[In the essay below, Loomis extols the anti-sexist message of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and points out the correlation between Zindel's play and Dante's Divine Comedy.]

Already preparing a bridge to such a recent male feminist play as Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias. Paul Zindel, in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, gave us, two full decades ago, a strong indictment of sexism. In Zindel's revisionary Dantesque play, the frumpy housewife Beatrice Hunsdorfer may look like an illusion-frustrated female transplanted into a Northern urban landscape from the barren Mississippi River towns of Tennessee Williams. Beatrice's tantrum in Act Two, turning her house into a chaos, may seem fully explained when she declares "I hate the world"; she thus appears at first no more positive a rebel than Kopit's Madame Rosepettle, in Oh Dad, Poor Dad Mamma's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feeling So Sad. But Beatrice's rebellion does not seek merely to hiss venom toward dominant patriarchs, in the manner adopted by La Rosepettle, and she surely does not demonstrate strength (like Williams's Serafina Delle Rose and Maggie Polliti) only while working out an alliance with males on whom she remains dependent. If Beatrice is like a Williams character, the model seems Big Mama. Like that Mississippi matriarch by the end of her play, Beatrice fully intends to create a freer, more dignified life for herself and the children she loves—including, in her case, a highly intelligent daughter, Tillie, who, if she fully grasps her evident educational opportunities, might eventually live a life of considerable success.

Whatever the superficial resemblances one might remark between Gamma Rays and Williams's Glass Menagerie, the "hopeful" philosophy apparent in Zindel seems a radical departure from Tennessee Williams. Williams's most famous heroines, in Menagerie and Streetcar, remain, for all their vividness of personality, resolutely trapped in all the illusions imposed on them by patriarchal culture. His heroines surely often enough prove sexually liberated—but still, frequently, remain encaged. Perhaps the ideal Williams heroine is one of calm spiritual liberation—a person like Hannah in Iguana. Yet Hannah, despite her spiritual liberty, remains economically starving; Big Mama is more amply fed, but only because she inherited a wealthy man's estate. Even though Hannah and other Williams heroines might become, like Big Mama, capable businesspersons, few even dare think of seeking economic self-determination, as Zindel's Beatrice finally does.

Gamma Rays may ultimately appear too much a product of late Sixties social optimism; Zindel does not seem aware of how harshly even educated Tillies must struggle for independence. Yet the main power of this play still remains its long-unrecognized anti-sexist vision. That vision makes it clearly a historically prophetic work; it is not, as multiple critics have narrowly claimed, a mere tired echo of earlier writers.

Gamma Rays ends with the rhapsodic teenage scientist Tillie Hunsdorfer declaring that

… [T]he effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds has made me curious about the sun and the stars, for the universe itself must be like a world of great atoms—and I want to know more about it. But most important, I suppose, my experiment has made me feel important—every atom in me, in everybody, has come from the sun—from places beyond our dreams. The atoms of our hands, the atoms of our hearts… (emphasis mine).

Surely, whether consciously or not, these lines—like Tillie's earlier response to a wondrous atomic cloud-chamber—call to mind both the imagery and the visionary fervor which conclude Dante's Paradiso:

… [L]ike to a wheel whose circle nothing jars,
Already on my desire and will prevailed
The Love that moves the sun and the others stars.

Zindel's play—if by accident, nonetheless with uncanny regularity—demonstrates remarkable affinity with Dante's Divine Comedy. The clearest hint of such affinity is Zindel's choice of the two main characters' names: Beatrice and Matilda. Obviously, Beatrice Hunsdorfer does share the name of Dante's central female character, although she markedly differs from her namesake, the medieval icon of spiritually quiescent splendor. Tillie Huns-dorfer, the incipient teenage intellectual, bears more direct resemblance to the Dantesque character she recalls. Matilda of Tuscany, the likely historical model for the character Matelda whom readers meet at the height of Purgatory near Dante's Beatrice, was "a wise and powerful woman, … splendid, illustrious … surpassing all others in her brilliance, … educated, [with] a large collection of books. … "

At least in Tillie Hunsdorfer, then, Zindel has a character who closely recalls an analogous character in Dante's great poem. It is, of course, Tillie who voices this play's most Dantesque sentiments; she shares Dante's belief that all earthly atoms are connected with originating stars of Love; that they were, as she speculates, "formed from a tongue of fire [the Holy Spirit?] that screamed through the heavens until there was our sun."

But the Dantesque affinities of Zindel's text do not cease with Beatrice's name and Tillie's name and personality. Zindel's earliest stage directions in the play set the action in "a room of wood," "once a vegetable store." The mention of "wood" and "vegetation," and, most of all, the note that this place was once "a point of debarkation for a horse-drawn wagon to bring its wares to a small town," all summon to my mind Dante's selva oscura, the "dark wood" which serves, in Inferno 1, as Dante's own "point of debarkation" for a pilgrimage toward the starry multifoliate rose of Paradise. According to Dante, he completed the visionary journey which young Matilda Hunsdorfer hopes, in her lifetime, to share.

But Matilda's mother Beatrice seems long ago to have lost any chance for a meaningful pilgrimage through life. Even as a child, she thought herself proven unworthy to take over her father's vegetable business—to sit atop its wagon, as if clothed in the radiant garb of Dante's own edenic chariot-rider Beatrice, and be a woman recognized (independently of any male mate) for her talents. She might, given other life-circumstances than those she knew, have imitated Dante's successful pilgrimage. But—because her father truly was not, as she mistakenly still wants to believe, one who "made up for all other men in this whole world"—she en-countered in him her primal "bogey man." He made her think that she, as a woman, was inferior to all men, that she could not care for his vegetable business either before or after his death, that she needed instead to "marry … [and] be taken care of." As a result, by the time of the play's scenes Beatrice has become a perpetual "widow of confusion," much as Dante began (but only began) the Commedia as one whose "way was lost."

Like Dante, too, Beatrice Hunsdorfer has dream-visions. But her visions do not foresee an attainable future bliss; they recall, instead, a "nightmare" of past denial. Her dreams, also like Dante's, contain ghosts of lost loved ones. Yet Dante's lost Beatrice still beckons ahead of him; she there pledges to teach him "nobility, … virtue, … the Redeemed Life," his soul's "ordained end." By contrast, Beatrice Hunsdorfer's lost earthly father, as a ghost, continues to deny her the self-esteem he first refused her long ago:

And while he was sleeping, I got the horses hitched up and went riding around the block waving to everyone. … I had more nerve than a bear when I was a kid. Let me tell you it takes nerve to sit up on that wagon every day yelling "Apples!" …

Did he find out? He came running down the street after me and started spanking me right on top of the wagon—not hard—but it was embarrassing—and I had one of those penny marshmallow ships in the back pocket of my overalls, and it got all squished. And you better believe I never did it again. …

Let me tell you about my nightmare that used to come back and back: Well, I'm on Papa's wagon, but it's newer and shinier, and it's being pulled by beautiful white horses, not dirty workhorses—these are like circus horses with long manes and tinsel—and the wagon is blue, shiny blue. And it's full—filled with yellow apples and grapes and green squash.

Huge bells swinging on a gold braid [are] strung across the back of the wagon, and they're going DONG, DONO … DONG, DONG. And I'm yelling "APPLES! PEARS! CUCUM … BERS!"

And then I turn down our street and all the noise stops. This long street, with all the doors of the houses shut and everything crowded next to each other, and there's not a soul around. And then I start getting afraid that the vegetables are going to spoil … and that nobody's going to buy anything, and I feel as though I shouldn't be on the wagon, and I keep trying to call out.

But there isn't a sound. Not a single sound. Then I turn my head and look at the house across the street. I see an upstairs window, and a pair of hands pull the curtains slowly apart. I see the face of my father and my heart stands still. …

Ruth … take the light out of my eyes.

Convinced by her sexist father that she had no gifts for managing her own meaningful career—"afraid that [if guarded only by her] the vegetables would spoil … and … nobody … [would] buy anything"—Beatrice has ever since been trapped in her own everyday earthly Inferno: on a "long street," "everything crowded," "not a soul around." Although she is like Zindel's own mother in her concocting "charmingly frantic scheme[s] … to get rich quick," she is, not surprisingly, highly jealous of her invalid boarder Nanny's daughter, "Miss Career Woman of the Year." She also envies her own daughters, refusing to admit that they have gifts which could lead them to careers even semi-professional. She can't believe that her daughter Ruth can even use a typewriter; at one point, she proclaims that Tillie should forget about her scientific ambitions and in-stead go to work in a dime store.

And Tillie might have been behind that dime store sales counter the next week had she not suddenly become a finalist in her high school's Science Fair. Her science teacher Mr. Goodman—himself typically sexist, at least in his shock that "he never saw a girl do anything like that before"—was convinced of her promise. As a slightly inattentive Ruth reports to her mother, Mr. Goodman said that Tillie "was going to be another Madame Pasteur."

So Tillie is spared the dime store, and Beatrice as her mother seems simultaneously spared her sense of being a complete "zero," "the original half-life!" Once it reaches her consciousness that Tillie has achieved what Ruth calls "an honor," Beatrice can declare, as she embraces her brainy child, an expletive which almost briefly approaches a creedal statement of faith: "Oh, my God. … " And, as she tells Ruth in the next act, "Somewhere in the back of this turtle-sized brain of mine I feel just a little proud! Jesus Christ!"

Indeed, it does not seem altogether fanciful to suggest that Act Two of Gamma Rays becomes (although not at all in a traditional Dantesque manner) Beatrice Hunsdorfer's en-counter with a personal purgatory. As Act One ends, the school principal Mr. Berg (translation from the German: "Mr. [Purgatorial?] Mountain") invites Beatrice to the Science Fair competition ceremonies. At the opening of the play's second act she has dressed for that event in a feathery costume, leading Ruth to quote some gossip from one of her mother's childhood companions: "[Mama's] idea of getting dressed up is to put on all the feathers in the world and go as a bird. Always trying to get somewhere, like a great big bird." Has Beatrice always frustratingly hoped that an eagle would lift her, as it lifted Dante, up to higher purgatorial crests?

Beatrice, after all, recalls her own youth as being something like Tillie's youth now. She might have advanced toward a better life had she not been intimidated (as Tillie herself is not) by others' disparagings. As Ruth tells Tillie, Beatrice as a girl "was just like you and everybody thought she was a big weirdo"; "First they had Betty the Loon, and now they've got Tillie the Loon."

Unfortunately, the selfish Ruth who utters these words eventually comes close to ruining her mother's chances for any sort of purgatorial experience. In brattish rage because she herself is being asked to skip the Science Fair and re-place her mother as guardian of Nanny the Boarder, Ruth screeches "Goodnight, Betty the Loon" at a Beatrice who is finally escaping, if still somewhat timidly, her fear of the outside world in order to attend Tillie's school ceremonies. Ruth's vicious ploy does gain her what she wants: Beatrice now immediately returns (or so it seems) to the agoraphobic terror of life which has for so long characterized her; she "helplessly" sends Ruth off with the Science Fair paraphernalia that she herself was to carry, and she then "breaks into tears that shudder her body, and the lights go down on her pathetic form."

Yet Act One had already prepared the way for Beatrice's doing something (in an earthly purgatory) with the insights which her memories (like Dante's in non-earthly Inferno) were giving her. She said then that she had "almost forgot[ten] about everything [she] was supposed to be." Still, Zindel built irony into such of her statements as "Me and cobalt-60! Two of the biggest half-lifes you ever saw!" Zindel's stage-directions soon afterwards told us that Beatrice was forming "mushroom cloud" smoke rings with her cigarettes; thus, her "half-life," like that of cobalt-60, always perhaps could, in its "mushroom cloud" explosion, hold positive mutation within it.

And, in the last scenes of Gamma Rays, Beatrice does lunge after such positive mutation. She tears newspapers off from the house's windows, then rearranges tables and places tablecloths and napkins on them. She calls Nanny's daughter, ordering her to take the old boarder away. Sitting down, guffawing over that conquest, and hitting her daughter's pet rabbit cage with her foot, she decides to chloroform the creature—which is, in Hugh Hefner's America, not only a children's pet, but an unfortunate symbol of female suppression.

No mere self-centered cruelty leads Beatrice to these behaviors. She is striving to make meaningful mutation occur in her (and in her daughters') life. Thus, when the girls start to express a fear that she may truly have killed their bunny, she doesn't directly respond to them. She matter-of-factly pronounces broader concerns: "Nanny goes tomorrow. First thing tomorrow"; "I don't know what it's going to be. Maybe a tea shop. Maybe not."

So long trapped in a hellish rut because not daring to lead a business-woman's produce-wagon off from "a point of debarkation," pilgrim Beatrice now seeks to redirect her life. For her, "hat[ing] the world" has not meant a spiritual leap beyond that world, in the manner of Dante's original Beatrice. She has, instead, made a ramshackle earthbound leap into self-assertion. And yet a certain level of spiritual other-centeredness has allied itself with that self-assertion. Even though she will force her daughters to "work in the [tea-shop] kitchen," she will not any longer seek to deny them an education for future self-determination. They will have "regular hours" in the business, but those hours will be scheduled "after school." She will no longer live so much in the shadow of her father that she tries to limit others in the way he limited her.

In introductory comments to the Gamma Rays script, which are really an unofficial dedication of the play to his mother, Zindel makes it clear that he considered that woman a beautiful mutation: someone who had at least striven, in her limited way, to become like the liberated modern mom he described in a short children's piece written for Ms. in 1976:

… She says "Absolutely not," when I want to drive the car, and "Have a good time," when I tell her I'm running away to Miami. She doesn't want me to know when we don't have enough money. … If I see her crying she says, "It's just something in my eye." She tells me secrets like she's lonely. When I tell her I miss my father she hugs me and says he misses me too. I love my mother. I really do.

("I Love My Mother")

Zindel has given us enough information to show his own mother's clear resemblances to Beatrice Hunsdorfer. One thus chuckles at his jocose offhand comment: "I suspect [the play] is autobiographical." Besides, autobiography may extend past the characterization of Beatrice to a character (unseen onstage) who may in some ways markedly suggest Paul Zindel himself: Mr. Goodman, Tillie's high school chemistry teacher.

Zindel taught high school chemistry for ten years and only left Staten Island, where he had taught, after the Pulitzer Prize award for Gamma Rays. Despite that fact, one of course would not claim that he deliberately insults himself when he has Beatrice at first describe Mr. Goodman as a "delightful and handsome young man" but then refer to him, a few minutes later, as "a Hebrew hermaphrodite." After all, the "hermaphrodite" reference is not ultimately intended as a physical description—at least not in the play's thematic undertext. A statement which at first seems only to exemplify Beatrice's crude-mouthed bitterness more importantly helps introduce the play's revisionist Hebrew theology, viewing all humankind as androgynous.

Zindel's anti-sexist thoughts of 1970 might be challenged now by such radical feminists as Mary Daly. She considers "androgyny" to be "a vacuous term," "expressing pseudowholeness" as an example of one of those "false universalisms (e.g., humanism, people's liberation) … which Spinsters must leap over, … must span" in order to affirm their own "intuition of integrity" [Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978)]. And, it is true, Zindel's androgyny still has a patriarchal sound; his anti-sexist thesis emphasizes the pun "Adam"/"atom," and he thus does recall for us the name of the first legendary Hebrew patriarch. Still, even Daly would grant "deceptive" but hard-to-avoid concepts of androgyny some relative value in progress to a non-sexist world. And others would remain more encouraged than she by Zindel's androgynous creed.

That creed is voiced throughout a play which has appeared to invite regular misreading. For instance, despite her obvious affection for the character's gutsy energy, Edith Oliver claims that Beatrice "is as much a victim of her own nature as she is of circumstance" [New Yorker, 18 April 1970]. Yet, given Zindel's pointed indictment of her father's sexism, why should we be assigning Beatrice herself with a heavy load of blame? Adler does perceive, without explaining why, that Beatrice's father caused her psychological problems. And yet he, too, does not seem at all to sense that this is a feminist play; he does not discuss it in his mildly feminist chapter "Nora's American Cousins," and he indeed rates Beatrice's plan to open a tea-shop as "slightly outrageous."

I do not believe for a moment, as Adler implies and as Brustein shouts, that Gamma Rays simply clones the illusion-ridden mother-daughter encaging atmosphere of The Glass Menagerie [Thomas P. Adler, Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama (1987); Robert Brustein, The Culture Watch: Essays on Theatre and Society, 1969-1974 (1975)]. Jack Kroll approaches closer to the truth about the play when he says that "The calculus of love, jealous vengefulness, remorse, flaring hatred, and desperate reconciliation[,] among these three people fighting for spiritual life, is the point and merit of Zindel's affecting play" [Newsweek, 27 April 1970]. And Harold Clurman, that ever-trustworthy sage, adds that "In Gamma Rays … a real person [he means Tillie, but I think Beatrice also fits the description] flowers from the compost of abject defeat and hysteria" [Nation, 15 March 1971].

In the play's very opening monologue, Tillie expresses indomitable faith in human androgynous potential as she tells of how Mr. Goodman, in chemistry class, helped her sense that in adamic atoms of origin all human beings are equal:

He told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine. This part of me was formed from a tongue of fire that screamed through the heavens until there was our sun.

… When there was life, perhaps this part of me got lost in a fern that was crushed and covered until it was coal. And then it was a diamond as beautiful as the star from which it had first come.

And he called this bit of me an atom. And when he wrote the word, I fell in love with it.

Atom.

Atom.

What a beautiful word.

For all its potential Dantesque echoes, Zindel's beautiful play finally shines with the ameliorative twentieth-century hope of an original, deeply sensitive, and highly enlightened modem good man. Paul Zindel, mat man, is distant from the norm, even in our own age, as he rebuffs the patriarchal sexism which was not absent even from Dante's enlightened Renaissance Christianity. Neither Beatrice Hunsdorfer nor Paul Zindel wants to idealize only "GOODY-GOODY GIRLS" like Dante's Beatrice Portinari dei Bardi. Both believe, or at least want to believe by their play's conclusion, that, by "hat[ing] the world" which limits women to roles as men's slaves (or even sacred muses), they may recreate that world—in Zindel's words, "bring innovation to civilization, to institutions, … make contributions … [toward a] world which is a better place to live" [interview with Paul Janeczko, English Journal 66, No. 7 (October 1977)]. Zindel's revised Genesis myth (perhaps his own creatively revisionist response to the very different Garden of Eden scenes which culminate Dante's Purga-torio) suggests how hard a non-sexist world is to create, and even to define. But such a world—in which we would recreate the meaning of "Adam" by finding our common personhood as "atom"—still seems to him a necessary earthly paradise, one always meant to be.