SOURCE: Patraka, Vivian M. “Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine: Realism, Gender, and Historical Crisis.” Modern Drama 32, no. 1 (March 1989): 128-45.

[In the following essay, Patraka discusses “how gender is thematized” in Watch on the Rhine.]

To historicize a drama means understanding it in its changing socio-historical context and accounting for one's own critical stance toward that context. To historicize a drama also means understanding the role of its contemporary spectator as well as the spectator in our own time. According to Brecht, who first theorized this problem for the theatre, historicized works construct the spectator as an historian who is able to look objectively at the complex material conditions and human contradictions within the play's events and, by extension, within their own history. Brecht, however, had no interest in gender as a specific social phenomenon, so gender was not a historical context for him. In contrast, I assume that there is no ungendered history and seek to investigate not only how gender is thematized in Watch on the Rhine but also how it is inscribed in the conditions of the play's production.¹ A gendered reading is not simply one option among many but a necessity if a play is to be fully historicized. In assuming this, I locate myself as part of an ongoing feminist project² to historicize gendered subjectivity as inscribed in plays and spectators.

Works of realism, in which the playwright's purported aim is to investigate social and material conditions, pose a particular problem to this concept of gendered historicizing because issues of gender are often reduced to emotional conflicts. These are the very plays that must be historicized, because the seamless unity of realism conceals the history of its own making, thereby suggesting that all the events which are depicted occur naturally and inevitably. This makes it difficult for the spectator to historicize and to recognize history as a place of difference, struggle, and choice. I argue for the importance of a gendered historicizing of realistic texts in order to understand how these texts position their spectators seemingly within, but actually outside, history, even when there is a concerted effort to replace “psychology” with “politics.”

Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine (1941)³ serves as a good example of a realist play that omits a gendered analysis in its representation of a historical crisis. In response to the urgent threat of fascism, Hellman sought to infuse anti-fascist polemic into the ahistorical structures of a naturalized and nostalgic version of gender relations. To do this, the “unpatriotic” text of Pentimento's Julia,⁴ who “prematurely” fights fascism in Europe, is repatriated in Watch on the Rhine's portrayal of the heroic, but depoliticized, European, Kurt. The plot of an imperiled family in America literally familiarizes the play, and naturalizes an asymmetric relation between the sexes within marriage and family. The spectator is offered the seduction of the seeming logic, acceptability, and inescapability of female subservience. The play exemplifies a general trend, deliberate or unconscious, towards gendered inequality in response to any perceived “ungendered” historical crisis, denigrating opposition to patriarchy by rationalizing regressive fictions about gender on the basis of this “larger” crisis. A common patriarchal fiction of ideological neutrality is that, especially in the face of a “large” crisis, gender (as well as race, class and ethnicity) are not determinants of history. By contrast, when gender is historicized as a product of alterable structures in history, the spectator is given a perspective on gender to consider and evaluate against their own gendered history. To quote Elin Diamond, “When spectators ‘see’ gender they are seeing (and reproducing) the cultural signs of gender, and by implication, the gender ideology of a culture.”⁵

My choice of Hellman's Watch on the Rhine rests in part on its “datedness” as a “relic,” on the melodramatic contrivances which allow the play to be dismissed more easily, less a part of the respected Hellman canon. The very obviousness of the play's message-laden rhetoric and didacticism obscures the sophistication and seductiveness of its use of the structures of realism, a form which gains much of its power from its seeming transparency. Unless one simply assumes that anti-fascist plays were, by definition, appealing to audiences in the forties, the powerful response to this one needs theorizing by the critic in the eighties.

Watch on the Rhine is a call to arms for “nice, liberal” (Pentimento, p. 186) middle-class Americans, an exhortation to fight or help those who fight against fascism. The text's creation of an implicit state of war results in the only justifiable killing in all Hellman's plays and her most deliberate, unambiguous act of creating a hero. Her indictment of American innocence and isolation takes place twenty miles from Washington, D.C. at the Farrelly country home.⁶ According to Pentimento, Watch on the Rhine was originally set in “a small Ohio town.” Hellman changed her locale to a more politically central one so that American ignorance of the threat of fascism could not be excused on the grounds of provincialism or distance from the center of power and information. Here Fanny Farrelly, widow of an American diplomat, and David Farrelly, her lawyer son, live a life that is “secure and comfortable in the American style.”⁷ Their house-guests are Teck de Brancovis, shady Rumanian ex-diplomat and refugee from failed European business deals, and his American wife Marthe who dislikes and fears him. In the play, Teck represents “Old Europe” with its cynical, manipulative, effete aspects, which Hellman believed made it easy for the fascists to take power. Teck is also a site onto which American audiences can project all their anti-European prejudices, leaving the hero Kurt, as the New Man of Europe, free for admiration.

Enter, exhausted and shabby, Sara Müller, the daughter Fanny has not seen for twenty years, her German husband Kurt, a professional “Anti-Fascist,” and their three children. Kurt is carrying $23,000 “gathered from the pennies and the nickels of the poor who do not like Fascism” (p. 278). After a ten-day stay, he learns his comrades in the underground resistance have been captured and he must return to Germany with the money to free them. But Teck has discovered that Kurt is on Germany's most-wanted list and blackmails him. In response, Kurt kills him to preserve his funds as well as the secret identity which will allow him to re-cross safely the German border. Fanny and David, finally comprehending the dangers of fascism, now manifest within their own living room and not an ocean away, are disillusioned of their belief that America is a special, immune world isolated from the tangle of European history. Because they delay reporting the crime, they become accessories to Teck's murder, and further implicate and thus commit themselves by giving Kurt money. After a tearful farewell to his family, Kurt leaves on his mission, knowing that this time he will probably never return.

In structuring these events, Hellman made hard use of her women and children: they provide the exposition, the tension, the comedy, the pathos, the audience for the “big speeches,” the secondary plot complications and the mechanism by which the hero is kept off-stage so that his purity remains unsullied by domesticity or the machinery of the plot. While Hellman always structured her plays around her female characters, this time she imbues this structure with a gendered pro-war ideology designed for the specific purpose of getting the American spectator to accede to United States participation in World War II. On the basis of the emergency posed by Nazism and for the sake of expediency, she reverted to a traditional model of gender relations, including female subservience wedded to conjugal bliss and familial devotion. In order to clarify though not justify this regression, it is necessary to look at historical events contemporaneous with the play and so to pinpoint both how the historical crisis is represented and how the spectator in 1941 would have been positioned.

The stage directions (and program) situate the play in late Spring of 1940. By 1938, Nazi troops had invaded Austria and Hitler had seized the property of Jews in Germany and begun interning adult Jews in concentration camps; Japan had taken Manchuria and was continuing to attack China in a full if undeclared war. During 1939, Franco, supported by the fascists, took control of Spain, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, Mussolini invaded Albania, and France and England declared war on Germany in response to its invasion of Poland. By the early summer of 1940, Hitler and the Nazis had already invaded and taken over Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. The spectator at a performance of the play in April of 1941 could add to these events (and so have more extensive knowledge of current history than the play's characters) the German invasions of Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, and parts of North Africa and the Japanese incursions into Indochina and Thailand.

In Pentimento (p. 185) Lillian Hellman notes that Watch on the Rhine was first conceived as early as 1938, a time of growing fascist aggression which Hellman already had identified as an urgent crisis.⁸ While the events of either 1940 or 1941 could serve, at least theoretically, as sufficient grounds for historical crisis, and despite the claims that Watch on the Rhine had “all the timeliness of first page news”⁹ and “carried the blazing effect of a front-page headline,”¹⁰ the play refers to few specific events—events which after all could be read about in any newspaper. The perception of timeliness results more from the sense of emotional urgency the play projects along with an external context of rapidly shifting events. Moreover, the contemporary spectator of Watch on the Rhine did not assent to our retrospective view of an urgent historical crisis of international proportions: through the Spring of 1941, eighty percent of Americans still opposed a declaration of war by the United States.¹¹ The dangers of fascist aggression may well have been obscured by an aura of optimism created by American business improving from trade with warring nations, by the stability of South and Central America as markets for goods and as sources of natural resources, and by, given the disillusionment after World War I, the satisfaction of Americans that they had so far managed to stay out of what they continued to view as a European embroilment.¹² Thus the historical crisis that the text responds to is that the threat of fascism did not constitute enough of a crisis for its spectators either in 1938 or in Spring 1941 to move them to struggle actively against fascism. To convince her audience that a crisis even existed, Hellman relocated it within the structure of American family, basing the play's appeal on an emotional and ideological narrative of possession. Funneling historical events and the emotions connected to them into the fate of a family and a marriage, into the loss of a father and husband, served as a strategy for getting the spectator both to internalize and internationalize what was now recreated as domestic crisis.¹³ Indeed, when The Village Voice reviewer Julius Novick polled his mother about seeing the play, she replied “It was very consciousness-raising at the time. It really hit you.”¹⁴ The question is with what exactly Hellman hit her audience.

GENDERED METAPHOR AND THE GENDERED APPEAL TO THE SPECTATOR

In Watch on the Rhine, spectators are positioned through a series of gendered, familiarizing metaphors which serve as the play's text more than its overt thematics, plot or characters. Of course, the creation of distorting equivalences between two things that are not equivalent is implicit in the structure of a metaphor, making it both a powerful and dangerous tool. But in the case of Watch on the Rhine, like so many realistic works, the equations, displacements, and substitutions are seamlessly made, with whatever contradicts or disrupts them rendered invisible, often at women's expense. Watch on the Rhine positions its male and female spectators in a gendered way that offers them (more than simply different identifications) different seductions and rewards. This creates a system of exchange that is flattering, exciting to audiences.

The marriages in Watch on the Rhine are metaphors for contrasting models of political relations between the United States and Europe. Marthe's marriage to Teck stands for the aspects of European culture which must be rejected, while Sara's marriage to Kurt for those which must be repatriated (along with Sara and Marthe) into an internationalized version of liberal American ideology. While the childless DeBrancovis marriage represents the depletion, cynicism, and amorality to which we as Americans resist connecting, the marriage of Kurt and Sara, with its three children, operates as a mediation, a bonding between the best of old and new worlds that is staged as loving and unshakable, and so challenges American isolationism in a tropological way. Marriage functions in a literal sense as a traffic in women as exemplified by Marthe's pretentious and opportunistic mother who married her daughter to Teck for the sake of a title. And since Sara, in defiance, had to escape her mother's trafficking to marry the poor but admirable Kurt, the text marks mothers both as poor personal advisors and, on a metaphoric level, political ones, thereby forcing into the background the play's literal critique of the policies of male diplomats. This prevents the process of historicizing by the spectator.

In its use of trans-Atlantic marriages to outline a desired response to international politics, the text itself traffics in women by creating a system of meanings in which the married female characters function as ideological commodities. The use of marriage as a metaphor creates an appeal to the male spectator residing in the notion that an adoring, faithful wife is the reward for politically and ethically correct action in the public arena. The female spectator is offered the idea that politically correct men are loving and humane and that the marriages that women make equate to politically important activity requiring no additional action in the public arena. For example, Marthe's switch of allegiance from her marriage to Teck to a romantic interest in David Farrelly operates as a sign of her growing political awareness of fascism's dangers and the text's payment for his. For both, it represents their rejection of their mothers and their mothers' power over them, past or present. When this romantic choice is equated with political awareness, it expands the danger of the mother and her independent actions into the international arena. Male authority is legitimated while female authority is displaced. The text then disarms the dangerous mother in Sara's scrupulous devotion to Kurt's ideals in her relations with her children.

The presence of Kurt's worshipful children and admiring wife radiates an aura of nostalgia for an idyllic place outside history, pushing the world back to the uninfringed borders of an intact nuclear family and using its fragmentation as the play's central crisis. As Janice Doane and Devon Hodges point out, the source of nostalgia is nostos, the return home to an idealized past. Nostalgia operates not just as “a sentiment but also a rhetorical practice.”¹⁵ Metaphorically, Watch on the Rhine equates the return home with the referent of the nuclear family as authentic origin or stable center where “sexual differences [are] uncompromised by questions about the relation of these differences to ideology and culture.”¹⁶ As a consequence, these familializing metaphors operate as an ahistorical structure of familiarity that is the underpinning for all the play's polemics and so extends out to naturalize or dehistoricize all the history the text slips into it.¹⁷

Furthermore, in its reinscription of patriarchal structures and heterosexuality clothed in blissful marriage, Watch on the Rhine equates the family configuration to the “good people” that fascism threatens and that must be re-covered by war. That the threat in the household comes from Teck conflates his literal threat as an opportunist and fascist sympathizer with the idea that outsiders to the family are suspect and dangerous. The creation of the Farrellys as a Washington diplomat family blurs the distinction between domestic decisions and national policy. Thus the nuclear family is established as the building block of American liberal democracy, complete with an ideological shift away from isolationism toward the idea that America must lead the world toward democracy, individual rights, private property, and Christianity (Kurt even quotes Martin Luther). Moreover, the configuration of a political network of resisters, who secretly consort to oppose fascism, is reconfigured by the play into the nuclear family with women assigned secondary support roles. Nuclear family structures become so metaphorically integrated with taking political action that characters outside it are assimilated into commitment to the nuclear family and to political awareness at the same time. Thus, David Farrelly, a bachelor, and Fanny Farrelly, a widow, operate as marginals in this system. They are underused commodities in the struggle against fascism and for the family, who will be reassimilated and re-educated, “shaken out of the magnolias” in the course of the play (p. 301). Peculiarly, given the frequent perception of the nuclear family as an isolated, protective, self-interested configuration, isolationism becomes a metaphorical equivalent to isolation from the nuclear family.

These familializing metaphors suggest several gendered appeals to the spectator in the context of impending war. Besides authenticating the traditional place of women, the text offers female spectators in the absence of their husbands matrilineal authority (through their sons), but not the dangerous (as presented) matriarchal authority. Also, the text grants the female spectator approval for staying patriotically at home instead of fighting fascism directly, by ensconcing her in the civilian family that has assumed moral weight by its reconfiguration as a network of resisters. And even if the actual departure of Kurt is presented as a painful, tragic event, the play still promises its male spectators authority over and ownership of a nuclear family while having the freedom to leave it for the moral adventure of war.

The opening of the 1943 film version of Watch on the Rhine refers to “some men, ordinary men, not prophets, who knew [the] mighty tragedy was on the way … and had fought it from the beginning. This is the story of one of these men.” This text informs the viewer to expect a gendered narrative of male heroism organized around a man who stands for courageous and foresightful men. Neither the play nor the film leaves its historical marking of “the beginning” vague. Kurt's frequent references to the struggle against fascism in Spain, including singing the whole German Brigade song, foregrounds American failure to aid the elected socialist-liberal government against a fascist rebellion aided by Hitler and Mussolini that culminated in Franco's victory in 1939. Thus the play creates a fixed point of origin for the escalation of fascist aggression, with Kurt proclaiming “It would have been a different world if we had [won]” (p. 269). This temporal slide in the text to an earlier time elicits in male viewers an amalgam of guilt about the past and glorification about the future war as a form of expiation.

To facilitate the metaphoric overlapping of 1938 and 1941, of a civil war having international consequences with a domestic invasion, of Brigade and resistance fighter with ordinary American soldier, the text erases the historical context of Kurt's political allegiances, thereby further essentializing the hero. Kurt's nine-year-old son Bodo comically parrots the language of class exploitation and revolt, so Kurt's possibly leftist politics are present but safely contained by a humorous domesticating device. Peculiarly, Teck reading aloud the Nazi's official description of Kurt as having neither “known political connections” or “known trade-union connections” (p. 286) makes the Nazi hatred of the Left serve as an assurance to the spectator that Kurt's politics equate to a loose ethical conglomerate of fundamental human decencies that can be mapped as the province of American democratic ideology. Bodo also serves as a device for articulating the qualities of Kurt as “a great hero.” He asserts that in Spain, “Papa was brave, he was calm, he was expert, he was resourceful …” (p. 247), this passage explicitly equating the (male) hero with the father. As “Papa,” the hero is middle-aged, sensitive, frightened, exhausted, physically ill from torture and bullet wounds, and violence-hating. This heightens the pathos, widens the range of spectators who can identify with him, and operates as more of a reproach by underscoring how far he deviates from the standard image of the young, healthy, strong male hero. Metaphorically, the abused Old World, European Father must be protected and avenged by the New World, American Sons.

Brecht's Mother Courage, remarking on what is required of soldiers, says “Take it from me, whenever you find a lot of virtues, it shows that something's wrong”¹⁸ and the completeness of Kurt's virtues¹⁹ conveys the text's anxiety about the power of the Nazis even if Kurt's anecdotes testify to how they can be defeated. At the play's end, Kurt's exit from America to rejoin the German underground serves as a paradigm of the male hero as soldier leaving his family to go off to war, just as his killing Teck enacts the deliberate injuring of persons that is war's goal in a more anonymous way. That an individual decision by an anti-fascist equates to what is by now, in 1941, a matter of national policy is a revealing displacement. It enhances the power of the ordinary male spectator by representing the historical process as an aggregate of individual, courageous acts outside specific institutional, cultural, or economic contexts. In this realistic play's system of representation, coherent, unified subjects located within the family either remain, as in Kurt's case, heroically unchanged or they learn (about the threat of Fascism), decide to act, and so recover their identities — identities implicitly linked to the development of an aggregate national identity. Since this identity is American, the European Kurt must be evacuated from the text. The finality of his departure on a mission from which he is unlikely to return combined with his son, Joshua, being too young to follow underscores the metaphoric gap at the center of the play, which the contemporary American hero/ordinary soldier must fill.

Getting male spectators to identify with a hero isn't hard, maybe creating a situation so urgent and a hero so appealing and loving that the female spectator will accede to a subservient role in his support isn't either; but creating a climate in which women will relinquish their male children for the sake of war, the central agenda of Watch on the Rhine, is difficult. The female spectator is given a vision of herself as courageous and mature, a heroine if she does not impede her sons from joining the struggle. Made when we are at war, the 1943 film foregrounds this aspect of the text. Joshua is cast as older and the dialogue between him and Sara where he asserts he will follow Kurt is bracketed off into a new, final scene months later. Symbolically, the two of them are in a bedroom, with Joshua tracing on a large map the route to Germany that will lead him to his missing father—a route that parallels that of many of our soldiers. He insists that he will leave to fight/find his father (the two become equated), that in his absence Sara must prepare Bodo for the same fate and that she is “a brave lady.” Thus becoming “Mother Courage” in this patriarchal economy rests not on protecting one's children, on holding them back but on offering them up however reluctantly to the dangers of war. As E. Ann Kaplan notes about the uses of maternal sacrifice in film, “investment in the pathos of lost Mother-son bondings keeps the maternal melodrama from straying too far from patriarchal mandates.”²⁰

The text constructs its crises around the absences of fathers and sons (suggesting the patrilineal authority of the realist text). No accident, then, that early on a less committed David Farrelly images himself as a “bad monument” to his dead father. And Kurt's patriarchal authority is facilitated by this evacuation of Joshua Farrelly in the text. This gap allows Kurt's European, better informed world view to merge with Joshua's without directly criticising his authority or that of his American liberalism. The portrait of Joshua looming over the living room transports him to the symbolic realm of the Father, exemplifying the entire movement constructed by the play toward the ideology of heroism and war conducted by men. Appropriately Sara says “Papa is going home” to explain Kurt's final departure even while the rest of the Müller family has “come home” to America. Thus the struggle against fascism is configured as the struggle between two patriarchal systems, one evil and the other benign.

If at the moment of excess, of overstatement of its ideas, a realistic play unwittingly reveals gaps in the seamlessness that hides the history of its own making, then Kurt's climactic speech fulfills this: “In every town and every village and every mud hut in the world, there is always a man who loves children and who will fight to make a good world for them” (p. 299). The familiarizing slide from town and village to mud hut promises heroism to each male head of household. It internationalizes the father/hero, firmly assuring the moral correctness of his mission while placing him “beyond politics,” beyond even a specific history of events. While women are to give their children to war as their patriotic commitment, in a curious appropriation of many mothers' concerns, men's commitment to children is erected as their reason for fighting in war.²¹ Besides erasing both political action by women against injustice and their labor in the production of children, these lines literalize the absence of women in the text's representations of them.

E. Ann Kaplan notes that in the maternal narratives of the thirties, “to be healthy, the daughter must turn away from the Mother and discover identity through marriage—that is, through subordination to the male.”²² Indeed, Sara's rejection of her mother and her mother's values in order to marry Kurt twenty years earlier is the anterior action to the play. The reward for her choice parallels what Maria LaPlace describes as the heterosexual romantic ideal of women's fiction, with its perfect understanding between the lovers: a “maternal” man who is a woman's soul-mate, who is capable of tenderness, nurturing and admiration of his beloved.²³ In the portrayal of the relationship between Kurt and Sara, the text even promises the female spectator that the emotional intensity of this romance continues after marriage. As Sara tells Kurt in the final scene: “For twenty years. It is as much for me today—(Takes his arms) Just once, and for all my life. (He pulls her toward him)” (p. 300). However, the equality between men and women that is part of this ideal is not present in this marriage; the text justifies Sara's subordination to Kurt's authority on the basis of the political crisis of fascism as reconfigured in the home. The subject of romantic love in marriage is recreated in a humorous way through Fanny's depiction of her marriage: “(Without turning, she points over her head to Joshua Farrelly's portrait) Thank God, I was in love” (p. 233), and “(shrieks) What! Your father bored with me! Not for a second of our life” (p. 247). There's even a competition between Fanny and Sara over whose marriage is the more loving, which is halted by an amused Kurt's “Ladies, ladies” (p. 248). A humiliating account related by the housekeeper Anise of how Fanny, when pregnant and jealous over her husband's dancing with another woman, faked the sounds of labor and so spitefully screamed for three weeks, ensures that this character has no matriarchal authority in the play but, instead, functions as the comic type of the sharp-tongued matriarch.

The text's use of parallel comic and serious tracks in representing the women, as in the depiction of conjugal love, occurs also in the depiction of the women's relationships to their husband's ideas. Fanny, who “always [finds herself] wondering what Joshua would have felt” (p. 236) states “I am proud to have Papa's convictions” (p. 260). Her parroting of her husband's ideas allows them to be criticised indirectly while, given Bodo's similar parroting of Kurt's ideas, infantilizing her. The case of Sara is more complex. Twice in the play, Kurt cuts off her speaking, once with a “Be still, Sara” (p. 253), and once to control her anger and interject a long narrative of his own. In response to this narrative, Sara says “I wanted it the way Kurt wanted it” (p. 253). Though never comic, Sara is no more a true speaking subject in the play than is Fanny. Her wifely function is to translate Kurt's point of view in his absence, serving metaphorically as both an extension of (more serious and perceptive than Fanny), and mirror for her husband.

If Robert Sherwood's 1940 play about the threat of fascism, There Shall Be No Night, has as its main female character a nearly speechless wife who is rarely without her apron, Hellman's strategy of making seemingly intelligent women self-consciously speak their subordinate positions is certainly more seductive, especially when aligned to the aura of maturity adhering to Sara. But a devolutionary image of girlhood underscores both Fanny's and Sara's representations. Half in amusement and half in anger, Davis tells his mother “Mama, I think we'll fix up the chicken house for you as a playroom. … and you can go into your second childhood in the proper privacy” (p. 235). And, included for the “self-effacing part” (as one reviewer put it)²⁴ of Sara is a gentle remonstrance from Kurt to “not be a baby” about enjoying her former, luxurious home. Moreover, praise for Sara culminates in David's and Kurt's evaluation of her near the end of the play as “a good girl” (p. 290). This larger, gendered narrative of infantilization includes the portrayal of Babette, Sara's daughter, four times described as “a pretty little girl.” Babbie exults in American opportunities to cook, sew, and get new dresses, implying to the audience that, in contrast to war-torn Europe, America is a place where femininity still flourishes. Indeed, with Sara described initially as “very badly dressed” in mismatched clothes, much care is given to the scene where Marthe brings in boxes of fashionable, expensive dresses secretly bought by Fanny for Sara and Babette. The re-absorption of the Müller females into the discourse of consumerism serves as a confirmation of their repatriation into middle-class capitalist America, with no parallel activity for the Müller males. It is as if upclassing were a promise reserved for women, while the effacing of class differences is one reserved for men fighting against fascism.

Watch on the Rhine capitalizes on the nostalgia for sexual inequality just at the edge of the historical moment when so many real women would shift into active industrial participation for the war effort. In one sense, then, the devolutionary women's line slides over the forties, erasing the competent, self-supporting image of Rosie the Riveter to anticipate the more restricted position of women in the fifties. But perhaps American responses to the war and its aftermath contained the seeds of the fifties with its suburban reproductions of “chickenhouse playrooms,” just as the portrayals of women in this play do. That Hellman's 1943 film script The North Star²⁵ included portrayals of gun-wielding, torture-resisting Russian women and girls responding to invasion by the Nazis reinforces by contrast that even when staged within the illusion of invasion of America, there was still no space in the form, content, or ideology of Watch on the Rhine for female resistance. In support of a formal declaration of war and acceptance of the archetypal departure of the soldier, the text sacrifices gender equality, so for the female spectator the play must create a situation so pressing, a mission so holy, that any role in it is glorified.

“JULIA”

Describing the writing of Watch on the Rhine, Hellman said it was “the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees” while “all other work for me had been fragmented, hunting in an open field with shot from several guns … unable to see clearly, … hands empty from stumbling and spilling” (Pentimento, p. 193). The “one piece” denotes the ease of reproducing ideology as consistent with itself and actual conditions, of not going against norms she challenged in other plays. The “open field” suggests some of the discontinuities and contradictions to a totalizing world view revealed in the process of much of Hellman's writing, including “Julia.” Instead of the coherent, linear, realist narrative of Watch on the Rhine, “Julia” is a structural and thematic interplay of movement—the movement of women across Europe and the associative movement of Hellman's memory and reflection contextualizing in unpredictable ways. As a text that foregrounds concealment and deception, both as the necessary language of the anti-fascist underground and as an indictment of those who denied the threat of fascism out of apathy and self-interest, “Julia” also oscillates between revealing and concealing Hellman's desire for Julia as a hero and as a beloved person of power and grace. Accordingly, language is never transparent in the text; the writing is self-reflexive, calling attention to its own textual strategies.

I want, now, to establish an intertextual relationship between Watch on the Rhine and the “Julia” section of Pentimento, to exemplify the way a text can historicize another by the same author. I won't give a full-blown reading of “Julia,” but employ the text as a way of exposing the limitations of Watch on the Rhine as realistic text. The events depicted in “Julia” occur through 1938, so “Julia” is a pretext to the play. Indeed, Hellman wrote that Kurt “was, of course, a form of” her vigorously anti-fascist, heroic friend Julia (Pentimento, p. 187). The “of course” denotes Hellman's assumption of the unproblematic transposing of gender which in reality erases gender—not as an essentialized, biological element but one that is constructed through history. Early on in “Julia,” Hellman marks her own awareness of the ideology of gender by noting her uneasiness around a man who made “pretend-good-natured feminine jibes” (Pentimento, p. 102). And later, she marks the suspiciousness and derision of homophobic acquaintances in response to her friendship with Julia, implicating them as well in a narrow, conventional morality and selfishness that gives them a kind of fascist potential. As a work written in the 1970s, “Julia” is also the post-text to Watch on the Rhine; it comments on the play's function as a pro-war text written in the historical moment of the 1940s by revealing in its own text a history of intimacy between women in relationship to political struggle against fascism. Thus “Julia” serves as the supplement to Watch on the Rhine: everything that the “Kurt” version of Julia cannot contain circulates invisibly through the play creating the “one character too many” Hellman thought was in this play but could not identify.

Instead of enfolding resistance to fascism within the confines of the symbolic ideological units of marriage and family, “Julia” presents an anonymous network of women and men “of Catholic, Communist, many beliefs” (Pentimento, p. 106), in which politically committed, ordinary women taking grave risks are foregrounded. The notion that the foundation for anti-fascism is to be found in various, specific systems of belief replaces the individual moral dilemmas of Watch on the Rhine, which suggested that context, even history itself, did not change people's values. And if Watch on the Rhine posits fascism as an evil based on its opposition to the nuclear family, “Julia” repoliticizes the struggle against fascism by reconfiguring those whom fascism most directly threatens, and who must be rescued by the underground as “Jews … And political people. Socialists, Communists, plain old Catholic dissenters” (Pentimento, p. 139). Through the character of Hellman, the text charts the uncertainty and disorientation of American intellectuals in the early thirties over the extent of the dangers of fascism, thereby offering both a sense of the historical forces of that time and a response to them, by which readers can evaluate and contextualize their own awareness of what contemporary events mean. Watch on the Rhine and “Julia” are both teaching texts and texts about teaching, but while the education of a family is crucial in the play, in “Julia” it is a woman, a writer, and political person, whose education and development are central. And this learning begins in a bond between two women in early adolescence. Replacing Babette, the daughter positioned solely by her relationship to her family, is the configuration of close friendship between unrelated girls—an intense one, full of questioning and speculation about the world.

Heroism itself is no longer the province of males, of fathers and sons vested with familial authority, when Hellman relocates acts of courage within a matrix of female friendships. The story marks the way Julia depends on this friendship to seduce Hellman via letters to come to Europe, recognize the gravity of what was happening, and risk carrying money across the border to Germany to secure the release of those interned in concentration camps. Even the props of this resistance work—fur hat and candy box—portray the paraphernalia of femininity as a strategy to defeat fascists instead of as a trivialized comic device. In its focus on female friendship, “Julia” historicizes the role of emotion and personal feeling outside the family and marriage in relation to politics. The text also reconceives women's anger: while Kurt polices Sara if she gets “too angry” in expressing herself, Julia tells Hellman that she's “always liked [Hellman's] anger, trusted it” and “not to let people talk you out of it” (Pentimento, p. 140), and, by implication, the insight and power to act that anger gives. The converse of anger in “Julia” is not the comfortably subordinate Sarah but “that kind of outward early-learned passive quality that in women so often hides anger” (Pentimento, p. 119), that is, a concealed and ineffectual rage conditioned by patriarchal norms.

While Hellman thought the film version of “Julia” did a good job of showing “that two women can be totally devoted to one another, and that each will do for the other what each wants,”²⁶ her own text rarely risks dehistoricizing the two women's political activity by subordinating it to an essentialized narrative of female friendship. When Hellman has accomplished her mission, Julia tells her to “believe that you have been better than a good friend to me, you have done something important” (Pentimento, pp. 138-9), implicitly enlarging the territory of friendship and its obligations while refusing to make it a transgressive political action in itself. Still, “Julia” does reconfigure the site of love and intense feeling outside marriage and into female friendship, and instead of the aggressively heterosexual text of Watch on the Rhine, “Julia” is grounded in a historically specific, sexual, intellectual, and political rapport between two women. Thus the text and its defamiliarizing configurations depict the conditions in which women become social subjects, rather than, given the gender ideology of Watch on the Rhine, subjecting them to a particular position in a social structure. As a text of many overlapping contexts that can't be tracked or sorted out, “Julia” portrays the historical process as both complex and discontinuous—a place of exclusion on the basis of gender, class, sexual preference, and race instead of a continuing, causal, naturalized chain of events.

Legitimate can be defined as “according to law,” as “in accordance with established rules, principles, or standards,” and as “in accordance with the laws of reasoning.” Illegitimate includes unlawful, illegal, irregular, and illogical. So established structures of authority are the context for deciding which term of this legitimate/illegitimate opposition applies. The text of “Julia” contains many “illegitimate” aspects. The only family in the text is her unpleasant, fragmented upper-class one, which she rejects and which repudiates her once she joins with the working class of Vienna. She uses her money in an illegitimate way—not in accordance with upper class standards and outside the discourse of consumerism—to bankroll the resistance. If the Müllers are repatriated into America in Watch on the Rhine, “Julia” is the unpatriotic text in which a woman must leave America to express her politics.²⁷ The depoliticized Kurt is replaced by the socialist Julia, thereby grounding in politics her early-thirties awareness of “the holocaust that was on its way” (Pentimento, p. 121), and her defense of Vienna's Fljoridsdorf district against violent attack by fascist thugs.

Julia has an illegitimate child whom she comfortably describes as “fat and handsome,” quickly dismissing the father as “an ordinary social climber.” For Julia, the term “bastard” is reserved for Nazis, not children, so, by implication, actions and ideology should determine legitimacy, not legal relations within the structure of the family. While the characterization of Sara relies on the traditional psychology of the maternal, in “Julia” there is no conflict between motherhood and active political struggle. Nor is the matriarchal rendered as threatening in this feminocentric world. Hellman's giving her character her own mother's name, and Julia's giving her daughter the name Lilly, after Hellman, reflect the way that the boundaries between female identities such as mother and daughter, as well as the borders between the relationships among women of lover and friend, collapse and blur in this gynocentric text. If, using Kurt's profession as a figuration for the play's structure, Watch on the Rhine is the engineered, fixed, logical text, “Julia” is its disruptive, repressed text. A final definition of legitimate refers to theatre, as in “the normal or regular type of stage plays.” The text of Julia is the illegitimate theatre of Watch on the Rhine, containing what cannot be placed into the historical perspective of a pro-war 1940s play, and further, what won't fit into the borders of the realistic system of representation in general.

If a text contains the seeds of what it does not say, of its opposite, Watch on the Rhine does so in ways that undermine its critique of fascism. Fascism denies history, replaces it with a myth of itself, constructs rigid oppositions and hierarchies of difference that are both menacingly authoritative and flexible. This process is reflected in the text's reinscribing of the patriarchal narrative of the nuclear family. The strategy of structuring the dehistoricized nuclear family as the bulwark of benign patriarchal opposition to fascism erases the historical reality of the fascist family and the organizing of Nazism (at least on the level of propaganda) around a pro-family, pro-natal ideology. Perhaps fascism, with its severe gender asymmetries, is made no longer threatening, is recuperated into dominant ideology via the domestic arena, when Hellman insists on a false opposition between a sugary version of patriarchy and fascism.

In response to her own historical dilemma, Hellman tried to explode the insularity of the family by familiarizing what was outside it, tried to internationalize political concerns and social relations by relocating them all within the United States and American democratic ideology. The result conveyed an aggregate national identity based on individual acts that appropriates history and politics as the province of the normal, the acceptable, the inescapable, and ultimately ahistorical structure of the family. And, as a pro-war play of the forties, Watch on the Rhine doesn't explore the question of what we do, how we live, how we resist fascism if we don't use war. Not tied to a war ideology, the retrospective presentation of Julia's anti-fascism may serve as more of a model for political action, including the fuller gendered historicizing the text accomplishes. If, in Watch on the Rhine, Hellman opposes one set of fixed ideological metaphors to another set implied by fascism, in “Julia” Hellman destabilizes the most traditional tropes of configuration, given her network of female resistance to fascism outside of the family structure. This suggests the instability of sexual identity, of male and female, as products of culture and subject to redefinition. Transgressive structures operate on both the “personal” and “political” level of “Julia” so that class and gender issues are more fully integrated into this work's anti-fascist ideology. An action of the plot of Watch on the Rhine is to conceal the dead body of Teck; the body buried, so to speak, in this realistic American family plot is the body of women as, for example, political resisters, close companions, and transgressors of the injunction to legitimize children through marriage. In its rejection of hierarchizing, of fixed identities enclosed in a thematics, and of naturalizing myths of origin that erase history, the text of “Julia” and not just the character Julia operates as a resistance to fascism, a disruptive expression of female desire not corralled into legitimacy or erased by dominant ideology.

Notes

1. This concept of historicization and gender was worked out in dialogue with Elin Diamond, Rutgers University. For a ground-breaking exploration of the potentiality of Brecht's theory for feminism and a re-radicalization of his theory through feminist theory, see her recent article “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism” in The Drama Review, 32 (1988), 82-94: hereafter cited as Diamond.

2. See, for example, Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre (New York, 1988), Jill Dolan's The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988), and Janelle Reinelt's “Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama” Theatre Journal, 38 (1986), 154-164.

3. Watch on the Rhine in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (New York, 1979), 227-301; page references to this edition are hereafter cited in the text. Herman Shumlin directed the 1943 screen version of Watch on the Rhine with a screenplay by Dashiell Hammett and additional passages by Lillian Hellman.

4. “Julia” in Pentimento (Boston, 1973), pp. 101-147.

5. Diamond, 84.

6. In her discussion of melodrama in America, Christine Gledhill notes how “The country [in contrast to the Europeanized city] was invested with America's founding ideology, egalitarianism, and regeneration was found in its rural past,” and Hellman's use of the country home, including references to the cleanness and openness of the house and the Edenic beauty of its garden, suggests these values. Fighting fascism then becomes a necessary “getting dirty” as in the violent response to the dirty business Teck brings into the house with him. As quoted in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London, 1987), p. 24.

7. Stark Young, The New Republic, 104 (14 April 1941), 498.

8. In a 1964 interview, Hellman stated that she had “felt very strongly that people had … gotten us into a war that could have been avoided if Fascism had been recognized early enough,” so the historical crisis is not recognizing the dangers of fascism in time to prevent war. In this sense, foregrounding Kurt's early recognition of and struggle against fascism's dangers gives Watch on the Rhine an anti-war subtext, an emphasis on how things should have been instead of how they ought to be. From John Phillips and Anne Hollander's Paris Review interview with Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I: Lillian Hellman—An Interview,” reprinted in Conversations with Lillian Hellman, edited by Jackson R. Bryer (Jackson, Miss., 1986), p. 66.

9. Burns Mantle, “‘Watch on the Rhine’ Stirring Drama of a Family of Refugees,” New York Daily News, 2 April 1941.

10. Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman: Playwright (New York, 1972), p. 120.

11. Norman A. Graebner, The Age of Global Power: The United States Since 1939 (New York, 1979), p. 14.

12. In The Twentieth Century, a People's History (New York, 1984), p. 112, Howard Zinn maintains that the crisis perceived by the United States government and which determined our entry into World War II occurred “when Japan threatened potential U.S. markets by its attempted takeover of China, but especially as it moved toward the tin, rubber, and oil of Southeast Asia” and threatened our supply of raw materials.

13. In his biography of Hellman, William Wright relates that in response to the 1943 film version of Watch, the Hays office “balked at the unpunished killing at the play's conclusion. They insisted that the script include some sort of ‘punishment’ for the killer, Kurt Müller.” In response, “in a scathing letter to Joseph Breen [Hellman] asked if he was aware that killing Nazis was at the moment the national policy of the United States?” and chastised the Hays Office for the incongruity of its response (Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman [New York, 1986], p. 182). This incident outlines the contrast between the official code of morality for domestic melodrama and the wartime code Hellman imported into the home once she metaphorically relocated the invasion of fascism to the American living room. In her use of the metaphor of invasion, Hellman was creating dramatically what had not happened historically.

14. Julius Novick, “Pentimentality” The Village Voice, 14 January 1980, p. 84.

15. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: the Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (London, 1987), p. 3.

16. Ibid, p. 7.

17. What may be repressed but traceable in the text's focus on familial crisis and its choice of a European family to convey it is Hellman's awareness of the historically specific threat to the Jewish family by the Nazis, who pursued the destruction of the Jewish family unit to fulfill their fascist biological determinisms of “racial hygiene.” It is also possible to trace in the metaphor of the international marriage between American and European a desire for a marriage of Christian with Jew that would lead to protest and struggle against the events of the Holocaust.

18. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, in Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays Volume 5, eds. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York, 1972), p. 148.

19. In Pentimento, Hellman relates how the representation of the heroic character Kurt differed from the behavior of the actor who played him. The Hungarian born Paul Lukas had been “a trusted follower of the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun, but the week before Kun fell he had joined Kun's enemies. He saw nothing contradictory in now playing a self-sacrificing anti-Fascist.” More of a Teck than a Kurt in real life, Lukas also cheated at tennis, and “Eric Roberts, who played [Bodo], disliked him so much that some nights he ate garlic before he climbed into Paul's lap and other nights he rubbed his hair with foul-smelling whale oil.” (Pentimento, p. 190). The angry comedy arising from the gap between what Hellman erected on stage and what actually was never permeates the religiosity of the text itself.

20. E. Ann Kaplan, “Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman's Film 1910-40,” in Gledhill, op. cit., p. 126.

21. Even in her 1974 interview with Bill Moyers, “Lillian Hellman: The Great Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long, Rich Life,” she reasserts that “one is almost dying to see a hero rise up in America now. It's a terrible lack too that there are certainly many decent men but … there's no large figure to say anything for any of us anymore” (Bryer, op. cit., p. 141). More curious, in her 1978 interview with Peter Adams, “Unfinished Woman,” when asked if she still shared the optimism conveyed by the mud hut speech, she replied “yes” but “I think I would rather say: ‘In every village, in every mud hut, in every country in the world, there is a man intelligent enough to make a fight for a better world’—to have sense enough to figure it out, that something better has got to happen. ‘A better world for children’ I do not think I would say any more” (Bryer, p. 225). So even after writing “Julia,” she still conceived of the necessary hero as gendered and familialized, but the father's commitment to children which overshadowed that of the mother is replaced by the concept of “knowing,” of seeing clearly.

22. Gledhill, op. cit., pp. 133-34.

23. Maria LaPlace, “Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive Struggle in Now Voyager,” in Gledhill, op. cit., p. 159.

24. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, 13 April 1941, sec 9, p. 1.

25. Lillian Hellman, The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People (New York, 1943).

26. 1978 Peter Adam interview in Bryer, op. cit., p. 228.

27. Expressing her own politics in the “Julia” story, Hellman herself became the subject of the debate. The struggle around the ownership of the “Julia” story and the accusation of Hellman having appropriated it serve most frequently as a means to discredit Hellman's famous stand against the House Un-American Activities Committee, and perhaps more telling, to undermine the credibility of Hellman's stinging analysis in Scoundrel Time of the behaviour of liberals in the McCarthy era. See e.g., Samuel McCracken, “Julia and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman.” Commentary, 77 (June 1984), 35-43.

The research for an earlier version of this paper, presented at the American Theater in Higher Education Conference in Chicago, August 1987, was made possible by a Summer Faculty Research Grant from Bowling Green State University in 1987. I wish to thank my colleague at Bowling Green, Ellen Berry, for her extensive discussion and editorial help.