SOURCE: Georgoudaki, Ekaterini. “Women in Lillian Hellman's Plays, 1930-1950.” In Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, edited by Maria Diedrich, pp. 69-86. New York: Berg, 1990.

[In the following essay, Georgoudaki discusses Hellman's portrayal of women in her major plays during the 1930s through 1950s.]

During the period from 1930 to 1950 Lillian Hellman wrote six original plays in the realistic mode. Three of these 1930s plays and one drama of the 1940s are set in and reflect the values of small American towns: The Children's Hour (1934) in Lancet, Massachusetts; Days to Come (1936) in Callom, Ohio; The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946) in Bowden, Alabama. Her two wartime plays, Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944), are broader in scope, however, and utilize other types of characters and settings and address different issues. All plays take place during the period from 1880 to 1944, and the events of the characters' lives are set against appropriate historical backgrounds that reflect the socioeconomic changes resulting from the Civil War, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the two world wars, and the effects of these events on European and American lives and values. Hellman interweaves the individual and the social, skillfully depicting the private and public lives and problems of her characters.¹

A large number of female characters of all age groups populate this dramatic world. Beginning with her first play, The Children's Hour, women dominate the action and in her later plays always have important roles as well. In her memoir, Pentimento (1973), Hellman justifies this preference for female protagonists by saying: “I can write about men, but I can't write a play that centers on a man. I've got to tear it up, make it about the women around him, his sisters, his bride, her mother and —.”² These protagonists come from the middle and upper middle classes; among her minor characters are descendants of the Southern aristocracy, a prostitute, and housemaids, three of the last-mentioned are black. In all of these plays, Hellman's interest in and skillful dramatization of these women's individual psychologies and their relationships to each other and to their families, society, and history are clear. Nevertheless, her female characters are always depicted in traditional social roles, as her critics have correctly pointed out. Hellman does not write from a self-consciously feminist viewpoint, but follows contemporary conventions of public discourse as well as the example of other women dramatists of the 1930s and 1940s.³ Yet in her plays she creates characters and situations that illustrate her critical attitude toward middle-class values and institutions that have restricted women to subordinate roles and to one basic sphere of action, the home.

Hellman's approach to women, her concern with their psychological, financial, and other problems, is the topic of this paper. I will examine that concern as it manifests itself in the various female characters and situations described in her plays of 1930 to 1950, analyzing how she presents her assorted stereotypes and the restrictions that society has imposed on them. I will simultaneously point to examples of Hellman's own difficulties in developing solutions to these characters' problems or viable alternatives to their lives, difficulties which are highly representative of the situation of American women in that period of transition.

In Hellman's society “the structure of authority in the household was frequently determined by who earned the money,” and “role divisions within the home were significantly shaped by economic considerations.”⁴ Like many women in American society during the 1930s and 1940s who were denied an independent economic role, Hellman's middle-class and upper-middle-class female characters are “relative creatures,” women who acquire their own sense of personal worth, identity, and social status through their relationships with the male characters in the roles of daughters, sisters, fiancées, wives, and widows;⁵ these female characters share a “middle-class dream of family, security, and upward mobility.”⁶ Consequently, most of them play the roles of wives, mothers, and under normal circumstances, they do not work outside the home. They just accept the traditional view that home and family are their proper sphere, and there they seek fulfillment. Their only contact with the public, male world of business is through spending, never through earning money. Some of these upper-class women are quite extravagant. Their obsession with money, clothes, and various pleasurable activities, such as traveling to Europe, costs their male relatives a great deal of money, and this constantly increasing need for more money often leads Hellman's protagonists to immoral business deals and activities. By showing the harmful effects of such immoral actions on the women's personalities and on the lives of other people from the same or from lower social classes, Hellman not only expresses her disapproval of the empty, unproductive, and parasitical lives which social convention forces women from the upper classes to lead, but also implicitly identifies the middle-class ideal of marriage as the true source of women's corruption.

This indictment against marriage gains its impetus in her iconoclastic discourse on the connection between money and power in family and social relationships. She portrays patriarchal families with the fathers, oldest sons, and husbands as the breadwinners and decision makers, while her women appear ignorant of business and political matters and are, therefore, unable to survive alone in the world, outside the sheltered domestic realm. Cora Rodman has a share in the family factory, but she remains idle and expects her brother Andrew to invest her money profitably (Days to Come). She neither cares for nor knows how to run their factory. The same applies to Julie, Andrew's wife. Andrew, on the other hand, does not discuss his business deals and difficulties with either woman. In Days to Come the financial problems of the Rodman factory and the local town during the Depression are in the hands of the men, who play the roles of capitalists, workers, union organizers, strike breakers, etc. Hellman is aware of the impact of class on the roles and attitudes of women, as can be seen in the fact that some working-class women characters show awareness of and sensitivity to the issues connected with the strike and lend moral support to their men to survive the crisis, but even they are not among the decision makers. In the two plays about the Hubbard family, the economic and social changes during and after the American Civil War are exclusively effected by men. Similarly, in the Second World War plays, the fates of Europe and America during the rise of Fascism depend on the decisions and actions of male characters.

Only in the cases of Sara Müller and her mother, Fanny Farrelly, in Watch on the Rhine, do we have examples of upper-middle-class women who try to help men solve social problems through the women's own actions or through use of their money. Sara's German husband, Kurt Müller, is involved in anti-Fascist underground activities, and therefore Kurt, Sara, and their three children are obliged to move around Europe and suffer the hardships of the war. Because Kurt is busy with his political activities, Sara becomes the breadwinner in the family, but she regards her work as temporary and is not interested in a career. They later seek refuge in her rich mother's home in the United States. After Fanny is informed of Kurt's political activities and the catastrophic political situation in Europe, she becomes willing to use her money and social position to help Kurt carry out his mission. Nevertheless, the fact that Kurt returns to Europe and Sara is left behind with the children demonstrates that Sara's and Fanny's roles remain auxiliary and that they act according to Kurt's instructions.

According to William Wright, one of Hellman's most recent biographers, Hellman's prototype for Sara was Muriel Gardiner, an upper-middle-class American woman who studied psychiatry in Vienna. There she got involved in the city's anti-Fascist underground movement and married Joe Buttinger, the leader of the Austrian resistance. She and her husband were later decorated by the Austrian government. After her return to the United States, she became a well-known psychiatrist. Hellman heard her story from a mutual friend and drew on material from it. What is surprising is that Hellman did not make Sara the main protagonist of the play but instead assigned a subordinate role to her, while choosing her husband Kurt, modeled after Joe Buttinger, as the central hero of the dramatic action. A possible explanation for Hellman's choice is found in Vivian Patraka's observation that in her early plays Hellman, in order to satisfy her conservative theater audience, often gave her women less power than was actually afforded by historical circumstance.⁷ That Hellman submitted to what she conceived of as dire necessity can be seen in the changes she made in later years. Feeling that the public was now ready to accept women protagonists who played unconventional roles inducing social changes, she rewrote the Gardiner story in Pentimento (1973): she created a women protagonist with heroic dimensions, the resistance fighter Julia.⁸

Hellman's dissatisfaction with the status quo is also manifest in her discussion of the question of class in relation to gender ascriptions. Most of Hellman's upper-middle-class women characters in her early works play the conventional roles of wives and mothers, but in contrast to them, her lower-class women, no matter whether they are single or married, hold jobs. Most of them are housemaids, an occupation traditionally considered appropriate for lower-class women in American society. There is no evidence in Hellman's plays that she openly protests against limiting these women to menial jobs. What she criticizes through them, however, are the extravagance and greed of the more privileged classes, the little foxes who “eat the earth and eat all the people on it,”⁹ as her black woman servant in The Little Foxes complains. In most of her plays Hellman blames the exploitation, poverty, and suffering of the lower classes on these foxlike rich people. The dramatic situations she creates make it clear that her lower-class women characters do not choose work outside the home as an expression of woman's emancipation. Like their counterparts in real life, they must work to support themselves and their families. The middle-class dream of “family, security, and upward mobility” obviously does not apply to them. Yet the effect of this social obligation on their consciousness also suggests a development that points beyond passive reaction to a more active participation: despite their class and financial limitations, Hellman's housemaids, made socially aware by their own precarious situation, show sensitivity to the problems of the people around them and do their best to help them (Hannah in Days to Come, Coralee in Another Part of the Forest, Sophronia in The Searching Wind, etc.). Most of her black housemaids are modeled after her own black nurse Sophronia, whom she mentions in her memoirs An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento as a surrogate mother and a powerful presence in her childhood and early adolescence. Like Sophronia, the maids in her plays are loyal to the families whom they serve, but at the same time they do not hesitate openly and severely to criticize their employers' immoral actions, even to the point of risking their jobs. The way Hellman presents them shows that she admires their inner strength, independence, and basic integrity. They often act as mouthpieces for her social criticism, or as foils to their corrupt masters and their compromised mistresses, thus suggesting alternative life-styles that transcend established conventions of gender, class, and race.

In Hellman's families it is the men who own and handle the money, and they misuse the power they have to control and shape the lives of their dependents, mainly women and children, who are expected to submit to the men's will. Lillian Hellman demonstrates this misuse of money and power in The Little Foxes and in Another Part of the Forest, the two plays about the Hubbard family. The Hubbard men, Marcus and Oscar, are tyrannical and cruel to their wives, Lavinia and Birdie, who are portrayed as typical victimized wives. Moreover, the father Marcus and the oldest son Ben show a possessive attitude and a morbid emotional-sexual attraction to the daughter Regina. Ben finally manages to ruin her plans of marrying a Southern aristocrat, whom she loves. He then forces her to marry the banker Horace Giddens in order to bring more money into the family. He also presses the younger brother Oscar to court and marry Birdie Bagtry, thus bringing her cotton plantation into the Hubbard family. In both cases the women are presented as passive objects that men purchase, sell, and exchange in the marriage market in order to serve their own interests.¹⁰

Not all of Hellman's women submit passively to this victimization. Those who fight back, however, tend to imitate blindly the corrupting power play of the male protagonists, thus becoming carbon copies of negative male behavior and personifications of Hellman's inability to visualize a constructive alternative behavior for her upper- and middle-class women. Regina is one of the few women who responds actively to her fate, who knows how to invest money, and who wants the power that accompanies possession of that money. In both Another Part of the Forest and The Little Foxes, Hellman shows that Regina is in a disadvantageous position because she is a woman: in the post-Civil War Southern society in which she lives, money can only be possessed and invested by men: her father's money is inherited and controlled by her brothers, who have even better access to her husband's money than she does. Although in Another Part of the Forest young Regina uses her feminine charm and sex appeal, the only weapons left to her, to manipulate her cruel father into spending a lot of money on her extravagant clothes while underpaying his two sons, the action of the play reveals that her life is shaped by the men in the family. Since society does not allow her to express her dynamic personality and business talents outside the house and since she is surrounded by ruthless men, Regina is confronted by two alternatives, both of which are demoralizing: she can submit to her fate and become victimized like her mother Lavinia and Aunt Birdie, or she can become competitive, manipulative, devious, and tough like these men.

Little Foxes illustrates the extremes to which the mature Regina goes in order to survive and thrive in a male-dominated world. When the husband upon whom she has wasted her youth and whom she never loved informs her that he plans to disinherit her in his new will, she refuses to give him his medicine when he has a heart attack during a fight. Horace dies before changing his will. By inheriting his money Regina acquires greater control over her life and her business interests, but she can only achieve this end through means which Hellman depicts as immoral and male. Yet Regina is not the true villain of the play. Hellman's discourse reveals that she is more sinned against than sinning: in Another Part of the Forest Hellman exposes the corrupting influence of young Regina's patriarchal family and social environment on her character, thus shifting the blame from the individual to the lack of moral values in her environment. Moreover, the action of the play shows that Regina's deviousness, manipulation, and domination are not necessarily inherent female characteristics, as society usually believes; they are acquired traits, and they serve as the means of Regina's self-defense and survival in a hostile, patriarchal world which is not only indifferent to her actual needs but prevents her from expressing her talents creatively and constructively.¹¹ The fate she designs for her heroine is illustrative of Hellman's ambivalence: after she has gone to great length in dramatizing this woman's victimization, Hellman groups the mature Regina together with the other evil characters in The Little Foxes, that is, her two brothers, and she expresses her disapproval of the whole Hubbard clan by revealing the harm they cause to the other characters. Regina's punishment is her final rejection by her only daughter. Feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and fear haunt her at the end of the play.

Like Regina, Mrs. Tilford in The Children's Hour and Fanny Farrelly in Watch on the Rhine acquire power through inherited wealth. They accept not only the money but also the conventional moral and sociopolitical values of their husbands, which the women defend vigorously and beyond which they dare not go. Mrs. Tilford gives moral and financial support to the two schoolteachers, Martha Dobie and Karen Wright. When her granddaughter Mary, however, falsely accuses these teachers of having a lesbian relationship, Mrs. Tilford appoints herself as the self-righteous defender of the traditional social code and New England puritan morality which the teachers were expected to convey to their young students. Without investigating Mary's accusations, Mrs. Tilford takes action against the teachers. Through her influence on the local society—students, parents, women's clubs, the judiciary, businessmen, etc.—she manages to destroy the teachers financially and morally, leading Martha Dobie to suicide. The woman who acquires power thus wields power destructively.

Hellman's discussion of the sensitive issue of lesbianism not only testifies to her difficulties in depicting viable alternatives to women's conduct but also provides a transition in the writer's critical attitude toward women. Although Hellman was not the first American playwright to deal with lesbianism, she knew she was dramatizing a taboo subject.¹² According to Reynolds, the theme of homosexuality in female schoolteachers was “strong stuff,” even for Broadway theaters in the liberal days of the 1930s.¹³ Hellman uses this theme not only to reveal taboos and confusions about sexual roles and relationships but also, as Falk states, to challenge deliberately the sexual mores of her time and to express her indignation against society's intolerance toward those individuals who deviate from its conventions.¹⁴ Through Mrs. Tilford and her women friends, Hellman shows that women are conditioned to accept socially approved images of themselves and are encouraged to defend them as moral and normal even to the point of persecuting and destroying other women who threaten these images. Moreover, she reveals the unhealthy and perverse moral climate that self-righteous and supposedly normal individuals like Mrs. Tilford and her lady friends create.¹⁵ Her portrayals of Mary Tilford and Mrs. Tilford deconstruct both the stereotype of the innocent child and the stereotype of the lady.¹⁶

Another example of Hellman's critical attitude toward women is seen in the almost total absence of constructive relationships between women in her plays. Patriarchal culture, her discourse suggests, encourages competition as well as self-hatred among women, perverting even the ideologically charged mother-daughter relationship into the game of domination and subordination that is expressed in the term “momism.” The friendship and cooperation between Martha and Karen in The Children's Hour is the closest relationship between women created by Hellman in her 1930 to 1950 plays. But this friendship breaks under the burden of the psychological problems and confusions connected with female identity that are shared by all the adult, middle-class women in the play. These conflicts surface after Martha and Karen are accused of being lesbians. Most other relations between upper-middle-class women in Hellman's dramas are disharmonious. Ironically, some of these women find greater support and understanding in their house-maids than in female members of either their families or their social class. As Patraka remarks, Hellman's depiction of women in disharmony with each other agrees with the feminist view of “a male-dominated culture which treats women as inferiors, encouraging both fierce competition amongst them and self-hatred on the basis of gender (and by logical extension, others of one's sex).”¹⁷ The problems pointed out by Patraka arise even in the mother-daughter relationships in Hellman's play. Her mother figures tend to be bossy and socially ambitious (Fanny and Marthe's mother in Watch on the Rhine, Regina, etc.). They usually try to control their daughters' lives.¹⁸ Yet, Hellman again abstrains from branding them as her culprits: their behavior illustrates the social phenomenon of “momism,” which social studies have linked with the conflicts, emptiness, and discontent in many married women's lives.¹⁹ Although Hellman is critical of her domineering mothers, at the same time she insists that their social environment and the empty or frustrating lives which they are obliged to lead are partly to blame for their behavior.

The culprit in Hellman's plays is thus social convention and, as a perfect illustration of this social convention, the middle-class concept of marriage. Hellman does not openly condemn marriage, a basic American institution, yet her choice of disastrous marriages as her dramatic subject matter betrays her critical attitude. All her married couples, except for Kurt and Sara Müller, are unhappy. They suffer from loneliness, lack of communication and fulfillment, and frequent sexual disharmony. Some husbands, like the Hubbards, abuse their wives both verbally and physically and thus cause serious psychological disturbances. Hellman's dissatisfied wives try to escape from their unhappiness through memories of an idealized past or through alcohol (Birdie), religion (Lavinia), infidelity (Julie, Marthe), dreams of traveling (Regina), etc. The reasons for their unhappiness are connected with their reasons for marrying. None married out of love. Desire for money and social advancement is portrayed as the main motive for marriage, but also as the main reason for unhappiness in it.²⁰ Hellman skillfully dramatizes marital problems as well as the efforts of some women characters to rid themselves of husbands whom they do not love. We already mentioned that Regina precipitates her husband's death. Marthe decides to ask for a divorce. Lavinia sides with her oldest son Ben, who overthrows his father and helps her escape to a place where she can live in peace and realize her dream of opening a school for black children. Most wives (Julie, Birdie, Emily), however, make compromises and continue living with their husbands. By connecting private with public events, Hellman's portrayals of the domestic realm thus acquire microcosmic quality. The disharmony and problems in her characters' relations reflect broader moral and social crises in American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period within which Hellman sets the action of her six early plays.

Hellman's dissatisfaction with the status quo is omnipresent in her dramas, but today's reader is also very conscious of her lack of an alternative vision. The harmonious marriage of Sara and Kurt Müller may be an exception to the rule of disharmonious marriages in Hellman's dramatic world, but it cannot be read as Hellman's attempt at a new start. It is important to see that the only good husband in her plays is not an American. The Sara-Kurt relationship is based on mutual love and respect. Neither of the two is obsessed by money and social advancement. They both devote their lives to the cause of freedom, and they convey their ideals to their children. Sara's early break from her mother's control, her marriage to Kurt, her awareness of contemporary political problems, and her support of the anti-Fascist resistance reflect certain fundamental social changes in middle-class mentality during World War II which resulted in the broadening of women's choices, interests, and experiences. Yet the action of the play does not focus on these changes. In both Watch on the Rhine and The Searching Wind Hellman focuses on the rise of Fascism and the dangers it presents for the freedom of the world community. She is not interested in the liberation of women or any other particular group within this community, and the people she accuses of being responsible for the events leading to the destructive war belong to both sexes.²¹

Hellman's ambivalence about women's role and women's place, her understanding of the negative effects of patriarchal culture, and her inability to envision the new are especially obvious in her portrayals of single women. In a dramatic world in which women usually play the socially approved roles of wives and mothers, single women are conceived by the writer as social anomalies. Thus, Hellman's Cora Rodman (Days to Come) is a strikingly unsympathetic woman. Too absorbed with her own self to care for her family or the town, she remains indifferent to the broader sociopolitical problems affecting the less-privileged classes during the Great Depression. Hellman presents Cora as a hysterical, neurotic, self-hating and hated spinster leading an idle, empty, and parasitical life at a time when many people around her can hardly survive.

In contrast to Cora, who is confined in the family house, the other three single women appearing in Hellman's 1930 to 1950 plays work outside the home and are thus able to support themselves, but they too fail as representatives of alternative perspectives. Instead, Hellman depicts them as conscious or unconscious defenders of the status quo that is responsible for their victimization: the teaching jobs they have chosen belong to the category of professions traditionally considered female.²² Martha and Karen worked hard for years to save money and open their own school for girls. As the action of The Children's Hour shows, however, the school curriculum (sewing, elocution, music, classics, etc.) and the teaching methods (mainly memorization and recitation) only perpetuate a genteel educational system that encourages reverence for tradition and obedience to authority, and cultivates the girls' “social and domestic graces.”²³ This “feminine curriculum” in Martha and Karen's school reflects the prevailing ideology among male educational officials in early twentieth-century America, according to which young women's education should be different from men's. Since women were considered intellectually inferior to men, their education should prepare them for the only suitable career, that is, homemaking and childbearing.²⁴

Hellman's play exposes the inadequacy and the harmful results of such an education, but her women protagonists are unable to transform it, and the effects of their failure are devastating: the girls are expected to be happy with the subjects society has chosen for them to learn, yet they are not. Mary Tilford, the evil girl in The Children's Hour, and the other girls are bored, especially in Mrs. Mortar's class, and consequently, negative responses, like playing tricks and power games, fighting, lying, and fantasizing about sex, become part of their daily routine. Both the educational system and their upbringing at home underestimate their actual needs, intelligence, and creativity, and discourage them from developing critical judgment, self-confidence, independence, and moral strength. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mary's lies meet with no serious opposition: being stronger and fearless, she is able to impose her will on the other girls. Like the girls, their mothers are products of the same institutions. Passive, confused, and uncritical, they accept Mary's slander without making an investigation. They submit to Mrs. Tilford's will and thus destroy the two teachers. The teachers themselves are obliged to contribute to the girls' social conditioning by adopting the conventional curriculum and teaching methods and by providing the students with accepted behavior models. When it is suspected that they do not meet society's expectations, they are ostracized and destroyed.

Hellman's attitude toward her protagonists is highly ambiguous: on the one hand, The Children's Hour shows the vulnerability of single women in a society unwilling to give value to women's educational and professional achievements and suspicious of women who do not play the expected roles of wives and/or mothers. On the other hand, the inner conflicts and confusions of Karen and Martha, after the slander against them spreads, illustrate that neither woman had formed a clear, positive self-image and a feeling of self-worth, nor had they attained emotional fulfillment and self-reliance through their education and hard work. Karen still shares the middle-class dream of self-fulfillment through marriage. Martha's reaction is a combination of materialistic and emotional needs: realizing that alone she may not be able to run the school and that all her previous sacrifices and labor may be wasted, she fears that Karen may give up work after her marriage. Moreover, Martha has had a loveless childhood and a very limited social life as an adult. Thus her attachment to Karen is partly due to her loneliness and her need to be loved. Martha is obviously in a more vulnerable position. Feelings of rejection, failure, shame, self-hatred, and guilt increase her confusion about her sexual-social identity and finally lead her to self-destruction. According to the prevailing criteria of patriarchal culture, Karen is the more successful and natural of the two because a man loves and wants to marry her, and the fact that this man has a profession highly regarded by society (he is a physician) gives an extra advantage to Karen. Mrs. Mortar, Martha's aunt, voices these public standards when she calls Martha's affection for Karen unnatural and advises her niece: “Well, you'd better get a beau of your own now, a woman of your age.”²⁵ Hellman undermines the validity of these standards by presenting Mrs. Mortar as an idle, pretentious, silly, irresponsible, and ungrateful person who constantly lies, yet her unmarried protagonists Karen and Martha accept them and judge themselves accordingly. The conflict remains unresolved; Hellman's discourse defies closure.

Another single woman with confused identity is Cassie Bowman in The Searching Wind. Hellman, similarly, places Cassie in a traditionally female job, teaching, but accords her a more privileged position than the majority of actual women teachers in the 1930s and 1940s; she is a college professor of English and even becomes the chairwoman of the department.²⁶ Compared with Martha and Karen, she enjoys greater sexual freedom, and society tolerates her behavior when she has a sexual affair with Alex Hazen before and after his marriage to her friend Emily. She is also one of the few upper-class women characters who has access to the public sphere. Thus she travels extensively and frankly expresses her liberal views. Her early political disagreement with Alex makes her break off her relationship with him and return to America to reconsider it. Still, Hellman's heroine defies the expectations of today's readers in that she does not live up to the potentials inherent in her position. Instead of doing something to defend the cause of democracy against Fascism, she merely talks with friends. Moreover, all her subsequent visits to various European countries where Alex is stationed are motivated by her desire to see him and not by her concern for the political problem of the time. Her actions throughout the play illustrate her early remark to Alex: “We're an ignorant generation. We see so much and know so little. Maybe because we think about ourselves so much.”²⁷

The selfishness and ignorance Cassie attributes to her generation in the handling of public affairs also apply to her own handling of her private affairs. In a final confrontation scene with Alex and Emily, she frankly admits that she chased Alex around Europe for several years, not because she loved him but because she was always haunted by rich Emily, whom she envied and whom she wanted to punish for taking Alex away from her. As Cassie also admits, “This got in the way of everything: my work, other people,” and she concludes: “I got mixed up and couldn't help myself. … We were frivolous people. All three of us, and all those like us.”²⁸ Cassie's speech reflects the general confusion of values in wartime Europe and the United States. On the personal level, it also shows that Hellman has Cassie measure her success and failure as a woman by the same standards that women of previous generations or less education did, that is, by her ability or failure to attract and marry a man. Her professional achievement has not given Cassie emotional fulfillment, a feeling of self-worth and intellectual independence from the prevailing ideology of her time, which praised marriage and condemned women ambitious for any other career outside the home.²⁹ Although she is more of a public person than the other women characters in Hellman's 1930 to 1950 plays, Cassie, unlike the men characters, is not happy in her public role; nor does she consider her job “the mirror” of her identity as do the middle-class men.³⁰ The American gospel of work, “Work is virtue; work builds character; work builds the nation. … There is nothing else important,”³¹ obviously does not apply to her, just as it does not apply to any of Hellman's single women protagonists.

Cassie Bowman and Sara Müller, Hellman's heroines in her plays of the 1940s, are ambiguous characters who illustrate equally Hellman's awareness of the greater opportunities American women acquired in the public sphere during World War II and the continued strength of conventional female role ascriptions. Both women stand for a wider range of mobility for women, but Sara always defines her role as an auxiliary one and is ultimately redomesticated, while Cassie, torn by conflicting identities and values, fails to live up to the potentials of her situation. The fate of both women not only reflects the futility and confusion determining contemporary social images about women's nature and the roles American women were expected to play, but is also indicative of a tension between dissatisfaction with the status quo and an internalization of established conventions, between the urge to change and the failure of vision that characterized Hellman's plays from the very start. Hellman depicts her female protagonists—those who submit as well as those who rebel, the married and the unmarried women, upper- and middle- as well as lower-class women—as “relative creatures,” as objects in men's destructive power play. She skillfully dramatizes the utter frustration of these women and their various reactions, and she names a materialistic patriarchal system as the source of evil, but her plays of the period discussed contain no evidence of an affirmative vision that would transform these women from passive objects to active and creative participants in the shaping of human history. From today's perspective, the writer and her protagonists appear suspended in midair—unwilling to remain where they had always been forced to be, yet ignorant of the road before them. The general situation of American women and of the American women's movement in this crucial age of transition, the 1930s and 1940s, could hardly have found a more convincing portrayal.

Notes

1. Historians of American literature and theater include Hellman among the realistic playwrights often concerned with social problems and evils. See C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. 1, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 274-97; Walter Blair et al., American Literature: A Brief History, rev. ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1974), p. 214; Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 148-50, 401-3; Alan Lewis, American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965), pp. 99-115; Walter Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1965), pp. 274, 278-81, 327, 329; Allardyce Nicoll, World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh (London: George Harrap & Co., 1966), pp. 829-30; and W. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway (New York: Hermitage House, 1955), pp. 279-89. Several critics also stress Hellman's tendency to interweave private and public events in her plays. See “Lillian Hellman,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Sharon R. Gunton (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1974), vol. 2, p. 188; Brother Carrol Angermeier, “Moral and Social Protest in the Plays of Lillian Hellman” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1970), p. 68; Katherine Lederer, Lillian Hellman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), pp. 34-35, 37, 60, 64; Vivian M. Patraka, “Lillian Hellman, Dramatist of the Second Sex” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977), pp. 9, 17, 114, 117, 144, 211; and Judith Olauson, The American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1981), p. 53.

2. Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 206.

3. For more details concerning (a) Hellman's contemporary realistic conventions, (b) American women playwrights' subject matter and female characters, and (c) Hellman's attitude toward and actual portrayal of women in her plays, see Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 5-6, 12-13, 148-49, 210-11, 213-17, and Olauson, Criticism and Characterization, pp. 1, 140-42, 145, 149, 150-53, 158, 173, 175-76, 178-79. For Hellman's concepts and portrayals of women, see also Sister Carol B.V.M. Blitgen, “The Overlooked Hellman” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1972); Sharon P. Friedman, “Feminist Concerns in the Works of Four Twentieth-Century American Women Dramatists: Susan Glaspell, Rachel Crothers, Lillian Hellman, and Lorraine Hansberry” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1977); and Cynthia D.M. Larimer, “A Study of Female Characters in the Eight Plays of Lillian Hellman” (Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1970).

4. William Henry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 222.

5. Relevant comments are made by Olauson, Criticism and Characterization, pp. 151-52, Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 14-15, 124, and June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1973), p. 125.

6. The passage is quoted from Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 148. For information about (a) ideas concerning male and female nature and proper roles, and (b) social changes in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, see pp. 148-76; and Sochen, Movers and Shakers, pp. 130-37, 171-75; Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 62, 64-65, 96-98, 104-6, 173, 202-10, 247-48; Barbara S. Deckard, The Women's Movement: Political, Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 296-99, 301-7; Tamara K. Hareven, “Continuity and Change in the American Family,” in Making America: The Society and Culture of the United States, ed. Luther S. Luedtke (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1987), pp. 241-57; Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam, 1981), pp. 285-340; and Judith Papachristou, Women Together: A History in Documents of the Women's Movement in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 213-15.

7. Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 115, 137. Patraka also discusses women's secondary social roles in Hellman's early plays on pp. 91, 119, 134-36.

8. Hellman, Pentimento, pp. 99-147. Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 136-37, and Lederer, Lillian Hellman, p. 54, accept the early critical view that Julia was a real person and a close friend of Hellman. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), however, proves that Julia was a creation of Hellman's imagination and that Julia's prototype was Dr. Gardiner, whom Hellman had never met. For more details about the Julia story and the events and controversies associated with it, see pp. 135, 164-67, 345, 377-81, 390, 395-96, 398, 403-12, 427.

9. The quotation is from Hellman's “The Little Foxes,” The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1972), p. 182. See Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 55, 57, Deckard, Women's Movement, pp. 296-97, Filene, Him/Her/Self, p. 151, Hymowitz, Women in America, pp. 305-7, and Papachristou, Women Together, pp. 213-14, for information concerning jobs available to American lower-class women and social attitudes toward working wives of this class.

10. Patraka analyzes Birdie's character as well as her situation before and after her marriage. Among other things she calls Birdie the typical “maiden/victim,” woman “as object,” as “chattel,” and as a “pawn in business exchanges” (“Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 85-88). She also considers Regina Marcus's and, later, Ben's sex object (p. 103).

11. Ibid., Patraka also underlines Regina's powerlessness resulting from being female (p. 71), and sees her deviousness as her only alternative to attain power (p. 72). She further discusses Regina's character and needs within the context of cultural myths about women's nature and proper place in society (pp. 73-83). In her memoir Pentimento Hellman writes that Regina and the other Hubbards were largely modeled after her mother's “banking, storekeeping family from Alabama,” and she recalls family dinners which inspired the kind of “angry comedy” elements she tried to recreate in the two Hubbard plays (pp. 180-82).

12. Wright, The Image, pp. 87, 93, 99-101, 109.

13. R.C. Reynolds, Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama in the Thirties (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1986), p. 133.

14. Doris V. Falk, Lillian Hellman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), pp. 36, 45.

15. See Angermeier, “Moral and Social Protest,” pp. 48-49, 52, 229, and Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 35-36 for more detailed discussions of Mrs. Tilford's Victorian morality and the unhealthy moral climate the town women create.

16. Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 21-26, 29-33, provides a more thorough analysis of this subject.

17. Ibid., p. 34.

18. Hellman probably modeled Mrs. Tilford, Fanny Farrelly, and the other bossy mothers in her plays after some of her own women relatives, and especially her grandmother Sophie Newhouse. In her memoir An Unfinished Woman (1969; London: Quartet Books, 1983), pp. 7-11, Hellman portrays her grandmother as a formidable matriarch who controlled her family and “crippled her own children.”

19. For more information see Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 201-7, 212-16, and Hymowitz, Women in America, pp. 331-32.

20. In An Unfinished Woman Hellman writes that she and her generation were “suspicious of the words of love,” pretended to be “cool,” revolted against the previous generation's “sentimentality” and “pretense,” and married men whom they simply liked or men with money (pp. 32, 37). But, as she admits, they “paid for it later on” (p. 32): “Of the five girls I knew best, three married for money and said so, and we were not to know then that two of them, in their forties, would crack up under deprivation or boredom” (p. 32).

21. In an interview, Hellman describes the characters in The Searching Wind as “nice, well-born people who, with good intentions, helped to sell out a world.” See Anne Hollander and John Phillips, “Lillian Hellman,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton, 3rd series (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 132. Critics divide Hellman's characters into the “despoilers” of the earth and the “bystanders” who watch the former performing their evil deeds without interfering to stop them - the protagonists in The Searching Wind are included among the latter. For details see Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 14 (1980), p. 258, and vol. 18 (1981), p. 222; Falk, Lillian Hellman, pp. 29-30; Lederer, Lillian Hellman, pp. 36-37, 53, 60; Olauson, Criticism and Characterization, p. 53; and Patraka, “Dramatist of Second Sex,” pp. 4, 65, 114.

22. Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 58, 60, 91, Deckard, Women's Movement, pp. 297, 300-301, Hymowitz, Women in America, pp. 315, 323, and Papachristou, Women Together, pp. 213-215, discuss the sexual division of work in American society and include teaching in the list of jobs traditionally considered female.

23. The quotation is from Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman, Playwright (New York: Pegasus, 1972), p. 41.

24. For more details see Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 207-10, and Hymowitz, Women in America, p. 329.

25. Lillian Hellman, “The Children's Hour,” The Collected Plays, p. 18.

26. Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 60, 91, Deckard, Women's Movement, p. 300, Hymowitz, Women in America, pp. 315-16, and Sochen, Movers and Shakers, p. 172, discuss discrimination against women in the better-paying, more prestigious and powerful educational positions.

27. Hellman, “The Searching Wind,” The Collected Plays, p. 289.

28. Ibid., p. 320.

29. See Deckard, Women's Movement, pp. 298-301, Filene, Him/Her/Self, p. 169, and Hymowitz, Women in America, pp. 323, 325, 329 for details about social prejudice against career women and the resulting negative stereotypes about them in American society before and after the Second World War.

30. Filene, Him/Her/Self, p. 169.

31. Ibid., p. 159.

Select Bibliography

Angermeier, Brother Carrol. “Moral and Social Protest in the Plays of Lillian Hellman.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1970.

Bills, Steven H. Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1979.

Blitgen, Sister Carol B.V.M. “The Overlooked Hellman.” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1972.

Braun, Devra. “Lillian Hellman's Continuing Moral Battle.” Massachusetts Studies in English 5, no. 4 (1978), pp. 1-6.

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Estrin, Mark W. Lillian Hellman, Plays, Films, Memoirs: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980.

Falk, Doris V. Lillian Hellman. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978.

Friedman, Sharon P. “Feminist Concerns in the Works of Four Twentieth-Century American Women Dramatists: Susan Glaspell, Rachel Crothers, Lillian Hellman, and Lorraine Hansberry.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1977.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Life and Death of Lillian Hellman.” The New Criterion 3, no. 2 (1984), pp. 1-6.

Larimer, Cynthia D.M. “A Study of Female Characters in the Eight Plays of Lillian Hellman.” Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1970.

Lederer, Katherine. “The Foxes Were Waiting for Horace, Not Lefty: The Use of Irony in Lillian Hellman's The Litte Foxes.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 26 (August 1980), pp. 93-104.

———. Lillian Hellman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

Moody, Richard. Lillian Hellman, Playwright. New York: Pegasus, 1972.

Olauson, Judith. The American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1981.

Patraka, Vivian Mary. “Lillian Hellman, Dramatist of the Second Sex.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977.

Riordan, Mary Marguerite. Lillian Hellman: A Bibliography, 1926-1978. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980.

Underwood, June O. “Experimental Forms and Female Archetypes: Lillian Hellman's Pentimento.” Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 5 (1980), pp. 49-53.

Vicinus, Martha. “Julia, the Special Woman,” Jump Cut 18 (1978), pp. 1, 6.

Wagner, L.W. “Lillian Hellman: Autobiography and Truth.” Southern Review 19 (April 1983), pp. 275-88.

Wright, William. Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.