SOURCE: Wiles, Timothy J. “Lillian Hellman's American Political Theater: The Thirties and Beyond.” In Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman, edited by Mark W. Estrin, pp. 90-112. Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1989.

Along with many American writers from the generation of the 1930s, our “red decade,”¹ Lillian Hellman addressed the Great Depression in her plays of the period, and reflected on its aftermath and her own political awakening throughout her career. Her analysis of American society is essentially Marxist, since it is based on the primacy of material and economic conditions to explain social relations, and emphasizes environmental conditioning, conflict among classes, and the hope that a new person, socialist man, would be born of the conflict through the dialectical collision of opposites.

Her view of her involvement with actual politics of the time changed considerably over the years, particularly her affiliation with Stalin, and in her volumes of memoirs she presents a more ambiguous and complex portrait of the artist engaged with her age than she had presented earlier through the spokesmen for socialism in her plays. But she never recanted her belief in the visionary goal to which socialism aspires, and she came to admire Bertolt Brecht as the master dramatist of the century. Although she never speculated about direct influences, a number of resemblances in technique and attitude can be noted between some of her later works and certain Brecht plays. A more significant comparison can be made with Brechtian theory of drama for her best and most explicitly political plays of the late 1930s, works she wrote before Brecht's influence had been felt among American playwrights. The comparison makes Hellman's own dramatic method appear more sophisticated than critics widely assume and may indicate a generic feature of political drama independent of influences.

The themes and forms in Hellman's thirties drama resemble those of noted or notorious playwrights from the decade (and for this discussion I include her plays from the 1940s whose formative influence can be traced to political events that evolved over the two previous decades, particularly the worldwide depression and international fascism). She shared with other thirties writers a belief in collective action and the socialist ideal, the critique of the capitalist personality and condemnation of fascism; as Marxists say, her works' “manifest content” was the same as theirs—strikes, industrial expansion, class warfare, opposition to fascism—and she employed some of their same subgenres, like the strike play, the antifascist play, and the play that indicted the dominant economic class. A simple list of her plays when compared with their thirties counterparts, however, would indicate to readers familiar with this literature how much more complex were her variants of these popular forms.² For the strike play, her Days to Come (1936) rings far truer as social history than Stevedore, Black Pit, Marching Song, or even Waiting for Lefty. All her plays indict the dominant social structure, but here the Hubbard plays The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946), along with The Autumn Garden (1951), are matched only by Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost for artistic maturity. In the antiwar genre, The Searching Wind (1944) and particularly Watch on the Rhine (1941) present a better history of the face of fascism than do Peace on Earth, Bury the Dead, or Idiot's Delight; she wrote them late enough to correct some leftist myths about the war's genesis, but as shall become apparent, all these plays share one central thirties assumption. Perhaps the greatest difference between Hellman's plays and most of these other works is that Hellman addressed her plays more deliberately to the mainstream audience than did her peers during the red decade: She wrote for Broadway, and often achieved success there, or at least a ready production. Most of the other engaged writers remembered from the period wrote for radical fringe stages or the Group Theater, a company of like-minded artists whose political affiliations extended into that fringe. And alone among all of them, her work and career developed and continued to gather respect throughout her lifetime.

With Hellman's memoirs and her uncomfortable emergence as a feminist late in her life, critical attention returned to her, but no study has described the political assumptions in her best plays in any detail or noted how she embeds them in some unique forms, perhaps because her dramaturgy seems relatively old-fashioned.³ Although her bold female characterizations have been widely admired, the particular nature of these women as political animals still needs to be analyzed. This essay surveys American political themes and forms in a number of Hellman's plays, but it concentrates on her best work. These plays demonstrate that political art is both a product of its age and a force of innovation, one which can lead to wider speculations about the genre (including her kinship with Brecht) and toward a more substantial evaluation of her current reputation as a feminist precursor.

First, however, Hellman's wartime plays must be examined against the backdrop of earlier antiwar drama to isolate a tenet of thirties leftism which indicates how much her social thought was indebted to the period: the role of class conflicts. Since this feature has made much of her drama seem dated, and since it is also a central component of her best play, it is instructive to see how she overcame an ideological blinder to create a memorable heroine who is at war within herself and against some “manifest” dictates from her environment as she simultaneously learns to master the power held by her class and wield it to her own ends. This alludes to Regina, of course, but it really extends to describe Hellman's best heroes, even Alexandra and Birdie, and may most fully describe the role played by Hellman as artist herself.

To maintain the artificial categories “strike play,” “antiwar play,” and “play indicting social conditions” for just a moment longer, one can note that Hellman's reputation as an engaged political artist rested most explicitly on her campaign against fascism during the actual 1930s and war aftermath. In terms of public actions, she provided financial backing for Hemingway's film The Spanish Earth (1937), a documentary made in support of communist-led Loyalists who fought Franco; she refused to support the anti-Soviet Finnish resistance movement by declining to donate proceeds from a Little Foxes performance against her own cast's wishes; in The Searching Wind she attacked the whole cycle of diplomatic-level appeasements of fascists by U.S. and European statesmen. Most of these gestures were not unusual for leftists of the period, and her antimilitarist drama follows a tradition initiated by earlier pacifist plays written by expressionists (Toller's Masse-Mensch, the Green and Weill Johnny Johnson, Shaw's Bury the Dead), as well as far-left or left-central antiwar plays emphasizing the American context such as Peace on Earth or Idiot's Delight. She viewed fascism with too much realism ever to indulge in a stance of universal pacifism embraced by the earlier drama. She scorned diplomatic appeasement both at the state level and in specific engagements, even the domestic scene, to the point of condoning in Watch on the Rhine the act of an underground resistance fighter when he kills a fascist secret agent.

Hellman, however, did support a major tenet of thirties antimilitarism, a core idea that permeated leftist culture and extended even to U.S. government accounts of the causes of war (such as in the Nye Commission Reports in Congress, which reexamined World War I). This widespread belief was based on Marxist critiques of World War I as well as on popular American perceptions; it held that modern wars among industrial powers were caused by the growth of armaments industries, nationalism as it develops in capitalist countries, imperialist expansion, and subsequent retaliation by owner classes to protect their investments. In short, world wars were caused by the upper classes disputing among themselves, with guiltless proletarian soldiers their victims on both sides. This analysis, a partial explanation of World War I, supported the sentiments held by such diverse groups as doctrinaire Marxists (since it depended on class analysis) and average citizens (since it reflected American weariness with international engagements brought on by high wartime casualties and the gathering economic depression which soon followed). Many took the interpretation not simply as a description of the past war, but as a prediction of the next.

Much of the isolationist antiwar literature written by thirties leftists predicted a second world war that would spring from causes identical to those purported for the first. Bury the Dead, an effective expressionist nightmare about “the war that will begin tomorrow” (this in 1936), exhumes not just live corpses but living myths about generals conspiring with businessmen, the advertising sector of the press, and politicians whose eyes are on Wall Street. Idiot's Delight brings onstage the promiscuous arms dealer who sells to all the feuding European powers as war breaks out even over Switzerland. It was a sign of Hellman's mature realism that she never proposed a naive pacifism as a means to oppose the National Socialists. Her war drama stems from the late 1930s and early 1940s period of the United Front when communists and various liberals united against fascism. It avoids a doctrinaire explanation for the Nazis' evil ascendency based simply on economics, and dramatizes social forces like the authoritarian personality and ideas like the banality of evil with skill and flair, against a backdrop of diplomats, spies, agents, and resistance fighters. Fascism represented more to her than just an enemy of the Soviet Union; it was a psychological force that could be unleashed in the mass mind by its proponents' conscious manipulation of racial hatred.

Hellman stayed within the limits of dogmatic communist rationalizing, however, when she came to depict the individuals who were most to be blamed for fascism's unchecked development. They are people who have outlived an epoch and cannot shake loose from passivity to act effectively, either for their own happiness or the national good—and apart from their politics, they most resemble the figures of Hellman's “Chekhovian” plays The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic (1960). Instead of portraying Germans succumbing to blood-and-soil nationalism, she displays American diplomats conducting unrequited triangular love affairs during the twenty-year rise of fascism; conveniently stationed in key European capitals, 1920-40, they rationalize their failure to request diplomatic censure over Mussolini's putsch, anti-Semitic riots, and the annexation of much of central Europe. Such is the tendentious chronicle found in The Searching Wind, which, however, does not fault the Allies for their gullible cooperation with Stalin. The same diplomatic corps, coming from old money and inhabiting the east coast corridor from Boston to Washington, provides the family background for Watch on the Rhine. Here also the inertia and complacency indulged by the neurotic rich are exposed as the chief reasons to explain why fascism was looming and America was unprepared to confront it. Somehow, a democratic society's elite is made to bear most of the brunt for World War II's inception, not a fascist society's moral collapse.

This slant dates Hellman's war drama more than the improbable melodramatics involving the union of a Washington society matron's daughter with a resistance fighter, or the maudlin romance central to The Searching Wind, or even its subplot in which the son of the love-torn diplomat loses a leg in the war his father's weak foreign policy failed to prevent. But the doctrine that underlies this tendentious slant was a vital component of the thirties socialism Hellman espoused and provides the energy to animate her best play, The Little Foxes. Although her communist ethic was inadequate to depict the coming war with any profound fullness, it could inspire her to impart a vision of the creative potential unleashed in people when they define themselves as citizens, one of the chief themes, but the hardest thing to depict, in socialist art. Of course, one reason she succeeded was because she placed the vision in the eyes of characters looking to it in the future (the union organizer Whalen in Days to Come and especially Alexandra in The Little Foxes); meanwhile she filled the present with fallen individuals who resist curbs to their own greed and self-satisfaction.

The machinations of Hellman's villainous characters certainly entertain us with their sardonic humor and extravagant ruthlessness in treating others in a purely instrumental way, and their crimes do expose the need for a socialist counterreaction. At their best Hellman's villains are fascinating, however, because they represent the highest degree of proficiency in and actualization of certain social models that have succeeded one another under differing economic systems. These models might bear stereotypical names, such as the “robber baron” hero and lone-wolf entrepreneur (Marcus in Another Part of the Forest), or the manipulator of corporate capital (Regina). Fortunately, they appear in Hellman's best dramaturgy as sharply defined people, who hunger, behave idiosyncratically, and who resist and eventually triumph over hypocrisy and restrictions imposed by an unself-conscious society. The big foxes in Hellman's plays are self-conscious; their avarice is all the more seductive because it comes tangled with legitimate grudges (like Regina's female subjugation). Her power figures go beyond being through models of the social stance that socialism must oppose; they stand forth as the best men of the age and level of social development they inhabit. This means more than to say that the villains in literature are always more interesting than the virtuous, or that Hellman gives us fascinating villains who are worthy opponents for her socialists to battle. One should credit Hellman's thoroughness as a socialist artist as well as acknowledge the real grounds for the positive appeal held by her dynamic villains. As an honest writer influenced by Marxism (an essentially evolutionist doctrine), Hellman was obliged to admire through heroic portraiture the leaders of a given age who had brought their world to the level of development at which it stood, even as she exposed the cost to others and the need to consciously restructure the world beyond this stage.

Marx and Engels had observed in The Communist Manifesto that social history consisted of successive class-and-economic configurations, like feudalism, the age of the bourgeoisie, and an age to be dominated by egalitarian workers. At their inception, these economic orders provided the progressive and productive force for their times, but eventually they resorted to holding power by physical force after they had lost creativity and the ability to expand the general wealth. Hellman illustrates this pattern vigorously if uncritically in her best political drama, and she is true to it impartially, neither seeking hidden proletarians in the Middle Ages nor dismissing the entrepreneurial expansionist without admiring his productive energy. She avoids such reductivism and makes her art fuller and closer to uncomfortable reality. It is too limiting to observe that her best villains compare favorably with the plutocrats and employers depicted by O'Neill and Miller, in plays like The Great God Brown, A Moon for the Misbegotten (Harder), and Death of a Salesman (Howard). These characters seem flat when compared with Hellman's counterparts because she allowed herself the realist's fascination with such citizens, the epitomes of a dominant class configuration. From this perspective, the socialist playwright with whom to compare Hellman is Bertolt Brecht. For all her use of suspense, representational narrative, and the well-knit plot, she bears several significant resemblances to this anti-naturalist; in terms of influence, the parallel development is accidental, but the two writers shared the same politics, even to the matter of their unhappy protracted loyalty to Stalin, and Hellman came to admire Brecht later in her career.⁴

Although politics can be found in most of Hellman's plays, only a few have a stage history beyond their moment or deserve one. Hellman drew her dominant characters and milieux from her own biography, and it is as an autobiographer that she achieved her most sustained quality of writing. She, however, sustained the notion far too long that the spiritual anemia of a gentry class really explained this country's economic woes and foreign policy missteps during the thirties and forties. Her strictly personal plays, The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic, seem like genteel clichés now, which repeat the superficial forms of Chekhov without his hard-edged irony or his universal reduction of our interaction to absurdity. Hellman captures only a localized dying culture, which can be presumed dead and therefore (unlike Chekhov's), no longer a danger to ourselves. The same must be said about the private lives and family plot of her unsuccessful strike play Days to Come, which deserves notice as an anthology of thirties gestures and as precursor to The Little Foxes, but which otherwise contains only isolated vitality. That the labor organizer Whalen is a rounded and fascinating figure is especially surprising, since this is usually the most insufferable and dogmatically portrayed character in labor drama.

Similarly, Hellman's grudge against her New Orleans and East Coast-urban backgrounds, one that socialist myths from the previous decades abetted, managed to load her wartime plays with the wrong ammunition: The spoiled American rich became the chief villains behind World War II. Her fading southern aristocrats of an earlier century hold little interest as political targets now; they are appropriately submerged in The Little Foxes but they almost scuttle Another Part of the Forest (which is scuttled by other factors), and indeed, the only time we feel the full danger and power of the foxes is when they prey on each other or threaten us. The Children's Hour (1934) suffers somewhat from its being set in a society school milieu, but it addresses problems that expose the tragedy of social existence: a reputation's susceptibility to lies; the power of taboos and the way American culture associates sexual expression with sin and corruption (vide the AIDS crisis); and most intractable because technically tragic (that is, irremediable), the desire to merge social approval and success with free expression of one's identity, including the sexual. In other words, The Children's Hour only works if one grants that Karen and Martha have lesbian longings at least at the unconscious level; these women want to express their affection if they could acknowledge it, but they also desire the world's approval through its social sanctions such as marriage, career success, and permission to nurture and educate children. This play has come into its own lately because of the feminist and gay rights movements' efforts to have these possibilities extended to all citizens. Yet its politics remain mostly the politics of personal expression. A more interesting analysis can be made of Regina in the feminist mode because she is neither a suffering nor guiltless victim, and because in the Hubbard plays Hellman advances beyond a tacit plea that women be extended certain enfranchisements, and through her portrayal of a female villain suggests that a heightened standard of human enfranchisement be set for all. Actually, The Children's Hour emerged to indict public politics (as opposed to the politics of the personal) during the fifties, when it did so to remind Americans of some thirties truths; in its 1952 revival the theme of a lie that blacklists and destroys the socially progressive could be read as a gloss on the McCarthy era, during which Hellman suffered for her principles, and an era that itself was reacting to the excesses and threatening energies of thirties leftism.

Hellman's stage adaptations should be judged separately, of course; they all contain elements of history and politics. Indeed, they are the main works to comprise her politics beyond the thirties (since the war plays really conclude that era and its thematology). Each has elements in common with the social themes found in her original plays, and for reasons of form and the mode of their satire, particularly Candide (1956) and My Mother, My Father and Me (1963) should be included when considering Hellman's American political theater. Although she allowed several friends (Leonard Bernstein, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur) to write the best jokes in Candide, both musical and verbal (through lyrics), she provided a solid sequence of Brechtian episodes (as she did with My Mother, My Father and Me) on which to hang the songs and as a platform to argue for a better world—given the contrast manifested by the existing one. And, in what may be the only poem in her dramatic canon, she wrote lyrics for one song, “Eldorado,” which summarized the socialist ethic as well as poignantly noting its distance from our present reality.

For her interpreters, Lillian Hellman's prominence as a political dramatist presents a conundrum: that reputation is so well established that new generations may wonder whether it is simply a shibboleth. Furthermore, this reputation became attached to her early and in connection with her best play, which immediately became her most popular play, and later, at least in the eyes of some anthologizers and authors of pocket histories of American drama, her only play. It is not the place of this essay to exhume that whole journalistic debate,⁵ but it is necessary to cut through these received ideas while simultaneously acknowledging that the main thrust of Hellman's reception, especially that by audiences, has been essentially accurate. What is left to be said about a work (and a writer for whose reputation it is central) when the play is already well known, accessible to appropriate understanding, and correctly regarded? The reader of Hellman's whole dramatic canon can place her other dramas in relation to this masterpiece and can read more out of their social arguments by showing how the continuity of argument prevails, but coalesces only when The Little Foxes remains central. She kept returning to coherent themes and drew characters who bear much family resemblance, even tracing the Hubbard roots to the previous generation in Another Part of the Forest and rehearsing in her most overtly political play Days to Come the same family relationship that was to have such dramatic force in The Little Foxes.⁶

Seen against the canvas of the thirties, virtually all her plays take on more resonance, as direct depiction (Days to Come), as an unearthing of the historical roots beneath the crisis of capitalism manifested by the depression (the Hubbard plays), as an extension of this crisis to the world arena (the war plays), or later in her career, as further refinements of some dramatic techniques associated with thirties political satire (her last adaptations). Indeed, the only comparable noted American playwright, in terms of the length of his career, the coherence of his politics, and his willingness to experiment with form and fable, is Arthur Miller, whose vision was also formed in the thirties.

Unlike Miller, however, Hellman's finest political drama is not set directly within the historical period that it intends to illuminate, and ironically, besides The Little Foxes, the best of her other original plays—The Children's Hour, Toys in the Attic—do not address a period, or politics, very directly.⁷ She is also unlike her major theatrical contemporary Clifford Odets, whose fame came during the thirties for his direct and essentially optimistic portrayal of families and workers struggling during the depression, but who lost credit with critics and audiences when that decade's issues lost immediacy and the writer himself lost his talent, such that his critics came to denigrate his early achievements unfairly.⁸

Because of the strength of character that Hellman brought to her public role, and because she maintained her skills and varied her forms throughout her career even while never recapturing the brilliance of her best early play, she gained stature as a writer and as a public artist throughout her career. Although these extrinsic factors are not necessary for a spectator to enjoy The Little Foxes, they provide useful guides for the critical reader who wishes to comprehend its lasting impact and attempts to specify the central political themes that this play conveys. Because it makes these themes palatable by embodying them in a gripping melodrama and through several complex characters—all of them women—who command a divided sympathy, the play succeeds as entertainment and impresses an audience that its themes, though none of them are novel as politics, represent social truth. And because the play is such good theater, one never suspects its author would prefer to harangue the audience with a stump speech or read it a moral tract instead of creating drama.

Indeed, The Little Foxes is such a good play that it seems reduced when its essential politics are isolated, and the politics seem reductivist when they are listed as tenets within Marxist doctrine: the conflict of base and super-structure; the exposure of social Darwinism; the condemnation of capitalist self-interest; the view of an alternative world sought by some of its characters in rebellion against their harsh surroundings. Any bald recital of such social theses needs immediately to be corrected by a thorough account of how Hellman puts those notions into the passing comments and mundane behavior of vivid characters who, the theater audience never forgets, are caught up in their own life drama and who never betray an awareness that they are expounding dogma. This would be expected from a good political play (even though that is a rare species); what is original to Hellman is that she locates these theories in people who were new to their time (1900 or 1939) and still new to our own, particularly in women whose predicament could be labeled a feminist issue but who themselves refuse the special pleading to which some oppressed minority members feel entitled. They particularly refuse our pity, and by their interactions especially within the female sphere, they block our habitual sympathies (and each other's), and demand of each other and of us that we look at their predicament with critical vision.

“Don't love me,” Birdie demands of Alexandra, and we should take her literally, for she gives a key to the subtle technique employed by this political drama, as well as to its original depiction of characters caught in a moment of social transition and crisis. By arguing against our empathy, Hellman intuited a major thrust in Brecht's theories of political art, in a play that, in its surface construction, seems mired in naturalism and enslaved to suspense, to cite two dramatic gambits Brecht railed against. Putting it another way, the elemental Marxist doctrine in Hellman's play would seem to be executed with technical prowess, but little else, if all her characters were men, or were thought of merely as creatures wearing pants more successfully than their brothers and husbands. But because Hellman makes them women and sets them at a time when the struggle between the affective, nurturing role and the rationalizing, self-gratifying one was more clearly divided in our culture along gender lines, she makes us feel the tragedy of the social crisis as it destroys the best representative of a given age, a woman who ironically has won out on the surface and who appears to have succeeded in destroying or thwarting almost all the others in her family. I add, if it is necessary, that Hellman does this not because she is a woman or believes her sex to possess superior virtue, but because she can use the woman issue as it exists in her culture to display a truth about mankind or humankind (and this explains why Hellman always balked when she was labeled “America's leading woman playwright,” or later, a feminist writer).

Hellman's women take the center of the stage of ideas only at the play's conclusion, although their longings and needs drive the work from its inception. The spectator may be impressed by Ben's mordant wit as he manipulates the inferior males early on, and may feel a stock sympathy for the pieties Horace speaks from his conventional podium, the sickbed, but one never feels greatly threatened by the former (partly because Ben desires so little, except cash and the control of provincial clerk-relatives), nor particularly moved by the latter (partly because Horace fought back so little for his principles, lacked passion as a lover, provided paternal support for Alexandra's idealism only through proxies like Addie, and lost his own vital energy and generativity around the time when he locked his broken violin away in the strongbox along with his railroad bonds). It is only after the spectator learns all the complications of these people's interrelationships, and how their business dealings intertwine to set a complex double mousetrap plot into the dramaturgy, that one realizes that certain characters are more rounded, self-aware (because they have more self), and complexly embedded in a tragedy than are the others, and that the groupings follow gender lines. Therefore, although The Little Foxes does not break into two halves in terms of levels of social analysis (received dogma and original variation), this essay considers the play's general politics first in terms of that kind of Marxist social analysis commonly held during the thirties, and, later, through its particular embodiment in the women.

It is the men in The Little Foxes who do business and extol it as the business of America. They speak the lines that ironically serve to offer a Marxist analysis of early capitalist expansion. In fact, Ben and Oscar would not be uncomfortable with the first passages in The Communist Manifesto, which portray the succeeding orders of social and economic organization as civilization evolved from feudal aristocratic dominance to the age of the bourgeois mercantile class. These new Southerners apply that same reading to their usurpation of the plantation gentry's lands and women, and they couch their reading in evolutionary terms as applied to the social sphere. They are filling a new niche with their entrepreneurial innovation of bringing the mills to the cotton, as they had done earlier by loaning money to blacks at lethal rates, two jobs the older gentry had shunned, and they condemn these weaker competitors for failing to change with the age; Ben boasts to Marshall it is because “the Southern aristocrat can adapt himself to nothing.”⁹

The play's social Darwinism extends to embrace that favorite adverb “naturally,” as if the conscious self-interest of schemers were the same process by which nature selects improved species for survival. “Naturally” is Ben's simple response to Oscar, when his brother wishes to discuss the possible marriage between Leo and Alexandra that would repay Oscar for the investment percentage that Ben coerces him to sacrifice (151); when Oscar later rationalizes Leo's plot to steal Horace's bonds by proposing that “a man can't be shot for wanting to see his son get on in the world,” Leo agrees that this is “natural enough” (160). Regina employs the discourse of nature when her mind turns to business. “It seems only natural,” she says in act 1, that a wife should look after her husband's interests by demanding that the silent partner get a bigger share (149), and at the play's end, when she confronts her brothers about their scheme to rob her, her mock sorrow takes the same language: “It's not a pleasant story. I feel bad, Ben, naturally” (194).

If money selects for survival in the human species, it must be the basis of existence. The Hubbards are thorough materialists in a way that Marx would find at least realistic. One primitive tenet he shared with nineteenth-century capitalists was the fundamental separation between material sources of biological survival, called by Marxists the base, and the superstructure of ideas, beliefs, and artistic expressions that man erects about his base as a rationalization for it. The Hubbards dismiss the immaterial realm accordingly, or employ it as a flag of convenience. Birdie's music is superfluous, just one of her graces that she shares with Alexandra and Horace and a symbol of her wasted gentry education; her husband stops her from fetching Wagner's autograph to show Marshall, who he thinks would not be interested. Marshall lets it go, but stops to comment ironically on Ben's credo that a man isn't in business just for profits, but for his heart's good: “You have a turn for neat phrases, Hubbard. Well, however grand your reasons are, mine are simple: I want to make money and I believe I'll make it on you. Mind you, I have no objections to more high-minded reasons. They are mighty valuable in business. It's fine to have partners who so closely follow the teachings of Christ” (142). His bluff called, Ben toasts him by inverting a Henry Frick platitude about railroads being the Rembrandts of investment to propose that now cotton mills will be those Rembrandts. Their dismissal of superstructural ideation extends beyond art and religion to scoff at contemplative thought itself. When Horace recalls that he had spent many weeks in his hospital bed just thinking things over, as if on holiday from life's daily business, Regina is astounded that he would take “a holiday of thinking” in Baltimore when her business needed him here (167).

Even the most elemental kinship ties are but ideas to the Hubbards, links that can be bartered, used for blackmail, eliminated by murder if this serves one's self-interest. Every family bond has its price, as the play demonstrates materially by quoting the figure. Regina pretended to be willing to consider marrying Alexandra to Leo to placate her brother for reducing his profits, she boasts to her husband (and calls the matter “all this business,” 167). Ben invented that scheme, and also manipulates Leo to steal his uncle's bonds while arranging to extricate himself from any blame in the affair. When Regina causes Horace's death by withholding his medicine, she is retaliating against his single direct action in the Hubbards' scheme, whereby he would rewrite his will to deny her significant inheritance and excuse her brothers for cheating him.

In the war of all against all, man's chief weapon is unwavering self-interest. Economic life is a battle (people like Ben “struggled and fought” to bring northern-style prosperity to the South, which he calls “patriotism” [141]), in which the decisive weapon is innovation: Ben's real toast to Marshall, delivered behind his back, holds that “God forgives those who invent what they need” (144). Hellman renders this as more than a tract; actually, she makes us admire the chief manipulators for their skill and wit, and impresses on us the ironic dictum that for their time and situation, these protocapitalists represented the most highly developed social species whose greed, for them, constituted a life force. We appreciate their recourse to pieties that we have employed ourselves in not-so-dissimilar situations. Even Oscar gains momentary sympathy when he tells his son “it's every man's duty to think of himself,” though this means spying into Horace's strongbox (158). They are merely perpetuating their existence while the weaker men around them uphold the values of a dying class, or seek to die economically or developmentally and drag the vital ones down with them.

Horace has humane reasons for resisting the new cotton development, which he argues to Ben and Regina in act 2 in speeches exposing the social misery their project will yield. He denounces exploitative wages, the ensuing class warfare between poor whites and unlanded blacks, the Hubbards' opposition to unions, and their dividend-derived incomes, all themes that make this play's thirties context explicit. But the Hubbards will not hear his higher values, partly because they float above the economic base of self-interest. To them, Horace's no-growth policy equals death; one must expand or die according to the family's biological progressivism. Regina localizes the attitude by perceiving that his refusal to let her join the mill development constitutes Horace's revenge against her schemes. It is his way of killing her since he must die: “You hate to see anybody live now, don't you. You hate to think that I'm going to be alive and have what I want” (176). As a further irony, while the Hubbards rationalize their own life force by likening it to nature and condemning any values that lack a material base, they treat capital as if it were a fact of nature and intend to live off its self-replicating power. They will “grow rich,” Horace notes with the biological metaphor intended, and they marvel at the way their little $75,000 shares will yield a million (171).

All the while Alexandra watches and listens, for all that social theory has been embedded dramatically in confrontations about thievery, confessions of lost dreams, and calls to resistance at the immediate level. Even Addie's credo about the active ones who eat the earth while the others stand around watching (her biblical association refers us back to the play's title) springs from her desire to protect Alexandra and help her resist her family (182). Not surprisingly for a political drama, Alexandra undergoes a conversion in response to promptings from her mammy, aunt, and father, and particularly because she observes how the Hubbards' plots have extended to designs against her freedom, to mutual aggression, and to murder. But her ultimate decisions come within a context of female awakening, one which she does not directly undergo herself (at least, in her speeches, aside from resisting the marriage scheme). The play lets her proclaim the awakening at the end, and articulate it as a collective and social goal: her intention to oppose the earth's devouring and not “stand around and watch [Regina] do it,” but “be fighting … someplace else” (199). But she is not active otherwise in the drama, nor does she attach feminist intentions to her decision. Hellman's most unconventional gesture with Alexandra is to block the audience's desire to learn her outcome and thus experience closure in terms of the plot. The author never tells us what cause Alexandra might join or how it could prevail. This withheld outcome for Alexandra, along with the denial of any probable opposition to Regina's final triumph, constitutes the major gesture Hellman makes in transferring the solution to this play's problem to the audience.

The feature also constitutes the major deviation from well-made dramaturgy in a play castigated for that, and the major reversal of the expectation that suspense will be solved at the level of ideas as well as plotting, for we never know how the called-for alternative idea to the Hubbards' worldview can prevail. Hellman's refusal to depict the resolution for Alexandra's predicament makes her drama closer to Brecht's dramaturgy than we find in other thirties drama, and Hellman herself called attention to the audience's persistent inability to accept the inconclusive ending for Alexandra.¹⁰ As political theater, The Little Foxes preserves by means of its dramaturgy the struggle that Hellman knows is still being waged. But she also remains Marxist in her ideals by implying that this general struggle will yield a progressive outcome, that hope exists, that the world evolves toward greater productivity for more people through a process of dialectical materialism.

Before examining the female awakening that this play depicts more surprisingly through its oppressed woman character Birdie and even through Regina, it is appropriate to survey the earlier and more explicitly political drama Days to Come, in which Hellman tried out the family relationships that she perfected with The Little Foxes. The play is flawed by its excessive emphasis on the capitalist's neurotic family entanglements and by its maudlin treatment of the strikers, but it does contain one vivid character, the strike organizer. In its broad outlines the play sets forth Hellman's full brief against thirties America.

The plot follows the usual strike play structure: strike breakers are brought in to provoke the strikers out of their passive resistance; a well-meaning owner discovers his complicity through his toleration of venal schemers within the company; the pitiable death of the leading worker's child prompts the man to stop sympathizing with the owner; and the strike organizer attempts to rally the workers, raise their consciousness, and turn their anger away from revenge and toward awareness about class conditions. The general issue that Hellman exposes remains valid: small town values and businesses run on paternalist principles and are incompatible with inherent conflicts within corporate capitalism and its resulting structural problems, though of course, she never states it so baldly in her play. Set in the 1930s, Days to Come vividly captures the poignant local version of that breakdown. When a small company that had thrived since the town was settled goes under, its owners and workers stop being peers and for the first time confront their basic antagonism. Union and antiunion tactics infect the town from urban centers, as the national depression touches the small town. Its citizens experience for the first time this country's first systemwide collapse of the industrial boom that had started during the transition from an agriculture-based economy.

In addition to its convincing materialist analysis of conditions at the factory, and in the town and nation, the play posits other materialist assumptions, especially at the level of emotional relations. All the characters are forced to acknowledge how they have fed off each other, and in the denouement the owner-family realizes its emotional parasitism, which took the form of a triangle among owner, wife, and lawyer, abetted by the spinster sister's maintenance of their secret. Hellman enlivens the otherwise uninvolving love crisis by couching each subsequent revelation in terms of “business”: Rodman's business to conceal his motives regarding Julie; Cora's business to know the secret; Ellicott's business to invest in its maintenance by seducing his employer's wife. A more interesting twist comes earlier, when the strike organizer Whalen blocks Julie's romantic overtures by admitting that he would treat her instrumentally whenever their class antagonism surfaced: “People like me always make symbols of people like you.”¹¹ Whalen even affronts both owner and chief worker-artisan by suggesting that their business became unprofitable when they persisted in making quality brushes that cost more to produce than the deflated market could bear.

His vulgar materialism, imported tactics, and detachment from the company's paternalism suggest that Whalen may harbor a foreign ideology, a notion supported by his warning to the worker Firth that, with the arrival of the deputized strike breakers, the strikers no longer constitute a peacekeeping force even as passive resisters: “They're law and order now and you're un-American” (104). The play emphasizes that the strikers' values are a native product, like that American craftsmanship, that their revolt is as justified as earlier rebellions on the same soil, and that their collective ethic represents the true national spirit. Firth keeps protesting that his people “ain't foreigners” although the strike breakers are, and for a long time he persists in cooperating with Rodman, trying to uphold a democratic ideal of common effort untainted by class antagonism (86-87). The play exists to enlighten him on that, but its recurrent theme of Americanism exposes a common impulse in thirties leftist drama. These writers took pains to represent collectivist unionism as a native product (it was in fact a German socialist import) and to conflate Marxist socialism with democratic revolutionary values as learned from the founding fathers.¹²

Whalen displays his authentic social vision when he explains to Julie his own political conversion, which came neither from reading tracts nor from unworldly love of the squalid souls who peopled his tenement, but from antagonism with his family and frustration at his failure to understand the structures and conditions around him. When he couldn't figure out either the rich or the poor, he took his present job to learn better about both and stop hating either; now he knows that he hates the condition of poverty, even to the extent of hating the meanness and cowardice that come with it, but he loves what the poor could be (107). In addition to debunking a certain folk song populism in this conversion account, Hellman sides with Brecht in his realistic depiction of poor people's squalor and debasement. (Joan of the Stockyards learned there not the evil of the poor but the poverty of the poor, and Setzuan's Good Woman suffered their venality.) She also identifies a tactic promulgated by communists, although not their exclusive invention, that we change our social consciousness by doing and working in the social world, thus realizing the interdependence between praxis and theory.

The most provocative aspect of Days to Come lies in its proto-Brechtian dramaturgy, really Hellman's hallmark, of withholding the resolution at the ending. This takes a maudlin shape when the entangled lovers' denouement is left entangled and they will all remain wed to each other, if not married, for all the days to come (128); the title also predicts social revolt. The workers' movement within the mill town is also left unconcluded. Where this dramaturgical tactic takes on real theatrical edge is in the scenes with Whalen, who consistently cuts off closure even of the kind with which an audience might sympathize. He rejects Julie's honest advances, not wanting to revolutionize the boss's wife. He taunts Firth even after Firth's child has been killed, both about the workers' failure to maintain passive resistance and their inability to seize their own fight when its time came; but when Firth makes the easy conclusion that his former friend Rodman was truly the man who killed his child, Whalen blocks that rationalization, telling Firth that this wrong answer will lead him astray and that the individual Rodmans have little to do with the workers' problems (121). Whalen is not the agent who breaks the bonds that hitherto linked people, however badly, in the town, but he exposes the structures and dysfunctions that have sundered them. Any resolution, or any new order, also lies in the days to come.

Another Part of the Forest can also be considered as anterior to The Little Foxes, because it is set in the Hubbard family a generation prior to that of Hellman's masterwork. Unfortunately, composed as it was seven years later and as a sequel, it reveals relatively little more of significance about this clan. Full of tumultuous vice and social discord surrounding these native carpetbaggers, the play fails to add much to Hellman's political portrait of America, although it vividly repeats popular myths about southern decadence and breakdown after the Civil War. Judged in its own right the play has vitality as a crackling melodrama infused with vicious wit about rubes and vice figures alike of a kind Hellman introduced more moderately in the earlier Hubbard play.

There, for example, Regina and Ben snigger about the results of a near incestuous coupling in their grandparents' generation—“And look at us” (151)—while Another Part of the Forest is larded with such sarcasm, much of it sexual. Marcus dismisses his son's infatuation with a doxy who herself had mused that she always wanted to give up whoring and take up embroidery by exclaiming, “Are you denying the girl makes use of a mattress, do you expect to go through life killing every man who knows she does?” (375). In these terms, with Another Part of the Forest Hellman tries out a Jonsonian comedy of humours and creates a sociohistorical satire, initiating a style that she later developed to the same end in her overt satires, the adaptations of Candide and My Mother, My Father and Me. In fact, the best satire in Another Part of the Forest attaches itself to political comments, although Hellman does not develop the political critique of American capital beyond the terms more subtly established in The Little Foxes. She exposes the origins of the Hubbards' greed and why they are shunned by Southern society, emphasizing Marcus's sharp trading practices during the Civil War, which leeched off the embattled Southerners while Marcus himself disdained their futile cause—a plot parallel to some action in Mother Courage. She creates early visions of his children's future schemes and passions: Ben seeking to control his relatives and hold their assets, although again with no desire to spend or consume the wealth; Regina transfixed by clothes, love affairs, and travel to glamorous Chicago; Oscar consumed with illicit sex and cruelty to black men. Though their Snopesian rape of the local surroundings is more detailed here, its wider ramification is undeveloped.

When contrasted with The Little Foxes, the general effect of Another Part of the Forest is to underline political themes and criticisms Hellman made more subtly before. For example, she makes the social Darwinism more explicit, both in regard to the succession of generations and the Old South's obsolescence. The whole plot within the action hangs on Ben discovering his father's war secret by coincidences, then manipulating his father into handing him the estate (and thus also cheating Regina, which motivates her desire to restore her inheritance in the next play). Ben repeats his self-justification constantly, claiming not only that his father held him back and underpaid him, but that the man has aged and must move aside for the son. (Regina turns this on Ben at the end of The Little Foxes, noting that he is getting old and less adept at his schemes.) Repeatedly, Marcus makes the same social point about the Old South, and in one speech he links this saw to a theory of the zeitgeist: “Well, I disapprove of you. Your people deserved to lose their war and their world. It was a backward world, getting in the way of history. Appalling that you still don't realize it. Really, people should read more books” (368).

This wit characterizes Marcus particularly well, and he develops throughout the first two acts as an unstoppable force, controlling his family and social environment through his greater insight, realism, and enlightened selfishness. He mocks the Southerners' fallen glory, advising a confederate officer to fight in South America on the winning side for a change, noting there is no hero so great as the man who fought on the losing side (367, 372). He calls his own sons' bluffs repeatedly, mocking Oscar's timid sexual rebellions and Ben's ire at being relegated to Bob Cratchit status. Marcus is aware of propriety's value in business. He answers Ben's plea for advancement with a mixed command to “call in some cotton loans or mortgages” and then go to church, but the message is clear that the new cash flow will land in Marcus's pockets, not his sons' (340). In The Little Foxes, Ben has inherited most of his father's traits, talents, and holdings, and he impresses us there particularly with his ruthless glee in manipulating others. That capacity shows how he has made a fetish of wielding power in its own right, ignoring the objects that it might bring him to take primal satisfaction in its execution (he first reveals this during Another Part of the Forest's revenge-plot, act 3). The sadistic pleasure of holding power has become its own end. One can observe a political critique about capital perpetuating itself and providing its own pleasure in this characterization.

Aside from this socio-sexual reading, which is further underscored in Another Part of the Forest by hints of incest and premarital sex attached to young Regina (implications that are not linked to the play's plot, but that contribute to the atmosphere of Southern Gothic, as do the various secondary characters), Another Part of the Forest does not deepen the resonance already contained in the play composed before it. Some flaws in its plotting, both internally and in relation to The Little Foxes, weaken its ultimate effect. Too much depends on coincidence, such as hidden papers that are not mentioned until act 3. More serious is Hellman's failure to present a significant antagonist to Marcus and his authority. Ben is too much his likeness, but ironically an inferior copy of his father, less vivid, just finally lucky to uncover the old man's secret. Even his power obsession is mainly known in the play because Marcus demonstrates it in a more fascinating way. It is Marcus, with his idea of history as a zeitgeist that should not be impeded, who bears the identity of that man of his time who is the best of his kind in terms of fulfilling the social destiny of his economic niche. Marcus, intimately linked with young Regina, constitutes the knowing villain whose charisma frightens us as we admire it. So his comeuppance due to accident at the end strikes us not so much as unfair as unfortunately wrong, a betrayal of the play's originating impulse.

These faults would not warrant elaboration were there not a Little Foxes. They do point to what Hellman succeeds at in that play, where she maintains the charisma and authority for the appropriate character throughout. Thanks to Hellman's skillful construction, Regina's character does not follow a simple line of aggrandizement or downfall (as does Marcus's), but instead describes a complex trajectory. Regina experiences a complex downfall on one front (the loss of Alexandra) while enjoying her inevitable reign (at least, within her circumscribed society). She even registers mixed emotions when she loses her daughter, since the playwright has plotted that scene in terms of a female awakening both women can share.

It is the women who make The Little Foxes a complex classic, and the least complex of these is Alexandra, whose socialist conversion at the end is justified and helps bear Hellman's visionary message. Her aunt and mother serve as female foils to her awakening, but paradoxically put it in partial shadow; ultimately they show that the awakening is not one that only women ought to have, but the goal of the race.

Birdie's contribution is somewhat stereotypical, since the abuse heaped on her repeats conventions about the fate of ineffective women, especially those who depend too much on their weak position, cultural graces, and good breeding when they oppose ruthless aggressors of either sex. What is fresh about this battered woman is her self-awareness and the degree of positive spirit that she has kept alive. She kept it intact by willful alcoholism and can admit that to her family intimates; drinking releases sustaining memories and provides a heightened spirit that the conditions surrounding her stifle when she is sober, vividly demonstrated in act 3 as she deliberately becomes tipsy, freeing herself to deliver Alexandra her most important insight. Here Birdie insists that Alexandra not love her, if the result would be that Alexandra will grow to resemble her, and suffer the same abuse (183). She condemns a pity that renders the sympathizer impotent, a lesson Alexandra applies directly in her final confrontation with Regina, when she rejects her mother's appeals to sympathize with her own stifled desires and refuses to seek or offer solace in Regina's bed.

This Brechtian gesture made before Hellman had heard of Brecht's antiempathic theories is certainly her own hallmark, one that clarifies the uneasy tone maintained in most of her drama. Her best-realized characters have a cold, somewhat cynical, but always intellectual air about them, which may fascinate the spectator, prod him to raise questions, but seldom draws him to them, or if so, it is mainly through intellectual admiration. An audience's complex fascination with Regina may be accounted for this way, as it is with Mother Courage. Her particular story yields little novelty for social analysis: the daughter bypassed in her father's will, saddled with a passive husband whose weak idealism retards her greed and ambition for too long, the immediate objects of her desire little different from any gilded age matron's. She devours her male by withholding her sexuality from him and exploiting it with all the males around her, and her kind would devour the earth. It is not adequate to pity her as a misguided female emancipationist, had she but lived in a better time.¹³ She does want to shake off the restraints coming from her culture, but she also wants to impose her will on others.

At the same time, she can admire other fighters who possess their own mind, particularly those of her gender and blood, and she must have a certain awareness of the validity behind Alexandra's socialist rebuttal because she offers no refutation. She may even perceive a zeitgeist (as her father had done), and refuse to deny in words the direction the times are taking, even though she will continue to use her actual power and psychological manipulations against the new forces. Her last lines reveal a new fascination with her daughter, as she explicitly refuses to force Alexandra to side or remain with her, perhaps in response to memories of her own manipulation by others in the past. She knows that she is losing something when Alexandra withstands her arguments on two crucial issues—the domestic one of leaving home, and the social one of taking a stand against her kind—and these have become the most important issues for the play.

This scene is political because it shows people at the moment of transition as one age passes to another. They are not just swayed by the times; they fight out and interact through the roles that the warring orders gave them initially, but which they have developed by their own choices. Alexandra chooses a socialist future, and the play leaves her outcome uncertain. Regina chooses to be to the utmost a man of the present stage of socio-economic development, which in part means that she will be a woman who seizes new openings for her gender, reverses males' expectations and prerogatives when they become too self-confident, embraces change while holding on to obsolete facades of feminine behavior when these serve her advantage. Her tragedy lies in the fact that she cannot possess both the future freedom (reserved for women who define themselves and are allowed to be defined as people) and the present reign simultaneously, since the two are in contradiction, and Regina wants it all. The power she seeks as queen contradicts the full freedom she thought she wanted while she was still held down.

Putting it another way, Hellman's oeuvre succeeded in portraying the complex and potentially tragic interaction of “people's lives together,” which was Brecht's ideal for what the theater for a new age would portray, a formula that is essentially political. (The person's life apart, in isolation, and usually destroyed there, is commonly portrayed in other American drama.) Not all her plays have the same quality, but most of them aspire to the same public seriousness. The best of them succeed as entertainment that enlightens because she could use the old tricks of the stage she inherited and shape the ones most crucial to her argumentative ends to new effect. For The Little Foxes, these involve the melodrama form, whose conventions Hellman undermined (while retaining its energy) by reversing some of the spectator's usual expectations regarding plot closure and audience empathy. The knowing wit shared by her strongest characters often makes them seem as if they are standing outside the role and commenting on it.

In her drama, the manifest content of her politics remained that of the thirties, but the vision in that politics was not time bound. Some issues she fought in the thirties and beyond returned to the political scene and theatrical stage during her last decades, and although she had turned to the memoir form by then, two of her late theatrical efforts had some stage life and demonstrated that her wit had not abated, meaning both comic prowess and political intelligence. They are both adaptations, and because they are both so extensively collaborative as creations it would be inaccurate to dwell on them as her exclusive or final theatrical statements. But her career is happier because of their performance.

I refer to her last stage work and final adaptation, My Mother, My Father and Me, based on Burt Blechman's novel How Much?, and her Candide, a more lasting theater spectacle. My Mother, My Father and Me provided little happiness for Hellman personally, because its run was short, she was dissatisfied with the production, and in general the critics emphasized its shortcomings—too many targets for her satire, too little control of the absurdist form that she had embraced at too late an age. Since both those elements stemmed from the original novel, the fault hardly lies with Hellman unless it lies in her choice to take on the venture. The play contains more comedy and surprising effects than are usually credited, and if viewed not as a would-be American dream but as a continuation of the loosely structured social vaudeville stemming from thirties political musicals and living newspaper satires it can be placed and appreciated better—particularly since that form resurfaced with vitality in sixties plays like those of Jean-Claude van Itallie and Megan Terry, and later flowered with Sam Shepard's exuberances. It presaged the subsequent war economy of the Vietnam period (here the joke is that no one knows where the war is being fought or whether it is really happening), and portrayed the odyssey of a naive idealist who is corrupted by his environment along lines that may still cause discomfort for the present generation.

That same theme of the corrupted idealist who does not know how he has been misled and who still struggles to realize his ideal vision underlies Candide. Even more than in her straight play adaptation, in her Candide musical Hellman exploits the many techniques and gestures codified by Brecht: picaresque episodism; direct address to the audience; political satire infused with a cynicism that does not simply want to denigrate this world; and particularly, “epic music,” or the self-conscious song set apart from the action, which breaks the illusionist frame and comments on its contents and audience emotions by suspending empathy and transforming debased or archaic music, in this case, operatic clichés. Of course, Leonard Bernstein created that element, as Weill had done for Brecht, but within the context devised by the play's author. Hellman's link with Brecht the librettist can be traced through Marc Blitzstein, who in the years prior to the 1956 Candide had turned The Little Foxes into his opera Regina, and rescored and adapted The Threepenny Opera for its ground-breaking off-Broadway run, but who in 1936 produced America's greatest political musical The Cradle Will Rock, which he dedicated to Brecht. Moreover, Martin's answer to Candide's question of who he is—“A foreigner. A scholar. A beggar. A street cleaner. A pessimist” (644)—echoes some of Brecht's autobiographical poems (such as “To Poor B. B.”), which share the same definitionary rhythms, the same protean identity, the same intelligent dismay and realism—and a statement of identity that may be Hellman's own.

My ending point in this survey of Hellman's political theater is to recall her most succinct and evocative statement, at least outside the exhortatory scenes within her explicitly political plays, regarding her social vision for the future. She made it in her one lyric written for Candide, the song “Eldorado”.¹⁴ Its simple lines, fecund images, and verbal and musical poignancy all project the paradise on earth toward which her socialist heroes aspire, but at which they know they have not yet arrived. The restraint and the withheld directive in “Eldorado” about how to actually get there or what form the socialist future will actually take support Hellman's belief that we will reach Eldorado by creating it ourselves, and then we will know what it looks like. The song resembles Voltaire's conclusion, another withheld resolution that only directs men to start planting their own gardens; in similar fashion, Hellman simultaneously displays and withholds her ending, which is the conclusive arrival at a social utopia.

Hellman's project as a public artist through much of her drama had been to bear witness to the need for our social engagement, considering our present world (“Change the world: it needs it”—Brecht). The goal of that engagement was never far from view, and in one play she articulated it in a perfect song, which shows both her ideal vision and her commitment to mankind now, during this present stage of existence. Hellman's Candide can view and even enter utopia, but he will never be happy until he can find a way to bring his fellow creatures there with him. And it is not just a matter of providing their passage: they must make the march themselves.

Notes

1. Rolf Meyn employed the term to survey social themes in 1930s American fiction, but the label has a long history. See Meyn, Die “Rote Dekade,” Studien zur Literaturkritik und Romanliteratur der dreissinger Jahre in den USA (Hamburg: 1980).

2. The most influential political plays of the 1930s from the leftist and liberal camps included Stevedore (George Sklar and Paul Peters, 1934), Black Pit (Albert Maltz, 1934), Marching Song (John Howard Lawson, 1937), and Clifford Odets's three plays of 1935, Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost. Antiwar plays included Peace on Earth (Albert Maltz and George Sklar, 1933), Bury the Dead (Irwin Shaw, 1936), and Idiot's Delight (Robert Sherwood, 1936). Prominent musicals that offered a leftist political critique included Johnny Johnson (Paul Green and Kurt Weill, 1936), The Cradle Will Rock (Marc Blitzstein, 1937), and Pins and Needles (Harold Rome, et al., 1937). Although these works owed their innovative formal features to several traditions, including agitprop, political cabaret, and constructivist graphics and cinema, probably German expressionism played the strongest role as an influence, as exemplified in Ernst Toller's Masse-Mensch, 1920, produced by the Theater Guild in 1924.

3. She plays a rather small role in major surveys of 1930s drama. See Morgan Y. Himelstein, Drama Was a Weapon, the Left-Wing Theatre in New York 1929-1941 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment, Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964); and Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theatre of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

4. In an Esquire interview in 1962 she called The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage “the great plays of our time.” See Thomas Meehan, “Q: Miss Hellman, What's Wrong with Broadway? A: It's a Bore,” Esquire 58 (December 1926):140-42, 235-36.

5. A handy survey of the dispute already exists in the form of Mark W. Estrin's annotated bibliography of the entire Hellman criticism to 1980, Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

6. When Days to Come was revived in 1978, Terry Curtis Fox noted that its family structure resembled the one later developed fully in The Little Foxes. See “Early Work,” Village Voice, 6 November 1978, 127, 129.

7. Compare the collapse of capitalist optimism that is Miller's central theme in Death of a Salesman, A Memory of Two Mondays, a main segment of After the Fall, The Price, and The American Clock, all related to the depression.

8. Perhaps we get more distance on thirties issues in The Little Foxes than in Odets's plays because Hellman's work is not set during the immediate era, which makes its anatomy of society seem more universal and not an immediate response to a current crisis (the problem with her war plays). In these terms she is more like Miller, who keeps returning in his dramatized memories to that decade which had already passed before his writing flowered. Her main difference from Odets is her greater toughness of mind, her refusal to tack a conversion scene of unmotivated political enlightenment or activism onto the end of otherwise realistic portrayals of conditions. For a comparison of Hellman and Odets, see Malcolm Goldstein, “The Playwrights of the 1930s,” in The American Theater Today, ed. Alan Downer (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 25-27.

9. The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), 140. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations from Hellman's plays are from this edition and are cited in the text.

10. In her Paris Review interview, she claimed that she expected Alexandra would grow to become “maybe a spinsterish social worker, disappointed, a rather angry woman” (John Phillips and Anne Hollander, “The Art of the Theater: Lillian Hellman, an Interview,” Paris Review 33 [Winter-Spring 1965]:64-95; reprinted in this volume). One might liken Hellman's frustration to Brecht's over the persistence with which spectators sympathized with Mother Courage. Mark W. Estrin elaborated the dramaturgical parallel here with Brecht in his introduction to Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs, p. 8, where he also collected a number of contemporaneous reviews of The Little Foxes that intuited the same structure without being aware of Brecht. Finally, one must note with dismay the major deviation from her stageplay, which Hellman permitted in the 1941 screen adaptation. There, a rival suitor for Alexandra appears in the person of a journalist lover from up north who solves the problem of her withheld happiness for us, and undercuts the force by which her problem is made ours by staying problematic.

11. This line does not appear in the final version of Days to Come found in Hellman's Collected Plays. It appears in earlier versions and in the collection Six Plays (New York: Random House, 1960; New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 119.

12. Most explicitly, when Whalen exposes their fundamental class antagonism to the owners and strikers, he cries, “Don't let 'em tell you that because your grandfather voted for Jefferson, you're any different from some Polack in Pittsburgh whose grandfather couldn't write his name” (121).

13. Honor Moore does not really propound this, but the force of her sympathetic analysis in the introduction to an anthology of new women's drama has that end. See The New Women's Theater: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, ed. Honor Moore (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), xi-xxxvii.

14. See The Collected Plays, 658. Following a poetry reading at Rhode Island College, 16 April 1986, Richard Wilbur, Candide's lyricist, confirmed that Hellman was the sole author of “Eldorado,” and that he had supported her wish to keep the song included in the score with her lyrics intact. Apparently Hellman herself questioned the sentimentality of the words, but Wilbur countered that the text suited its author's vision precisely. Unhappily, the version of Candide currently in general production does not employ Hellman's libretto, but a new version authored by Hugh Wheeler.