SOURCE: Holditch, W. Kenneth. “Another Part of the Country: Lillian Hellman as Southern Playwright.” Southern Quarterly 25, no. 3 (spring 1987): 11-35.

[In the following essay, Holditch discusses elements of Hellman's life in the South that are reflected in her dramas.]

It seems strange, to say the least, that the last volume Lillian Hellman published before her death was a cookbook. The woman in the kitchen practicing the skills of the gourmet is an image decidedly at odds with that of the strong, independent writer, smoking and drinking with “tough guy” Dashiell Hammett, confronting the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in what may have been her finest moment (“I can't cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion”), hurling sarcastic barbs at a multitude of enemies, and finally, nearly blind and suffering from emphysema, undertaking the rigors of a lawsuit against that other iron-willed and indomitable lady of letters, Mary McCarthy, over a gratuitous and insulting but trivial remark that should, for the good of all concerned, have been ignored.

Significantly, many of the recipes in Eating Together are southern in origin, specifically from New Orleans or other parts of Louisiana (gumbo, red beans and rice, seafood dishes), a circumstance which attests to Hellman's never having lost touch with her origins, early in this century, in that region of the country that provided the setting of her best dramas. It is another surprising element of the life of this remarkable, if not especially lovable or even likable woman, that given the brevity of her time in the South in relation to the years in New York and New England, her interest in New Orleans, its people, its food and customs, and the general romantic mystique of the place should have continued many years after the fact. She theorizes in the book that “one of the reasons for fine New Orleans cooking is the absence of … second-generations snobbery” so that the Creoles in the city could adopt and adapt the recipes of the rural Cajuns into their own more “fancified” cuisine (10). She recalled in 1974 that “New Orleans had a live-and-let-live quality about it. That was rare in the South” (Bryer 197).

The abiding effect of the South on her finest writings, particularly The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, is surely akin to the powerful influence exerted by the region on other native writers for a century and a half. Edgar Allan Poe, who had little cause to rejoice in the memory of the Virginia of his childhood, given what happened to him in the early years following his parents' deaths, continued to regard himself as a southerner and became, indeed, one of the first and perhaps the most ardent polemicist for the cause of southern authors and literature. In the twentieth century, Thomas Wolfe, who could not go home again in reality perhaps, in effect never left the hills of North Carolina insofar as his writing, his attitudes and his sentiments were concerned. William Styron, a later author of the eastern seaboard southern states, long an exile in New England, in his fiction returns again and again to the Virginia of his youth and young manhood, even interjecting a large portion of it into the story of a Polish refugee, her New York lover and the tragedy that engulfs and destroys them in the northern city. Others—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price—have, in effect, never left, either physically or spiritually, the region that gave them birth and nourished their creative gifts.

Hellman's childhood was not, of course, like those of many other southern writers, spent almost entirely in the region. Born in New Orleans though she was, she lived only the first six years in that city. The next decade, until she was sixteen, involved what might be described as a schizophrenic shuttling back and forth between that languid Latin city with its Caribbean mentality and New York with its frenetic pace, six months in one, six months in the other. In retrospect, however, she was in a 1974 interview to speak of herself as southern, stating that she was “very rebellious and that I think in part I inherited” since “I grew up in part of the South. …” Later she observed that “people who grew up in the South … consider themselves Southern,” and “I came from a family of Southerners. It wasn't simply a question that I was brought up and down from the South. I came from a family, on both sides, who had been Southerners for a great many generations” (Bryer 150, 186). Among her southern traits is one that she acknowledges herself in a 1975 interview when she recalls that a psychiatrist once told her that she looked at herself as if she were another person” (Bryer 181). Any number of modern authors from the region have commented upon that quality of irony in southern character. It is a significant part of the makeup of Will Barrett in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, who attributes it to his having been born in the South; and in The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, the protagonist defines that trait in himself as being integral to most of his decisions and actions. In these writers as in Hellman, the characteristic contributes a distinct quality to the literature produced.

The image that best characterizes the southern half of those formative years of Hellman's life is the fig tree in the backyard of her two aunts' home in uptown New Orleans (a marked contrast to the large New York City apartment of her mother's family that exemplifies the northern segments of her young life). That tree, which she recalled in An Unfinished Woman as her “first and most beloved home” (321) where she fled to escape the adult world and learned to read, is an ideal symbol for the lazy, slow and unambitious existence in miasmic South Louisiana, a seasonless clime in which day blended into day, week into week. There was little to mark time's passing other than the occasional scrapes in which the already self-willed girl became involved (running away from home, hiding out in Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral, for example), the deaths of family members, the decline in her father's fortune; and the food, rich, heavy and spicy, redolent of the West Indies and Africa and, to a lesser extent, France and Spain, the food which she was to remember fondly and exactly until her dying days.

Fortunately for her, what she retained from that half of her early life were those memories which fed her work, provided the material with which her creative and dramatic powers could construct the melodramas which were to make her famous, while from the diametrically opposed times of residence in the northern city, she seems to have derived the push, the motivation, the ambition which drove her to move roughshod ahead, ignoring or overwhelming whatever obstacle, material or ideological or human, might stand in her predetermined way. A healthful injection of the Puritan work ethic obviously served to prevent her having been infected with that feverish torpor which has afflicted writers, artists, musicians and others from the time of the first settlement of the decidedly non-Puritanical Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, aptly described by A. J. Leibling as “one more city of the Graecia Maxima that rims the Mediterranean” (321). Authors from the time of W. C. C. Claiborne, the first American governor of the Louisiana territory, headquartered in New Orleans in the early 1800s, until the present day have bemoaned the combination of temperature and atmosphere and Latin American attitudes that more often than not results in a laissez faire approach that makes for a pleasant life of leisure but may be destructive to initiative, to creativity, to productivity. More than one writer has despaired at the enervating quality of the place which, delightful as it is in its more positive aspects, can thwart the ambitions of the artist. Many observed New Orleans, drew from its mystique, and then, like Faulkner, went away to write. Only George Washington Cable and Tennessee Williams among established authors of the last hundred years seem to have been able to work there successfully, and Cable was a Calvinist, strongly resistant to the hedonistic attractions of his hometown, and Williams a man driven by a compulsion to work that would have gladdened the heart of any seventeenth-century New England divine (who would not, of course, have approved of the dramas being produced).

If Lillian Hellman's family fate had ordained that she remain in the city, it is entirely possible that, had she not been Jewish, she might have become a debutante or Junior leaguer, even queen or at least maid in some minor Carnival organization. In a city, however, that has consistently through the years denied to Jews access to what its privileged few deem “aristocratic” pursuits (namely, being a member of Rex or Comus and such organizations as the Boston Club; making an appropriate debut), fate might have assigned her a role as supporter of the many charities and cultural organizations traditionally maintained to a large extent by Jewish benefactors and volunteers and, surely, given her political bent, as active member of groups such as the League of Women Voters. She addressed the issue in a 1976 interview by saying that like other New Orleanians, Jews there were a breed apart. “They had a pleasant community of their own and in turn the community allowed them to have it, although they never accepted them into their own circles.” She alludes to the rumor, much repeated in the city, that some Jews leave New Orleans during Carnival to avoid embarrassment (Bryer 196-7).

Not the least remarkable aspect of Hellman's very remarkable career, in fact, is that despite her ethnic background, she is one of the least Jewish of all Jewish authors, not merely in a religious sense but in terms of attitudes and choice of subject matter. She has acknowledged that she was not brought up religiously, and that “Southern Jews, particularly New Orleans Jews, had different histories than Northern Jews” (Bryer 196). The stories she chooses to tell in her dramas (and indeed in her autobiographical works as well) attest much more to her place of origin than to her ethnic background, and her view of humanity and its weaknesses seems surprisingly close to that of southern Protestantism, something that one does not expect, given the fact that she is not religious, indeed seems no more interested in theological and teleological concerns than a writer like Henry James. The only truly religious character in her southern plays is Lavinia in Another Part of the Forest, who is, of course, deranged. Yet in tone, Hellman is often strongly moral, and the righteous indignation with which she views the vices of the spoilers—greed, avarice, ruthlessness, for example—is more akin to Calvinism in its fervor than to the modern Jewish tradition that is part of her heritage. She acknowledges this ironic element herself in a 1975 conversation with Rex Reed: “Dashiell Hammett always said I was the only Jew he knew who was also a Puritan” (Bryer 183). Again in 1979, when an interviewer observed that she had used the word puritan several times to describe herself, she agreed that it was probably because of her sense of right and wrong (Bryer 269); in 1980 she recalled, “I remember Dorothy Parker saying about me that if I get a cold I feel I've sinned against God” (Bryer 274). Although she denied being preoccupied with evil in a 1974 conversation with Bill Moyers, she went on to state that “I'm a moral writer and looking at evil is a form of morality, isn't it?” (Bryer 148).

Like other writers from the region, Hellman's work is indelibly marked by the specific place of her origin, by the physical, intellectual and spiritual peculiarities that distinguish it from other locales; and, in general, by many of the attitudes and beliefs that constitute what Wilbur J. Cash called “the mind of the South.” Those elements of her best dramas which categorize them as southern include not only setting and characters, then, but her concern with traditions and those “old truths and verities of the heart,” to use Faulkner's phrase. Underlying her portrayals of human frailty and vice is an abiding conviction of the fallen state of the world, the natural depravity of human beings and their imperfectibility and a concomitant belief in the virtues often exhibited in the aristocratic class of society, perhaps more aptly called “the gentry.” Many of the above qualities would seem, obviously, to be at odds with the liberal political beliefs the playwright seemed to espouse for much of her career. There is an abiding distrust of progress, industrial, sociological or otherwise, and, to a lesser extent, a concern for ecology and the land, both aspects of southern Agrarianism. The plays exhibit as well the author's sense of one's obligations to family, society and race; a devotion to family pride, which includes the motif of inheritance; and a conviction that lost causes may somehow function beneficially in forging character.

In relation to setting, Hellman employs the Alabama of her mother's childhood and youth, the New Orleans of her own early years and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where well-to-do New Orleanians spent part or all of their summers in the early decades of this century as well as now. These settings are often more impressionistic than realistic, with an occasional detail to indicate that they are indeed southern. They are, after all, settings recalled for the most part from memory, since Hellman did not live in the area after her early teens. In some instances—the small Alabama town in which the Hubbards live, for example—they are probably imagined locales rather than those actually experienced. Of The Little Foxes she was to say that placing it in the south was “purely incidental and fortuitous. … That it was set in the milling district of the South stems from the circumstance that I wanted to set the time scheme of the play at about the turn of the century and that it was in the cotton states that these years witnessed the sort of exploitation I wanted to write about. … I merely chose the South because it fitted the period I wanted for dramatic purposes and because it is a part of the world whose atmosphere I personally am familiar with as a Southerner” (Bryer 8). This is recognizable, of course, as the sort of disavowal occasioned in author after author who has been labeled a southerner and fears that the next step is being called “provincial” or charged with slurring his native region.

Disavowals aside, it is apparent that the southern settings of several of her dramas are integral to and essential for their effectiveness. First of all, the dichotomies that concern her—the old landed gentry versus the nouveaux riches, the Old South traditions versus the New South movement, Agrarianism versus industrialism, a code of honor versus the new amorality—are inextricably linked to the milieu of the region, to the character of its inhabitants and to the times about which she wrote. The conflicts manifest in both The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest require the rural and small-town Alabama settings to give them meaning. In The Autumn Garden, set in the home of a woman fallen on hard times who has converted it into a boarding house, both locale and atmosphere are essential elements in the drama, one motif of which concerns itself with southern provincialism. For example, Mrs. Ellis, finding Nick Denery asleep on the couch which usually serves as a bed for the maid, observes that scandal is inevitable: “you are in Sophie's bed, in the living room of a house in a small Southern town where for a hundred and fifty years it has been impossible to take a daily bath without everybody in town knowing what hour the water went on” (524). While the choice of setting for Toys in the Attic seems perhaps less dictated by the demands of a southern theme and more by the fact of its characters having been based on Hellman's father's family, it is surely true that it would have been quite a different work had it been set anywhere other than New Orleans.

In terms of characters in general, Hellman's people often have one or two traits that distinguish them as being of the South, although the qualities that set apart her most remarkable creations are not confined to any region: greed and ruthlessness are, after all, without restrictions of time or place. Of her characters, Hellman observed in a 1939 interview that “I always wanted a certain naive or innocent quality in some of my characters which I could find in the South but which would have been quite out of place in any other American setting” (Bryer 8). Characters such as Lavinia (Another Part of the Forest), Birdie (The Little Foxes) and Carrie and Lily (Toys in the Attic) clearly exhibit such a quality in a distinctively southern mold. Lavinia, for example, is eccentric, transformed by memory of her husband's sins and her complicity in them into a ghost who walks about the house at night. In The Autumn Garden, there is considerable dialogue devoted to characterizing southern women. Rose Griggs is almost a stereotype of the “Southern Belle,” flighty, empty-headed, talking incessantly. She reports of her husband's Boston-born mother, “sometimes a little sharp about Southerners,” that “She used to say that Southern women painted a triangle of rouge on their faces as if they were going out to square the hypotenuse” (466). In the same play, southern men in general are portrayed in action and described in dialogue as romantic and immature, as when Edward Crossman observes that “boys will be boys and in the South there's no age limit on boyishness” (529).

Various segments of southern society play essential roles in the development of Hellman's dramaturgy. There are the aristocrats, all of them in her portrayal fallen on hard times perhaps because of moral weaknesses they display; they struggle ineptly to survive in a new world with new standards they do not comprehend or perhaps even perceive as existing, still clinging as they do to memories of “the War” and “the Lost Cause.” Doomed families, they are parallel to those in the classic Greek tragedies and, nearer to home in time and place, to those immortalized by William Faulkner in novel after novel. Juxtaposed to them are the nouveaux riches, those who made their money in illegal dealings during the War Between the States or, in the case of The Autumn Garden, World War II. They share many traits in common with the reprehensible Snopes family in Faulkner's fiction: they are voracious, destructive, materialistic and, although the playwright herself would perhaps disagree with such an interpretation, essentially amoral.

In her autobiographical writings she describes herself as a young girl distressed by the plight of blacks, and her devotion to Sophronia, who worked for her family, has been attested to in nonfiction and in her plays. Sophronia's name is given to a strong black character in The Searching Wind, and in other plays, it is the blacks who, chorus like, offer wise advice to the misguided white characters. In The Little Foxes, for example, it is the servant Addie who dispenses wry aphorisms on the actions of the region's inhabitants—“You ain't born in the South unless you're a fool” (186); who predicts the decline of the town due to industrialization and comments on the nefarious means whereby the Hubbards came into wealth and power; and who voices the central theme of the spoilers: “there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it” (182). The significance of this comment is underscored when at the end of the play Alexandra repeats it to her mother while asserting her independence from the Hubbards and Hubbard ways. In addition, Hellman spices her Alabama plays with black dialogue and folk wisdom, both serious and humorous, some of which would probably be offensive to many readers or audiences in the 1980s. In The Little Foxes, for example, Cal remarks to Oscar, “Bet you got enough bobwhite and squirrel to give every nigger in town a Jesus-party” (157). In The Little Foxes, Leo, commenting on the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans and the cresting of the river there, quotes the blacks who say, “a man born of woman can't build nothing high enough for the Mississippi” (173).

Other language specifically associated with the South and southern characters spices the plays. There is much talk of the cotton economy, predictions that cotton will be king once again, and of other staple crops of the area. Such regional flora as figs, plums and scuppernongs are mentioned in dialogue, as well as food such as grits. The evening meal, regardless of how large it may be, is termed “supper” by the Hubbards, and much is made of the fact that Horace Giddens has found northern coffee inferior to that of Alabama. Colloquialisms of the area abound, as when Ben uses the expression “a silver quarter” (141). (New Orleanians of Hellman's childhood regularly used the term “silver dime.”)

It is in the two Hubbard plays that Hellman employs the most southern elements, motifs and themes, and employs them to most effective advantage. An examination of those plays will reveal the extent to which she is aptly described as a “southern writer,” worthy of consideration with those other authors from the region who have achieved fame for their use of similar material. Since the two later works set in the area, The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic, are less integrally connected to their settings, the Gulf Coast in the former, New Orleans in the latter case, they will be noted only briefly.

Another Part of the Forest and The Little Foxes are two parts of a trilogy detailing the history of the Hubbard family, loosely based on Hellman's mother's Alabama family, the Newhouses. The trilogy was never completed, apparently because the author lost interest in the project in later years. It is clear that her intention originally involved a triad of dramas based on the pattern of Greek tragedies, perhaps similar to what Eugene O'Neill had attempted in Mourning Becomes Electra a decade before The Little Foxes appeared. There are numerous standard trappings of the Greek model: for example, the doomed families, laboring under a curse because of the sins of their forebears; the chorus, usually in the person of servants, offering sane counsel, observing the beginning and the end, the inescapable destruction; the paradoxical sense of man's free will in contrast to the fatal trap in which he is caught, of the inevitable flaw which leads him to blunder and fall. In addition, Hellman makes frequent direct references to Greek history and mythology, using classical names such as Regina, Lavinia, Marcus, Horace and Alexandra. Marcus asserts proudly that he knows “more of the Greek wars than I do of our own” (367). There is a hint of incest between him and his daughter, standard fare for the classical tragedies, and frequent allusions to the customs of the ancients. Ben Hubbard, maliciously teasing his father with the threat that men in the community may lynch him for his misdeeds and making fun of his pretentions, inquires, “How did the Greeks bury fathers who were murdered? Tell me, and I'll see to it” (390). Later, after he has blackmailed his father into relinquishing his money, Ben explains having it by saying, “I'm the eldest son: isn't that the way with royalty? Maybe he could find me a Greek title” (397-8).

Although written almost eight years after The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest concerns an earlier period in the life of the Hubbard family and it seems appropriate to consider it first. Its title, alluding of course to the stage directions from Elizabethan drama, signals the author's implicit universalizing message by suggesting that the modern world is the forest, this particular locale only one portion of it. Set in the small town of Bowden, Alabama, the play opened 20 November 1946. Hellman employs a setting that alludes directly to the world of antiquity. The stage directions state that the Hubbard house is “Southern Greek. It is not a great mansion but it is a good house built by a man of taste. …” Marcus has purchased it from that builder and altered it to suit his own view of what is “correct” for a man moving up in the world. Now there is an excessive amount of furniture on the portico, two heads of Aristotle are displayed on pedestals, and the overall effect is “too austere, too pretended Greek … as if it followed one man's eccentric taste and was not designed to be comfortable for anyone else” (329). At the end of the play Ben, scornful of his father's attempts to elevate the family to the level of the aristocrats (who are, for Ben, has-beens, failures who stupidly supported a lost cause from which they could not have hoped for material gain), remarks, “I never liked this house; it wasn't meant for people like us. Too delicate, too fancy. Papa's idea of postwar swell” (397).

Marcus Hubbard's futile attempt to establish himself as an aristocrat bears striking parallels to the efforts of Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, published three years before the play. There are, first of all, the Greek tragic elements delineated above, employed here as in the novel to portray a man who achieves great wealth through mysterious and suspicious means and launches a determined campaign to become an aristocrat, to acquire the trappings which he presumes will make him “cultured” or “southern” in the best sense of that word. The similarity of their dreams, despite the somewhat different methods they employ to try to realize them, becomes apparent if one compares Faulkner's text to Marcus Hubbard's description of his own past: “At nine years old I was carrying water for two bits a week. I took the first dollar I ever had and went to the paying library to buy a card. When I was twelve I was working out in the fields, and that same year I taught myself Latin and French. At fourteen I was driving mules all day and most of the night, and that was the year I learned my Greek, read my classics, taught myself—Think what I must have wanted for sons. And then think what I got” (376). There is, of course, an ersatz quality about Marcus's “culture” as about Sutpen's manner which, according to General Compson, subtly reveals his humble origins. Marcus, for example, composes music that is apparently mediocre and when he invites local musicians to perform it, Ben observes that “talk of money would disturb him on his music night” (364). In addition, there is a kind of “innocence” about him, in the sense of that word as it is applied by General Compson to Sutpen.

Both Faulkner's and Hellman's protagonists have vague, ineffectual, flightly wives from the Old Order who finally effect a kind of escape from painful reality in mental illness. There are parallels as well between their daughters: Regina, like Judith Sutpen and Clytie, is strong-willed, although she does not share their moral strength. Both Marcus and Sutpen have two sons who, in different ways, prove their undoing. Just as Marcus refers to Ben and Oscar as “One trickster, one illiterate” (376), so might Sutpen characterize his male offspring; and just as Charles Bon frustrates the dream of the father who will not acknowledge him, so does Ben terminate Marcus's grand scheme.

The basic historical social struggle against which the drama of the Hubbard family is cast is, of course, that between the Old South and the New South, between Agrarianism and the new order which desired to imitate the North for the purpose of moving the region into the modern world. From the beginning of the play to the end, that contrast is stated and reiterated by character after character in scene after scene. The Old Order here, that which Marcus would emulate, is that which, ironically, he also holds in contempt. There is much talk among the Hubbards of breeding and of class distinctions, as if they are obsessed with them, but Marcus and his offspring are scornful of those model aristocrats, the Bagtrys, of their obvious weaknesses, of what he considers to be their pretensions and of the fact that they are now forced to be reliant upon him to survive. Ben scoffs at them for their pride, their unwillingness to acknowledge their cause as lost and their inability to adapt themselves to “modern” ways. “I always said there wasn't a Southerner, born before the war, who ever had sense enough to trust a bank” (387). When Ben informs Marcus that Birdie wants to borrow money and that he has invited the Bagtrys for the musical evening, he adds, “I thought you'd like having the quality folk here. Come here to beg a favor of you.” Marcus, perversely intrigued, responds, “Bagtrys in this house, begging. Might be amusing for an hour. … I'll be charming to the visiting gentry” (349-50).

When later that evening John Bagtry asserts that he had believed that the South would win the war, Marcus, ever the cynic, responds, “I never did. Never, from the first foolish talk to the last foolish day.” Plaintively, Birdie observes that it is “hard for us to understand anybody who thought we'd lose. …” Upon learning that John wants to go to Brazil, as many ex-Confederate officers were in fact doing, for the purpose of defending slavery there, Marcus asks, “Why don't you choose the other side? Every man needs to win once in his life” (367). Subsequently, he characterizes John as “a foolish man, an empty man from an idiot world. A man who wants nothing but war, any war, just a war. A man who believes in nothing, and never will” (379). By extension, it is clear that what Marcus believes in is not ideals, not “Lost Causes” or, indeed, any causes, but solely in himself.

Like her father and brother, Regina, desiring John Bagtry though she may, observes and comments cynically and openly upon the weaknesses of his kind. In the opening scene she inquires why he did not meet her last night—“Plantation folks giving balls again? Or fancy dress parties?”—and he responds that those days are gone forever; indeed, he has not attended a ball since he was sixteen (330). The distinction between the families (and their classes) is stressed in the exchange which follows. Regina refers to his aunt and his cousin Birdie as “mummies” and threatens to go over “right on that sacred plantation grass and tell them the war's over, the old times are finished, and so are they.” He angrily replies that at least they are not “raising their voices in anger on an early Sunday day.” Regina insists that she does not want to hear about how the two families differ: “That's what you always mean when you say I'm screaming” (331). The same motif of the even temper of the gentry is voiced in The Little Foxes by Birdie Bagtry Hubbard, who remembers that “Papa used to say nobody has ever lost their temper at Lionnet, and nobody ever would. Papa would never let anybody be nasty-spoken or mean” (150). Like her father, Regina looks upon the war as productive of nothing of material value and therefore merely a ridiculous exercise in futility. When John states that it was the only time that he was ever “good” and happy, she answers, “wearily” the stage directions state, “Oh, don't tell me that again. You and your damn war. Wasn't it silly to be happy when you knew you were going to lose?” (332).

Although the Hubbards, exemplary of the New South nouveaux riches, come into money through whatever nefarious means during the war and Reconstruction, betray their own vices and lack of standards in their scornful evaluations of the Bagtrys, it is by no means to be assumed that the aristocrats are above reproach. Their fall has resulted not solely because they were defeated by the North but because of inherent weaknesses within their own character. Indeed, much of the Hubbards' criticism, grounded though it may be in a materialistic and secular view of the world, is not without truth. Through their own dialogue, John and Birdie reveal the weaknesses that mar their character, those “sins of the fathers” which surely contributed here, as in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, to the decline and fall of the Old Order. John, for example, despite his expressed contempt for the Hubbards and all they stand for, has been sleeping with Regina and allows her to control him, and his obsession with the war is surely not entirely idealistic. When Marcus, astonished to hear that John has no memory of an early trip to Europe, inquires what he does remember, John replies, “The war. … I can't remember the years before, and the years after have just passed like a wasted day. But the morning I rode off, and for three years, three months, and eight days after, well, I guess I remember every soldier, every gun, every meal, even every dream I had at night” (366). His decision to fight in Brazil is, contrary to what his cousin Birdie thinks and what he may believe, hardly altruistic. First of all, combat is, by his own admission, all he knows, all he wants: “I was only good once—in a war” (331). Secondly, there is no other way for him to make a living, given the condition of his class in those desperate Reconstruction years. Finally, it must be remembered that although he insists that “I fight for a way of life” (367), the “cause” to which he has committed himself this time is no idealistic battle for freedom but a defense of one of the modern world's most inhumane systems of slavery in which he has no personal stake. Birdie likewise demonstrates the weaknesses that have brought her class low. Defending John's decision to go to Brazil, she insists that he “wants to fight for his ideals” (367). In desperate financial straits, she seeks to borrow money from the Hubbards, even though she knows how they came by it and must remember that John's twin brother died the night of the raid which was, at least indirectly, caused by Marcus. She reveals, in line after line of dialogue, that she distrusts them, fears them and even, to some extent, holds them in contempt. Further, through her vague, not especially intelligent attitudes and actions, she exemplifes the inherent weakness of the aristocrats that resulted in their fall, so that the playgoer hearing her assertion that “when everything else is gone, Mama says you at least got pride left” (345) may wonder whether it is truth or merely truism.

As counterpoint to the aristocrats, the Hubbards embody the amorality, secularism and materialism of the modern world that has been decried not only by southern authors—William Alexander Percy, the Agrarians and Faulkner, for example—but by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and myriad others. Hellman has described them as “a very predatory middle class family, on its climb to enormous riches” (Bryer 113). Marcus is portrayed as a modern pragmatic Aristotelian, an American in the practical, Franklinesque mode, some of whose words may even remind one of the aphorisms of Poor Richard: for example, “There is never so great a hero as the man who fought on a losing side” (372). But his “modernism” does not stop there, unfortunately, for he is totally devoid of morals or standards or even unselfish emotions. He reveals that he is not interested in his son's motives: “As long as they benefit me, he is welcome to them” (369). Having sworn on a Bible that he will allow his wife Lavinia to leave home to set up a school for black children, he refuses to honor that oath, denying that he ever meant it. Devoid of ideals, he is skeptical of their existence in others. He insists that those who supported the Confederacy got what they deserved: “It was a backward world, getting in the way of history. Appalling that you still don't realize it.” Significantly, Marcus, like Faulkner's Popeye in Sanctuary and Flem Snopes, does not like to be touched.

The means whereby Marcus acquired his wealth is another link between him and the Snopes family of Faulkner's trilogy. Ben observes that his father “made too much money out of the war” (343), and Oscar tellingly reveals that “Right after the war Papa bought—or something—this house from old man Reed” (360). (Hellman's use of the world something in this context is strikingly similar to Faulkner's use of it in Absalom, Absalom! where Shreve describes Sutpen as coming out of nowhere, building a plantation, marrying and begetting children, who should have been “his pride”: Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died.” Ironically, however, it is Laurette Sincee, the poor white girl Oscar brings home, who confronts Marcus with the truth about his past and sees through the Hubbards' veneer of culture. When Oscar urges her to act as if she is as good as the other guests, she indignantly replies, “Pretend? Pretend I'm as good as anybody called Hubbard? Why, my Pa died at Vicksburg. He didn't stay home bleeding the whole state of Alabama with money tricks. … I'm not better than anybody, but I'm as good as piney wood crooks” (361-2). Subsequently she reveals that it was by supplying much needed salt during the war to the impoverished inhabitants of the region that Marcus made his fortune. “Right in the middle of the war, men dying for you, and you making their kinfolk give you all their goods and money—and I heard how they suspected you of worse, and you only just got out of a hanging rope” (372). Indeed, his crimes are worse, since his illegal activities contributed to the deaths of twenty-seven Confederate soldiers.

If Marcus has introduced a secular and materialistic attitude into the Hubbard family, his children have certainly taken to it with ease and, indeed, in some cases outdone him at his own amorality. Regina demonstrates repeatedly that she has learned her lesson well; she is crafty, scheming, and is willing to live with John Bagtry, if he will have her, without benefit of marriage. Although she professes to care for John, Ben assures her, “You're not in love; I don't think anybody in this family can love” (399). Aware though she must be of her father's incestuous attraction to her, Regina is perfectly willing to use her feminine charms to persuade him to grant her wishes.

Although both are amoral, there is a marked contrast between the Hubbard sons in the two plays. Ben is intelligent and practical, the typical New South Man who foresees the coming of the industrial future of the region and wants to be a part of it: “big goings on all over the country. Railroads going across, oil, coal. … Things are opening up” (401). It is Oscar, however, who exemplifies some of the worst traits of the Snopes family. He is a “professional Southerner,” who insists that he would have fought in the war had he only been old enough, a man of limited intelligence who belongs to the Ku Klux Klan, unaware of the irony, which Ben points out to him, that their father continues to make his money off the very blacks and Carpetbaggers the night riders attack. In characteristic new-rich fashion, Oscar categorizes his girl friend as a social inferior, “But the lower classes don't matter to me; I always say it's not how people were born but what they are.” In a line typical of Hellman's humor at its best, Marcus responds to this observation from his son that “some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity. You, by necessity” (357).

Only Lavinia, the “outsider” among the Hubbards, obviously belonging to the tradition of a South for which her husband and children have no understanding or sympathy, recognizes the culpability of Marcus, which she feels has brought a curse upon her family, and wishes to take some responsibility for it. “I got to do a little humble service. I lived in sin these thirty-seven years. … Such sin I couldn't even tell you” (351). Honored by one of the minor characters as “the redeemer of this family” (354), she believes that God wants Marcus to expiate before he dies. The sins of which Marcus stands convicted by Another Part of the Forest include greed, avarice, false pride, false witness, lack of love, and incestuous desire, presumably unfulfilled. His retribution comes, not surprisingly, given Hellman's Puritan attitudes and the framework of the Greek tragedy which she has chosen for pattern, at the hands of his own family.

The saga of the Hubbard family continues in The Little Foxes, which, although first produced 15 February 1939, almost eight years before Another Part of the Forest, concerns events which happened twenty years following those described in the other play. It is the spring of 1900 and the Hubbards are on the rise. “The century's turning, the world is open,” Ben says to Regina. “Open for people like you and me. Ready for us, waiting for us. … We'll get along” (197). Marcus is dead, but his sons and daughter carry on his tradition of ruthless, selfish and totally secular attitudes and actions. The set, the living room of Regina's home, symbolizes their new-rich materialism: “The room is good looking, the furniture expensive; but it reflects no particular taste. Everything is of the best and that is all” (135).

It is a tribute to Hellman's strengths as a dramatist that the various Hubbards are portrayed as being similar and yet different in the two works. Another Part of the Forest was obviously an effort to understand what naturalistic forces had shaped the middle-aged “monsters” portrayed in the earlier drama. In many ways, they are similar, concerned as they both are with materialism, amorality and the New South in two periods of time, but in The Little Foxes another theme is introduced, involving agrarianism and ecology. That theme is sounded in the epigraph of the play from which the title comes, a quotation from the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” Thus the Agrarian theme is from the beginning linked in the drama with the motif of the spoilers who would destroy the land for their own gain or gratification. Birdie, who has been for many years Mrs. Oscar Hubbard, complains to her husband, “I don't like to see animals and birds killed just for the killing. You only throw them away” (146). Later she remembers that her brother had once teased their mother by insisting that she invite the Hubbard family to dinner. “He said Mama didn't like them because they kept a store, and he said that was old-fashioned of her.” Angry, the mother replied that was not the reason, that “she was old-fashioned enough not to like people who killed animals they couldn't use, and who made their money charging awful interest to ignorant niggers and cheating them on what they bought” (181-2). In a similar vein, we learn from Alexandra that Leo, the son of Birdie and Oscar, beats the horses unnecessarily.

A significant aspect of the Agrarian theme, of course, concerns the dangers to the ecology, to the economy and especially to human beings, from industrialization. In a 1968 interview Hellman, while denying that the play is intended as a picture of the evils of the industrial revolution in the South, adds, “I do think a kind of Southerner and a kind of Northerner ravaged the land every place in the world” (Bryer 101). In preparation for writing it, she did extensive research on how the economy of the South was affected by the War Between the States (Bryer 114). In the play itself, it is Addie, the black maid, who first complains about the effects the new cotton mills will have on the town; everyone is excited, she says, “All because smoke's going to start out of a building that ain't even up yet” (164). Later, when Birdie comments that it is quiet in the Giddens living room, Addie replies, “Well, it won't be that way long. Little while now, even sitting here, you'll hear the red bricks going into place. The next day smoke'll be pushing out the chimneys and by church time that Sunday every human born of woman will be living on chicken. That's how Mr. Ben's been telling the story” (179). In her simplicity, the black woman perceives a truth the exploiters struggle to hide from those upon whom their greed will feed.

Marshall, the Chicago industrialist, early sounds the contrast between the small-town South and the urban North when he says, “You Southerners occupy a unique position in America. You live better than the rest of us, you eat better, you drink better. I wonder you find time, or want to find time, to do business.” Ben, who, like Thomas Sutpen, has a materialistic dream, a grand design which has motivated him for years to “bring the machine to the cotton, and not the cotton to the machine” (142), responds in words laden with meaning he may not perceive: “A great many Southerners don't” (138). Echoing the words of a northern robber baron, Ben in an ironic juxtaposition of art and commerce predicts that “Southern cotton mills will be the Rembrandts of investment” (142).

Horace Giddens, Regina's husband, a member of the old fallen aristocracy of the region, refuses to participate in what he considers the destructive scheme to bring in northern industry and its concomitant evils. “Why should I give you the money?” he inquires of his wife. “To pound the bones of this town to make dividends for you to spend? You wreck the town, you and your brothers, you wreck the town and live on it.” Suffering from a serious heart condition, Horace asserts that he will die “without making the world any worse. I leave that to you” (176-7). The one aspect of the corruption of the town that most distresses Horace is the exploitation of labor. When he inquires if the Hubbards had promised the Marshall company cheap wages to convince them to move South, Ben replies that in contrast to the standard eight dollars a week earned by workers in Massachusetts, “there ain't a mountain white or a town nigger but wouldn't give his right arm for three silver dollars every week. …” Furthermore, he has assured the northern industrialist that there will be no strikes in the Alabama plant. Horace predicts that whites and blacks will be turned against each other when the mill is in operation and will take even lower pay. “You can save a little money that way, Ben, and make them hate each other just a little more than they do now” (171). Like Faulkner's aristocrats, both Horace and Birdie feel that sense of obligation for the descendants of freed slaves which is incomprehensible to Ben and his type.

The contrast between Old Order and the New South continues in The Little Foxes with added ramifications. The lines are drawn between Regina, Ben, Oscar and Leo on one side, Birdie, Horace, Alexandra and Addie on the other. If anything complimentary can be said of Ben, it involves his willingness to admit the Hubbards' true place in the social order of the South, while at the same time sharply criticizing the upper class. Early in the play, Marshall, misreading the family's standing in society, observes that “It's very remarkable how you Southern aristocrats have kept together. Kept together and kept what belonged to you.” Ben corrects this error, saying “Southern aristocrats have not kept together and have not kept what belonged to them” (139). Among them, only Birdie, he points out, is a plantation aristocrat, and when Marshall remarks that he makes “great distinctions,” Ben responds that “they have been made for us. And maybe they are important distinctions” (140). Some of those distinctions are dramatized by Hellman in actions and dialogue; for example, there is the contrast between Leo's attitudes and Horace's toward material possessions. Insisting that he can “borrow” the bonds from the bankbox since Horace never examines it, Leo states in amazement, “Imagine not looking at all that. You can bet if I had the bonds I'd watch 'em …” (165). At the end of the dinner honoring Marshall, Ben, member of a class for whom traditions are meaningless if not nonexistent, invents a new one: “Down here, sir, we have a strange custom. We drink the last drink for a toast. That's to prove that the Southerner is always still on his feet for the last drink” (142).

By the time of the action of The Little Foxes, the aristocracy of Hellman's world has slipped even further in terms of influence since the period portrayed in Another Part of the Forest, and Ben offers a naturalistic explanation for their decline and the rise of his own type. Describing the Bagtry plantation which now is in the hands of the Hubbards, he explains to Marshall that when the war came, the gentry rode off and left “the cotton, and the women, to rot” (140). After the war, the plantation is almost ruined, “and the sons finish ruining it. And there were thousands like them. Why? Because the Southern aristocrat can adapt himself to nothing. Too high-tone to try.” On the other hand, he continues, “Our grandfather and our father learned the new ways and learned how to make them pay. They were in trade. Hubbard Sons, Merchandise” (140-1). The underlying implication here, as in Sidney Lanier's poem “The Symphony,” that scathing attack on the New South principles, seems to be that trade, the “king of modern days,” is all head, no heart, a destructive occupation that dehumanizes society.

Ben continues with his naturalistic sermon by asserting, “I can't believe that God wants the strong to parade their strength, but I don't mind doing it if it's got to be done,” a paradoxical blend of Christianity and naturalism characteristic of the time's apologists for industrialization (150). It is noteworthy that Ben in the two decades that have elapsed since the action of Another Part of the Forest has acquired considerable polish in his manner of speaking, which is here often highly rhetorical. Filled with optimism for the economic future of the region (and, of course, his own increasing wealth), Ben echoes the New South doctrine as it was stated by numerous advocates of the cause when he remarks that he has “always said that every one of us little Southern businessmen had great things—right beyond our fingertips” (169). Although Oscar lacks the intelligence and cunning of his brother, he has adopted Ben's materialistic views to the best of his ability. “It's every man's duty to think of himself,” he tells Marshall. “My brother always says that it's folks like us who have struggled and fought to bring to our land some of the prosperity of your land” (141).

Such attitudes seem to imply a totally amoral nature in the Hubbards, a characterization that Hellman herself would perhaps deny, given her 1975 comment on what she considered to be the humorous quality of Regina and her brothers. “I think it's much less dangerous if the so-called villain, or liar, or deceiver, knows it. That's what I meant really in The Little Foxes that they were all rather amused by it, the fact that they knew they were, and were thus, in a sense, less dangerous” (Bryer 190-1). She contrasts the Hubbards to Hitler, who thought that he was right, and insists that her characters knew they were behaving viciously.

The question of amorality brings into consideration again the parallels between Hubbards and Snopeses discussed in relation to Another Part of the Forest. Like William Alexander Percy, who bemoans the fact that the world his ancestors built and which he has known and loved is being destroyed by the rise of “Demos,” the secular, materialistic class from which the southern demagogues (Vardaman, Bilbo, the Longs and others) emerged, Hellman seems to view her voracious nouveaux riches family as part of the rising middle class, nourished financially by the industrialization of the South. Distinctive individuals though they surely are, they also represent a large segment of the population moving up in the world at the turn of the century. They are the naturalistic products of their hereditary backgrounds and of the environment in which they prosper and flourish, devoid of tradition, of any code of honor or virtue upon which to build a humane philosophy of life. That Hellman should align herself with the views of such essentially conservative authors as Percy, Faulkner and the Nashville Agrarians strikes one as rather surprising, given the fact of her own political stance in the 1930s and 1940s. The two parts of her uncompleted trilogy, however, certainly speak for themselves. As Ben, the “philosopher” and apologist for the family, evaluates the situation, “There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country. All their names aren't Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country someday” (197). In a similar vein, Regina, endeavoring to prevent Alexandra from leaving her after Horace's death, promises that “I'll make the world for you the way I wanted it to be for me” (198). It is interesting that the third play was, according to Hellman, to be set twenty or twenty-five years after The Little Foxes, when Regina is living in Europe and Alexandra has “become maybe a spinsterish social worker, disappointed, a rather angry woman” who had the courage to leave her mother but lacked the “force or vigor” of the Hubbards (Bryer 56).

Like Flem Snopes, who does not object to his wife's affair with Manfred de Spain since he benefits financially from it, as long as it is kept secret, the Hubbards are more concerned about appearances than about any moral principles. Ben, for example, instructing Leo to terminate his affair with a woman in Mobile, explains, “I haven't got no objections to outside women. That is, I haven't got no objections so long as they don't interfere with serious things” (158). An advocate of expediency. Oscar commends his son for illegally examining the contents of Horace's lockbox at the bank. “Sometimes a young fellow deserves credit for looking round him to see what's going on. … Many great men have made their fortune with their eyes” (160). So willing to take advantage at whatever cost to honor and virtue are the brothers that even Regina recognizes their status as spoilers in this newly emerging world when she tells them, “you couldn't find twelve men in this state you haven't cheated and who hate you for it” (196).

In combination, The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest constitute a unit which is perhaps Lillian Hellman's best contribution to the literature of the American theatre. Much of the power of the two dramas derives from southern elements and themes which underlie and unify them. To a lesser extent, her two later plays set in the South exhibit some of the same concerns, but their virtues are not integrally associated with those themes, and therefore they are not, in the sense applied here, “southern dramas.”

The Autumn Garden, first produced in 1951, Hellman has on several occasions called her favorite play. It is set in a home on the Gulf Coast, a hundred miles from New Orleans, in September 1949. Showing the definite influence of Anton Chekhov, the play concerns itself with a society that has become static, without motivation. As in the Russian author's work, there are the ineffectual artistocrats, shorn of much of their wealth and consequently of their power, and the rising class, possessed of an energy that will enable them to establish themselves in the positions vacated by the others. For most of the characters, the concerns are with what happened in the past, what people will think, what is in their own best interest. Some of the same motifs and themes that are central to the Hubbard plays, involving, for example, the impoverished gentry (what Birdie in Another Part of the Forest termed “the new poor”) and the rise of the nouveaux riches, are examined briefly in this work. There is again much talk of good breeding, of class distinctions. Constance, one of the “new poor,” has sold her home in New Orleans and survived by turning her summer home into a “guest house.” When Nick observes to Constance that she is pleased by Ned's attention when she is not “pretending to be genteel,” she replies, “Genteel? How awful of me. Mama used to say gentility was the opposite of breeding …” (495). Juxtaposed to Constance and members of her class are Rose Griggs and her family. Mrs. Ellis, the haughty and acerbic grande dame who delights in putting people in their place, remarks of a local family that they have become very “liberal” of late, even including Rose in their invitations. “And nobody can be more nouveau riche than your family, can they?” she inquires of Rose. “I mean your brother during the war and all that” (471). The attitudes (and prejudices) of her class are exhibited by Mrs. Ellis when she tells Carrie, “there is no morality to money, … and immoral of people to think so” (503).

Toys in the Attic, first produced in 1960, is Hellman's only play set in New Orleans, which is somewhat surprising, given the large portion of her later autobiographical works which she devoted to the city of her birth. It seems less a play with southern themes and motifs than one in which the author seeks to come to terms with the relationship between her father and his two sisters, who for many years ran a boarding house in New Orleans, and, perhaps by extension, to examine the general enigma of the relationship between women and the men they love. Despite the cogency of the New Orleans sense of place, which asserts itself in some way in every scene, occasional references to southern mores and customs, to class difference and breeding, and some elements of regional dialect, Toys in the Attic is far less a southern play than the two works devoted to the Hubbards. It seems apparent that here as in The Autumn Garden, Hellman had moved to a consideration of more private, intimate concerns, to human emotions other than greed and avarice, to motifs other than materialism and secularism and amorality. The conflicts between old and new that function thematically in the earlier works are not integral to these plays. The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest are, however often and with whatever degree of vehemence their creator may have denied it, political dramas, constructed not only to entertain but also to make a social statement, in the pattern of the Ibsen well-made play. In the decade of the 1950s, the playwright had moved from the influence of Ibsen to that of Chekhov, from political to more private concerns, to produce two interior dramas in which the structure of society, the mobility of classes, and the loss of traditions are of only peripheral importance.

Whatever the final evaluation of Lillian Hellman's place in American literature and the history of theatre may be, it seems certain that she will be accorded some notable position, given the significance of her contribution. If she does not occupy that highest level in the pantheon of modern American dramatists reserved for Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, surely she will always be recognized for the quality of several of her plays. The virtues of her dramas, demonstrated again and again through the many years of her active career in the theatre, include well-developed plots, larger-than-life characters who are nevertheless credible, dialogue as believable as any on the American stage in this century and themes that are integral to life in the modern world. If, as some of her most severe critics have charged, her works are melodramas and “well-made plays,” which in recent decades have become terms of opprobrium in criticism, she is masterful in her handling of those forms. In 1968, she answered the “well-made play” charge by stating that in her most productive period she was “caught between a so-called realistic theater and a so-called new theater coming after the Second World War. …” It is, she continues, “a rather foolish charge against anybody, because what is too well-made? Why should something be badly made?” (Bryer 115). To the charge that her plays are melodramas, she terms it a “meaningless word … usually used to cheapen something, and to deny it always seems to me to defend oneself, and I don't very much like to” (115). Such a label, it might be added, belongs to the absurd tradition of categorizing theatrical works which is satirized by Shakespeare in the exchange between Hamlet and the players.

Surely there is a place in theatre for the melodrama in an age in which the classical tragedy has ceased to be viable. The success of the revival of The Little Foxes a few years ago attests to the fact that the work is not too dated to draw an audience, to be effective, not too well-made to be convincing in an age that has survived the vogue for the “Theater of the Absurd.” It demonstrates that melodramas can still interest, inspire and, most important of all in a theatrical production, entertain. Surely the future will see numerous revivals of Hellman's best works, and her southern dramas seem the most likely candidates to continue to be presented to new generations of theatre-goers.

Works Cited

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986.

Hellman, Lillian. The Collected Plays. Boston: Little, 1972.

———. Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, 1979.

Hellman, Lillian, and Peter Feibelman. Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes. Boston: Little, 1984.

Leibling, A. J. The Earl of Louisiana. London: W. H. Allen, 1962.