The Square Root of Wonderful

by Carson McCullers

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Bizarre Nonsexuality

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McCullers was an eccentric, and nothing about her was more eccentric than her sexuality. Especially because McCullers was a woman and a southerner who lived in less liberal times than now, this eccentric sexuality has always loomed large in studies of McCullers’s life and her work. (‘‘Especially’’ because sexual experimentation has been, in general, more tolerated in men than in women and because southern culture, in general, has given women less latitude than they have had in other regions to explore various roles and lifestyles.) Readers and critics alike, of course, are always tempted to see literary characters as barely disguised incarnations of their creators. The temptation is particularly strong when everything that is known or suspected about an author’s intimate life is offbeat and titillating.

It is not surprising, then, that those who comment on McCullers’s work often analyze the sexual attitudes and behaviors of her characters and assume that these are an undistorted reflection of the author’s attitudes and behaviors. It is also not surprising that The Square Root of Wonderful would come in for more than its share of such analysis, since the play is all about love and sex. Hence, Lynne Greeley, in a recent article in Theatre History Studies, declares that in The Square Root of Wonderful and other works, McCullers ‘‘decapitates sex totally and retreats into a kind of bizarre nonsexualilty.’’ Greeley’s thesis is that McCullers, profoundly uncomfortable with her own sexuality, created characters, including Mollie in The Square Root of Wonderful, who are sexually dysfunctional and stories that portray sex as base or even pathological.

Well-known facts about McCullers provide the starting point for such analysis. The author dressed androgynously and chose to use her gender-neutral middle name in place of her first name, Lula. In addition, she had a troubled marriage; a cadre of gay male friends, including playwright Tennessee Williams; and exceptionally close (though not necessarily sexual) relationships with women. For Greeley and some other critics, these facts add up to a flight from sexuality that, they believe, is clearly mirrored in The Square Root of Wonderful and other works.

The Square Root of Wonderful does, indeed, portray love as more elevated than sex. Mollie tells John that Phillip wanted her for her body but that John loves her for her mind, which clearly makes her happy. The play’s symbolism links love to light and luminosity, while through characterization, the point is driven home that love and sex are two separate entities. John, who loves Mollie, does not have sex with her; Phillip, who does not love her, seduces her one last time. Mollie tells John that ‘‘a kiss that is warm can lead to sin and sorrow.’’ She refuses to have sex with John, although readers can reasonably assume that she plans to have a sexual relationship with him in the future. When Phillip reminds Mollie that ‘‘you used to like it in the car, in ditches, in open fields,’’ Mollie is embarrassed.

Mollie’s words and actions certainly show a change in her attitudes about sex between her adolescence, when she first met Phillip, and the time of the play’s action. This hardly is tantamount to a rejection of sexuality. In Mollie’s life, impulsive indulgence of physical desire has cost her dearly. It has led her to marry, twice, a man who does not love her but who nevertheless expects her to fulfill his needs and desires. Phillip is an unstable, abusive alcoholic who, according to Mollie, has used physical attraction to cast a spell over her and draw her into physically satisfying but emotionally destructive encounters. Mollie’s withdrawal...

(This entire section contains 1325 words.)

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from Phillip, and her unwillingness to immediately enter into a sexual relationship with John, represent not a desperate, unhealthy flight from sexuality but a shift from immature, impulsive sexuality to a more mature handling of this challenging area of life. The older, wiser Mollie is more strongly attracted to John, a stable and loving man, than she is to Phillip. Her words and actions imply that she expects to have a physical relationship with John in the future. The fact that she is not willing to initiate this when she has known John only briefly, and when they are sharing the house with her ex-husband, his mother and sister, and Mollie’s son, hardly seems unreasonable. Simply put, Mollie has learned through hard experience to take care of herself—to protect her heart, her feelings, and her well-being—by controlling her impulses and choosing her lovers wisely. She is committed to expressing her sexuality in a way that is not self-destructive.

Critics who cast the change in Mollie as a rejection of sexuality are seeing in black and white; they seem to conclude that any limit placed on sexual behavior represents an unhealthy denial of a natural instinct. Both life and literature prove them wrong. Prudence is one of the age-old cardinal virtues; it is rare in the young, and its mastery is considered an important part of the maturation process. Young people are often rash and moved by impulses. More often than not, impulsive behavior brings suffering, and suffering leads eventually to the development of prudence, which simply means the wisdom to stop and think of the possible consequences before acting. This is what Mollie is finally learning to do.

Most readers can think of people they have known in their own lives who have succeeded in learning prudence and, unfortunately, of those who have failed to do so. Literature, too, offers many stories built around the lesson of prudence: the tragedies of characters who fail to acquire it (the title character in Madame Bovary, for example) and the comedies of those who, after youthful errors and the resulting suffering, succeed (Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). This theme is far from unique to McCullers; in fact, it is universal.

Critics who interpret Mollie’s transformation negatively are predisposed to do so because they interpret McCullers’s life as a failure to come to grips with her own sexuality. But, they are wrong about Mollie, and they are quite possibly wrong about McCullers as well. Wearing pants and refusing to settle into conventional gender roles are not symptoms of a retreat into ‘‘bizarre nonsexuality.’’ McCullers had a famous contemporary who gives the lie to such notions. Actress Katharine Hepburn, like McCullers, has always been known for her androgynous dress and her complete lack of interest in traditional female roles. Hepburn, like McCullers, prefers to live alone. The great love affair of Hepburn’s life, with alcoholic Spencer Tracy, was a relationship in which she loved much more than he and acted as caretaker and lover to a married man who gave her virtually nothing, emotionally or otherwise. In this way, Hepburn is reminiscent of Mollie. Further, since Tracy’s death in 1967, Hepburn, who is still living as of this writing, has remained unattached. That in itself might seem to be grounds for a charge that Hepburn retreated from sexuality.

It is interesting, then, that Hepburn shares so much with McCullers and Mollie and yet, unlike them, has never been accused of being maladjusted, sexually or otherwise. In fact, Hepburn has been admired throughout her life for her determination to be her own person regardless of convention.

The question of why Hepburn is judged so favorably while McCullers and her characters are labeled pathological is beyond the scope of this essay. Perhaps eccentricity is more tolerated in a New England woman than in a southern one, or in an actress than in an author. Perhaps McCullers’s physical illnesses colored opinions of her emotional health. In any case, the diagnosis of McCullers as having been a dysfunctional woman who wrote about dysfunctional women is far from certain, and it is a diagnosis that requires something in addition to the facts.

Source: Candyce Norvell, Critical Essay on The Square Root of Wonderful, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

The Different Types of Love in McCullers's Play

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In her discussion of The Square Root of Wonderful in her book on Carson McCullers, Margaret B. McDowell says that in this play McCullers ‘‘approaches love rationalistically,’’ meaning that the lesson she is conveying is that love is a matter of logic rather than magic. This interpretation of McDowell’s gets to the central issue of the play, and yet it is not quite accurate to say McCullers condemns magic and promotes rationality in love. It would be truer to say that she presents two sorts of magic, clearly indicating that one is preferable to the other. As to rationality, that is more present in the play as a refusal of love than as a way to get to it.

It is true that the love McCullers promotes is the love offered by John Tucker, an unpoetical, scientific man, an architect who never wrote a poem in his life, a man who talks of the ‘‘logic’’ of love and who even uses the mathematical term ‘‘square root’’ in discussing the subject. Still, the logic that John talks of bears closer examination. When Mollie, in the middle of act 2, asks John what he means by the logic of love, he tells her it means, in effect, that they were fated to meet. If they had not met on the road where they did, they would have met somewhere else: in the Statue of Liberty or at the Panama Canal.

This sounds more magical than logical, and indeed John goes on to say that the logic of love is ‘‘zany’’ and ‘‘crazy,’’ which sounds a long way from rationalistic. Moreover, near the beginning of the play, when he describes his relationship with Mollie, he calls it a ‘‘crazy time’’ in which ‘‘something magical happened.’’ He also says love can happen almost instantly, or at first sight. And near the end of act 1, he says that you cannot plan love; it arrives totally unexpectedly, and when it does, it puts a light in a person’s eyes and makes objects, such as the chair and table in Mollie’s house, shine like a watch dial. None of this sounds very scientific or rationalistic.

The task for Mollie in this play is not to learn to reject love’s magic in favor of a more rational sort of love, but to learn to choose good magic over bad. John’s love is based on good magic; it is the magical coming together of people who are good for each other, who support each other. When John and Mollie magically meet, it brings order to John’s life; it gives him what he calls ‘‘color, pulse . . . [and] form.’’ As for Mollie, what John offers her is protection, affection, and collaboration. He wants her to help him with the house he plans to build for them, and it will be a strong house, a protective house. When Mollie says she will be desolate if he goes to San Francisco, he gently puts his arms around her. When she repeats a cruel thing Mother Lovejoy said to her, he has an angry word for Mother Lovejoy.

This is all quite different from the sort of love Mollie had previously with her ex-husband, Phillip. Phillip was an abusive husband. He beat Mollie, made fun of the way she talked, and one time even threw her naked out of the house. He also had affairs with other women. Yet, Mollie loved him and loved him in a magical way. She tells John that she was under Phillip’s spell, drawn as if by an irresistible force, as if they were two magnets. Love with Phillip, which she says was like ‘‘witches and ghosts,’’ made her powerless, swirled her head, and turned her legs to macaroni.

Remembering this sort of love with Phillip, Mollie at first will not even let John kiss her. Kissing, she tells him, leads to the dark and to sin, as if there was a sort of black magic associated with it, the bad sort of magic that weakens a person and binds them in an unhappy relationship like hers with Phillip. Thus, she tells John she cannot kiss him; instead she must ‘‘think and be practical.’’ Similarly, when Phillip returns bringing flowers and asking for love, Mollie tries to push him away by saying she has to be ‘‘adult and practical.’’ Later, when John is telling her lovingly about the dream house he is planning for the two of them, she interrupts to do something practical: she goes off to fix dinner. It is as if she is pushing away both good love and bad love, good magic and bad magic, by trying to be down to earth, practical, rational. What she has to learn is to distinguish between good and bad love, good and bad magic.

She does learn this. It is a gradual process. At the end of act 1, she is able to say that John is her moral support. At the end of act 2, she realizes that looking at John makes her strong. At the end of the play, Mollie is able to open herself to loving John, and as a result, loves everybody.

Actually, even when Mollie loved Phillip she loved everybody, she tells John. There is something positive about Mollie’s love even when directed at someone who is no good for her. This can be seen at the end of act 1 when she tries out John’s theory that love makes objects shine. She is able to make the table and chair shine for both Phillip and John, for the two men she loves.

Interestingly, when Phillip sees the same table and chair, they do not shine for him. Quite the contrary. They stand out as a sort of reproach to him, in his eyes; he thinks they will outlast him and is angry with them. There is no love in Phillip, one might conclude, at least not love of a positive sort. The table and chair can shine for John and Mollie, but not for him. Indeed, when Phillip returns, although he asks for Mollie’s love, he tells her he cannot love her back. All he is really focused on is his writing. He thinks that if Mollie will love him again and protect him like a cocoon, then he will be able to write again. But cocoons are dead, Mollie says, a point Phillip seems indifferent to. He does not care if their relationship leaves her feeling dead. He does not care if it gives her nothing. He just wants it for what it can give him.

To be fair to Phillip, he too seems in the grip of an irresistible force. In reciting the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke about the violin and the bow, he seems to be saying that he would rather keep to himself, only something makes the two of them ‘‘twin.’’ He is able to remind Mollie of the lovemaking they used to engage in: they had that physical sort of love together. He says she needs him just as he needs her, which may be true in a way. They seem to have developed what a later era would call a pattern of co-dependency; they are both dependent on each other in an unhealthy way.

Mutual desire and dependence is the nature of the love between Phillip and Mollie. It seems the sort of love it would be a good idea to escape. Mollie at first tries to escape through rationality and practicality, but this seems to have little effect. When Phillip returns, she is drawn to him again. Another sort of escape is the one practiced by Sister. Avoiding love in the real world, Sister indulges in all sorts of love fantasies about men who never existed. This seems a sad sort of solution, and quite unfulfilling.

The only effective escape from the unhealthy love relationship with Phillip seems to be another love relationship, the one with John. Only by connecting romantically to John can Mollie free herself from Phillip. Only by indulging in John’s good magic can she free herself from Phillip’s bad sort. The play is not recommending a rejection of love’s magic in favor of rationality, nor is it questioning all heterosexual love as suggested by Brooke Horvath and Lisa Logan in their Southern Quarterly article ‘‘Nobody Knows Best: Carson McCullers’s Plays as Social Criticism.’’

The play is condemning the hypnotic sort of magic that forces a person to do demeaning things against their will, as in the hypnotist’s show that John remembers, in which old ladies were made to ride bicycles and a dignified gentleman was made to stand on his head. What the play is recommending is the sort of magic that brings together a man and a woman who support each other and make each other strong, who literally light up each other’s life.

This sort of magic transforms Mollie when John comes to live with her. Mother Lovejoy notes it in act 2, saying that when Mollie last lived with Phillip she lost her looks, but now she has got her old figure, her old color, and her old life back. Sister agrees, saying Mollie looks radiant. Mother Lovejoy attributes the transformation to sex, but what it really has to do with must be Mollie’s new love for John, which has not yet become sexual. Sex is what Mollie had with Phillip, and it made her sad and did not save her looks. What Mollie has with John is something much deeper, a magical love that makes her strong.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on The Square Root of Wonderful, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

The Politics and Artistry of Play-Production

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Carson McCullers was the author, too, of a littleknown, second play, The Square Root of Wonderful, which opened on Broadway nearly eight years after the premiere of The Member of the Wedding. The reception of this play, however (by audiences and critics alike), was anything but enthusiastic.

McCullers conceived the piece originally as a play and worked on it sporadically from 1952 until 1956, along with her novel, Clock Without Hands. This four-year period was scarred by McCullers’s continued ill health, the suicide of her husband, and perhaps the most devastating single event in her life, the death of her mother. Sick of heart yet salved by the will to keep writing, McCullers retained the essential features of the story line that eventually became The Square Root of Wonderful, but altered the characterization (and certain other features of the tale) sufficiently to cast its disparate parts into a long short story entitled ‘‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’’ Yet she could not abandon altogether her original plan to make a play of the story and soon resurrected her several scripts.

In a preface to the published version of The Square Root of Wonderful, McCullers commented upon its autobiographical roots: ‘‘I recognized many of the compulsions that made me write this play. My husband wanted to be a writer and his failure in that was one of the disappointments that led to his death. When I started The Square Root of Wonderful my mother was very ill and after a few months she died. I wanted to re-create my mother—to remember her tranquil beauty and sense of joy in life. So, unconsciously, the life-death theme of The Square Root of Wonderful emerged.’’

The play went through more than a dozen drafts, six or eight by McCullers alone and a handful of assorted other scripts written in collaboration with her several producers and directors. The play’s first director was Albert Marre, who, having successfully directed Kismet, Saint Joan, The Chalk Garden, and a number of other plays, was invited by producer Arnold Saint Suber to direct The Square Root of Wonderful. Marre, along with Saint Suber, worked intensively with McCullers through six different scripts for over a year, but when Saint Suber announced that the script was ready to be cast and produced, Marre was on the West Coast and unavailable. Jose Quintero, who was selected to replace Marre, worked with McCullers and Saint Suber until the play’s disastrous opening at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on October 10, 1957, then left the play (though his name stayed on the credits for the Broadway opening).

The afternoon that Quintero resigned, McCullers called the cast together and told them: ‘‘I have never directed a play, and I have never seen anyone direct a play, but I wrote this play, and I know what the characters are and what I want them to be. Now you can go home if you want, but if you’d like to stay, I’ll take over and do the best I can.’’ No one left. As though a single voice, the cast sang out: ‘‘We want you. We’ll stay!’’

According to Anne Baxter, who played Mollie Lovejoy, the lead role, ‘‘Carson’s play—the child— was dying, and she knew it.’’ Baxter believed that the chief problem was that McCullers ‘‘simply could not rewrite.’’ Albert Marre was convinced, however, that McCullers ‘‘could rewrite, but not the kind of square, so-called theatrical craftsman writing that the others tried to require of her.’’

George Keathley, Quintero’s eventual replacement, took the play from Princeton to Philadelphia for a nine-day run in an attempt to work out its problems, while the playwright herself and others assisted in major revisions. In a statement to the Philadelphia Inquirer just before the play’s opening in Philadelphia, McCullers told a reporter that one of the main difficulties for a writer was ‘‘to handle tragedy and comedy almost simultaneously,’’ but that the two elements had to be present ‘‘with the proper emotional progression.’’ McCullers wrote later (in her preface to the published version of The Square Root of Wonderful) of the emotional flexibility that a reader of novels has—with ‘‘time to reflect before he is pushed on to the next action’’— in contrast to the lack of that kind of flexibility on the part of the theater-goer, who must respond immediately to the ‘‘absurd and painful truths of life’’ in a single line. ‘‘I have learned this in my work in the theater: the author must work alone until the intentions of his play are fulfilled—until the play is as finished as the author can make it. Once a play is in rehearsal, a playwright must write under unaccustomed pressure, and alas, what he had in mind is often compromised. That is why of the five or six evolutions this play went through I prefer to publish the one which follows. It is the last one I wrote before the production was set in motion and is the most nearly the truth of what I want to say in The Square Root of Wonderful.’’

In the play, McCullers paints a dramatic portrait (as highly charged autobiographically as the one revealed in The Member of the Wedding) in which the protagonist is a woman named Mollie Lovejoy, whose alcoholic husband (Philip) is a failed writer of one successful novel. They have been married twice to each other and have been twice divorced. At the play’s opening, Philip has just been released from a mental hospital. He still adores Mollie and goes to see her and their twelveyear- old son, Paris. But when he learns that Mollie has fallen in love with someone else (an architect named John Tucker), a man she hardly knows— who is already ensconced in her home—Philip commits suicide. Tucker plans to build for Mollie and her son a new house (in effect, a new life) and gives evidence of becoming the reliable and nurturing father figure to her son that Philip was not.

The Square Root of Wonderful was soundly drubbed upon its opening on Broadway at the National Theatre on October 30, 1957, and it closed after forty-five performances. Whereas first-night critics commended Baxter for her brilliant performance as Mollie Lovejoy, the consensus was that the play could not survive its ‘‘stilted dialogue,’’ ‘‘wooden action,’’ and ‘‘unconvincing characters’’ (especially the young Paris Lovejoy). McCullers conceded that the child changed little during the course of the play, but defended her conceptualization of Paris in that it was primarily through him that the ‘‘proper emotional progression’’ of the other characters could be seen. The play demonstrated that it was the adults in the tale who had to gain emotional maturity, that, in effect, it was they—not Paris—who were the children.

Reviewers agreed that comparisons of McCullers’s new play with The Member of the Wedding were inevitable, and it seemed to those who knew McCullers personally (and of her increasingly debilitating illnesses) that writing for the theater was not her force. The production of The Square Root of Wonderful taught the playwright what she perceived to be a bitter lesson, and she vowed never again to attempt anything for the theater. In her preface to the published version of The Square Root of Wonderful, McCullers said that she found the ‘‘picayune last-minute changes’’ irritating, although she admitted that they were important since every weakness in the script becomes ‘‘magnified on the stage.’’

John Leggett, who edited the hardcopy edition for Houghton Mifflin, recalled that McCullers was deeply resentful of the rewrites that had been made without her permission in the acting version of The Square Root of Wonderful: ‘‘In working with her, I made several suggestions for minor changes, and she nodded, saying ‘Yes, that’s fine, Jack. Put it in like that.’ When I protested that these were my words, that I didn’t presume to write the play for her, she said ruefully, ‘Why not? Everybody else has?’’’

More than a curtain dropped when the play closed on December 7, 1957. McCullers had failed to work out in it the ambivalent love/hatred emotions kindled repeatedly, both in actuality and memory, by her husband and mother. Unlike The Member of the Wedding, which had given McCullers emotional release as well as extraordinary acclaim and financial security, The Square Root of Wonderful had become its opposite for the dejected playwright—‘‘the square root of humiliation.’’ Coping with a collaborator on The Member of the Wedding before producing a script that was, finally, wholly hers, and that became a prizewinning play with a long run was one thing; but to have The Square Root of Wonderful carved up beyond recognition by the play’s producers and directors was quite another, a dejection from which McCullers never quite recovered. Tennessee Williams once told her in speaking of his own career as a playwright: ‘‘It takes a tough old bird to work in the theater.’’ ‘‘Carson was tough,’’ said Williams, ‘‘like this marble-topped table,’’ he added, pounding it for emphasis, but he knew, too, that she had no intention of submitting herself wittingly ever again to the hazards and ‘‘bolts of chance’’ by writing for the theater.

Source: Virginia Spencer Carr, ‘‘The Square Root of Wonderful,’’ in Understanding Carson McCullers, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 99–105.

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