spirituality and Seth’s materialism are humorously represented in Bynum’s apparent unconcern for the vegetable garden in which he conducts his ritual, unconcern that leads Seth to yell, ‘‘Hey Bynum . . . Watch where you stepping!’’ from his station by the window. While characterization and staging tend to present the material and the spiritual as separate realities, they do not present this separation as absolute or even as clearly marked. Though the vegetable garden provides bodily sustenance and ostensibly belongs to Seth, it is also the site of Bynum’s ritual and the place where Bynum grows plants for use in magical preparations. The division of ‘‘Seth’s’’ garden, moreover, reflects a similar division (or amalgamation) in Seth’s character, for though he calls Bynum’s rituals ‘‘mumbo jumbo,’’ he has the conjure man bless his house. Likewise, though Bynum represents the claims and needs of the spirit, he is no enemy of the material world or of pragmatic, commercial realities that Seth deals in. He both relishes Bertha’s biscuits and accepts payment for spiritual services. In a similar way, the staging
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suggests the intimate connection as well as separation of the material and spiritual. Though the spiritual world is off stage, it is connected to the material, the practical and the everyday by a window, and Seth’s report on that world while Bertha bakes biscuits suggests that these two realities exist in close relation. Indeed, Bertha’s matter-of-fact response to Seth’s sacrilegious speculation about how Bynum will use the pigeon’s blood suggests that, in some fundamental way, the spiritual or extramundane is part of everyday, pragmatic reality. Bertha knows the course of Bynum’s ritual without looking because she has seen it many times, because it is a regular part of everyday existence. The first scene’s dialogue continues a pattern of showing the material and spiritual to be separated and interrelated, but it also shows how their integration can be subverted. Seth’s commentary on Bynum’s off-stage ritual is interspersed with discussion of more material, pragmatic concerns—his unsatisfying work on the night shift at a mill and his desire to start his own business with the financial help of white businessmen. Despite the practicality of Seth’s plan, however, the white men he approaches refuse to lend him the money he needs unless he signs his house over to them. It is here that we begin to see why Seth’s house needs to be blessed and in what way the spiritual and material may become not integrated and complementary but opposed realities. At least part of the material, pragmatic, and everyday world inhabited by Wilson’s characters, that part dominated by whites, opposes their spiritual being because it is organized to oppress them. Much of the oppression experienced by Wilson’s characters might be described as material or economic. Thus, Seth’s guitar-playing tenant, Jeremy, is jailed without cause and fined two dollars and later fired from his job on a road crew when he refuses to pay a white coworker fifty cents in protection money. Steady work and home ownership give Seth a certain financial security, yet he too is vulnerable to a white society bent on extracting what it can from him and limiting his opportunities for economic advancement. Commenting on the hopes of black migrants for prosperity in Pittsburgh, Seth notes that though he has lived in Pittsburgh all his life, white European immigrants have ‘‘come over and in six months got more than what I got.’’ Though the oppression encountered by Wilson’s characters may seem to be solely economic or material, that oppression is spiritual as well in its
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capacity to deprive the individual of a sense of himself or of his unique ‘‘song.’’ Since the play presents the material and the spiritual as interwoven or integrated, material oppression necessarily has an effect on the individual spirit, denying it value and even existence. The individual spirit or song, in Wilson’s play, can only exist as a manifestation in the world, as an act or expression of self that ‘‘marks’’ or makes the world. This expression, in a sense, uses the self up to create the world, translates the spirit into material form. Bynum’s song, for example, consists in the act of binding people together, but this use of his song ‘‘cost[s] me a piece of myself every time I do it.’’ The use of self to create the world does not really entail the sacrifice or loss of self, however, but leads rather to that self’s realization. As Bynum puts it at one point, ‘‘[I] got so I used all of myself up in the making of that song. Then I was the song in search of itself.’’ Because the world created through the individual’s song is a place in which the self is reflected, a place in which the individual is able to see and know how to identify himself, to use the self in the expression of one’s song is also to create and affirm that self. Material oppression as it is depicted in Wilson’s play denies this essential bond with the world of one’s creation and, consequently, the being of the subject who creates the world. To be defrauded of the products of one’s labor, or to see that creation diminished (as that of Jeremy and the other musicians is in the guitar contest), is to be denied a reflection of individual worth and identity in the world. It is to be exiled from self and world together. This alienation and displacement of the individual, moreover, is accompanied by the severing of relationships and the fragmentation of community. ‘‘People cling to each other out of the truth they find themselves,’’ Bynum says at one point. Hence, if they have been separated from this truth through the operation of oppression, their capacity to bond with one another, to form friendships, couples, families, or a people, is undermined. The social effects of the alienation felt by Wilson’s characters are expressed in their stories of broken relationships and in the uncertainty or suspicion that they feel toward one another. As Seth puts it, ‘‘Anybody liable to be anything as far as I’m concerned.’’ The connection between oppression, alienation from self and inability to form bonds with others is clearest in the character of Herold Loomis, the hero of Wilson’s play. Accompanied by his young daughter, Loomis arrives at Seth’s boarding house while searching for his wife, Martha. Loomis became
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separated from his wife ten years earlier when he was imprisoned and forced to work on a chain gang for seven years by a white man named Joe Turner. When Loomis was finally released, he returned to the farm where he had been a sharecropper to find that little remained of his former life. Though he found his daughter in the home of his wife’s mother, his wife had gone to the North with the church. Taking his daughter with him, Loomis went in search of his wife, but he also sought himself and the ability to connect with others. Joe Turner had separated Loomis not only from his family and the life in which he knew himself but, in a more fundamental way, from his sense of self-worth and identity. Turner’s ability to oppress Loomis carried a judgment of non-worth which a guard made explicit: ‘‘He told me I was worthless.’’ This judgment of worthlessness, which Loomis was forced to accept by the reality of the white man’s power, has ‘‘marked’’ Loomis as ‘‘one of Joe Turner’s niggers’’ at the same time that it has caused him to forget ‘‘how he’s supposed to mark down life.’’ It has, in other words, transformed Loomis from a subject into an object, a condition in which he remains bound to Joe Turner even after he has been released. Marked by Joe Turner as a worthless object without agency or power, Loomis is not only alienated from himself but displaced from his relation to the world, for the world is home only to selves able to create it in their own image. He is unable to establish bonds with people around him (‘‘I done forgot how to touch,’’ he tells Mattie Campbell), and he wanders without a clear sense of either his origin or destination. Asked where he is from, Loomis replies: ‘‘Come from all over. Whicheverway the road take us that’s the way we go.’’ Deprived of a place in the world through oppression, Loomis is ‘‘bound up to the road.’’ By finding the wife he has lost, Loomis hopes to reconnect with the past life which had grounded his identity and, in this way, to find a ‘‘starting place’’ for remaking the self in the future. As Loomis tells Martha when he finally sees her, ‘‘now that I see your face I can say my goodbye and make my own world.’’ In his search for the past and himself, Loomis enlists the services of a white traveling salesman or trader named Selig, who, besides selling pots and pans he purchases from Seth, hires himself as a ‘‘people finder’’ to blacks looking for lost loved ones. For a dollar fee, Selig writes down the name and description of the missing person and watches for that person as he travels around the country
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selling his wares. If one of the purchasers of his goods happens to be on Selig’s list of missing persons, then that person has been ‘‘found’’ and can be reunited with Selig’s client. By performing this service for African Americans in search of one another, Selig follows a calling he has inherited from his father and grandfather. As he tells Loomis, [W]e been finders in my family for a long time. Bringers and finders. My great-grandaddy used to bring Nigras across the ocean on ships. . . My daddy, rest his soul, used to find runaway slaves for the plantation bosses. . . After Abraham Lincoln give you all Nigras your freedom papers and with you all looking all over for each other . . . we started finding Nigras for Nigras.
In a recent interview in which he was asked if Selig is an evil figure, Wilson replied, ‘‘[H]e’s not evil at all. In fact, he’s performing a very valuable service for the community.’’ Given the continuity between Selig’s ‘‘finding’’ and that performed by his father and grandfather, Wilson’s defense of his character and his commercial sideline seems disingenuous. And the play presents Selig’s people finding in quite another light. In order to be ‘‘found’’ by Selig, a black man or woman must first buy something from him, must, that is, enter the market economy as customer. While this leveling of identity within economic relations does not reproduce quite the radical denial of intrinsic human worth entailed in the professions of Selig’s ancestors, the parallel nevertheless seems clear. The economic system represented by Selig, a system which exploits and excludes blacks, is one that they can be ‘‘found’’ in only as ‘‘Nigras.’’ And to be found in this way is to experience the same alienation from self and community that created the need for Selig’s services in the first place. As Bertha Holly informs Loomis after he has hired Selig to find his wife, You can call him a People Finder if you want to. I know Rutherford Selig carries people away too. . . Folks plan on leaving plan by Selig’s timing. They wait till he get ready to go, then they hitch a ride on his wagon. Then he charge folks a dollar to tell them where he took them. Now, that’s the truth of Rutherford Selig. He ain’t never found nobody he ain’t took away.
Selig represents economic forces which not only exploit African Americans but deny their intrinsic worth as persons, in the terms of the dichotomy discussed above, as spirit. Though these forces may not be self-consciously ‘‘evil,’’ the injury they inflict through indifferent exploitation resembles that inflicted by Joe Turner’s more direct oppression.
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If the search for the past and self through the economic system represented by Selig seems to be doomed to failure, a second possibility for selfrecovery is presented through Bynum’s account of how he learned ‘‘the Secret of Life’’ and discovered his essential self or ‘‘song.’’ Bynum’s experience of revelation and self-recovery is described in terms of a spiritual journey. While walking along a road, Bynum met a man who, saying he has not eaten for three days, asked him for food and for information about the road Bynum had come by. The stranger then offered to show Bynum ‘‘the Secret of Life’’ and led him back the way he, Bynum, had come. The stranger was able to serve as guide on this unfamiliar road because he had ‘‘a voice inside him telling him which way to go.’’ After cleansing Bynum’s hands with blood, the stranger led him to a place where ‘‘everything was bigger than life’’ and there left him, disappearing in a light streaming from his body so that Bynum ‘‘had to cover up my eyes to keep from being blinded.’’ After the ‘‘shiny man’’ left, the spirit of Bynum’s father appeared and took over his instruction, taking him to an ocean where he witnessed ‘‘something I ain’t got words to tell’’ and teaching him how to find his song. Bynum chose ‘‘the Binding Song,’’ he tells Selig, ‘‘because that’s what I seen most when I was traveling . . . people walking away and leaving one another.’’ Possession of this song conferred on Bynum both a new identity and a unique task in the world: ‘‘Been binding people ever since. That’s why they call me Bynum.’’ Bynum’s narrative of revelation and self-recovery resembles Afro-Baptist conversion narratives. In these narratives, according to Michael Sobel [in Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith], a ‘‘seeker’’ makes a journey that leads him not only to rebirth in Christ but to recovery of his essential self, ‘‘the ‘little me’ in the ‘big me.’’’ Though unique, this self is also a manifestation of a collective spirit that, Sobel suggests, ‘‘the Black had brought . . . with him from Africa, not as a deity but in his own inner self.’’’ By recovering the ‘little me,’ the convert is both reborn in Christ and ‘‘brought . . . back to his African heritage.’’ As in Afro-Baptist conversion, the self recovered by Bynum was both unique (his personal ‘‘song’’) and already there and waiting for him as part of his African heritage, a self related to an ancestral or ethnic past. Thus, the place where Bynum was taught ‘‘the Secret of Life’’ and learned how to find his song was one that lay on a road Bynum had already traveled, and he received in-
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struction from an ancestor, the spirit of his father. As ‘‘the One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way,’’ the shiny man was potentially both spiritual guide and spiritual ancestor. Elements of Bynum’s narrative of revelation and self-recovery evoke the Biblical story of Saul’s transformative encounter with a risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Reading Bynum’s story through the Biblical one suggests that the shiny man who guided Bynum toward his song and then disappeared in blinding light was a Christ figure from whom Bynum received a new identity, just as Saul, the persecutor of Christians, was transformed into Paul, the great preacher of the gospel. Bynum himself, according to this paradigm, would be a reborn Paul and his ‘‘binding song’’ the task of uniting African Americans in anticipation of a returning savior or messiah. Bynum does, in fact, hope to see the shiny man again, but the person and the advent he waits for do not have quite the meaning that they have in the Biblical paradigm. If the shiny man is a messiah figure, he is not an otherworldly or even exceptional individual. As Bynum tells Selig, ‘‘I ain’t even so sure he’s one special fellow. That shine could pass on to anybody. He could be anybody shining.’’ The shiny man is an ordinary man who, possessing his song as ‘‘a voice inside him telling him which way to go,’’ is able to guide others toward repossession of their songs, toward becoming shiny men in their own right. And since ‘‘that shine could pass on to anybody,’’ the shiny man is also the individual who has not yet found his song, one who searches for himself. That search takes place in the world, and for Bynum to see the shiny man ‘‘again’’ means assisting that search by acting as the shiny-man guide to another. Seeing the shiny man again does not entail Bynum’s deliverance from the world but confirmation of his contribution to it. As Bynum’s father told him, ‘‘There was lots of shiny men and if I ever saw one again before I died then I would know that my song had been accepted and worked its full power in the world . . .’’ The shiny man is an ordinary individual who seeks himself or is sought by others in the world, so it is not entirely strange that Bynum engages Selig’s help in this search, paying him a dollar to find that shiny man for him. Given that this search is for an individual’s self, song or soul, however, Bynum’s use of Selig’s services is highly ironic, and his greetings to the ‘‘People Finder’’ carry more than a hint of sarcasm: Bynum: If it ain’t the People Finder himself.
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Selig: Bynum, before you start . . . I ain’t seen no shiny man now. Bynum: Who said anything about that? I ain’t said nothing about that. I just called you a first-class People Finder.
Selig cannot find the shiny man because neither he nor the economic system he represents is able to recognize African Americans as persons or individuals. Bynum’s description of the shiny man as ‘‘anybody shining’’ is an affirmation of the intrinsic value of each individual. The shiny man could be anybody because each individual possesses the potential for self-realization which the shiny man represents. Selig’s observation that ‘‘there’s lots of shiny Nigras,’’ by contrast, implies that African Americans are indistinguishable from one another, that they are, in fact, not individual subjects but bodies that are ultimately the same body: ‘‘The only shiny man I saw was the Nigras working on the road gang with the sweat glistening on them’’ (emphasis added). Though the economic system which Selig represents cannot see black persons, the shiny man cannot be found wholly outside that system since persons realize themselves in a world of concrete material relations. Bynum acknowledges the material basis of the search for self in his employment of Selig and in his description of the shiny man as one who ‘‘shine like new money.’’ The shiny man’s spiritual or inner shine cannot be divorced from the material or economic world, but it also transforms it, makes it serve the expression of soul, self, or song. Bynum uses Selig, then, but he does not rely on him, and the real ‘‘People Finder,’’ as Bynum hints at one point, is Bynum himself: ‘‘I binds them [people] together. Sometimes I help them find each other.’’ Bynum can act as ‘‘People Finder,’’ however, only to people who carry within themselves a sense of their own humanity. He can act as a spiritual guide only to the ‘‘anybody’’ who already searches for himself. As a man cut off from self and community, seeking himself through the recovery of the past, Herold Loomis is that anybody, as Seth unconsciously reveals when he voices suspicions about Loomis’s identity: ‘‘Anybody can tell anybody anything about what their name is. That’s what you call him . . . Herald Loomis. His name liable to be anything.’’ Though Seth’s distrust expresses the fragmentation of community that accompanies the self-alienation of its members, a community of anybodies is also one that might cohere as its members find their own identities through a past
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that is collective. Since Loomis is the anybody who could be the shiny man, his search and Bynum’s are the same. Loomis is searching for himself through recovery of the past, and Bynum is searching for the man whom he can guide to himself and whose selfrecovery will validate the efficacy of Bynum’s own song, its ‘‘power in the world.’’ The search for the shiny man is a collaborative and, indeed, a collective project, for the self that is its object can be found only in a past that is held in common with others. Searching for the self in the past presupposes that the past is one which can ground a self, that it was made by other selves whose agency can function as the precedent for and promise of one’s own. Initially, Loomis is unable to see the collective African-American past in this way, as can be observed in a powerful scene that begins when the lodgers of Seth’s boarding house perform a variant of the ‘‘ring shout,’’ an Afro-Christian ritual in which frenzied dance and ecstatic shouts mediated an experience of possession or inspiration by the Holy Ghost (Sobel). When Loomis walks in on this dance, he is angrily contemptuous of the boarders’ evocation of a past which he clearly considers to have been marked by passive suffering and useless piety: ‘‘You singing for the Holy Ghost to come? What he gonna do huh? He gonna come with the tongues of fire to burn up your wooly heads?’’ Loomis, however, is fundamentally connected to the past and people he scorns, and his own challenge, giving way to dance, glossolalia and a visionary trance, merges with and continues the act of the collective memory which he has interrupted. The lodgers’ ecstatic ritual, in fact, produces precisely the state of trance and vision which it was originally intended to, and the vision which Loomis witnesses is given expression in a collective act, a call-andresponse exchange between Loomis and Bynum: Bynum: What you done seen, Herald Loomis? Loomis: I done seen bones rise up out of the water. Ride up and walk across the water. Bones walking on top of the water. Bynum: Tell me about them bones, Herald Loomis. Tell me what you seen
Asking questions, prompting, repeating images and phrases, interpreting earlier lines, Bynum is essential to the realization of Loomis’s vision as more than a private experience. The past evoked in Loomis’s vision is one which affirms the possibility of agency Loomis has defined. Briefly, Loomis’s vision records two journeys. The first is a journey of bones traveling across
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a body of water, a journey symbolizing the transAtlantic voyage in which Africans, enslaved and taken from their homes, both died by the thousands and were treated as mere bodies without identity of human worth: ‘‘Wasn’t nothing but bones and they walking on top of the water.’’ The enslaved Africans of Loomis’s vision do not remain insentient bones however. The bones sink into the ocean from which they are then resurrected as bodies with flesh and restored to life by a wind that fills them with breath or spirit. Resurrected, the Africans then begin a second journey which requires individual agency and decision. Standing up from the shore of the New World where a wave has thrown them, the Africans bid each other goodbye and leave the place to pursue their different paths: ‘‘They shaking hands and saying goodbye to each other and walking every whichaway down the road.’’ Loomis’s vision is one which affirms the presence of agency in the African-American past, suggesting that it is not one of victimization alone, but of agency and self-empowerment. The vision suggests, moreover, that even the history of victimization can be and has been redeemed. The people of Loomis’s vision exercise agency not only in the present following their resurrection, but in relation to the past that brought them to the New World. By beginning a second journey which parallels or repeats the first but adds the new dimension of choice and self-determination, the people of the vision change the meaning of the past, remake it retrospectively. This re-creation of the past might be called an act of transformative repetition such as is embodied in the call-and-response form itself. Moving from statement to repetition and restatement, the call-and-response exchange shared by Loomis and Bynum continually remakes itself as it develops, symbolically remaking the events which are its theme. This history of self-empowerment is Loomis’s by right of inheritance, for the people of his vision are his people: ‘‘They black. Just like you and me. Ain’t no difference.’’ But the connection that justifies the claim of co-possession of historical agency seems to go beyond inheritance and precedent, as Loomis becomes not simply like his ancestors but one of them: Loomis: They ain’t moved or nothing. They just laying there. Bynum: You just laying there. What you waiting on, Herald Loomis? Loomis: I’m laying there . . . waiting. Bynum: What you waiting on, Herald Loomis?
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Loomis: I’m waiting on the breath to get into my body.
Here the collapse of differences of time and identity would seem to open the possibility of reentering and enacting the past in order to fully claim its legacy of self-empowerment. Loomis, however, is not yet able to claim this legacy by standing up with the people of his vision. The part of the vision in which the Africans stand up, say goodbye to one another, and depart on their different journeys is recounted by Bynum alone, suggesting that this part of history does not yet exist for Loomis and cannot exist until he realizes it through an act of his own. Before Loomis can claim the legacy of empowerment left him by his ancestors, he must confront and understand his own experience of oppression: seven years of false imprisonment and forced labor on the chain gang of Joe Turner, brother to the governor of Tennessee. Though this experience is part of Loomis’s personal past, it is not one that he has suffered alone, but with the men imprisoned with him, those who lived in fear of imprisonment and the families deprived of their men. Loomis’s experience, then, is once again part of a collective past, a past preserved for collective memory in a song. The refrain of this song is, ‘‘They tell me Joe Turner’s come and Gone.’’ As sung by ‘‘the women . . . down around Memphis’’ who ‘‘made up that song,’’ the song is a testimony of loss. If ‘‘Joe Turner’s come and gone,’’ then husbands, sons, fathers and brothers have been taken away from their families. By singing this song, Bynum uses collective memory to confront Loomis with his personal loss and with the way this loss still affects him: Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life . . . See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it . . . till he find out he’s got it with him all the time. That’s why I can tell you one of Joe Turner’s niggers. ‘Cause you forgot how to sing your song.
Bynum’s suggestion that a song of loss and victimization has displaced Loomis’s own song and that Loomis is still in bondage to Turner, still ‘‘one of Joe Turner’s niggers,’’ provokes first violent denial, then implicit acknowledgement as Loomis recounts the story of his imprisonment, his release to find nothing left of his former life and his efforts to see his wife once more so that he can begin again: ‘‘I just wanna see her face so I can get me a starting place in the world.’’ By acknowledging the past, Loomis is enabled to confront the judgment of
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worthlessness which keeps him bound to Joe Turner and counter it with his own truth. Joe Turner did not catch and keep him for seven years because he was ‘‘worthless’’: ‘‘Worthless is something you throw away. . . I ain’t seen him throw me away.’’ Rather, it was envy of Loomis’s song that led Joe Turner to imprison him. As Bynum puts it, ‘‘What he [Joe Turner] wanted was your song. He wanted that song to be his. . . But you still got it. You just forgot how to sing it.’’ Once Loomis has understood the past in which he was victimized and has rejected the judgment of worthlessness which oppression forced upon him, it remains for him to say ‘‘goodbye’’ to what he has lost and reclaim the self that Joe Turner has not been able to take away. What Loomis has lost is the life he had with his wife, Martha, before Joe Turner entered it. He cannot reclaim that life except as a past he confirms by seeing Martha again: ‘‘I just wanted to see your face to know that the world was still there. Make sure everything still in its place so I could reconnect myself together.’’ Loomis must ‘‘say goodbye’’ to Martha and the world they made, but this goodbye is everything. By relinquishing the past, Loomis also reclaims it as his own, in a sense, nullifying Joe Turner’s expropriation. Loomis’s declaration, ‘‘Well, Joe Turner’s come and gone and Herald Loomis ain’t for no binding,’’ transforms the meaning of the words sung by women whose men had been taken away. The words no longer communicate present loss but consign Joe Turner to a history of which Loomis is the subject. Repossessed of the past, Loomis is no longer its victim but the measure of its meaning, free to judge it and reject what seems false, including the Christian faith that Martha tries to lead him back to: Great big old white man . . . your Mr. Jesus Christ. Standing there with a whip in one hand and a tote board in another, and them niggers swimming in a sea of cotton. And he counting. He tallying up the cotton. ‘‘Well, Jeremiah . . . what’s the matter, you ain’t picked but two hundred pounds of cotton today? Got to put you on half rations.’’ And Jeremiah go back and lay up there on his half rations and talk about what a nice man Mr. Jesus Christ is ‘cause he give him salvation after he die. Something wrong here. Something don’t fit right!
Loomis rejects Christian promises of salvation as complicit with African Americans’ historical oppression and, declaring that ‘‘I don’t need nobody to bleed for me!’’ slashes himself across the chest. This declaration of self-sufficiency and of break with the pieties of the past is also one in which Loomis reconnects with a collective identity and a
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heritage of self-empowerment: he finds that ‘‘I’m standing now’’ just as the ancestors in his vision had stood up. Reclaiming himself and translating a collective past to the present, Loomis becomes indeed the shiny man who knows his own song and, ‘‘shining like new money,’’ shows the way. Source: Douglas Anderson, ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’’ in CLA Journal, Vol. XL, No. 4, June 1997, pp. 432–57.
SOURCES Bogumil, Mary L., Understanding August Wilson, University of South Carolina Press, 1999, p. 65. Fleche, Anne, ‘‘The History Lesson: Authenticity and Anachronism in August Wilson’s Plays,’’ in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, edited by Alan Nadel, University of Iowa Press, 1994, p. 14. Pereira, Kim, August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey, University of Illinois Press, 1995, pp. 70, 81. Plum, Jay, ‘‘Blues, History, and the Dramaturgy of August Wilson,’’ in African American Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 1993, pp. 561–67. Shannon, Sandra G., The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Howard University Press, 1995, pp. 120–21. ———, ‘‘The Ground on Which I Stand: August Wilson’s Perspective on African American Women,’’ in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, edited by Alan Nadel, University of Iowa Press, 1994, p. 151. Wilson, August, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Penguin Books, 1988. ———, ‘‘The Play,’’ in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Penguin Books, 1988. Wolfe, Peter, August Wilson, Twayne Publishers, 1999, pp. 77, 79–80, 88.
FURTHER READING Aptheker, Herbert, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United State 1910–1932, 1973, reprint, Carol Publishing Group, 1993. Aptheker’s renowned historical study of AfricanAmerican history relies on original documents—including essays, reports, speeches, letters, and news articles—from people who lived during this time period. Collectively, the book offers a good picture of what life was like for African Americans from 1910 to 1932. Among the many topics covered is peonage. Earle, Jonathan, The Routledge Atlas of African-American History, Routledge, 2000. This book chronicles the four centuries of African American history and culture in the United States,
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from the arrival of the first African slaves in the early 1600s to the present day. The book contains short essays on everything from politics to sports, and each topic is depicted with photographs, charts, graphs, maps, and other illustrations. The book also features a chronology of African history from 3200 B.C.E. through the late 1990s. Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook, Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. Originally published in 1994, this revised collection of essays explores several aspects of Wilson’s life and career, including the playwright’s creative process, his famous collaboration with theater director Lloyd Richards, and the various contexts of Wilson’s plays. The book also includes a 1993 interview with the playwright. Handy, W. C., Father of the Blues: An Autobiography, Da Capo Press, 1991. Through songs like ‘‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’’ W. C. Handy chronicled the African-American experience through his blues music. In this autobiography,
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Handy explores the roots of jazz and blues and discusses the background of some of his most famous songs. Herrington, Joan, ‘‘I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done’’: August Wilson’s Process of Playwrighting, Limelight Editions, 1998. In this book, Herrington discusses the development of three of Wilson’s plays, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Through her analysis, Herrington explores the various experiences in Wilson’s life that influenced his drama. Schwartzman, Myron, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Although Wilson and Bearden came from distinctly different backgrounds, they captured the AfricanAmerican experience in similar ways. Bearden captured it with art, and Wilson through plays—which were sometimes inspired by Bearden’s art. This book offers a look at Bearden’s life, and features both black-and-white and color reproductions of many of Bearden’s works. It also includes several interviews with Bearden.
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Miss Lulu Bett ZONA GALE 1920
Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett was produced in 1920, less than a year after publication of its genesis, the bestselling novella of the same name. New York producer Brock Pemberton telegraphed Gale that she should adapt her novella for the theater, and she immediately set to work. ‘‘I’m almost ashamed to say how quickly it was done,’’ she told a friend, as Harold P. Simonson noted in his study Zona Gale. ‘‘I finished it in a week, but as I wasn’t satisfied with the last act I held it over from Saturday to Monday to revise it.’’ That new ending would prove to be the play’s greatest source of controversy. The novella’s original ending—which saw Lulu wedded to a neighbor after her first ‘‘marriage’’ was voided by her ‘‘husband’s’’ prior marriage—was changed so that Lulu went off in the world on her own, telling her family, ‘‘I thought I wanted someone of my own—but maybe it was just myself I wanted.’’ Gale asserted she had changed the novella’s ending because it would stretch the audience’s credulity to have one woman marry two men in the course of two hours. However, the second ending caused an uproar among theater-goers, who craved a happy resolution. Obligingly, Gale wrote a new ending in which Lulu’s first marriage turns out to be legitimate and she and her husband are happily reunited. The audience, if not the critics, were thus satisfied, and Miss Lulu Bett went on to enjoy a successful run and immense popularity. For this play, Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
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Despite the controversy over the ending, Miss Lulu Bett shows a woman who makes the choice to assert her identity and independence. As such, the play conveyed Gale’s feminist politics, which she made an important part of her fictional work. The play also is significant in Gale’s body of work, marking her transition from sentimental works of fiction to more realistic, sharp-edged works of fiction. Miss Lulu Bett can be found in Plays by American Women, 1900–1930 (1990), edited by Judith Barlow.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Zona Gale was born August 26, 1874, in Portage, Wisconsin, a small-town setting to which she frequently returns in her novels and plays. As a teenager, Gale wrote poetry, short stories, and a play, and during her years at the University of Wisconsin, she wrote her first unpublished novel. Upon graduating with a degree in literature in 1895, she worked as a reporter for several years. She continued her studies during this period, earning her master’s degree in literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1899. In 1901 she moved to New York where she obtained a position as a reporter for the Evening World. After only eighteen months, however, she quit journalism so she could devote herself to creative writing. She sold her first magazine story in 1903, and soon made her living through the publication of her sentimental fiction. Visits home to Wisconsin inspired Gale to write a series of short stories about the fictitious Friendship Village. The success of the ensuing four volumes ensured Gale’s popularity.
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social issues of the time. Her short novel Miss Lulu Bett, published in 1920, showed her interest in women’s rights. Gale was approached by a producer about turning Miss Lulu Bett into a play, and she wrote the resulting script in ten days. The play Miss Lulu Bett—which opened in December 1920 on Broadway in New York—was a hit with critics and the public alike. Gale received the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for drama for this work. It was later made into a silent movie.
Gale’s official career as a playwright dates to 1910, when the Wisconsin Dramatic Society asked her to write a one-act play. Gale’s The Neighbours was quite similar to her Friendship Village stories. The play was a critical success, and in 1916 it traveled to New York.
Despite this success, Gale concentrated on her novels in subsequent years, and developed a solid reputation as a leading American writer. She completed a one-act play, Uncle Jimmy, in 1922, and in 1925 adapted her successful novel Birth (1923) into the play Mister Pitt. This play was only moderately successful, however, and Gale turned her attention back to fiction.
Throughout the 1910s Gale focused on writing short stories and novels. She returned to Portage to live, but the work she produced during this period gradually moved away from her earlier sentimentalism and idealism to a harsher, realistic portrayal of small-town life. This new emphasis on realism stemmed partially from her continuing interest in
Throughout the rest of the 1920s Gale produced several volumes of short stories, a book of essays, and several novels. Preface to Life (1926), considered her best work of the period, showed a turn from regional realism toward mysticism. During the 1920s Gale also worked for progressive causes and social reform. She helped write Wiscon-
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sin’s Equal Rights Law of 1923 and served as her state’s representative to the International Congress of Women in 1933 in Chicago. She also established a series of scholarships at her alma mater for students in the creative arts, and served on the university’s board of regents. In the 1930s Gale returned to writing plays, and the three dramas she produced blended domestic realism with an optimistic faith. Evening Clothes (1932) marks her final visit to Friendship Village. Gale died of pneumonia December 27, 1938 in Chicago. Her final work, the novel Magna, was published posthumously in 1939.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Miss Lulu Bett opens in the Deacons’ dining room, where most of the family is gathering for the evening meal. Over the course of the meal, Mrs. Bett appears, then Di’s friend Bobby, who is looking for a job mowing the lawn, and finally Di accompanied by Mr. Cornish, who is carrying her party favors. After dinner, when Di and Mr. Cornish have already left, Dwight notices a letter on the shelf, which both Ina and Lulu forgot to tell him about. The letter is from Dwight’s brother Ninian, who lives in Oregon, and announces that he will arrive for a visit sometime the following week. Dwight teases Lulu that Ninian would have come sooner had he known how pretty she was. Then he and Ina leave for their study group. Soon thereafter, Bobby comes in from having cut the grass and Di returns home. Di flirts with Bobby, then tells him to leave, and she gets a snack to bring to Mr. Cornish, who is waiting on the front porch. Mrs. Bett and Lulu talk about how easily Di manipulates Bobby and wonder if Ina knows about this romance. Scene 2 opens a week later in the dining room. Di is talking tenderly to Bobby through the window. Then Lulu and Monona come into the room. Monona tells Lulu that Ninian had been talking to Dwight about her; Ninian said hers was the best cooking he had ever tasted. Lulu is disgusted because men only notice her for her cooking. When Ninian comes into the room, he asks Lulu if she has ever married, and she says, no, from choice. Ninian tells Lulu that her family treats her like a slave and that she should have a life of her own. Although Lulu protests that
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the Deacons treat her well, she eventually admits that she would rather live under different circumstances, perhaps get an education or obtain a job where people appreciate her. Ninian hits upon the idea of taking Lulu to a show and dinner in the city, along with Dwight and Ina. Lulu protests that she should not go, but Ninian will not hear of it. He goes off to arrange the excursion, and he invites Mr. Cornish and Di as well. When Dwight comes home, like his wife, he is surprised that Ninian convinced Lulu to make the trip. As Ninian explained to Ina, it is simple: he invited her. Lulu comes back, dressed for the theater, and soon the entire party has assembled. It is too early to leave yet, and Dwight jokes that they must find something amusing to do, otherwise ‘‘They’ll begin to read the funeral service over us.’’ Ninian asks, why not the wedding service, and says he would not object. Then he asks Lulu if she would. Ninian says, ‘‘I, Ninian, take thee, Lulu, to be my wedded wife,’’ and over Dwight’s protest, Lulu says her part. Dwight informs them that they now are married. He is a magistrate, and they have just performed a civil wedding, which is legally binding. At this news, Ninian expresses his pleasure at being married to Lulu. Although surprised that Ninian would want to marry her, Lulu agrees to stay married and go on a honeymoon in Savannah before returning to Oregon. When Mrs. Bett hears the news, she wonders who will do the work around the house.
Act 2 Act 2 opens a month later. Di wants to go to the library, but Ina does not want to let her go since she has been out every night this week. Dwight says he supposes Bobby will be at the library. After Di has left, Dwight and Ina remark that they have not heard any news from Lulu and how they miss having her around the house. Suddenly Lulu appears, alone. She says that Ninian is on his way to Oregon. She left him after finding out he has another wife. Though he had not seen the wife in fifteen years and thinks she is dead, he is not sure, so Lulu could not stay with him. Ina sends Lulu to bed, and the family talks about the problem. Ina exclaims it is a good thing that no one knows about the scandal, which surprises Lulu. Dwight agrees with Ina, saying it would bring disgrace to the family. Lulu is concerned that the townspeople will think she had not been a good wife, but Dwight tells her that if she expects to return to live with them, she had better not tell anyone the truth. Lulu argues that the truth is
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better, but Dwight asks if he showed Lulu any proof that he had been married. Dwight says that Ninian was always making up stories and maybe he just wanted to get rid of Lulu. The next night finds the family again bickering over Di’s trip to the library. Di asks what happened with Lulu and Ninian, and Dwight tells her that Ninian deserted her aunt. Lulu enters and asks Dwight for Ninian’s address in Oregon. She wants to know the truth: if Ninian was married or if he was just lying to get rid of her. Dwight does not want to give her the address, and Lulu threatens to tell the whole town the story. Even Dwight’s threats to turn her out of the house do not deter her. In the end, Dwight volunteers to write Ninian himself, and Lulu mails the letter. However, Dwight and Ina are going to visit Dwight’s aunt, and Lulu wants to open Ninian’s letter should it come while Dwight is away. Dwight refuses. Lulu acquiesces, but after she goes inside, Dwight and Ina remark how changed she is since Ninian’s arrival. Dwight further calls Lulu a ‘‘brazen’’ woman for marrying Ninian in the first place. A week later, the letter from Ninian sits on the piano while Lulu and Mr. Cornish are playing the instrument. Mrs. Bett opens the letter and inside is an old newspaper clipping announcing Ninian’s marriage. Lulu is thankful to find out that Ninian had not lied to her and that he did not just want to get rid of her. As Mr. Cornish gets ready to leave, he asks Lulu to marry him. Mrs. Bett encourages her to accept the proposal, but Lulu refuses, and he leaves. Then Di appears with a traveling bag, ready to elope with Bobby. Lulu urges her to wait for her parents and get married at home, but Di says that her parents would simply laugh at the idea and ignore her wishes. Bobby shows up and tells Di they cannot get married because they are underage. While Di wants to lie about their age, Bobby will not lie about so serious a matter. Just then Dwight and Ina return. They want to know what is going on, and Mrs. Bett reveals that the whole town is talking about Di and Bobby wanting to get married. Di denies the rumor, and Dwight turns to Lulu for the story, but she will not tell. Bobby, upset that Di denied their affair, breaks up with her. Dwight asks Lulu if a letter came for him and is upset when he sees it is open. When Dwight learns what Ninian has to say, he thinks Lulu is worse off, for she lived with Ninian without being married to him. Lulu and Dwight argue about whether or not she will keep the truth from the townspeople. She
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wants people to know that Ninian has a first wife, but Dwight feels it will bring disgrace upon him and the family. Only when Dwight points out that Ninian could go to prison for having committed bigamy does Lulu agree to keep the affair secret.
Act 3 Later that day, Lulu has made her decision to leave. She does not want to stay and have the townspeople think that Ninian did not care for her, nor does she want to resume work in Dwight’s kitchen. With the blessing of her mother, Lulu departs for the train station. When the family comes down, they discover that breakfast is not ready. Eventually, Mrs. Bett tells them that Lulu has left. She says that Lulu wanted to get away from them, as Di did when she set out to elope with Bobby. No sooner has everyone left the room then Ninian enters. He has come to tell Lulu that his first wife is dead—and he has a letter to prove it. Upon finding out that Lulu has run away, he dashes off to the train station to catch up with her. Almost immediately, however, Lulu returns, and Mrs. Bett sends Monona to bring back Ninian. Lulu has heard from the station agent that Ninian is in town and she wants to know why. Dwight and Ina come in. They ask Lulu to remain with them, but she refuses. Ninian returns, and he affirms that his first wife is dead. He asks Lulu to forgive him, and she does, agreeing to go back to him.
CHARACTERS Miss Lulu Bett Miss Lulu Bett, a mid-thirties spinster, is the protagonist of the play. For the past fifteen years she has lived in the household of her sister’s family, along with her mother. In the Deacon home, she serves in the role of cook, housekeeper, and general domestic. Her sister and brother-in-law take advantage of her, treating her and speaking to her more like they would a servant than a family member. Lulu finds her situation in the Deacon household paradoxical. On the one hand she feels she ought to be grateful that the Deacons have taken her into their home. On the other hand she knows— despite her contrary protests—that they do not treat her well. She would like to leave the Deacons and
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telling Ninian that she would not allow marriage to happen. Having buried a husband and four children, Mrs. Bett believes she has saved Lulu from extra pain.
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Miss Lulu Bett was made into a silent film in 1921. It was directed by William C. DeMille, produced by Adolph Zukor, and starred Lois Wilson and Milton Sills. It is available through Nostalgia Family Video.
find a job where she is better appreciated, but she thinks other options are unavailable to her. Her family has long told her she is no good for work or for a relationship—for instance, she does not believe that any man could possibly like her for herself, as Ninian does—so she feels that she has no chance now to ever change her life. Lulu jumps at the chance to leave the Deacon house as Ninian’s wife. When she comes back a month later—after learning Ninian was previously married and his first wife may still be alive—it is with new resolve and a new ability to stand up for her own rights, much to the dismay of her sister and brother-in-law, both of whom want her literally to return to her place in the kitchen. Lulu realizes that she cannot take this role on again, and she sets out to create a life of her own, despite her own uncertainties about what the future will bring. Before she can leave town, however, she discovers that Ninian’s wife is dead and that he wants her back. Thus, instead of leaving town alone, she leaves, again, with her husband.
Mrs. Bett Mrs. Bett, Lulu and Ina’s mother, lives with the Deacons. A senile elderly woman, she dislikes her son-in-law, and in fact all her family members from time to time. In act 1, she accuses Lulu of always having been jealous of Ina, but in act 3 she shows real tenderness toward Lulu when she realizes that Dwight and Ina had been trying to convince Lulu that Ninian never loved her. At that moment, she supports Lulu’s decision to leave, even giving up her entire savings to the venture. Mrs. Bett also claims to be the reason that Lulu never married,
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Mr. Cornish Mr. Cornish is a possible suitor for both Lulu and Di. He has several attributes that endear him to the Deacons: he owns a business (a piano store), but more notably, he is due an inheritance of $500. Ina is confident he will fall in love with Di. Cornish, however, a thinking man who studies laws in the evenings, appears more infatuated with Lulu, praising her cooking, her appearance, and her virtues. After Lulu learns about Ninian’s prior marriage, he asks Lulu to be his wife, but she refuses because she loves Ninian.
Di Deacon Di Deacon is Dwight and Ina’s oldest daughter. About nineteen years old, she is looking for a way out of the home and for someone who will treat her well. As she tells Lulu, ‘‘I could love almost anybody real nice that was nice to me.’’ To achieve these goals, she plans to elope with the neighbor Bobby Larkin. The romance fails when he refuses to lie about their ages, and now that he offers her no escape and thus is of no use to her, she denies their affair to her angry, suspicious parents.
Dwight Deacon Lulu’s brother-in-law Dwight is a pompous man, for instance, referring to his daughter Monona as ‘‘progeny,’’ mispronouncing words such as rendezvous and chef, making fun of Lulu’s supposed dowdiness, and talking down to his wife. He always insists that his observations are correct and that his rules be followed. His attitude endears him to no one in his family but Ina. Dwight focuses on his own needs, which are at no time more apparent than when Lulu returns with news of Ninian’s first marriage. His primary concern is how having a brother who is a possible bigamist will reflect upon him, not how this surprising turn of events has affected Lulu. He orders Lulu to hide the truth and let the townspeople think Ninian sent Lulu away because she was not a good wife. Lulu’s refusal to accept this plan both startles and angers Dwight, who accuses her of being ungrateful. His marked selfishness is apparent in his demand that Lulu not open any letter from Ninian in
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his absence. This time, he places the sanctity of his privacy above Lulu’s need to know the truth from her so-called husband. These instances show Dwight’s utter inability to consider the feelings of others or to see the world from another person’s viewpoint.
Ina Deacon Lulu’s sister Ina, wife of Dwight, has her husband’s sense of self-importance, but to a lesser degree. She joins Dwight in bossing Lulu around and in making fun of her, but at times she treats her sister with acts of relative kindness, for instance, lending her sister her old clothes or even complimenting her. Her acts of kindness, however, are more along the lines of those a person would bestow on someone he or she deems to be an inferior, such as a maid. What is abundantly clear is that Ina does not consider her sister an equal; rather, she pities her unmarried sister, while at the same time relishing the fact her sister has nowhere else to go, because it makes Ina’s life easier. As she says at the end of the play, when she realizes that Lulu really is going to leave for good, ‘‘Dwight, you’ve simply got to make her stay. When I think of what I went through while she was away . . . everything boils over, and what I don’t expect to b-b-boil b-b-burns.’’ She demonstrates her true feelings about Lulu with her next lines: ‘‘Sister, how can you be so cruel when Dwight and I—.’’ To Ina, Lulu is a cook, a maid, and a babysitter, but little else.
Monona Deacon Monona Deacon is the youngest of Dwight and Ina’s children. She is only a child, maybe ten years old, but at times she speaks the closest thing to truth in the Deacon household. For example, she says that ‘‘grown folks’’ do not act grown up.
Ninian Deacon Ninian Deacon has not seen his brother Dwight in twenty years and has never met Dwight’s family. Ninian has spent the past twenty-five years wandering around Central and South America. He sees in Lulu a person in her own right, not merely a household drudge. He believes that her family treats her as a ‘‘slavey,’’ and he encourages her to have a life of her own, offering to give Dwight a ‘‘chunk of my mind.’’ Ninian is the first person in anyone’s memory who actually invites Lulu out for the evening. He believes that Lulu is a fine, capable woman, and when he and Lulu accidentally marry, he tells
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her he would like to let the marriage stand, although he never explains exactly why. Ninian, however, has a secret: he once was married and is not certain that his first wife is dead. He tells Lulu the truth during their honeymoon in Savannah, Georgia, before they set off for Oregon, so she can decide whether to accompany him and take her chances that his first wife is, as Ninian believes, dead. Instead, Lulu returns to the Deacons’ house, but as soon as Ninian learns definitively that his first wife is dead, he comes to win Lulu back. As Lulu hoped all along, he does love her.
Bobby Larkin Bobby Larkin is Di’s young, illicit boyfriend. He is the neighbor boy of whom, for inexplicit reasons, everyone likes to make fun. Di and Bobby plan to elope but are unable to do so because he refuses to lie about their ages for so sacred a matter. When Di then refuses to acknowledge their relationship to her parents, he breaks up with her.
THEMES Family Relationships The play is set within the Deacon family home, where three generations of the Bett-Deacon family live together. Dwight regularly extols the virtues of family life and relationships, speaking often of the solidarity among kin. He remarks that people ‘‘don’t know what living is if they don’t belong in a little family circle,’’ crows of ‘‘the joys of family life as Ina and I live it,’’ and speaks in platitudes such as there is ‘‘no place like home.’’ However, the way the family members treat each other belies his words. For fifteen years, Dwight and Ina have used Lulu like a household drudge. Ina berates her for burning Monona’s toast and Dwight berates her for spending his money—25 cents of it—on fresh flowers. Dwight also uses the sanctity of the family to make others submit to his will. He orders Lulu not to let the townspeople know that Ninian may be a bigamist because of the disgrace that it will bring upon himself and his family: ‘‘What about my pride?’’ he asks Lulu. ‘‘Do you think I want everyone to know that my brother did a thing like that?’’ Despite this rhetoric, Dwight is convinced that
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Read the novella Miss Lulu Bett. How do the play and the novella compare? Which do you prefer? Why?
failed to show strong, independent women. Which assessment of the play do you feel is more accurate? Explain your answer.
• As Gale saw it, the character Lulu Bett had three possible futures: marriage to Mr. Cornish, marriage to Ninian, or the solitary journey away from home to make a new life for herself. Which of these endings do you think most strongly supports the ideals of feminism? Which of these endings do you think works best artistically? Explain your analyses.
• Conduct research to find out more about what was happening with the women’s rights movement in the 1910s and 1920s. Do the difficulties that Lulu faces seem representative of the period? Why or why not?
• At the time of its publication, Miss Lulu Bett was alternately praised as a feminist statement on the drudgery and oppression of women, and criticized as being merely feminist propaganda that
Ninian made up the story about a previous marriage to get free from a life with Lulu. He sanctimoniously explains that he and Ina will stand by Lulu in her time of distress because ‘‘the family bond is the strongest in the world,’’ but he really is pleased to have her back in his kitchen. Lulu easily sees through his talk; she says ‘‘l . . . I know you’d sacrifice Ina, Di, mother, Monona, Ninian— everybody, just to your own idea of who you are.’’ The other members of the household are not immune to the unpleasant family dynamics. Di confesses to Lulu the real reason she wants to elope with Bobby: she does not love him, but ‘‘I could love almost anybody real nice that was nice to me.’’ In act 2, scene 1, Monona, the sassy child, speaks the voice of truth about the Bett-Deacon household when she announces, ‘‘I hate the whole family,’’ to which Mrs. Bett replies, ‘‘Well, I should think she would.’’
The Oppression of Women Simonson wrote that Gale ‘‘believed her novella [Miss Lulu Bett] to be an honest portrayal of the duty-bound, domestically enslaved woman of her day’’; she felt the same about the play that
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• With the novella Miss Lulu Bett, Gale found her voice and her place among the burgeoning American realist school of writers. Find out what life in small-town America was like around 1920. How accurately does Gale portray this milieu? Explain your answer.
derived from that novella. In the play Gale creates a household composed entirely of women, with the exception of the head of the family, Dwight. The women are under Dwight’s control. He controls the purse strings (chastising Lulu for spending money of her own accord), makes the rules (deciding that he will not give Ninian’s address to Lulu, and then forbidding her to open the return letter should it arrive in his absence), and sets the tone for Ina’s shabby treatment of her sister. Offhand comments that Dwight makes also show his denigration of women; for instance, he states on more than one occasion that women cannot generalize. Another time, when Ina sides with Lulu and implores him to write Ninian about the first marriage, he says, ‘‘Isn’t this like a couple of women?’’ It is up to the most oppressed women—Lulu and Mrs. Bett—to rebel against Dwight. Mrs. Bett does so by flagrantly opening Ninian’s letter and thus satisfying her curiosity. She also is the only family member to be supportive of Lulu, both in her belief in Ninian’s love for Lulu, and in her approval of Lulu’s decision to leave the household. For her part, Lulu’s defiance of Dwight comes through her insistence that he write to Ninian despite his threats
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to throw her out of the house. Even before Ninian returns for her, she announces to Dwight her intention of leaving Dwight’s home ‘‘for good.’’ Lulu eventually learns to speak up for her own rights, and tacitly, those of the other women in the household. She tells Dwight, ‘‘You’re one of the men who can smother a whole family and not even know you’re doing it.’’ Lulu also shows her dissatisfaction with her plight in life, aside from her relationship with Dwight. She speaks to Ninian of her wish for an education and her desire to hold a job where she helps people and where she is appreciated. She despairs to Cornish because all she can do is cook and has no means to earn her own living. Her comprehension of these inadequacies in her own life reflect the domestic trap into which many women of Lulu’s day fell.
Love and Marriage In Miss Lulu Bett, love hardly seems to be the unifying force in marriage. Dwight and Ina draw together over their mutual satisfaction with their own life and their mutual condescension of others, namely Lulu. While they openly praise one another, they demonstrate little affection based on any genuine appreciation of each other’s good qualities. Lulu and Ninian come together for different reasons. While the play makes it uncertain why Ninian wants to stay married to Lulu, other than to save her from the intolerable situation he observes in the Deacons’ home, Lulu’s reasons are abundantly clear. As she tells Cornish, ‘‘You see Ninian was the first person who was ever kind to me. Nobody ever wanted me, nobody ever even thought of me. Then he came. It might have been somebody else. It might have been you.’’ For Lulu, kindness and regard, from which she has long been deprived, equate to love.
STYLE Comedy The majority of the comedy in the play derives from the shenanigans of the characters. Dwight’s pomposity—marked by his language, and most notably, his mispronunciation of words—is cause for mirth, especially since he does not recognize his own inflated self-importance. Di’s forbidden romance with Bobby Larkin plays out under the eyes of her witless family; at the end of act one, stage directions read, ‘‘At the window, behind the curtain, Di has just kissed Bobby goodby’’—all despite the
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presence of her mother, father, and prospective suitor in the very room. Mrs. Bett’s chronic confusion comes and goes in flashes—one minute she encourages Lulu to accompany the theater party and the next she forgets where everyone is going—but she still emerges as one of the few sensible members of the family. Comedy also arises from Gale’s use of repetition. For example in act 2, scenes 1 and 2 contain identical dialogue: ‘‘Mama, I have to go down to the liberry,’’ Di says—and action—the family is seated in the ‘‘approximate positions’’ on the porch. Monona, left out of the family dramas because of her young age, craftily eggs her family on; as she informs her grandmother, ‘‘Oh, I like to get them [Dwight and Ina] going.’’ Other times, Monona sassily responds to her family’s constant shuttling her around, as when Ina tells her to run off and play and she ‘‘runs her circle and returns.’’ Monona’s one-liners, such as that ‘‘grown folks’’ do not act grown up, or her wondering if grown ups ‘‘always say something bad,’’ provide comic relief while giving voice to the truth as applies to this household.
Plot The storyline of Miss Lulu Bett is quite simple: a spinster in her mid-thirties, long ill-treated and disrespected by her family and with seemingly no options to change her life, finds herself married to a man she met a week ago. She seizes the opportunity to escape, leaves her family’s home, but returns a month later with the news that the man was previously married and may still be so. Despite the simplicity of the story, and the characters as well, Gale raises themes of supreme importance of her day, namely, the domestic oppression of women and their lack of independence. The play also allows for a related subplot in Di’s attempted elopement with Bobby. She reveals to her aunt that she only wants to marry Bobby to get free from Dwight’s house; she does not love him, but she could learn to love almost anyone who treats her well. In this sense, Di’s problem reflects Lulu’s problems; the two women, though separated by some fifteen years, feel trapped and with little hope of any relevant future in the Deacon home. They both also have been so starved for genuine affection that kindness and attention, in any form, transforms into love.
Ending As Gale saw it, her character Miss Lulu Bett had three different futures. In the novella, after learning that Ninian’s wife is still alive, Lulu mar-
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ries Cornish. In the first version of the play, after learning that Ninian’s wife is still alive, Lulu sets off on her own, to make her way in the world. In the version of the play that won the Pulitzer Prize—the version generally known today—Ninian, having learned that his wife is dead, comes to the Deacon home to ask Lulu to return to him. The play’s ending is thus a happy ending, one that reunites a couple that has grown to love one another while at the same time, one that allows Lulu to escape the Deacon home with a more secure, stable future.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Modern American Woman During the 1920s the ‘‘new woman’’ appeared in America. Women no longer believed that marriage and family was the ultimate goal in life. Women were voting and taking part in America’s political life. Many women began seeking jobs outside of the home, which give them greater economic and social independence, and others became reformers and sought to improve social conditions for women. Women also exhibited greater independence in other ways, such as by wearing short, loose dresses, cutting their hair, and wearing makeup. Young women in particular began modeling their behavior after freethinking artists, such as writer Dorothy Parker. Married women, however, did not share these freedoms. A married woman was still expected to be a homemaker, which remained the ideal of American womanhood.
Women’s Rights In 1920 after decades of struggle, women gained the right to vote with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Voting gave women the opportunity to influence American politics, and serve as political leaders. In 1924 Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam ‘‘Ma’’ Wallace Ferguson of Texas became the first two female governors, and by 1928, 145 women held seats in state legislatures, and two women had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Female activists continued to seek broader social gains. Laws still regulated the types of work women could do, the pay they could receive, and the loans they could get. In 1923 the National Women’s Party proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution which would make such
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laws illegal. Women activists disagreed on whether the ERA should be passed, however, since some women protested that it would take away labor protections that they had fought hard to achieve. Other groups, such as the League of Women Voters, believed that the ERA would interfere with women’s roles in society. The ERA failed to win widespread political support, and it did not pass.
Rural vs. Urban America As America became an increasingly urban and industrial society, the differences between city and rural residents became more apparent. For example, one of the key disagreements between rural and urban residents was over prohibition (the banning of alcoholic beverages). Rural residents often believed that city culture was less moral. Some urban writers responded by accusing rural residents of remaining ignorant of new technology and modern times.
The Midwest Many of the Midwestern states relied on an agricultural economy. In the 1920s, prices for food crops dropped dramatically. For example, in 1919 a bushel of Nebraska corn sold for $1.22, but the following year, it sold for only 41 cents. Many farmers found it impossible to pay their debts, and nearly half a million lost their land. In an effort to solve their economic problems, farmers in the Midwest elected pro-agriculture members of Congress. Known as the Farm Bloc, these members of Congress hoped to pass legislation to ease the plight of farmers. They helped pass the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act, which placed high taxes on imported farm products. Intended to prevent foreign farm goods from being sold in the United States and thus raise demand and price for domestic crops, the tariff raised the cost of many consumer goods, which hurt everyone, including farmers. The federal government refused other suggestions to help the farmers, and only large farms or those with expensive, modern machinery prospered in the 1920s.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW In 1920 Gale’s novella Miss Lulu Bett was published and quickly became a bestseller. Critics lauded Gale’s new work as a welcome departure from her
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1920s: The Nineteenth Amendment is passed in 1919 and ratified the following year, giving women in the United States the legal right to vote. In 1924, two states have female governors, and by 1928, 145 women serve in state legislatures and 2 women sit in Congress. In 1923 the National Women’s Party proposes an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Many people, including women, oppose this amendment because they fear it will make legislation protecting women workers unconstitutional, and it fails to pass. Today: More and more women are holding public office, with numbers rising continuously throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, 1,664 women hold offices in state legislatures. In 2002 74 women serve in Congress. • 1920s: In 1920 women make up 20 percent of the workforce, but few hold professional jobs; instead, most are employed as domestics and servants. Throughout the decade, increasing num-
sentimental style of writing. Most read the work of fiction as a realistic portrayal of an average woman’s life in small-town America. Less than a year after this publication, Gale was approached to write a dramatic adaptation of the novella, which she did in less than two weeks. The play Miss Lulu Bett opened in December 1920 in New York City. For the dramatic version, Gale changed the ending: instead of having Lulu marry Cornish, she sends her heroine out alone in the world to make her own way, leading some of the play’s earliest critics to compare it favorably with Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Harold P. Simonson, writing in Zona Gale, noted that the transformation to an ‘‘unromantic ending creates a more artful ambiguity,’’ leaving viewers to wonder whether Lulu is really free and if so, with few job prospects, whether she will merely find herself again trapped, as she was by the Deacons. Some of Gale’s con-
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bers of women go to work outside the home— more than 2 million by the end of the 1920s. However, women continue to face obstacles in the workplace, such as the types of jobs they can get and the low pay they receive. Today: By the beginning of the decade, around 48 million women, aged sixteen and over, are employed. These women make up about 44 percent of the American workforce. Women generally earn less money than men; on the average, women earn only 74 cents for every dollar a man earns. They also tend to be concentrated in fewer types of jobs. • 1920s: For the first time in the country’s history, more Americans live in urban settings than in rural ones. A little over 50 million Americans live in rural settings compared to about 55 million who live in urban settings. Today: In 1990, just over 75 percent of Americans live in urban areas.
temporaries agreed with this assessment. Ludwig Lewisohn, critic for the Nation, believed that the first performance of Miss Lulu Bett easily demonstrated the success of this ‘‘weightier and severer ending.’’ He called the play ‘‘the most genuine achievement of the American stage since Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon.’’ Not all viewers agreed, however; in fact, so many complained that the new ending was depressing that after the play’s second-week run, Gale rewrote the ending, reuniting Lulu with the now widowed Ninian. This traditional happy ending satisfied most playgoers but raised a host of protest from critics. As Leslie Goddard summarized in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘‘Those critics who had previously approved Gale’s depiction of women’s independence now railed against her for giving in to popular, conventional tastes.’’ Heywood Broun (quoted in Simonson) alleged in 1921 in the
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New York Tribune that demanding a happy ending for such a play made about as much sense as ‘‘demanding feathers on a mountain lion.’’ Lewisohn assessed that with this change, Lulu’s ‘‘act of liberation is thus stultified and with it the significance and strength of the dramatic action sacrificed at one blow.’’ Despite his disappointment over the ending, Lewisohn enjoyed important aspects of the play— in fact, he subtly suggested that audiences leave at the end of the second act. He reveled in Gale’s ‘‘transferring to the stage the exact moral atmosphere of a class, a section, and a period. . . . That Deacon family group on its front porch is magnificent and memorable. . . . mark[ing] an enormous advance in the American drama.’’ Not all critics were as favorable, however. Alexander Woollcott, writing in the New York Times, called Miss Lulu Bett ‘‘a rather dull and flabby play, one somewhat sleazily put together by a playwright who has but slight sense of dramatic values and no instinct at all for the idiom of the theatre.’’ Still other critics charged that in changing the ending, Gale proved that Lulu’s fifteen years with the Deacons arose out of her own lack of initiative and that Lulu’s story was mere propaganda for the feminist movement. Eventually Gale answered her critics in the New York Tribune. She pointed out (quoted in Simonson) that ‘‘the common experience affords as many examples of marriage as of going out into the world alone’’; that Lulu was not witless but ‘‘overshadowed, browbeaten . . . enslaved by duty,’’ as were many women she knew; and that Lulu story’s was not meant to be about the plight of women but merely about one woman. The controversy over the ending did nothing to lessen the play’s popularity. The play ran for 201 performances, toured in the Midwest, and won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Miss Lulu Bett continues to resonate with audiences, even though some current theaters choose to restore the original ending, as did a New York City production in 2000. Elyse Sommer wrote in CurtainUp that the play had ‘‘considerable assets.’’ Perhaps Lulu’s appeal stems from her complexity; as Goddard wrote, she is ‘‘similar to conventional melodramatic heroines in her initial meekness and desire to be rescued by a Prince Charming and strikingly modern in her transformation into an assertive, self-knowledgeable woman.’’
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CRITICISM Rena Korb Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In this essay, Korb discusses Lulu Bett’s transformation into an independent-thinking woman. Miss Lulu Bett focuses on the dramatic transformation of Lulu Bett, a middle-aged, unmarried woman who believes she is doomed to spend the rest of her life as a ‘‘slavey’’ in her brother-in-law’s kitchen. Through the course of three acts, Lulu takes the opportunity to escape this future and stays true to this course despite an unsupportive family and trying circumstances. The Lulu whom the audience meets at the beginning of the play has remarkably little control over her own life. She works as a drudge to earn her keep in the household of her sister and brother-inlaw. Both in financial matters and in decisionmaking, Lulu lacks any independence; Gale demonstrates this lack of autonomy through small yet telling details. For example, although Lulu has full responsibility for cooking for the family, Ina insists on overseeing her every move in the kitchen, down to telling Lulu whether to use yesterday’s bottle of milk or today’s bottle of milk. For his part, Dwight controls the purse strings, growing upset when Lulu spends a quarter on a handful of fresh flowers. ‘‘[W]e give you a home on the supposition that you have no money to spend, even for the necessities,’’ he chastises her, thereby handily recalling her inferior status within the family. Dwight and Ina’s disrespect of Lulu is both public and private; they openly question her desire to have ‘‘a little something, same as other folks,’’ as if she does not deserve the pleasures of life that other people enjoy; behind her back, they make fun of her manners and dress. Dwight even mockingly asserts that when Ninian ‘‘sees Lulu you can’t drive him away’’ because she is such ‘‘a stunner,’’ showing his supposition that Lulu holds no attractions as a woman. The Deacons’ confusion as to how Ninian manages to get Lulu to accompany them to the theater—which he does simply by inviting her— shows that they fail to see her as a person in her own right. Lulu puts up with such daily indignities because she feels she has no choice. Her mother, professing to have saved her from the pain of family
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Gale’s best selling novella Miss Lulu Bett (1920) was the basis for the play of the same name. The play is very faithful to the novella with one notable exception: the novella ends in Lulu’s marriage to Mr. Cornish. • Gale’s novel Birth (1918) was considered by the author to be her best work. Marking Gale’s shift away from writing sentimental novels, it focuses on life in the grim village of Burage, which entraps its residents with its stern provinciality. • The Group (1963), by Mary McCarthy, follows the lives of several women who have just graduated from college in the early 1930s. Their stories fascinatingly detail the changing morality as well as the roles assumed by women of that decade. • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s short story ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother,’’’ published in 1891 in the collection A New England Nun and Other Stories, chronicles the oppression of a farmwife and her rebellion against her long-standing familial role. • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston, tells the story of Janie, an inde-
life, ‘‘never let her go to the altar,’’ and a conversation with Ninian shows that Lulu knows that she is widely considered to be a spinster. LULU: What kind of a Mr. are you? NINIAN: Never give myself away. Say, by George, I never thought of that before. There’s no telling whether a man’s married or not, by his name. LULU: It doesn’t matter. NINIAN: Why? LULU: Not so many people want to know.
The influence of her family keeps her trapped in the Deacon’s home and unable to obtain a home and husband of her own. She also has never sought a ‘‘real’’ job; for the past fifteen years, her family has
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pendent-minded young black woman, and her three very different marriages. • Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920) tells the story of a young woman married to a Midwestern doctor who settles in a small town in Minnesota. Lewis clearly portrays local speech, customs, and social amenities, satirizing both the townspeople and the condescending so-called intellectuals who dislike them. • Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) created a furor among its nineteenth-century audience, who wanted a ‘‘happy ending.’’ The play focuses on Nora, a middleclass wife, who once committed a fraud in order to obtain a loan to save her husband’s life. When Nora’s husband, who prides himself in his sense of ethics, finds out about this, he repudiates her out of concern for his reputation. Faced with the utter disillusionment about her husband and his loyalty, Nora leaves her family, declaring her independence. • Donna M. Lucey’s I Dwell in Possibility: Women Build a Nation, 1600 to 1920 (2001) provides an overview of the wide variety of roles women played in America up through the time that Gale wrote Miss Lulu Bett.
insisted upon the idea that she is not strong enough to work, so she remains with the Deacons. Almost thirty-four, Lulu nurtures no hopes of ever escaping. While she would like to do something different— ‘‘[T]ake care of folks that needed me’’ or simply ‘‘get clear away’’—as she tells Ninian, ‘‘I can’t get out. I’ll never get out—now.’’ The lack of positive reinforcement in her life, combined with the sheer dearth of possibilities, leads Lulu to accept her family’s perception of her, even when it is patently untrue. As Ninian, the outsider, immediately notices, she works harder than anyone else in the family; in his words, she
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THIS ACTION ON LULU’S PART IS TREMENDOUS, FOR SHE POSSESSES ONLY $62, LACKS MARKETABLE SKILLS, AND HAS NO SOLID PLANS OTHER THAN TO GET OUT OF THE DEACON HOUSEHOLD.’’
‘‘make[s] this whole house go round.’’ He tells her, ‘‘I think you have it pretty hard around here.’’ Ninian’s positive support leads Lulu to take small chances that she would not have dared otherwise, such as defy Ina and put on a nicer dress, or to take larger chances, such as defy the family and leave the house as Ninian’s wife. The opportunity to leave the house as a married woman comes to Lulu by chance—she and Ninian find themselves married after uttering the marriage vows in front of Dwight, who is a magistrate. Lulu’s shock at finding out that Ninian would like to let the marriage stand shows how her self-esteem has suffered at the hands of her family these long years: ‘‘Why—why—that couldn’t be,’’ she stutters, and asks, ‘‘How could you want me?’’ It is practically inconceivable to her that someone could like her from ‘‘the first moment’’—for a reason other than her cooking—although Ninian told her this prior to the ‘‘wedding.’’ Still, her desire to leave the Deacons and her stultifying life is strong enough that she decides to go with Ninian, though she has known him only a week. He offers the excitement of travel—a honeymoon to Savannah, Georgia, and then a return to his home in Portland, Oregon—but more importantly, he offers Lulu the chance to be respected and admired as a wife and as a person. Unfortunately for Lulu, she is forced to return to the Deacon household scarcely a month after leaving it, having learned that Ninian was already married and is uncertain whether his first wife is dead. Ina and Dwight are determined that no one in their town will know about this scandal, this ‘‘disgrace of bigamy,’’ but Lulu wants to tell the truth: she does not want people to think she ‘‘hadn’t been a good wife to Ninian.’’ Dwight, however, wants to protect his own name more than Lulu’s ego, and to
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this end, he plans to tell everyone the so-called truth: that ‘‘Lulu’s husband has tired of her and sent her home.’’ The conversation between Lulu and Dwight demonstrates that, once again, the Deacons focus on how circumstances in Lulu’s life impact them rather than how these circumstances impact her. Instead of feeling badly for Lulu’s troubles, the Deacons are pleased at this turn of events. They now have her back ‘‘on the old terms,’’ meaning that she will follow their orders—typified by not telling anyone what really happened with Ninian—and return to all her household duties, at which Ina fails so miserably. They immediately try to force her back into this old image, but Lulu, although she feels dependent upon the Deacons, has returned not only with new clothing but also with more gumption. For instance, when Dwight says, ‘‘I think you’d show more modesty if you arranged your hair in the old way,’’ Lulu merely replies, ‘‘Yes, you would think so.’’ More importantly, however, Lulu has developed enough sense of entitlement to make certain demands; her top priority is to find out from Ninian if he was telling her the truth about his first wife or if he merely wanted to get rid of her. Dwight, who holds the power of his brother’s address, resists this course of action, but eventually writes to Ninian himself, after Lulu threatens to tell what happened ‘‘all over town’’ otherwise. ‘‘I shall tell what I know and then leave your house anyway unless you get Ninian’s word,’’ she announces. ‘‘And you’re going to write him now.’’ The family notes Lulu’s radical transformation. When Ina suggests that Lulu keep ‘‘out of sight’’ for a few days until they hear news from Ninian, Lulu refuses. ‘‘It certainly has changed Lulu—a man coming into her life,’’ says Ina. ‘‘She never spoke to me like that before.’’ Lulu again finds herself at odds with Dwight and Ina after the arrival of Ninian’s letter. Now that she has ‘‘the proofs’’ of Ninian’s first marriage, Lulu wants to tell everyone that she left her husband, not because he did not want her anymore, but because he was already married. Dwight and Ina ‘‘wouldn’t have people know of it for worlds.’’ They put their own pride against Lulu’s even though she points out it is ‘‘the only thing I’ve got.’’ Perhaps it is this realization that leads her to take an even greater radical step; the day after reading Ninian’s letter, Lulu leaves the Deacons’ home—in the words of her mother, she has ‘‘Gone to call her soul her own.’’ This action on Lulu’s part is tremendous, for she possesses only $62, lacks marketable skills, and has no solid plans other than to get out of
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the Deacon household. At the eleventh hour, however, Ninian arrives with the welcome news that his wife is dead. He asks Lulu to forgive him and return to him, which she does. Many critics of Gale’s day denigrated this ending; it was a second version, rewritten by Gale after audiences complained about the first ending, which had Lulu venturing out in the world alone. Ludwig Lewisohn wrote in the Nation that Lulu’s achievement of ‘‘respectable wifehood’’ thwarted Lulu’s ‘‘act of liberation.’’ To judge the play, and Lulu, solely by the ultimate outcome, however, misses the significance of Lulu’s resolve to leave the Deacon home ‘‘for good’’ and make a new life for herself, regardless of her chances of success. After hearing that Ninian is in town, Lulu opts not to catch the train but to go back to the Deacons.’ She does not return because she is fearful of life on her own and looking for an excuse not to leave—she makes it abundantly clear that she will not remain with the Deacons no matter what Ninian has to say. Instead, her reason for returning is simple—she has grown to love her husband and hopes to hear good news from him regarding their marriage. By returning to her marriage, Lulu does not show her transformation back into the meek, subservient woman she was at the play’s opening; rather, this action shows Lulu’s development into a more complete woman, one worthy of love and respect and one who loves and respects herself. Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on Miss Lulu Bett, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Patricia R. Schroeder In the following essay excerpt, Schroeder explores how ‘‘Miss Lulu Bett uses the conventions of realism’’ to criticize the lack of fulfillment in the lives of women.
Domestic Entrapments One play that offers a serious critique of women’s familial entrapment is Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (first performed in 1920). Miss Lulu Bett depicts an unmarried woman’s domestic enslavement to her unappreciative and demanding family. However, it also scrutinizes the plight of the other women in the household—those with ostensibly more ‘‘enviable’’ positions—and ends with the suggestion that autonomy and self-support may offer the only escape from enforced domestic roles. Gale’s three-act play focuses on the title character, who performs all the household work for her
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THIS DEVALUING OF LULU’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE FAMILY PERMITS DWIGHT AND INA TO SEE LULU AS A FACELESS DRONE, NOT AS A PERSON WITH DESIRES AND ASPIRATIONS OF HER OWN. THEY CRITICIZE EVERYTHING SHE DOES. . . .’’
sister Ina’s family, her labor the price paid so that she and her mother can exist as dependents of Ina’s husband Dwight. The family mythology has defined Lulu as not ‘‘strong enough to work,’’ thereby emphasizing both Lulu’s dependency and the belief that performing all the household duties for four adults and two children does not constitute ‘‘work.’’ This devaluing of Lulu’s contribution to the family permits Dwight and Ina to see Lulu as a faceless drone, not as a person with desires and aspirations of her own. They criticize everything she does, from the color of the bread she toasts for them to her purchase of flowers to brighten their table (at which she rarely gets to sit). Although Lulu owns nothing but what they provide for her, including a wardrobe of Ina’s cast-off clothes, they complain about Lulu’s appearance, finding her presence in front of company to be an embarrassment. Dwight’s kindhearted brother Ninian sums up Lulu’s plight when he tells her, ‘‘They make a slavey of you. Regular slavey. Damned shame I call it.’’ In Miss Lulu Bett, Gale made powerful use of the realistic set to emphasize the protagonist’s restrictions. Act I, in which Lulu functions solely as a household servant, takes place in the family dining room, an enclosed space which Lulu enters and exits from the kitchen while the rest of the family sit and eat. At the end of Act I, however, Lulu marries Ninian, and the scene thereafter shifts to a side porch of Dwight’s house. This space, attached to the house but with fewer confining walls, parallels Lulu’s partial break from Dwight’s family. After traveling briefly with Ninian, Lulu has seen something of the world and has been recognized as an individual instead of a mere functionary filling a role. Unfortunately, when Ninian confesses that he
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had lost touch with his first wife fifteen years previously and does not know for certain if she is dead (and, therefore, if his marriage to Lulu is legal), Lulu feels she must return to Dwight and Ina’s home. At this point, however, she is, like the porch, attached to the household but not entirely confined by it, and she begins to assert herself against Dwight and Ina by keeping their daughter’s secrets from them, appropriating a dress of Ina’s without permission, and reading Dwight’s letter from Ninian despite Dwight’s express order not to. This movement to an exterior space thus symbolizes Lulu’s emerging consciousness of her own identity and desires, desires that cannot be contained within the walls of Dwight’s house. In Gale’s original script, Lulu’s desires also exceeded the boundaries of realistic closure, an important innovation in an otherwise realistic play. In that original ending, Ninian’s first wife is found to be alive, thus invalidating Lulu’s marriage. Rather than marrying Cornish (another suitor) or maintaining her position in Dwight’s household, however, Lulu chooses a life of uncertain independence. Refusing to let Cornish explain her decision to Dwight and Ina, Lulu insists on speaking for herself. Furthermore, she leaves town alone to seek employment, needing, as she says, ‘‘to see out of my own eyes. For the first time in my life.’’ The play thus originally concluded with Lulu’s escaping her lifelong imprisonment, but without any resolution of her economic or social problems. Like the shift in set, then, the original ending of Gale’s play indicates the rebellion of Lulu’s desires against the forces of oppression, forces represented, in part, by the realistic set and resisted by Lulu’s refusal of containment. Unfortunately, this open ending caused so much controversy in the original 1920 production that the author felt compelled to change it to ensure the play’s successful run. In the revised ending, Ninian’s first wife turns out to be dead, and he returns to rescue Lulu from her life of drudgery in Dwight and Ina’s house. While Cynthia Sutherland sees this change as Gale’s capitulation to public opinion—in her view, an example of women increasingly choosing to act as mediators rather than revolutionaries after women’s suffrage was won—Carole L. Cole notes astutely that both versions retain Lulu’s basic evolution as she strives to define herself rather than merely accept Dwight and Ina’s definition of her; the way the play concludes is not its whole meaning. The merit of Cole’s interpretation is further suggested by other elements in Gale’s realistic text,
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elements hinting that domestic entrapment was common among women of the era and suggesting some of the social and economic forces that sustained it. The primary reason women accepted roles like Lulu’s within Dwight’s family was economic necessity, a condition Lulu recognizes and laments on several occasions. First she discusses the problem with Ninian, revealing her awareness of her plight as just one example of a widespread social condition. She says: ‘‘I can’t do any other work—that’s the trouble—women like me can’t do any other work.’’ Later, she makes a similar remark to Cornish, explaining her desire for independence and the economic difficulties that prevent her achieving it. She tells him that although she is a locally renowned cook, ‘‘I can’t earn anything. I’d like to earn something.’’ Lulu’s perceptions of her limited earning power accurately reflect the conditions of the time. Despite the political gains women apparently achieved with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 (the year of Miss Lulu’s premiere), political rights did not bring economic equality. As historian William Chafe has noted, almost all the women who joined the labor force in the 1920s were motivated by economic need, yet they were treated on the job as marginal employees whose primary responsibilities—and chief sources of support— were in the home. While clerical opportunities for refined, middle-class, white women were expanding, uneducated women like Lulu rarely had the chance to ‘‘earn something’’ and so support themselves. Given these economic limitations, marriage might seem to be the most desirable option a middle-class woman had to ensure her financial support. Yet Gale’s play emphatically suggests otherwise, even given the revised ending in which Lulu is reunited with Ninian. Close scrutiny of the other female characters reveals the strictures placed on all women within the traditional patriarchal family, even if those women were not primarily responsible for domestic work. Lulu’s mother, for example, states outright that marriage offers no better alternative to Lulu’s position. When Ninian asks Mrs. Bett if Lulu wouldn’t be better off with a husband, Mrs. Bett replies: ‘‘Wouldn’t make much difference. Why look at me. A husband, six children, four of ‘em under the sod with him. And sometimes I feel as though nothin’ more had happened to me than has happened to Lulie . . . Only she ain’t had the pain.’’ In Ina, the female head of the household, we see the clearest example of how limiting marriage could
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be, especially to women married to petty tyrants like Dwight. Despite his contradictions and repeated sexist remarks, Ina follows her husband’s lead in all actions, accepting his every notion, no matter how illogical or insulting. In everything from the proper preparation of potatoes to the value of family life, Ina echoes Dwight’s remarks with her own ‘‘That’s what I always think.’’ When Dwight attempts to coerce Lulu’s obedience with a family vote, Ina mindlessly follows his lead, consolidating his power and making a mockery of the democratic process. In short, Ina is a cipher, a useless woman literally unable to boil water without Lulu’s instructions or to conceive a thought without Dwight’s direction; she is yet another victim of Dwight’s manipulation, even as she practices the same arts on the other, less powerful members of her household. As Cole has explained it, the play ‘‘is a study of the power relationships within the nuclear family. Indeed, the play constitutes a devastating portrait of the male autocrat who holds absolute power in ways both petty and profound and the hierarchy that forms among the female family members based on each one’s relationship and usefulness to him.’’ Given a social reality in which most women lived as economic dependents of possibly despotic men, some form of entrapment for women was virtually inevitable. And while Gale’s play does focus on a domestic world where women are ‘‘others’’ with little possibility for self-fulfillment or even self-definition, Miss Lulu Bett uses the conventions of realism to criticize those limitations and to suggest some of the widespread cultural conditions that create and sustain them. In this way, the play makes a strong political statement regarding the rights of women. Some feminist critics have argued that realism is without value for feminist dramatists because it is incapable of exploring individual dilemmas in terms of a broad social context. Miss Lulu Bett’s attention to historical context, social convention, and women’s economic realities challenges the universal applicability of this dismissal.
Women in the Workforce While Gale and others were using realism to document how social conventions and economic restrictions often forced women into narrow domestic roles that offered no choice or potential for growth, other playwrights were portraying women who had already moved outside the domestic sphere. This depiction of single women pursuing careers and creating alternatives to patriarchal living arrangements reflects a social trend of the early 1900s. As historian William Chafe has observed, at the end
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of the nineteenth century, ‘‘half the graduates of the best women’s colleges remained single, and they constituted the core of female professional workers.’’ These career women—often ridiculed as humorless, sexless ‘‘New Women’’ in the popular press—faced a number of social problems that sound distressingly familiar to 1990s feminists: hostility to women working outside the home (especially from men competing for their jobs), lack of role models in other than traditionally female fields such as teaching and nursing, disparagement of female aspirations, malicious rumors about independent women’s sexual orientation, and the apparent need to choose between marriage and a career. So while female playwrights of the era were eager to depict autonomous working women with interests beyond the domestic, as working women themselves they recognized the potentially paralyzing problems the New Woman faced. As playwright Martha Morton observed in a 1909 interview, ‘‘Woman is going out into the world and helping to do the world’s work, and adapting herself to the new condition hurts.’’ A number of playwrights writing between 1900 and 1920 explored these sometimes hurtful adaptations in their realistic plays, documenting the personal and professional problems faced by career women and protesting social conditions that interfered with women’s pursuit of economic independence. By their very existence these plays counter the criticism that realism was limited to portraying and therefore validating the domestic world of the patriarchal nuclear family. The feminist plays I have chosen to explore here show the conflicts between and within individual working women, conflicts created by social mores and internalized by the women characters of these realistic plays. In this way, these plays illustrate the current feminist belief that female identity is, at least in part, a product of cultural mythology. Furthermore, they delineate the problems that arise when the forces of convention or individual desires conflict with a woman’s wish for autonomy. These plays reveal that realism could be used in the theatre to depict what women might accomplish, as well as what price they would have to pay, as they moved outside traditional domestic spheres. Two plays that use realism to explore the plight of the career woman are Rachel Crothers’ A Man’s World (1909, published 1915) and Marion Craig Wentworth’s The Flower Shop (1912). Both plays focus on independent women with satisfying work to do, and both emphasize the central character’s
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connections with a community of women who exhibit various stages of feminist awareness. Both plays explore the economic and social forces that propel women into marriage, and both depict women in conflict with the men they love when it comes to balancing a home and a career. However, the similarities between the plays end at their conclusions, as the two central characters find different ways to reconcile their romantic attachments with their feminist ideals.
relations and man’s exploitation of women] a matter of public concern, and in the process gives herself a platform. As social housekeeper, mother to destitute girls, Frank makes maternity her career outside the home.’’ Frank’s life work is therefore the inverse of Miss Lulu Bett’s. Rather than showing us the impact of social concerns on the home, Crothers has created a feminist-activist protagonist who takes the values of home and care and attempts to infuse them into society at large.
A Man’s World takes place primarily in the apartment of Frank Ware, a female novelist and social reform worker who lives with her small adopted son, Kiddie. While Frank’s drawing room is conventionally appointed and focused on the domestic, it certainly offers a counterpoint to the male-dominated living spaces inhabited by Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett. For Frank’s parlor is located in a rooming house occupied by an assortment of struggling artists, musicians, and writers, male and female, who each occupy a private space but who nonetheless move rather freely from one room to another. The extent to which Frank’s bohemian drawing room differs from that of a traditional patriarchal family is illustrated vividly in the first act, when Frank arrives home from work to find a group of male friends entertaining Kiddie—that is, engaging in child-care activities traditionally associated with women. As Frank flops onto a chair, the men gather to wait on her, offering her food, stoking her fire, and helping her off with her gloves. Lois Gottlieb has noted that this scene reverses the patriarchal norm in which the male breadwinner enters a domestic space expecting service from the subservient women who work within the domestic space and whom he supports. Yet despite the fact that she is the only one of the group who is financially successful, Frank asserts no authority; she is simply depicted, as the stage directions clarify, as an equal, exuding ‘‘the frank abandon of being one of them—strong, free, unafraid.’’
Margaret Kendall of Wentworth’s The Flower Shop is a similar character: an independent career woman (formerly an opera star, currently a shop owner) with an interest in social reform and in building community with other women. The setting of Wentworth’s play, moreover, moves out of domestic spaces entirely and into the flower shop of the title, an enterprise owned and managed by Margaret. While the set is realistic in its functioning doors and its attention to detail, it depicts a public space controlled by Margaret and populated with her staff, her customers, and occasionally her women’s group, which holds its meetings in the shop. Margaret’s social work differs from Frank’s, however, in that she is attempting to enlighten women of her own upper-middle class to the dangers of being financially dependent on men. For Margaret, economic freedom is the greatest freedom of all, the one on which all other liberties depend. As she tells a friend, ‘‘I shall always be my own mistress because I have my own work, my own pocket-book.’’ For her, many of the members of her women’s club—her ‘‘followers’’—‘‘seem like a lot of frightened slaves . . . and the husbands masters and owners by right of the household purse.’’ Perhaps Margaret’s work to ‘‘abolish’’ this form of domestic slavery is not so different from Frank’s work with ‘‘fallen’’ East Side women after all, since Margaret views marriage based on financial dependence as just another form of prostitution.
Unlike most of the other inhabitants of her building, Frank takes her work outside her home: she not only publishes critically acclaimed novels about the exploitation of impoverished women, she is also deeply involved in setting up a ‘‘girls’ club’’ for former prostitutes. While Frank may write in her apartment (her exact writing habits are never made clear), her work in both publishing and social reform extends her influence beyond the domestic scope. As Sharon Friedman has argued: ‘‘Through her social welfare activity and her writing, Frank makes these private grievances [i.e., unequal sexual
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Building communities of women for their mutual support is thus important to both Frank and Margaret. Frank defends her rooming-house arrangement against a detractor as ‘‘rather good for me . . . The house is filled with independent women who are making their own living’’; she also experiences great satisfaction in her reform work with poor girls. Margaret likewise is dedicated to her ‘‘followers,’’ claiming that the interests of a family (were she to have one) would not make her forget ‘‘the other women, their helplessness and their needs.’’ Yet both plays do an excellent job of depicting the differences among the varied women
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each independent protagonist encounters. What Doris Abramson has noted about A Man’s World is true of both plays: not all the women characters are at the same level of emancipation, so the plays illustrate a moment of historical transition. Each female character has to make decisions between new freedoms and old customs and prejudices. In A Man’s World, this transitional moment for women is perhaps best reflected in the character of Clara, an aspiring miniaturist from a wealthy family who (as one of the other artists describes her) would ‘‘like to tiptoe through bohemia, but she’s afraid of her petticoats.’’ While Clara admires everything about Frank, from her self-sufficiency to her generosity and kindness, she herself is without marketable skills and feels ‘‘absolutely superfluous.’’ Complaining about the double standard that relegates unmarried women to ‘‘old maid’’ status, Clara asserts: ‘‘If I were a man—the most insignificant little runt of a man—I could persuade some woman to marry me—and could have a home and children and hustle for a living—and life would mean something.’’ But Clara is not the only counterpoint to Frank. Lione, a singer, while more independent and also more talented than Clara, also rails about the unfair position of women who must depend on men for financial support and social position. Her response to the problem, however, is a self-centered acceptance of the status quo. She tells Frank: ‘‘Men are pigs of course. They take all they can get and don’t give any more than they have to. It’s a man’s world—that’s the size of it. What’s the use of knocking your head against things you can’t change? I never believed before that you really meant all this helping women business. What’s the use?’’ Despite these women’s differences from each other and from her, Frank responds to both of them with sympathy and support. While Frank herself values autonomy and fosters sisterhood, she realizes that not all women would or could make the choices she has made. In response to Clara, who accuses her of believing ‘‘in women taking care of themselves,’’ Frank asserts: ‘‘I believe in women doing what they’re most fitted for. You should have married, Clara, when you were a young girl—and been taken care of all your life.’’ Given this backdrop of social reform work and varying states of feminist consciousness, Crothers’ play avoids projecting one proper course of action for all women, focusing instead on the complex network of environmental forces complicating all women’s choices. The Flower Shop also depicts the various conflicts faced by women, both the independent New
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Woman of the period and her more traditional sisters, during this transitional historical period. In Wentworth’s play, these differences emerge most clearly in the discussions about marriage in which Margaret’s flower shop staff frequently engage. For Polly, young and pretty and enamored of her beau, traditional marriage beckons appealingly. Noting that ‘‘It is a man’s place to provide for the woman he loves,’’ Polly proclaims that she wants ‘‘a real oldfashioned marriage,’’ in which she will quit her job, devote her time to caring for the household, and never object to asking her husband for money. Lena, another shop worker, sees marriage not as a romantic adventure but as an opportunity to rest from toil. Like Crothers’ Clara, Lena is aging, unmarried, and alone. She sees marriage to a decent carpenter whom she does not love as ‘‘a good chance’’ to achieve financial security, to avoid lifelong loneliness, and to have a child, which she desperately wants. These experiences with other women, while they do not change Margaret’s ultimate choices for herself, do allow her to see (as Frank does) that not all women have the fortitude or the training to face daily economic demands and a solitary life. Both of these plays, then, document the difficult choices and limited options women faced in the early twentieth century, thus providing a tapestried background against which to evaluate the actions and decisions of the central characters. Against this backdrop, Frank and Margaret look all the more courageous in overcoming the many obstacles to their freedom. For Frank, most of these obstacles are placed in her way by social convention and public opinion. The strength of these forces against an independent woman are made clear in the very first scene, when Frank’s male friends are discussing her book in her absence. First they read aloud from a glowing review, which finds Frank’s novel especially impressive in its ‘‘strength and scope’’ now that she has been revealed to be a woman. This brings them to wonder where she finds her material—that is, what man is ghost-writing for her. Their gossip then moves to her love life, and they wonder about the exact nature of her relationship with Malcolm Gaskell: whether he and Frank are, in fact, lovers, and whether he is the man supplying her material. That Frank’s alleged friends have such doubts about her veracity and ability suggests the wave of hostile criticism and innuendo faced by women active in public life. Frank’s problems in maintaining her autonomy are compounded by her love for Gaskell, a successful newspaper man and a staunch supporter of the
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gender-divided status quo. He disparages her book as ‘‘clever as the deuce’’ but not ‘‘big’’; he asserts that ‘‘Women are meant only to be loved—and men have got to take care of them’’; he protests that her settlement work is ‘‘disagreeable’’; and he summarizes proper relations between men and women this way: ‘‘Man sets the standard for woman. He knows she’s better than he is and he demands that she be— and if she isn’t she’s got to suffer for it.’’ In addition to his belittling of Frank’s work and beliefs, he insists that she reveal her entire history (especially how she came to adopt Kiddie), while insisting that she has no need to know his. It may seem unlikely that the independent Frank could actually fall in love with such a man. That she does suggests two things: that independent women have as much a need for love as traditional women do; and that, as products of the social system they are trying to reform, women like Frank have nonetheless internalized much of their patriarchal culture. As Florence Kiper noted in the 1914 review that I cited earlier: [Frank] is a type of the modern feminist. And the conflict of the drama is waged not so much without as within her own nature, a conflict between individual emotion and social conviction. What many of our writers for the stage have missed in their objective drama that uses the new woman for protagonist is a glimpse of that tumultuous battlefield, her own soul, where meet the warring forces of impulse and theory, of the old and the new conceptions of egotism and altruism.
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American dramatic platitude that love makes right all things,’’ we are left inspired that Frank has stood up for her principles but saddened that her stand has cost her emotional fulfillment. In short, Crothers’ realistic treatment of an increasingly common predicament of the era, combined with the varied background characters and with her innovative refusal to provide an easy solution, forces an audience to feel something of the losses women face when their feminist ideals collide with their very human hunger for love. In The Flower Shop, Wentworth does an even more thorough job of depicting the ‘‘warring forces’’ within career women of the day. Her task is made easier because Margaret has already rejected her version of Malcolm Gaskell, the extremely chauvinistic William Ramsey, who years before had wanted Margaret to renounce her career as an opera singer in order to marry him. Her current problems are twofold: the first involves helping her old friend Louise, also a former opera star and now married to Ramsey, to return to her career over her husband’s objections; the second concerns reconciling her insistence on financial independence with her deep love for Stephen Hartwell, who is currently running for a judgeship under much public scrutiny.
The conclusion of the play indicates exactly how painful this conflict between ‘‘impulse and theory’’ is for Frank and how much she is willing to pay for her feminist ideals. Just after Frank reveals to Gaskell that she reciprocates his love, they discover the secret of Kiddie’s parentage: Gaskell is actually Kiddie’s father and, therefore, a man Frank has long hated for abandoning the boy’s biological mother. When Gaskell refuses to admit any responsibility for the affair, Frank refuses his marriage proposal. In a reversal of Nora’s slamming the door to Ibsen’s Doll’s House, Gaskell leaves Frank’s apartment, closing the door behind him.
When the wealthy Hartwell first proposes, he simply assumes that Margaret will give up her flower shop. Once she convinces him of the absolute necessity, for her, of maintaining a separate income and therefore her own business, he capitulates, realizing that ‘‘It is easy to be romantic . . .— set woman on a pedestal as a saint for devotion and all that,—it is harder to help her live her own life, but perhaps after all that is the most genuine devotion—real chivalry in the end.’’ Given his public position, however, it soon becomes clear to Margaret that her independence may cost him both the support of his traditional family and the judgeship he seeks. Her conflict, then, is internal—her desire for autonomy versus her love for Hartwell— but also includes public repercussions for the man she loves.
While the door may be shut on Gaskell’s relationship with Frank, the debate between the New Woman and the traditional man, and thus the issues of the double standard and equality for women, are left open at the end of the play. The play thus beautifully illustrates Kiper’s point about the New Woman’s inner conflicts. Because the play ends, as Kiper describes it, with ‘‘no sentimentalism, no attempt to gloss over the situation with the pet
In Act III, as she waits in the darkened flower shop to hear if Hartwell has found some way to reconcile their love and his public interests, and as Polly and Lena come in separately to tell her of their wedding plans, Margaret vacillates in agony. This scene of Margaret’s turmoil, while perhaps suffering from unrealistic coincidences, brilliantly encapsulates the ‘‘tumultuous battlefield’’ within themselves that independent women of the era suffered.
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First Margaret thinks of her ‘‘followers,’’ lamenting that she cannot give up her business without disappointing them. Then, haunted by the dance music filtering in from across the street and tormented by the sensuous fragrance of the flowers surrounding her, she surrenders to her emotions and desires, feeling that she cannot lose Hartwell’s love. Margaret cries out: ‘‘Is this what it is to be merely a woman—no will—no head—all heart—nothing but heart, with a cry in it that will not be stilled. I want him . . . Ah, my sisters, I have understood your needs—now I see your temptation.’’ Just as Margaret decides to send for Hartwell and renounce her flower shop, however, Louise returns with the news that she has abandoned her career plans for fear of losing her husband’s love. Louise’s lack of persistence reinvigorates Margaret’s own, and she vows to ‘‘renounce the sweetness’’ in order to promote the new order she envisions between women and men. Unlike A Man’s World, however, The Flower Shop ends with a conventional reconciliation. It seems Hartwell’s publicity director has found a way to avoid ‘‘the woman question’’ during his campaign, so Hartwell and Margaret are free to marry under their original agreement: Margaret keeps her shop and her economic independence. This forced closure does falsely simplify the complex issues raised by the play. However, Hartwell’s resolve to stand by Margaret no matter what the cost suggests a more positive vision for social reform than the one Crothers envisioned in A Man’s World. Margaret’s happy ending suggests that men as well as women can suffer from sexist public criticism, that some men are willing to support women’s autonomy, and that heterosexual love is not necessarily a cage designed to restrain women and regulate their activities. It also vividly paints the conflicts and agonies that career women faced in trying to lead full emotional lives. In these plays of women in the workforce, both Crothers and Wentworth dramatize the conflict between career ambition and the desire for love that working women of the early twentieth century faced (to say nothing of their late twentieth-century sisters). Using a realistic set, everyday characters, increasingly commonplace situations, and the linear logic of realism, the plays accurately depict and protest the barriers to achievement faced by women of the 1910s. Realism has historically been used in this way more than once. As Michelene Wandor has observed, ‘‘artistic movements which seek to represent the experiences of oppressed groups reach initially for a realistic and immediately recognisable
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clarity . . . Such realism has a radical impact when the content is new, when the selection of ordinary everyday elements in life are shaped into a work of art.’’ By using realism in this way, these playwrights made the new and sometimes radically revised ideas about gender roles and gender relations more accessible to theatregoers of their era, inviting audiences to see these changes as a part of everyday reality.
Rethinking Realism In this chapter, I have used my analysis of three plays to illustrate some crucial points in the ongoing debate about realism’s usefulness to feminist drama. Most obviously, I have tried to show that historical context is crucial in determining meaning. In the Progressive Era, realism was considered the highest and most modern form of dramatic writing, the only form appropriate for critical exploration of social problems. Many feminist playwrights of the period thus wrote realistic plays as the best way to have their voices heard and their ideas taken seriously. We would do them grievous disservice to dismiss their work as inadequate because realism is sometimes seen, in late twentieth-century criticism, as an outmoded or debased form. But it is not only in distant historical contexts that I want to rethink the relationship between feminism and realism, for realism as dramatic form has persisted now for over a hundred years, and perhaps contemporary feminists can learn some lessons by looking at its history. While realism is based on the specific theatrical conventions described at the beginning of this essay, it can also be adapted and modified by innovative playwrights; indeed, many feminist playwrights from the Progressive Era to the present have mingled realistic conventions with antirealistic ones to create hybrid forms, suitable for many purposes. Furthermore, even the most traditional realism can still reach wide audiences and protest the social conditions it presents. Let the continuing lesson of Gale, Crothers, and Wentworth be this: depicting what is can be a step toward creating what should be. Source: Patricia R. Schroeder, ‘‘Realism and Feminism in the Progressive Era,’’ in Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, edited by Brenda Murphy, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 31–48.
Cynthia Sutherland In the following essay, Sutherland examines a pulling back from more strident portrayals of femi-
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nist concerns in plays of the 1920s, including Miss Lulu Bett. Ibsen’s Nora shut the door of her ‘‘doll’s house’’ in 1879. Among the generation of American women born in the 1870’s and 1880’s, Zona Gale, Zoe Akins, and Susan Glaspell all won Pulitzer Prizes. Rachel Crothers, the successful dramatist who wrote more than three dozen plays, characterized her own work as ‘‘a sort of Comédie Humaine de la Femme.’’ In an interview in 1931 she said: ‘‘With few exceptions, every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it . . . I [do not] go out stalking the footsteps of women’s progress. It is something that comes to me subconsciously. I may say that I sense the trend even before I have hearsay or direct knowledge of it.’’ During a period in which most American play-wrights confined their work to representations of the middle class, these women were distinctive because they created principal roles for female characters whose rhetoric thinly veiled a sense of uneasiness with what Eva Figes and others more recently have called ‘‘patriarchal attitudes.’’ By the turn of the century, the mostly ‘‘abolitionist’’ women who had originated the battle for suffrage in the 1840s and 1850s were either dead or retired, and a new generation of leaders was attempting to expand popular support through the use of muted political rhetoric which intentionally avoided controversy. The majority of women resisted arguments advocating changes in sex roles on the grounds that their inherent femininity would be diminished and their homes threatened. In the Ladies’ Home Journal, Jane Addams argued benignly that a woman who wanted to ‘‘keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children’’ ought to ‘‘have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside her immediate household.’’ The conciliatory strategy of feminist leaders like Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt exalted the family, motherhood, and domestic values, minimized conflicts between self-realization and inhibiting social conditions, and often disregarded the arguments of radical feminists who insisted that only basic alterations in the organization of the family and sexual relationships could effect substantive changes in women’s lives. For many members of audiences, political issues continued to be dissociated from personal lives in which an equator divided the world of human activity marking ‘‘homemaking’’ and ‘‘breadwinning’’ as hemispheres. In 1924, a study
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of a fairly large group of young girls indicated that a substantial number planned to choose marriage over a ‘‘career’’ and that few had developed alternative goals. Asked to ‘‘name the four heroines in history or fiction whom [they] would most like to resemble,’’ only two of 347 chose women identified chiefly or even at all with feminist causes. They elected, rather, to live vicariously through husbands and children, accepting the traditional sex-role differentiation in which ‘‘instrumental/task functions are assigned to males, and expressive/social functions to females.’’ Glaspell, Akins, Gale, and Crothers chronicled the increasingly noticeable effects of free love, trial marriage, the ‘‘double standard,’’ career, divorce, and war on women’s lives. Public rhetoric generally subsumed private sexual rhetoric in the theatre during this period, and dramatic discourse tended to mediate conflicting views of women’s ‘‘legitimate’’ place in society more often than it intensified dispute. Although the sector of life subtended by domesticity was being steadily decreased by technological and economic developments in the early years of the century, feminist leaders, artists, and housewives shared the common inability to suggest an alternative social structure through which discontent might be alleviated. To the extent that female characters on the stage accepted the traditional sex role, a diminished state of consciousness manifested itself in language that avoided strong or forceful statements, evinced conformity, consisted of euphemism and question-begging, and celebrated the processes which safely domesticated erotic pleasure. As contemporary critics, we tend to be disappointed by portrayals of women who cannot express, much less resolve, their problems. Yet, here, precisely, I believe, is the reason for the popular success and the ‘‘critical’’ failure of many of these plays. The spectacle of dramatic characters conducing themselves in the ironic guise of people only half aware of conflicts between individuation and primary sex role has usually been interpreted as trivial, the result of mediocre artistry, rather than what it is—the theatrical encoding of a ‘‘genderlect,’’ or to put it another way, a language that reflects the internalizing by members of society of a particular system of sex differentiation and values. However, during the period before the thirtysixth state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a significant number of plays did present exceptionally articulate female artists as figures incarnating the dilemma of people torn by the conflicting demands of sex role and career. In A
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Man’s World (National Theatre, Washington, D.C., October 18, 1909), Rachel Crothers’s protagonist Frank Ware is a novelist who oversees a club for girls who ‘‘need another chance.’’ She has published anonymously a defense of women’s rights which even her friends—themselves painters, writers, and musicians—agree is much too good to have been written by a woman. After accidentally discovering that her fiancé, Malcolm Gaskell, has fathered her adopted seven-year-old son (the deserted mother had been her friend and died in childbirth), she renounces him. Avoiding a facile reconciliation, Crothers chose rather to stress Frank’s abhorrence of her lover’s complacent refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the deplorable consequences of his own sexual license. In the final curtain scene, their relationship is abruptly severed: FRANK. Oh, I want to forgive you . . . tell me you know it was wrong—that you’d give your life to make it right. Say that you know this thing is a crime. GASKELL. No! Don’t try to hold me to account by a standard that doesn’t exist. Don’t measure me by your theories. If you love me you’ll stand on that and forget everything else. FRANK. I can’t. I can’t.
In He and She (Poughkeepsie, 1911), Crothers again explored the dilemma of a woman who must decide between sex role and career, in this instance, motherhood or sculpting. Ann Herford surrenders the commission she has won in a national competition to her husband, Tom, who has been openly skeptical that his wife could do ‘‘anything for a scheme as big’’ as the project required for the contest. When he wins only the second prize, his ego is badly shaken, and he retrenches to the familiar rhetorical stance of chief breadwinner. Reconciliation comes only after Ann abandons her prize in response to the needs of her teenage daughter. Crothers, although she shows a woman conceding final ‘‘victory’’ to her primary sex role, allows her character to voice bitterness and disappointment: TOM . . . you’ve not only beaten me—you’ve won over the biggest men in the field—with your own brain and your own hands; in a fair, fine Hard fight . . . there’ll be times when you[ll] eat your heart out to be at work on it—when the artist in you will yell to be let out. ANN. I know . . . And I’ll hate you because you’re doing it—and I’ll hate myself because I gave it up— and I’ll almost—hate—her . . . my heart has almost burst with pride—not so much that I had done it—but for all women . . . then the door opened—and Millicent
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SUCH CAPITULATION TO PUBLIC OPINION EVIDENT IN THE MODIFICATION OF THE ENDING BY A WRITER WHO HAD SUPPORTED THE WOMAN’S PEACE UNION, THE WOMAN’S PEACE PARTY (WISCONSIN), JANE ADDAMS AND THE HULL-HOUSE WORKERS AND WHO LATER HELPED TO WRITE THE WISCONSIN EQUAL RIGHTS LAW, HAS CONSIDERABLE SIGNIFICANCE.’’
[their daughter] came in. There isn’t any choice Tom—she’s part of my body—part of my soul.
Ann’s uneasy capitulation to the obligations of motherhood is carefully orchestrated by the simplistic attitudes of two women who are in love with her husband’s close friend, a partially caricatured ‘‘male chauvinist’’ hard-liner; one woman accepts a promotion in her job rather than tolerate what she views as his suffocating demands, the other chases him because she believes that ‘‘all the brains a woman’s got [are]—to make a home—to bring up children— and to keep a man’s love.’’ That Tom and Ann might exchange roles, he taking over as parent temporarily while she carves her frieze, is outside the realm of dramatic choice, because, in Crothers’s dialectical structure, the men and women are shown to be incapable of conceiving this as an alternative. General expectations that a shift towards a more egalitarian society would lead to personal and social enfranchisement in the progressive era as middleclass women moved in the direction of greater selfconsciousness are clearly undercut in the endings of Crothers’s plays. A vastly more imaginative if less independent playwright, Susan Glaspell both directed and acted in her own plays. From 1913 until 1922, she worked with the Provincetown Players. A sounding board for new ideas, the Provincetown group produced plays that sometimes spoofed feminist excesses, yet usually respected the seriousness of the ‘‘movement’s’’ political aims. In Suppressed Desires (Wharf
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Theatre, Provincetown, Summer, 1915), Glaspell ridiculed a woman who nearly wrecks her marriage by testing psychoanalytic theories on her sister and husband, and in Close the Book (Playwright’s Theatre, 1917), she poked fun at a liberated girl who naively insists, ‘‘Hand on heart,’’ that she is ‘‘not respectable.’’ In Woman’s Honor (Playwright’s Theatre, 1918), she presents a satiric sketch of the effects of the ‘‘double standard.’’ A young man accused of murder refuses to provide himself with an alibi by identifying his married mistress. He is beleaguered by a bevy of volunteers, each of whom wants to sacrifice her own ‘‘honor’’ to save him by claiming that she has been the anonymous lover. The women are comic types with predictable opinions about female honor: ‘‘The Shielded One,’’ ‘‘The Motherly One,’’ ‘‘The Silly One,’’ ‘‘The Mercenary One,’’ and ‘‘The Scornful One.’’ The last of these expresses her resentment of society’s definition of ‘‘woman’s honor’’: ‘‘Did it ever strike you as funny that woman’s honor is only about one thing, and that man’s honor is about everything but that thing?’’ With amusing logic, she tells the prisoner that since ‘‘woman’s honor means woman’s virtue,’’ the lady for whom he ‘‘propose[s] to die has no virtue.’’ Caught in the midst of chatter, he resigns himself: ‘‘Oh, hell, I’ll plead guilty,’’ rather than be faced by another speechifying female. But in her most famous play, Trifles (Wharf Theatre, Province-town, Summer, 1916), Glaspell began to explore seriously the more violent psychological aspects of women trapped in loveless marriages. Minnie Wright has strangled her husband. The wives of the sheriff and a neighbor have come to her home to collect a few things to make her more comfortable in jail. As their husbands search for evidence that would provide a motive, the women discover among Minnie’s ‘‘trifles’’ a canary’s carcass and decide to defy the law by concealing it, guessing that her husband ‘‘wrung—its neck . . . Wright wouldn’t like the bird—a thing that sang— She used to sing. He killed that, too.’’ The neighbor expresses her regret: ‘‘I might have known [Minnie] needed help! I know how things can be—for women . . . We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.’’ As they leave, the women explain to the men who have ridiculed Minnie’s ‘‘trifles’’ that she was going to ‘‘knot’’ her quilt, a subdued, ironic, and grisly reminder of the manner in which a stifled wife has enacted her desperate retaliation. In the theatre of the next decade, the motifs of the caged bird and the lost
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singing voice were to become the hallmarks of numerous ‘‘domesticated’’ women who abandoned careers. In Trifles, Glaspell had negotiated that portrayal of a woman’s violent repudiation of her husband’s narrow notion of sex role by removing her from the sight of the audience (a technique she later was to repeat in Bernice and Allison’s House). But the play in which she confronted most vehemently the sex-role imprisonment of women is The Verge, first performed by the Playwright’s Theatre in its last season (November 14, 1921). Claire Archer rejects her daughter and murders her lover. Her insane passion to breed a fresh botanical species which she calls ‘‘Breath of Life,’’ one which may be ‘‘less beautiful—less sound—than the plants from which [it] diverged,’’ expresses her radical rejection of biological and cultural inheritance— she is identified as the ‘‘flower of New England . . . what came of men who made the laws that made . . . [the] culture.’’ She has divorced a ‘‘stick-in-themud artist and married—[a] man of flight,’’ who she has hoped will ‘‘smash something,’’ but who also has turned out to be baldly conventional. The son who had shared her vision of transcendence is dead. Driven by frustration and disappointment, in a terrifying scene, she strikes her daughter across the face with the roots of an ‘‘Edge Vine,’’ believing that both the girl and the plant are incurable conformists. Her words echo horribly those of familiar mythic murderesses: ‘‘To think that object ever moved in my belly and sucked my breast.’’ When the lover who has rejected her frenetic sexual advances returns because he wants to keep her ‘‘safe’’ from harm, she strangles him as a ‘‘gift’’ to the plant, choosing to break ‘‘life to pieces in the struggle’’ to cast free from traditional sex role. A demented Demeter, Claire has been mesmerized by an apocalyptic vision: ‘‘Plants . . . explode their species—because something in them knows they’ve gone as far as they can go. Something in them knows they’re shut in. So [they] go mad—that life may not be imprisoned. Break themselves up—into crazy things—into lesser things, and from the pieces—may come one sliver of life with vitality to find the future. How beautiful. How brave. Glaspell’s representation of a failed Goddess-Mother was treated respectfully by reviewers in England, but in this country it was largely misunderstood or ignored. Written a year earlier, another study of a woman’s plight, Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett, opened at the Belmont Theatre on December 27, 1920 and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize. Like Rachel
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Crothers and Susan Glaspell, Zona Gale had come to New York from the Midwest and was sympathetic to feminist causes despite her mother’s caveat to shun radical politics and women’s groups—‘‘I would let that mess of women alone!’’ she had advised her daughter. The novel on which Gale had based her play had been immediately successful, and in eight days, she had hastily, though with considerable dramatic skill, adapted it for production. Even though Miss Lulu Bett did not present a threatening subject (for ‘‘old maids’’ were commonly seen not as electing spinsterhood but as having had it thrust upon them by faithless lovers or deprivation), strong critical pressure influenced Gale to alter the last act, in which, like Ibsen’s Nora, Lulu walks out of the house in which she has been a virtual servant to become an independent woman. Gale rewrote the last act so that it conformed more closely to her popular novel, which concluded with Lulu comfortably established as a respectable wife. This story of a drab but resourceful and dry-witted woman—whom Fannie Hurst called a ‘‘shining star’’ reflected in ‘‘greasy reality’’—ran for 186 performances. Such capitulation to public opinion evident in the modification of the ending by a writer who had supported the Woman’s Peace Union, the Woman’s Peace Party (Wisconsin), Jane Addams and the Hull-House workers and who later helped to write the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law, has considerable significance. It anticipated the new style of mediation used by playwrights who continued to dramatize aspects of the ‘‘woman problem’’ in the 1920’s. After World War I and the extension of the franchise, the momentum towards fully equal status for women slowed considerably. One of Rachel Crothers’s characters sees herself as an exception to what was to become an increasingly regressive trend: ‘‘I haven’t slipped back one inch since the war. Most women who sort of rose to something then have slumped into themselves again, but I’ve gone on. My life gets much fuller and wider all the time. There’s no room for men. Why, why should I give up my own personal life—or let it be changed in the slightest degree for a man?’’ But the woman who speaks these somewhat fatuous lines will, during the course of the dramatic action, reveal her disingenuousness by seducing a member of the British upper class so that her ‘‘personal life’’ and career are, in fact, exchanged for marriage. Statistics on employment indicate that the percentage of females in the total labor force had decreased from 20.9 in 1910 to 20.4 in 1920.
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Among women, the proportion of the total college enrollment dropped—three of every four new professionals chose traditionally female-dominated fields, and the number of doctors decreased by nearly one-third. Female architects and lawyers continued at less than three percent, and attendance at professional schools increased only slightly. When members of Pruette’s test group were questioned, only thirty-two percent indicated that they would like to be successful themselves in ‘‘some chosen work’’; the remainder opted for success ‘‘through’’ husband and family. The choice between marriage and career continued to be polarized; and the divorce rate rose steadily. By 1929, Suzanne la Follette was to comment that ‘‘the traditional relations of the sexes is far from being reversed in this country, [but] . . . has shifted away enough to cause alarm among those to whom it seems the right and inevitable relation because it is conventional.’’ Many of the changes affecting women’s lives were seen as detrimental to their femininity. George Jean Nathan opined that ‘‘. . . women more and more have ceased to be the figures of man’s illusion and more and more have become superficially indistinguishable from man himself in his less illusory moments. In sport, in business, in drinking, in politics, in sexual freedom, in conversation, in sophistication and even in dress, women have come closer and closer to men’s level and, with the coming, the purple allure of distance has vamoosed.’’ The plays of this period characterize masculine responses that range from reactionary to adjustive but are rarely innovative. Crothers spoofs (or does she?) a gentleman’s overreaction to a woman who aggressively courts him: ‘‘. . . it seems to be awfully important . . . nowadays to be a woman . . . I’m not criticizing. Men are totally unnecessary, I s’pose, except for breeding purposes. And we go on taking ourselves for granted in the same old relationships with women. Stupid of us, isn’t it?’’ Early in the 1920s, the struggle against social oppression had shifted towards a rebellion against convention in which the manipulation of style was both means and end. The flapper was sometimes a flamboyant flouter, as Zelda Fitzgerald’s life apparently proved, but she generally strayed only temporarily from acceptable patterns of conduct, because her values were essentially the same as those of her parents. Cocktail in one hand and cigarette in the other, she made an avocational pretense of ‘‘rebellion’’ that was quite compatible with middle-class wisdom, as she mimicked the demands of earlier feminists for sexual equality.
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The plays that Crothers wrote in the 1920’s signal her own ambivalence toward the contrived stance of young women whose gold-plated philosophy was an amalgam of ‘‘free-thinking’’ writers like Ellen Key, Mona Cairn, Havelock and Edith Ellis. Like Congreve’s Millamant, they were choosing to ‘‘dwindle into a wife’’ rather than persevere in a search for practical alternatives. Crothers’s formulaic plot for flappers continued to have the staple elements described by Clara Claibourne Park in her study of the young women in Shakespeare’s comedies: ‘‘Invent a girl of charm and intellect; allow her ego a brief premarital flourishing; make clear that it is soon to subside into voluntarilyassumed subordination; make sure that it is mediated by love.’’ But Crothers’s perspective is ironic, because she juxtaposes romantic courtship and the harsh antagonisms that often grow between marriage, partners. The plays she wrote during these years strongly emphasized deteriorating sexual relationships over a period of time, thus undermining the power of the traditional plot to sustain communal custom through ritual reenactment, In Mary the Third (Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, February 5, 1925), the playwright presented three generations of women in the throes of choosing mates. The grandmother, Mary the First, traps a mate with flirtation in 1870; the mother, Mary the Second, yields to the proposal of her most vigorous but most unsuitable lover in 1897. These two women are seen as mere anachronisms by Mary the Third, in 1923, who fecklessly flaunts convention by insisting that she will choose her mate only after going off to the country on an experimental trip with two men and another woman to ‘‘live naturally and freely for two weeks—doing a thing we know in the bottom of our souls is right, and knowing perfectly well the whole town is going to explode with horror.’’ However, after only a few hours, Mary rationalizes her own lack of persistence, deciding to be ‘‘magnanimous’’ to the ‘‘deep prejudices’’ of her parents. She returns home. Fearful of being scolded, she and her brother hide and are horrified when they accidentally overhear their parents in a fight (reminiscent of Strindberg and foreshadowing Albee) that shaves off the thin skin concealing the bleeding tissue of their marriage. They hear their father tell their mother: ‘‘I’m flabbergasted at you. You seem to have lost what sense you did have . . . I can’t count on you. You aren’t there. Sometimes I think you aren’t the woman I married at all,’’ and their mother’s even more devastating reply: ‘‘And sometimes I think you’re a man I couldn’t have married. Sometimes I loathe
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everything you think and say and do. When you grind out that old stuff I could shriek. I can’t breathe in the same room with you. The very sound of your voice drives me insane. When you tell me how right you are—I could strike you.’’ The fate of the marriage of Mary the Third has left unresolved at the conclusion. Even though Mary the Second is seen her mother’s agonized entrapment and recognized its partial basis in her inability to earn an independent income, the daughter herself yields to the pressures of convention and enters marriage knowing just as little about her future husband as her grandmother and mother had known of theirs. Self-deceived, she has only partly digested the teachings of those writers who had argued for new kinds of marriages: ‘‘. . . you ought to be able to [make your own living] . . . I shall have my own money. I’ll make it. I shall live with a man because I love him and only as long as I love him. I shall be able to take care of myself and my children if necessary. Anything else gives the man a horrible advantage, of course. It makes the woman a kept woman.’’ Significantly, Mary has rejected an intelligent suitor who has warned her that ‘‘unless we change the entire attitude of men and women towards each other—there won’t be any marriage in the future’’ and disregarded the fact that she is as ill-trained to support herself as her mother had been. Crothers’s plays signal changes in the treatment of the ‘‘woman problem’’ in the theatre during the twenties. The dialectic between the ‘‘new woman’’ and her ‘‘old-fashioned’’ relatives increasingly undercut conventional comic endings as reconciliation with older patterns became a hollow act. In a series of skillfully constructed one-act plays, Crothers continued her mordant comment by creating the character of a successful but shallow politician, Nancy Marshall, whose words expose a growing ‘‘tokenism’’ in the feminist views of many of her contemporaries: We women must be considerate of each other. If I am nominated I’m going to be awfully strong for that . . . Men have made a mess of it—that’s all. The idea that there aren’t enough houses in New York to go ‘round. What nonsense! . . . All those awful people with money who never had any before in their lives ought not to be allowed to crowd other people out. It’s Bolshevism—just Bolshevism . . . And not enough school teachers to go ‘round . . . People ought simply to be made to teach school, whether they want to or not . . . I can’t teach school. God knows I’d be glad to—and just show them if my hands weren’t so full now of—I’m going to have awful circles under my eyes from standing so long.
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She contrasts her own knowledge of the nuances of political style with her female opponent’s corpulent presence on the hustings: ‘‘She is so unpopular I should think she’d withdraw from sheer embarassment . . . she is so unattractive. That’s why the men have put her up . . . they’re not afraid of her because they know she’ll never get anywhere.’’ The sheer vacuousness of Nancy Marshall’s political views elicits the response from her best friend that ‘‘Between you and her I’d vote for the best man going,’’ and comes into sharp relief when compared to the comment of Mary Dewson, director of women’s work for the Democratic party, after the election of 1932: ‘‘. . . we did not make the oldfashioned plea that our candidate was charming, . . . we appealed to the intelligence of the country’s women.’’ In a one-act sequel, after the same friends calls her an ‘‘old maid,’’ Nancy Marshall suddenly comprehends the real ‘‘importance of being a woman’’ and hastily puts on a proper gown for the purpose of attracting a proposal of marriage. The customary import of the courtship scene is compromised, because the gentleman of her choice has been rejected, in an earlier scene, by Patti Pitt, a young woman who sees herself as public property (she is an entertainer!), but who actually has meant it when she said ‘‘It’s power, . . . I’ve got it and mustn’t throw it away . . . Any woman can get married, but I have something more important to do’’ (The Importance of Being a Woman). The satiric treatment of both women by Crothers indicates that she was sensitive to the processes of rationalization used by women confronted by the choice between career and marriage, and had identified in those who opted for the latter an erosion of energy that was to continue to perpetuate, for a number of years in the theatre, the prominence of the ‘‘feminine mystique.’’ In the 1930’s, Clare Boothe’s satire, The Women (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, December 26, 1936), slashed at materialistic Park Avenue matrons, but also reflected an underside of the cultural milieu as female characters turned increasingly to divorces, affairs, and sometimes to temporary careers. In a late play by Crothers, When Ladies Meet (Royale Theatre, October 6, 1932), the scenario of the struggle of female characters for economic and moral independence receives less emphasis than the failing and futile relationships all the women have with the men. Mary, a writer, and Claire, a wife, are both in love with the latter’s philandering husband. Mary has continued to reject the persistent courtship of
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good-natured Jimmie, a friend who puts women ‘‘in pigeon holes and tab[s] them—[according to] a man’s idea of women.’’ ‘‘Jimmie shrewdly arranges a meeting of mistress and wife at a mutual friend’s country house. The play’s title is drawn from a remarkable scene that occurs ‘‘when ladies meet’’ to discuss the fictional case in Mary’s novel in which a mistress tells her lover’s wife that she wants to live for a year with him on a trial basis. Claire’s comments on the verisimilitude of Mary’s novel barely conceal her response to her own situation: I suppose any married woman thinks the other woman ought to know enough not to believe a married man, if he’s making love to her . . . I happen to be married to a man who can no more help attracting women than he can help breathing. And of course each one thinks she is the love of his life and that he is going to divorce me. But he doesn’t seem to . . . I can always tell when an affair is waning. He turns back to the old comfortable institution of marriage as naturally as a baby turns to the warm bottle . . . I’d say [to the mistress] of course something new is interesting. Of course I look the same old way—and sound the same old way—and eat the same old way and walk the same old way—and so will you—after a while. I’d say of course I can understand his loving you—but are you prepared to stand up to the job of loving him? Most of the things you find so irresistible in him are terribly hard to live with. You must love him so abjectly that you’re glad to play second fiddle just to keep the music going for him.
When her husband unexpectedly blunders into the room, fiction become’s reality—true to Claire’s prediction—he begs to return, but she rejects him with a newly discovered decisiveness: ‘‘You can’t conceive that I could stop loving you. It happened in just one second—I think–when I saw what you’d done to [Mary] . . . I’m not going home—now—or ever.’’ Mary will continue to write and to live alone. The theme of the emotional consequences of both disintegrating marriages and the pursuit of careers had been introduced earlier in the play by their hostess, who diagnoses women’s restlessness as due to a far-reaching lack of fulfillment in either institution . . . ‘‘Men mean a great deal more to women than women do to men . . . I don’t care what strong women—like Mary tell you about loving their work and their freedom—it’s all slush. Women have got to be loved. That’s why they’re breaking out so . . . They daring to have lovers—good women—because they just can’t stand being alone.’’ Crothers had managed to write, on the average, a play a year since 1904. The incipient thirty-year-
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long quietism in feminist activities produced by apathy, factionalism, and personal loneliness is evident in the uneasy resignation of her later female characters. The playwright’s response to a reporter, in 1941, revealed her final alienation from feminist causes and repeated her earlier assertion that her plays had mirrored, mutatis mutandis, the social evolution of sex roles: ‘‘What a picayune, selfconscious side all this woman business has to it . . . I’ve been told that my plays are a long procession reflecting the changing attitudes of the world toward women. If they are, that was completely unconscious on my part. Any change like that, that gets on to the stage, has already happened in life. Even the most vulgar things, that people object to with so much excitement, wouldn’t be in the theatre at all if they hadn’t already become a part of life.’’ In 1931, the Pulitzer Prize was given to Susan Glaspell, the first woman to win it in a decade. In Alison’s House (Civic Repertory Theatre, December 1, 1930), her last play, she again returned to the dramatic techniques she had used during her years with the Provincetown a decade earlier. Zoe Akins won the Prize, in 1935, for The Old Maid (Empire Theatre, January 7, 1935) but her skillful dramatic adaptation (like Edith Wharton’s novelette published eleven years earlier) is set back in time. Both prize-winning plays safely distanced controversial feminist issues by presenting women tethered by Edwardian proprieties rather than more immediately recognizable topical restraints. It is possibly worth pointing out that the plays for which American women have won Pulitzer Prizes deal essentially with the ‘‘old maid’’ figure in whom the threat of sex-role conflict is ‘‘neutralized,’’ as did the near-winner, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (Maxine Elliott Theatre, November 20, 1934), which dealt with the cruel ostracism of suspected lesbians. The efforts of women to understand and determine their own lives, their failure to develop effective strategies for the realization of personal gratification, their continuing attachment to the perimeters of capitalism were portrayed by Glaspell, Gale, Crothers, and Akins less as a passionate subjugation than as the restless sojourn of half- articulate captives in a land that seemed alien to them. Marriage continued to be the first choice and a career the second of most women, as their enrollment percentage in colleges continued to drop steadily from 40.3 in 1930 to 30.2 in 1950. In the theatre, divorcees and professional women continued to be perceived as ‘‘threats’’ to the institution of marriage, because
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they personified women’s fulfillment through chosen alternative social roles. Not until the late 1950s would public attention again focus on the issues probed so searchingly by this generation of playwrights. Certainly, isolated expressions of ‘‘feminist’’ theatre, like Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (Plymouth Theatre, September 7, 1928), had continued, but they were generally short-lived, and for a quarter of a century, there was no reappearance of the serious concern with the ‘‘woman problem’’ that had characterized the work of America’s women playwrights from the Midwest. My comments have been limited to plays written by middle-class women who bring to issue kinship rules and incest taboos in which primary sex role determines generic restrictions for dramatic action. A thoroughgoing analysis would have included, among others, the ordinary females and heteroclites created by Clare Kummer, Rose Pastor Stokes, Alice Gerstenberg, Alice Brown, Sophie Treadwell, Rita Wellman, Neith Boyce, Lula Vollmer, Maurine Watkins, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Julie Herne. Nor have I mentioned Edward Sheldon, George Middleton, Bayard Veiller, Sidney Howard, George Kelly, Eugene O’Neill, and S. N. Behrman, who were remarkably sensitive to the predicaments of female characters and deserve to be reevaluated in this light. As theatre historians and critics, we must now attempt to refine our working lexicon. Beyond female roles dictated by kinship structures (e.g. wife, mother, daughter, sister, bride, mother-in-law, widow, grandmother), there exist other roles which are more or less independent (e.g., coquette, ingénue, soubrette, career woman, servant, shaman, witch, bawd, whore) as well as interdependent roles (e.g., the other woman, mulatto). Only by developing descriptive categories with some historical precision can we hope to account for both formulaic successes and changes in dramatic modes. A more accurate vocabulary for female ‘‘dramatis personae’’ could help us to understand the interrelationships between the theatre and evolving social milieus in this and other periods. Source: Cynthia Sutherland, ‘‘American Women Playwrights as Mediators of the ‘Woman Problem,’’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 21, No. 3, September 1978, pp. 319–36.
Harold P. Simonson In the following essay excerpt, Simonson covers the creation and publication of Miss Lulu Bett, and subsequent critical attention.
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II Early in 1919 Zona Gale began sending her new manuscript on its rounds to magazine editors, her cover-letter typically restrained: ‘‘Dear Sir:—I am submitting with this a novelette, ‘Miss Lulu Bett,’ with the hope that it may just possibly be acceptable to you.’’ Six editors rejected it straightaway, even though it could have been run as a magazine serial. Finally Rutger Jewett of D. Appleton Company agreed to publish it as a book. For the story Zona Gale had taken an episode originally intended for Birth but cut out to shorten the already too lengthy novel. Jeffrey Pitt became Bobby in Miss Lulu Betti and the title character was his casual aunt in Birth changed to the leading character in the novelette. Carefully she expanded the episode, which in its completion was still ‘‘as spare,’’ thought Carl Van Doren, ‘‘as the virgin frame’’ of the heroine. Wilson Follett and other friends had warned her that another long novel would probably have the same unprofitable fate as Birth. This advice, which augmented her previous resolution to strip away the fanciful, left her with forty-five thousand lean words, the length of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Wilta Cather’s A Lost Lady, with which Zona Gale’s story was later favorably compared. Because of meager sales with her preceding novels, booksellers were skeptical about this one. But with the vigorous promotion which her new publisher gave it, plus the burst of favorable reviews, it soon competed as a best seller with Lewis’ Main Street, published also in 1920. Without hesitation reviewers thought it the best novel Zona Gale had yet done; furthermore, it promised them that she had forever cast sentimentality behind her, that she was unquestionably finished with Friendship Village. They read the new novel as a tart picture of small-town American life, and as first-rate realism. Nothing now interfered with her straightforward expression—no sentimentality, no distracting threads of mysticism, no contrived optimism, no tiresome chatter, and no tea parties. In it instead were realism’s sordidness and triviality, its tragedy of unfulfilled lives, its hypocrisies, its mundane and dishwater monotony. Writing five months after the novel appeared, Robert Benchley in the New York World (July 10, 1920) apologized for merely hailing it as ‘‘a great book.’’ ‘‘But I can’t do anything else. I’m very sorry.’’ His wry point was that for five solid months the same adjective had been used. Constance Rourke a month later summarized the
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MISS GALE DID NOT INTEND THE PARADOXICAL ENDING IN MISS LULU BETT, THE NOVEL, TO SUGGEST THAT LULU’S LIBERATION FROM ONE HOUSEHOLD ONLY SENDS HER INTO THE CONFINEMENT OF ANOTHER. SHE THOUGHT THAT LULU’S MARRIAGE TO CORNISH CONSTITUTED A ‘HAPPY ENDING. . . .’’’
attitude generated about the book by stating flatly, ‘‘Whatever its antecedents, the book stands as a signal accomplishment in American letters.’’ A ‘‘portent’’ to Miss Rourke of even firmer work to come, Miss Lulu Bett also reinforced the current hue and cry over women’s rights. Her most successful treatment of woman’s plight comes in this novel. No longer does Friendship Village, with its kindness and goodwill, befriend the newly educated American woman—nor do its comforting niceties satisfy her. The ‘‘home town’’ now tyrannizes her. What was once familial harmony is now in Miss Lulu Bett snapping and peevish incivility. Worse still, the chances for escape are few, the hopes gigantically disproportionate to their realization. After fifteen years in her sister’s and brotherin-law’s household, Lulu Bett, unmarried at thirtythree, presents a sad spectacle of the frustrated, unemancipated woman. When old Mr. Bett died, Lulu and her senile mother moved in with Ina and Dwight Deacon who routinely assumed that, for her ‘‘keep,’’ Lulu would take over all the menial domestic chores. Her stirrings of rebellion offer no hope, for the pattern of small-town mores dictates her duty to the household. She is its only competent person, its workhorse, but no one pays attention. She has long ago sacrificed her pride to Dwight’s grossness. Virtually a slave having no means of liberation, she stoically submits to the treadmill. Her own summary, ‘‘Nobody cares what becomes of me after they’re fed,’’ echoes the old woman in Sherwood Anderson’s story, ‘‘Death in the Woods.’’
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Demeaned and scorned, the butt of jokes, both women represent figures found in a social captivity which deprives them of individuality and relevance. It is not surprising that when Dwight’s brother, Ninian, comes to visit the family, Lulu’s expectations stir. Ninian has traveled for twenty years, has been to all the places John Embers described to provincial Cosma Wakely in A Daughter of the Morning, and has now returned with endless stories to tell. Though lacking the capacity for intensive observation, he has nevertheless been away, to alien lands. Incredulous that Lulu has never left Warbleton, merely another Portage-Katytown-Burage, he lightly suggests a trip to the city with Dwight and Ina. Symbolizing liberation, the big city dazzles Lulu; with her companions, she sees Peter Pan, chosen by Ninian because the tickets were expensive. Later the four go to a restaurant where, as a gag, Dwight performs a marriage ceremony for Lulu and Ninian. Startled to discover its legality, since Dwight is a justice of the peace, flushed and tremulous Lulu accedes to Ninian’s wish to consider themselves married. Ironically for helpless Lulu, that which was intended as a joke becomes a marriage; brassy ragtime music is her wedding march. A month later when Lulu returns to Warbleton without her husband, the Deacons are shocked to learn from her that Ninian was already married and has gone to Oregon to learn if his wife is still alive. Caring nothing for Lulu’s torment, Dwight thinks only of the gossip Lulu’s return will set afoot. ‘‘I desire that you should keep silent and protect my family from scandal,’’ he thunders. But the neighbors’ curiosity cannot be curbed. ‘‘Lulu Betti’’ Or ‘‘W-well, it isn’t Lulu Bett any more, is it? Well, what are you doing here? I thought. . . ’’ ‘‘I’m back to stay,’’ she said. ‘‘The idea! Well, where are you hiding that handsome husband of yours? Say, but we were surprised! You’re the sly one—’’ ‘‘My—Mr. Deacon isn’t here.’’ ‘‘Oh.’’ ‘‘No. He’s West.’’ ‘‘Oh, I see.’’
While waiting to hear from Ninian, Lulu meets Neil Cornish, the new music store proprietor whom the Deacons regard as an eligible husband for Di, Dwight’s eighteen-year-old daughter by an earlier marriage. Cornish, however, attends to Lulu when, for example, after dining with the Deacons he joins
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her at the piano in singing such tender classics as ‘‘Long, Long Ago’’ and ‘‘Little Nell of Narragansett Bay.’’ More importantly, he recognizes the stifling Deacon household and Lulu’s intolerable role in it as a parody of the old-fashioned ‘‘historical home,’’ a haven transformed into a trap. She discovers in Cornish a sensitivity and intelligence rare indeed in prosaic Warbleton. She tells him about her bizarre marriage to Ninian and her present anxiousness to hear from him. When Ninian finally writes to Lulu that their marriage is absolved because he has found his wife who had deserted him, she and Cornish marry. Lulu leaves the household welter to her inept sister and serenely gives to her shattered brother-inlaw the task of rebuilding his respectability among his gossiping neighbors who will be agog at learning of his brother’s bigamy. Zona Gale’s characterizations are economical and strong. Lulu is what Fannie Hurst called the ‘‘shining star’’ reflected in greasy reality.’’ She mitigates the family’s heavily weighted banality with an ingenuousness which Henry James enjoyed portraying in his young, unmarried women. By contrast, the boorishness of Dwight Deacon, the village’s prototypal businessman, prevents his ever transcending the maudlin or the tiresomely respectable. Ina is weak and simpering, able to do little but feed Dwight’s own image of self-importance. Old Mrs. Bett, shriveled and disaffectionate, occasionally ‘‘sasses’’ Dwight but is herself a narrowminded person given to ‘‘tantrims.’’ The daughter Di apes sophistication in an unsuccessful elopement with Bobby Larkin, the neighbor boy, but her intentions only reveal a sauciness nurtured by her father. Little Monona, daughter of Ina and Dwight, is a whiny, recalcitrant pest. In short, the traditional family hearth as the center of peace is now a stage upon which dull-witted, thoroughly bourgeois fools do their strutting. Zona Gale’s angular and staccato style, her stark brevity, artfully project these characterizations. Embroidery is cut away, and what remains is ‘‘a hard little picture,’’ a term Edith Wharton used when writing to Miss Gale about the novel. But Miss Wharton was uneasy about it too, even though she praised her for the sharpness of the picture’s edges. She cautioned her that at this ‘‘turningpoint’’ she must avoid stripping her style to the point of barrenness. In her opinion this was what Zona Gale had done in Miss Lulu Bett. ‘‘I resent this,’’ Miss Wharton continued, in her own Jamesian way, ‘‘first because you have needlessly limited your field of expression, and produced an impres-
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sion of monotony in your style as well as in the lives of the people you depict; and secondly, because it is to this telegraphic brevity, and to this poverty of vocabulary, that hurry, laziness and ignorance of the history of our language and its boundless resources, are inevitably leading all our young writers. . . ’’ Miss Wharton, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for her novel The Age of Innocence, was inveighing against the notion that a denuded subject needs a denuded style. She was far too acute to suggest that Zona Gale’s earlier filigree enhanced characterization: she readily acknowledged Miss Lulu Bett as a major literary achievement, a ‘‘turning-point.’’ Her warning was directed toward a style lacking ‘‘inflections, modulations, twists, turns, surprises, heights and depths.’’ Even a mediocre mind such as Dwight Deacon’s, she would insist, is the result of invisible accumulations and its atmosphere the totality of innumerable experiences. She wanted Zona Gale to subtilize the picture, not simply to etch it. The Jamesian ‘‘figure in the carpet,’’ elusive as it is, would never show if the carpet itself lacked texture. And Miss Wharton was at a loss to find texture in a passage like this, from Miss Lulu Bett: ‘‘Baked potatoes,’’ said Mr. Deacon. ‘‘That’s good— that’s good. The baked potato contains more nourishment than potatoes prepared in any other way. The nourishment is next to the skin. Roasting retains it.’’ ‘‘That’s what I always think,’’ said his wife pleasantly. For fifteen years they had agreed about this.
It is important to know that Edith Wharton wrote this letter in September, 1922, more than two years after Miss Lulu Bett first appeared. By this time, Zona Gale had successfully adapted it for the stage; she had written another lean novelette entitled Man at Red Barns which The Delineator had run serially; and she had also sent off the manuscript of Faint Perfume to Glenn Frank, editor of Century Magazine. In other words, for nearly three years she had been experimenting with her new style, fully appreciating that it had implemented her literary success. Yet Miss Wharton’s words disturbed her. In her reply she said she was, in fact, under the ‘‘spell’’ of the letter. Two weeks later she confessed to Miss Wharton that her criticism of Miss Lulu Bett had come ‘‘at precisely the moment I needed it, was restless because of the need of it.’’ Then, pointedly, she added, ‘‘Since my new book [Faint Perfume] left my hand I have been haunted by just this verbal insufficiency, unwise compression, inflexibility, monotony.’’ The style bringing her literary fame dis-
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satisfied her. For Robert Benchley to praise her for having dared to create a Dwight Deacon who says ‘‘the gorgeously conventional thing with epochmaking dullness’’ only increased her own uncertainty, now provoked by Edith Wharton. Regardless of these misgivings, Zona Gale believed her novel to be an honest portrayal of the duty-bound, domestically enslaved woman of her day. Its impact satisfied her. When New York producer, Brock Pemberton, wired her on October 27, 1920, that she should adapt it for the theater, she immediately set to work. ‘‘I’m almost ashamed,’’ she told Keene Sumner, ‘‘to say how quickly it was done. I finished it in a week, but as I wasn’t satisfied with the last act I held it over from Saturday to Monday to revise it. So I can say that it took me ten days, and that doesn’t sound quite so bad.’’ Another wire from Pemberton on November 13 said he would look for actors and a theater at once. On December 27 the play opened at the Belmont Theater in New York. Five months later she won the Pulitzer Prize for it. She had practically no writing experience for the stage. Six years earlier she had written the oneact drama called The Neighbors, which had been produced by the Wisconsin Dramatic Society and taken on tour through several states. Yet so adroitly did she shape this first full-length theatrical effort that it ran for some six hundred performances in New York and on the road, and it brought her royalties amounting to nearly six thousand dollars. For the dramatic adaptation Zona Gale retained the same terse expression to depict the banality of the Deacons. Minor changes bring Neil Cornish into the play sooner, arrange Lulu’s marriage to Ninian in the Deacon kitchen instead of in a big-city restaurant, and soften the character of old Mrs. Bett. Missing is the novel’s romantic ending with Lulu as the new Mrs. Cornish. Instead, Lulu first receives word that Ninian has found his wife, then she leaves the Deacon family and, bewilderingly liberated, goes alone into the world to find work. As the curtain falls, old Mrs. Bett turns to helpless Ina and snickers, ‘‘Who’s going to do your work now, I’d like to know?’’ Miss Gale did not intend the paradoxical ending in Miss Lulu Bett, the novel, to suggest that Lulu’s liberation from one household only sends her into the confinement of another. She thought that Lulu’s marriage to Cornish constituted a ‘‘happy ending’’—something hardly credible after she had depicted what domestic oppression is really like. In
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the play, however, the unromantic ending creates a more artful ambiguity. Is Lulu free? With no job and no husband, what are her chances? Will love and marriage, or a job paying wages, sustain her freedom? Or must she inevitably again be trapped? Ludwig Lewisohn correctly pointed out that this is ‘‘a weightier and more severe ending’’ than the novel’s. But rumors convinced Zona Gale after the second week that the public thought this ending too depressing. So she rewrote it! In the new third act Ninian discovers that because his unnecessary first spouse has obligingly been dead for many years, he can return to rescue Lulu from her drudgery. Lulu achieves respectable wifehood, this time as Mrs. Ninian Deacon. Immediately a torrent of criticism broke. Heywood Broun in the New York Tribune (Feb. 6, 1921) thought that employing the ‘‘happy ending’’ tradition was about as sensible as demanding feathers on a mountain lion. Lewisohn argued that Miss Gale’s new twist destroyed Lulu’s significant liberation. Alexander Woolcott in the New York Times (Dec. 28, 1920) called the whole play ‘‘sleazily put together,’’ an opinion which the rewritten last act failed to change. In a parody on Zona Gale’s confusion over her heroine’s destiny, Louis Untermeyer has Lulu say: ‘‘‘We’—she flushed suddenly—‘my first husband and I—I think it was my first husband, although the play and the book and the lady wrote about me mixed me up sort of about myself.’’’ The occasion brought other criticism: that Lulu’s fifteen years with the Deacons proved her own lack of initiative, and that the story was only propaganda for the feminist movement. To her scoffers Miss Gale gave straightforward answers. In no way apologizing for her revised act, she publicly replied in the New York Tribune (Jan. 21, 1921) that ‘‘the common experience affords as many examples of marriage as of going out into the world alone.’’ Irony, satire, tragedy ‘‘must constitute many and many a curtain. But not all.’’ To the charge that Lulu’s treadmill cannot represent women’s plight because it presupposes a witless Lulu, she sharply replied: ‘‘Do you mind my saying: ‘I know them’ . . . overshadowed, browbeaten women, wives or Lulus’’ enslaved by duty, ‘‘dead duty.’’ And to the charge of propaganda, she averred that the story merely shows one woman, Lulu, anxious about herself. As is to be expected, the storm increased the play’s popularity. Months of solid booking made it a
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contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Among several other productions creating lively response the same season were Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, who had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous year for Beyond the Horizon; Frank Craven’s The First Year; and Porter Emerson Browne’s The Bad Men. But it was Miss Lulu Bett that attracted the most favor with Hamlin Garland, Robert Morss Lovett, and Stuart Sherman—the group appointed to recommend the best play of 1921 to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Though the decision to recommend Miss Gale’s work was unanimous, Garland expressed disappointment with the way she ‘‘had fumbled about for a ‘happy ending.’’’ Again the New York critics stormed. Heywood Broun in the Tribune (June 1, 1921) led the pack by declaring that only a few would agree with the committee’s choice. To dull his attack upon Miss Gale but to sharpen it upon the committee, he argued that Miss Lulu Bett, the novel, might better have been the committe’s choice for fiction the preceding year instead of Miss Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. This cross-fire grew too hot for Zona Gale, who had been in New York most of the time since the play’s opening five months earlier. With the prize money of $1,000 she was only too ready to hurry back to her Portage home adjacent to the silently flowing Wisconsin River. Zona Gale’s public image now appeared to be clearly set; Wisconsin had no other woman to match it. A La Follette supporter, a Progressive, a pacifist, a leader in women’s rights and suffrage, the author of more than a dozen books, a Pulitzer Prizewinning dramatist—these were the unmistakable hallmarks of this slightly built, modest Portage woman. New to the image was Zona Gale as the iconoclast, one who was cutting into bourgeois Babbittry to find it both mean and vulgar. While formerly a small-town romanticist, she had now boldly come forth as a skeptic of American values in the 1920’s. She saw in the times—as did H. L. Mencken and Lewis—a flabby degeneration of nineteenth-century idealism. Her futile attempt to reconcile America’s traditional faith in human dignity with the newer instances of exploitation and Darwinian competitiveness aroused her disgust toward the reincarnated American hero, the man of business, who, typically, like Cyrus Harkness in her Man at Red Barns pontificated, ‘‘I hope to thunder the time’ll come when we can have a real business man in every pulpit.’’ Her fiction during this period showed that, in America, vices had become virtues: deceit in business was hailed as shrewdness; gener-
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osity was belittled as evidence of unmanliness. Her lethal pictures of ‘‘leading citizens,’’ ‘‘successful men of affairs,’’ and ‘‘super patriots’’ placed her solidly among the literary realists at a time when there was both a vogue and a need for them. Her realism reminds one of Edgar Lee Masters’ icy cynicism toward Spoon River’s leading ‘‘whited sepulchres,’’ but it is counterpoised in her fiction with a deep sympathy toward the unsuccessful, disappointed, inhibited people. She captured the drabness of these lives, forgotten in the backwashes of American bombast. She went further to create amid these gray scenes a faintly mystical tone. This vague mysticism, colored by her characters’ private longings for self-assurance, suggests that Zona Gale was not a realist at all. She was, instead, a poet, a mystic, a symbolist. But this deeply flowing, silent strain was not visible to the public’s eye or, if seen, not allowed to interfere with its image of her.
III Before starting Faint Perfume (1923), her third and in some ways her best novel explicitly written as realism, she published three minor pieces more interesting for what they imply than for their literary excellence. The first was an inconsequential one-act play for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Entitled Uncle Jimmy (1922), it resurrected for a brief moment the buried Calliope Marsh and her Friendship Village neighbors. That this play should have followed Miss Lulu Bett is evidence that Zona Gale’s break from Friendship Village sunshine never conclusively occurred. The second piece was the serial Man at Red Barns, published in The Delineator. Reflecting Zona Gale’s growing interest in religious New Thought movements, the novelette’s protagonist is John Hazen, a recently widowed Universalist minister who believes that all churches should become one. By preaching universal love, supposedly more deeply infused than any creed, Hazen hopes to eliminate the ‘‘stupid duplication or competition of the denominations.’’ Unfortunately, his efforts toward the ‘‘evolving process of brotherhood’’ excite more antipathy than cooperation in the community, the exception being Anita Wentworth who joins him in the double blessedness of both religious reform and matrimony. In a third work, this time a thin volume of poetry called The Secret Way (1921), Miss Gale again develops what may seem a paradoxical theme for the social reformer who trusts legislation as a means to effect reform. Working assiduously for social legislation, she retains the illusion that any
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worth-while change must come from within rather than be imposed from without. Her subject in these poems is again love, the secret way to clarify one’s sight to ‘‘abiding beauty everywhere.’’ In ‘‘Contours,’’ she traces beauty as a true line, ‘‘drawn from my spirit to some infinite outward place.’’ In ‘‘Enchantment,’’ the ‘‘ultimate star’’ becomes her neighbor, and the town’s confining walls dissolve like Thoreau’s prison. The interlude, then, between Miss Lulu Bett and Faint Perfume reveals a deeply moving interest in the metaphysical and a growing crystallization of key ideas soon to be vital. For example, ‘‘love’’ is Zona Gale’s term for the release of an indwelling spiritual force fusing with an all-encircling Spirit. One’s captivity, even in small-town realities, is never ultimate so long as one’s spirit has not been annihilated. Consequently, her hard little pictures of village life lack the dreadful quality with which a Sartre or a Camus would imbue them: her walls are porous and ultimately nonexistent because one’s spirit can never be imprisoned, while those of the Frenchmen remain forever impenetrable. Searching for the certainty that ultimate reality lies somewhere outside the walls, that it transcends the dreary and mundane workaday world, Zona Gale found herself ready to write another Birth. Yet she had not finished outlining the bleakness of the market-place world and its tortuous confinement. Her emphasis in Faint Perfume still is on the village’s uninspired commonplaceness which, when not allayed, turns its inhabitants into clods. Love someday might enable her new heroine, Leda Perrin, to fly above what Miss Gale called the ‘‘labyrinth of the unreal,’’ but for now love’s absence consigns Leda to the town, ironically named Prospect. In the town one finds Orrin Crumb’s house, where Leda lives, no different from Dwight Deacon’s. Both are ‘‘violently dedicated to the concrete.’’ The faint perfume of spring is barely perceptible, and then only to Leda, the little boy Oliver, his father Barnaby Powers, and old grandfather Crumb. To all the others, who rule the house and town, ‘‘the ground was iron beneath dirty snow.’’ In this novel Zona Gale’s use of symbols reveals a surer hand. The red and awesomely beautiful poinsettia dominates the family table, and its ‘‘red eye’’ is like Dr. Eckleburg’s in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; both silently gape upon the human debris. Before the severity of ‘‘red eye’s’’ judgment, Leda, trapped in her cousin’s household, feels naked. Here is not the nakedness of Richmiel,
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her fleshy and worldly-wise cousin, whose ‘‘yellow gown unclothed her.’’ Instead, Leda is exposed to her own conscience. She stands guilty; the charge is submission to the prosaic and the ugly. By marrying Barnaby, Richmiel’s divorced husband, Leda hopes to atone for her guilt: a marriage to another caged spirit would, neatly, liberate both. Barnaby is ideally suited to rescue Leda. No longer distracted by the heavy eyes and wanton ankles of Richmiel, he discovers to his surprise that looking upon Leda reminds him of angels who perhaps ‘‘know something better.’’ But any such knowledge of bliss possessed by angels or by D. H. Lawrence’s Miriams will not be Leda’s. Earthbound Richmiel stands in the way. Legally divorced from Barnaby but given custody of their small son Oliver, Richmiel now manipulates him as a pawn to keep Barnaby and Leda apart. Richmiel’s heartless game is to allow Barnaby, who adores Oliver, to have his son only as long as Leda remains apart. In this way Richmiel, a hedonist who cares nothing for Oliver, can twist the screw into her former husband and at the same time revenge her jealousy of Leda. Barnaby must choose between rescuing Leda from the Crumbs or freeing Oliver from his mother. His departure with Oliver leaves Leda stranded with only the small hope that someday Richmiel will marry another man, be glad to rid herself legally of the boy, and thereby enable Leda to join with Barnaby. In the meantime, Leda lives amid all the frustrations and hypocrisies present in Zona Gale’s transformed village. Orrin Crumb is stamped from the same machine of Babbittry, and Miss Gale’s scalpel cuts just as deftly into the fat as did Lewis’. Busy as both a salesman and Gideonite, Crumb distributes his wares and Bibles with equal gusto: ‘‘It would not matter what the corps was, the esprit would be there.’’ The particularly handy combination he created for himself—the religious order of traveling salesmen—pleases him completely. Cloddish and gauche, he resolves any problem with a grunt, guffaw, sigh, or moral platitude. His wife, Tweet, is just as inert to complexities, except for family intricacies such as Richmiel’s divorce which may provoke town gossip. Tweet’s two sisters, Richmiel and Pearl, and their mother, lock the cage around Leda. After Barnaby and Oliver have left, the only kindred but also trapped spirit remaining is grandfather Crumb, a worn-out old man still harboring the feelings of a poet. His last years in his son’s house-
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hold have cost him his privacy and singular dignity. His silence serves as his only refuge. But Richmiel’s meanness and the taunting of the others who scorn his old age finally overwhelm him. His suicide note reads: ‘‘Canal. By the cottonwood. Blind in a year. Can’t take care of my room much longer. Have broken the water picher [sic]. Good bye all. Good bye Leda. Shiny quarters for the little chap.’’ Swept by desolation now even more profound than that in the valley of ashes named Prospect, Leda sees life as only ‘‘cadaver, skeleton, dust.’’ She hears screams inside her which she cannot openly voice to Crumb: ‘‘You have killed me a hundred times since I have been in this house. Your way of life is death. I cannot die anymore.’’ Barnaby’s remembered words about love and freedom—the faint perfume—provide only fragile solace to Leda who, as the novel ends, sits in the Crumb house which is filled with grandfather’s funeral flowers and listens to the hollow voice of Orrin Crumb, the Gideonite: ‘‘. . . a Bible in every hotel room. And on the inside cover these wholesome references: If lonesome, read Twenty-third Psalm. If in trouble, read John fourteen. If trade is poor, read——.’’ Faint Perfume swiftly compresses Zona Gale’s distinguishing marks as a literary realist. In this novel her small town again shuts in small people whose cherished values kill spontaneity, imagination, freedom, and life. Ensnared is the fragile soul, like a butterfly, seeking egress. If escape is possible at all, the passage out is as precarious as Thoreau found it to be on leaving the village for Walden Pond. Not only the village’s commitment to mercantilism but its intolerance and militant conformity crush a beautiful spirit. Marshall and Jeffrey Pitt, Lulu Bett, Leda Perrin are similar spirits, impaled and imprisoned by Mencken’s boobus americanus. Her taut realism—her depressive pictures of American life etched with bold hard lines—added to the baleful cry, uttered by other realists, that the bumptious nouveau riche had left the nation barren of culture. Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1873) and William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and, by the end of the century, more than sixty other novels lampooned the bustling, business-minded, self-satisfied middle class and its new wealth. In 1896 historian Brooks Adams declared in the last chapter of his sensational Law of Civilization and decay that no art can flourish in ‘‘the arid modern soil.’’ Critics Van Wyck Brooks, V. F. Calverton, and Matthew Josephson added their voices to the protest. Across the ocean Matthew Arnold
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had warned against what he called ‘‘philistinism,’’ and Swinburne, Wells, Shaw, and Wilde reiterated his warnings. Exile from middle-class mediocrity sent artists to their separate sanctuaries; the Americans in the 1920’s were going to Parisian bistros. Zona Gale stayed in Portage and found her escape in contemplating the real mysteries of the river seen from her second-floor back window. After the last touch of poison in Faint Perfume she went no further. She knew she was on the verge of something big, and, whatever it was, it did not lie in further depicting the hollow Deacons and Crumbs nor the broken wings of Lulu and Leda beating empty air. Her literary stature she thought secure, and she was corroborated by such critics as Carl Van Doren who, as fiction editor of Century Magazine, told her of his pleasure in serializing Faint Perfume, which was followed after its last installment by Willa Cather’s three-part novel The Lost Lady. Even Heywood Broun, in the New York World (March 23, 1923), praised Faint Perfume. Edith Wharton’s ‘‘grumble’’ that sensitive Leda could not possibly also be a Crumb cousin, elicited from Zone Gale only a quiet answer, not an argument. With something else on her mind, she merely thanked her for the letter and added that she had learned a great deal from writing the book. In a cryptic conclusion she referred to ‘‘a certain brooding hope which leaves me quite breathless.’’ That brooding hope concerned her next novel, Preface to a Life. Source: Harold P. Simonson, ‘‘On to Realism,’’ in Zona Gale, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962, pp. 73–91.
SOURCES Goddard, Leslie, ‘‘Zona Gale,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 228: Twentieth-Century American Drama-
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tists, Second Series, edited by Christopher J. Wheatley, The Gale Group, 2000, pp. 73–80. Lewisohn, Ludwig, ‘‘Native Plays,’’ in Nation, Vol. 112, No. 2900, February 2, 1921, p. 189. Simonson, Harold P., Zona Gale, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962, pp. 73–91. Sommer, Elyse, Review of a production of Miss Lulu Bett, CurtainUp, http://www.curtainup.com/ (March 24, 2000). Woollcott, Alexander, ‘‘Zona Gale’s Play,’’ in New York Times, December 28, 1920, p. 9.
FURTHER READING Derleth, August, Still Small Voice: The Biography of Zona Gale, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1940. This in-depth biography, while more anecdotal than critical, provides an interesting look into Gale’s life and the literary times in which she lived. It also includes excerpts from Gale’s writing, including her poetry; other writers on Gale’s work; Gale’s unfinished autobiography; a selected bibliography; and photographs. Nettels, Elsa, ‘‘Edith Wharton’s Correspondence with Zona Gale: ‘An Elder’s Warm Admiration and Interest,’’’ in Resources for American Literary Study, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1998, pp. 207–34. Wharton and Gale corresponded with thoughts about each other’s writing, and Wharton criticized the stark style employed in Miss Lulu Bett. In this article, Nettels investigates the helpful literary relationship between the two writers. Williams, Deborah Lindsay, Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship, St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Williams investigates the transition in the early twentieth century from the model of the ‘‘lady author’’ to a new, but yet undefined alternative. ———, ‘‘Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Edith Wharton, Zona Gale, and Willa Cather,’’ in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1997, pp. 211–39. Williams discusses why these women authors placed an importance on remaining separate from other women writers.
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Orpheus Descending TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 1957
Orpheus Descending, a play by Tennessee Williams (New York, 1958, currently in print, published by Dramatist’s Play Service), opened in 1957 in New York City. Although Williams was at the time an established playwright, having had huge success with The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and other plays, Orpheus Descending was harshly criticized and widely considered a failure. It was a play that Williams had labored over for more than seventeen years. The earliest version was called Battle of Angels, and was first produced in 1940. After Battle of Angels was almost universally condemned by critics, Williams rewrote it five times, reshaping it as a modern version of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Orpheus Descending, a young charismatic musician descends on a small, repressive southern town. He forms a relationship with a passionate woman who is trapped in a bad marriage and who has a tragic past. The play exhibits many of the playwright’s typical themes: loneliness and desire, sexuality and repression, the longing for freedom. Violence lurks just below the surface, and it bursts into the open at the play’s end. The play is also rich in imagery, lyrical language, and symbolism. It is now recognized as one of Williams’s weightier plays, although perhaps not on the level of his finest work.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, the son of Cornelius Coffin (a traveling salesman) and Edwina (Dakin) Williams. Williams, whose first published story appeared in Weird Tales in 1928, attended the University of Missouri from 1931 to 1933, continued his education at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1936 to 1937, and then graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. Before he became a full-time writer in 1944, Williams worked various jobs, including clerk and laborer for a shoe company in St. Louis, and waiter, hotel elevator operator, teletype operator, and theatre usher in New Orleans; Jacksonville, Florida; and New York City. In 1940 Williams’s first major production, Battle of Angels, took place in Boston, but the play was a failure and was quickly withdrawn. However, Williams did not have to wait long for success. The Glass Menagerie, first staged in 1944 in Chicago and then running for 561 performances in New York City, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and established his reputation. In 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire was an even greater success, winning another Drama Critics Circle Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize. Williams then entered a prolific period, and over a period of a decade, a new play of his was produced every few years. These include Summer and Smoke (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; which won a Pulitzer Prize), Orpheus Descending (1957; a revised version of Battle of Angels), Garden District (1958; which became Suddenly Last Summer, 1964), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Many, although not all, of these plays were highly acclaimed, commercial successes. But in the 1960s, Williams’s critics became harsher, disturbed by the amount of violence and sexuality in his plays and what they saw as repetitious themes. Williams had a mental breakdown in 1969 and was committed to an institution in St. Louis. Upon recovery, he continued to produce plays. These include Out Cry (1971), Small Craft Warnings (1972), and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). During this period, his reputation revived, and he was acknowledged as one of the foremost American dramatists. His plays were translated into many languages and many of them were made into films.
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Williams also produced three volumes of short stories, two novels, a memoir, and essays. He died February 24, 1983, when he choked on a medicine bottle lid in a New York City hotel.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Prologue Orpheus Descending is set in a dry-goods store in a small southern town. It begins with Dolly and Beulah laying out a buffet supper. As they talk they reveal that Jabe Torrance has had surgery in Memphis but he is dying. Beulah recalls how he had in effect bought his wife Lady, when she was eighteen and had just had her heart broken by David Cutrere. Beulah also recalls that Lady’s father was an Italian immigrant who during Prohibition acquired an orchard and made a wine garden of it. But he made the mistake of selling liquor to a black man, and the incensed locals burned down his orchard. He was killed in the blaze. Beulah wonders if Lady knows that her husband, whom she hates anyway, was the leader of the mob. Beulah also explains that Lady is
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planning to reopen a ‘‘confectionery’’ (which will serve as a kind of nightclub) in another room in the store.
Act 1, Scene 1 Carol Cutrere makes a telephone call, while the Temple sisters gossip about her. Val Xavier enters, and shortly afterwards Vee Talbott arrives with one of her paintings. But it is Val, the stranger, who is the center of attention. Carol insists that she has met him before, in New Orleans, but Val denies it. Carol suggests they go out together, but Val, who is looking for a job, is not interested. Lady and Jabe enter. Jabe looks sick and goes upstairs to bed, but not before he and Lady reveal their mutual dislike. Carol continues to pester Val, and reveals to him some of her past. She used to be a civil rights campaigner, and once went on a protest walk wearing nothing but a potato sack. She was arrested for lewd vagrancy, and a vigilante group warned her to stay out of the county. Val picks up his guitar and leaves the store as the women continue to gossip.
Val and Vee discuss Vee’s painting, Church of the Resurrection, and Val understands her artistic gift. Vee’s husband, Sheriff Talbot, arrives and visits Jabe upstairs. Vee and Val continue to talk, as Val shows great understanding of her work. He takes her hands in his and lifts them to his mouth. At that moment, Talbott comes down the stairs. He sees the gesture and angrily tells them to stop.
Act 2, Scene 3 Val tells Lady that he wants to stay in town, even though he does not feel safe. Lady offers to allow him to stay at the store, in a small alcove behind a curtain. She says it will make her feel safer if he is there, guarding the store. She is physically tense and he manipulates her head, neck, and spine to relieve the tension. He also strokes her neck, after which she leaves to get linen for the bed. While she is gone, Val removes some money from the cashbox and leaves the store. Lady returns and discovers the theft.
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Two hours later, Val and Lady talk. Val complains about Carol’s earlier attempt to seduce him. He shows Lady his guitar, which has been autographed by famous blues singers. Lady agrees to hire Val as a clerk, while insisting she has no wish to become sexually involved with him.
Late that night, Val returns and replaces the money he took. Lady appears on the landing and Val tells her he is quitting his job because he has won money gambling. Lady is suspicious and finds out that Val borrowed money to gamble with. She accuses him of robbing her, saying she deliberately left the money in the cashbox to see if she could trust him. Val accuses her of hiring him because she wanted to take a lover, which she denies. Then she breaks down in sobs. As Val is about to leave, she begs him to stay, and they go together to the alcove behind the curtain.
Act 2, Scene 1 A few weeks have passed. Val, who has been falsely accused by a woman of making a sexual advance on her, explains to Lady his past in New Orleans, where he indulged in wild living. He says he has now put that behind him. Outside, Carol constantly sounds her car horn, because the gas station refuses to serve her. Then she goes to a pharmacy, while Lady says she will provide Carol service if she comes into the store. Carol enters, and her brother David calls to say that he is coming to fetch her. Lady says she will refuse to allow him, her former lover, in the store. Carol once again makes romantic declarations to Val, which he again shrugs off. It transpires that he did know Carol during his New Orleans days. When David enters, Lady sends Carol and Val out of the store, and confesses to David that she had been pregnant with his child when he discarded her, and she had an abortion. She tells him never to return.
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Act 3, Scene 1 Early Saturday morning, just before Easter, Lady tells Val to get dressed and come out of the alcove, since Jabe is coming down and he does not know that Val lives there. Jabe sees the new confectionery and dislikes the way it has been decorated. At that moment, a circus calliope is heard, advertising the opening that night of the Torrance Confectionery. Jabe cruelly reminds Lady of her dead father, and then makes it clear that he was part of the mob that was responsible for his death. After he has gone back upstairs, the nurse returns saying that he is having a hemorrhage. Lady is stunned by Jabe’s admission.
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Act 3, Scene 2 At sunset, Vee enters the store and says she has been blinded by a vision of the risen Christ. She falls on the ground and as Val tries to lift her, her husband enters, furious. He orders Val not to touch his wife, and then interrogates him while Dog and Pee Wee point knives at him. Talbott asks to see Val’s guitar, but as Dog touches it, Val jumps on the counter and kicks at the men’s hands. Talbott tells him he has until sunrise the next day to get out of the county.
Act 3, Scene 3 Half an hour later, Beulah and Dolly discover that the confectionery has been decorated to resemble the orchard of Lady’s father. Carol enters, trying to find someone to drive her across the river. She has heard that Val is leaving that night. Lady expresses surprise, and Val says he is not leaving with Carol. Lady is determined to continue with the opening of the confectionery that night. She wants to resurrect in spirit her father’s wine garden, and show that she has not been defeated. Val emerges with his luggage; he has decided to leave since he has been threatened. Lady says if he goes, she will not pay his wages. He replies that he is going anyway. Lady grabs his guitar and says she will go with him, but they must wait until Jabe dies. She tries to persuade the nurse to give Jabe a fatal dose of morphine, but the nurse refuses. The two women quarrel, and the nurse blurts out that she believes Lady is pregnant. After the nurse leaves, Lady confirms to Val that she is pregnant and the baby is his. She tells him he must leave because it is dangerous for him to stay. Jabe appears on the landing with a revolver and fires, wounding Lady. He rushes out saying that Val shot his wife. Lady dies and then some men arrive, bent on murder. One of them has a blowtorch. They rush out, and cries of anguish are heard as they burn Val to death.
CHARACTERS Beulah Binnings Beulah Binnings is the middle-aged wife of Pee Wee. She gossips with Dolly about local events and people, and she plays an important role in the prologue, where her monologue serves to inform the audience about the tragic story of Lady’s father.
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • The Fugitive Kind, a film version of Orpheus Descending, opened in December 1959 in New York, starring Marlon Brando as Val and Anna Magnani as Lady and directed by Sidney Lumet. The film is available on VHS. • Orpheus Descending was made as a movie (shown on television) in 1990, starring Kevin Anderson as Val, and Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Torrance.
Pee Wee Binnings Pee Wee Binnings is a small, red-faced planter who keeps company with Dog Hamma. During Val’s confrontation with the sheriff, he menaces Val with a knife.
Carol Cutrere Carol Cutrere is David’s younger sister. She looks over thirty years old and likes to gain attention by her appearance. Her face and lips are powdered white, her eyes are outlined with black pencil, and her eyelids are painted blue. She admits to Val that she is an exhibitionist who wants to be noticed. She likes to drink and dance and expects to get her way, but she is also, in spite of her exhibitionism, vulnerable and lonely. Her family is the oldest and most distinguished in the area, but she is unpopular in the county. Some years earlier she was involved in civil rights campaigning and, after going on a protest walk wearing nothing but a potato sack, she was arrested for vagrancy. As a result, she is not allowed to stay in the county overnight. The local people gossip maliciously about her, calling her corrupt and degraded. She once met Val in New Orleans, and when he appears in town, she tries to get to know him better, but he is not interested in her. She entices him out on the ruse that her car needs fixing, and Val returns wiping lipstick off his mouth and face. But, it is clear he rejected her advances. After Val’s murder, Carol takes his snakeskin jacket as a reminder of the wild freedom he represented.
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David Cutrere David Cutrere is Carol’s brother. He is tall and handsome, but with a hard look about his face and eyes. A plantation owner, he married a rich girl and now drives a Cadillac. Twenty years earlier, he had a romance with Lady Torrance, but he rejected her, breaking her heart in the process. He appears only in act two, scene one, when he comes to collect Carol, and Lady tries in vain to prevent him from entering the store. He and Lady have an emotional confrontation in which Lady tells him that when he jilted her, she was pregnant. He did not know this before and claims to have little memory of their affair.
Dog Hamma Dog Hamma is Dolly’s wife and a friend of Pee Wee Binnings. After Val is accused of misconduct with Vee Talbott, Dog joins with Sheriff Talbott and Pee Wee to harass Val. Dog rips Val’s shirt open, then grabs his guitar. Dog is also one of the men who murder Val.
inappropriate. After the second occasion, he interrogates Val and then tells him he must be out of the county by sunrise.
Vee Talbott Vee Talbott, the wife of Sheriff Talbott, is a heavy, sexually frustrated woman in her forties. She is a visionary painter and claims to have been blinded by a vision of the risen Christ. She finds in Val a sympathetic listener. It was Vee who first befriended Val when his car broke down in a storm and he needed a place to stay.
Eva Temple Eva Temple is an elderly spinster who, like her sister, is curious about other people’s business.
Sister Temple Sister Temple is Eva’s sister. They are so similar that sometimes people cannot tell them apart.
Dolly Hamma Dolly Hamma is the wife of Dog. She gossips with her friend Beulah and seems to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others.
Uncle Pleasant Uncle Pleasant is a black man, part Choctaw Indian, who comes from Blue Mountain. His ragged clothes are decorated with talismans and good luck charms. The locals call him the Conjure Man and regard him as crazy. When he enters the store, he frightens away the Temple sisters and Dolly. Carol knows how to talk to him and gets him to give the Choctaw cry, a series of wild barking sounds. It is the Conjure Man who brings the murdered Val’s jacket back into the store, and his ‘‘secret smile’’ is the last action of the play before the curtain falls.
Nurse Porter Nurse Porter is the caregiver for Jabe Torrance after he returns from the hospital. She has the false cheeriness of someone used to caring for the dying, and she is mean-spirited. She and Lady quarrel when she indignantly rejects Lady’s suggestion that Jabe be given a fatal dose of morphine.
Sheriff Talbott Sheriff Talbott is Vee’s husband, a rough, bullying man who twice catches his wife and Val touching each other in ways that appear to him
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Jabe Torrance Jabe Torrance is gaunt and sick-looking, with a gray and yellow appearance. He returns home from cancer surgery in Memphis, but he is not expected to live. Jabe dominates his wife Lady, and keeps banging on the floor of his upstairs bedroom to get her to come up to him. He dislikes her as much as she dislikes him, which has been the case for many years. Lady married him only because he had money. At the end of the play, Jabe shoots Lady to death and then calls in a mob to kill Val.
Lady Torrance Lady Torrance is probably in her late thirties and still has a youthful figure. She is a passionate, emotional woman of Italian ancestry, whose state of mind borders on hysteria when she is under pressure. Physically tense, she must take pills to sleep at night. Lady is also lonely and bitter. She feels she has wasted her life, having been married for twenty years to Jabe, a man she hates. She was rushed into the marriage after she was jilted by her first lover, David Cutrere. Lady was pregnant with David’s baby at the time, and she had an abortion. She still has hard feelings about David, and when she meets him again, she says he must never return to the store. Lady has also had to endure another tragedy. Her Italian immigrant father died in a blaze deliberately
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set at his orchard by a mob. She did not know it at the time, but finds out during the course of the play that Jabe was the leader of the mob. Lady has not forgotten her father and remodels the confectionery in the store so that it resembles his wine garden. It is her way of showing that she has not been defeated; she is determined to triumph over adversity. Lady feels liberated by her relationship with Val and becomes pregnant by him, and she exults in the fact that she is able to bear a child.
Valentine Xavier Valentine Xavier is a wandering singer and musician of about thirty who is described in the stage directions as having a wild beauty about him. He wears a snakeskin jacket, mottled white, black, and gray. In the bars of New Orleans where he sang and lived wildly, he was known simply as Snakeskin. Val always carries a guitar with him, and he describes it as his ‘‘life’s companion.’’ Music saves him whenever he gets into a bad situation. The guitar itself is covered with the autographs of famous blues singers. Val is a free spirit who does not fit into conventional society, and it is significant that the Choctaw cry given by the Conjure Man, a cry of wild intensity, coincides with Val’s first entrance. Val was raised in a place called Witches’ Bayou, and he claims to have unusual powers of self-control. He can hold his breath for three minutes, stay awake for forty-eight hours, and not urinate for a day. He also claims that his body temperature is two degrees higher than normal, like a dog’s. He left Witches’ Bayou when he was in his teens and drifted to New Orleans, where he soon found that women were irresistibly drawn to him, but he eventually tired of their attentions and of the dissipated life he was leading. Val is basically a good-hearted man who has insight into the deeper longings of life. He can sense what others really need and desire, and he knows how to give comfort when it is needed. He himself says that although he has lived among corruption (in New Orleans), he is not corrupted. In Two River County, however, people find his manner sexually suggestive, although he does nothing deliberately to cultivate this impression. However, because he is an artistic spirit who does not fit into the accepted ways of thought and action, and because he allows himself to be drawn into an affair with Lady Torrance, he is hunted down by the men of the town.
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THEMES Loneliness The main characters—Val, Lady, and Carol— are lonely, isolated figures. They do not fit into the environment in which they find themselves, are unable to communicate their deepest feelings and passions to others, or feel cut off. The uniqueness of their being is unable to find an outlet, or a fellow spirit, in a harsh world that continually frustrates human desires. Val sums up this theme when he says to Lady, ‘‘Nobody ever gets to know no body! We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!’’ Val himself is a free, unconventional, artistic spirit who is bound to be misunderstood and isolated wherever he goes in a narrow, repressive society. Lady is trapped in a loveless marriage, in which her passionate nature has no opportunity to express itself, except through hate and resentment over the past. She echoes the theme of loneliness when she reminisces about her dying aunt. As a girl, Lady had asked her aunt what dying was like. The response was, ‘‘It’s a lonely feeling.’’ And Val knows that Lady’s motivation in allowing him to stay at the store is because she feels lonely and needs a lover. Her loneliness and great need to overcome it is expressed at the end of act 2, when she yells that she needs Val and will follow him wherever he goes. The third character, Carol, tries to overcome her loneliness by her showy exhibitionism. This is really a desperate attempt to connect with others, to be significant to someone, and to get someone to take notice of her. During an emotional encounter with Val, she confesses that she uses sex for the same purpose. Even though lovemaking is physically painful for her, she endures it because ‘‘to be not alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.’’ In the world of the play, people’s attempt to connect in a deep and meaningful way, to overcome the solitariness of their lives, is doomed to failure. Their happiness will be snuffed out almost as soon as it is gained. Val is correct: loneliness is the fundamental condition of humanity.
Sexuality, Freedom, and Repression Throughout the play there is a contrast between the free expression of sexuality, presented as a
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Obtain a copy of the movie The Fugitive Kind, which is the film version of Orpheus Descending. Write an essay asserting whether or not you believe it effectively captures the spirit of the play. Does Marlon Brando make a convincing Val? Are the changes made in the ending justified and do they improve on the original or spoil it? • Orpheus Descending is in part about the place of the artist in society. What role should the artist play? Is the artist always likely to be marginalized, like Val, or misunderstood, like Vee, in a conventional, materialistic society? For what should the artist stand, if anything? What values do you believe should motivate him or her? • Williams wrote in his introduction to the play (in Tennessee Williams: Eight Plays) that Orpheus Descending is about ‘‘unanswered questions that
positive life force, and the repressive, prudish mentality that prevails in the small town, in which the people are suspicious of anyone who does not conform to their narrow values. Val is a very sexual figure. Women are attracted to him like bees around a honey pot. He exudes physical allure, and it is he who acts as a lightning rod for the suppressed longings of Lady and Carol. For example, after having established a sexual relationship with Val, Lady, who was full of physical and emotional tension, is restored to a new, fresh, life-affirming state of being. This is particularly emphasized when she discovers she is pregnant and exclaims, ‘‘I have life in my body, this dead tree, my body, has burst into flower!’’ Formerly, Lady had frequently complained of being cold, suggesting the frozen state of her inner being. Val, on the contrary, is always warm—he even claims that the temperature of his body is permanently two degrees higher than normal. It is as if Val lends Lady his heat, and only then she can blossom.
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haunt the hearts of people.’’ Some of the characters simply accept prescribed answers, Williams wrote, but not the four main characters—Val, Lady, Carol, and Vee. They continue to ask questions. What might those questions be, and what answers, if any, do these characters find? • Research the history of race relations in the South from the 1950s to the 1960s. Who were some of the major historical figures of the time? What major changes came about during the period? • In the play, Carol bitterly recalls the execution of a black man for the rape of a white woman. Research the history of capital punishment in the South from the 1950s to the present. Based on your research, write an essay explaining whether or not the legal system in death penalty cases is biased against minorities.
The erotic energy embodied in Val also manifests itself in his dealings with the sexually frustrated artist, Vee. He understands the essence of her visions and creativity, and as he touches her hands she shudders with excitement. Then as he tells her that she started to paint as if God had touched her fingers—just as he himself is doing at the time—it is as if, in his empathy and eroticism, he is divine himself. This impression is strengthened later, in act 3, scene 2, when Vee is struggling to convey her vision of the risen Christ: ‘‘His hand!—Invisible!— I didn’t see his hand!—But it touched me—here!’’ At that point, she takes Val’s hand and presses it to her chest. As in the previous incident, it is not difficult to make the connection, perhaps subconscious in Vee’s mind, that Val himself is Christ. A moment later, Vee is on her knees with her arms around Val as he tries to lift her up—a fine visual image of the earthbound human artist being lifted by divine aid. Val’s sexual potency is also symbolized by his beloved guitar. When Val arouses the hostility of
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the men of the town, it is his guitar that fascinates them. Talbott wants to know more about it. Dog touches it and pulls it towards him. If the guitar is viewed as a phallic symbol, it might be said that the older men are experiencing sexual jealousy of the virile younger man. Pee Wee and others produce knives during this scene, which gives a hint, at least symbolically, of their desire to castrate their young rival. (The guitar has another, more obvious function: it represents music, specifically the power of music to give expression to human hopes and desires in a way that spoken words cannot.) If sexual energy, in Williams’s romantic vision, is life-affirming, it is counterbalanced in the play by its opposite—denial, negation, and death. Val represents a kind of innocence (his former dissolute life in New Orleans notwithstanding) and primal power, but Jabe, the cancerous authority figure with his yellow and gray appearance, represents death. Lady even refers to him in the final scene as ‘‘Mr. Death.’’ At the end of the play, it is the death-impulse that overcomes the life-impulse. Lady and her unborn fetus are killed, and Val is burned to death, just as, a generation earlier, Lady’s father and his vineyard (another symbol of Dionysian life and ecstasy) were also destroyed by fire. It is a grim, generation-to-generation reminder that the forces arrayed against life are powerful, and any happiness and fulfillment can last only for a brief time.
The bird image occurs again in Val’s reminiscence of the first time he made love to a girl. As he looked at the girl from afar, a bird flew by and made a shadow on her body, and he heard its call, ‘‘a single, high clear note.’’ He interpreted this as a signal of the girl’s willingness to make love—an act of freedom for both of them. The stage set contains a visual image of a bird, visible throughout the play. It is on the drapery which covers the tiny bedroom alcove where Val and Lady get together. On the drapery are depicted fantastic white birds—suggestive once more of freedom, and a stark contrast to the dullness of the general store. This is particularly noticeable at the end of act 2, when the drapery, lit from behind by a bulb, becomes translucent. The allusions to wild animals also suggest freedom, although of a wild, untamed kind that is certain to attract predators. At the beginning of act 3, scene 2, for example, Val stands stock-still ‘‘in the tense, frozen attitude of a wild animal listening to something that warns it of danger.’’ Like a wild animal, Val has been hunted all his life, even when he was a teenager growing up in Witches’ Bayou. The image returns at the end of the play when Carol picks up Val’s snakeskin jacket after it has been torn off him by the lynch mob. A snake renews itself by shedding its skin, and Carol takes the jacket as a sign that the wild, free spirit embodied in Val has indeed not been snuffed out but has been passed on: Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind.
STYLE Imagery The principal imagery in the play is that of birds and wild animals. Both are symbols of freedom. The bird image first appears in Val’s extended poetic speech in act 1, scene 2, in which he tells Lady there is a kind of tiny, almost weightless bird that has no legs and so spends its entire life flying. Since these birds are the color of the sky, they are transparent and are invisible to the hawks: ‘‘[T]hey live their whole life on the wing, and they sleep on the wind . . . they just spread their wings and go to sleep and . . . never light on this earth but one time when they die!’’ The image suggests a kind of freedom, to which human life may aspire but not be able to reach. Lady, who knows that such a bird exists only in Val’s imagination, responds, ‘‘I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free.’’
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Earlier in the same scene, Carol had taken up the image of wildness and extended it, linking it to positive human values and contrasting it with the artificiality of the modern world: The country used to be wild, the men and women were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts, for each other, but now it’s sick with neon, it’s broken out sick, with neon.
Religion and Myth There are various hints of a religious dimension to the play in the many allusions to Christianity. Val’s full name, Valentine Xavier, contains the names of two Christian saints, hinting perhaps at another element of his nature. It might seem that the sensual Val is an unusual candidate for sainthood, but he does boast of his capacity to overcome the
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demands of the physical body—a self-denying asceticism characteristic of some forms of saintly life. For example, he tells Lady that he can sleep on a concrete floor or go without sleep for forty-eight hours if he wishes. Another religious element in the play is Vee, a visionary artist who paints representations of the Holy Spirit and of the risen Christ. The latter points to the significance of the fact that the play takes place near Easter; and Lady’s plan to reopen the confectionery the night before Easter Sunday suggests an allusion to the resurrection of the dead. This is emphasized by the way she decorates the confectionery so that it resembles her dead father’s wine garden; it is her way of showing that she is not defeated, just as Christ’s resurrection showed that he had triumphed over death. This is shown visually on stage in the last scene, when the lights are switched on in the confectionery. It is as if, on the eve of Easter Sunday, light has entered the dark world. Up to that point, the confectionery has been, as Williams expressed it in his stage directions at the beginning of the play, ‘‘shadowy and poetic as some inner dimension of the play.’’ The play also has a mythic dimension, in that it alludes to the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was a Greek demigod, whose songs were so beautiful that he was able to charm all of nature. When his bride Eurydice dies after a snake bite, Orpheus goes down to the underworld to bring her back. In the play, Orpheus is analogous to Val, who enters the underworld of the small southern town, to rescue Lady, who is enduring a living death in her partnership with Jabe.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Racism in the 1950s South In the 1950s in the American South, discrimination against black people was commonplace. In Orpheus Descending, Carol mentions that she protested against the execution of a black man named Willie McGee. This was an actual case that occurred in 1951 in Mississippi. McGee was accused of raping a white woman, although in fact he and the woman had a long-standing sexual relationship. McGee’s defense counsel challenged the fact that blacks had been excluded from the jury, and that the death penalty for rape was used only against blacks,
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never against whites. During the trial and appeal, white supremacist groups threatened violence, and although the Supreme Court twice ordered a stay of execution, McGee was eventually put to death. At this time in the South, many white people were vehemently opposed to any sexual relationships between blacks and whites. The practice was referred to as miscegenation, and many states had laws that banned it. During the 1950s and 1960s, fourteen states repealed those laws, but sixteen others, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, kept their antimiscegenation laws on the books until the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 1967. The routine mistreatment of black people is obvious in the play, in which they are referred to by white authority figures such as Talbott and Jabe as ‘‘niggers.’’ When Val is told to leave the county, Talbott mentions a county where a sign says, ‘‘Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you in this county.’’ Carol and Val are the two characters who are keenly aware of these injustices. Val has the name Bessie Smith inscribed on his guitar, and he says, ‘‘Jim Crow killed Bessie Smith, but that’s another story.’’ He is referring to the fate of a famous black blues singer named Bessie Smith, who was known as the ‘‘Empress of the Blues.’’ In 1937 Smith was involved in a car accident in Tennessee. What happened next has not been established beyond doubt, but some historians say that she was taken to a hospital that refused to admit blacks, and she died on her way to another hospital; other versions of the story say that the black hospital she was taken to was too poorly equipped to save her life. Either way, the story of Bessie Smith passed into local legend as an example of the injustices done to black people. During the 1940s and 1950s in Tennessee, however, there were already signs that things were changing. In 1948 a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in Jackson-Madison County, Tennessee. In 1952 four black students were admitted to graduate programs at the University of Tennessee. In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down its historic decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that school desegregation must quickly be brought to an end. Earlier in that same year, however, Frank Clement became governor of Tennessee with the promise that he would never integrate the state’s schools. And in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, there was much resistance
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1950s: The American South is largely segregated, with many public facilities designated for ‘‘whites only.’’ During the 1950s, the modern civil rights movement begins. Today: Overt racial discrimination has largely ended and laws are in place to ensure that it does not recur. However, race relations remain problematic in many ways. Minorities complain of the practice of ‘‘racial profiling,’’ in which African Americans or Hispanics are sometimes targeted by police just because of their race, not because there is any evidence linking them personally to a crime. • 1950s: Sexual attitudes throughout American society are conservative, especially in the socalled Bible Belt in the South. Pre-marital sex is frowned upon. Today: After the freedom of the 1960s and 1970s, sexual mores once more tilt to the conser-
to desegregation in the South, and this led to a resurgence of the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan. But the tide towards integration and civil rights for blacks was inevitable. From 1955 to 1959, Memphis State University began gradual desegregation, and in 1956 Clement called out the National Guard to integrate schools in Clinton. In 1959 the Federal government sued Tennessee’s Fayette County Democratic Executive Committee after its officials refused to let blacks vote in a Democratic primary. It was the first lawsuit of its kind filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, black college students in Nashville, Tennessee, began sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters at Kress’s, Woolworth’s, and McLellan’s stores. It was not long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Many challenges
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vative, largely because of the risk of contracting the deadly disease AIDS. However, American society has not returned to what many regard as the sexually repressive 1950s. Sex before marriage is no longer universally viewed with disapproval, and single mothers whose children are born out of wedlock are no longer subject to the social stigma that occurred in former generations. • 1950s: For decades, American theater has been dominated by realism. Williams, the leading playwright of the decade, goes far beyond these realistic conventions, particularly in his highly lyrical style and his use of cinematic effects through music and lighting. Today: Realism is no longer the dominant dramatic form. Theatergoers now regularly enjoy absurdist works by playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, the surrealism of Edward Albee, and the minimalism and unusual dialogue in the plays of David Mamet.
remained for the civil rights movement, however. In 1960 only 29 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote in the southern states, compared to 61 percent of whites. The problem of disparities in opportunities to vote was addressed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW In 1957 Orpheus Descending ran for sixty-eight performances in New York City; it was also produced in 1959 in London and Paris, and had an offBroadway production in 1959. Critical response, however, was often harsh, and many considered the play to be a failure. Critics were ready to acknowledge the excellence of the poetic language and the touches of humor, but there were complaints about what was seen as a badly constructed plot, and the
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fact that Williams appeared to be repeating themes he had explored in earlier plays. Henry Hewes argued in Saturday Review that the many revisions Williams had made to Battle of Angels, the play which in much revised form became Orpheus Descending, resulted in unnecessary complications to a simple tragedy, which made the action seem chaotic. Hewes did have praise for the occasions ‘‘when this play glows with Williams’s magnificent awareness of the battle between the forces of life and death,’’ and for the excellence of the language. Yet the play runs into trouble when it attempts to fly its poetry through a conventional stage atmosphere thick with gossiping old ladies, thefts from the cash register, and Saroyanesque comedy and pathos. The action becomes casual and accidental, a happy ending just as possible as the sad one.
When the play was revived two years later in New York at the Gramercy Arts Theater, Judith Crist in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that the play lacked ‘‘the complexities, the shadings, the broader implications so clearly defined in earlier Williams works and in the subsequent Sweet Bird [of Youth].’’ Orpheus Descending has been revived in major productions several times since its early days. In 1989 Peter Hall directed a production at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre. According to Robert Brustein in the New Republic, Hall charged the play with Freudian significance, treating it as an oedipal revenge story. By this he meant that Val and Lady, the younger man and the older woman, embodied the oedipal complex, in which a man is sexually attracted to his mother. Lady’s husband Jabe then becomes the avenging father figure who punishes the symbolic son for his transgressions. This production won some high praise from audiences and critics, but Brustein was a dissenting voice, arguing that Vanessa Redgrave was miscast as Lady Torrance, and that the necessary electricity between her and Kevin Anderson’s Val was entirely absent. As for the play, Brustein regarded the plot as ‘‘never far removed from gothic soap opera.’’ Nearly half a century after its premiere, Orpheus Descending is still not regarded as one of Williams’s best plays, although it does reflect his typical themes and characters. In 2000 a major revival of the play was staged at London’s Donmar Warehouse, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Catherine Bates in the Times Literary Supplement singled out Helen Mirren’s Lady for praise: ‘‘Helen Mirren
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plays Lady to perfection, casting off her false selves as so many skins to reveal the despair behind the shrieking nerves, the pride behind the despair, and the girlishness behind the pride.’’ John Lahr in the New Yorker also had praise for Mirren’s ‘‘superbly controlled performance,’’ and he had a positive view of the production as a whole, which allowed the audience ‘‘to see beyond the play’s showy exterior to its compelling internal drama.’’ For Matt Wolf, reviewing the production for Variety, ‘‘Hytner’s is a surprisingly by-the-book reading of a defiantly showy play that flirts with melodrama and yet can, in the right hands, seem majestic.’’
CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the play in terms of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has fascinated poets, playwrights, and composers from the Renaissance to the modern era. Since a central element of the myth is the power of music, it has not surprisingly been the subject of numerous operas, including a version of Williams’s Orpheus Descending, with libretto by J. D. McClatchy and music by Bruce Saylor (1994). Plays such as Eurydice by French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and Orpheus by Jean Cocteau (1926; made into a film by Cocteau in 1950), and films such as Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (1959) are testament to the enduring nature of the myth. The Orpheus story was not, however, part of Williams’s original concept of the play, which initially emerged as Battle of Angels. In this play, one of Williams’s earliest, Val Xavier was not a singer but a writer, and therefore no Orpheus. But when the play failed so miserably in 1940, Williams refused to abandon it. Over the course of seventeen years, he rewrote it five times until it reemerged as Orpheus Descending in 1957. Williams’s typescripts show that the new title did not appear until 1953, and it is clear that the playwright was intrigued by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Orpheus was a minstrel, the son of the god Apollo. He learned to play the lyre with such beauty that he could charm wild animals, and even trees
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and stones. The trees would uproot themselves and move, just to be nearer to his music. Orpheus’s story is told most fully in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Orpheus married the nymph Eurydice, but on the very day of their wedding, Eurydice was bitten by a snake in a field and died. Orpheus mourned her but was determined to bring her back from Hades. Descending into the underworld, he reached Pluto and Persephone, the shadowy realm’s king and queen, and appealed to them, accompanying his words with the music of his lyre. As he made his plea, the ghosts were in tears and everything else in Hades stood still. Moved, Pluto and Persephone granted Orpheus his request to take Eurydice back with him to the world of the living. There was only one condition, which was that Orpheus should not look back at her until they were safely home. As he led his wife back almost to the surface of the earth, Orpheus became afraid that Eurydice’s strength was failing, and he also desired to see her. So he looked back. At that point, Eurydice faded away, dying for a second time, and was lost to Orpheus forever. Williams’s interest in the myth is apparent from the poem he wrote called ‘‘Orpheus Descending,’’ which was published in his collection of poems In the Winter of Cities (1956). In this poem, Orpheus’s attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld is doomed to failure: for you must learn, even you, what we have learned, that some things are marked by their nature to be not completed but only longed for and sought for a while and abandoned.
And so it is that Val Xavier must fail. He is Williams’s modern-day Orpheus who descends to the Hades of a small southern town where Lady Torrance, the equivalent of Eurydice, is enduring a living death. Although the parallels with the myth should not be pushed too far (Lady Torrance, for example, is a highly emotional and spirited woman, far removed from the passive Eurydice of the legend), they do explain the significant role ascribed in the play to music. As in Shakespeare’s plays, music often has significance beyond its immediate context, as a symbol of harmony. It is also used as an indication of the kind of ‘‘lyric space’’ (a term used by Jack E. Wallace in his essay ‘‘The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending’’) in which deep and sincere feelings can be expressed, and life reaches upwards to a fleeting glimpse of freedom and transcendence. Furthermore, music is a symbol of purity, as Val’s comment to Lady about his guitar makes clear: ‘‘It
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Lola Muethel, Hannes Riesenberger, and Johanna Wichmann in the 1958 theatrical premier of Orpheus Descending in Frankfurt, Germany
washes me clean like water when anything unclean has touched me.’’ The power of music is also conveyed when Val explains to Lady about the autographs of musicians on his guitar. He points to the signature of Leadbelly (1885–1949), the legendary blues artist, and says, ‘‘Greatest man who ever lived on the twelve-string guitar! Played it so good he broke the stone heart of a Texas governor with it and won himself a pardon out of jail.’’ Leadbelly is thus presented as a thoroughly authentic Orpheus figure, with the Texas governor playing the part of Pluto. And Val’s having Leadbelly’s autograph, as well as those of others, on his guitar has the effect of linking Val to a tradition of music-making that is larger than himself as an individual. There are at least five moments in the play when music asserts itself and becomes part of the play’s thematic texture. First, Val sings Williams’s own song, ‘‘Heavenly Grass,’’ or part of it, several times. It begins with the following verse: My feet took a walk In heavenly grass All day while the sky shone clear as glass, My feet took a walk
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is one of Williams’s most famous plays. Readers will recognize in the character Blanche Du Bois some similarities to Lady Torrance from Orpheus Descending. • The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (1997), by Donald Spoto, is the first complete critical biography of Williams. Spoto examines the close connections between Williams’s dramas and his turbulent and finally tragic life. • Like Williams in Orpheus Descending, Canadian writer Alice Munro explores the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in her short story ‘‘The
In heavenly grass.
Through the ethereal image of ‘‘heavenly grass,’’ the song echoes the theme of freedom, which is embodied in all the main characters. Val, Lady, Vee, and Carol all long for ‘‘heavenly grass,’’ each in his or her own way. Music again adds weight to the freedom image in the second example. As Val gives his lyrical speech about the tiny legless bird that lives its whole life on the wing, music (details unspecified) fades in. Val accompanies the faint music on his guitar as he says, ‘‘They sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time when they die!’’ So like that mythical bird of paradise, music too can give expression to an unearthly reality, quite removed from the corruption of human life. Third, music has the power to make people speak truthfully, or at least to highlight when they are doing so. In act 2, scene 1, music fades in as Carol, in a moment of tender sincerity, confesses to Val that she would love to hold something as tenderly as he holds his guitar. She then says, ‘‘Because you hang the moon for me!’’ This startling image well conveys how Val, and the music
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Children Stay,’’ which can be found in Munro’s collection The Love of a Good Woman (1998). • Along with Williams, Eugene O’Neill is another of the great figures in American drama. His Long Day’s Journey into Night, written between 1939 and 1940 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama for 1957, covers just one day in the tragic lives of the four members of the Tyrone family. • French dramatist Jean Anouilh wrote Eurydice in 1941, updating the Orpheus legend to 1930s France. Orpheus is a young musician who makes a paltry living from performing on the streets, and Eurydice is a young actress traveling around in a theater troupe. The play can be found in Anouilh’s Five Plays (1991).
from which he is inseparable (his guitar, after all, is his ‘‘life’s companion’’), gives Carol the feeling that everything is right on earth and in the heavens. Everything is in its place, with the moon hanging exactly where it should be in an orderly cosmos. For Renaissance composers such as Monteverdi who set the Orpheus myth to music, this cosmic dimension of music was an important part of their conception of the myth. In Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (1607), for example, Orpheus sings in praise of his lyre: When you play, the stars fall silent at music so celestial, and all the constellations dance in measure with swift or slow gyrations.
In other words, Orpheus ‘‘hangs the moon.’’ His lyre is an expression of a cosmic harmony, what the poet Shelley called in Prometheus Unbound, ‘‘the deep music of the rolling world,’’ as quoted in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. The fourth moment when music makes a significant contribution to the play’s themes comes at the end of act 2. Lady and Val have quarreled over
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the money Val borrowed from the cash register, and he is about to leave the store for good when he is stopped by Lady’s passionate outcry that she needs him just to go on living. Guitar music, ‘‘Lady’s Love Song,’’ fades in and continues during their tender reconciliation in the tiny alcove. This is a fine theatrical moment because visual and musical elements combine to reinforce the theme. The alcove is lit up, making the curtain that covers it, with its bizarre design of white birds and scarlet fruit, translucent. The alcove becomes a kind of sacred space in which love can triumph. Finally, music accompanies Lady’s dying moments as she walks unsteadily to the confectionery, having been shot several times by Jabe. Williams’s stage direction is telling: ‘‘Music rises to cover whatever sound Death makes in the confectionery.’’ In a contest between music and death, music triumphs. At the personal level, of course, the tragedy is inescapable. Lady and Val die violent deaths. Val’s demise, burned to death by a mob, has some vague similarity to the fate of Orpheus. The minstrel was torn to pieces by a group of Ciconian women, who were angry because Orpheus, after losing Eurydice, had renounced the company of women. And yet despite this grisly end, the ancient myth is not ultimately dark, because the principle of music survives. In Ovid’s version of the story, after Orpheus has been killed, his head and his lyre are thrown into the river Hebrus. Miraculously, the lyre still plays, the tongue of the dead singer still moves to the melody, and the riverbanks echo in lament. Orpheus is dead, but music lives on. And so it is with Val Xavier. At the end of the play, his snakeskin jacket remains, and is gathered up by Carol. She runs off with it, in spite of Talbott’s shouted order to stop. The jacket symbolizes a whole complex of meanings that it has accrued during the course of the play. It is the longing for ‘‘heavenly grass,’’ for the bird that never touches the earth, for creative and sensual ‘‘wildness,’’ for beauty, for authenticity in feelings, for an end to loneliness—and also for music, since the jacket was part of Val’s identity as a singer in New Orleans, when he was known simply as Snakeskin. As Williams (quoted by Wallace) put it in a draft that was intended as a foreword to the play, the ‘‘impulse of song . . . breaks out of confinement and goes on despite all order to halt.’’ Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Orpheus Descending, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
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THROUGH THE ETHEREAL IMAGE OF ‘HEAVENLY GRASS,’ THE SONG ECHOES THE THEME OF FREEDOM, WHICH IS EMBODIED IN ALL THE MAIN CHARACTERS. VAL, LADY, VEE, AND CAROL ALL LONG FOR ‘HEAVENLY GRASS,’ EACH IN HIS OR HER OWN WAY.’’
Kevin O’Sullivan O’Sullivan writes for both film and stage. In this essay, O’Sullivan examines the use of both pagan and Christian motifs in Williams’s play. Orpheus Descending occupies a unique place in Tennessee Williams’s body of work. Orpheus Descending, in fact, descends from Williams’s first produced full-length play, Battle of Angels, which opened to disastrous reviews in 1940. Both Orpheus Descending and its antecedent concern the arrival of a virile stranger in the midst of a repressed Southern community. While the psychosexual dynamic that fuels most of Williams’s work was present in the earlier play, a surfeit of incident coupled with an excess of religious and pagan imagery threatened to overwhelm it. This welter of sex and symbolism proved too much for early audiences and Battle of Angels was forced to close shortly after its opening. The playwright was undaunted and for the next 17 years, a period that witnessed his greatest artistic and commercial triumphs, he continued to rework the original material of Battle of Angels. The result of this relentless effort was Orpheus Descending, which premiered on March 21, 1957. As Williams pointed out in the introduction to the published script, the basic plot of Battle remained intact. Orpheus Descending, he wrote, was ‘‘the tale of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop.’’ Benjamin Nelson has pointed out in his study Tennessee Williams that ‘‘Much of the naive plot pyrotechnics have been eliminated in transition,’’ and, he adds, ‘‘the physical plot is considerably tightened.’’ Yet,
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THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF THE PLAY CAN, IN LARGE PART, BE MEASURED BY THE DEGREE TO WHICH WILLIAMS HAS BEEN ABLE TO FUSE BOTH PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN IMAGERY.’’
despite these changes, Williams stubbornly clung to the surplus of symbolism that so baffled and infuriated Battle of Angels’s critics. Orpheus Descending did not fare much better. The play received poor notices and closed after a short run. Williams expressed his disappointment to Don Ross in a 1958 interview that ran in the New York Herald Tribune: I was terribly shocked by its reception. . . . I had invested so much of myself in it. I had worked longer at it than any other play. I thought it had lyricism, the feeling of tenderness, the striving to understand, the longing, but I did feel that the ending didn’t come off quite right.
To best judge the play on its intrinsic merits, independent of the strengths or shortcomings of any given production, one must look at the elements woven into the fabric of the play, particularly on the promiscuous use of symbolism from conflicting traditions. The success or failure of the play can, in large part, be measured by the degree to which Williams has been able to fuse both pagan and Christian imagery. The play abounds in symbols. There is an excessive commingling of motif from the pagan and Christian traditions. The weight of these symbols threatens to founder the play, freighted as it is with too many allusions. If, as Williams claims in the introduction to Orpheus Descending, the play is ‘‘a lyrical play about memories and the loneliness of them’’ he risks burying these memories under an excess of symbols. It would be well, then, to discuss some of the motifs, both Christian and pagan, which Williams employs in his story of light against dark, life against death. There is a marked Mediterranean aspect of the play, rich in classical allusions. The fallen debutante Carol Cutrere has evolved from the character of
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Cassandra Whiteside, who appeared in Battle of Angels. In classical mythology, Cassandra was a seer whose prophecies were not believed. In act 2, scene 3, a fugitive from a chain gang is pursued by dogs offstage. Val and Lady listen as the dogs’ baying ‘‘become almost a single savage note.’’ ‘‘They’re tearing him to pieces!’’ says Val. This both illustrates Val’s affinity for the fugitive kind and foreshadows the tragic denouement that closes the final act. It also carries with it the connotation of the rending of Actaeon by his own dogs, after he spied the goddess Diana bathing. Again, Williams has demonstrated his ability to load—or overload— a scene with multiple layers of meaning. As the baying of the dogs dies out, following a single gunshot, the couple make the first tentative steps towards the coupling that will both rejuvenate Lady and threaten her life. Dolly, Beaulah, and the Temple Sisters function as a sort of Greek Chorus, commenting on events as they happen and providing the audience with background information. The character of Lady Torrance, an Italian immigrant whose father was burned alive, along with his wine garden, for selling wine to blacks, is derived from Battle of Angel’s Myra Torrance. The shift in Mrs. Torrance’s ethnicity and the manner and place of her father’s death serve multiple purposes. On the level of plot, the immolation of Lady’s father presages the violence of act 3. The vines of Papa Romano and the wine made from them also evoke the wine-wreathed Dionysus, god of excess, inebriation and, incidentally, theater. Dionysus, who gave wine to humankind, is associated with orgiastic revels, unbridled passions, and irrational violence. The effect the god has on his female followers, the Maenads, is akin to the effect that Val has on the town’s women, from the nymphomaniacal Carol Cutrere, to the visionary Vee Talbott, to the repressed Lady Torrance. The title change is, perhaps, the most telling. In the Greek myth, adopted by the Romans, Orpheus descended into Hades to retrieve his beloved Eurydice after she had been bitten by a deadly snake. He so charmed the guardians of Hell with his lyre playing that he was allowed to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld with the condition that he must not look back at her until he had left Hades. He, of course, looks back, with the fatal consequence that she is lost to him forever. Grieving over the loss of Eurydice, he sang of his love for her until Maenads tore him to pieces. The classical scholar Michael Grant points
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out in Myths of the Greeks and Romans that Orpheus, who was first associated with Apollo, who gave him his lyre, later came to be contrasted with him, ‘‘So Orpheus combined both Apolline and Dionysiac tendencies in Greek religion.’’ Val Xavier, a writer in the earlier version of the play, is now a guitar-toting drifter in a snakeskin jacket. The change of occupation emphasizes the identification of Val with the lyre-strumming Orpheus. He is now something more than a mere ‘‘fox in the hen house.’’ Val’s arrival has an intoxicating effect on the local womenfolk, inciting the jealousy and resentment of the town’s men. As Nelson points out in Tennessee Williams ‘‘Val’s music does not affect everyone but his presence certainly does. He descends into the under-kingdom to help Eurydice but his mission goes awry. The enchanted minstrel descends into the under-kingdom and is defeated.’’ Yet, in classical mythology, Hell is not a place from which no one may return. Michael Grant points out that there have been many Harrowers of Hell, including Heracles, Theseus, Dionysus, Orpheus and Aeneas. And, of course, the Christian tradition begins with Christ’s own descent into Hell. Perhaps most pertinent to this play, however, is the example of Persephone. As the queen of Hell she welcomed Orpheus into the Underworld. According to myth, she was carried off by Pluto and forced to spend half the year underground. Her time underground was associated with the germination of seeds and the regeneration of spring, thus becoming an important symbol of rebirth. While evocative of the temptation in the garden, Val’s snakeskin jacket also resonates as a symbol of rebirth. The snake sheds its old skin, to make way for the new, just as the fallow time of winter makes way for the renewal of spring. And, as will be shown the thematic of rebirth or resurrection is the central element of the Christian symbolism, which shares, or competes for space, in this play crowded with symbols. The Christian motifs commence with Val Xavier’s name, ‘‘pouring symbolism through every letter,’’ as Nelson states in Tennessee Williams. Val is short for Valentine, a Christian martyr whose feast day, February 14, is associated with romantic coupling and links, in one image, both death and regeneration. While it is clearly intended that Val be associated with the Orpheus of the title, it is worth noting that, according to Grant in Myths of the Greeks and Romans, ‘‘the Christians identified him
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with the Prince of Peace in Isaiah.’’ Nelson remarks of Val’s descent, ‘‘once in the Underworld his role as Orpheus becomes conspicuously confused with Christian symbolism and he is presented as a Christ figure, raising up the local Magdalenes.’’ The violent denouement of the play evokes both Greek tragedy and, most scandalously, the Passion of Christ. While Cassandra’s prophetic vocation has been downplayed with the name change to Carol, another seer, the religious visionary Vee Talbott is highlighted. Vee is another of the frustrated women suffocating in this small Southern town in whom, as Nelson points out ‘‘sexuality has been so perverted that it is hopelessly confused with religious exaltation.’’ It is a running gag that the visions of apostles that Vee commemorates with her religious paintings all bear the likeness of local men. In act 3, scene 2, Vee has a vision of Christ in the cottonwoods, evidently in the form of Val Xavier, which helps precipitate the play’s final crisis. Vee has witnessed the sky split open: ‘‘I saw, I tell you, I saw the TWO HUGE BLAZING EYES OF JESUS CHRIST RISEN!—Not crucified but Risen! I mean Crucified and then RISEN!—The blazing eyes of Christ Risen!’’ Vee’s ecstatic religious passion exceeds even Carol Cutrere’s erotomania, and when Vee places Val’s hand on her chest to show her how Christ touched her, his fate is sealed. The fact that the play has two seer figures, each representing a different tradition, rather than settling on a single figure that could fuse the two traditions, demonstrates some of the problems presented by Williams’s design. Whether this doubling of the visionary motif deepens or confuses the concept is open to question. The play’s climax occurs between Good Friday and Easter, deepening the association of Val with Christ: the fox has now become the lamb. In a recurrence of the Orpheus motif, Val tarries when he learns that Lady is bearing his child, thus losing the chance to save himself. This Eurydice, evidently, has no plans to abandon her Hell. Val is not torn apart by Maenads; instead, he falls prey to the lynch mob. Yet, his demise manages, in its characteristic excess, to jumble together the disparate imagery that has both marred and enriched the play. As Nelson notes, ‘‘Val’s destruction at the conclusion is symbolic of many things: the crucifixion of Christ, the destruction of the bringer of light, the rending asunder of Dionysus, the god of fertility and rebirth, and the punishment of Orpheus.’’
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Orpheus Descending played only sixty-eight performances. The purpose of this essay is to suggest through an analysis of the myths creating the dramatic structure that Orpheus Descending is a better play than its dismal performance record suggests, a play which has yet to fulfill its potential in production but which even in the printed text represents a significant attempt to recreate myths in the context of our own time.
Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson in the 1990 film adaptation of Orpheus Descending, directed by Peter Hall
Source: Kevin O’Sullivan, Critical Essay on Orpheus Descending, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Nancy Baker Traubitz In the following essay excerpt, Traubitz examines the complexity of myth in Williams’s Orpheus Descending. Tennessee Williams’s first professionally produced play, Battle of Angels (1940), failed during its Boston tryouts. However, the play did not die. Williams continued to rewrite, to add, to modify and in March, 1957, with the great successes of Glass Menagerie (1945), Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) behind him, he committed Battle of Angels, now titled Orpheus Descending, to another Broadway production. ‘‘I honestly believe,’’ Williams wrote, ‘‘that it is finally finished. About 75 percent of it is new writing, but what is much more important, I believe that I have now finally managed to say in it what I wanted to say . . .’’ Few plays have been so long meditated and so staunchly believed in by their creators, yet after seventeen years of perpetual revising by America’s most successful playwright and one of the most influential figures in the international theater,
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Although I will consider only those myths with obvious referents in the text to the exclusion of whatever subconscious archetypes we might posit, Williams’ autobiographical impulses are important, as he superimposed and strengthened the Orpheus myth upon the myth of the battle between light and dark, the good and evil angels who war in heaven. Williams does not suppress this battle-in-heaven myth, as Hugh Dickenson clearly demonstrates in his comparison of the two published versions of the play. Rather, Williams comes to emphasize the responsibility which love places upon the poet/ singer Orpheus and the pull toward life and fruitfulness that the Orpheus figure creates in those dead souls he meets in the hades of the Torrance Mercantile Store. Williams himself always considered Orpheus Descending autobiographical. ‘‘Well,’’ he wrote, ‘‘nothing is more precious to anybody than the emotional record of his youth, and you will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart in this completed play . . .’’ The hero/savior Orpheus or Val, as Williams calls his hero, embodies the playwright as he chooses to see himself, heart on sleeve, ‘‘a wild spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop.’’ In the play itself we are able to distinguish five separate myth patterns: the loss of Eden, the battle of angels, Christ, Orpheus, and Adonis. The setting of the play is the Torrance Mercantile Store, from late winter in Act I through the dark night before Easter dawn at the end of Act III. Throughout the play we are aware of rain, occasionally in torrents and at points accompanied by thunder and lightning, perceived through a giant ‘‘dusty’’ window looking out on ‘‘disturbing emptiness.’’ Dogs, the hounds of hell, bark with varying degrees of menace. The store interior is almost entirely bare, but does contain ‘‘the black skeleton of a dressmaker’s dummy’’ and ‘‘a sinister-looking artificial palm in a greenishbrown jardiniere.’’ A much smaller bedroom alcove contrasts with the larger set. Across the alcove
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hangs an oriental drapery picturing two major myth motifs of the play, ‘‘fantastic birds’’ and a golden tree with scarlet fruit, a tree of life. Before the action of the play begins, the conflict is clearly announced in this set: life, fruitfulness, freedom against sinister artificiality, barrenness and death. The conflict will be played out within the mercantile hell where there are only the ones who are bought, the buyers and those few who have never been branded. The setting is completed by a prologue ‘‘treated frankly as exposition’’, in which two of the local inhabitants act a Chorus filling in background and emphasizing the myths. The play is set in Two River County, at once introducing the Eden motif. We learn the power in the play, Jabe Torrance, embodies sterile impotence—he and his wife have money instead of children and do not sleep together—and is dying of a spreading cancer. Jabe ‘‘bought’’ his wife, Lady, and brought her into his hades from a different country and race. She is a ‘‘Dago’’; her father, Papa Romano, was a ‘‘Wop from the old country’’ who built a garden of wine, music, and love. Lady had known love ‘‘like a fire’’ in her father’s ‘‘wine garden,’’ but the garden and with it Lady’s father were burned by the local vigilantes, the Mystic Crew, led by Jabe Torrance, when Papa Romano violated their commandment and ‘‘sold liquor to niggers.’’ Lady now plans to recreate her father’s wine garden by opening a confectionary adjacent to the store on the Saturday before Easter. The Chorus introduces their husbands, two slouching, red-faced henchmen of death, Dog and Pee-Wee, and the Temple sisters, two old maid vestal virgins who prowl about the store. In both the store and the living quarters above it, they tel1 us ‘‘everything is so dingy and dark . . .’’ Surrounded by all this death, Beulah discovers the olives set out for the funerallike reception for the dying Jabe are not stuffed but have seeds in them. The action of the play begins with the entrance of Carol Cutrere, the outcast member of the oldest and most distinguished family in the county. In the earlier version of the play her name was Cassandra and she retains her function as a prophetess. At her behest the Negro Conjure Man gives the magic Choctaw cry and Valentine Xavior materializes in his snakeskin jacket and carrying his guitar. Almost immediately behind him is Vee, short for Veronica, wife of Sheriff Talbott. Her entrance fixes Val in the Christ role, for like Saint Veronica, who gave Christ her veil to wipe his forehead on his journey up Calvary, Vee dispenses mercy. She has sheltered Val and hopes Lady will accept him as a clerk in the
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EVEN IF WE APPROACH THE PLAY AS TEXT RATHER THAN PRODUCTION, WILLIAMS HAS MANAGED, TO A REMARKABLE DEGREE, TO INTEGRATE FIVE MAJOR MYTHS INTO A DRAMATIC STRUCTURE.’’
store. Like Val, she is a creator, a primitive painter, capable of visions. She comes bearing gifts, pineapple sherbert for Jabe. Symbolically, her effort to bring together the pines of sterility and the apples of fruitfulness is ‘‘reduced to juice.’’ As the play progresses, Vee clearly identifies Val as a savior, painting him as Christ in her long contemplated picture of the Last Supper. Val understands her visions, which seek to metamorphose the horror and corruption of life among the living and dead into something of beauty. In their final confrontation, Val kneels to her as she sits in the shoefitting chair, symbolically reenacting the ritual washing of the feet of the disciples. She recognizes him as the figure of Christ in her vision, a vision of such brilliance it has nearly destroyed her physical sight by an influx of spiritual insight. —I heard this clap of thunder! Sky!—Split open!— And there in the split-open sky, I saw, I tell you, I saw the TWO HUGE BLAZING EYES OF JESUS CHRIST RISEN!—Not crucified but Risen! I mean Crucified and then RISEN!—The blazing eyes of Christ Risen!
Like Saint Veronica, who received her veil back from Christ with the lasting impression of His face upon it, Vee—who ‘‘was born with a caul! a sort of thing like a veil’’ and who on the Saturday afternoon before Easter meditated on the ‘‘mysteries of Easter, veils!’’—recognizes Val Xavior as the Christ of her vision, Christ harrowing the hell of Jabe Torrance’s store in Two River County. ‘‘She collapses, forward, falls to her knees, her arms thrown about Val. He seizes her to lift her.’’ Vee’s recognition of Val as Savior ensures his destruction; from this moment in the play he is turned over to the forces of corruption, the devils, to be tormented by Sheriff Talbott, Dog, Pee-Wee and then by
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Jabe before he is hung upon the tree and lynched by blowtorch, tying together both sacrifice and purification. However, the legend of Christ and Saint Veronica as embodied by Val and Vee is fraught with ambiguities. Vee paints her Church of the Resurrection with an all too blatant red phallic steeple. Although Val kisses her ‘‘soft woman hands’’ that paint ‘‘as if God touched your fingers’’, in her vision Val/Christ touches her bosom. Their whole relationship is one of highly charged, barely repressed physical desire. Structurally, the Val/Vee confrontations appear in the second scene of each act and always during the daylight hours. Vee is intensely aware of the light, ‘‘a blaze of light’’ outside the store, while Lady complains of darkness inside the store in an early speech. ‘‘We always had a problem with light in this store.’’ Vee and Val agree that ‘‘a world of light and shadow is what we live in, and—it’s— confusing . . .’’ While Vee is associated with daylight, Lady belongs to the dark night in hell. Val’s function as Orpheus is less ambiguous than his function as Christ. In their first meeting, Lady, unaware of Val’s presence, mutters, ‘‘I wish I was dead, dead, dead . . .’’ to which Val responds quietly, ‘‘No, you don’t, Lady.’’ Lady cannot sleep. She is obsessed with the fire which destroyed her father and his wine garden, and with her desire to recreate it in the confectionery. She is also ‘‘cold.’’ Val immediately gives Lady the snakeskin jacket, symbolic of regeneration, to wear and introduces the guitar, a phallic life-giver. He also tells her he is a light-bringer. ‘‘I do electric repairs.’’ His supernatural qualities are quickly established. His temperature is always ‘‘a couple of degrees above normal and he is above such human needs as sleep, breathing, and elimination. ‘‘I can sleep on a concrete floor or go without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy, for forty-eight hours. And I can hold my breath three minutes without blacking out . . . And I can go a whole day without passing water.’’ And, ominously, Val can ‘‘burn down . . . any twofooted woman.’’ Against Lady’s wish for death, Val juxtaposes the vision of the transparent birds with no legs who soar in the high blue sky near the sun and sleep on the wind, touching earth only in death. In the Orpheus myth, Orpheus is reincarnated as a swan, thus the transparent birds associated with both the dove of the Holy Spirit and the Orphic swan help to fix Val in the roles of Christ and Orpheus. Lady accepts the vision of life Val offers and
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although at first she is not interested in anything but a ‘‘working relation’’ with Val, she would ‘‘give this mercantile store and every bit of stock in it to be that tiny bird the color of the sky.’’ Val and Lady establish the sexual liaison which creates life in the depths of hades when Lady/ Eurydice realizes Val/Orpheus offers life. ‘‘I NEED YOU!!!’’ she cries, ‘‘TO LIVE . . . TO GO ON LIVING!!!’’ He looks up gravely at her from his guitar. She closes the curtain behind her. Its bizarre design, a gold tree with white birds and scarlet fruit in it, is softly translucent with the bulb lighted behind it. The guitar continues softly for a few moments; stops; the stage darkens till only the curtain of the alcove is clearly visible.
With his music and his vision of earthly life and love, Val is almost able to bring Lady out of hades. But Lady refuses to leave until Jabe is destroyed and the wine garden recreated. She tells Val, ‘‘I guess my heart knew that somebody must be coming to take me out of this hell! . . .—but DEATH has got to die before we go . . .’’ But Death survives. Lady/ Eurydice will not escape hades nor will she bear life within it. Her suspected pregnancy confirmed by Jabe’s nurse, Lady dismisses Val—‘‘You’ve given me life, you can go!’’—and, in a lovely image, compares herself to the barren fig tree in her father’s wine garden: Time went by it, spring after useless spring, and it almost started to—die . . . Then one day I discovered a small green fig on the tree they said wouldn’t bear! . . . I ran through the wine garden shouting, ‘‘Oh, Father, it’s going to bear, the fig tree is going to bear!’’—It seemed such a wonderful thing, after those ten barren springs, for the little fig tree to bear, it called for a celebration—I ran to a closet, I opened a box that we kept Christmas ornaments in!—I took them out . . . I decorated the fig tree with glass bells and glass birds and stars and tinsel and snow! . . . I’ve won, Mr. Death, I’m going to bear!
The fig tree brings together the pagan and Christian myths. The difficulty of fertilizing fig trees led to symbolic marriages between human representatives of male and female fig tress and human sacrifice among the ancient Greeks. Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nakedness after eating the fruit of the Forbidden Tree (Genesis 3:7) and Christ cursed the barren fig tree (Matthew 2:19). The shape of the fig has lent itself to symbolic associations with both the testicles and the womb. By hanging Christmas decorations on the fig tree Lady celebrates not only her fertility, but foreshadows resurrection and eternal life. Among her deco-
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rations are the transparent ‘‘glass birds’’ but also ‘‘icicles and snow’’ of death. In her triumph Lady has stopped to look back at Jabe and Val has stopped to look back at Lady. The strangely rejuvenated Jabe shoots Lady and sets the waiting vigilantes on Val. What happens to Val is never completely clear. The vigilantes take rope and a blowtorch from the store and they repeatedly expostulate ‘‘—Christ!’’ However, we also hear dogs and remember that Vee and Val have seen chain-gang dogs tear fugitives to pieces, and Val and Lady actually hear a convict torn as the Maenads torn Orpheus. The ambiguities in the Val/Orpheus—Lady/ Eurydice myth are not entirely the result of an overlap with the Val/Christ—Vee/Saint Veronica or the wine garden/Eden myths. Val is an extremely handsome young man appearing for the first time on his birthday. His attraction to the older Lady seems less strong than her’s to him. He becomes almost a prisoner unable to escape Lady’s need for him. We are reminded here of Adonis, so handsome at birth he is loved by Aphrodite. Aphrodite entrusts her mortal lover to Persephone, but Persephone, Queen of Hades, loves him too, and refuses to give him up until Zeus intervenes, giving him half the year to Love and half the year to Death. Surrounded by hunting dogs, he is eventually gored to death by a maddened boar . . . Both Romano and Val are outsiders, superior to the local population of Twin River County; and both have descended into a hell in Twin River County through the traditional pattern. They have crossed water to reach Twin River County; they confront there the spirits of the dead. Both do battle with the monstrous tyrannical figure of Death, Jabe Torrance, and a host of demi-monsters, the Mystic Crew, the Sheriff, Pee-Wee and Dog. Both are associated with the beautiful Lady and each loses her to the monster as she, through her unborn child, is about to triumph over death and sterility. Val, whose descent is more fully chronicled, receives aid from the traditional helper with more than human powers, Carol Cutrere. Unlike the cyclical heroes, Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, neither Romano nor Val rises from his descent. Death prevents their crossing the second river and Carol Cutrere’s sky-blue Cadillac waits for Val in vain. The play ends in the dark night before Easter dawn. While Williams does not complete the expected pattern in his hero’s quest, he does transfer the symbol of reemergence and regeneration to Carol Cutrere, the embodiment of the transparent bird symbol, who knows love and life
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are ‘‘unbearably painful’’ and ‘‘dangerous.’’ Carol also knows dead people chatter like birds, ‘‘but all they say is one word and that one word is ‘live . . .’’’ Her exit from the hell of the store is perhaps as close as Williams can come to assent and affirmation. ‘‘Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind . . .’’ Occasionally, the relationship between the myth and its referent within the naturalistic context of the literal action becomes tenuous. For example, we can accept Val as Jesus or Orpheus but can we also accept him as Adonis without completely reassessing Lady’s character? Jesus, Orpheus, and Adonis never physically consummate their love. Can we accept physical love as analogous to divine love? Jesus, Orpheus, Adonis, and Adam all have divine progenitors, Val is a drifter with hazy origins, something of a reprobate, who, although he refuses Carol’s offered ride back across the water to safety, still poses a problem as to how willingly and deliberately he sacrifices his life. While Val’s jacket associates him with the ancient’s snakeskin symbol of regeneration, it also carries overtones of both the serpent’s bite which sent Eurydice to hades, and the snake disguise assumed by Satan in the Garden of Eden. Val thus becomes a fallen angel, but his function in the Orpheus and Eden myths becomes ambiguous. Jabe is so viciously a god of death that even the most Romantic reading of Genesis cannot easily relate him to the God of fiery justice in the myths of Eden and the fallen angels myths. Despite such ambiguities, the myths of Orpheus Descending are integral to the dramatic structure, never imposed on the naturalist action or introduced selfconsciously. The emphasis and shading of a direction and cast have overcome far more serious ambiguities in far less worthy plays. Even if we approach the play as text rather than production, Williams has managed, to a remarkable degree, to integrate five major myths into a dramatic structure. Source: Nancy Baker Traubitz, ‘‘Myth as a Basis of Dramatic Structure in Orpheus Descending,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. XIX, No. 1, March 1976, pp. 57–66.
SOURCES Bates, Carolyn, ‘‘Anger, Oh Yes,’’ in Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 2000, p. 21.
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Brustein, Robert, ‘‘Orpheus Condescending,’’ in New Republic, October 30, 1989, pp. 25–27. Crandall, George W., ed., The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams, Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 143–49. Crist, Judith, ‘‘Orpheus Descending in Revival at Gramercy Arts,’’ in New York Herald Tribune, October 6, 1959, sec. 2, p. 6.
———, Eight Plays, Nelson Doubleday, Inc., 1979, p. 540. ———, In the Winter of Cities, New Directions, 1956, pp. 27–28. ———, Orpheus Descending, in Four Plays, Signet Classic, 1976, p. vi. Wolf, Matt, ‘‘Orpheus Descending,’’ in Variety, Vol. 379, No. 7, July 10, 2000, p. 33.
Falk, Signi Lenea, Tennessee Williams, Twayne, 1961. Grant, Michael, Myths of the Greeks and Romans, Mentor Book series, New American Library, 1962, pp. 239, 266–73. Hewes, Henry, ‘‘Tennessee Revising,’’ in Saturday Review, March 30, 1957, p. 26. Lahr, John, ‘‘Heavenly Itch,’’ in New Yorker, July 17, 2000, pp. 84–86. Monteverdi, Claudio, The Operas of Monteverdi, English National Opera Guide series, No. 45, Riverrun Press, Inc., 1992, p. 50. Morley, Sheridan, ‘‘Eerily Prophetic,’’ in Spectator, July 8, 2000, pp. 43–44. Nelson, Benjamin, Tennessee Williams: The Man and his Work, Ivan Obolensky, Inc., New York, 1961, pp. 224–31. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated and with an introduction by Mary M. Innes, Penguin, 1975, pp. 225–28, 246–48. Reiman, Donald H., and Sharon B. Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, W. W. Norton, 1977, p. 200. Wallace, Jack E., ‘‘The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending,’’ in The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams, edited by George W. Crandall, Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 157–58. Williams, Tennessee, Battle of Angels, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 1, New Directions, 1971.
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FURTHER READING Griffin, Alice, Understanding Tennessee Williams, University of South Carolina Press, 1995, pp. 172–96. This is an in-depth analysis of nine of Williams’s most successful plays, including Orpheus Descending. Griffin considers language, characters, themes, dramatic effects, and staging. Hirsch, Foster, A Portrait of the Artist: The Plays of Tennessee Williams, Kennikat Press, 1979. Hirsch analyzes Williams’s play Battle of Angels and shows how it developed into Orpheus Descending. Jackson, Esther Merle, The Broken World of Tennessee Williams, University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Jackson describes the major characteristics of Williams’s dramatic form and emphasizes the changing idea of theater that is reflected throughout his work. Kataria, Gulshan Rai, The Faces of Eve: A Study of Tennessee Williams’s Heroines, Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1992. Kataria studies Williams’s plays from an archetypal, Jungian perspective and views Lady Torrance as an example of the amazon archetype.
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Overtones Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones is considered the earliest example of a play that dramatizes the unconscious on stage. In it, Gerstenberg uses two actresses for both Margaret and Harriet to represent the single character of Margaret and Harriet. Each embodies a disparate part of the character’s personality; or, to put it in Freudian terms, one is the id and the other the ego. In Overtones, Harriet and Margaret are the cultured and refined selves, while Hetty and Maggie represent the wild, primitive desires of these same women. Using two women to play one character was a unique convention that had not been seen before. This new technique, along with Gerstenberg’s ability to write witty, interesting dialogue made the play an instant success. Overtones was first produced November 8, 1915, by the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theater in New York. At the time of its production, Sigmund Freud had recently made his first trip to the United States, and the publication of his works had spread interest in the workings of the unconscious mind. Freud’s theories were a common topic of discussion and the play capitalized upon this fad. The play influenced many later playwrights including Eugene O’Neill, who used a similar technique in his play Strange Interlude.
ALICE GERSTENBERG 1915
Overtones was Gerstenberg’s second New York success. Earlier that same year, she had received accolades for her adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Overtones was to become her most popular and most widely produced play, however. It was
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presented by numerous theatres across the country, had a successful run on vaudeville, and was performed in London by the great actress Lily Langtry. Overtones was originally published in 1921 in Gerstenberg’s Ten One-Act Plays and has appeared in many subsequent anthologies. It is still presented by regional theatres and universities today and remains one of the finest examples of the dramatization of Freudian theory to date.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Alice Gerstenberg was born August 2, 1885, in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents, Julia and Erich, were wealthy socialites who were regularly featured on the society pages of the day. She was educated at Kirkland School and then attended Bryn Mawr, a college known for providing education to many high society women. During this time, she began writing plays and performing in college theatrical productions. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1907 and returned to Chicago. The following year, Gerstenberg enrolled in classes at Anna Morgan’s studio and became active in Chicago’s theatre circle. Morgan encouraged Gerstenberg to write some one-act plays and the four resulting plays were published later that year in a volume entitled A Little World. Two years later, Gerstenberg studied theatre in New York, where she composed her first full-length play, The Conscience of Sarah Platt. Gerstenberg continued her writing career and had some moderate success in 1912 with a production of Captain Joe at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. Also that year, her first novel, Unquenched Fire, was published. Later in 1912 she returned to Chicago and became one of the founding members of the Chicago Little Theatre. Unfortunately, personality clashes with Maurice Browne, the theatre’s director, caused Gerstenberg to quit at the end of the first season. In 1915 Gerstenberg had her greatest success with the plays Alice in Wonderland and Overtones. Alice in Wonderland was presented by the Fine Arts Theatre, and again by the Booth Theatre in New York. Also in 1915, the novelized version of The Conscience of Sarah Platt was published. The book won strong reviews in the New York press. Gerstenberg had finally established a strong reputa-
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tion as a novelist and playwright. Overtones was first produced in New York by the Washington Square Players. It was an immediate success and became a popular choice of many performers in the United States and abroad. The production played on vaudeville, and the great actress Lily Langtry starred in a 1917 London production. Despite her growing reputation, Gerstenberg remained in Chicago. Although she never matched the success of Alice in Wonderland or Overtones, she continued to write popular plays for the Chicago theatre. In 1921 she co-founded the Chicago Junior League Theater, a group that sponsored plays for children, and in 1922 she founded the Playwright’s Theater, a group dedicated to providing opportunities for local artists to develop and present their work. She ran the Playwright’s Theater until 1945. In 1938 she received the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award. Gerstenberg died July 28, 1972, in Chicago. Although Gerstenberg’s connections with the wealthy families of Chicago helped provide contacts and backing to foster her early writing career, her talent took her beyond the need for help from family and friends. Her novels and plays quickly became recognized for their own merit by the publishing and theatrical communities. Gerstenberg is now considered an influential member of the ‘‘little theatre’’ movement in the United States and an innovator of theatrical form.
PLOT SUMMARY At the beginning of Overtones, Harriet is preparing for the arrival of a former acquaintance, Mrs. Margaret Caldwell, whom she has invited to tea. She is also having a discussion with her primitive ‘‘inner self,’’ Hetty. The two women establish that they are indeed very different parts of the same person. As Hetty notes, ‘‘I’m crude and real, you are my appearance in the world.’’ Harriet concedes that they are one and the same, but refuses to admit that Hetty is also the wife of Charles Goodrich. Harriet asserts that she alone is Charles’s wife because it is she who manipulates him and manages him through her social airs and artifice. Eventually the conversation turns to John Caldwell and to Hetty’s despair over not having married him when she had the opportunity. Harriet reminds her that John’s desire
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to be a painter made for too uncertain a future and that, ‘‘It was much safer to accept Charles’s money and position.’’ Hetty then begins to coach Harriet on what she must say and do when John’s wife Margaret arrives. She is to make sure that Margaret knows she is rich, and should try to make her jealous. Harriet then decides she will make Margaret ask if John can paint her portrait. She will then have the opportunity to make him fall in love with her again.
false niceties by telling each other what a pleasant time they have had and bidding each other a sweet ‘‘goodbye.’’
Margaret arrives with her primitive counterpart, Maggie. Immediately, Hetty tries to goad Harriet into mentioning how rich and influential she is. Harriet resists Hetty’s prodding, however, and greets Margaret sweetly and politely. Maggie instantly faces off with Hetty and the two trade insults and each tries to get the truth out of the other. All the while Harriet and Margaret continue their pleasant conversation, complimenting each other and affirming how wonderful their respective lives have turned out. Maggie admits that Margaret is starving because John has no orders for paintings. When Harriet offers tea, Maggie makes sure Margaret takes it with cream because it is ‘‘more filling.’’ The pleasant chit-chat between Harriet and Margaret continues, while Hetty and Maggie return to prodding their respective counterparts to try and win the game and obtain what they want. Harriet gives in a bit and casually lets drop she has an automobile and a chauffeur. Margaret also gives in to Maggie and brings up the subject of John perhaps painting Harriet’s portrait.
Margaret Caldwell
The subject then turns to John’s time as a painter in Paris. Margaret speaks as if John has become an artist of great renown, while Maggie admits that John is actually drawing advertisements and is ‘‘growing weak with despair.’’ Hetty and Maggie finally get down to business once the conversation turns to the subject of Harriet sitting for a portrait done by John. Hetty vehemently urges Harriet to negotiate a low price, while Maggie warns Margaret to be careful not to lose the opportunity. Finally, it is agreed that John will paint Harriet, and with that, both women think they have won. Throughout the entire conversation Harriet and Margaret have remained reserved, with a false air of polite decorum, while Hetty and Maggie have become more and more desperate. In the final moments of the play, Hetty and Maggie face off viciously, each vowing to ‘‘rob’’ the other and take what they covet the most. After a cymbal crash and a brief blackout, Harriet and Margaret end their conversation with
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CHARACTERS
Margaret is one-half of one character who appears in this play. She is the refined, cultured part of herself, just as Harriet is. She is the ego. In addition, Margaret shares many other similarities with Harriet. She is in a desperate situation from which she longs to escape. Margaret is married to the painter John Caldwell. The two of them have just returned from eight years in Paris, where John tried to make his mark as an artist. He was unsuccessful, however, and they are now forced to live in poverty while John makes his living drawing advertisements. Margaret loves John, but the benefits of this have been overshadowed by the severe poverty in which they are forced to live. Margaret is desperately hungry and longs for the food and fine things that wealth can bring. She is willing to give up love for money. John’s name also gives a clue as to Margaret’s relationship with him. John is called well. In other words, while it may seem prestigious and glamorous to be married to an artist, the reality is not as good as it sounds. To say you are an artist’s wife is exciting. To live it is horrible. Just as Harriet must work to control her baser instincts, so must Margaret. Margaret’s lavender gown connects her with Maggie, who wears a dark purple gown. The two together represent one complete person.
Harriet Goodrich On the surface Harriet is a cultured society lady who is married to the very wealthy Charles Goodrich. She has a beautiful house, a car, a chauffeur, wonderful food, and all of the fine trappings that wealth can provide. She presents an air of being extremely happy and content. This is all a façade, however. Deep down, Harriet does not love Charles and she is in despair over being trapped in her current situation. She hates her marriage to Charles because it only provides a life of comfort and wealth. There is no passion. Harriet married her husband for the
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money and that is all she got. His name even indicates what he represents to her: Charles is only good because he is rich. Harriet secretly longs to escape her current situation and to rekindle the passion of her earlier relationship with John Caldwell, a man whom she believes to be the true love of her life. Harriet grew up in the same town as John. The two dated in her youth, and she has been in love with him ever since. At the time they dated, John was an aspiring painter. He actually proposed to Harriet, but she turned him down because she was afraid his desire to be an artist would lead to a life of poverty and hardship. She has never lost her desire for John, however, and is now deeply jealous of Margaret’s marriage to him. Harriet (with Hetty) is actually one-half of one of the characters presented in this play. She represents only the ego portion of this character. She is the person that is presented to the outside world, the cultured, polite woman that everyone expects this character to be. She is the part that has been molded by society and taught how to behave. Harriet wears a green gown, which represents the jealousy that runs deep within her.
Hetty Hetty is Harriet’s counterpart. She is not a complete person, but is the other half of Harriet’s personality. Hetty embodies the wild, untamed desires and wants that live deep within Harriet. She represents her true feelings. Hetty is able to see beyond the courteous everyday conversation that takes place when people talk to one another. She understands that deep down people are vicious and self-serving and that they just cover this up for the sake of appearing humane. Hetty has little patience for these polite games that human beings play with each other. Because she has not been cultured and refined by society, she operates on a very basic level. She is the id portion of Harriet’s character. Hetty has the ability to be violent and cruel and is willing to do almost anything to get what she wants. She desperately wants Harriet to succeed in regaining John and will use any means necessary to convince Harriet to act upon her desires. Harriet’s sense of propriety and decorum is all that keeps Hetty’s unsociable behavior in check. Hetty is always present, and Harriet must consciously work to keep control of her. If Hetty was ever able to completely overcome Harriet, she would be deemed unfit for society and would probably be locked
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away. Hetty wears a gown of deep green, which reflects her connection to Harriet. The deeper color signifies the harsher, baser emotions she represents.
Maggie Maggie is Margaret’s darker half. She is the instinctual, desire-driven force who constantly prods Margaret to go after what she truly wants. It is Maggie who has brought Margaret to the meeting with Harriet in order to carry out her plan of getting Harriet to order a portrait. Maggie is Margaret’s id, and she operates on a primitive level, just as Hetty does. Maggie is not afraid of confrontation. She will do whatever is necessary to get what she wants. During the play, Maggie’s actions are governed primarily by hunger and her need for food. Just as Harriet must be careful to keep Hetty in check, Margaret must work to do the same with Maggie. If Margaret lets her guard down for a moment and forgets the rules of social etiquette, Maggie will overcome her and drive her to behave in a way that might be considered insane.
THEMES Ego versus Id The theories of Sigmund Freud were very popular when Overtones was first produced. Freud looked at the way various psychological forces shape a person. He eventually concluded there were three major parts that made up an individual’s psyche: the ego, the id, and the superego. The ego represents the part of the psyche that experiences the outer world through the senses. It is the ‘‘rational’’ part that primarily governs the actions of the person. The id is the part that contains the instincts for survival and the drive for pleasure. It is often considered the wild, primitive part. The superego is the part that contains the values and moral standards. Although Freud did not publish The Ego and the Id (the book which clearly identified these terms) until 1923, he had already extensively discussed the concept of conflicting societal and primitive forces upon the psyche, and these theories were well-known among educated circles in the United States. They influenced many playwrights of the period, who began using dream interpretations, hypnosis, and subconscious states as themes in their work. Overtones is
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Read Marsha Norman’s play Getting Out. Compare and contrast the way Norman uses the dualcharacter technique in her play with the way Gerstenberg employs it in Overtones. What are their similarities and differences? Does Getting Out relate to Freud’s theories of the ego and the id in any way? • Research the history and etiquette surrounding the ritual of taking afternoon tea. Who originally popularized this custom? Do we still use any of this same etiquette today when eating or drinking with friends? Explain. • Research the history surrounding women’s entry
considered the first example of physically dramatizing the conflict that takes place between the ego and the id. By using a dual-character format, Gerstenberg was able to personify the struggle taking place within each of the characters. At the opening of the play she clearly establishes for the audience that the characters of Harriet and Hetty are actually the same woman with Hetty’s opening line, ‘‘Harriet. Harriet, my other self. My trained self.’’ Gerstenberg goes on to reinforce this dual-character format by having Margaret and Maggie represent the ego versus id conflict of the other character in the play.
Feminism The theme of feminism is addressed in an inadvertent way in Overtones. While the two characters do not directly discuss the suppression of women or their lack of opportunity, these concepts are made apparent by viewing the situations in which they are trapped. Both Margaret and Harriet owe their discontent and sad situation to their total dependence on what their husbands can provide. They both have relied on their respective men to provide a wonderful life for them, and now, since their lives (and husbands) have not turned out as they had hoped, the two women are trapped. Neither woman has the resource to stand on her own or to
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into the workplace around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. How did this change the lives of American men and women and their relationship to each other? What problems arose when more women left the home? • Read an overview of Freud’s theories about the ego and the id. Do you agree with his conclusions? Why or why not? • How would you direct this play so that the audience could easily understand the associations between the characters? Would you follow Gerstenberg’s stage directions or use an alternate technique? Why or why not?
improve her situation. Instead each sees only one possibility: link up with a better man who might provide a better life. Harriet wants John because Charles cannot give her adequate love. Margaret wants Harriet’s money and influence because John cannot adequately provide for her. The possibility of being proactive in improving their current relationship never occurs to either. This is, of course, in keeping with the times in which Overtones was written. During this period, women were expected to remain at home and to obey their husbands. Most women had little social power or influence within society. Like Harriet and Margaret, their choices were extremely limited.
Jealousy The theme of jealousy is pervasive in Overtones. Each character wants what the other has and is willing to go to great lengths to get it. Because we can hear the characters’ inner thoughts through the dialogue of Maggie and Hetty, Gerstenberg can make the deep-seated jealousy very clear. At the end of the play when Hetty threatens, ‘‘I’m going to take him away from you,’’ and Maggie counters with, ‘‘I want your money—and your influence,’’ there is no question as to just how envious and desperate these two women are of each other. Margaret’s jealousy
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is even visually symbolized in her costume. As Gerstenberg states in the opening stage directions, ‘‘Harriet’s gown is a light, ‘jealous’ green.’’
bility of continuous action and of an additional set of internal character conflicts that could be visually experienced.
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Strictly speaking, the Victorian era corresponds to the reign of Queen Victoria of England from 1819 to 1901, and Victorianism is a term used to describe the social mores and customs that became prevalent during Victoria’s reign. Although her reign ended more than a decade before Overtones appeared, many of the trappings of Victorianism were still present in the United States at the time of Gerstenberg’s writing. The Victorian household was ruled by the husband. The husband was the ‘‘breadwinner,’’ and the wife was expected to stay home and raise the children. Instruction in proper behavior and in the manners of society was considered extremely important. People were expected to follow the rules of decorum at all times and any display of unbridled emotion was scorned. The custom of having afternoon tea became popular during the Victorian era. Victorianism is also sometimes associated with haughtiness and arrogance. Overtones exhibits a strong sense of Victorianism in the way Margaret and Harriet interact while at tea. Although their emotions are raging inside, they make sure to eat daintily and properly, and try desperately not to let their true emotions show.
Gerstenberg uses various types of symbolism throughout Overtones. She uses both visual and textual means to convey symbolic concepts. Also, Hetty and Maggie each wear darker versions of her respective counterpart’s costume colors. This symbolizes the attachment between each character and her primitive self, and also suggests the deeper, darker emotions that Hetty and Maggie harbor. In addition to the color, the style of the costumes also serves a symbolic function. In the stage directions, Gerstenberg describes the cultured characters’ gowns as made of chiffon, in order to suggest the ‘‘possibility of primitive and cultured selves merging into one woman.’’ The title of the play also functions as a symbol. Overtone is defined as an ulterior, usually implicit meaning, or a hint. In the play, Gerstenberg lays out this symbolism for the audience when she has Harriet remark to Hetty, ‘‘I am your subtle overtone.’’
STYLE Dual Characters Overtones is the first known instance of a playwright using two actresses to portray a single character. By splitting each character into two parts, Gerstenberg allows the audience to hear the inner thoughts and desires of the character without having to stop the action. Prior to this, when a playwright wanted the audience to hear a character’s private thoughts, he or she would use an aside or a soliloquy. An aside is when a character speaks directly to the audience, without the other characters onstage hearing him or her. A soliloquy is when a character is alone onstage speaking his or her thoughts out loud. Both of these techniques often bring a momentary halt to the action of the play. Gerstenberg’s dual-character technique allowed the audience to experience the ‘‘outside’’ and the ‘‘inside’’ of the characters simultaneously, thus creating the possi-
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Shadowing Overtones uses the visual technique of shadowing to help the audience make the connection between the disparate parts of each character. Each primitive self stands behind her respective cultured self and shadows her by using similar gestures. The primitive self also moves around the stage in conjunction with her counterpart. The shadowing primitive self is always behind the cultured character, sometimes looming over them, thus creating a visual image which reinforces the duality present in Margaret and Harriet, and the threat that Maggie and Hetty provide.
Unity of Time and Place Unity of time and place occurs in a play when it takes place in one setting and in real time. In other words, there are no jumps to another place and there is no passing of time in which the story is picked up later. Overtones has a strong unity of time and place because it takes place in one room and the audience experiences the entire meeting between Harriet and Margaret. These type of plays were popular with small upstart theatres because they usually had small casts, one set, and thus were easy and inexpensive to produce. Gerstenberg often wrote specifically with these factors in mind. As Stuart J. Hecht notes in the Journal of Popular Culture,
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‘‘Gerstenberg intended such performances as inexpensive productions which could help raise money to begin or sustain a local little theatre.’’
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The New Woman In the early 1900s an increasing number of women were leaving their homes and entering the workforce. The swell of industry taking place in the United States created more jobs than could be filled by the male population. More employees were needed to work in the new factories and industries, and women were there to answer the call. They were now not merely wives and mothers, but active participants in the economy, and this newfound independence led many to question their place within society. They began to push the bounds of acceptable behavior and to call for equal rights and the right to have a say in matters of government. The ‘‘new woman’’ had more power, was more opinionated, and was more self-determined than females of the previous generations had been. With this surge in women’s self-confidence also came a backlash of resistance, and a strong debate arose over the proper role of women in society. Out of this debate rose the feminist movement, a drive for women’s rights and equality that still persists today.
theatre’’ movement. The little theatres were founded by local artists and based upon similar independent theatres that had been established in Europe. The actors and technicians were not paid, and the theatres relied on subscriptions and donations for financial support. They usually presented small, inexpensive productions and experimented with form and style previously unseen by most audiences. One of the most influential of these was the Chicago Little Theatre, formed by Maurice Brown in 1912. Alice Gerstenberg was a member of this theatre during its first season.
Freud and Psychoanalysis In 1909 the famous pioneers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, traveled to the United States to give the first American lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Massachusetts. The lectures were published in 1910, and suddenly much of the American population became interested in the topic of psychology and of the subconscious mind. Articles on Freud’s theories began appearing in many of the popular literary magazines of the day and they became a common topic of parlor conversation. Freud intrigued and shocked American society with his frank discussions of sexuality and deviance, and his theories eventually led to a change in attitude toward members of society who were considered to be insane or psychologically impaired.
Women’s Suffrage In 1915 the fight for women to win the vote was in full swing. From 1905 to 1910 the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew from seventeen thousand members to seventy-five thousand. In 1912 the Progressive Party, led by Theodore Roosevelt, finally endorsed the suffragist position. On January 12, 1915, the women’s suffrage amendment failed in the House of Representatives. The suffragettes were not deterred, however. They continued their struggle and finally succeeded in winning women the right to vote in 1919.
Little Theatre Movement In the early 1900s the theatre was dominated by large commercial institutions that were run by powerful and wealthy entrepreneurs. The commercial aspects of these establishments caused them to offer popular, ‘‘safe’’ productions that would bring in as much money as possible. Little thought was given to artistic innovation or risk-taking. Around 1912 that began to change with the advent of the ‘‘little
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Overtones is recognized as the first example of visually depicting the Freudian split between the id and the ego onstage. As W. David Sievers notes in Freud on Broadway, ‘‘it marks the first departure from realism for the purpose of dramatizing the unconscious.’’ When the play premiered in 1915, it was a popular success and was ‘‘heralded as representing a new formula in theater,’’ according to Beverly M. Matherne, writing in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. The New York press did not give the play rave reviews, however. As Keith Newlin reports in his introduction to American Plays of the New Woman, the New York Times concentrated most of its critique on the other works presented on the same bill and only briefly noted of Overtones that its ‘‘idea was more clever than its execution.’’ Newlin also notes, however, that the New Republic was a bit more generous when it
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1910s: The first phonograph is introduced by the Victor Talking Machine Company. By 1919 Americans spend more on phonographs and recordings than on most other forms of home entertainment. Today: Phonograph records are no longer manufactured. The compact disc has replaced the phonograph record and many people own a compact disc player. • 1910s: The average price of a new car is $600. A Model T costs $360. Most Americans do not own an automobile. Today: Almost everyone has at least one car. The price of a bottom-of-the-line new car generally exceeds $10,000. • 1910s: Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, becomes the first intersection in the United States to be equipped with an electric traffic light on August 5, 1914. Today: Traffic lights are found in every major city in America. The colors red, yellow, and green are recognized as symbols for stop, caution and go, across the country.
touted the play as an ‘‘interesting event’’ and stated that ‘‘Miss Gerstenberg’s success will incite other dramatists to try their hands’’ at plays of a similar form. In this supposition, the New Republic was correct. Gerstenberg’s dual-character form was used by several other playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill. Echoes of her work can also be found in the plays of ‘‘Sophie Treadwell, Adrienne Kennedy, Marsha Norman, and Peter Nichols,’’ according to Mary Maddock in Modern Drama. Recent critics still consider the play to be an important milestone in American theatre history. Hecht calls the play ‘‘telling and innovative.’’ Maddock states that Overtones initiated a ‘‘significant trend in twentiethcentury American drama.’’
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• 1910s: Electric clocks are first introduced. Most people, however, still use windup clocks to keep track of time. Today: Digital clocks and wristwatches are the most prominent time-telling devices. Clocks on computers and handheld devices can be set to the precise second. • 1910s: The divorce rate is one in one thousand. Most people remain married no matter how difficult their situation may be. Today: One in two marriages ends in divorce. There is no longer a horrible social stigma attached to being a divorced woman. • 1910s: The life expectancy for a man in the United States is 48.4 years and for a woman is 51.8 years. Today: The life expectancy for a man in the United States is 74.2 years and for a woman is 79.9 years. While better health care and medicine have lengthened general life expectancy, the entry of women into the workforce and the increased common stress of daily life has closed the gap between the sexes.
CRITICISM Beth Kattelman Kattelman holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Ohio State University. In this essay, Kattelman discusses the various techniques used by Alice Gerstenberg to heighten visual, auditory, and symbolic interest in her play and how these techniques serve to highlight similarities and differences between the characters. In Overtones, Alice Gerstenberg uses duality, contrast, and juxtaposition to create a piece that is both visually and symbolically intriguing. The play is noted for being the first instance of the use of the
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is an excellent short story about the psychological breakdown that can result from a woman’s feelings of being trapped and powerless. It is considered a standard text of early feminist literature. • Getting Out (1979) is Marsha Norman’s play about a young woman struggling to break free from her younger, primitive self. The play uses two actresses to portray a single character and was highly successful when it premiered at the Humana Festival of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. • Sophie Treadwell’s play Machinal, originally presented in 1928 and published the following year, is an excellent example of an innovative use of style and form. The play is written in nine episodes and uses offstage sounds to suggest the
dual-character, a technique in which two actresses portray different parts of one single woman. In Overtones, the split is a Freudian one, with one actress portraying the id or primitive portion of the character, while the other portrays the socialized and mannered ego. This dual-character technique allows the audience to experience the inner struggle of the subconscious firsthand, and because the character’s inner thoughts do not have to be conveyed to the audience through an aside or soliloquy, the audience can learn what the character is thinking while the action continues uninterrupted. The dual-character technique also allows some interesting parallels to be drawn between the two women of the play, and Gerstenberg makes the most of this opportunity. Through the course of the play the audience learns just how similar Harriet and Margaret really are. They are both desperately unhappy and are willing to scheme and lie in order to better their situation. They are also both caught in circumstances that have been dictated by the forces and expectations of society. As Mary Maddock
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mechanized world that keeps its heroine, the Young Lady, trapped. • Daily Life in a Victorian House (1993), by Laura Wilson, gives a good account of the manners and etiquette of England’s upper classes. Although the book deals with an extremely wealthy family in England during the height of the Victorian era, it offers a glimpse of the manners and mores that were eventually picked up by upper-middle class families in the United States. • Afternoon Teas: Recipes-History-Menus (1995), by Pam McKee, Lin Webber, and Ann Krum, contains a brief synopsis of the history and the customs of afternoon tea. The book also contains simple recipes. It provides a concise introduction for those not familiar with the etiquette and history of afternoon tea.
notes in Modern Drama, ‘‘Margaret and Harriet are the unhappy products of the process of socialization that replaces women’s personal desires with patriarchally correct wants and needs.’’ Thus, the characters are both trapped in a world ‘‘not of their own design.’’ The dialogue of Hetty and Maggie make the similarity between the characters very clear. Gerstenberg often uses a parallel construction of dialogue for these two characters in which one line is a direct counterpoint to the line spoken by the other character. For example, when Maggie urges Margaret to ‘‘Flatter her,’’ Hetty counters with, ‘‘Tell her we’re rich.’’ And when Hetty cautions Harriet, ‘‘Don’t let her see you’re anxious to be painted,’’ Maggie also warns, ‘‘Don’t seem anxious to get the order.’’ This repetition of sentence structure textually emphasizes the analogous circumstances in which Harriet and Margaret are trapped. The similarity of the characters in Overtones introduces a strong sense of irony. Although they do
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WITH THIS PLAY, GERSTENBERG PUSHED THE BOUNDARIES OF THEATRICAL FORM AND USED ALL MEANS AVAILABLE TO CREATE AN INTRIGUING EXPLORATION INTO TWO WOMEN’S PSYCHES.’’
not realize it, Margaret and Harriet are practically mirror images of one another. They have both been schooled in the fine art of etiquette and decorum, and they are both trapped within a patriarchal system that affords them no power except for that obtained by marrying the ‘‘right’’ man. They both believe that if they could only possess what the other has they would be truly happy. Yet, one suspects that if the two were to succeed in gaining what they want, they would still be as miserable as they are now. They may trade places, but they would still be confined within a situation that would make them extremely discontent. Eventually Margaret would become desperately bored and unsatisfied with her marriage to Charles, and Harriet would be hungry and miserable with John. One can imagine the scene presented in Overtones being repeated in the future with the characters reversed. Harriet is forced to grovel for customers while Margaret now laments the loss of her one true love. As Maddock notes, ‘‘the desires of Harriet and Margaret are so perfectly symmetrical that should both women succeed in their goals they will both fail.’’ Although the play is a meeting between two women, one can almost see it as struggle that is taking place within a single individual who is in turmoil over whether to listen to the practical side that desires Charles’ money, or the idealistic side that desires John’s love. Although this interpretation is not what Gerstenberg intended, the close parallels and similarities between the two characters allow for this type of reading as well. The final moments of the play solidify just how alike Harriet and Margaret are when Hetty and Maggie simultaneously exclaim, ‘‘I’m going to rob you—rob you.’’ Comparison and contrast are two key elements of Overtones. They generate interest, and help to
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raise the play above the level of a typical afternoon tea. One of the ways Gerstenberg introduces contrast into Overtones is through her choice of the husbands’ respective professions. Although the play does not make clear what Charles does for a living, one can assume he is a successful businessman. John, on the other hand, has chosen to forsake the money that the business world could bring in order to pursue his art. John pursues a world of ideas, Charles a world of possessions. In the play, Gerstenberg alludes to this dichotomy by emphasizing the place love plays in each relationship. One gets the feeling that Harriet is just another one of Charles’s possessions. He can keep her safe and comfortable, but does not love her. John, on the other hand, loves Margaret, but is not able to provide safety and comfort for her. Margaret has love. Harriet has material possessions. Neither woman has both. Another way Gerstenberg uses the ‘‘compare and contrast’’ motif in Overtones is through her use of color. She establishes in the opening stage directions that each primitive self wears a gown of the same color as their counterpart, but in a darker shade. This helps the audience to visually make the connection between each pair of actresses. But Gerstenberg also helps the audience make the distinction between Harriet and Margaret through a clever use of color. She has chosen their costume colors from opposites sides of the color wheel. Purple and green are not directly opposite each other on the wheel because they both share the color blue, and yet the two colors are far enough apart that they provide a strong visual contrast to one another. In other words, purple and green are alike and yet different, just as Margaret and Harriet are. The juxtaposition of these two colors visually emphasizes the themes and relationships contained within the play. Gerstenberg also plays upon a light/dark theme by keeping Maggie and Hetty upstage and partially veiled. One almost gets the sense that they are lurking in the shadows just waiting for the right opportunity to reveal themselves. In the stage directions, Gerstenberg even uses the term ‘‘shadow’’ to describe how Maggie and Hetty move in conjunction with their respective counterparts. Allowing Maggie and Hetty to interact directly with one another was a wise choice for Gerstenberg, although it is not strictly in keeping with Freudian theory. Normally, one would not assume that the id of one person can directly interact with the id of another because the id’s influence is usually thought to affect only the person within which it is con-
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tained. In Freudian theory, the id can only have contact with the outside world through the ego. The ego is the part of the psyche that mediates the influence of external realities. As Freud notes in The Ego and the Id, ‘‘the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id.’’ By allowing Hetty and Maggie to directly confront one another, however, Gerstenberg multiplies the possibilities for conflict, making for a much more dynamic and forceful piece of theatre. The audience witnesses four simultaneous ‘‘tennis matches’’ on stage: Hetty vs. Harriet; Harriet vs. Margaret; Margaret vs. Maggie; and Maggie vs. Hetty. Ironically, while this possibility for direct conflict between the competing ‘‘ids’’ heightens the intensity, it also heightens the humor contained in Overtones. It is comical to watch Hetty and Maggie physically struggling with each other directly behind the reserved pair of their respective socialites. Harriet and Margaret serve as a static facade in the foreground and their prim and proper mannerism provide a humorous counterpoint to the insanity that is occurring right behind them. This humorous vein is in keeping with Gerstenberg’s usual style. As Stuart J. Hecht notes in the Journal of Popular Culture, ‘‘The vast majority of Gerstenberg’s plays are comedic. The few times that her dramaturgy takes a more serious turn comes in those plays where the inner self is confronted.’’ The above techniques of dual-characters, parallel dialogue, color imagery, and direct interaction between the subconscious-character elements all combine to make Overtones an interesting theatre piece visually, audibly, and symbolically. With this play, Gerstenberg pushed the boundaries of theatrical form and used all means available to create an intriguing exploration into two women’s psyches. She provided numerous clues as to what the piece is ‘‘about’’ so that audiences would be able to easily understand this innovative and complex presentation. Apparently her ideas worked because the influence of Overtones on theatrical form is still recognized. That the play survives and is still produced across the country attests to the fact that audiences during the early part of the twentieth century were ready for this type of theatrical/psychological experience and that they still appreciate it today. Source: Beth Kattelman, Critical Essay on Overtones, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
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SOURCES Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, translated by Joan Riviere, edited by James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Co., 1960, pp. 11–21. Hecht, Stuart J., ‘‘The Plays of Alice Gerstenberg: Cultural Hegemony in the American Little Theatre,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 26, No. 1, Summer 1992, pp. 1–16. Maddock, Mary, ‘‘Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones: The Demon in the Doll,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 37, No. 3, Fall 1994, pp. 474–84. Matherne, Beverly M., ‘‘Alice Gerstenberg,’’ in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Lina Mainiero, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981, pp. 118–20. Newlin, Keith, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in American Plays of the New Woman, edited by Keith Newlin, Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2000, pp. 1–29. Sievers, W. David, ‘‘First Freudian Plays,’’ in Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama, Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1970, pp. 46–61.
FURTHER READING Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate, Freud for Beginners, Pantheon, 1990. An exploration of Freud’s life and theories presented in cartoon form, this book covers Freud’s writings and terminology in an entertaining and accessible way. Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins, eds., Women in American Theatre, Theatre Communications Group, 1987. This anthology contains a good overview of all facets of women’s theatre history in the United States. It includes discussions of numerous lesser-known figures and groups and also provides an extensive bibliography. Diner, Steven J., A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era, Hill & Wang, 1998. This book provides a cohesive social history of 1900 to 1920, a time which is considered the ‘‘progressive era’’ in the United States. It explores how the technological revolution during the early twentieth century transformed the lives of all Americans. Kramer, Dale, Chicago Renaissance, Appleton-Century, 1966. Kramer presents a social history of the literary movement in Chicago from 1900 to 1930. The book extensively discusses the theatrical community of the time.
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The Petrified Forest ROBERT E. SHERWOOD 1935
The Petrified Forest, first performed in 1935, is one of the frequently performed plays of Robert E. Sherwood, one of America’s best-known playwrights, winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1936, 1939, and 1941. One of the reasons the play is so well known is that the 1941 movie adaptation is considered a classic of the gangster genre. Like the Broadway production, the movie starred Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. The role of Duke Mantee, a bitter and complex sociopath, made Bogart a movie star, and his performance helped define how Hollywood was to portray gangsters ever after. The story concerns three characters who move between love and despair: Alan Squier, a penniless intellectual who has come to the desert to die; Gabby, the cafe waitress who believes that her life would be rich with meaning if she could leave the cultural wasteland of America and go to France to study art; and Mantee, a desperate criminal who stalls his escape to reunite with a woman he never talks about. Sherwood uses them, along with the other characters who are held hostage by the gangsters at a small diner on the edge of the desert, to explore the American myths of the sensitive artist and the gangster, finding that they are not as different as they might at first seem. Because of its blend of lively dialog, colorful characters, and psychological understanding, The Petrified Forest has remained a perennial favorite and has continuously been revived since it was first
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written. It is often included in anthologies of American drama and is available from Dramatists Play Service of New York.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Robert Emmet Sherwood was one of the most well recognized and prolific writers of the mid-twentieth century, winning awards in several major fields. He was born in 1896 in New Rochelle, New York, and educated at Milton Academy in Massachusetts and then at Harvard. In 1917, he left Harvard to join the Canadian Black Watch and fight in World War I. He was gassed twice and injured in both of his legs. Like many writers who found their worldview changed by participating in World War I, Sherwood came home disillusioned and virulently opposed to war. He earned his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1918. After college, he worked for several important magazines, as a drama critic for Vanity Fair, as editor-in chief for Life, and as a literary editor for Scribner’s. Sherwood’s first venture into writing for the movies came in 1925, when he was hired to rewrite the title cards for the silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His first professionally produced play, The Road to Rome, was a success on Broadway in 1927, allowing him to quit his magazine work and support himself with writing. There followed a series of plays, nearly one every year, that focused on the futility of war and stressed Sherwood’s faith in individual moral action. These plays were critical and financial successes. The best-known of the plays from this period is The Petrified Forest, which was produced in 1935. Following The Petrified Forest came a stretch of plays that established Sherwood as one of the most important dramatists of his time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Idiot’s Delight in 1936, another Pulitzer for Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1939, and yet another Pulitzer for There Shall Be No Night in 1941. During this period, World War II began in Europe, with America holding back from involvement as Hitler’s army followed a program of expansion. Sherwood’s antiwar position changed as he became increasingly outraged at Nazi aggression. He spent huge amounts of his own money to finance a media campaign to raise American consciousness about what was going on across the ocean. One result was that President Franklin Roosevelt brought Sherwood into his administration, first as a
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speechwriter in 1940, then putting him in charge of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information. After the war, Sherwood wrote a biography, Roosevelt and Hopkins, about the relationship between the president and Harry Hopkins, his most trusted advisor; it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1949. He also won the Academy Award for best screenplay in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives, a drama about veterans readjusting to civilian life. Sherwood’s literary output declined in the years after the war. He wrote a few plays, but they were not well received. In his later life, he was recognized more for his political achievements than for his dramas or screenplays. He died in New York City in 1955 of a heart attack.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The Petrified Forest takes place in the diner of the Black Mesa Filling Station and Bar-B-Q in the desert of eastern Arizona on an autumn day in 1934.
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As the first scene opens, two telegraph linemen who are eating lunch at the diner discuss political theory. The First Lineman believes that the Russian Communist revolution is destined to spread to the rest of the world, and the second is skeptical. Jason Maple, the proprietor of the Black Mesa, enters and tells Boze, his employee, that there is a car outside waiting for gas. Gramp Maple, Jason’s father, enters the linemen’s conversation, telling about when he came to the desert fifty-six years earlier and about the interesting historical figures he has met, including Billy the Kid. Jason becomes annoyed at the First Lineman’s support of Communism. As he leaves, the First Lineman mentions a massacre in Oklahoma, referring to Duke Mantee’s escape from jail; throughout the rest of the scene, the approach of the Mantee gang is mentioned often. Jason talks with Gramp about selling the Black Mesa so that he can use the money to open a motel in Los Angeles. When he goes to change for his American Legion meeting, his daughter Gabby is left alone with Boze. Boze is a former football star, and he is brash and cocky. He tries unsuccessfully to flirt with Gabby. He looks at the poetry she reads and is not interested; he shows her newspaper clippings about his college football glory, but she does not care. A dusty hitchhiker, Alan Squier, enters the diner and orders food. Gramp talks to him about Mantee and about Billy the Kid. Gabby tells Squier about her ambition to go to France to study painting, after he notices her reading the poetry of a French writer. He tells her his story—that he wrote one novel and then lived in France for eight years trying to write another—with the wife he stole from his publisher —and Gabby begins to trust him enough to show her paintings, which she will not show anyone else. As they talk about their lives, she asks if he would like to run off to France with her, asking, ‘‘Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?’’ He admits his attraction but says he must leave. Gabby arranges for Squier to get a ride with the Chisolms, a wealthy couple with a chauffeur who have stopped for gas. Before he leaves, Squier asks Gabby for one kiss, which is interrupted by Boze’s entrance. Boze becomes threatening when Squier cannot pay his thirty-cent tab, but Gabby tells Squier to just leave and, in addition, gives him a dollar. When he is gone, Boze propositions Gabby again. Remembering the way Squier encouraged her to embrace life and upset about being rejected by him, she agrees to
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go out into the field with Boze, but they are stopped when Duke Mantee and his gang force them back into the diner. Mantee is described in the stage directions as having ‘‘one quality of resemblance to Alan Squier; he too is unmistakably condemned.’’ The workers are rounded up: Boze is hostile and threatening, while Gramp Maple tells the gangsters how Old West marshal Wild Bill Hickock filed down the trigger catch on his gun so he could kill five men in quick succession. Mantee tells the cook to make some food, and he orders drinks for everyone— even Gramp, over Gabby’s objections. Act 1 ends when Alan Squier reenters, saying that the Chisolms’ car was hijacked by the Mantee gang. When he sees that he is in the middle of a hostage situation, he is excited: ‘‘It’s pleasant to be back again—among the living. . . . Hooray!’’
Act 2 Act 2 begins about a half hour after the end of act 1. It opens with Gramp telling stories of some more obscure killers he has known. They listen to a radio broadcast, which describes the search for Duke Mantee as ‘‘the greatest manhunt in human history.’’ It mentions a second getaway car, populated by three men and a woman. They have stopped at the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q to rendezvous with the other members of the gang and specifically with the woman, Doris. When Boze calls Squier to task for the liquor he has been drinking, Squier says that he can pay for it. Boze questions this, since he had no money to pay for his meal earlier, and Squier eventually admits that Gabby gave him a dollar. Angry, Boze starts to tell Squier about how she was prepared to go off and have sex with him before Mantee arrived, but Gabby stops him. Boze professes his love for her, and she, in turn, professes her love for Squier. Squier tells her that she should lavish her love on Duke: ‘‘There’s your real mate—another child of nature.’’ When she points out that he has been drinking too much, he explains that both he and Boze are suffering from impotence because the gangsters have taken control of their actions. Mr. and Mrs. Chisolm and their chauffeur, Joseph, walk up, having waited for Squier to come back with help after the Mantee gang stole their car. Boze dives on a machine gun and gets the drop on Mantee, but Mrs. Chisolm enters and, seeing men with guns, screams. Her scream distracts Boze enough for Mantee to draw his pistol and fire,
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hitting him in the hand. He is led into the back room to be bandaged, but his heroic action makes Squier want to do something just as notable. Squier takes out a five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy from his bag and makes it out to Gabby, asking the Chisolms to act as witnesses, to make it legal. He then asks Mantee, who is already sentenced to die for multiple murders, to kill him before leaving the diner, and Mantee agrees. There is tension when Pyles, the black member of the Mantee gang, offers a drink to Joseph, the Chisolms’s black chauffeur. Joseph asks Mr. Chisolm if it is all right to accept the drink and Pyles finds his attitude degrading: ‘‘Ain’t you heard about the big liberation?’’ he asks. ‘‘Come on—take your drink, weasel.’’ Joseph drinks it, but only after Mr. Chisolm nods his permission. As she becomes slightly drunk, Mrs. Chisolm turns against her husband. She responds to Gabby’s idealism by recalling how her own family squelched her dreams of becoming an actress and how she married Chisolm, a boring banker, in order to be respectable. She openly propositions Duke Mantee: he is uninterested, and her husband is embarrassed. Jason Maple arrives at the Black Mesa with members of his American Legion post, and the gangsters capture them. They bring the news that the other part of the Mantee mob has been captured and that the woman, Doris, has become an informer for the federal agents who are hunting Duke. Mantee’s associates tell him that they have to flee, quickly. He hesitates, and Squier encourages him not to let himself become wrapped up in thoughts of revenge but, instead, to run and be free. The local sheriff and his deputies surround the diner and have a shootout with the gangsters. Some members of the gang are killed. Mantee and the rest take hostages with them to ride on the car’s running board as human shields. As he is leaving, Mantee turns and shoots Squier. The sheriff’s men commandeer Jason’s car to chase them, and the other characters, including Boze and Gramp, surround Squier and pronounce their respect for him as he dies.
CHARACTERS Edith Chisolm Mrs. Chisolm is a society lady who seems, at first, to be very concerned with being proper. Her stuffiness misleads audiences, who are shocked
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • The Petrified Forest was adapted as a film starring Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart (who were in the original Broadway production) and Bette Davis. Directed by Archie Mayo and produced by Warner Brothers in 1936, it is available on VHS from Turner Home Video. • The play was also filmed as part of the Producers’ Showcase series and broadcast on NBC television on May 30, 1955. This version, starring Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, and Jack Klugman, is available on VHS from Video Yesteryear.
when, later in the play, she propositions Mantee openly in front of everyone, including her husband. She spends a long time drinking liquor and listening to Gabby’s frustrated dreams of being an artist and then tells Gabby about her own plans to be an actress when she was Gabby’s age. She says that her dream was dashed by her family, who wanted her to remain respectable. ‘‘And before I knew it, I was married to this pillar of the mortgage loan and trust,’’ she says, indicating her husband. After encouraging Gabby to run off to France, she compliments Mantee on being a ‘‘real man,’’ and when someone notes that it sounds as if Mantee has had an offer, she says, ‘‘He certainly has! And it was made with all sincerity, too.’’ In the end, she and her husband are taken as hostages, as the gangsters escape.
Mr. Chisolm Chisolm is a wealthy, cautious, somewhat cheap man. He arrives at the Black Mesa with his wife in a chauffeured car. Inquiring about the cigars for sale, he hears the price of one kind and opts for the less expensive brand. Before he is willing to take Squier, a hitchhiker, across the desert in his car, he has his chauffeur check him for weapons. Still, his precautions do not protect him from the Mantee gang, who steal his car. When the Chisolms walk back to the
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Black Mesa, he offers Duke Mantee money to let them go; Mantee just takes the money from him without bargaining. Later, he is further humiliated when his wife tells everyone about what an unsatisfactory life she has led and offers herself sexually to Duke Mantee.
A Deputy The Sheriff runs onstage with two deputies at the end of the play, while they are pursuing Mantee. The first deputy never speaks.
Mantee. He is led offstage to have his wound bandaged and does not come back until the end of the play.
Jackie A member of Mantee’s gang, Jackie makes suggestive comments to Paula, the cook, as he leads her out back to tie her up. Later, during the shootout, Jackie is supposed to be defending the rear of the building. It is when he hears that Jackie has been shot that Duke knows he has to flee.
Another Deputy Pursuing the Mantee gang at the end of the play, the second deputy calls out from offstage that his car has been disabled because the tires have been shot out.
First Telegraph Lineman Of the two telegraph linemen who eat at the Black Mesa in the beginning of the first act, the one labeled First Lineman talks of the good things that are being done in Communist Russia for the cause of social equality. The Second Lineman calls him ‘‘Nick.’’ Jason Maple threatens him for being critical of America, and he calls Jason ‘‘Mr. Tin Horn Patriot.’’
Herb Herb is a regular customer of the Black Mesa, who comes in early in the play to buy moonshine liquor and beer because he is going to be in a posse that the sheriff has sworn in to capture Duke Mantee. In the end, when Mantee is pursued, Herb is enthusiastic about shooting him.
Boze Hertzlinger Boze is a gas station attendant and former football player who represents physical virility in the play. He played football for Nevada Tech, and in his wallet he carries an old clipping of a newspaper article that praised his athletic ability. He tries to sweet-talk Gabby into giving up her virtue to him, trying to convince her that he loves her and that she just may, deep in her heart, love him too. She is on the verge of giving in to him when the Mantee gang shows up. While they are being tied up, Boze tells Gabby he loves her. When he finds out that she loves Squier, though, he starts to tell the people in the diner how close Gabby came to giving in to him. To prove his love for her, he makes a daring leap to grab a shotgun but ends up being shot in the hand by
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Joseph The Chisolms’ chauffeur Joseph is deferential to his employers, and Pyles is angry with him. Pyles is also black, but because he is a gangster, he does not have to act subservient. Even when Pyles controls the situation by holding a gun on the Chisolms Joseph refuses to take a drink until he has Mr. Chisolm’s permission. During the play’s final gun battle, Joseph cries out in prayer.
Legion Commander The Legion Commander is the Commander of the Ralph M. Kesterling post of the American Legion, and is leading his men in a search party. The stage notes describe him as ‘‘a peppery little man.’’ When they are caught by the gangsters at the diner, he gives Duke the news that his comrades have been captured.
Duke Mantee Mantee is a famous gangster who is on the run from the law and ends up at the Black Mesa. His escape from prison and subsequent crime spree is the subject of gossip and media coverage long before he arrives. When he does show up, near the end of act 1, he turns out to be more courteous and soft-spoken than the ruthless killer that he’s been described to be. He offers the diner’s food and drinks freely to his hostages. He also steals from the rich Chisolms without any hesitation, even showing a sense of amusement. Even though it delays his escape to the Mexican border, Duke insists that his companions must wait at the Black Mesa for another part of his gang, which includes a blonde woman, Doris. He is almost cheerful about agreeing to kill Squier when Squier asks him to, indicating that Mantee might not
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take the request seriously. In the end, though, Mantee finds out that he has been betrayed by Doris, and the cold-blooded killer in him comes out. He shoots Squier on his way out, indicating either his frustration at the world or his sympathy for Squier’s disillusionment.
Gabby Maple The female lead of the play, Gabrielle ‘‘Gabby’’ Maple reads and writes poetry and paints pictures. She is faithful to her father and kind to her grandfather, but she is also tough and uses coarse language. Her mother was French and divorced Gabby’s father when Gabby was young. Each year when she was young, Gabby received a book from her mother, but the books were in French, and she could not read them. Gabby feels her life would be fulfilled if she could just go to France to study art. She is mildly interested in Boze’s flirtations until she meets Alan Squier, who embodies all of the artistic sensibilities that she admires: he is the only one she will show her paintings to, and they are so abstract that he has to ask her, ‘‘Is—this a portrait of someone?’’ When he leaves, she is bitter enough to give in to Boze, just for the experience of it, but is stopped by the gangsters’ arrival. When Squier comes back to the diner, he becomes more and more drawn to Gabby’s idealism, until he eventually declares his deep love for her.
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Jason Maple The manager of the Black Mesa, Jason Maple is a patriotic American and a loyal member of the American Legion. Jason proves to be crude, telling his father to ‘‘shut up,’’ and vain in the ornate uniform he wears to his Legion meeting. Jason is a veteran of the war, although he did not see combat: he drove a truck, which is a point he is very defensive about when Gramp ridicules his American Legion uniform. He plans to move to Los Angeles when Gramp sells the diner. Jason leaves for a Legion meeting early in the play and shows up later with a posse of Legionnaires that is looking for Mantee. They are taken hostage, and Jason feels betrayed when the troops that he was helping to hunt Mantee shoot up his restaurant and then commandeer his car to chase after the fleeing gang.
The Other Legionnaire When the American Legion troops enter the diner with Jason and are captured by Mantee, the Other Legionnaire (referred to by the stage name ‘‘Other’’) alternates with the Legion Commander in telling of the capture of Doris and the other members of Duke’s gang. He is introduced in the stage notes as ‘‘burly and stupid.’’
Paula Paula is the Mexican cook at the Black Mesa.
Gramp Maple Gramp owns the Black Mesa Diner and refuses to sell it, even though his son and granddaughter would like to leave Arizona. He is something of a rebel in that he has fond memories of the time he met Billy the Kid, who once shot at him, and he is a fan of Duke Mantee and follows the gangster’s exploits in the newspaper. When Gramp came to Arizona from Virginia in the 1870s, the area was Indian territory, and he and men like him took their lives into their own hands, running the first telegraph cable. He considers himself a pioneer and feels that life in the modern world has lost the pioneering spirit. ‘‘The trouble with this country is, it got settled,’’ Gramp tells Gabby. During the course of the play, Jason is disrespectful to him, telling him to not talk to the customers, and Gabby follows Jason’s command that Gramp cannot have a drink. When Duke arrives, he returns Gramp’s respect at first by telling the others to give him what he wants, but later he becomes protective and says that Gramp should not drink, because Gabby says so.
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Pyles Pyles is the African-American member of the Mantee gang. When he offers a drink to the Chisolms’ chauffeur and the chauffeur asks for Mr. Chisolm’s permission before drinking it, a stage direction tells performers that Pyles is ‘‘ashamed for his race.’’ Later, when he interrupts Squier’s declaration of love because he is worried for his life, Mrs. Chisolm tells him, ‘‘Be quiet—you black gorilla.’’ Instead of standing up for Pyles, Mantee tells him, ‘‘She pegged you, all right, Pyles.’’
Ruby A member of Duke Mantee’s gang.
Second Telegraph Lineman The Second Lineman is an instigator. He encourages Gramp to tell his stories of the Old West and the First Lineman to talk about Communist principles, and he seems just as amused by each.
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Sheriff At the end of the play, the Sheriff and his deputies enter the diner in pursuit of Mantee’s gang. They take Jason Maple’s car, over his objection, to chase the gangsters who have fled in the Chisolms’ Duesenberg.
Alan Squier Squier is a disillusioned intellectual who eyes other people’s concerns with ironic humor but who ends up dying for love. Squier was born in 1901, and when he was twenty-two, he wrote a novel that was ‘‘very, very stark.’’ It sold poorly, and the publisher lost money on it; then the publisher’s wife divorced him and married Squier. For eight years he lived on the Riviera, trying to write another book, with his wife paying the bills, which he describes to Gabby as being ‘‘a gigolo.’’ He defines himself as a member of a vanishing breed, intellectuals who have conquered nature and now have no purpose to their lives. After his meal, he admits that he has no money to pay, showing no concern or embarrassment. When Gabby offers him a dollar, he accepts it from her. When he ends up back at the Black Mesa, Squier is happy to be part of the hostage situation. He drinks liquor and encourages Duke Mantee and his gang to run from the law. Although he is without ideals himself, Squier tells Mantee to be true to his plan: ‘‘Don’t betray yourself,’’ he tells him. ‘‘Go on, run for the border—and take your illusions with you!’’ Boze’s heroic act of defiance spurs Squier to his own heroic act: he makes Gabby the beneficiary of a five thousand dollar life insurance policy and asks Mantee to kill him, which Mantee does as he is leaving in the end.
with the existing social order, and so he is openminded about different ideas about how society should run. The current social order is represented in the play by Jason Maple, who wears an ornate uniform to his American Legion meeting and opposes things that he finds un-American. Jason’s own father mocks his uniform and points out that he was not even involved in active fighting while he was in the service, which shows Jason’s patriotic fervor to be based more on appearances than on substance. Gramp finds the American Legion’s militaristic attitude to be a sign that they are soft, or too refined. ‘‘The trouble with this country is, it’s got settled,’’ Gramp explains. Gramp favors gangsters, who fight to disrupt the social order, over Legionnaires, who fight to maintain it. He speaks glowingly of killers with whom he has associated, fascinated by their deeds. The mystique of the gangster is that he rejects society’s laws and places himself above them, which makes him more free than those who accept the law. Mrs. Chisolm proves the attraction of lawbreakers by choosing the gangster Duke Mantee, whom she calls a ‘‘real man,’’ over her socially powerful husband. Sherwood has her recall how the established social order made her turn away from her heart’s desire, which was to be an actress, showing how being socially acceptable has led her to eye her husband with contempt. Although the play raises doubts about the prevailing social order, it is that social order that triumphs in the end. Duke Mantee, the social misfit, is hunted down; Squier, the lone traveler, ends up dead. The only one to benefit is Gabby, from the insurance money she will inherit.
THEMES Peril Social Order The Petrified Forest raises questions about the prevailing social order from the moment the curtain rises. The first person to talk is a Communist sympathizer, and his first line is, ‘‘Certainly it’s Revolution!’’ This character explains what he thinks about capitalism and its flaws. Throughout the course of the play, readers can see that Robert Sherwood is not endorsing communism. He does, however, recognize that there is something wrong
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The main element for change in the lives of this play’s characters is their awareness that their lives are in danger. The threat of death makes them give up all pretensions. For instance, in the early part of the play, Boze puts on an act of arrogant overconfidence. When Gabby notes that he thinks a lot of himself, he responds, ‘‘Who wouldn’t, in my position?’’ But when the gangsters hold him at gunpoint, Boze mutters vague, barely coherent threats that are easily laughed away. In the same way,
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research the famed arts and literature scene of Paris in the 1920s, and explain why so many Americans were drawn to become part of that lifestyle.
• Robert E. Sherwood is known for the antiwar themes of his plays. Try to identify subtle ways in which The Petrified Forest can be seen as a statement against war.
• Compare the sort of publicity that Billy the Kid received in his lifetime to the things that were written about a famous 1930s gangster like John Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson when they were alive. Did public attitudes change? If so, why?
• Boze is a former football star who has become a gas station attendant. Find someone who used to play football, and interview him about why he quit playing and how he feels about the game now.
• Watch a few gangster films from the twenties and thirties. In what ways is Duke Mantee a typical criminal figure from that time? In what ways is he unique?
• Write a short three-person play describing the conversation in the Chisolms’ car on the drive back to Ohio.
Squier tries to keep up his carefree attitude while being held hostage, but his good humor is strained and can only be maintained with drinking. As he drinks, he becomes more depressed and filled with self-loathing, telling Gabby that his problem is ‘‘the same disease that’s affecting Boze! Impotence!’’ He is not talking about sexual impotence but rather the inability to take action in the face of mortal danger. Things change when Boze faces the danger they are in directly: he grabs a shotgun and turns it on Mantee. His move fails, but at least he has broken the sense of doom. Alan Squier is not the type of man to handle a gun, but seeing Boze face death encourages him to face death in his own way, by asking Mantee to shoot him, which Gramp, in the end, calls ‘‘a hero’s death.’’ One other character whose life is affected by peril is Duke Mantee himself. He does not talk about Doris, who is supposed to meet him at the Black Mesa, but audiences can tell that he loves her, because he seems blind to the danger that he is in, needing the members of his gang and Alan Squier to shout it at him. As the play progresses, Mantee finds himself paralyzed, torn between the instinctive de-
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sire to keep himself out of peril and the desire to wait for her or, later, the desire for revenge once he finds out she has betrayed him.
Man versus Nature This play presents a clear view of the way that man’s intellectual ability separates him from his natural, instinctive functions. It assigns each human tendency, intellect and instinct, to the two main male leads, who are physically linked, according to Sherwood’s stage direction, by the fact that they are both ‘‘unmistakably condemned.’’ Squier feels a loss of meaning in his life because he has become alienated from nature. He describes himself as having ‘‘brains without purpose. Noise without sound. Shape without substance.’’ He is one of the intellectuals who felt that they had subdued Nature, only to find that nature is fighting back with neuroses. Gabby, who has been raised in a difficult land and has never had a real chance to express herself intellectually, is impressed with Squier’s intellectual ability and finds him much more interesting than Boze, who is earthy and physical. Squier, in turn, admires Duke Mantee, who is able to act unself-consciously in a way that he
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himself never can. He calls Mantee a ‘‘child of Nature,’’ suited to be Gabby’s ‘‘mate.’’ It is a great disappointment when, in the end, he finds that Mantee does not act instinctively to save his own life by running but, instead, complicates his action by thinking about going to Doris to take revenge for her betrayal. Squier tells him that going for his revenge would be a betrayal of himself: he would be overriding his instinct for self-preservation with a complex, purely human emotion.
Morals and Morality Alan Squier arrives at the Black Mesa empty of any morals. He defines himself as a gigolo, who made his living for years taking his wife’s money in exchange for being her sexual plaything. He turns down Gabby’s offer to travel with him, happy to have the opportunity to remember her and to think that he might have been able to sin. He lists all of the philosophical and religious systems he can think of and proclaims that they are as dead as the trees in the Petrified Forest. The play represents Squier’s moral growth. Through some combination of jealousy for Boze’s grand gesture that got him shot and the shadow of his own lost values that he sees in Gabby, he builds a rudimentary sense of morality. It is not very complex and has only one level—all that he does for the rest of his short life is done in order to assure her ability to go to France, as she has always dreamed. Still, it is a moral system in that it gives him something to live for beyond immediate pleasure or pain. It is ironic, then, that Squier almost makes Gabby give up her own morality. She comes away from their first conversation together with his assurance that there is nothing very magical about France, which she has pinned her hopes on. She later tells Boze that she was willing to have sex with him (Boze) because she thought, ‘‘I’d better get rid of all the girlish bunk that was in me, like thinking so much about going to France, and Art, and dancing in the streets.’’ Having learned from Squier that only experience counts, regardless of whether it is in France or the American desert, she nearly gives in to Boze’s vulgar propositions, just to see what sex is like. Later, she looks in horror at what she almost did, realizing what a violation of her own sense of morality it would have been. As Squier is rebuilding his own moral sense, which has been worn down by years of abstract intellectualism, Gabby is learning to defend her own morality from the same intellectual void.
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STYLE Convention The Petrified Forest uses an age-old dramatic convention which takes a set of diverse characters and creates some reason why they have to remain together in some confined space, in order to keep the actors on stage together throughout the performance. Plays have used such conventional devices as a social gathering, such as a wedding, birthday party, or poker game; or a closed method of transportation, such as a lifeboat or elevator. In Robert Sherwood’s next play, Idiot’s Delight (1936), travelers are forced to remain in a hotel in Europe when bombs start dropping at the start of World War II. In his play Key Largo (1939), a Florida hurricane makes it impossible for anyone to leave the premises of a hotel. (Another reason they are unable to leave is that, as in The Petrified Forest, the hotel staff and guests are being held by gangsters who are waiting to join others from their mob.) Because the traditional stage is a rectangle at the front of the theater, audiences have become accustomed to conventions that bring strangers together into one confined space, and they tend to accept them even when such gatherings would seem highly improbable in the real world.
Denouement Denouement is a French word meaning ‘‘the unknotting.’’ In literary criticism, it is used to refer to the part of the story that comes after the climax, when the various plot complications are resolved. In The Petrified Forest, the climax comes when Duke Mantee shoots Alan Squier. It is the one definitive moment at the end of the play, the one action that settles issues that had been left open. Once Squier asks Mantee to shoot him, early in the second act, the situation is out of his hands. It is no longer his decision about whether Mantee goes through with it; it is Mantee’s decision alone. Audiences are given several clues to make them believe that Mantee might not kill Squier even after he has said that he will. First, the fact that he only wounds Boze, who is trying to kill him, indicates that his reputation as a cold-blooded killer might be exaggerated. He seems to find a soft spot in his heart for people, particularly Gramp Maple, and so one could easily believe that he never really intended to shoot someone who poses no threat to him. In addition, the whole play seems to be a test of Squier’s
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character, so that once he has found meaning in his life by professing his love for Gabby, there is no dramatic reason why he has to die. Still, in spite of all of the indicators to the contrary, Mantee shows himself to be the murderer that his friends and the newspapers say he is. After the climactic moment when Squier is killed, several interesting, but not necessary, things happen in the denouement. Boze, who had been his rival for Gabby’s affection, pronounces him ‘‘a good guy’’; Gramp says he was ‘‘a hero,’’ raising a question of what it really means to be heroic; and Gabby deals with her grief courageously, reciting a poem that gives her comfort in her time of need, which signifies that her artistic ideals have not been shattered by the day’s proceedings. These are all aspects of the characters that might have gone differently, but the play’s denouement is showing audiences what the future holds for them. What the denouement does not give is the fate of Duke Mantee. There are hints that the manhunt is closing in on him and that the chase will only last as long as it takes radio-alerted policemen to pull him over. There is, however, just as much evidence that the same cunning and ruthlessness that has helped him escape before will serve him again and that he will always be on the run.
Antihero An antihero is a main character in a play that does not have the traditional qualities that a hero possesses, such as courage, strength, or idealism. In The Petrified Forest, Alan Squier is very honest about the fact that he does not have any of these traits. He tells Gabby when he first meets her, ‘‘I’ve been hoping to find something that’s worth living for—and worth dying for.’’ He wants to be buried in the Petrified Forest because it represents ‘‘the world of outmoded ideas.’’ When he is taken prisoner, he asks for whiskey and passes drinks around to the others. He even tells Mantee that he is no threat to the gunman’s ‘‘superiority,’’ saying, ‘‘[i]f I had a machine gun, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’’ Despite the fact that he does not have the traditional qualities of a hero, audiences can take interest in how Alan Squier comes out of this situation because they care for him. They admire his honesty, even though it does replace courage and ideals. When Gramp says that he died ‘‘a hero’s death,’’ he is giving new meaning to the word ‘‘hero,’’ expanding it to mean someone who has done a supremely selfless act, even though he is not technically a hero.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Organized Crime A new era for crime in America arose in the 1920s when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution ushered in Prohibition. For decades, temperance groups had fought to outlaw alcohol, citing clear and overwhelming evidence of its negative effect on society. Sale and consumption of liquor was prohibited in the United States from January 1, 1920, until 1933, when the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. An unanticipated result of Prohibition was that it gave rise to a criminal class that had previously been scattered. Even though it was illegal, people still wanted liquor and were willing to pay for it, which meant that there was a handsome profit to be made for anyone willing to flout the law. In small towns and rural areas, moonshiners, who made their own product in stills put together out of copper kettles and tubing, often provided liquor. Local people, sometimes even those involved in law enforcement, knew who had the stills, and they went to them for moonshine. Prohibition, therefore, served to blur the line between criminals and law-abiding citizens. Instead of making alcohol socially unacceptable, it often ended up making it socially acceptable to ignore the law. The effect of Prohibition on organized crime was even more powerful in urban areas. In cities, people could not operate stills with open fires, at least not to provide as much liquor as was required. Criminal syndicates rose up to illegally import alcohol from other countries, usually Canada or Cuba. The benefits gained from unity, from pooling resources of transportation, offshore connections, and political influence, made it worthwhile to combine forces, creating larger mobs, while the competition from different mobs going after the same customer base gave rise to violent gangland wars. The image of gangsters firing Thompson submachine guns (‘‘Tommy guns’’) that is commonly evoked as an element of the Roaring Twenties comes from the public’s full awareness of the turf battles that were being played out in city streets by gangsters whose names were becoming nationally familiar, such as Dutch Schultz, ‘‘Bugs’’ Moran, and Al Capone.
Bank Robbers While Prohibition made public personages out of criminals, it was the Great Depression that made them popular. The depression began after the stock
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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1930s: America is in the middle of the Great Depression. Small businesses like the one in the play have a difficult time avoiding bankruptcy. Today: Independent gas stations and restaurants are increasingly rare, as both industries are dominated by franchise businesses. • 1930s: America has a fascination with the exploits of gangsters such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and Baby Face Nelson.
• 1930s: The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest area of Arizona is a popular vacation stop. Today: Entertainment spots such as Disney World and Las Vegas are more popular than are natural formations as vacation destinations.
Today: A whole category of rap music is dedicated to the exploits of ‘‘gangstas.’’
• 1930s: Audiences are shocked to hear the kind of language that Gabby uses in the play, considering it improper for a lady.
• 1930s: A young woman living in the Arizona desert could only dream of what France was like.
Today: Gabby’s language is so mild by today’s standards that it would hardly be noticed.
Today: Any person with an internet connection can find endless information about daily life in France from the World Wide Web.
• 1930s: Workers in the United States who are distressed about the nation’s social inequality might have a casual discussion about the benefits of Communism over lunch in a diner.
• 1930s: Because of laws and traditions that require races to remain separated, law-abiding blacks are likely to participate in society as paid servants, such as cooks, butlers, and cleaning persons.
market crash of October 1929: within two years, U.S. stocks lost around $50 billion, which had a rippling effect on the economy. Banks that lost money from investments had to call in loans; businesses that had borrowed from the banks had to lay off workers; unemployed workers had to draw what money they had out of banks and then default on their mortgages, causing even tighter financial conditions. A certain class of criminal arose, one that realized that the only way to get money was to go to where it was kept, the banks, and steal it at gunpoint. They targeted banks in small towns, generally, where the security would be lax. Different career bank robbers were known for their different approaches: Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, for
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Today: Equal job opportunity has been required by federal law since the 1960s, and as a result no occupations are expected to be staffed solely by any one race.
Today: During the cold war (1945–1990), most Americans considered Communism a threat. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most Americans dismiss it as a failure.
instance, were polite to their victims, whereas George ‘‘Baby Face’’ Nelson gained a reputation as a ruthless homicidal maniac. John Dillinger was recognized as the most important of them all, having been named by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, as ‘‘public enemy number one.’’ Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Dillinger were all killed in shoot-outs with authorities in separate incidents in 1934, the year before this play was produced. As opposed to the urban mob figures, the bank robbers found a place in the imaginations of the American people who, like Gramp Maple in The Petrified Forest, idealized them as folk heroes, much as an earlier generation had done for thieves like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Those who were
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made suddenly poor by the depression found a sense of empowerment by watching the bandits rob the banks they felt had cheated them out of their money. The majority of Americans were poor, and many found the direct criminals more sympathetic than the ones who made their fortune manipulating the system. As folk singer Woody Guthrie put it in his song ‘‘The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,’’ which lionized the notorious criminal as a modern-day Robin Hood, ‘‘Some will rob you with a six gun, / And some with a fountain pen.’’ A later line from the same song notes: ‘‘And as through your life you travel, yes and through your life you roam / You won’t never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.’’
Movie Gangsters During the depression, Hollywood, and in particular the Warner Brothers Studio, made a series of films that focused upon criminals. The first was Little Caesar, in 1930, starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico, a small-time hood who rises to wealth and power through sheer ruthlessness. The film makes grand drama out of the inherent complexities of the criminal lifestyle: in the end, Rico, having decimated his enemies, is betrayed by a man that he could not bring himself to kill, out of friendship. The film was a huge success, and Warner Brothers quickly followed it with Public Enemy, starring James Cagney, who surprised audiences who were used to seeing him act in sophisticated comedies. Like Rico, Cagney’s Tom Powers starts small and ends big, losing his humanity along the way. What these films had, and what the dozens of gangster films that followed tried unsuccessfully to copy, was strong central performances by actors who could hold audiences’ sympathies while frightening them with their machine-like determination. The film-gangsters’ mastery of their worlds allowed victims of the depression to imagine that success was available to anyone but that the moral cost was not worth it. The gangster film cycle burned itself out quickly. By 1933, America had elected a new president, and the optimism of Roosevelt’s New Deal edged out the nation’s panic over a free-falling economy. Protests over the gangster films’ excessive sex and violence made studio executives realize that public tastes had changed, and escapist musicals became the new trend. Still, the American archetype of the doomed, machine-gun-wielding bandit had been established, and it remains with us today.
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Petrified Forest is generally considered to be the start of Robert Sherwood’s most prolific period as a playwright, during which he won three Pulitzer Prizes for drama within five years. Even when The Petrified Forest was first produced, it was recognized as a sign of a major literary career. Brian Doherty, writing in the magazine Canadian Forum, noted that this play and the one Sherwood wrote before it, Reunion in Vienna, ‘‘definitely establish Sherwood’s right to be ranked as one of the leading American dramatists.’’ Many critics found the play to be technically complex and intellectually challenging in its structure. One was John Howard Lawson, who used it as an example in his 1936 essay, ‘‘The Technique of the Modern Play.’’ Lawson observed how Sherwood’s approach to his material was ‘‘as static as the point of view of the hero,’’ identifying only one real action in the entire production, when Mantee kills Squier at the end. ‘‘From a structural point of view,’’ Lawson wrote, ‘‘the deed is neither climactic nor spontaneous, because it is a repetition-situation.’’ This acknowledgement of the play’s lack of traditional dramatic action in its structure is not a criticism, just an acknowledgement of the style Sherwood used to capture Squier’s intellectual condition. Edith J. R. Isaacs, on the other hand, was openly critical of the way Sherwood handled the situation in The Petrified Forest. In her essay ‘‘Robert Sherwood: Man of the Hour,’’ which was written near the height of Sherwood’s dramatic career in 1939, she praised the craftsmanship he displayed in Reunion in Vienna but went on to say that ‘‘[t]hen, to disturb the critics’ placidity, came The Petrified Forest, with one of the best first acts Sherwood has ever written . . . and with a second act that rides full tilt into the most specious hokum with which the playwright has ever made a compromise.’’ Isaacs conceded that the structure of the play is meant to show the contrast between Squier’s inability to act and Mantee’s violent outburst at the end, but she did not think his attempt to combine structure and content was successful, nor did she find it worth doing in this case. ‘‘It is sincerely hoped that Mr. Sherwood regrets writing The Petrified Forest after Reunion in Vienna,’’ Isaacs wrote. Critics in general have not been as harsh in their judgment as Isaacs, but they have been willing to concede that the play may not work as well on the
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A scene from the 1936 film adaptation of The Petrified Forest, featuring Bette Davis and Leslie Howard
philosophical level as it does on the dramatic one. What Isaacs found problematic and branded as ‘‘hokum,’’ more recent critics have accepted as entertainment. One critic who was able to view the play at a distance of more than twenty years was Joseph Wood Krutch, who singled it out in his 1957 book, The American Dream since 1918: An Informal History. After noting Sherwood’s serious intent in writing the play, Krutch explained that the author’s sincerity was irrelevant in this case, because Sherwood was such a gifted craftsman that he could make the play work anyway: ‘‘The Petrified Forest could succeed on its superficial merits
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alone,’’ Krutch writes, ‘‘and one has some difficulty in deciding whether or not one has been charmed into granting it virtues deeper than any it really has.’’ Because philosophical issues have changed over time and the question of meaning and meaninglessness is not the pressing social concern that it was in the first half of the last century, recent appraisals of the play tend to focus away from its worldview and, like Krutch, to appreciate Sherwood’s control of language and situation. Some critics still feel that the situation is too contrived to make The Petrified Forest the serious drama that it presents itself to be.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Sherwood followed The Petrified Forest with Idiot’s Delight, the first of his three Pulitzer Prize–winning plays. Published in 1936, it concerns a group of European travelers who are trapped in a hotel, coming to grips with their beliefs as World War II begins. In reality, the war began years after the play was written.
• Gabby Maple’s enthusiasm for French art is fueled by the poetry of the fifteenth-century writer François Villon. François Villon: Complete Poems is available in a 1994 edition by University of Toronto Press, edited with English translation and commentary by Barbara N. Sargent-Baur.
• Of all of the famous criminals of the early thirties, the one Duke Mantee seems most closely patterned after is Charles ‘‘Pretty Boy’’ Floyd, who was accused of murdering federal agents in helping a prisoner to escape in an event called the ‘‘Kansas City Massacre’’ (like the ‘‘Oklahoma City Massacre’’ reported in the play). The facts of Floyd’s life and mystique are examined in Michael Wallis’s Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd (1992).
• As opposed to Gabby’s romantic view, Alan Squier expresses his own nihilism by referring to T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, ‘‘The Hollow Men,’’ considered one of the basic texts in modernist thought.
• Edward Anderson’s novel Thieves Like Us (1935) was a groundbreaking work about bank robbers trying to stay one step ahead of the law in the Southwest. It is currently out of print but is available in its entirety in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s, edited by Horace McCoy. • In the second act, Alan Squier compares the situation in the diner to the situation in All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 war novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque that was obviously a source of inspiration for Sherwood.
CRITICISM David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College. In this essay, Kelly examines the ways in which Sherwood’s play can be categorized as a comedy. Robert E. Sherwood’s 1935 play The Petrified Forest, delves into deep topics concerning love and
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• One of the best sources to tell modern readers what life was like when this novel takes place is Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970). Terkel recorded his interviews with ordinary people who talked about their lives and how they viewed the events of the time. • Sherwood was one of the most famous literary figures around New York in the 1920s and 1930s. James R. Gaines’s Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table is an informative and witty account of the famed social group that Sherwood belonged to with a group of other writers and actors known for their lively and witty conversation. It was published in 1977 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
existence, and it ends with one man shooting another in cold blood—but at its core it is a comedy. This might seem an odd idea to audiences who find few outright laughs in the play. A better way to judge it overall, though, might be for audiences to ask what effect the play has had on them when it is done. Most viewers would probably find that they are sorrier for hopeless intellectual Alan Squier’s loss of ideas than they are for his actual death, and that gangster Duke Mantee being ‘‘doomed,’’ as Sherwood describes him in a stage direction, is not
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really such a bad thing at all. The basic distinction between tragedy and comedy, as defined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, is that in tragedy everything turns out badly, regardless of who is good and who has good intentions, whereas in comedy things turn out well. A further distinction, which derives from the first, holds that tragic characters are the ones audiences come to care deeply about and empathize with, whereas comic characters are held at an objective distance, where their successes and failures can be observed as part of one grand and generally benevolent scheme. The characters in The Petrified Forest are passionate, sometimes; they have personality traits that most people can relate to, even when those traits are submerged in broadly painted caricatures. What happens to them, even the lead characters, is less compelling to audiences than the ways in which they interact. They operate like cardboard cutouts that are posed in interesting positions, which is not at all unusual for comedy. The play is enjoyable, and it is thought-provoking in a large, abstract sense, but Sherwood is only able to achieve its many virtues by rendering all of the characters as types. The most obvious of these is, of course, Gramp Maple, the grizzled old-timer who wanders around the stage looking for someone willing to listen to his stories about how life used to be, when his life was vibrant and what he did and said actually mattered. His is a character type that appears in all cultures, a reminder of how times change. Sherwood makes Gramp interesting by making his values the opposite of what audiences would expect. Normally, the ‘‘cranky old man’’ figure will have conservative values, because he feels that the old order that he’s been comfortable with is being overrun by lawless criminal attitudes. Gramp, on the other hand, is sick of order. He misses the challenges of the uncivilized frontier. But turning the stereotype around by having Gramp cheer the troublemakers does not make him less of a stereotype; he’s just doing the unexpected: surprising the audience in the way that good comedy often does. Gramp is given his nemesis in his son, Jason, who is pompous, arrogant, and devoted to the social order in an almost maniacal way. Jason, too, is a character type. Early in the play, he is rankled by the Communist lineman. Rather than revealing any further dimensions to his character as the play progresses, Sherwood proceeds to magnify this one trait of gung-ho patriotism by putting Jason in a ridiculous uniform and having him grab a gun that
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he is obviously (compared to the play’s gangsters) unqualified to use. His foolish nature holds true to form when the posse he has joined to capture the Mantee gang is itself captured and immediately disarmed. Boze Hertzlinger, whom Alan Squier sarcastically refers to by his jersey number when he calls him ‘‘Number 42 out there,’’ never really rises above the stereotype of the washed-up athlete. Sherwood does try, in the second act, to add depth to Boze by having him swear true love to Gabby, but this has little effect on her or, therefore, to the audience. Boze’s most notable action is in making a grab for a shotgun and turning it on the notorious killers, but this does not really say anything about him that was not already present from the beginning. Sherwood does say in the stage notes that Boze’s voice is ‘‘strained’’ when announcing that he is not afraid to die, indicating that he actually is, but this does not mean that he is a coward, and since he is not an established coward, his courageous act does not represent the turning point that it seems meant to be. Boze starts out as a self-deluded braggart, and his claim of love and his leap for the gun do nothing to contradict that. Any consideration of the comic elements of The Petrified Forest would be incomplete without mentioning the Chisolms. Mr. Chisolm is the kind of character who would have delighted depression audiences: though he is rich, he is not necessarily better than anyone and generally is, in fact, quite worse. His wealth is of no use to him at the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q. He is foolish enough to try to bargain with a tough guy like Duke Mantee. Like a character from Aesop’s Fables, he tries to be thrifty and ends up losing all of his money. His wife openly despises him and mocks his sexual virility in public. Chisolm’s final instructions to his wife are played as pure, unabashed comedy. The comic set-up—‘‘[i]f I’m killed and you’re not’’—leads audiences to expect some emotional dimension that Chisolm has not shown so far, some tenderness even after she has humiliated him. The comic payoff is that she should ‘‘notify Jack Lavery. He has full instructions,’’ showing him to be a heartless bureaucrat to the end. Secondary characters can be comic figures without the play itself being a comedy. The focus of the play is, after all, on Alan Squier, Gabby Maple, and Duke Mantee. These characters have more problems, more issues to discuss, and they provide more for the audience to empathize with. They certainly do not seem at first to exist in a comedy.
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There is a difference, though, between involving the audience with the character’s issues and involving them with the actual character. Even these lead characters, whose ideas are explored in detail, end up functioning more as symbols of people than as convincing, rounded characters. In the case of Duke Mantee, much of the play’s emotional distance is probably intentional. He is a media-star gangster, his viciousness hyped in newspapers and on the radio and by his henchman Jackie, who precedes Duke into the restaurant announcing, ‘‘This is Duke Mantee, folks. He’s the worldfamous killer and he’s hungry.’’ In person, though, Mantee does not act like the heartless animal that others say he is. When Boze threatens to shoot him, he stops him by just injuring him slightly, only as necessary—hardly the sort of thing a soulless killer would do to keep his hostages in line. The fact that he changes positions late in the play and decides that Gramp should not have any liquor, because ‘‘[t]he girl says he oughtn’t to have it,’’ implies a growing concern for the old man’s health. And his insistence on waiting for Doris shows him to be, at least in part, as much of a fool for romance as anyone. The structure of the script requires that audiences believe there is at least a slight possibility that Mantee will not shoot Alan Squier in the end, and so these humane touches are necessary for story construction. His contradictory actions do not really make him a complex character, though. A case could be made that Mantee finds himself going soft as he bonds with the people in the diner and that he shoots Alan to reaffirm to himself that he will not let sentiment pull him down, but that does not explain why he would let Boze off so lightly. He shoots Squier to assert his animal nature over Squier’s intellectualism. This much is clear on the abstract level, but it does not fit with his actions. His personality quirks are understandable for symbolic purposes, but they are too far removed from real human behavior to consider this a tragic drama. Alan Squier seems to be the play’s focal character, the one that audiences are supposed to relate to, but under scrutiny he proves himself to be little more than a big, walking allegory. He has allegedly come across the desert without a penny on him, forging ahead, even though life has no meaning for him. The reason life has no meaning appears to be that he has read much but could not write his second novel. Still, he retains a poetic appreciation for metaphor. He lights up at the appropriateness of the Petrified Forest as symbolic of all of society’s ills,
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SQUIER HIMSELF WOULD BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT THAT HIS DEATH IS A SYMBOLIC END TO A SYMBOLIC LIFE. IT IS NOT COMIC IN A ‘FUNNY’ SENSE BUT COMIC IN THAT AUDIENCES FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH SEEING HIM GO.’’
and when he starts to admit to finding meaning in his life, he expresses it just as poetically: ‘‘I’ve found what I was looking for here in the Valley of the Shadow.’’ It is easier to understand Squier’s concerns in theory than it is to understand him. Squier himself would be the first to admit that his death is a symbolic end to a symbolic life. It is not comic in a ‘‘funny’’ sense but comic in that audiences feel comfortable with seeing him go. At the end of the play, Gabby remains. She grieves for Squier, the man that she fell deeply in love with hours ago, during their first conversation. What has she lost? The company of the man who engaged her in intellectual conversation and clever talk, trying to convince her that intellectuality and cleverness are worthless. What has she gained? Five thousand dollars in insurance money. She starts out the play with romantic dreams of Villon’s France and ends it reading Villon over that most romantic image of all, a lover who died young. With all of the gunplay and shouting, not much changes for Gabby throughout the course of the play except that she finds herself rich enough to leave Arizona. The Petrified Forest is a comedy with more frights than laughs. It presents itself as an exploration of modern ideas, but, in the process of putting those ideas into the mouths of characters, Sherwood has turned them into self-fulfilling prophecies. Duke Mantee is a murderer with some kind traits, but basically he is the murderer that everyone says he is. Alan Squier shows up at the Black Mesa thinking that ideas are irrelevant and that he is obsolete, and in the end he dies, and none of the survivors seems to have registered a word that he said (a fate that he seems to wish upon himself by prompting Gabby
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with the Villon poem she reads at the end, as if he is pushing her back to the emotional place she was when he arrived). Gabby Maple dreams of France in the beginning, and at the end she has her opportunity to go there. As Alan tells her, after he has arranged his own death, ‘‘Maybe we will be happy together in a funny kind of way.’’ Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Petrified Forest, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
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SOURCES Doherty, Brian, ‘‘Footlights,’’ Review, in Canadian Forum, Vol. XV, 1934–1935, p. 194, quoted in R. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood, Twayne’s United States Author Series, No. 58, Twayne Publishers, 1964, p. 67. Guthrie, Woody, ‘‘The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,’’ lyrics, Woody Guthrie, American Folksong, Sanga Music Inc., 1958. Isaacs, Edith J. R., ‘‘Robert Sherwood: Man of the Hour,’’ in Theatre Arts, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, January 1939, pp. 31–40. Krutch, Joseph Wood, ‘‘Comedy,’’ in The American Dream since 1918: An Informal History, rev. ed., Braziller, 1957, pp. 134–225. Lawson, John Howard, ‘‘The Technique of the Modern Play,’’ in Theory and Technique of Playwrighting, Hill & Wang, 1936, pp. 143–44.
FURTHER READING Auchincloss, Louis, ‘‘Robert E. Sherwood,’’ in The Man behind the Book: Literary Profiles, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996, pp. 192–98.
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Written by one of the most famed biographers of the mid-twentieth century, this brief but telling profile of the playwright does not have much detail about Sherwood’s life but is told by an intelligent observer. Brown, John Mason, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896–1939, Harper & Row, 1962. Brown’s book is considered to be the definitive biography of Sherwood, following his life up to the start of World War II and offering insight into how the playwright’s ideas formed. He also wrote The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War, published by Harper & Row in 1970. Meserve, Walter J., Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist, Pegasus, 1970. Meserve examines Sherwood’s career in terms of his Christian social ideals. Wiser, William, The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s, Carroll & Graff, 2000. Wiser’s follow-up book to The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties does what the play does: it links the artistic freedom that Paris was famous for to the harsh realities that lay ahead with the coming of World War II.
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The Sisters Rosensweig The Sisters Rosensweig, Wendy Wasserstein’s play about the transformative power of love, of sisterhood, and of life, was directed by Daniel Sullivan at Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in New York City, opening in October 1992. Currently available in print, it was published in 1992 by the Dramatists Play Service in New York. The play is held together by the richly woven dialogue of three JewishAmerican sisters pushing against the boundaries of their own lives in order to define themselves. Consequently, they do come to a point of resolution in their struggles, sometimes raising their voices in protest to be heard, at other times speaking softly in an attempt to hear themselves. Despite the absence of any action, the sisters manage to transform both themselves and their lives in the course of one evening. Another significant feature of the work is its ability to capture and make real several social and political issues that gave shape to the late part of the 1980s—the fall of the Soviet Union, Reaganomics, and the plight of the homeless, to name a few. In fact, the events discussed in the work are merely a reflection of what Wasserstein experienced in her own travels, first in eastern Europe, before the fall of the Soviet Union, and in Poland, in a town where she could see no evidence of her Jewish ancestry. It was her goal not only to raise certain political and social questions but also to illuminate her Jewish heritage, using her work as her vehicle. The play was admired by critics for its humor and insight, and it managed to earn the
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playwright both an Outer Critics Circle Award and an Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award nomination for best play in 1993.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Wendy Wasserstein is recognized not only for the celebration of women in her feminist plays but also for the celebration of her Jewish heritage. She was born on October 8, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York. Wasserstein initially attended the Calhoun School to study dance with Judy Taylor and spent considerable time at Broadway matinees. Her playwriting began in the years she attended Mt. Holyoke College, where she earned a bachelor of arts in history in 1971. During this time, a friend managed to convince Wasserstein to take a playwriting course at Smith College. She was so taken with the genre that, upon graduation from Holyoke, she studied creative writing at City College of the City University of New York, where she received her master of arts. In an interview with Esther Cohen in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, she shares her recollections on when she really began writing. Wasserstein remembers writing something called the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show in high school, to get out of gym: ‘‘I know very little about fashion, but they used to have this Mother-Daughter Fashion Show . . . and you got to leave school to go.’’ According to Wasserstein, ‘‘if you wrote it you didn’t have to go to gym class for like two or three weeks. It was fantastic. So I started writing those.’’ Wasserstein developed an intense love for playwriting, her love for the genre eventually taking her to Yale. She developed a passion for Russian literature and immersed herself in it. In consequence, a certain Russian style is evident in her writing, particularly reflecting the works of Anton Chekov, whose influence appears in many of her works. The rumblings of Chekov’s Three Sisters in the background, for example, subtly influence The Sisters Rosensweig. The situational comedies she writes maintain a certain reserve, in keeping with her former studies. The action of her plays is limited, yet the characters go through tremendous life changes. In Tender Offer, for example, a family reaches a new level of mutual understanding through communication. Wasserstein’s greatest achievement was The Heidi
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Chronicles, a work that earned her a Pulitzer in 1989. It is a feminist documentary, of sorts, tracing the life of one woman for over twenty-five years as she moves through the 1960s to the 1990s in her search for identity. Further awards include the Tony Award for best play, League of American Theaters and Producers, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award, all in 1989 for The Heidi Chronicles; and an Outer Critics Circle Award and Tony Award nomination for best play, 1993, for The Sisters Rosensweig.
PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Act 1 marks the beginning of the Rosensweig sisters’ family reunion in London. ‘‘Blame it on Jesse, Jesse the Sikh,’’ explains Pfeni, the fortysomething, eccentric world traveler, of her tardiness. Tess shares with Pfeni that she is listening to her mother’s college singing group as part of a school summer project. The project requires Tess to write a biography on her mother’s ‘‘early years.’’ Says Tess of the project, ‘‘It’s pretentious. I can’t wait to leave London and go back home to school.’’ When Pfeni asks her niece why she has not asked her mother if she can return to the United States, Tess replies that her mother is ‘‘the only American who is convinced that Harvard and Yale are second-rate institutions,’’ stating that ‘‘she [Sara] won’t even discuss it.’’ Tess confides that Sara worries she will become like Pfeni, an emotionally defensive woman, who compulsively travels to avoid her fear of commitment. ‘‘I just don’t know what you have in common with someone who dreams of selling radio parts,’’ declares Sara to Tess. Tess argues that ‘‘Tom comes from a perfectly balanced and normal family,’’ something her mother has ‘‘never managed to maintain,’’ and that Tom is desirable company compared to Sara’s dinner guest, ‘‘the socially acceptable, racist, sexist, and more than likely anti-Semitic Nicholas Pym.’’ Dismayed by the sense of determination Tess demonstrates to create a life in opposition to hers, Sara concedes by quietly extending an invitation to her daughter’s boyfriend. Pfeni points out that Tess is no different from either Sara or herself, in that, as justified as Sara was in her act of rebellion, ‘‘so maybe is Tessie.’’
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Both Merv and Geoffrey plan to meet up with a ‘‘homeless delegation’’ to discuss the possibility of putting on a homeless benefit at the National as ‘‘a sort of story theatre.’’ When Geoffrey leaves Merv behind to meet up with the group at the Savoy Hotel, Pfeni also exits to find Tom and Tessie, and Merv settles into a conversation with Sara. They exchange personal histories, Merv pointing out to Sara that she’s ‘‘the first Jewish woman I’ve met to work in a Hong Kong bank.’’ Sara corrects Merv’s assertion, stating that she is ‘‘the first woman to run a Hong Kong bank, Mr. Kant.’’ Merv acknowledges her intention to avoid any reference to ethnicity by pointing out that his name ‘‘used to be Kantlowitz’’ and asks her if she would prefer him to leave. Despite initial attempts to hide her discomfort, Sara challenges Merv’s increasing interest in her, particularly when he announces that Geoffrey has invited him to Sara’s birthday/dinner party. When she asks Merv just how intimate he is with Geoffrey, Merv coolly responds that he met Geoffrey when he was a show biz and novelty furrier and has maintained a friendship with him since. In an attempt to exclude Merv and ‘‘scare [him] away,’’ Sara takes yet another tack, mentioning the intimacy of the occasion and the less-than-kosher dish she is serving. Merv continues to talk, even after Sara has moved into the kitchen, commenting on her book collection and her musical tastes, impervious to her subtle manipulations. ‘‘It’s just like my mother to have a dinner party on the night the Soviet Union is falling apart,’’ remarks Tess. This statement becomes a pivotal point of the dinner conversation, as Tess attempts to goad Nicholas Pym, Sara’s dinner guest, into a discussion of the Lithuanian resistance. Whereas Nick is apt to dismiss the convictions of both Tess and Tom, Merv is quick to point out that the Lithuanian city was home to sixty-five thousand Jews. When Merv asserts that anti-Semitism has formed the core component for European nationalism, Nick responds in protest, but Sara surprisingly has no opinion. ‘‘I thought Tessie was Jewish,’’ interjects Tom. Sara again sidesteps the issue by replying, ‘‘She is. But Mr. Kant is really talking about families in Russia and Eastern Europe who are unable to practice their religion.’’ Merv continues to press the topic of ethnicity on Sara after the guests have departed that evening. A discussion of cooking provides the perfect segue for Merv, who asks her if her mother is Jewish. Sara responds coolly, ‘‘for a supposedly intelligent man
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you have a persistently narrow perspective.’’ Merv has unwittingly pressed several buttons as a result of his inquiries. The interest he shows in Sara triggers her, and she begins to cry suddenly after asking him to ‘‘just go home.’’ Vulnerable once more, Sara once again recoils from Merv’s advances by telling him she is not his type. ‘‘You weren’t a nice Jewish girl,’’ says Merv, and again Sara notes that Merv ‘‘always comes back to that,’’ that is, her heritage.
Act 2 It’s 6:12 a.m., and Pfeni, who has just emerged from her apartment, takes a moment to dance playfully with Geoffrey. Geoffrey then informs her that he is taking his former male lover to the country. This sparks jealousy in Pfeni. Geoffrey exclaims, ‘‘What is it you want angel, that you’re not getting? Do you want to get married?’’ Pfeni sidesteps ideas of children and matrimony by telling Geoffrey to get dressed. Geoffrey then takes his lover to task on a book project she has failed to complete. He calls the friends he’s lost ‘‘too many lights that never had their chance to glow and burn out overnight.’’ Taking a different tack, he concludes that children, country homes, and domestic bliss are better left to others. Geoffrey informs her that, as artists, ‘‘Pfeni, you and I can’t idle time.’’
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Both he and Pfeni are intercepted by Gorgeous just before Geoffrey excuses himself to dress for his breakfast meeting with Gorgeous’s group of ladies. He is subjected to a grilling from Gorgeous, who is interested in his intentions with Pfeni, before making his exit. Pfeni criticizes her sister for the obvious intrusion into her personal life. Gorgeous hints at possible infidelities in her sister’s relationship. She inquires if Pfeni’s lover is still interested in men, before making some observations of her own. She tells her sister that ‘‘eccentric women in their forties’’ aren’t interesting to men and that, in ‘‘wandering around the world at forty,’’ Pfeni is wandering herself ‘‘right out of the marketplace.’’ Of Geoffrey, she remarks, ‘‘I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, sweetsie, you’re at the wrong library altogether.’’
and would like to spend more time with her in the company of his own children. A war with words ensues between the two, Sara sidestepping Merv’s intimations that they enter into a relationship. Defeated, Merv concedes to Sara’s argument and leaves.
Sara cannot escape a prying Gorgeous. As the family surfaces for breakfast, she is the only member willing to mention Sara’s amorous night with Merv. Sara again dances around any questions until Tess speaks up, saying, ‘‘Mother you slept with that furrier last night. Everyone here knows that.’’ Gorgeous seizes the opportunity to sway Sara into settling down with a nice man. Sara then attacks Gorgeous, claiming she is in no need of mothering. Further, Sara goes as far as to say the mind of her sister is cluttered with nonsense; Gorgeous responds and, clearly hurt and defensive, decides to exit. Tess indicates to Tom that it is also time for them to leave: ‘‘Let’s go, Tom. Just because it’s not important to her [Sara] to have any passion in her life doesn’t mean we can’t.’’
Geoffrey has just left with his lover when a rain-soaked Gorgeous arrives. When Sara stops Gorgeous to ask her what has happened to her shoe, Gorgeous explodes in anger. ‘‘Thanks to both of you,’’ Gorgeous says to her sisters, ‘‘this has not been an especially enjoyable trip for me. I’ve spent two days schlepping around London with the sisterhood and two nights having my own sisters tell me everything I do is wrong.’’ Sara finally hits a nerve with Gorgeous by suggesting she call her husband to buy a replacement pair of shoes. Consequently, both Sara and Pfeni are shocked to find out that their Harvard-educated brother-in-law has not worked as an attorney in two years.
Sara turns to Pfeni to remark that ‘‘maybe Gorgeous is the smartest one of us all.’’ She pleads with her sister to speak with Tessie. She further shares that it frightens her how much Tess is like Pfeni. ‘‘How can I tell Tessie not to go to Vilnius,’’ replies Pfeni. ‘‘In some crazy way I wished I could be there.’’ Sara expresses how sad she is to see Pfeni avoid her true calling as a journalist. Pfeni takes her sister’s hand and tells Sara she relies on her input the most, expressing her deep gratitude for her sister’s insights. ‘‘Pfeni, don’t and I won’t,’’ answers Sara, pulling away from a moment of intimacy between siblings. She pulls away from Merv as well. ‘‘I’ve never met anyone like you, Sara. You’re warm and cold all at the same time,’’ says Merv, perplexed by her reaction after their night together. He pours his heart out to Sara, telling her she is a beautiful, remarkable woman. Merv tells her he wishes to know her better
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Later in the day, Pfeni’s attempts at work are interrupted by Geoffrey’s return. He appears to Pfeni to be highly agitated in their conversation, and she questions his ‘‘manic’’ mood. Despite claiming to love and care for Pfeni deeply, he admits to missing men. Geoffrey then attempts to smooth over the sudden break with Pfeni. He defends his actions based on his instinctive personality, stating simply, ‘‘Today this is who I am. I have another choice. I miss men,’’ to which Pfeni tartly replies, ‘‘it’s alright Geoffrey. I do too.’’
As their emotional walls begin to come down, tensions dissolve amongst the sisters. Gorgeous learns that Geoffrey has left Pfeni for his former male lover and that Sara was ‘‘big and mean and nasty’’ enough to chase Merv away and any chances for a relationship. ‘‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the road to Vilnius?’’ asks Pfeni of her niece early Sunday morning. Tess says that after a night of handholding and singing Lithuanian folk songs she realized the resistance movement had no personal meaning for her and asks, ‘‘Aunt Pfeni, are we people who will always be watching and never belong?’’ Pfeni says that waking up at forty in her big sister’s house cleared her own head; she now knows she must return to Tajikistan to continue her work. Moments later, when the doorbell rings, both Gorgeous and Pfeni are delighted to discover Merv, responding to a call from Sara instructing him to pick up his shirt. He presents Gorgeous with a box, left on the doorstep by one of her ‘‘ladies.’’ Gor-
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geous exclaims, ‘‘It’s the real thing! A genuine Chanel suit! And a purse! And earrings! And even shoes! They got me the shoes!’’ Pfeni also makes her departure, and Tess excuses herself with a wink to Sara, telling Merv she will get his shirt. Sara confides to Merv that she called him because she ‘‘can’t seem to come up with a good answer for what’s wrong with [him].’’ Merv points out the difficulty both he and Sara have had consummating a relationship and then remarks, ‘‘but difficult can be engaging. Even surprising.’’ Accepting the Shiva from Sara, Merv leaves, but not before reminding Sara that she has his shirt, evidence of his future return. Tess shares with Sara that she has decided, independent of Sara’s wishes, to tell Tom to go to Vilnius without her. She also tells Sara that she must find a life independent of Sara’s life, saying, ‘‘I don’t even know what mine is.’’ Sara tells Tess how much her daughter resembles her own mother, Rita, in spirit, assuring Tess, ‘‘you are smart enough, and brave enough, and certainly beautiful enough to find your place in the world.’’ The scene then closes as Tess interviews her mother for her paper.
CHARACTERS Geoffrey Duncan Geoffrey Duncan is an attractive forty-year-old man, an ‘‘internationally renowned director and bisexual,’’ and the love interest of Pfeni. He is also a business associate and friend of Merv, with whom he is organizing and recruiting the homeless to perform in a story-theater benefit. True to his theatrical roots, Geoffrey often bursts out in song and is observed dancing in his turquoise underwear in Sara’s kitchen at six in the morning. A performer as well as a clown, at Sara’s birthday celebration he kneels in front of her, announcing that he has been ‘‘dispatched twelve days on horseback’’ by her sisters to impart their birthday wishes for her. Geoffrey met Pfeni at a ballet performance shortly after his male companion/lover leaves him for a chorus boy from Cats. In fact, Geoffrey gave Pfeni a stage name, stating, ‘‘if not for me, you’d still be plain and simple Penny Rosensweig.’’ His affections for Pfeni, and his intentions for the relationship, zigzag as much as their on-again/off-again
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romance. Geoffrey swears he’s faithful to Pfeni; however, in one moment, he’s assuring Pfeni they’ll be married soon and in another, he shuns the idea of domesticity for both Pfeni and himself for the sake of the arts. Geoffrey is not at all reticent concerning his sexual orientation, admitting to Pfeni at one point that he is a ‘‘closet heterosexual.’’ On the pervasiveness of homosexuality, he exclaims, ‘‘if those tights could talk! Why do you think that band of merry men was quite so merry!’’ In the end, it is Geoffrey’s preference for men that leads to a break with Pfeni and, in turn, becomes a catalyst for Pfeni to find herself as a journalist.
Sara Goode Sara Goode, the eldest of the three Rosensweig sisters and the mother to Tess, is an expatriate from the East Coast living in London who has left her Jewish-American past behind her. She is a woman of unusual character and intelligence. She not only is the first woman to be put in charge of the Hong Kong/Shanghai Bank, Europe, but has also made the cover of Fortune magazine twice. Of the Rosensweig trio, she is clearly in a position of great influence as the eldest sister, at one point even labeled by Gorgeous as the family ‘‘shtarker,’’ Yiddish for someone who takes charge. Pfeni also shows equal deference for her sister’s opinion by telling Sara, ‘‘there is no one I rely on in life more than you. There is no one I am more grateful to than you.’’ Where Tess is concerned, although an openly great admirer of her daughter, Sara is critical of her daughter’s choices, particularly in men. When Pfeni, in a show of support for Tess’s participation in the Lithuanian resistance, recommends places in Vilnius that she believes both Tess and Tom will enjoy, Sara responds sarcastically, ‘‘That way, Tessie, when they send the tanks in, you and Tom can take in a quick hamburger and a show.’’ Sara demonstrates an equally cool distaste for Tom by ridiculing him publicly, based on his seeming lack of personal depth. She tells Tess, ‘‘I just don’t know what you have in common with someone who dreams of selling radio parts.’’ According to Tess, Sara actively discourages passion in her life. This assertion is particularly evident in her interaction with Merv, a furrier and friend of Geoffrey’s, who inadvertently becomes a dinner guest at Sara’s fifty-fourth birthday party.
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Sara openly shares with Merv that she prides herself on being threatening to men, subsequently making every effort to discourage him from making any advances. In one instance, when Merv gets too close after the party by asking Sarah if she wishes ‘‘to connect’’ to another person, she deflects the question with insult and sarcasm. ‘‘How many support groups did you join when Roslyn died?’’ quips Sara, immediately apologetic for demonstrating such cruelty. During her conversations with Merv, Sara shares that she has been divorced twice and is openly bitter because of it. She has, on occasion, gone so far as to characterize herself as being an ‘‘old and bitter woman.’’ But with Merv, Sara also demonstrates an equally vulnerable side by crying in front of him. Their relationship and the reunion of the Rosensweig sisters serve to open Sara’s heart once more, to her past, and to the possibility of romance.
Tess Goode Named for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Tess Goode is a teenage idealist who finds life in London and her education at Westminster to be pretentious, and she longs for life in the States and, in her efforts to define herself, protests her mother Sara’s encroachment into her personal life. The defiance she feels for her mother is evident in the opening scene of the play, when she says with marked disdain and a show of defiance that she intends to be a hairdresser. The struggle Tess has with her mother is indicative of teenage rebellion. Her boyfriend does not meet with Sara’s approval—nor does her choice to join the Lithuanian resistance. Tess also struggles to contain her own passions in situations in which both she and her mother share strong philosophical differences. In the case of Nicholas Pym, for example, she is exceedingly harsh in criticizing her mother’s choice of dinner guests. Responding to her mother’s distaste for Tom, she says she will tell her boyfriend ‘‘he’s not invited to dinner here tonight with the socially acceptable, racist, sexist, and more than likely anti-Semitic Nicholas Pym.’’ Further, she personally attacks her mother’s dinner guest on the basis of these values. Tess comes full circle by the end of the play, successfully asserting a place in her mother’s life. She represents another generation of Rosensweig women embarking on the path of self-discovery. On some level, by watching Tess, the sisters also recognize in themselves that the rebellion against their own mother is no longer a luxury for them.
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Mervyn Kant ‘‘I was a show biz and novelty furrier. Now I am the world leader in synthetic animal protective covering.’’ A business associate and friend of Geoffrey’s, fifty-eight-year-old Mervyn Kant, or Merv (also more affectionately known as Murf the Smurf, or Sir Murf), is a quick-witted, fashionable Jewish-American professional residing at the Savoy Hotel over Charing Cross station in London. Like Geoffrey, he is prone to playfully breaking out in song. At the same time, he demonstrates a deeply serious devotion to his Jewish roots, in his travels to Budapest with the American-Jewish Congress or to Ireland to have lunch with the Rabbi of Dublin. Merv’s strongest qualities, perhaps born of life experience, hinge on his sense of courtesy. He shows a genuine interest in others and is often respectful to a fault. He decidedly demonstrates patience and tolerance in his encounters with Gorgeous, who endlessly prattles on to him when they are initially introdced, and is unaffected when she insists on calling him Merlin, even after she has taken the time to ask Merv his name. Sensitive and supportive, Merv also acknowledges Tess’s passion for the Baltics by offering her facts about Vilnius related to her own Jewish heritage. From the outset of the play, it is clear that Merv has more than a passing romantic interest in Sara. As the play progresses, Merv proves to be the one person, apart from Sara’s sisters, who is able to chip away at Sara’s chilly exterior to uncover her softer, more passionate side, by sharing intimate details regarding his own personal life. In one instance, Merv inspires a discussion on their intertwining past lives in New York and strikes a chord with Sara by calling her ‘‘Sadie,’’ an endearing pet name Sara’s own grandfather reserved for her. Finally, he encourages Sara, repeatedly insisting that she is capable and worthy of love, regardless of what she may think and feel to the contrary. In the end, when Sara off-handedly mentions that life with her may be difficult, Merv responds, ‘‘there are real possibilities in life, even for left over meat and cabbage,’’ like him and Sara.
Nicholas Pym ‘‘The racist, sexist, and more than likely antiSemitic Nicholas Pym’’ is a high-society Englishman and elitist on Sara’s birthday party guest list. He is quick-witted and glib, speaking with a natural, off-handed ease that betrays a lack of sincerity. Making idle dinner conversation, Nicholas proves
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to be insensitive to the point of being extremely offensive. In a conversation with Tess and Tom, for example, he responds to the notion of Lithuanian culture and people wanting to be independent of the Soviets, stating, ‘‘So does Kentucky. Think of Colonel Sanders and all his yummy little chicken pieces.’’ Nick is a foil to Merv, a character whose personal qualities contrast strongly with Merv’s, his haughty, elitist attitude clashing loudly with Merv’s jocular good nature. At one point, Merv challenges Nick, and the two get into a bit of a disagreement over the influence of European anti-Semitism. Tess favors Merv as a suitor for Sara, suggesting to her mother that Nick is ‘‘one of those weirdo English bankers who takes sixteen-year-old models to dinner’’ and afterward returns home, ‘‘puts panty hose over his head and dances to Parsifal,’’ a Wagner opera.
Pfeni Rosensweig Pfeni Rosensweig is a forty-year-old eccentric journalist and shopping-bag-toting world traveler who has ‘‘dropped in’’ from Bombay, India, to attend Sara’s birthday party. Absorbed in her work, Pfeni is truly gifted, famous enough that one of her books has been assigned to Tess for her next semester at Westminster. She has no permanent emotional ties, other than to her sisters Sara and Gorgeous, and visibly struggles with intimacy issues and her own sense of identity. Says Tess of her favorite aunt, ‘‘My mother says you compulsively travel because you have a fear of commitment and when you do stay in one place you become emotional and defensive just like me.’’ Pfeni is trying to come to terms with the rather unconventional niche she has chosen to carve out for herself by fixating on a future with Geoffrey. She chooses to half-heartedly pursue a future with a wishy-washy bisexual director with whom she has been in a long-distance relationship for years. Her insecurities about herself and her life drive Pfeni to pursue a more permanent connection with her lover. In the end, her failed relationship with Geoffrey becomes a source of great strength. Pfeni embraces her talent as a gifted journalist after realizing that world travel and a career are what she has desired on a subconscious level from the beginning. She is also a defender of her young niece Tess, whose defiance and desires mirror Pfeni’s at a very young age. Sara not only finds a source of support in Pfeni but, through her sister, also recognizes that
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Tess’s defiance of her mother is natural and in keeping with both Sara and her sisters’ desires when they were teens.
Gorgeous Teitelbaum Dramatic, flamboyant, chatty Gorgeous Teitlebaum is the Rosensweig sister most consumed with being part of the status quo; her life is driven by appearances. She demonstrates this side of herself with Merv, for example, referring to her sisters as ‘‘such funsy people.’’ She is a self-proclaimed newage diva—a radio talk-show host acting as a pseudo-psychologist to the ills of American pop-culture. According to Gorgeous, she is much more than a cliché—‘‘I am what they call a middle-aged success story. And I am having a ball.’’ Based on this, she often acts as a yenta [meddler] in her attempts to advise her sisters on marriage, as well as the selfappointed psychologist for the family. She is also the keeper of Jewish religious traditions. Says Gorgeous, ‘‘remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,’’ ignoring Sara when she interjects or protests, and continues to pray over candles. Gorgeous is not intellectually sharp in the way that her sisters are. She is often injudicious, speaking without concern for the facts, much to the consternation of her sister Sara. She is also terribly self-absorbed in her prattlings with Merv, whom she continues to call Merlin even after he has corrected her. But it is her appearance that Gorgeous hides behind to mask her vulnerability. Gorgeous, despite Sara’s impressions, is more thoughtful than she seems, if not preoccupied in her shouldering of family financial burdens. Her unbridled enthusiasm and the image she projects of someone who cannot easily be rattled prove to surprise her sisters when she gives them the news that her husband’s career is in shambles. As a result, her family sees a completely different side of Gorgeous and, taking a lesson from her, each sister realizes her own shortsightedness.
Tom Valiunus Tom Valiunus is Tess’s blue-collar boyfriend who is as passionate about the Lithuanian resistance as he is insistent on eating primary-colored foods. Tom’s greatest ambition involves opening a radio supply store of his own. He is as seemingly impervious to the conflict between Tess and her mother as he is to Sara’s dislike for him. Although Tom’s heart is in the right place, he is not so bright, and his clumsy interjections become a source of comic relief in the work. When he and Tess walk in on
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Gorgeous’s Sabbath prayers, for example, Tom asks of Sara and Gorgeous, ‘‘are you having a séance? . . . I love Stonehenge.’’ In another, when Merv asks Tess what goes with European nationalism, Tom clumsily replies, ‘‘American movies and CNN?’’ Dating Tom represents another form of rebellion by Tess. He is also a foil to Tess, illuminating her great intellect as a teenager by being, himself, both thick-headed and dull.
THEMES Identity and Self The struggle many of the characters experience in grappling with their own identities—whether it be as a Jewish American (Sara), as an adolescent (Tess), or as a bisexual (Geoffrey)—proves to be the chief focus of the play. In their interactions with each other, the characters are able to rediscover and ultimately transform themselves spiritually. Pfeni, for example, struggles to deny who she is as a writer. She continues to insist on a life with Geoffrey on one level but betrays her true desires on another. When Pfeni pushes for a commitment, Geoffrey suggests that perhaps they should consider marrying. Pfeni is quick to respond with several questions, including how they expect to have children when she is ‘‘already forty.’’ The answer lies in her untimely break with Geoffrey, which, instead of being a devastating occasion personally, proves to push her back in the right direction professionally, and she returns to Tajikistan to write. Says Pfeni of her own decision, ‘‘if . . . you make sure to fall in love with men who can never really love you back, one morning you wake up in your big sister’s house and where you should be seems sort of clear.’’
Memory and Reminiscence The process of recalling the past plays a pivotal role in the development of Merv and Sara’s relationship. In the case of Sara, it is a catalyst for change. Merv recounts the past in an effort to break through Sara’s icy exterior, and eventually he does so by evoking memories or images of her youth. Thus Merv is able to steadily chip away at her bitterness, proving to Sara that she, as much as he, still has a chance of reconnecting with someone in a meaningful way. Sara, in turn, is able to embrace a more youthful, spirited self, which has been overshadowed by bitter disappointment.
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After Sara’s evening of celebration, an intimate moment alone with Merv sparks memories of the past for both of them. Merv reminds Sara of her beauty, sparking her to respond. Sara tells Merv that, although he cannot hope for a relationship with her, he has encouraged her to succumb to her youthful, carefree passion. Sara expresses this wish in her desire to relive the past in a night of lovemaking, longing to be Merv’s ‘‘Sonia Kirshenblatt at the Brighton Beach Baths.’’
Heritage and Ancestry The idea of heritage is explored on many levels by several characters. Some emphatically defend their culture. Lithuania’s struggle for independence is much more than a ‘‘pet’’ cause for Tom. His passion for the Baltics originates with his nationality. Tom’s reason for joining the Lithuanian resistance is obvious. He states simply, ‘‘my dad is from Lithuania. And me uncles and me aunts still live there.’’ The attraction Tess has to Tom is fostered by such convictions. At the play’s conclusion, it becomes clear that Tess is drawn to him because of his loyalty to his ancestry and his sense of heritage, aspects of self that she is actively seeking. Ponders Tess, ‘‘if I’ve never really been Jewish, and I’m not actually American anymore, and I’m not English or European, then who am I?’’ Merv deeply values his own heritage, as demonstrated in his participation in and travels with the American Jewish Confederacy. In a show of support for Tess and Tom, he acknowledges, ‘‘before the Holocaust, Vilnius was home to about 65,000 Jews.’’ This comment fuels a somewhat heated debate concerning anti-Semitism in Europe. Merv aptly demonstrates that the passion he feels for his heritage comes from as deep a place as does perhaps Tom’s participation in the Lithuanian resistance. The attraction Merv feels for Sara is also bound up in the idea of her Jewishness, as it relates to his own. When he looks into Sara’s eyes, he sees the spirit of his mother’s family. ‘‘When I look into your eyes,’’ he tells Sara, ‘‘I see those women’s strength and their intelligence.’’ Because of this he confides to her, ‘‘to me you are the most beautiful and most remarkable woman.’’
Intellectuals and Intellectualism The characters of the play pride themselves, and each other, on their intellectual prowess. Members of the Rosensweig family are as apt to discuss at the breakfast table the efficacy of the American
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Critics overwhelmingly acknowledge Wasserstein’s great contribution to feminist thought as a playwright. In consideration of the feminist movement, study one of the author’s plays, and comment on the work as it relates to historical developments in the movement. Do Wasserstein’s characters resemble their contemporaries today? Describe the differences and similarities. • Thematically, Wasserstein’s plays explore the issue of Jewish identity in society. Study the current crisis in the Middle East between the Palestinians and the Israelis. How do aspects of Israel’s struggle mirror those of the characters in the author’s work? • The Holocaust had a devastating effect on the Jews of Poland. The author, having traveled to the area, was startled to see no familiar Jewish
educational system as they would a day at work— and often do. In this way, Wasserstein creates strong, powerful female characters who are able not only to stand up for themselves but also, in doing so, to prove they are as capable of rising to mental challenges as are their male counterparts, if not more so. Certainly this ability is well demonstrated at Sara’s birthday celebration, where even Tess, Sara’s sixteen-year-old daughter, aptly demonstrates her knowledge of modern history. Wasserstein is careful to highlight Tess’s ability by juxtaposing the teens Tess and Tom. Whereas Tess can quickly and correctly respond to Merv’s questions, Tom’s contribution to a discussion on the Concert of Europe and the issue of anti-Semitism is completely flat, apart from providing some comic relief. When Merv asks Tess to explain what goes hand in hand with European Nationalism, Tom offers, ‘‘American movies and CNN?’’
Appearances and Reality The outward aspects of many of the characters’ lives do not always gel with the perceptions of
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faces in a town once inhabited by her people. Investigate the impact of the Holocaust in Poland on its Jewish citizenry. • Environmental issues like Chernobyl loomed large in the 1980s, and the effects of a thirdworld economy on what was considered a superpower took its toll on the Soviet Union. Examine environmental problems in Europe today. How have they changed since the 1980s? • Memories bring Merv and Sara closer together. In their mutual sharing, they discover they have common pasts, besides sharing a common ancestry. Write about the power of reminiscence in the play. Would Merv and Sara have made a connection without a similar past? What does this say/ not say about Sara’s sense of identity?
those around them. Assumptions between characters lead to misunderstandings in the form of gross misperceptions. An exercise of judgment based on outward appearance often leads to comments that are simply inappropriate, if not just rude or hurtful. More importantly, in such gross misperceptions the audience is able to see, as well as to appreciate, that depth and complexity of character can be surprisingly elusive even to the most perceptive individual. A good example of this is both Sara and Pfeni’s impression of Gorgeous. For a large portion of the play, Gorgeous sells herself as the happy-go-lucky, somewhat bubble-headed, babbling housewife who ‘‘has it all.’’ Her sisters, Sara in particular, chastise her for her artifice, her new-age mentality, and her airy intellect. To them, Gorgeous lacks dimension, but neither sister is prepared for the truth behind their baby sister’s façade. Gorgeous quickly turns the tables in a show of strength and character when she commands her sister to ‘‘put the phone down’’ when Sara decides to call Henry to ask him to buy her sister another pair of shoes. Sara has a difficult time accepting that her sister’s spouse, the Harvard-
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educated lawyer, is unemployed, insisting not only that he should be employed but also that employment for someone like him is inevitable. When she tells Gorgeous ‘‘maybe I know someone’’ who can get him a position, Gorgeous snaps, ‘‘you don’t know anybody. Henry isn’t even looking for a job. He’s writing mysteries in the basement.’’
STYLE Point of View The events of the play are told from the third person, independent of any one character’s perspective. At no time does a character address the audience or offer any special insight into his or her motivations or actions. Instead, the audience is able to draw conclusions about the characters by observing them in dialogue with various other characters. The dynamic nature of such interactions gives breadth and depth to these individuals and helps the audience to better understand their motivations. In Sara’s case, she chooses to share with Merv that her husband ‘‘is on his fifth wife,’’ adding, ‘‘My first I’ve lost track of and personally I doubt there will be a third,’’ giving him a glimpse of the bitterness she feels for men, and for love. As Merv presses her to open up, Sara responds, ‘‘You know what really irritates me in life, Merv? When men like you tell women to take it easy because somewhere they believe that all women are innately hysterics.’’ The audience can infer, without Sara actually stating such, that her issues with men run deep, thus explaining her desire to push Merv away.
Structure The play closely follows the traditional unities, the principles of dramatic structure based on rules regarding action, time, and place. The play does stick to a single plot, that of the reunion of the Rosensweig women and the transformative power of their reunion to change the course of their own lives. The play has a succinct beginning, middle, and end, documenting the journey they take together to come to some significant realizations as women. The main action is limited to the day of Sara’s birthday celebration; the setting, to Sara’s flat in Queen Anne’s Gate.
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als. In the play, for example, all of the sisters in the Rosensweig family are succinct stereotypes. Pfeni is described as a shopping-bag-toting, eccentric forty-year-old world traveler and journalist. Gorgeous, on the other hand, is the somewhat bubbleheaded, upper-middle-class, self-appointed new age guru and modern housewife, the sister who ‘‘did everything right,’’ whereas Sara is the intelligent, thick-skinned, ‘‘hot-shot Jewish lady banker’’ who has made the cover of Forbes magazine twice. The use of stereotypes is effective for several reasons. First, the variety of characters illuminates the struggles of women from various perspectives. This is an effective approach—the women represent not one voice, but many. Second, by using such stereotypes, Wasserstein is able to break through the social veneer separating one from the next, by adding surprising personal dimension to any one character, as expressed in dialogue. For example, Sara may seem to be the hardened business professional, but in a conversation with Merv, she shares that her seemingly impenetrable heart is a defense mechanism developed out of fear, in reaction to the loss and disappointment she feels after two failed marriages.
Zeitgeist The play represents ‘‘the spirit of the time,’’ the moral and intellectual trends of the late 1980s. Characters engage in deeply thoughtful, intellectual discussions about contemporary issues of the time— the fall of the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian resistance, the efficacy of the top educational institutions in the United States, and the like. For example, when prompted to share what Sara has heard about the United States, she tells Merv that it is a ‘‘society in transition.’’ She expounds even further, stating that the evolving transactional U.S. economy is ‘‘exacerbated by a growing disenfranchised class, decaying inner cities, and a bankrupt education system.’’ Her comments mirror the effects of Reaganomics on the social and economic life of many Americans.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Stereotypes
Introduction
All of the characters created by the author are representations of understood ‘‘types’’ of individu-
The period of the 1980s to the early 1990s forms the backdrop for much of The Sisters
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Rosensweig. The fall of the Soviet Union signaled the end of the cold war, and its dissolution, with its fragmentation of the country into sovereign independent states, literally redrew the map of Europe. The end of the cold war also exposed the truths about the devastating impact of a nation scrambling to keep up with the technology of a superpower on a third-world budget, and that of great environmental destruction. Ronald Reagan, hero of the cold war, was in the meantime implementing economic policy, which, although presented as an economic stimulus plan for the United States, would prove to line the pockets of a select, wealthy few, while many Americans faced unemployment, or worse, homelessness.
The Collapse of the Soviet Regime Tess is quick to point out that ‘‘it’s just like my mother to have a dinner party on the night the Soviet Union is falling apart.’’ The irony of this statement is found in the events leading up to the demise of the system itself. The Soviet collapse was the result of a stagnant economy and an apathetic work force uninspired in the absence of competitive forces driving a capitalistic economy. Others offer the belief that pressure exerted by Reagan, particularly in the escalation of his ‘‘Star Wars,’’ or satellite weapons system, provided the push needed to destroy the Soviet economy. Whatever the cause, there were definite contributing factors on Soviet soil. Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization of the government fell apart when the demands of its citizenry for democratic capitalist reform became too great to ignore. In 1987, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Soviet regime, the Wall, was torn down after a stirring speech given by Ronald Reagan commanding Gorbachev to dismantle it.
Reorganization of the Soviet Union ‘‘Lithuania has a culture and people independent of the Soviets,’’ states Tom in defense of the Lithuanian resistance movement. His sentiments reflect a time of great change in Europe, particularly in the Soviet Union. Most of this change was in fact precipitated by the liberal policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s renouncement of the Brezhnev Doctrine was perhaps one of the more radical changes to be instituted as a result of his policy of liberal reform. The doctrine was the brainchild of Leonid Brezhnev, who was president of the Soviet Union
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from 1977 to 1982. It essentially allowed for the USSR to exercise military intervention at will in the Warsaw Pact nations and therefore prevented the possibility of rebellion. As a direct result of Gorbachev’s decision, however, these once-dissolved Soviet Republics declared themselves independent nations, with only nine of fifteen in agreement with Gorbachev’s new union treaty. Members of the KGB, army conservatives, and stragglers of the old regime were not keen on negotiation with the re-established republics, subsequently placing Gorbachev and his family under house arrest. As tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin and his followers, sympathetic to the plight of the leader, barricaded themselves in the Parliament building of the Russian Republic. Construction workers, in a show of support, erected barricades around the building as Soviet citizens by the thousands began to encircle it, hands clasped together to form a human chain. As the human chain grew in depth, the Moscow militia, in a show of sympathy, distributed gas masks to the crowd. In fact, several army units involved in the coup, including those manning tanks, abandoned their efforts, and the coup was over in just a few days. Gorbachev was released and returned to Moscow. The Republics by and large voted to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They instead claimed they were part of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Despite their new identity, these states would continue to be referred to as being part of the former Soviet Union. The problem with their newfound independence ran deeper than identity—the Soviet system was abandoned with essentially nothing to replace it and was expected to participate in a free-market economy.
The Environmental Aftermath of Soviet Occupation It was not only the new Republics which suffered; several environmental disasters with widespread consequence can also be attributed to the failing Soviet economy. The artificial economic system could no longer sustain the latest technology, particularly evident in the events of Chernobyl. Engineers were experimenting with reactor number four on April 26, 1986, when a miscalculation was said to have been made. This caused an atomic chain reaction that spiraled out of control and became the catalyst for a power surge responsible for an explosion of radioactive steam, followed by a chemical explosion.
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Gorbachev was not forthcoming about the disaster immediately, instead informing the public of the scope of the event several days later. In all, thirty-one people were killed in the blast and an additional five hundred were injured. The area was evacuated within a nineteen-mile radius. In addition, Europeans were concerned about contamination of food and water supplies from airborne radioactive materials. Many Europeans still lived on contaminated soil, and in the 1990s, incidents of cancer and other conditions skyrocketed. The government chose to maintain the system instead of considering alternative power sources and, amazingly, despite reports of several additional accidents, the facility was kept open.
Reaganomics Events occurring in the United States at the time are equally relevant to the play, as is particularly revealed in Sara’s comments regarding her former residence. She shares that ‘‘in many ways America is a brilliant country. But it’s becoming as class-driven a society as this one.’’ The divisiveness of the classes in America had everything to do with the trend in the economy. During the Reagan years, David Stockman, director of the OMB, or Office of Conservative Management and Budget, had come up with a fiscal plan. Supply-side economics called on the government to stimulate the economy by the deregulation of commerce and industry and by cutting taxes. Stockman felt that the production of goods and services would create a demand for them. In other words, the more goods and services created, the more people would buy. By cutting taxes and easing up on industry regulations, businesses would then be able to ‘‘beef-up’’ production. President Reagan adopted the plan, but in consideration of the budget he also cut government spending. It was called ‘‘trickle down’’ economics by some—the idea that relieving the tax burden on the rich would encourage investment by the rich and that this investment would ‘‘trickle down’’ and thus impact the less-well-off in the form of jobs. Further, Reagan felt that increased investment meant more taxable income generating more revenue. George Bush found the notion absurd, calling Reagan’s plan for financial reform ‘‘voodoo economics.’’ In the end, tax cuts did not benefit middle- and lowerincome individuals but, instead, helped an elite few of the extremely wealthy in the form of profitable business deals. Companies merged or were dismantled and sold at a profit to the stockholders, resulting in even fewer jobs and higher unemployment.
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The New Homeless ‘‘I have an idea to do this year’s homeless benefit at the National as sort of a story theater. I want to hear their brilliant voices,’’ says Geoffrey. His idea is to use actual homeless people to effectively capture their stories. In the United States, at least, there certainly would be no shortage of potential participants. As a result of Reagan’s policies, many people found themselves in the position of being underemployed, if not unemployed, just one paycheck away from financial ruin, unable to invest in their futures. Suddenly large numbers of homeless were visible on city streets. Alan Axelrod, in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 20th Century History, says that during this time ‘‘‘homeless people’ became a ubiquitous euphemism for those formerly described as indigent, derelicts, or bums’’ and called them the ‘‘walking wounded of Reaganomics.’’
CRITICAL OVERVIEW According to many critics, The Sisters Rosensweig has a feminist appeal in its portrayal of generations of Rosensweig women that is undeniable. This idea is in keeping with the bulk of Wendy Wasserstein’s plays, which are consistently described as being treatises on women and their attempts to fit accepted social roles while at the same time maintaining a sense of self-identity. She is, at times, recognized and even appreciated for her typecasting of predictable characters, which work in tandem to speak to a more encompassing feminist perspective. Other critics, however, have seen this stereotyping as a reason for less-than-engaging story lines and a lack of action. However predictable Wasserstein’s characters are, they manage to be equally colorful. Critics have delighted in the lively, entertaining Rosensweig bunch. Their diversity brings a lot to their often intellectually engaging conversations, stimulated by the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as does their supreme sense of wit. Again, however, Dick Lochte, in his review of the play in the Los Angeles Times, draws attention to the predictability factor in the work. Lochte states, ‘‘Though most of these supporting characters get their fair share of witty dialogue, there is something just a bit too predictable about everything they do.’’ Finally, she has been praised for her depiction of the Jewish culture as it is realized in her characters. Wasserstein, in Michael P. Kramer’s Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish Ameri-
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can Culture; or, ‘‘Isn’t that the Way the Old Assimilated Story Goes?,’’ comments on the complexity Wasserstein takes on in the work’s consideration of ethnic assimilation, explaining, ‘‘Wasserstein carefully casts Sara’s declaration of Tess’s independence from Jewish guilt and ambivalence as an affirmation of her daughter’s Jewishness.’’
CRITICISM Laura Kryhoski Kryhoski is currently working as a freelance writer. She has taught English literature in addition to English as a second language overseas. In this essay, Kryhoski considers the issue of identity as a function of age. What fuels the The Sisters Rosensweig thematically is the issue of identity as it is expressed in or explored by all of Wendy Wasserstein’s characters. The play is rich in its representation of women struggling to define themselves against the backdrop of conventional social roles as a function of their age. In this respect, the work affords its female audience either a look forward or a look backward, or it invites them to dip a toe or two into the pool of present social values surrounding them, in selfreflection, in personal introspection, or in selfaffirmation. Pfeni’s sense of identity is a bit ambiguous at forty. In conversation, Pfeni is obsessed with her bisexual director boyfriend, insisting that a life with him would define her own life, giving it the meaning and substance she is seeking. ‘‘I love you Geoffrey. I’m not going to travel anymore. I want to stay with you,’’ declares Pfeni. She is building a defense for her present life, without even realizing it. She responds adversely to the idea of children and, on a subconscious level, of marriage, stating, ‘‘Geoffrey, I’m already 40.’’ It is in this statement that Pfeni fails to hear herself. In this way, Wasserstein comments on the idea of identity from a mid-life, feminine perspective. For most women, forty is a time for either looking back with trepidation or looking forward with a sense of hope and security about the future and one’s place in the universe. Pfeni is at a spiritual crossroads, and in her obsession with Geoffrey she succumbs to the temptation to ‘‘look back,’’ without realizing that the need for self-expression as a journalist supersedes any desires for domestic bliss.
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Identity is a function not only of age but also of any one character’s ability to hear his or her own voice. In the case of Pfeni, she expresses feelings of insecurity and self-doubt to Geoffrey concerning the nature of their relationship. Pfeni discusses the nature of Geoffrey’s bisexuality to confirm his unwavering commitment to her, but she is missing the bigger picture with respect to her own dreams and desires. Geoffrey makes promises to Pfeni. Anticipating her need for commitment, he tells her that if marriage will console her, he will marry her. But Pfeni’s agenda, on a deeper level, is not dependent on the status of the relationship. Geoffrey’s convictions are met with protest. The ‘‘truth’’ about Pfeni is all in the ‘‘hearing.’’ She protests the idea on the basis of her Jewish heritage, asking if the children will be Jewish. An affirmative from Geoffrey leads to yet another protest on the basis of age. In her depiction of Pfeni, Wasserstein is also coming from a personal place. The author shares in an interview that before turning forty she became depressed. Making lists of things she had to do before forty, she drove herself crazy. After turning forty, she stopped focusing on the list and, ultimately, was much happier. For Wasserstein at least,
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), by Rebecca Wells, accounts for the Ya-Yas, a circle of women whose activities seem to center on Siddalee’s mother, Vivi. This is a book about female friendship, love, and the power of forgiveness as expressed in the memoirs of the YaYa Sisterhood. • Schindler’s List (1982), by Thomas Keneally, recalls the story of Oscar Schindler, a Jewish businessman and wartime profiteer who, during World War II, saved more Jews from the gas chamber than did any other individual. The book is a great source for understanding the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust and its impact on the Jews of Poland.
with middle age comes the sense that youth is no longer a physical condition but merely a state of mind. For women, age brings an end to fertility, another limiting factor in terms of personal choice. Values change, and time becomes more important. The author’s point is that there is a mental empowerment that must take place before true contentment is realized. In consideration of Wasserstein’s own personal feelings regarding age, the empowerment involves a mere shift in perspective. Therefore, identity for Wasserstein, and by extension her character Pfeni, hinges on self-acceptance, rather than on potential or on a preoccupation with what could be. By the play’s end, Pfeni comes full circle in her convictions. She announces she is returning to Tajikistan to finish her book. The ingredients for her decision, she confides in Gorgeous, are the choices she has made. She shares that her unexplored writing potential and her involvement with an emotionally unavailable bisexual have been subconscious positives for her. In making these choices, she has set limits on both her marriage and her career. Tess, too, is at a crossroads in her young life. Her sense of identity is also a function of her
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• The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (1991), by Wendy Wasserstein, is a collection of three of Wasserstein’s plays: Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, and the Pulitzer Prize– winning Heidi Chronicles. These plays are further examples of the author’s feminist works. • The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (2000), by Ruth Rosen, is a contemporary history of the Women’s Movement in the United States, beginning in the 1960s with the advent of The Feminine Mystique. Rosen looks back at women’s roles in the 1950s, moving forward then to develop a chronicle of those people, places, and events that have shaped the lives of American women today.
pubescent angst. As a teenager, Tess is pushing out against invisible boundaries to discover her convictions and, in those convictions, to express her individuality. Throughout the play, Tess remains vocal about the Lithuanian resistance. Her passion for the movement, however, is more or less dictated by a need to assert herself as an individual. Tess gets into a scuffle with her mother, and she responds to Sara’s criticism of the Lithuanian resistance and of her boyfriend, Tom, with criticism of her own: ‘‘Tom comes from a perfectly balanced and normal family which is something you’ve never managed to maintain despite being on the cover of Fortune twice.’’ Her response to Sara is quite rebellious. In a conversation with Nicholas Pym, her convictions become suspect—when Nicholas Pym asks Tess to explain her interest in the Baltics, Tom fills in the blanks, responding that his family has been personally affected. Tom speaks for Tess, but she never seems to speak of her own personal motivations for joining the resistance. As the play comes full-circle, so does Tess’s level of awareness. She tells her mother that she has told Tom to go on to Vilnius without her, upon the realization that she felt ‘‘apart’’ in some way from Tom’s convictions.
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Specifically, it is her experience at the rally that is a point of personal discovery for her. She asks Pfeni, ‘‘are we people who will always be watching and never belong?’’
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DESIROUS OF ADULT RESPECT AND AUTONOMY, TESS IS
For Tess, an attachment to Tom and to the Lithuanian resistance movement attracts her in her search for identity. Tom’s personal convictions draw Tess to him precisely because she longs to harbor some convictions of her own. The teenage years, for many, symbolize a time of great transition. Desirous of adult respect and autonomy, Tess is attempting to pull away from Sara’s values and opinions in an effort to discover and forge her own. This is not a comfortable process. Tess has initially been given a set of values by her parents, which, ultimately, may not match her own. As she begins to test things, to embark on the process of self-discovery, she moves from a point of comfort to one of confusion in an effort to define herself. Sara doesn’t always respect Tess through this confusing time, and thus the conflict between mother and daughter intensifies. Wasserstein is careful to point this process out in a conversation between Sara and Pfeni. Worried that her daughter is determined to pursue a life that runs completely counter to her own, Sara implores her sister to speak with Tess. Pfeni defends Tess, recognizing the necessity for her niece’s acts of defiance, telling Sara, ‘‘that’s exactly what we set out to do because of our mother.’’ Indeed, this idea is affirmed in her daughter’s own words. Tess speaks of opting to stay behind on the trip to Vilnius, telling her mother that she made the decision for herself rather than for Sara. ‘‘You have your own life,’’ says Tess. Linda Rohrer Paige, in Wendy Wasserstein: Overview, asserts that Wasserstein’s work often ‘‘highlights female community and friendship, even amidst the tension ignited by woman’s trying to ‘fit in’ to prescribed social roles, yet simultaneously, attempting to ‘define herself.’’’ Certainly, this idea is evident in the author’s portrayal of both Pfeni and niece Tess. Pfeni is responding to prescribed social roles in her pursuit of Geoffrey and a life of domestic bliss. Tess, on the other hand, is reacting to the social roles imposed on her by her mother, in an attempt to break away from them in order to achieve a sense of autonomy. Ultimately, it is their communion with each other—sister to sister, aunt to niece, mother to daughter—that transforms the women of the Rosensweig family, helping them to see and to define themselves.
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ATTEMPTING TO PULL AWAY FROM SARA’S VALUES AND OPINIONS IN AN EFFORT TO DISCOVER AND FORGE HER OWN.’’
Paige also asserts that the appeal of the Wasserstein’s plays for feminists (as exemplified by The Heidi Chronicles) is in an identification with the protagonist’s struggle for change and search for her own identity. Adds Paige, ‘‘At times, self effacing, but at other times, powerful and wise beyond her years. . . . Her struggle is, in many ways, our own.’’ Women breaking through socially imposed boundaries of age, of gender, and of ethnicity to define themselves—this is the touchstone for Wasserstein’s work. In The Sisters Rosensweig, the issue of age figures prominently. The beauty of the work is the personal growth continuum represented by generations of Jewish-American women who, on some level, are responding to ambiguous social cues and their own passions to define themselves. As confusing and daunting a process as it may seem, there is one consistent message that Wasserstein imparts to a female audience: ‘‘you are smart enough, and brave enough, and certainly beautiful enough to find your place in the world.’’ Source: Laura Kryhoski, Critical Essay on The Sisters Rosensweig, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Allison Leigh DeFrees DeFrees has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia as well as a law degree from the University of Texas, and she is a published writer and an editor. In the following essay, DeFrees discusses the notion of forging an identity within the inevitable confines of family relationship. Throughout her career, playwright Wendy Wasserstein has focused relentlessly on the issue of a woman’s right to own her independence, strength, and integrity in what is essentially a ‘‘man’s world.’’ In seeking this independence, her characters—and the characters in The Sisters Rosensweig are no
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exception—often undergo some kind of transformation, either a change of circumstance or a change of mind. In The Sisters Rosensweig, Wasserstein’s women do both: in bringing together three JewishAmerican sisters in the physical setting of Queen Anne’s Gate in London, Wasserstein allows the mundane event of a birthday party to force the women to examine the familial bonds that have both drawn the sisters together and repelled them from one another. In coming together, and in being forced to speak truthfully of their feelings about one another and their past, each sister faces an emotional epiphany. Wasserstein uses her characters to span the generational gaps of various women from one Jewish-American family from Brooklyn, New York. The play opens with the daughter (Tess) of one of the three sisters (Sara), listening to an old recording of her mother’s ivy league college a cappella singing troupe. Immediately, Wasserstein establishes that her characters are upper-crust, thus supposedly dispensing with the themes of poverty or economic strife and honing in on the emotional lives of the women. Pfeni, the middle Rosensweig sister, arrives from traveling in Bombay. She brings with her, in one of the many shopping bags she carries in lieu of real suitcases, a present for Tess, which is a statue of Shiva the destroyer, an Indian god said to ‘‘destroy all evil and bring you hope, rebirth, and a lifetime guarantee that under no circumstances will you grow up to be like me.’’ Pfeni’s self-deprecating manner introduces self-doubt and a picture of a smart, well-traveled writer who is grappling with her place in the world. In fact, the use of the profession of international writer is particularly clever on Wasserstein’s part. She has created a woman who travels the world in search of an elusive sense of self, who never pauses for long enough to examine her personal needs and desires, nor to assess whether those needs are being met. For the previous four years, Pfeni has dated Geoffrey, a bisexual and world-renowned British stage director, never seeing him for more than a few days or weeks at a time, never allowing herself to settle down long enough to investigate her deeper feelings. When Geoffrey tells her that he wants to date men again, she hardly reacts, but when he says ‘‘I miss men,’’ she rather coldly replies, ‘‘It’s all right, Geoffrey. So do I.’’ It is not until she confides in her sisters that Geoffrey has left her that she breaks down. Back in the arms of her family, Pfeni is able to examine her life and realize the loss, not just of her lover, but of the years she has spent closed off from
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her dreams. Tying herself to Geoffrey had been typical of the way Pfeni consistently attached herself to mismatched goals—or rather, how she avoided diving in to the very things she most craved, out of trepidation and fear of failure. Pfeni stayed in a dead-end relationship to avoid true intimacy with a man, just as she spent years skirting around the book she is writing about the women in Tajikistan, to avoid the pain of experiencing their plight. As a travel writer, she can justify a flighty existence, to a point. When discussing Tess’s intention of going to witness the Lithuanian revolution, Sara questions Pfeni as to why Pfeni stopped writing about revolutionary causes and settled into being a travel writer. Pfeni tells Sara, ‘‘Somewhere I need the hardship of the Afghan women and the Kurdish suffering to fill up my life for me. And if I’m that empty, then I might as well continue to wander to the best hotels, restaurants, and poori stands.’’ But, Sara does not accept Pfeni’s self-deprecating excuse, and says to her: Pfeni, real compassion is genuinely rarer than any correct agenda. I’m a pretty good banker, but it’s not a passion. You, on the other hand, have a true calling, and the sad and surprisingly weak thing is you’re actively trying to avoid it. I think you care too much and you’re looking for excuses not to.
Hearing her sister’s frank words, Pfeni takes Sara’s hand and tells her, ‘‘[t]here is no one I rely on in life more than you.’’ Sara quickly pulls away, and the moment evaporates, but not before Pfeni can appreciate herself through her sister’s eyes. After Geoffrey leaves her, Pfeni decides to return to her passions and tells her sisters as she is leaving Sara’s house to return to Tajikistan: Well, Gorgeous, if you only write ‘‘Bombay by Night’’ and you make sure to fall in love with men who can never really love you back, one morning you wake up at forty in your big sister’s house, and where you should be seems sort of clear.
Sara, the oldest sister, speaks earnestly to Pfeni, and in fact, speaks forthrightly to everyone in the play except herself. Twice divorced, Sara is convinced of her future as a solitary woman—she is mistrustful of men, in part as a result of two failed marriages and of being a female executive in the misogynistic world of international finance. Thus, when Mervyn Kant arrives as an unexpected dinner guest and subsequently as an unexpected love interest, Sara is automatically closed off to his advances. In the simplest, most obvious way, and with the help of Sara’s sisters, Merv opens Sara’s life to the possibility of love. Using an almost rote character— the Jewish New Yorker with a heart of gold—
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Wasserstein rekindles the heartstrings of a woman who had renounced the very idea of love. It is a lovely gesture on Wasserstein’s part, to have culled a stereotype from the topography of stock characters and imbued him with a wistful air that rings true. Merv serves as a foil to Sara: he is all heart, worn on an unbuttoned sleeve, while Sara is a deflection of love. Just as she has soured on love, each character in the play introduces sweet offerings of love, and of acceptance and honor, to her. It is not clearly spelled out why all of the other characters are so willing to look beyond her cold exterior and attempt to reach Sara’s hidden warmth, but clues in the dialogue are interspersed throughout the play. She seems to speak truthfully about issues that the others skirt. Gorgeous, the youngest of the Rosensweig sisters, saunters into Sara’s home, dressed to the hilt in fake Chanel and overdone accessories, speaking in as glib and gilded a tone as her clothing. When Gorgeous says, ‘‘Some of the most interesting men I know in Newton, Massachusetts are furriers,’’ and then is unable to substantiate her statement, she balks when Sara pokes fun at her. In response, Sara says, ‘‘I am asking you to be specific. I am asking you to take responsibility for whatever it is you babble about. Life is serious business, Gorgeous. Life isn’t funny.’’ Ironically, if anyone of the sister’s lives is not funny, it is Gorgeous’s life. Her husband has been unemployed for two years, and she is living in an estranged, and strained, arrangement with him. While he stays up all night every night attempting to write detective novels, Gorgeous must find a way to make ends meet. Gorgeous, unready or unwilling to share these facts, threatens to leave and stay with friends rather than deal with the strained relationship with her sister, and Merv and Sara together quell Gorgeous’s anger. It is a foreshadowing of Merv’s ability to relate to Sara that becomes more pronounced as the play progresses. Interestingly, however, it is Sara who finally prods herself out of her dark disposition toward love—a subtle statement by Wasserstein that, ultimately, it is up to the individual woman to choose to face her fears, rather than sidestepping them. Sara spends the day after her birthday waiting for Merv to call her, despite the fact that she told him to leave and that she was not interested. The evening before she calls, Sara and her sisters have congregated, and after Pfeni and Gorgeous loudly encourage Sara to call Merv, Gorgeous says that she wishes that ‘‘each of us can say at some point that we had a moment of pure, unadulterated happiness!
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. . . WASSERSTEIN ALLOWS THE MUNDANE EVENT OF A BIRTHDAY PARTY TO FORCE THE WOMEN TO EXAMINE THE FAMILIAL BONDS THAT HAVE BOTH DRAWN THE SISTERS TOGETHER AND REPELLED THEM FROM ONE ANOTHER.’’
Do you think that’s possible, Sara?’’ Sara, without the usual sarcasm or defenses, answers, ‘‘[b]rief. But a moment or two.’’ It is possible—love is possible, and even if only fleetingly, Sara has opened the door to happiness. Wasserstein’s theme of sisterhood and family ties is not new—female writers in the past hundred years have written vociferously on the topic, in fact. What differentiates Wasserstein’s storytelling from the rest of the tales of female self-discovery that poured onto the stage in the latter half of the twentieth century is that she drives her story from a specifically religious building block. The characters of Gorgeous and Tess provide a framework for the theme of how religion plays an integral part in each woman’s search for meaning in their lives. Gorgeous, the youngest of the sisters, and Tess, Sara’s daughter, ground the play in the theme of religious journeys. Gorgeous has retained all of the ritual of her Jewish upbringing, and she is steadfast in adhering to its tenets; however, beyond the surface, it is not clear that she understands her reasons for her faith. Thus, while she has never strayed from her Judaic upbringing, blindly modeling the life her mother led, she has also never quite owned up to glaring faults in a life she tries to portray to the outside world as easy and complete. Tess, Sara’s daughter, is the foil to Gorgeous’s on-the-surface complacency. Tess is full of resolve to make a difference in the world, but also full of questions about her place in that same world. She is constantly asking the philosophical questions that frame all of the women’s lives. At one point, she asks, ‘‘Aunt Pfeni, are we people who will always be watching and never belong?’’ And to her mother, she asks, ‘‘Mother, if I’ve never really been Jewish, and I’m not actually American anymore, and I’m not Eng-
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lish or European, then who am I?’’ Gorgeous and Tess come from opposite planes of introspection: Tess is an avid intellectual who directly seeks the answers to her questions about her faith and her place, and Gorgeous just as avidly seeks to avoid confronting those same questions. In the familial embrace of Sara and Pfeni, each of the women, while not necessarily finding answers to her questions, at least finds comfort in the realization that in their journeys, they are not alone. When Gorgeous breaks the heel of an expensive pair of shoes she has just purchased, Sara tries to call Gorgeous’s husband and tell him to replace the shoes. Not until this moment is Gorgeous forced to admit to her sisters that her husband is unemployed and has been for two years; that her love life has fizzled; and that she is, under all of her baubles and sweater sets, deeply unhappy. But, the act of admitting her unhappiness allows her a release—free from the weight of keeping up appearances, she gains a newfound willpower, as well as a closeness with her sisters that had not been previously possible. It is a quite breakthrough, tenable and lasting. What she has lost in pride, she has gained in compassion. The Sisters Rosensweig is perhaps Wasserstein’s most adamant construction of what it means to be a woman in the twentieth century. Her characters exhibit the post-Industrial Revolution woman’s freedom to travel, to work in any field she chooses, and to have both a family and a career. Yet, along with all of these accomplishments comes the crashing realization that, while achieving these hard-won goals, a woman’s identity becomes an all the more fiercely guarded prize. Wasserstein seems to be asking, ‘‘Who am I if I am not my mother? How do I forge my future when my past teaches me no lessons for this future?’’ Ultimately, the answers to these questions come round to the realization that whatever path a woman takes or does not take, and whatever choices she makes or events happen in her life, she is the product of her heritage. Whether her life takes her to Tajikistan, or London, or Newton, Massachusetts, family remains the basin of memory, the origin of spiritual understanding, and the crux to the understanding of the world one builds for oneself. Source: Allison Leigh DeFrees, Critical Essay on The Sisters Rosensweig, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
John Simon In the following review, Simon commends The Sisters Rosensweig for being ‘‘both of its time . . . and of all time.’’
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The Sisters Rosensweig is Wendy Wasserstein’s most accomplished play to date. It is throughcomposed, with no obtrusive narrator haranguing us. Its central, but not hypertrophic, character is the eldest sister, Sara Goode, divorced from her second husband. An expatriate in London, she is celebrating her fifty-fourth birthday, for which her younger sister Gorgeous Teitelbaum has flown in from Boston, where she dispenses personal advice over the airwaves. From farthest India, the youngest sister, Pfeni Rosensweig, has jetted in; now a travel writer, she is shirking her mission, a study of the lives of women in Tajikistan. Equitably, all three sisters end up sharing center stage, both literally and figuratively. Gorgeous, who, we are told, is happily married with four children, is group leader of the Temple Beth-El sisterhood of Newton, Massachusetts, on a visit to London; Pfeni is here to touch base with her lover, the famous stage director Geoffrey Duncan, whom she has converted to heterosexuality and may soon be marrying. Here, too, is a friend of Geoffrey’s, the New York faux furrier and genuine mensch Mervyn Kant. Rounding out the cast are Tess, Sara’s precocious teenager; Tom Valiunus, Tess’s dopey but good-natured punker boyfriend, with whom she is planning a political-protest trip to his ancestral Lithuania; and Nicholas Pym, a British banker, stuffed shirt, and suitor to Sara. This is the stuff of Anglo-American comedy, more specifically Anglo-Jewish-American drawing-room comedy, in which some related but diverse mores and some diverse but trying-to-become-related people are playing off one another. Sara, a banker herself, is high-powered, smart, and sex-starved. Pfeni and the ebullient but labile heterosexual Geoffrey are having difficulties. And the ostensibly contented Gorgeous is there to stick her bobbed but nosy nose into everybody’s business. A seasoned theatergoer may well guess several plot developments, though there are also a few surprises. But plot is far less important than character and dialogue, both of which Miss Wasserstein does handsomely and humorously. She is surely one of our wittiest one-liner writers, but under the bubbles and eddies of her wit are real people in deep water, resolutely and resonantly trying to keep from drowning. And she is able to orchestrate the interaction of her disparate characters into a complex, convincing polyphony. There may be a touch of the arbitrary here and there; mostly, however, the play flows, entertains, and liberally dispenses unpompous wisdom about ourselves.
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Particularly pleasing is that Sisters manages to be both of its time, 1991, and of all time, unless human nature changes radically, which for these 5,000 years it hasn’t. The three Rosensweig sisters are by no means unworthy descendants of a famed earlier sisterly trio, to whom an occasional quotation in the text alludes. If I have any problem with the play, it is that several of its characters have a propensity for bursting into song and dance at the slightest, or even no, provocation. In a straight play, this can be as unsettling as long spoken passages in a musical. Source: John Simon, ‘‘The Best So Far,’’ in New York, Vol. 25, No. 43, November 2, 1992, pp. 100–1.
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Assimilated Story Goes?’’ in American Jewish History, Vol. 88, Issue 3, 2000, pp. 407–15. Lochte, Dick, ‘‘The Sisters Rosensweig: Play Review,’’ in Los Angeles Times, Vol. 39, September 1994, pp. 140–41. Paige, Linda Rohrer, ‘‘Wasserstein, Wendy,’’ in Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996. Wasserstein, Wendy, The Sisters Rosensweig, Dramatists’ Play Service, 1993.
FURTHER READING Barnett, Claudia, ed., Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook, Casebooks on Modern Dramatists series, Garland, 1998. This casebook contains discussions of the author’s works in consideration of Jewish storytelling, feminism, comedy, and so forth. The author is also compared to playwright Anton Chekhov and others to provide context and understanding for her works. Ciociola, Gail, Dramatizing Women, Their Choices and Their Boundaries, McFarland, 1998. A scholarly study of Wasserstein’s works, this book also provides helpful explanations of current feminist terminology to set up Ciociola’s textual analysis and in-depth character study.
SOURCES Axelrod, Alan, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 20th Century American History, Alpha Books, 1999, pp. 377–422. Ciociola, Gail, Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices and Their Boundaries, McFarland, 1998. Cohen, Esther, ‘‘An Interview,’’ in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1998, pp. 257–70. Kramer, Michael, ‘‘Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; Or, ‘‘Isn’t That the Way the Old
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Homes, A. M., ‘‘Wasserstein, Wendy,’’ in Bomb, H. W. Wilson Company, Spring 2001. In this interview with the playwright, Homes and Wasserstein discuss such topics as the concept of political correctness, a writer’s social and moral obligations, and the influence of motherhood on the author’s work. Johnson, Haynes, Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years, Doubleday, 1991. Johnson’s work paints a harsh portrait of America during the Reagan years by recounting the nation’s economic and political fall in the 1980s.
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The Subject Was Roses The Subject Was Roses was first presented at the Royale Theatre, New York City, on May 15, 1964. It was an outstanding success with critics and the public alike and it won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play belongs to the category of domestic realism and has a cast of only three characters. John and Nettie Cleary live unhappily together in a middle-class apartment in the Bronx, New York. Their twenty-one-year-old son Timmy has just returned home after serving three years in the army during World War II. As the drama unfolds, the tensions in the family become apparent. Husband and wife squabble; Nettie is overprotective toward her grown son; John tries to overcome years of neglect and make an affectionate connection with Timmy, but that path proves stormy. Eventually, Timmy, who has more awareness of the effect of the negative family dynamics than his parents, decides he must leave home. The play achieves its effects in part through effective use of dialogue. The dialogue conveys the long-standing hostility between John and Nettie, their doomed efforts to recapture their lost love, and their failure to understand that their old ways of behavior alienate Timmy and drive him away. They manage to
