leave Dwight’s home "for good." Through these acts, Lulu discovers her voice, advocating not only for her rights but also implicitly for those of the other women. She confronts Dwight, saying, "You’re one of the men who can smother a whole family and not even know you’re doing it."

Lulu's Yearnings and Realizations

Beyond her tumultuous interactions with Dwight, Lulu expresses a yearning for a life beyond her current confines. She confides in Ninian about her aspiration for education and her dream of a fulfilling job where her contributions are valued. To Cornish, she laments her limited skills, confined to merely cooking, with no means to earn her livelihood. Lulu’s awareness of her life’s deficiencies highlights the domestic trap that ensnared countless women like her during that time.

In the heart of Miss Lulu Bett, love scarcely appears as the thread binding the tapestry of marriage. Dwight and Ina find their bond not in romantic fervor, but in shared self-satisfaction and a collective disdain for others, particularly Lulu. Their outward expressions of admiration are hollow, lacking any foundation of true appreciation for each other's virtues.

By contrast, the connection between Lulu and Ninian is woven from entirely different threads. The play leaves us pondering Ninian's motives for clinging to Lulu, except perhaps out of a desire to rescue her from the stifling environment he perceives in the Deacons’ household. Yet Lulu’s motivations are crystal clear. She confides in Cornish, "You see Ninian was the first person who was ever kind to me. Nobody ever wanted me, nobody ever even thought of me. Then he came. It might have been somebody else. It might have been you." For Lulu, the simple acts of kindness and consideration—elements she had long been starved of—transform into the essence of love.

The subtitle of the published play, An American Comedy of Manners, signals the ironic tone of the work. The term “comedy of manners” implies sparkling drawing-room repartee, but the verbal interactions in this middle-class domestic setting, presumably in Zona’s Gale’s native Wisconsin, achieve their comic effect by means of their utter banality. In the first scene, for example, Dwight puts on patriarchal airs yet harps on the food and the cost of small items and then declares: “The conversation at my table must not deal with domestic matters.” Ina’s frequent (mis)corrections of Dwight’s mispronunciations are an amusing inversion of the sophisticated wordplay in traditional comedies of manners. The first two scenes of act 2 contain sequences of virtually identical dialogue spoken by the same characters, a forceful yet humorous illustration of the smallness of these characters’ lives. Thus, the play might well be described as a satire on small-town American, middle-class life, emphasizing the limited horizons, lack of imagination, self-delusion, excessive concern for what others might think and the selfish pursuit of petty comforts.

Compounding the limitations of this middle-class mentality were some generally conflicted attitudes about the place of women in the changing American social landscape of the early twentieth century. Although women had begun entering the American workforce even before World War I, spinsterhood was viewed as an embarrassing circumstance. Many families in the 1920’s still harbored “maiden aunts” who had never held outside jobs. As a single woman (until she was fifty-three) who supported herself by writing, Zona Gale understood firsthand the social dynamics of spinsterhood. While Miss Lulu Bett’s strength of character and dramatic development ensure that this play will be examined as a portrayal of conditions faced by women in the early twentieth century, one might fold this concern into the larger problem of people whose potential is stifled by various restrictions: the lack of education, having to care for an ailing family member, racial quotas, or economic barriers.

Family relationships are an interesting feature of this play. Well before psychologists had explained certain behaviors, Zona Gale demonstrated them in action. Dwight and Ina make the most basic mistakes of parenting in the inconsistency with which they make and apply rules for their daughters, “performin’ like a pair of weathercocks” in Mrs. Bett’s view. Dwight and Ina do not serve as role models, as their own behavior contradicts the standards they expect of the children. Sibling rivalries are shown, notably between the daughters Di and Monona, but also between brothers Dwight and Ninian and to a lesser extent between Ina and Lulu. Mrs. Bett gives little indication that she is anything other than a dependent, querulous old woman—until she twice releases a brief torrent of pent-up memory that hints at a generation’s hardship that enabled the middle-class comforts available to her remaining children.