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1965 Revolution in Manners and Morals: the Treatment of Adultery in American Drama Between the Wars. James Morris Salem Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

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SALEM, James Morris, 1937- REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS: THE TREATMENT OF ADULTERY IN AMERICAN DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS. Louisiana State University, Ph.D., 1965 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS: THE TREATMENT OF ADULTERY IN AMERICAN DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of English

by James Morris Salem B.S., Wisconsin State University-LaCrosse, 1961 August, 1965 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

X wish to express ray sincere gratitude to Professor James T.

Nardin for his guidance in the writing of this dissertation. I am also indebted to Professor Thomas A. Kirby, Professor Otis B.

Wheeler, Professor Nicholas Canaday, and Professor Malcolm Ware.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

TITLE PAGE...... i

ACKNOWLE DGMENT...... i i

ABSTRACT...... v

CHAPTER

I . AMERICAN DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS: REVOLUTION, SOCIOLOGY, AND SEXUAL MORALITY ...... 1

I I . ZOE AKINS AND THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION...... 34

I I I . ADULTERY IN THE SERIOUS PLAYS OF ELMER RICE, SIDNEY HOWARD, CLIFFORD ODETS, AND EUGENE 0 ' NEILL...... 49

Elmer R i c e ...... 50

Sidnery Howard ...... 61

Clifford Odets ...... 71

Eugene O'Neill ...... 80

IV. ADULTERY IN THE COMEDIES OF RACHEL CROTHERS, MAXWELL ANDERSON, PHILLIP BARRY, S. N. BEHRMAN, ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, AND CLARE BOOTHE ...... 107

Rachel Crothers ...... 110

Maxwell Anderson ...... 121

Phillip Barry ...... 125

S. N. Behrman ...... 141 Robert E. Sherwood ...... 147

Clare Boothe ...... 157

V. ADULTERY IN OTHER PLAYS BETWEEN THE WARS...... 171

The influence of Sidney Howard and ElmerRic e ...... 171

Moral conservatism and the minor dram atist ...... 178

Adultery and other sociological problems ...... 185

Progress of the revolution in manners and m o r a l s ...... 201

VI. CONCLUSION...... 210

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 216

VITA ...... 227

iv ABSTRACT

This study is concerned with the treatment of adultery in published American drama between the wars and with the sociological developments in American life which allowed the playwright, after

World War I, to treat a sexual issue with honesty and complexity.

Some of the more important of these developments were the change in the theater audience, the revolution in manners and morals, the revolt of the younger generation, and the emergence of the new woman--the result of which enabled our dramatists to make a significant comment on sexual problems of American life. And comment they did. Over

four hundred plays produced between the 1919-1920 and 1941-1942

seasons deal with real or suspected marital infidelity.

Of the major dramatists treated in this study, only one,

Sidney Howard, adopts a middle-of-the-road approach to adultery.

In Dodsworth and They Knew What They Wanted, the playwright is willing to forgive a single adulterous affair in order to preserve

a marriage, provided that the guilty partner resolve to behave better

in the future. Other dramatists adhere more closely to a strictly

liberal (advanced) or conservative (conventional) view of sexual morality. In serious drama, for example, Elmer Rice endorses adultery

in Street Scene, by showing how a woman is driven to infidelity but

is punished too severely for her infraction of the moral code; in

The Adding Machine, by presenting a character who did not commit

v divorce nor adultery is ever acceptable.

It is significant that neither of the m o ra lly conservative playwrights was as successful in his moral m e ssa g e as his liberal counterpart--0'Neill was frequently m isin terp reted and Crothers was criticized for her lack of profundity. I£ > 5 u r drama does re­ flect the attitudes of the period in which it w a s w ritten, we must conclude that theatergoers of the time did not s e e adultery as so horrible a sin as O'Neill and Crothers would h a v e le d them to believe. The fact that adultery was discussed s o often, however, indicates that the issue was still vital and s u b j e c t to debate and analysis, as, indeed, it is today.

vii CHAPTER I

AMERICAN DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS; REVOLUTION, SOCIOLOGY, AND SEXUAL MORALITY

America did not have a playwright of the stature of novelist and poets such as Melville, Whitman, or Dreiser until after World War I.

The theater would not allow it, and the theater, limited and in­ fluenced as it was by sociological factors, paid the fiddler and called the dramatic tune. The tune it called before the Great War, moreover, was one which did not offend the sensibilities O’f its audience. Rather, it reflected the attitudes, morals, manners, and mores of the American people, a charge that can hardly be made against

the writers mentioned above. This is not to say that novelists and

poets can disregard completely the morals and manners of their read­

ing public, though they frequently do, but rather that playwrights

ordinarily cannot. They must be constantly aware of the many restric­

tions which limit what can be said and done on the stage. In a general way we can consider the dramatist as a victim of censorship, though

censorship in the sense that the writer of plays knows, even before

he begins writing, what is acceptable and what is not. He is free to

write whatever he pleases, but he is narrowly limited in what he can

publicly present on stage. The final result is the same: he is not

permitted to offend the moral taste of his audience. A play which

does offend remains in manuscript and is never produced or published.

On the other hand, a play which is acceptable in treatment and theme

1 2 to a sufficient number of playgoers to merit its continued production has a reasonable chance of being issued in printed form. What drama we have, then, is the product of successful theater, subject to and influenced by all the limitations of the theater.

The dramatist must be aware at all times of the problems and limitations of the theater. The novelist or poet, anxious as he is to find a publisher, cares little about the problems and limitations of the publishing business--he need not satisfy the general public so completely that he must be concerned with extra-literary matters. As

Elmer Rice sees it, the vast difference between a novelist's publica­ tion and a dramatic production existed even before the period we are consideritn here:

Even in the nineteenth century, the difference in cost between publishing a book and producing a play was enormous. Further, the publisher's expense after the book comes o ff the press is t r i v i a l , w hile the pro­ ducer, in order to keep the play alive, must contlnously incur very heavy operating expenses, as must the theatre owner. Immediate and widely popular success is essential if the play producer is to avoid disastrous losses. To recoup his investment he must count upon an audience of many thousands. Therefore, his choice of plays to be produced is determined by his judgment of their potential popularity. The state of things does not make for the choice of plays in great depth or literary value. Most readers pretend, at least, to an interest in literature; most playgoers do not.*

It is interesting to speculate on the possible playwriting success that Melville, Whitman, and Dreiser would have achieved. If Melville had been a playwright and his plays had been received with as little enthusiasm as were some of his novels, his plays would have been quickly closed and a Mobv Dick lost to later students of American 3

literature. If Whitman had been a playwright, the manuscript of a five-act Leaves of Grass might have gone up in smoke in Longfellow's fireplace. As for Dreiser's Sister Carrie, no Broadway producer of

1900 would have risked the certain financial ruin of presenting the story of a woman who commits the sins of fornication and adultery yet ends up as a successful actress. The American public would have damned and the authorities closed such a shocking play. Of course none of these writers was a playwright, but the important point is that their masterpieces, which did not reflect the manners and morals of the

American people, have survived. According to Elmer Rice, each writer, as a dramatist, would have had to keep this advice always in mind:

If he wanted his play produced he could not ignore the tastes and prejudices of the mass audience to whom the producer catered. If what he wrote troubled the waters or outraged the sensibilities and invaded the reticences of the respectable citizens who constituted the bulk of theatregoers, or placed too great a burden upon their capacity to understand, he could hardly expect anyone to run the financial risk of a production.

M elville's Moby Dick was published, forgotten, and revived.

Whitman's Leaves of Grass, shocking as it was, was published. And

Dreiser's Sister Carrie, notwithstanding the damnation of the re­ viewers, was reluctantly published in a small edition. But there are

no small editions for the playwright. He must attract and keep an

audience in the theater for several months to establish the worth of

his work of art, and to keep an audience he must please it. If he is

fortunate enough to accomplish this, he will perhaps have the oppor­

tunity to publish his play. And publication, after all, is the

essential difference between drama and theater. The unpublished play 4 remains only in the minds of those who have seen it performed.

It is always difficult for the student of literature to come to terms with the relationship between drama and theater. He would like to believe that drama is a literary genre and that the theater is a commercial venture, and it disturbs him to have to admit that American drama, by the nature of its theatrical origin, is shaped and influenced by the same sociological factors which affect the Broadway playhouse.

It is a critical commonplace that for all practical purposes serious American drama began with Eugene O 'Neill's plays of the early

1920's. Rarely does a college course in American drama begin with dramatists before O'Neill, though novel courses do not begin with

Sherwood Anderson nor those in poetry with Robert Frost. This is not to argue that our earlier playwrights need to be re-evaluated but rather to point out that developments in American life reshaped the nature of the theater, hence the drama, to the extent that the change has been called a revolution. The result has been that our drama prior to World War I has really nothing to say to us today. We need

the sterner stuff that postwar drama provided.

Contemporary with and responsible for the revolution in drama in

the 1920's was the revolution in manners and morals taking place in our

society. The revolution enabled the dramatist to treat some of the problems of American life with honesty and complexity--problems of a

social, moral, or sexual nature. Central to this study is the change

in the treatment of the problem of adultery, previously a forbidden

subject, in our drama between the wars. 5

The purpose of this first chapter is to examine briefly the extent of the change in our drama between the prewar and postwar years, to consider some of the sociological influences operative in the change, and to attempt to understand our dramatists' concern with the problem of sexual morality--specifically adultery.

During the period prior to World War I, America's literary output was badly out of balance. In fiction we could boast of Stephen Crane,

Henry James, and William Dean Howells, and we could point to many social heretics who were publishing widely--Theodore Dreiser, Frank

Norris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. In drama, however, we were hopelessly behind the achievement made by our w rite rs of fic tio n and the dramatic renaissance which had begun in Europe in the 1880's. The reason for this lag was not a lack of playwriting talent but rather the commercial nature of our theater out of which our drama was born. In short, the inferiority of American drama was caused by the theatergoers of the time--theatergoers who were complacent, optimistic, and who wished primarily to be entertained.

Most drama scholars agree that early twentieth century American plays were superficial, at least superficial in the sense that the drama of the period was not true to life as we understand it today.

Alan Downer, in Fifty Years of American Drama; 1900-1950, makes the point that this criticism was not shared by playgoers of the period.

At the same time he adds a key word to explain the national temper of

the time; he says, about the early plays; 6

Nevertheless, they were successful with audiences, which is to say that the plays are as true to life as their contemporary audiences desired or believed it to be. For if it were possible to sum up in one word the national temper in the era that followed the Spanish-American war, that word might well be complacency.

America before the war was a proud and optimistic nation, and, along w ith William Dean Howells, we preferred to think and deal only with the smiling aspects of life. The plays of the period for the most p a rt end happily, reflecting the immense self-satisfaction that most

Americans felt. Downer says that happy endings were not necessarily theatrical convention so much as a kind of popular conviction that life in America was rendered true by this kind of conclusion. As he phrases the optimism of the 1900-1915 period, "there were few problems incapable of solution in this oversize Eden."^

The playgoer of the prewar era was not interested in problems or insordid details. He attended the theater to be entertained, and he more often than not brought the whole family along with him.

To go to the theater was a fairly safe decision--one could attend w ith the certainty that his sensibilities would not be offended.

Edmond Gagey, in his Revolution in American Drama, discusses what the playgoer could expect:

Whatever performance was finally chosen, the Broadway seeker a fte r amusement would know there was l i t t l e chance of his being disturbed unduly by contemporary problems or driven to painful thought. He would count on being moved to laughter or tears, with the strongest possible emotional stimulation. Whatever the production, he would be very sure of beholding a star. If he brought along a maiden aunt or adoles­ cent daughter, he would have little fear that lines or 7

situations would bring a blush to their tender cheeks or sully their female innocence. It was, on the whole, a pleasant world of escape and make-believe that was presented on the stage, a conventional and Freudless universe, not much more adult than the movies of a later age, and just about as sentimental.

The comparison of our early drama and the movies is a fair one,

though we must take exception to the more serious direction that

Hollywood took after television had syphoned off that part of the

audience which sought only entertainment. In fact, television

changed the nature of the movies in the same manner that movies

earlier changed the nature of American drama.

Elmer Rice, in his partly autobiographical book The Living

Theatre, makes essentially the same point about our early drama

and our fairly high dramatic standards of today:

To the literary critic or the sophisticated theatregoer of today, most of these plays would seem contrived, crude, two-dimensional and even puerile. But if they do seem so it may be largely because their themes and their manner of expression have been relegated to the movies and to television, and the standards by which the American theatre is judged today are far, far higher than they were fifty years ago. As a matter of fact, many of the dramatists of the period ended their careers as successful Hollywood writers.

Rice's catalog of trite themes from prewar drama should be quite

familiar to the viewer of teleplays today. He lists as recurrent

themes the celebration of the frontiersman and the rough diamond,

the turning of the worm, the triumph of the underdog, the glorifi­

cation of American aggressiveness, the taming of the philanderer or

domineering male by the sly woman, the successful struggle of female

chastity against overwhelming odds, the swift punishment of fallen 8 women, the canonization of motherhood, the conversion of the ir­

religious, and, in general, " the comeuppance of the sinner, the

criminal, and the nonconformist."^

It would not be fair, however, to say that our early drama

absorbed nothing from the advances being made in Europe. The tech­

niques of realism, stage design, and lighting were quickly picked

up. But the theatrical devices of realism were used mainly to cover

up the trite plots and sentimental endings. Again this state of

American drama cannot be laid at the playwright's door alone. The

dramatist of the period was limited in the same way that a writer of

teleplays today is limited by the sponsor's demands for typical

characters, easily identifiable situations, and happy endings. He

had to appeal, as all dramatists have to appeal, to box-office

standards, and the box-office standards ,as always, depended upon

theatergoers. But the theatergoers in the early part of this century

were still very much Victorian:

The box-office standards of Broadway rested upon the system of popular morality inherited from the nine­ teenth century. According to an unwritten but widely prevalent code, unpleasant subjects were barred from the theatre. Plays need not preach a sermon, but they should not run counter to conventional manners and morals

And so they didn't. Reminded constantly by censors and producers

who had had plays closed by public demand, the dramatist wrote the

innocuous kind of play that audiences paid to see. He was, in short,

completely at the mercy of the public and its manners and morals.

As John Mason Brown comments: 9

Our early dramatists did not dream of molding their public's group thinking. They followed the prejudices of that public from a distance respectful enough to be intellectually insulting. If our early playgoers looked upon our early dramatists with condescension it was because these playwrights matched their audiences in the intellectual condescension with which they approached the stage.®

All of this is not to say that the dramatist alone was dissatisfied with the state of the theater. Contemporary critics were also quick to point out that the drama was failing to achieve anything like its promise. But the blame ordinarily was directed at the playwright, who had, if he wanted to work, really no choice but to write a play that could be produced. The pressures that forced the theaters to consider only "safe1' plays for production had really nothing to do with playwriting or with the playwright. The drama­ tist could hardly hope to change the professed manners and morals of his audience even if he were given a chance to do so. As it was, he was not given the chance, but he was criticized as if he wrote superficially because he elected to. Clayton Hamilton in his The

Theoryof the Theatre (1910) is typical of the contemporary critics; he sees the smoke but not the fire:

Most of our American playwrights, like Juliet in the balcony scene, speak, yet they say nothing. They represent facts, but fail to reveal truths. What they lack is purpose. They collect, instead of meditating; they invent, instead of wondering; they are clever, instead of being real. They are avid of details; they regard the part as greater than the whole. They deal with outsides and surfaces, not with centralities and profundities. in 10

The Great War ended that era, however, in terms of manners and morals and in terms of dramatic history. In both cases the change

can be seen now as a revolution. The influences operative in the

change will be discussed later, but first it would be useful to

compare the new theater of the postwar era with the old theater

with which we have been dealing--the old theater which serious

playgoers and critics did not, after the war, look back on with

nostalgia as the "good old days" of America drama. George Jean

Nathan says about the transition:

The old American theatre, in short, is as dead as a door-nail. Its triviality, its hypocritical morals, its bastard audience and its obvious, gold-digging box-office are things of the past. The new American theatre, with all its ambitions and hopes, may true enough for all its great step forward be still far from the top of the celestial ladder, but it is climbing hard, and steadily, and unmistakably. And if it ever slips back, it will be done for.

Though there was enough little theater activity after 1915 to

establish a beginning date for the "new drama," most scholars and

drama historians, preferring a specific event, think of Eugene

O’N eill's first Broadway play as beginning a new era in American

drama. Elmer Rice says:

. . . American drama came of age in the season of 1919-20 with the production in a Broadway theatre of Beyond the Horizon, by Eugene O'Neill, who was to be awarded the Nobel Prize and four Pulitizer Prizes (one posthumously), and whose arresting and powerful plays, known wherever the drama is enacted or studied, have been largely instrumental in winning for the American drama a foremost place in the world th e a tr e . ^ 11

And a foremost place it has won which, In itself, is enough to set it far apart from the drama that preceded it. In fact, by 1920 the renaissance of dramatic activity in Europe had diminished greatly with the death or lessened play output of Ibsen, Chekhov,

Strindberg, Shaw, Maeterlinck, and Hauptmann, Now it was for America

to establish in dramatic excellence what already had been accomplished

in fiction and poetry. Following O'Neill came Elmer Rice, S. N.

Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, Phillip Barry,

Clifford Odets, Sidney Howard, and the play-producing groups of

the Theatre Guild, the Playwrights' Company, and the Group Theatre,

all of which wrote or presented drama far superior to that of the

previous years.

One of the reasons for the superiority of the new drama was

that the dramatist no longer wrote down to his audience--not that

playwrights were necessarily more courageous and outspoken than

their predecessors (though they might well have been) but that the

audience had changed in temper and interest. The cause of this

change will be explained later. The important point, though, is

that we now had what George Jean Nathan calls the "hundred per cent

drama:"

What is this new-born theatre? It is a theatre that has had imposed upon it the necessity of abandoning in major part what may be termed the fifty-fifty drama, that is, the drama designed to appeal to the half-movie-minded, half-drama-minded audience, and the equal necessity of sponsoring at least some faint 12

approximation to what may be called the hundred per cent drama, that is, drama that shall appeal to the relative- ly superior emotions and relatively superior intelligence of the simon-pure theatregoer.^-^

Moreover, this "simon-pure theatregoer" would no longer sit still for dramatic themes which had been so successful in the past. Perhaps this fact more than any other points up the difference between our drama before and that after the war. Of the prewar theater Nathan believes that

the three cardinal articles in the catalogue of su ccessfu l dram atic hokum were Mother, the Baby, and the Flag. Today they are guarantee of ridicule and failure. Let a playwright attempt to coax an audience's sympathetic reaction with any of them, or even with all three rolled together, and the neighing of the horses attached to the storehouse wagons outside will drown out the audience's ribald laughter.

The audience needed, and received, sterner stuff. Influences working on the theater changed the whole complexion of American drama--influences, though, which came not so much from the playwright to theaudience as from the audience to the playwright. America was no longer as naive and optimistic as it once was, and the older notion that we did not have a problem we could not solve (with a resulting happy ending, of course) was outgrown. Alan Downer comments:

But even the most innocent eyes must recognize the snake in the garden if a sharp enough light is thrown upon it. A series of events originating far back in the nineteenth century had brought illumination to practitioners of other arts (like Crane, Norris, and Dreiser In the novel), and at last the theatre, 13

which would have preferred to remain wrapped In red plush and cradled In a stage box, could no longer pretend th ere was nothing th e re . 5

Critics agree that American drama changed radically after the war years and that the influences contributing to the change were from many directions. For the relative importance of the in­ fluences, however, there is no standard agreement. The influence of the European theater, for example, has been cited as an important one, though the impetus of the movement was m ostly over by 1920.

Moreover, we have noted that our borrowings from Europe were mostly a matter of stage business; nothing like the serious treatment of social Issues, so vital a part of European drama, was seen in America until after the war. The interest of colleges and universities in the drama is sometimes proposed as of prime importance, though ex­ cepting Professor Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard, there was little that universities could do for the theater except to provide it with writing talent. And the talent, 1 submit, was available all along-- what kept our best fiction writers out of the theater in the first place was the strict conventions and taboos of the Broadway play­ house. No doubt the l i t t l e th e a te r movement was of some im portance-- especially the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown

Players, to which Eugene O'Neill belonged. But they were too small to put much of a dent in the American theater; the proof of this, 1 th in k , is th a t O 'N e ill's f i r s t long play, Beyond the H orizon, was presented at a Broadway playhouse. All three of these literary or artistic influences no doubt contributed to the change in drama, 14 as did the sudden Interest in Freudian psychology. But other In­ fluences which had nothing to do with literature or art were of greater importance in making it possible for the playwright to grapple with problems, to argue unorthodox theses, to come to terms with himself, and to attempt to discover, on stage, just what

America was all about. The influences which changed our theater and our drama so drastically were all sociological. The change began with the American people and with the national and personal prob­ lems they faced. They demanded more serious dramatic treatments, and their demand filtered up through the theater to the producer and finally to the playwright. It was possible then for us to have drama that could hold its own with the drama of Europe.

It is ironic that the dramatic renaissance in America was, in part, the product of the movies, but Hollywood was responsible.

The war period permanently established silent films as a vehicle for popular entertainment. For a time the theater and the movie industry grappled for the public's money, but, fortunately, the movies won out, and part of the audience who originally attended the theater was lost. This did not mean, as some thought, the end of the th e a te r (th e "Fabulous In v a lid ," as George S. Kaufman ca lle d it). Rather it was the beginning. Elmer Rice explains the result of the audience shift:

An increasingly large section of theatregoers was developing more sophisticated tastes, and the bald melodramas, simple-minded farce-comedies and treacly romances that had occupied the stage for so 15

long now seemed outmoded and artistically un­ satisfying. However, this was exactly the sort of fare that was Ideally suited to the movies, which catered to a mass audience composed largely of adolescents and children. Consequently the movies siphoned off from the theatre that part of the audience whose preference was for the trite, the obvious and the conventional, making possible the development of a more adult drama. °

All drama historians note that the theater audience changed, though some are more willing to grant the importance of the change than others. Alan Downer feels that the new audience liked to be shocked and would not tolerate being bored by the expected. More­ over, as the new audience knew something of books and life, it was anxious to have the world outside the theater interpreted and shaped

into a work of a rt.^ George Jean Nathan is of a similar opinion.

He maintains that the new audience demanded logical endings rather

than happy ones, and "ably treated" dramatic themes rather than

sentimental or pleasant ones. 18 In short, the new audience in­

sisted it be met on its own intelligent terms. Nathan says:

With the great audience change that has come about, intelligence, truth, and honesty in character portrayal are insisted upon, let "sympathy" go where it may. What the new audience wants is not necessarily sympathetic characters but veracious characters. As a consequence, some of the plays most highly endorsed in the theatre today are plays with central characters that would have been hissed out of the theatre in other years.^

Certainly the new drama did change in terms of the central

characters presented. Before the war, stage characters were re­

membered more or le ss as a ro le th a t an outstanding a c to r or

actress made famous. Although this practice continued after the 16 war, It was possible, in 1928, for example, to discuss Nina Leeds of O'Neill's Strange Interlude as a character and not merely as a point in the career of Lynn Fontanne. Stage characters were begin­ ning, by the end of the war, to be rendered more complex, even unique. As Alan Downer p o in ts out;

In the more mature dramas the characters are con­ ceived as a part of their environment, shaped and conditioned by their past experiences, and reacting to the situations that confront them in their own way, not the way of theatrical tradition. It becomes increasingly difficult to classify the characters as villains and heroes. The firm morality (of the theatre) prevented the heroire of The E a sie s t Way J_ 1909_/ from claiming our sympathy; Anna C h r is tie 's lo t is much the same, but because she is portrayed honestly she arouses pity and demands understanding.^

Whether or not Eugene O'Neill's Anna in Anna Christie (1922) is really credible as a character need not enter this discussion; the important point is that by 1922 a dramatist could treat a prostitute on the stage without sending her to the flames of hell in the last act. Ten years earlier the frank treatment of such a disreputable character would have kept the play from the stage.

The reason that women characters could be treated with com­ plexity by the postwar playwright is due partly to the changed audience but due also to another sociological factor--the emergence of the new American woman. The revolution for woman's independence had begun before the war, but wartime increased the tempo of the movement. Women held important positions during the war, became financid.ly independent, and thought increasingly of careers. This new creature, who disliked staying home to cook and make the beds, 17 was the su b ject of many p lay s. James F o rb es's The Famous M rs. F air

(1919), which will be treated later, is a good example of the domestic problems th is new woman c re a te d . At any r a te , i t was in ­ evitable that dramatists, now able to treat the problems of American life, should deal with the new woman in all her complexity. Es­ pecially popular in the twenties was the play which attempted to come to terms with the "double standard" of morality. Anita Block, in The Changing World in Plays and Theatre, discusses this problem:

One of the tenets of sexual morality most tenaciously adhered to since the beginning of mono- gamic marriage is "the double standard," which, toward the end of the modern era, was first subjected to sharp attack. This is the code which demands complete c h a s tity on the p a rt of a l l members of the female sex who expect to be ad­ mitted into the sacred bonds of marriage, but permits the male to roam at will, on the theory that woman is by nature asexual and "pure," while man is a creature of sex and therefore inevitably impure.21

As Block argues, chastity was imposed on women merely to insure the

legitim acy of a man's h e irs , and monogamy, though i t reduced women to economic and sexual subjection, had nothing to do with the erotic life. She concludes that sociological factors were respon­ sible for the attack against this system:

The revolt against the "double standard" could there­ fore come only when industrial evolution necessitated woman's economic emancipation.22

To carry her argument a step further, sociological developments were

responsible for attacks on the system in the theater. 18

It would be rather useless to argue at any length that World

War I Itself Influenced American life and the theater; the point is to obvious. What might not be obvious about the influence of the war is that it caused us, as a nation, to re-examine our whole moral code. While the Lost Generation writers were questioning our morals and manners in fiction, dramatists were active with moral problems too. As A. H. Quinn points out in his study A History of

American Drama From the Civil War to the Present:

There has come in consequence / o f the war_/ a confusion of standards, and on the part of the younger generation a scrutiny, pitiless in its rejection of authority and pitiful in its brave show of self-confidence, of institutions and laws, of manners and morals, in an effort to establish its own standards of life.^3

Beginning in 1920, many Americans were shocked at the sexual freedoms taken by the younger generation and the antagonism shown toward the prewar moral code. The moralists, as usual, considered

the new behavior as the end of the world, but moralists are easily

shocked. In America As A Civilization, Max Lerner sees the twenties as a period which was undergoing a revolution in manners and morals.

He dismisses the idea that America of the twenties suffered a

"moral breakdown," but he explains how this country arrived at the moral state it was in. Formerly religion took care of moral conduct,

Lerner believes, but with the breakdown of religious faith in

America, the burden was assumed by secular groups in the nineteenth

century. The result of this change of power was a moral code much more strict than any previous one and a code which was enforced by 19

community opinion and pressure groups . ^ There soon developed,

Lerner argues, a wide gap between the professed code and the actual

operative one. It was this gap to which the younger generation of

the twenties reacted. America was without a valid set of rules to

play the game of life. This is the background for Lerner1s thesis

that America was (and still is) suffering from a "moral interregnum":

One king is dead and a new one has not yet been crowned, as with the moral interregnum at the time of the Roman Empire, when the pagan codes had broken down and the Christian codes had not yet been shaped. In fact, although American writing and thinking show signs of a constant search for a new formulation, it is not even clear out of what line the new kingship will come--out of what ethos the new moral code will e m e r g e .25

The drama especially did some searching for a new moral code;

it was concerned, according to Alan Downer, "with the morality of

a society adrift."26 plays began by debunking middle class standards

and turned eventually to proposing positive reforms, some of which,

as we s h a ll l a t e r see, met v io le n t o b je c tio n . Edmond Gagey comments:

At the start the postwar playwrights shared the spirit of disillusioned questioning that pervaded the fiction and poetry of the "lost generation." The typical attitude was negative, critical, often cynical. In drama it generally took the form of debunking the pretensions and Ideals of middle-class culture. All kinds of problems--social, ethical, psychological, religious, political--aroused dramatic comment. . . . The moral re v o lu tio n . . . was now re in ­ forced by a systematic study of Freud, with the result that the ethical code of Frohman-Belasco era was promptly relegated to the movies and producers plunged in where angels--heavenly and Broadway--had feared to tre a d . 20

Not of course without the frenzied protests of censors, official and self-appointed, who ob­ jected to everything on the stage from O'Neill onward.27

What was objected to most strongly in the twenties was the frank dramatic treatment of sex, though the war had more or less estab­ lished that the old codes of sexual behavior would not be adhered to any longer. The roaring twenties had arrived. Gagey believes that the revolution in sex mores was explicit or implicit in almost all postwar plays, regardless of subject, and that by 1924 (Sidney

Howard's They Knew What They Wanted) the conservatives had lo s t out and a broader conception of individual morality had been estab­ lished on the s ta g e .28 gy 1933, i t was p o ssib le to p resen t a play like Tobacco Road, a play which defied every moral convention. The remarkable success of the play (over 3,000 performances) represents, for Gagey, "the revenge of the subconscious for lip service paid to family duty and conventional morality."29

The frank treatment of sex, as we have seen, was one of the results of the revolution in manners and morals of the postwar period. Max Lerner notes that American writing is always concerned with problems which have no precise solutions. Sexual morality, he

thinks, falls into this category:

The problems of hunger for love, of sexual be­ wilderment, of the struggle of personalities within a marriage, of the clash between old moral codes and new operative norms, of the search for a personal and social ethic, are questions for which American society offers no fixed solutions.30 21

Given the problem, the playwright's approach, no longer limited by some prewar moral truism which had little or nothing to do with the facts of life, was to assume the role of a modem sociologist. He felt a sense of responsibility to his audience to deal with the problems that vitally concerned him and his country. The theater was becoming more serious and aware of the outside world.

At the same time that the dramatist turned sociologist he also turned psychologist. The twenties finally established the influence of Freud on the drama. Again we can see that the drama was behind fiction in dealing with the new psychology--Sherwood Anderson had opened the Freudian gates in the novel a half-decade earlier.

Although Elmer Rice was not nearly as affected by Freudianism as

Eugene O'Neill, Rice sees the new psychology as the perfect vehicle for the dramatist to deal with sexual morality:

The impact of the new psychology dispelled the reticences that had surrounded the treatment of sexual themes in the arts and destroyed the established conventions, particularly in the theatre. A whole new approach to sexual prob­ lems became apparent: bold, frank, unromantic. . . . Old standards of morality were re-examined and questioned. Unconventional sexual behavior was condoned and sometimes even justified. Pre­ marital chastity and postmarital fidelity were no longer the indispensable attributes of stage heroines.31

The dramatist now had the opportunity to deal with the prob­ lems of existence which formerly had been the province of the novelist. Max Lerner, perhaps ignorant of the history of earlier

American drama, sees the new theater as the perfect place to probe 22 and explore:

The theater serves as a kind of recoil from the big media*-a chance for a playwright to do some probing and exploring in depth as he may not be able to do in the other media, a form in which he does not have to express the optimism of American life or its surface values, and where he is not dependent upon big sponsors or a mass audience. Since he is writing in the first place for a relatively limited audience, he can become a part of the countercyclical force, reversing old trends and creating new ones, becoming a molder who in turn will be followed by the big m e d ia .^

According to most commentators on our society, America is, as a nation, slightly confused and bewildered on the subject of sex.

We havediscussed earlier Max Lerner's thesis that we are in a

"moral interregnum" rather than suffering from a moral breakdown

that stems from the twenties. To Lerner, America is peculiar in

its overconcern with sex:

Almost since the beginnings of their society, Americans have been as troubled about the everyday infractions of the moral codes as about the pathologies of social disorders. Their moralists are forever talking of the "moral breakdown" of their time. In few civilizations is there so constant a sense of moral crisis-- to which one might remark that where there is so con­ tinuous a crisis there is no crisis at all, but only an unremitting malaise and anxiety.^3

Other critics are less kind. To Phillip Wylie in Generation of

Vipers, we are suffering from a mass hallucination:

I submit, then, that our national attitude toward sex--which I wish to have you consider merely as a specimen of many similar attitudes--is so dis­ oriented, so unreal, so prejudiced, and so wishful that it is not an attitude at all, but a halluci­ nation. The mass hallucination of a whole people who have been hypnotized during their youth into 23

believing the realities which they know are still, somehow, untrue--hypnotized by various good-sized, ruthless minorities whose li£e as organizations depends upon the maintenance of the chimera, even though the illusion may lead us all to dissolution.-^

Wylie, needless to say, does not document his conclusions, but

Albert Ellis, in his books The Folklore of Sex and The American

Sexual Tragedy, does, Ellis, perhaps America's leading authority on sex attitudes, has made an analysis of marriage and family attitudes as expressed in the popular mass media; newspapers, magazines, novels, motion pictures, plays, radio and television performances, and popular songs. His assumption has been that if Americans continual­ ly support the mass media with their money or time, the media must contain views and attitudes which reflect the needs and desires of the public. We have seen earlier that the dramatist frequently

treats problems of American life which offer no ready solution and

that sexual morality falls into this category. Ellis, of course, deals with drama in conjunction with other forms of the mass media.

But his method, 1 think, is valid; and his findings are truly in­ dicative of American attitudes, which we need to consider fully before making a thorough study of the treatment of adultery in our drama. It would be useful to look first at Ellis' conclusion, or what he calls "The Behavioral Implications of the Facts Dis­

covered ;11

The average American--in fact, virtually every living American--is completely muddled-, mixed-, and messed-up in his sex views, feelings, and acts. Much of the time he is quite consciously confused and knows that he does not know sex 24

"right” from "wrong." Or else he keeps changing his mind about what is sexually proper and im­ proper. Or he engages in sex acts which he feels he should not perform but which he would feel even more uncomfortable about not performing. When—occasionally--this average American does manage to get consciously straight in his sex views, he still remains unconsciously caught and tangled in beliefs that are frequently as consistent with his conscious thoughts as Isadora Duncan was with Anthony Comstock. The resu lt, in terms of the modern American's external and internal sex harmony, is a degree of peacefulness remarkably like that now existing between the United States and the Soviet Union.35

The conclusion reached by Ellis and his analysis of the attitudes expressed by the mass media are similar to the indict­ ment made by Phillip Wylie, who uses Dr. Kinsey's behavioral

studies as his evidence:

Whoring, raping, and s ta tis tic a l unchastity may not be the proper introduction, for some readers, to my thesis that the U. S. A. is technically insane on the matter of sex. Let us, therefore, consider it from a more folksy aspect. Why is it that most of the young men, and almost most of the young women, have gotten to sleeping with each other in our land--even though our land pretends they have not? How did i t come about? Where does it go on? Why is it that the average upper middle-class husband cannot honestly sign a certificate of his fidelity, and his wife, in a large percentage of cases, has kept her person no more "sacrosanct"? Why are we an unchaste nation?

Wylie goes on to answer his question. A more pertinent question,

though, than why we are unchaste is why do we pretend to be? And

pretend we do. Ellis found, on the subject of adultery, that novel,

play, script, senario, and song writers portrayed an adulterer or

adulteress as "hideous," "indecent," "a dirty dog," "reprehensible," 25

"shocking"wicked," "incredibly arrogant," "a nauseating in­ triguer," "a phony little fake," "a base philanderer," "a shameless 7 hussy," and "a cruel home wrecker." The list he gives is, merci­ fully, only a partial catalog of epithets. About our drama his findings were that plays featured the greatest number of sex ref­ erences (along with movies, men's magazines, humor magazines, women's magazines, and fiction best sellers),^® that playgoing audiences demand more liberal sex views and more salacious material

OQ than moviegoers, * and that sex attitudes expressed in plays were 40 evenly divided between liberal and conservative views. On the subject of adultery E llis found that the issue was a live one; although once unalterably opposed by the public, the attitu d e was changing to a more liberal viewpoint in spite of a desperate fight on the part of the moral conservatives.^*- The "liveness" of the issue has been discussed earlier, and we will come later to an analysis of plays about adultery which do vary from liberal to con­ servative views.

Ellis is correct in citing drama as a medium which features the greatest number of sex references. At least on the subject of adultery I have found that American drama between the wars seemed obsessed with the problem. A careful search through Burns

Mantle's Best Plays of the Year and Yearbook of the Drama In America

series reveals over four hundred productions of plays between the

1919-1920 and 1941-1942 seasons which tre a t the issue of real or 26 suspected marital infidelity. This obsession, though, must not be considered unhealthy. What was unhealthy, as Lerner points out, was that America had become an overmoralizing and overlegislating society.^ The drama contributed considerably in bringing moral codes more relevant to the problems of life in America. Anita

Block comments that

our contemporary theatre has done v ita l work in bringing changed sexual standards to the attention of the slow-moving compact majority. As 1 have said, our sole test of contemporary drama Is the value of these plays for us who need a living theatre today, and since one of the salient ex­ pressions of this time is the individual's conflict with changing sexual standards, we can judge the deep significance, for us, of plays that Interpret this conflict.43

As Edmond Gagey sees i t , the American playwright a fter World War

1 deliberately attempted to modify the American scene:

Realistic drama provided a forum for the free discussion of current ideas in a difficult and troubled period. Right or wrong in their opinion, the playwrights wrote scathingly and earnestly on what they saw or fe lt. They maintained always a liberal or radical point of view. They showed sympathy for the downtrodden and the exploited. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their work has been the most significant drama of the period.44

On the issue of sexual m orality, American plays range from negative questioning to positive demanding for reform, and on the issue of our moral code the points of view range from defense to attack. The fact that there is no general agreement indicates some­ thing of the complexity of the problem. Anita Block believes that

our drama is an accurate barometer of the changing 27

attitu d e toward m atters v ita l in our own time. We should expect, therefore, to find other individual conflicts in the sexual field; if not more revolution­ ary than the struggle for the single standard, then at any rate even more shocking to the conventional con­ cepts of the compact majority. If we can show that the taboo against some of these vital sexual subjects has been lifted in our theatre, then we shall know that our contemporary playwrights are performing something of the great service rendered by the modern dram atists.45

The metaphor of the barometer is, as we shall later see, an apt

one. The drama does record changing attitudes, especially the

attitu d es which deal with American manners and morals. As Max

Lerner points out, "The reflections of American attitudes in the minds of sensitive and creative w riters, however transmuted, are

an index of what people believe about themselves,"46

At the beginning of the period under consideration, we find

that the dramatist did not deal primarily with such shocking

m aterial as pro stitu tio n but with manners and morals in relation

to family life . Edmond Gagey comments;

The Younger Generation, the new woman, the gigolo, infidelity, divorce--these became the recurrent motifs in a thousand permutations. Their inter­ relation of theme and their variety make it impossible to discuss them in any truly coherent order, but a few examples should suggest the in terests of both audiences and dramatists. Few topics were as ab­ sorbing to the twenties as the revolt of the Younger Generation against conventions. . . . The war had hastened the breakdown of b arriers, and Prohibition with its hip flasks and speakeasies was offering a favorable climate for a radical change.47

Of course the drama was not so radical as most playgoers thought.

Drama always remains a b it behind the times because of the "closeness" 28 of the theater--the liveness of the stage which seems to lessen the aesthetic distance which fiction enjoys. Certain words, for example, which are not spoken on the stage, occur with regularity in novels. Censorship has something to do with the limitation of theatrical vocabulary, of course. But primarily the difference between the genre is that our sensibilities can stand much more in private than in public. A. H. Quinn says about the matter:

Drama, of course, follows, not precedes, the progress of life . C onflicts, which are the life of drama, have often been in process of settlement, while the tone of the plays which record these conflicts has s t i l l seemed daring. This is sometimes because human beings decline to recognize a social or moral change u n til long a fter i t has occurred, and some­ times because the change has after all not been so fundamental as it at first appeared. . . . Attacks upon social or moral conventions seem more daring on the stage than they do in the novel, partly because in the theatre we feel compelled to observe with the traditions and standards of the herd, while in reading the novel, we judge entirely by our own standards.48

The herd, as a rule, gets stampeded easily; and many pressures are brought to bear on plays which are considered risqu/. The reaction of some play producers to such pressures is indicative of how far American drama has come since the Great War. In 1928, for example, Boston banned Eugene O 'N eill's Strange Interlude. Instead

of giving in to the pressure exerted by the Boston censors, Lawrence

Langner, as he explains in his book on the Theatre Guild, set the

play up in nearby Quincy and ran busses to transport the audience to

and from the t h e a t e r . 49 Fifteen years earlier the play would have

been quietly withdrawn. 29

There are some critics who feel that public furor is a good sign. Barrett Clark, in his book An Hour of American Drama, says:

This is a ll immensely stimulating. When mayors and clergymen, the D.A.R. and the American Legion get wrought up over plays and novels, it means that the plays and novels are beginning to matter.50

At any rate, the revolution in manners and morals was dealt with by dramatists, whether local groups liked it or not. And the problem of adultery was argued on stage by the moral "left" and

the moral "right," By 1934 Joseph Wood Krutch was frankly tired

of the whole business. He says, in a review of A. E. Thomas's No

More Ladies;

The discouraging thing, however, is the fact that despite ten years of listening and watching I still do not know just where we stand on this all-important matter of adultery. I gather that it is almost un­ iversally practiced and that we are all agreed to abandon the more melodramatic attitudes toward i t . Nevertheless, the exact status of the diversion re­ mains imperfectly defined, and I can only report a certain tendency on the part of various schools of thought to converge toward a common uncertain!ty. The conservative has now got around to granting that the erring husband can be forgiven on fairly easy terms, but meanwhile the school which used to cele­ brate the Splendid Sin has largely disappeared to make way for the sophisticate who announces in the last act that sophistication, is not, after all, incompatible with a final surrender to monogamy.

The result, he says, is that plays by defenders of the conventions

becameindistinguishable from plays by the "moderns," and that

neither side seems willing to state that adultery is a horrible

crime or a harmless diversion. No one, Krutch in sis ts, adds any­

thing new to the argument: 30

Most plays on the subject seem to leave the discus­ sion exactly where they £ound i t , and my suggestion is that it be quietly dropped until such time as someone has discovered something new to contribute. We know that there is much to be said on both sides and we have heard it a l l . ^

He ends his review by mentioning plays about adultery which were recently withdrawn after three or four performances. Plays about adultery which were successful enough to get published, notwith­ standing Krutch's disgust with the whole topic, we are ready to consider in the next chapters. 31

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER I

l-Elmer Rice, The Living Theatre (New York: Harper and Bros., 1959), p. 114.

2Ibid. . p. 115.

^Alan S. Downer, F ifty Years of American Drama: 1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1951), p. 39,

4Ibld. . p. 40

^Edmond M. Gagey, Revolution In American Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 2.

^Rice, p. 95.

7Ibld.

®Gagey, p. 20.

9John Mason Brown, Broadway In Review (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1940), p. 139.

^^Quoted in Montrose Moses and John Mason Brown, e d s., The American Theatre As Seen By Its C ritic s. 1752-1934 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1934), pp. 192-193.

H-George Jean Nathan, Passing Judgments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935), p. 44.

^2Rlce, p. 121.

l^Nathan, P* 37*

1AIb ld ., P. 39.

l^Downer, p. 40

16Rice, p. 119.

l 7Downer, p. 41.

1®Nathan, p. 41.

19Ibld. , pp. 40-41. 32

20 Downer, pp. 44-45. 21 Anita Block, The Changing World in Plays and Theatre (Boston; Little, Brown and Co., 1939), p. 78.

22Ibid.

^A rthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama From the Civil War to the Present. (New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, Inc., 1936), II, 207.

2W Lerner, America As A C ivilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), II, 667.

25I b id .. 673

^Downer, p 45.

27Gagey, p 121.

28I b id ., p. 123.

29Ibid. , p. 142 30 Lerner, II, 794.

3^Rice, p 125.

32Lerner, II, 861-862.

33Ibid. , 666.

■^Phillip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955), p 80.

■^Albert E llis , The Folklore of Sex (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1951), p. 272.

3^Wylie, p. 61.

37E llis , p. 41.

38Ib id . , p. 262.

39Ib id . . p. 249.

40Ib id ., p. 262. 33

41 Ibid. . pp. 234-235.

^Lerner, II, 668.

4^Block, p. 11.

^G agey, p. 174.

45Block, pp. 101-102.

46Lerner, I I, 585.

4^Gagey, pp. 187-188.

48Quinn, II, 207-208.

4^Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York: E.P Dutton and Co., 1951), pp. 238-239.

^ B a rre tt H. Clark, An Hour of American Drama (Philadelphia: J. B Lipplncott Co., 1930), p. 120.

5iJoseph Wood Krutch, "And So To Bed," The Nation, CXXVIII (February 7, 1934), 168.

52Ibid. CHAPTER I I

ZOE AKINS AND THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION

No attempt thus far has been made to analyze a play from the

"old drama" of the prewar period and to discuss how plays of this period failed to achieve a valid criticism of life in terms of

contemporary moral problems. The fact is that there is no real need

to do so. The plays of Zoe Akins, written during the early postwar years, serve as well to indicate how a fairly serious problem could be treated with timidity and sentimental clap-trap. It is convenient

to devote a separate chapter to the plays of Zoe Akins which comment

on the problem of adultery not because she is important as a

dramatist, but because her plays provide a point of departure from

which to view the progressive force of the revolution in manners and

morals. Akins' play Declass/e* (1919), for example, is typical of

the drama of the prewar theater. The play, chosen by Burns Mantle

as one of the ten best of the 1919-1920 season, was a popular

success in terms of its 257 performances^ and its newspaper reviews.

Drama historians, however, have not been so enthusiastic.

The play is concerned with Lady Helen Haden, a British noble­

woman of the line of "the Mad Varicks," and her brutish husband Sir

Bruce, a former butcher. Lady Helen is a sensitive, warm woman

with a noble sense of fair play; it is this sense of fair play, in

fact, which reveals her as an adulteress. At a party in their

34 35

London home, Sir Bruce accuses one of Helen's friends, Edward

Thayer, of cheating at cards and orders him to leave the house. The husband creates an uncomfortable scene, and Helen threatens to leave him if he does not apologize to Thayer. She can tolerate his rudeness and boorishness in private, i t seems, but not in front of guests. He finally does apologize and the game continues. This time Helen herself discovers that Thayer is a cheater. She takes him into another room and demands that he apologize to her husband.

He refuses. She says that to do this is only fair play. He says;

You said tonight that if he kicked me out of the house, you'd go out of it, too, forever. Very well; I say that if he kicks me out, you will go out of it, too, forever. You don't get what I'm driving at, do you? I mean that I've got letters of yours--(33).

Helen and Thayer, obviously, have had an affair. Obviously too,

Helen te lls her husband of the cheating at cards and Thayer shows him the letters.

When the second act opens, Helen is in New York. She has been a divorcee for the past three years and of late has been spending her pearls to pay her bills. We see her give her last pearl to the waiter of a hotel dining room--now she is penniless and friend­

less. She is strictly d£class^e, and her old friends now find it convenient to snub her. She has fallen considerably for her sin: from a luxurious London apartment and affluent social set to a penniless and lonely New York tourist.

As if a ll this were not enough, Miss Akins piles more misery on 36 her by showing, in the last act, some hope for happiness, then by

taking i t away. Helen meets Rudolph Solomon, a rich New York Jew, who invites her to his home for dinner. He loves her very much--

so much, in fact, that he has followed her around and brought up

all the pearls she has sold. He plans to present them to her that evening and to ask her to marry him. His plans are interrupted,

though, by the arrival of Edward Thayer, who has completely reformed.

Solomon decides that he must give Helen up for Thayer, whom he

knows she still loves. He tells her that evening;

I am going to say something which may seem strange to you. . . . I think it would be a mistake for us to go through with this marriage. . . . You don't understand--but you will in a moment. There is someone else who can explain b etter than I. Wait here—(93).

She does not understand and, sensing a rebuff on his part, leaves

the house where she is, of all things, struck by a taxi-cab. She

is carried into the house and learns then that there are two men

who wish to marry her, but she, as an adulteress, is made to die--

holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the

other. Although she is tended to by two men who love her, the

morally acceptable fate (and the sentimental one as well) demands

that she be denied any hope of future happiness.

The play is bad enough, but Alexander Woollcott's review is

worse. After praising Ethel Barrymore's Lady Helen, which takes up

most of the review, Woollcott praises the ending of the play. He

says that the "gathering shadows of the play are not dispelled, 37 because Miss Akins is true to her characters and Lady Helen true to

3 her code." And he smacks his lips over "such a lingering and luxurious death scene as has not been vouchsafed to this hurried city in our day and generation."^

A. H. Quinn in his History admits that D^classie is "good theatre" but says it is difficult to take the play seriously as drama because the plot is unconvincing and the ending absurd when

Lady Helen "takes fifteen graceful minutes to die."^ He also mentions the "artificial profundity, which has remained character­ istic of Miss A kins.Thom as H. Dickinson in Playwrights of the

New American Theatre agrees that the play is effective but false and adds that Miss Akins has "a mental awareness that goes beyond experience, a sense of the theatre as something artificial and separate from life."^ About the falseness Dickinson says:

But the means by which Lady Helen Haden achieves ostracism for herself are in the extreme tortuous and perverse. The author could not have forced the issue more, played more arbitrary tricks, if she had been satirizin g the whole school of drama of "vague regrets."®

But the playwright is not satirizing; she is merely of the old school of drama and morals which requires that an adulteress die for past sins.

Donald Koster, in his very sociological study The Theme of

Divorce in American Drama, 1871-1939, uses the plays of Zoe Akins to support his thesis that it was not until after World War I that serious treatments of divorce were attempted on the stage. Koster 38 finds that dramatic treatments of divorce lagged far behind (by almost a half-century) the treatment in popular periodicals;

What stands out in any review of the drama of divorce is that the dramatists from Daly up to the World War generally fought against divorce as a social evil and a menace to morals. All of them reflected the public realization of and concern over the rapid increase in the rate of divorce. . . . Consnon to all these dramatists is a lack of sympathy for divorce which accurately mirrors the attitude of the majority of citizens before the War. The essentially conservative nature of the drama is well illustrated by the fact that, although advocates of free divorce. . . had been stating their case in the popular periodicals since before 1870, it was not until 1917 that Jesse Lynch Williams, in his Why Marry?, presented the first mild indication on the stage that divorce might quite possibly be a highly moral and desirable way out of an unhappy marital situation.^

This conclusion is important for several reasons. For one thing, it establishes that Miss Akins' play is a step backward from the ad­ vance made by Jesse Lynch Williams' 1917 play, which treated divorce as a re a lity of American life . In addition, the findings of Mr.

Koster about one moral problem, divorce, should not differ consider­ ably from another moral problem, adultery, with which this study is concerned. Finally, the point should be made that in our drama adultery and divorce are frequently treated together. While it is true that divorce sometimes follows adultery in real life , there is another reason why the two are necessarily connected. Our drama is primarily directed toward the New York theatergoer, and New York statutes stipulate that divorce can be granted only for adultery. It is not surprising, therefore, to find dramatists using the strict 39 divorce laws as a device for dealing with the problem of marital

infidelity.

The change in public attitu d e toward adultery a fte r the war

corresponds with the change that Koster finds in his study of

American plays:

With the shift, after the War, in public attitude on divorce toward a position of greater tolerance and a tendency to regard marriage and divorce more from the point of view of the individual's happiness and less from the social institutional point of view, came a corresponding change on the part of American drama­ tists. No longer was there so much moralizing about divorce; instead, there was a noticeable tendency toward the acceptance of i t as an integral part of American life , and a consequent study of its effects on individuals.*-®

Mr. Koster believes, however, that Miss Akins' play Daddy' s

Gone A-Hunting*-*~ (1921) is a serious attempt to deal with the prob­

lem of divorce. As the theme of adultery in the play is perhaps more central than the theme of divorce, it is convenient here to

summarize the story. Edith Fields, a gentle and loving woman, has

made great sacrifices so that her husband Julien can study a rt in

Paris for a wear. She makes elaborate plans for his homecoming

which she and her daughter Janet have waited for anxiously. A

friend, Walter Greenough--a very wealthy man who has watched over

Julien's family during his absence--brings flowers for the occasion.

But when Julien arrives he brings with him a man and woman to stay

at their apartment; the friends are very Bohemian, but so is Julien.

He immediately proclaims his freedom and his disgust for bourgeois

standards. Edith tries to bear it all. She even moves to a larger 40 but shabbier apartment where Julien can work and keep his friends.

But he becomes publicly involved with Mrs. Dahlgren, a wealthy married woman. Edith explains to Walter:

He thinks we ought both to be free. He doesn't think our being married to each other ought to make the least difference--to either of us. Julien* s fair (161).

Walter gives Edith some bracelets to wear to see if Julien really is willing to share his wife. He is. In fact, he seems proud that she

has made a conquest. Edith is shocked and leaves him;

I don't know what you'll make of yourself--but now I know what i t is you'd be willing to make of myself. And that's what I can't bear--that you're willing to--see me--that low'. (167).

When the last act opens, Edith is situated in Walter's plush

apartment, where she has been living with him for the past three

years. Janet, the daughter, is to return there from the hospital

that very day. During the girl's unstated illness, Edith and Julien

have stayed together in the hospital room; both have been seriously

concerned about their daughter's illness. Walter is worried that

Edith might return to her husband now that a crisis has thrown them

together in a mutual interest; he wants to marry her so that they

can live together respectably. She tells him:

Thank God you'd walked away from our house that night--just ahead of me! I think you know that-- that--frora that time on there began for me a new lif e (184).

It appears at this point that the couple who have been "living in

sin" have a reasonable chance for happiness. But not so. The hospital 41 calls to say that the g irl has died (although we have been assured minutes before that she is well enough to come home). Now Edith feels she must return to Julien, who had great love for the child and who must necessarily need her in his sorrow. Walter says good­ bye and leaves town. Julien arrives to say that he is not good for

Edith and that she should marry Walter. Julien leaves. Edith is left without her child, her husband, or her lover. A friend asks what she w ill do now. She answers with the same curtain line she has spoken for the last two acts; "God knows." We can consider, as her audience surely did, that sympathetic though we are to her plight,

Edith is an adulteress and must not be given the opportunity for possible happiness.

Koster believes that the play tries "to treat profoundly and sincerely the situation in which a husband and wife find that they have grown away from each other but are held together for a time by their mutual love for their child," although he does grant that the conclusion reached is "feeble."^ jt is at least that. The play is so obviously contrived in the last act that one wonders how i t can be a "sincere" attempt at anything. The fact is that after the war a dramatist could elect to write sentimental endings, though he was not required to as he once was in the past. Because Miss Akins con­ sistently wrote in the old way, one can only conclude that she was either unwilling or unable to say anything meaningful about life outside the box set, though audiences filled the theater for 129 performances to watch Edith Fields get her "rightful" punishment. 42

A. H. Quinn says about the play that

the conclusion with the heroine's smiling reply to the natural query as to her future conduct, "God knows," is rather inconclusive than profound. The preceding conversation too, between the wife, her lover and her husband is absurd, and when the death of the little daughter is announced, we recognize that Miss Akins is endeavoring to develop the contemporary interest of spirit by means of the older sentimental devices of the theatre.13

Given the Zoe Akins approach to serious moral issues, it is no wonder that Elmer Rice should write, in an article called "Sex in

the Modern Theater," that "on the whole, the treatment in the drama

of love and marriage and their related problems has been, with a few notableexceptions, timid, conventional, orthodox, and banal.

pic lassie and Daddy1s Gone A-Hunting are certainly all of these. It

is not fair to damn only Miss Akins, however, who was always able to

fill the theater with her plays. As Katherine Metcalf Roof points

out in her 1921 article "Does the Popular Represent Public Taste?":

Richard Wagner once said that all reforms in the theatre must proceed from the audience. But the audience a fte r a ll can pass only upon what is set before it. The audience can not select plays or cast them. It can only express its feelings about the plays and actors chosen for it.^

The plays to be discussed in the next chapter, serious plays

treating adultery which were written by major dramatists, were

written after 1923--two or more years after Daddy's Gone A-Hunting.

The time interval here is not long, yet a look at the drama per­

iodicals between 1921 and 1923 reveals that the time was active with

concern about the "moral decay" of the theater. An article in the 43

November, 1923 issue of Theatre Magazine entitled "Is A Theatre

Censorship Inevitable?" carries the sub-title "A Flood of In­

decency is Sweeping the Stage and O fficia l Control Seems the Only

Remedy." The a r tic le pleads with theater managers to clean up th e ir

playhouses before the state government takes action against them.^

In the next month's issue, John S. Summer, Secretary of the New York

Society for the Suppression of Vice, writes in his essay called "The

Sewer on the Stage":

Some of our upstart managers are trying to go Paris one better. Our muddle-headed producers are substituting mental sewers for those physical. There is no excuse for the unmoral element which puts in the way of susceptible people incentives to vicious and lawless thoughts, speech and acts. They should be clubbed into a sense of decency.^

Mr. Summer does not mention any plays by name, nor is it entirely

clear whether he is referring to Broadway playhouses alone or

burlesque houses as well. The whole issue is quite muddled. There

is , on the one hand, the argument of Summer's that the drama is

"unmoral." On the other hand there is Elmer Rice, writing a few

years later, it is true, saying that the discussion of sex on the

stage is "squeamish":

The serious modern drama in i t s treatment and discussion of sex is timid, squeamish, super­ ficial, and conventional. Not only does it function upon a much lower plane of frankness and enlightenment than is represented by the views and the conversation of moderately in­ te llig e n t adults and the body of s c ie n tific knowledge possessed even by the intelligent layman, but it lags far behind the other arts, particularly the related arts of poetry and the 44

novel, in Its attempt to deal sensitively, honestly, and profoundly with the problems of sex.

The editors of Theatre Magazine finally asked the readers of the magazine to decide. In an advertisement in the December, 1923 issue they asked;

IS THIS PLAY FIT FOR THE PUBLIC STAGE?

For many weeks past Mme. Nazlmova has been appearing in vaudeville in the one-act_play by George Middleton en titled "The Unknown Lady J_ . /" As there is only one ground for divorce in New York State--adultery-- this play shows how law-abiding citizens, who mutually want a divorce, cannot get it except by committing the crime of collusion. The scene takes place in a hotel room. The play was presented with­ out interference until October 30 when Mr. E. F. Albee, head of the Keith interests, ordered it withdrawn. It was said this was done at the request of Father John B. Kelly, chaplain of the Catholic Writers1 Guild, who is said to have declared the piece to be an offence against public morals. Judge Ben Lindsey, on the other hand, took quite the opposite view. He voluntarily endorsed the playlet saying; What the people of this country need is the truth about their own hypocrisies."

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?

So our readers may judge for themselves who is right, Father Kelly or Judge Ben Lindsey, we shall print in our next issue. . . the entire text of The Unknown Lady. . . . We ask our readers to decide if the play exerts a good or evil influence . ^

The play, of course, is harmless, though one of the characters is a prostitute.20 But nothing obscene occurs on stage or is alluded to.

A wealthy man takes a prostitute to a cheap hotel where he stalls long enough to be caught by detectives with the "unknown lady." He explains to her later that he and his wife have always been faithful 45 to one another, but his wife is in love with another man. He has

set up the hotel room episode so that she can legally divorce him and marry the man she loves. His only bitterness is for the New

York law which forces him to be dishonest so that his wife can be

respectable. There is nothing in the play to bring a "blush to a maiden's cheek." In fact, the only time the dialogue lapses into

a choice of words which some playgoers might have considered ob­

jectionable is to express a very moral sentiment. When the two are

left alone in the room and it is obvious that the man is stalling,

the prostitute says;

You can always tell them the first time they wander from th eir fire sid e s. I t _is the f i r s t tim e, eh?

He answers:

Yes, and I hope to hell it's the last (26).

The play can hardly be called "an offence against public morals."

Elmer Rice argued later that those who decry the outspokenness

of the stage shut their eyes to the fact that the theater follows

the popular trend of morals and manners rather than leading it. 20

By then, however, the censors had given in, and our drama was

treating serious issues--moral and social--with honesty and com­

p lex ity . B arrett Clark says, a f te r dealing with a number of plays

which do this very thing:

I could go on listing recent plays that approach a more or less satisfactory expression of modem American life, but I don't want to turn these pages into a catalogue. 46

The point is clear, isn't it? The country is pausing to look at itself in all its aspects, and here and there a playwright, a novelist, a poet, a critic, is abl i co see things clearly and w rite as he sees. :i

We are now ready to see how Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Clif­ ford Odets, and Eugene O'Neill treated a serious moral issue--that of adultery--in their plays. 47

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER II

*Zoe Akins, p/class je: Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting: and Greatness--A Comedy (New York; Boni and Liveright, 1924). All passages quoted from the play are taken from this edition. In further citations, the page numbers given in the text of the study refer to the edition of the play listed in the footnote and bibli­ ography .

^Burns Mantle, e d ., The Best Plays of 1919-1920 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1943). All further statistical information on individual plays has been taken from the appropriate year of the Burns Mantle series and w ill not be documented.

^Alexander Woollcott, "'Declass^e' a Brilliant Play," New York Times, October 7, 1919, p. 22.

4Ibid.

3Quinn, I I , 142.

6Ibid. , 141-142.

^Thomas H. Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theatre (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925), p. 217.

8I b id ., p. 216.

Q Donald Nelson (Coster, The Theme of Divorce in American Drama, 1871-1939 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1942), pp. 107-108.

10I b id ., p. 108.

Hzoe Akins, D^class^e; Daddy's Gone A-Hunting: and Great­ ness--A Comedy (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924).

■^(Coster, p. 73.

13Quinn, I I, 142-143.

l^Elmer Rice, "Sex in the Modern Theater," Harper1s Mag­ azine , CLXIV (May 1932), 672.

15Katherine Metcalf Roof, "Does the Popular Represent Public Taste?." The Drama, XII (December 1921), 80. 48

■^James S. Metcalfe, "Is A Theatre Censorship Inevitable? ,,r Theatre Magazine, XXXVIII (November 1923), 9.

^John S. Summer, "The Sewer on the Stage," Theatre Magazine, XXXVIII (December 1923), 78.

18Rice, "Sex," p. 669.

19Theatre Magazine, XXXVIII (December 1923), 77. 9ft ^uGeorge Middleton, "The Unknown Lady," Theatre Magazine, XXXIX (January 1924), 24, 26, 28, 48.

^Clark, p. 118. CHAPTER I I I

ADULTERY IN THE SERIOUS PLAYS OF ELMER RICE, SIDNEY HOWARD, CLIFFORD ODETS, AND EUGENE O'NEILL

There are a number of ways in which a dramatist can comment in a serious play about a moral problem such as adultery. He can, for example, show that a character who defies the established moral code and commits adultery is punished more severely than the infraction warrants. This is essentially what Elmer Rice does in Street Scene.

With this method, however, the playwright must show in sane depth why the moral code was broken and how the character was more or less driven to the act by powers and needs he could not control. He may, on the other hand, prefer to place on stage a spokesman for his view that our moral code as it concerns adultery is too strict and allow the character to comment directly about the matter. This is the technique Clifford Odets uses in Rocket to the Moon. Or, as Odets does in Awake and Sing, he may allow his characters to break with the common attitude toward adultery and allow them to do so with the dramatist's good wishes. Any of the above approaches lends itself to a liberal or advanced treatment of the issue of m arital in­ fid e lity .

In order to present a conservative or orthodox view of adultery, a dramatist can use a spokesman to explicitly state his thesis that infidelity is never acceptable, as Eugene O'Neill does in Welded, or he can show that adultery is the f ir s t step toward complete

49 50 decay and destruction. O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Mourning

Become Electra are good examples of this approach. Or he can, as

O'Neill does in Days Without End, present a character who is able to stop himself before he and his marriage are completely destroyed by having him ask forgiveness and resolve to behave better in the future.

The middle-of-the-road approach involves presenting a character who is willing to preserve his marriage by overlooking a single extra­ marital affair but to insist, nevertheless, on consistent fidelity in the future. Sidney Howard's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis'

Dodsworth presents this point of view, as does his comedy They Knew

What They Wanted, which w ill be considered here because of its seriousness and because of the precedents the play established.

ELMER RICE

Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine1 (1923) is an expressionistic play which treats not only adultery but also the vacuity of exis­ tence for the middle-class white collar worker. Rice's approach to the problem of adultery in this play is different from the list of possible approaches mentioned above; he shows us, in this case, how a character did not commit the sin of adultery but why he should have. In Rice's opinion, middle-class America suffers from a

standardized conscience which does not permit its members to fulfill

themselves completely.

The protagonist, Mr. Zero, is an accounting clerk in a depart­ ment store where he works with his fellow clerk, Daisy Diana 51

Dorothea Devore. He is not very kind to her, though if he were not so respectable he would like to have an a ffa ir with her. She is a lonely girl who is secretly in love with him. Zero's married life is deplorable. He has stopped even trying to communicate with Mrs.

Zero, who makes every moment at home a miserable one. She has nagged him more than usual since she caught him peering across the airshaft for a look at the "loose woman" across the hall. Having been caught at this diversion, Zero finds it necessary to turn the woman over to the police.

When Zero learns that he is to be replaced in his job by an adding machine, he kills his boss and is executed for the murder.

As a ghost he meets Shrdlu, a boy who has murdered his possessive

■r- t mother. At the graveyard they talk about their deeds on earth

Both are convinced of their sins and consciously or unconsciously want to be punished. Shrdlu says:

Do you think there can ever be any peace for such as we are--murderers, sinners? Don't you know what awaits us--flames, eternal flames.' (79)

In the next scene the two sinners are in the Elysian Fields, a place of beauty and peacefulness The playwright is explicit in his stage directions about the intended effect of the Fields:

A pleasant place A scene of pastoral loveliness A meadow dotted with find old trees and carpeted with rich grass and field flowers. In the back­ ground are seen a number of tents fashioned of gay-striped silks and beyond gleams a meandering river. Clear a ir and a fleckless sky Sweet distant music throughout (83). 52

But the two men are not happy They have, on earth, been prepared to suffer such severe punishment for sin that they can feel only discomfort at not finding it. Their standardized consciences are operative even in heaven Shrdlu says:

But th is--th is is maddening.' What becomes of justice? What becomes of morality? What becomes of right and wrong? It's maddening--simply maddening! (87).

Soon Daisy arriv es, who a fte r Zero's death has committed suicide to be with him again. They talk about old times, especialr ly the time Zero pressed his knee against hers and she moved away from him. Daisy says she moved just to see if he meant to do it, but he never followed after her. Zero admits he did mean to do it, but he thought she was "sore." He te lls her:

I was always stuck on you An' while I'd be addin' them figgers I'd be thinkln' how if the wife died, you an1 me could get married (105).

Daisy thinks it would be nice to stay in the Elysian Fields forever.

Zero replies that it is not possible because of the seriousness of th eir crimes and because a fte r a ll he is married. Moreover, he doesn't want anyone in the Fields to see him lying on Daisy's lap.

He tells her:

But we don't want people talkin' about us. You better fix your hair and pull down your skirts (114).

Shrdlu enters and has discovered that anyone who wishes may remain in the Elysian Fields. Zero says to this that he and Daisy were thinking of getting married. Shrdlu replies that it isn't 53 necessary . Zero is shocked that they could remain under those conditions. Shrdlu tells him there are drunkards, thieves, vaga­ bonds, blasphemers, and adulterers there. Zero is shocked further and decides he cannot stay a minute longer. After this decision he can no longer hear the heavenly music. He is, in effect, out of tune with what it means to be human.

Zero goes to work with an adding machine for twenty years; then his soul is sent back to earth to exist in a man who will operate an adding machine with only his toe . An attendant tells him:

You're a failure Zero, a failure. A waste product. A slave to a contraption of steel and iron. The animal's instincts, but not his strength and skill. The animal's appetites, but not his unashamed indulgence in them (138).

Zero, it seems, could have fulfilled himself had he been willing to break with the established moral codes. Whathappened to Zero, Rice is arguing, is what happens to a ll of us robots who come out of society's mass-producing factory of moral conscience. Earlier in this study we have seen Phillip Wylie's argument that our conven­ tions would lead us all to dissolution. Zero has been there before

u s .

Ludwig Lewisohn, in his review "Creative Irony," connects what Rice has to say with what has been said by American poets and novelists of the moral protest school: 54

What Mr. Rice has to tell us is not new. But creative literature, I hasten to add, need not have novelty. What Edgar Lee Masters, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Zona Gale, what the whole new American lite ra tu re of moral protest has told us, is also told here. This par­ ticular world of ours deliberately hides or chokes with '•ust and ashes the very sources of human life. It has made fetishes of ugliness and monotony and intolerance. I t has given to these fetishes and high-sounding names. It is wedded to denial and has made a pact with death.

One of the critical arguments which developed in regard to the play was Rice's insight (or lack of it) into middle-class respecta­ bility. Edmund Wilson argued that respectability is more easily shed than Mr. Zero's case indicates and that the reviewer himself saw American soldiers in France yield to feebler temptations and

3 accept stranger codes than Zero rejected. Phillip Moeller, on the other hand, in his foreword to the Samuel French edition of the play, sees the charge that we suffer from a standardized conscience as the real meaning of the play:

How many sex-starved Zeros are there who pilfer their poor gratification by peeping across the tenement airshafts, how many terrible parties are there such as Mr. Rice shows us which are going on night after night and in which people such as Mr. One and Mrs. Two and others like them are gathered "to give the air" to such baleful profundities. In short, how many souls are there who here or hereafter, will be able to live up to a paradise--if there is one here or hereafter--where everything will be of a bliss, of a sort, that such souls can profit in and understand. To my mind this is the real Importance of Mr. Rice's play (ix-x).

At any rate, Rice would have us believe that we as a society need to 55 establish a more lenient moral code that is more in tune with the problems and frustrations of life. This liberal position is main­ tained by Rice in all of his plays in which the theme of adultery is evidenced.

Unlike the experimental The Adding Machine, which ran for only

72 performances, Elmer Rice's Street Scene*1' (1929) played a to ta l of

601 performances and was judged by Burns Mantle as one of the ten best plays of the year. Although the play attempts a "slice of life" of the occupants of an ugly brownstone apartment building in a mean quarter of New York,the main story that emerges is of Mrs. Anna

Maurrant and her affair with the milk collector Steve Sankey.

Anna Maurrant does not lead a very pleasant life . Not only must she put up with the drab existence of a tenement in the poorer part of

the city , but she and her two children must suffer equally from

living with her husband Frank, who is something of a beast. He is a beast, however, who has very orthodox moral views. When old

Abraham Kaplan, a socialist, argues that the family unit will not

need to exist a fte r private property is abolished, Frank goes into

a rage:

Yeah? Is that so? No reason to exist, huh? Well, it's gonna exist, see? Children respectin' their parents an' doin' what they're told, get me? An’ husbands and wives, lovln1 an' honorin' each other, like they said they would, when they was spliced-- an' any dirty sheeny that says different is li’ble to get his head busted open, see? (57).

What Frank says about the family and marriage is one thing, but

what he practices is quite another. Even his teen-age daughter Rose 56 sees that her mother is partially justified in seeking love outside her marriage. She tells one of her friends;

What can I do, Sam? You see, my father means well enough, and all that, but he's always been sort of s tr ic t and--I don't know--sort of making you freeze up, when you really wanted to be nice and loving. That's the whole trouble, I guess; my mother never had anybody to really love her (104-105).

Rose even advises her father that Mrs. Maurrant is not like in ­ dependent g irls nowadays; she needs someone to look after her. Rose does not get very far with this argument.

As a last resort, she appeals to her mother to keep Sankey from coming around so often so that perhaps her father would be kinder.

Anna replies that she thought Rose, if anyone, would understand.

She asks her daughter; "What's the good of being alive, if you can't get a little something out of life? You might as well be dead" (155). The same day Frank, who has been drinking, finds Anna and Sankey together and murders them. The double murder satisfies

the sense of moral justice for many of the neighbors. Mrs. Jones says;

"Well, I a in 't sayin* i t 's right to k ill anybody, but if anybody

had a reason, he certainly had" (210). Frank is apprehended and will be executed for the murders. Rose is left to take over and raise

her brother. The neighbors predict, on the basis of seeing Rose with

her married boss a few times in the past, that she will end up just

like her mother. The irony of their moral judgments is obvious.

Rice has shown that none of the neighbors is an example of pure

virtue--except, perhaps, for Sam, the idealist, who does not judge 57 others. Of Mrs. Jones' family, we know, for example, that her daughter Mae is a cheap tramp and that her son Vincent is a brute who, when he finds he cannot seduce Rose, resorts to insulting her and bullying her friend Sam.

The playwright never explicitly says that Anna Maurrant is not solely responsible for her unfortunate end, but he implies it over and over in his sympathetic rendering of her character and the equally unsympathetic rendering of her husband and her neighbors.

Of the sixty characters in Street Scene, it is Anna who deserves most to live. Rice's treatment of her marriage--a kind of hell on earth--parallels his treatment of marriage in The Adding Machine.

These two plays seem to say that extra-marital affairs, though

the consequences are grave indeed, are more human and wholesome

than sexual relations within the marriage bond. Later we shall see

Maxwell Anderson and S. N. Behrman arguing in much the same manner.

Counse11or-At-Law^ (1931) does not treat seriously the problem

of adultery, but adultery does occur in the play. George Simon,

a successful lawyer, is married to a divorcee with two children.

Neither the children nor his wife Cora cares anything about George,

and when there is the possibility that he will be involved in a

scandal, Cora takes off for Europe. She says; "But what am I to

do? Flutter about pathetically in the background, in an atmosphere

of scandal and recrimination?" (216). After successfully handling

the scandal threat (he has learned that his accuser is, unknown to

his wife, and adulterer), George finds that Cora has been having an 58 a ffa ir with Roy Darwin. He becomes so depressed that he trie s to jump out of his office window, but he is stopped by his secretary, who loves him and believes in his work; they exit together. Rice does imply in this play, again, that the institution of marriage is not often worth the license fee. The Catholic World called the play "briskly human; conservative in sentiment and morally up to date,"^ though it is difficult, in the light of what Rice implies about marriage and the technique of blackmail that George uses to get out of the scandal threat, to see how the sentiment is con­ servative.

In The Left Bank?(1931) adultery is not the central issue in the breaking up of a marriage, but the fact that it is not central is significant to this study. Rice says in this play what almost all of our comedy writers say: marriage is basically a spiritual relationship which takes precedence over the business of sleeping together. He also repeats the charge (made at the end of The Adding

Machine) that Americans are unhealthily ashamed of their sexual appetites. The story concerns two couples who are occupying adjoin­ ing rooms in a Paris hotel: John and Claire Shelby and Waldo and

Susie Lynde.

John is an expatriate writer, an intellectual, and is totally anti-American. He is living in Paris so that he can be free from his barbaric homeland. His son is enrolled in a very progressive

English school for the same reason. John is something of a moral 59 radical. Claire, his wife, is liberal in her moral attitudes, but, we later learn, is pretty much old-fashioned in her attitude toward parenthood. Of the other couple, who have came only to visit, Waldo is a conservative American businessman; Susie has a strong sexual appetite--especially for John. Susie and John go to Venice together to straighten out the estate of Susie's deceased father and to have their affair. Waldo and Claire are left alone together in Paris.

On Bastille Day, Waldo wonders why Americans cannot enjoy themselves the way the French are obviously enjoying themselves at the street dance. Claire says;

I don't know. I think perhaps it's because we're essentially a Christian people. We've been taught for centuries to believe in the mortification of the flesh and to look for heaven anywhere except on e arth . You c a n 't enjoy the good things of life if you're ashamed of your appetites and have to be a little furtive about satisfying them (94-95).

Waldo is slow to realize that his wife is having an affair with

John. When he does discover it, he is profoundly shocked. Claire

tells him that she is not a great believer in the importance of

sexual fidelity. He asks if the marriage relationship does not mean anything to her. She answers;

Yes, I think it does--I know it does. But don't ask me what. It's one of the things I'm profoundly puzzled about--along with a lot of other people, apparently. But I'm sure I don't think it means anything as simple as a man and woman sleeping exclusively together (109).

To her, adultery is symptomatic of a much broader problem;

You see, Waldo, to me this--this escapade of John's and Susie's--all this sex business and 60

the way we a ll talk and think and carry on, nowadays, is all part of a larger problem, a basic problem of adjustment and self-realization (112) .

When John and Susie return, Susie feels "funny" about meeting

Waldo and Claire again. John has been freed from the bourgeois notions of convention and morality, but Susie still has a standard­ ized conscience, though her problem is not as severe as that of Mr.

Zero. John te lls her: "Exactly. You're s t i l l having growing pains.

Our moral heritage dies hard" (179) . Claire cares little about

John's affair, but she is concerned about their son enrolled in the progressive school. She wants to return to America where they can

live together the way a family should. John refuses to go. Susie announces that she w ill divorce Waldo. Claire and Waldo leave, and

John and Susie retire into the bedroom as the French valet looks on.

His curtain line is; "Ah, ces Americains!" (225). Rice implies that while a marriage can withstand infidelity, it cannot be preserved where no deep sp iritu a l bond or mutual in tere st in a child exists.

That the implication was not strong enough is evidenced in the

review of the play by Francis Fergusson;

What he seems to be trying to do is to say that American writers in Europe are liable to mix up th e ir married rela tio n s and became promiscuous; but all of the Left Bank scandals he shows could be matched in plenty of fast business sets in our own suburbs.8

Elmer Rice, in all of his plays, presents a liberal position in

regard to sexual morality and marital infidelity. 61

SIDNEY HOWARD

In Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1924), for the

f ir s t time in our drama a woman guilty of adultery was le ft unpun­

ished and her marriage preserved. In view of the precedent which

the play established, They Knew What They Wanted is perhaps the most important play written between the wars on the subject of

adultery. The play is a realistic comedy, but it will be treated

in this chapter because i t antedates Howard's serious plays which

treat the problem and because it is indicative of the approach that

he adopted toward the drama. In fact, Howard is one of the few

American dramatists of the twenties and th irtie s who did not turn

to writing tragedy, formal comedy, or Marxist propaganda. His con­

tribution to our drama has been, primarily, his interest in

straightforward realism. Joseph Wood Krutch in his book The American

Drama Since 1918 sees Howard as somewhat of an innovator in this

respect;

Mr. Howard stands very near to the head of the list of those who rescued the popular drama from that sentim entality which for some reason con­ tinued to be considered indispensable in plays long a fte r i t had disappeared from most serious writing in other forms.

They Knew What They W a n t e d (1924) is indicative of this

realistic and anti-sentimental approach. Not only are the char­

acters rendered in completely human terms, but a woman guilty of

adultery is not killed or severely punished in the last act. A.H.

Quinn believes that the difference in Howard's play in terms of 62 punishment is "the difference between the Thirteenth and Twentieth

Centuries although to look back on the plays of Zoe Akins one could argue that the difference is something less than that; a few years would cuffice. Today, of course, the play is not so startling, and when it was revived during the fifties Joseph Wood Krutch said;

"Both critics and public shrugged their shoulders. The play, they said, was old fashioned. . . ."12 it was so usual a thing after

World War IX to see an adulteress go unpunished, in fact, that in

1956 They Knew What They Wanted became the musical comedy The Most

Happy Fella. As a play, however, it treats, like Madam Will You

Walk, a typical Howard thesis. It is significant, I think, that this thesis is present in They Knew What They Wanted, which comes at the beginning of Howard's career, and in Madam Will You Walk

(1939), produced posthumously. Barrett Clark, who was a personal friend of the dramatist, says that Sidney Howard believed

whatever a healthy and normal human being feels to be right _is right. The traditional taboos are usually a ll wrong, and tw ist men's minds, and create situations that delight writers but bedevil the lives out of most of us. He seemed to think that man will ultimately triumph over his stupidities by living life more fully and zestfully than he ever thought he could do--and will save his soul at the same time,

Tony, in They Knew What They Wanted, seems to believe much the same.

As the play opens, Tony Patucci, "stout, floridly bronzed,

sixty years old, vigorous, jovial, simple, and excitable," is waiting for his mail order bride, Amy, a girl he saw once in an

Italian restaurant in San Francisco. In making the arrangements for 63

the marriage, Tony has not been exactly honest. He has had Joe, his

hired man and a ''dark, sloppy, beautiful, and young" Wobbly,write

hisletters to Amy and has, without Joe's knowledge, sent the younger man's photograph. While Tony is on his way to the railvjay station

to pick up his bride, Amy is delivered to the house by the mail

carrier. She, of course, thinks she is to marry Joe. Tony, mean­

while, has had an accident in the car; he is carried in with compound

fractures of both legs and will be laid up for six months. Amy

threatens to leave when she learns whom she is to marry, but she is

so anxious to find the security of a home that she agrees to the

ceremony. Although Tony cannot leave his bed, the two are married

by a priest in the injured man's bedroom. That night, after much

wine, Joe and Amy kiss. He follows her off stage as the curtain

falls and spends the night in her room.

Three months later the town doctor tells Joe that Amy is preg­

nant and that Tony could not possibly be the father. Joe goes to

Amy, who admits: "If you go wrong, you're sure to get it sooner or

later. I got it sooner" (157). She refuses to agree to an abortion

because by th is time she has come to love Tony, who wants children,

and because she is concerned about him more than about herself, Joe

wants her to go away with him and, realizing what little choice she

has, Amy reluctantly accepts. First, she tells Tony:

I'm going to tell you the truth and after I go away and you d o n 't see me no more you can say: ,rWell, she wasn't no good but it wasn't my fault." Because i t w asn't your fa u lt Tony. Not one b it 64

of it wasn't. You didn't have nothing to do with it. And I wouldn't be going away, neither, not for a million dollars I wouldn't, only for what's happened. . . (165-166).

When she tells him about that first night of their marriage, Tony goes into a rage and accuses her of loving Joe, which she denies, and of being Joe's woman, which she also denies; "I a in 't! . . .

I ain't. I been straight all my life! Only that one night. .

(168). Tony gets a gun to kill Joe with, but Joe springs on him and topples the older man off his crutches.

Tony begins to sob. He wants to know if Amy will live with

Joe (shewon't), if she has any money (she hasn't), and if she knows what w ill happen to her and the baby (she doesn't have any idea).

He holds on to her skirt and refuses to let go;he wants her to stay on, though she says she cannot. Tony says;

Yes. . .yes. . .ees good. Joe is wantin' go with Wobblies, eh? With goddamWobblies. All right. . . Looka Amy. . . Amy is wantin' stay here nice and safe in dees fine house with Tony. Is not true, eh? Sure is true. Looka Tony, Dio mio, an1 ask him w'at he want? Don' he want baby? (176-177).

Amy says that people will talk. Tony says;

W'at I care w'at evrabody say? We tellin* evrabody he's Tony's baby. Den evrabody say Tony is so goddam young an' strong he's break both his leg* an' havin' baby ju st da same! (177).

She cannot help thinking about what she has done, but Tony tells her she has made a mistake "in da head, not in da heart." Tony embraces her as she tells Joe he had better go alone. He is relieved to find 65 that he w ill not have to take her:

I guess there ain't none of us got any kick cornin' , at that. No real kick (179).

Tony is still embracing Amy as the curtain falls.

Much of the critical comment on the play has to do with

Howard's new treatment of a shopworn theme and the complete integrity with which the dramatist rendered his characters. Thomas Dickinson writes:

Here is a play that deals with a very old theme that has for generations been sadly marred in the handling. Human motives and impulses have so long been prescribed within the theatrical as distinguished from the natural or instinctive convention that i t is d iffic u lt to say what is false and what is true. I t is Howard's chief service to this play that along with an effort­ less craftsmanship and a sunny temper he brines a quick and infallible eye for human values.^

To Barrett Clark, the play is important because it established that

audiences were finally ready to appreciate human beings who were not

altogether white or black, good or bad, and that a playwright could

show men and women with "mixed motives" without resorting to the

novelist's methods.15 1924 this was something of a landmark--

not that stage characters had not behaved badly before but that

those who did now were treated with so much sympathy and understand­

ing. As Joseph Wood Krutch points out about the conflict in the play,

the dramatist set himself up perfectly to preach and proclaim:

What an opportunity--entirely neglected by Mr. Howard--to expound a paradoxical morality, to define Love, to explain the Case for the Un­ married Mother, and, in general, ^pater des bourgeois! But the explanation supplied by 66

Mr. Howard for these events is not intellectual at all. They become understandable and accept­ able purely in terms of the characters; convincing and satisfactory as a series of concrete situations which work themselves out in that way. The play, in other words, is not a play about ideas but a play about men and women, and the same may be said of all its author's best w o r k .16

One of the dissenting views of the play was Edmund Wilson's insistence that Amy and Tony would find i t impossible to put back together the pieces of their marriage that Amy necessarily broke into fragments. And an old husband and a young w ife, he f e l t , could not e sta b lish a successful relatio n sh ip . As he comments,

you are left with the not very reassuring prospect of a tragedy for the old man if his young wife does not remain fa ith fu l to him--as from what one has seen of her character there is no reason to believe she will--or of a tragedy for the wife if she does.*?

Most audiences, critics, and readers of the play, however, see no impending danger for the couple, and though it is not entirely true that everyone got what he wanted (except, perhaps, for Joe), it can be reasonably supposed that everyone got what he could accept.

Tony's love for Amy really undergoes no change from the time he sees her in the restaurant to the time that he begs her to stay on with him. His burst of rage in the last act is merely his conventional mind and emotions in action, or, as Elmer Rice would argue, his standardized conscience. On second thought he knows he cannot destroy his marriage for the sake of convention. Amy, however, does undergo a change. She accepts Tony at the beginning of the play merely for the security that comes with a home and a loving husband. 6?

By the last act she has cane to love him, and her main concern about her pregnancy is for him--not for herself or for the security she feels she must now necessarily lose. Notwithstanding Edmund Wilson's objection, there is no reason why Amy and Tony cannot live happily together for the rest of their lives.

Ned McCobb's D a u g h t e r *-** (1926) is straightforward realism and is not overly sentimental, but as a play it says nothing--except, perhaps, that it is possible for nice people to make bad money by bootlegging whiskey. Adultery occurs in this play but only as part of the plot machinery. Howard does not attempt to come to terms with the problem; he merely shows that George Callahan, the heroine's husband, is not only a thief and a blackmailer but an adulterer as well. (It seems that an unfaithful husband is able to secure promptly the disgust of a theater audience. Little or no other

evidence is needed to indicate that the character is a hopeless cad.)

Howard's Dodsworth^ (1934), a dramatization of the Sinclair

Lewis novel and one of Mantle's best plays of the year, does attempt

to come to terms with adultery. Because the playwright deliberately

focused his adaptation on this problem and at the same time ignored

other aspects of the novel, we may assume that his treatment of the

Dodsworth's marriage reflects something of his own views. Howard

presents, in this play, as in They Knew What They Wanted , a strong

sense of marriage--of marriage which can survive in spite of the in­

fidelity of one of its members. Of course the marriage of Sam and

Fran Dodsworth does not survive, but i t could have, had Fran not been 68 so consistently promiscuous or so consistently out of tune with everything her husband stands for. It is the lack of a spiritual bond between husband and wife, in fact, rather than infidelity which finally causes the dissolution of the marriage. The play, given wittier dialogue, might well have been written by Phillip Barry.

As the play opens, Fran Dodsworth has persuaded Sam to retire from his position as president and founder of Revelation Motor

Company, to give up their house in Zenith ("Middlewest"), and to accompany her on an extended tour of Europe. Sam is the stereo ­ type American businessman who is happy only while he is working, but

Fran wants to get away from Zenith before she grows old.Sam tells her he can be free enough at home. Fran says;

I'm thinking of my freedom, too! And I want the lovely things I've got a right to! In Europe a woman of my age is just getting to where men take a serious interest in her! And I just won’t be put on the shelf by my daughter when I can still dance better and longer than she can! I've got brains and, thank God, I've still got looks! And no one ever takes me for more than th irty - five--or thirty, even! I'm begging for life, Sam! No, I ’m not! I'm demanding it! (9).

Tubby Pearson, Sam's oldest friend, knows he is giving up every­

thing he loves for Fran's benefit. He tells him: "You're pretty

God damned near everything that I'm not and ought to be. But you're

the rear end of a horse about your wife!" (12).

On the boat to Europe Fran makes her first conquest--Major

Clyde Lockart, an Englishman. Later in the Dodsworths1 rooms at

the London Ritz Clyde kisses Fran and tells her he loves her. She 69 is pleased but dismisses the kiss and the comment. Clyde tells her that he thought he was doing what was expected of him. She is furious over this remark. He says: "If I may also offer you one bit of advice, give up undertaking things you aren't prepared to finish. It's evident they only lead you out of your depth. . ."

(48). She tells Sam about Clyde's advances, but Sam comments only that she has been flirtin g with him and that he must have had an excuse fi>r making a pass.

In Paris it is evident that Fran and Sam have grown distant from each other. Sam is a rather unhappy, homesick American to u rist while Fran does everything she can to " f i t in" to French society.

When Sam demands that they return to Zenith, she signs a lease rent­ ing a Swiss villa for the summer. She wants a last "fling"; he returns home alone. Next she makes a play for Arnold Isra e l, an

international financier, who wants her to "escape the whole way" by divorcing her husband. She refuses but allows him to come to her

room that night. When Sam wires her to come home, she refuses again.

He decides to meet her in Paris to confront her with her behavior with Israel. In the presence of the two of them he asks her: "I want to know if you're coming back to me as my wife or keeping him

on as your lover" (111). She doesn't want to divorce him or to come

back as his wife "just yet." He tells her: "Then you'll have to

divorce me and use your best judgment about him. Or I 'll divorce you

for adultery" (112). The argument becomes brutal. Fran says;"He's

made me feel like a bride as you never did. Not even in the 70 beginning" (113). But she gives in, and Sam arranges for them to leave Europe in a month.

After a few weeks Fran has made another conquest--young Kurt von Obersdorf, a poor Austrian nobleman. One night she maneuvers him into saying he would marry her if she were free. She te lls Sam she will divorce him. Two months later Sam is a broken man, living in Naples. There he meets an old friend, Edith Cortright, who in­ vites him to stay at her v illa on the Mediterranean, where he fa lls in love with her and is rejuvenated. Then Fran calls to say the

Baroness von Obersdorf refuses to allow her son to marry an older woman. She says she is dropping the divorce and wants Sam to take her home. The stage directions read: "When j_ Sam_/ looks up he is an old man again" (151). Edith doesn't want him to go: "I love you and she doesn't.' You're content with me.' You're miserable with her.'"

(152). But Sam goes to his wife.

The last scene, on board the boat preparing to sail,finds Fran already criticizing Zenith and their old friends. Suddenly Sam announces that he is not sailing with her. She is aghast and wonders what is to become of her. He doesn't know, but he does know that she has to stop "getting younger some day." She asks if he will ever get her out of his blood. He says: "Maybe not! But love's got to stop somewhere short of suicide" (161). We have every reason to believe that life with Fran in Zenith would be just that.

In an article called "His Voice Was American," BarrettClark says about Sidney Howard: 71

He wanted, of course, to be a famous and successful playwright, but he wanted still more to put into artistic shape some of his convictions about men and women, and perhaps clarify his not-too-complex philo­ sophical notions about the society of which he was a living part.

Howard's conviction seems to be that moral codes can be stretched so long as in the process an innocent person does not get broken.

Sidney Howard was not concerned with the problem of sexual moral­ ity to the extent that Elmer Rice was. In his other plays, for example, he does not deal with the problem at all. In fact it is difficult to find a pattern of interest in his plays. His first drama, Swords

(1921), is a melodrama set in the Italian Renaissance, The Silver Cord

(1926) treats a possessive mother and her neurotic love for her sons,

Yellow Jack (1934) is almost a documentary of the b attle of science against yellow fever, and Madam Will You Walk (1939) is a Faust-like treatment of a woman who, with the help of the devil, makes New York

City a pleasant place in which to live.

CLIFFORD ODETS

It should be recalled that the findings of Albert Ellis, cited earlier in this study, showed that American writing in general attack­ ed adultery and adulterers. Ellis does find, though, that at the same time attitudes which range from mild acceptance to wholehearted en­ dorsement of adultery are frequently expressed in American writing and perform ances.M ild acceptance is seen in Sidney Howard's They Knew

What They Wanted and Dodsworth and endorsement in the plays of Elmer

Rice. For wholehearted endorsement of adultery, we must turn to the plays of C lifford Odets. 72

In Awake and Sing^(1935), one of Mantle's best plays and a popular success of over 200 performances, Odets throws adultery In with social reform, in a plea for action and moral revolution. The dramatist has no less a thesis to tack on the wall in this play than he had in the earlier labor strike play Waiting for Lefty. The story treats the family of Myron and Bessie Berger and especially their son Ralph (with a "clean spirit"), who is trying to live in a world where there is too much struggle, to il, misery, and pain. The daughter, Hennie, has become pregnant and is not able to locate the father of her unborn child. The parents, in spite of the children's protest, plan to marry her off to an immigrant, Sam Feinschreiber, who is too naive to suspect anything. Moe Axelrod, a roomer at the

Bergers and a skeptic who lost a leg in the war, has had an affair e a rlie r with Hennie and would like to marry her. But he says:

I need a wife like a hole in the head. . . . What's to know about women, I know. Even if I ask her. She won't do it! A guy with one leg--it gives her the heebie-jeebies. 1 knew what she's looking for. An arrow-collar guy, a hero, but with a wad of jack. Only the two don't go together. But I got what it takes. . . plenty, and more where i t comes from. . . (58).

A year la te r Hennie is bored with Sam and the baby:

Twenty-one a week he brings in--a nigger don't have i t so hard I wore my fingers off on an Underwood for six years. For what? Now I wash baby diapers (67).

Sam is pretty much of a crybaby, especially when Hennie tells him in a moment of anger that he is not the father of her child. He runs to

Bessie,who assures him that Hennie doesn't mean what she says when 73 she is tired." Hennie sends her husband home alone that night so that she can sleep at her parents' house. By this time grandfather

Jacob has committed suicide so that young Ralph can use his $3)000 insurance money to escape from the money-grubbing family and "awake and sing." Hennie and Moe are drawn to each other again; he wants her to go away with him:

Come away. A certain place where it's moonlight and roses. We'll lay down, count stars. Hear the big oc€an making noise. You lay under the trees. Champagne flows like--(98).

Hennie doesn't love Sam or the baby, but she does not know what to do.

When she tries to appeal to God, Moe says:

Don’t look up there. Paradise, you're on a big boat headed south. No more pins and needles in your heart, no snake juice squirted in your arm. The whole world's green grass and when you cry it's because you're happy (99).

He uses the analogy of his leg: "The doctor said it--cut off your

leg tosave your life! And they done it--one thing to getanother"

(100). Ralph comes into the room and advises Hennie to do whatever

Moe proposed. They all decide that Bessie, who will "go on forever," can take the baby.

Most reviewers were not happy with what the play said about one’s responsibility to orthodox morality. Stark Young in his review

"Awake and Whistle at Least," objected to the girl and her lover going off together "upsetting meanwhile a whole social system." He commented:

Watching the last scene of "Awake and _Sing." 1 was unable to tell whether or not Odets_/ thought of Ik

value the reactions to life of people who asked of life so little that is valuable or profound; or whether, with his young man's final curtain, the dramatist is thinking of revolution as one more stage clich^ or as a pathetic canvas of possib ility on which passionate or starved youth can begin to draw the pattern of the life it desires for itself.^

Greenville Vernon, writing in Commonweal. saw the play as a parable of the revolution in morals and manners of the twentieth century:

The play cannot be defended on moral grounds, but it is none the less a story which bears only too clearly the marks of truth in a civilization in which moral standards are fast disintegrating. . . . "Awake and Sing" is a study of the old against the new, and though the dramatist's sympathy is evidently with the la tte r, he never preaches, and the triumph of the new cannot hide the fact that the faith which upheld the old has found nothing substantial to take its place.24

There is no doubt that Odets would have us revolt from conventional morality. In Awake and Sing the characters succeed in their revolt-- at least he offers us their optimism that they will succeed without giving us any reason why they should not--but in a later play he shows that with some people the marriage bond is so great that they are unable to break away.

Rocket to the Moon^ (1938) is another best play of the year, according to Mantle. It tells the story of Ben Stark, a middle-aged dentist who is married to a nagging wife, Belle. Ben would like to give up his rather poor practice and take a chance at the big time.

His father-in-law , Mr. Prince, has offered to buy new equipment for him if he w ill, but Belle, who has not spoken to her father for years, 75 flatly refuses to consent to the move because of the risk Involved in establishing a new practice. Ben gives in, as he always does.

Belle does not like his new secretary-assistant, Cleo Singer, either, or Rill Cooper, the other dentist who helps pay the office rent. She is used to giving orders at the office as well as at home. As Cleo remarks: "I thought Dr. Stark was such a nice man when 1 came here. But his wife just twists him around her little finger, like a spit curl" (41).

Mr. Prince gives Ben all kinds of advice. Structurally he serves the same purpose as old Jacob in Awake and Sing--to try to get the younger generation to do something, to act. He tells him:

"There are two kinds of marriages, Benny--where the husband quotes the wife, or where the wife quotes the husband. Fact? Fact!" (53).

His advice to Ben is:

Iceberg, listen . . . why don't you come up and see the world, the sea gulls and the ships to Europe? When did you look at another woman last? The year they put the buffalo nickel on the market? Why don't you suddenly ride away, an airplane, a boat! Take a rocket to the moon! Explode! What holds you back? You don't want to hurt B elle's feelings? You'll die soon enough--(61).

He thinks Ben should have an affair with Cleo so that he can live again. Ben does. But Frenchy, the foot doctor whose office is next door, warns the g irl:

Look,Cleo, for him there is sleep and day and work again. He's not a happy man. He spends his days trying to exhaust himself so he can fall asleep quick. Not that he told me this. . . . 1 seen it 76

with my two good eyes. Don't make trouble for him, Cleo. Don't take him over the coals. Unless you're serious, unless you love him. . . (150).

When Belle discovers the affair she demands that Ben fire "that dirty rag of a girl." For once he refuses to do as she asks. More­ over, it occurs to him that he can't live with Belle any longer. He tries to tell her how much his relationship with Cleo has meant to him, but she is frightened and refuses to listen:

But you don't love her! You had an a ffa ir, a ll rig h t, but you don't love her! The g irl was here a ll day. You were close together and you fe ll into that thing. I can forget i t , I can forget it, Ben. I'm your wife. It doesn't involve our whole relationship. We can have many happy years together. I 'll do anything you want. We’re young--we have our life together in common, our ten years. We can talk it out--we're civilized beings--I'll never mention it. We'll both forget it! We need each other, Ben (199).

Belle leaves so that he can decide. Ben feels so profound a sense of guilt and shame that he thinks his face is "twisted," especially when one of his patients tells him: "Don't I know yourtype?--A bourgeois balcony climber--married, prates of purity--gives tem­ perance lectures, but drinks and plays around" (223). The father- in-law, Mr. Prince, knows that Ben cannot break loose and wants

Cleo for himself. He te lls her;

What can he o ffer you? He loves you--his memoirs are written on his face. But I see a big chapter heading: "No Divorce." Why not? Ten years they're married. She runs his life like a credit manager. They lost a child together. . . they're attached underground by a hundred different roots. But if he left her--as he knows--could he leave his practice? 77

Never! Then you*d be a credit manager. . . . Buy why go on? He won't leave her. That needs courage, strength, and he's not strong (232).

Of course there are other forces operative on Ben besides his lack of courage and his puritan conscience. Jewish mores demand not so much that a husband be perfectly faithful (though the wife must be) but that he keep in mind at all times the sanctity and permanence of his marriage. Odets, as a revolutionary, is not interested in this, but his characters must come to terms with it. The sense of the sanctity of marriage causes Belle to forgive Ben's unfaith­ fulness very quickly; the same sense is responsible for Ben's agony when he thinks he cannot live with his wife any longer. He has violated a cultural code which exists on a deeper level than mere convention.

Cleo prefers to leave both Ben and Mr. Prince alone. She would like to marry Ben, but he is "a citizen of another country."

Ben is heartbroken because he really loves the girl, but now he feels something inside that he never felt before:

For years I sat here, taking things for granted, my wife, everything. Then ju s t for an hour my life was in a spotlight. . . . I saw myself c learly , realized who and what I was. I s n 't that a beginning? Isn't it? (243-244).

His curtain line is: "Sonofagun!. . . What I don’t know would fill a book!" (244). Similarly, what we do not know about Ben Stark's revelation or discovery would fill several pages, though most

reviewers were relieved to find Odets not explicitly preaching moral or social revolution. Implicitly, however, the idea of moral 78 revolution is evident.

Edmond Gagey comments in his book:

Through love, self-expression, and rebellion Odets' characters are driven to personal conversion in its intensity--which leads to full realization or to action.^6

Awake and Sing certainly leads to action and Rocket to the Moon to full realization, though the exact nature of the realization is ambiguous. The moral conservative can argue that it is Ben Stark's weakness which allows him to fa ll in love with his secretary and his strength which permits him to stay with his wife. The moral lib­ eral can argue with as much validity that Ben is strong in loving

Cleo Singer but weak in continuing his marriage with Belle. At any rate the usual Odets call to action is not present in the play; drama c ritic s liked Rocket to the Moon for this reason. The

Catholic World wondered:

Is it strength or is it weakness that keeps the dentist in bondage or would he have been more in bondage had he tried to be free? No one is secure in his or her philosophy. . . . It is the fumbling quality that both weakens the dramatic structure and strengthens the psy­ chology, but since Awake and Sing, Mr. Odets has added to his own tolerance of human nature and his understanding of it.

It is true that Odets has a better understanding of human nature in Rocket to the Moon, but I am not convinced that he is more tolerant of it. Mr. Prince, obviously Odets' spokesman, presents a fairly harsh indictment of his son-in-law--the same kind of in­ dictment raised against Mr. Zero in The Adding Machine. That the 79 dramatist did not accomplish what he set out to do in the play is thus explained by R. Baird Shuman, who has studied an earlier version of the play:

Odets had originally intended that the play's hero, Ben Stark, be portrayed as a meek, in­ significant dentist who is ravaged with love for his receptionist, a young woman of question­ able mentality but of distinct physical attractiveness. Through this love, Ben was to have grown and matured beyond his normal expectations, and would, as a result, have emerged as the central character in the play. As the play finally developed, the central character is the childish little romantic, Cleo; and the theme, rather than being one of growth through love, is one depicting the extreme difficulty of finding love or anything ever approximating i t in modern society.

In Odets' terms, the in stitu tio n of marriage and the bonds which hold husband and wife together do not make for en tirely satisfactory relationships. We have seen Elmer Rice argue in a sim ilar manner.

It is true that the financial depression of the thirties de­ creased the number of divorces in America and in American drama, as Koster found,^9 but for as radical a dramatist as Clifford

Odets, these s ta tis tic s have l i t t l e v alid ity . C ritics, however, allowed the moral conservation of the period to color their inter­ pretations of the play. Grenville Vernon wrote:

Mr. Clifford Odets, however much the statement may offend him, has yet to show himself a dramatist of ideas. This is why his latest play is one of his most successful--he does not attempt to preach any philosophy or social panacea, but simply to tell a story of a man who though in love with another woman refuses to divorce his wife.^O 60

Mr. Vernon misses the point of the play. To say that Ben

Stark refuses to divorce his wife implies a conscious choice on his part--a weighing of facts, of considering advantages and dis­ advantages. The fact is that he is unable to divorce her and live with Cleo Singer; he is bound tightly by conventional moral stan­ dards or as Elmer Rice would argue, by a standardized conscience.

Thornton Wilder misses the point too when he says; "I am not in­

terested in such ephemeral subjects as the adulteries of dentists."31

Clifford Odets has always been interested in mistreated or exploited people like Ben Stark. Till The Day I Die (1935), for example, deals with the mistreatment of Communist agents by the

Nazis; Golden Boy (1937), with Joe Bonaparte, who gives up his dream of becoming a violinist to earn a living by prizefighting; and

The Country Girl (1950), with Georgia Elgin who, as badly treated by her husband as she is, decides that she cannot leave him. Odets

is concerned with social protest, and conventional sexual morality

is to him just another social evil to revolutionize. It is not a main motif in his work as it is, for example, in the plays of

Eugene O'Neill.

EUGENE O'NEILL

In direct contrast to the moral radicalism of Clifford Odets

stands the moral conservatism of Eugene O'Neill, the only major

writer of serious plays between the wars who insists upon the

established conventions. As a Roman Catholic, separated as he was 81 from the mother church, he never abandoned the stern morality of his religious background. In 1928 The Catholic World said of

O'Neill:

In striking contrast to most present-day authors he has always had a clear-cut conception of the division between right and wrong--and a very keen perception of the tangibility of evil.-^

The comment is especially significant in that it was written several years before Days Without End, O'Neill's play of religious con­ version, and at a time when most critics were damning O’Neill for the echoes of hate and violence found in his plays.

Another insight into O'Neill's plays, also written before Days

Without End, indicates that some drama editors of the 1930's under­ stood O'Neill better than Eric Bentley does today. In an article called '‘Eugene O'Neill and Religion," published in The Christian

Century, Fred Eastman says;

Wherever, in the souls he has revealed, he has found God and the Devil struggling against each other he has nearly always found the Devil winning out. He does not rejoice that the Devil wins, but that is what he sees and so he records i t . This is not to say that the struggles he portrays issue in immorality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He is the sternest of m oralists. The censor boards, which have ex­ cluded his plays from certain cities have been exceedingly shortsighted. Jonathan Edwards never preached hell-fire with more passion than Eugene O'Neill. Over and over again the doctrine that "the wages of sin is death" is illustrated in the lives of his characters.33

Mr. Eastman was delighted when only a few months later O'Neill and his hero, John Loving, soundly trounced the Devil in his 1934 play. 82

At that time, the other reviewers either dismissed Days Without End as not to their taste or re-evaluated their attitude toward O'Neill's work. Stark Young, who did not dismiss the play, said:

To the real defenders of O'Neill his basic appeal has never been hate, social attack or violent themes: i t has been the intense re a lity of lif e 's impact on the w riter: and what they have loved most in him has been not the attack but the human loyalty and thwarted passion for harmony, love and full life that was imp licit.34

Many of O'Neill's plays deal in one way or another with illicit sexual passion. In Beyond the Horizon (1920), this passion is re­ sponsible for sending Andrew Mayo, the brother who is most suited to farm life, off to sea to endure a life of drudgery, and for destroying the other brother, an idealist and adventurer, who attempts to run the family farm. In Anna Christie (1921), Anna has fallen into sin as a prostitute but is able to stop herself before she is to tally destroyed, when she fa lls in love with a sailor and vows to leave her old life behind her.

Within the period between the wars, O'Neill wrote five plays which tre at the theme of adultery--two of which, Desire Under the

Elms and Mourning Becomes E le c tra , do not comment on the problem of infidelity but rather concentrate on the punishment of those who are guilty of adultery. The failure to comment on the problem limits somewhat their usefulness to this study; but the plays will, nevertheless, be treated b riefly inasmuch as they do comment on the dramatist's view of infidelity. Furthermore, the adultery as well as the violence of the plays frequently caused the moral guardians of 83 some cities to forbid production. Desire Under the Eims35 (1924), one of Mantle's best plays and one which ran for more than 200 performances, is a case in point.

The play can be briefly summarized as it does not deal with the problem of adultery per se so much as adultery and incestuous desire producing complete decay and destruction. Ephraim Cabot, age seventy-six, has just taken a third wife, Abbie, age thirty- five. His two sons by his f ir s t wife are convinced by Eben, of

Ephraim's second marriage, to sell their interest in the farm and move West. He tells them that with a new wife they must wait a

long time to gain control of the farm. When Abbie arrives, she and Eben begin battling immediately over ownership of the property a fte r Ephraim dies. To establish her right to the farm, Abbie con­ vinces Ephraim that they must have a son and heir. He agrees, but

she seduces Eben and becomes pregnant with his child. After the original seduction,which is mere lust, Abbie falls in love with

Eben and carries on a torrid affair with her husband's son.

After the child is born, Ephraim out of hatred tells Eben that he has been out-manuevered: he is now dispossessed, by Abbie's plan, of any right to the estate. Eben thinks he has been double-

crossed and threatens to leave. Abbie, who cannot stand the

thought of losing him kills the baby to prove her love. Eben is

shocked and goes to the sheriff. While he is gone Abbie te lls

Ephraim the truth about the baby's death and its real father. When 84 the authorities arrive, Eben, too much in love with Abbie to part with her, claims that he helped plan the murder. Both are taken into custody while Ephraim, a ll alone, makes plans to burn the farm.

It is convenient here to neglect the play in terms of Freud­ ian psychology. What is left, then, as a single work of art, says very little about the moral problem of adultery, but as part of the total O'Neill canon, the play is consistent with one of the dramatist's favorite theses: the price of adultery is total de­ struction. This aspect of the thesis was frequently overlooked by contemporary audiences and reviewers, who preferred to condemn the playwright for treating lust and violence on stage. "'Records' of a

Tragedy," a contemporary article which appeared in the Literary

D igest, ironically commented:

O'Neill's play is collecting records. "Desire Under the Elms" has been forbidden a London production by the British censor, perhaps the first time such a distinction has been given an American play in the British capital. In New York the play is well past its three hundredth performance, tho there are said to be other American centers which would follow London rather than New York. Such a situation makes the history of this play noteworthy, even tho its theme and character, which is a treatment of adultery and murder, render the play abhorrent to many sensitive n a t u r e s . 36

The author of the article, whose name is not provided, takes great delight in quoting from the damnation given the play by the San

Francisco Bulletin:

The story belongs to criminal records rather than to dramatic literature. Not that crime may not be a le­ gitimate theme of the stage. Without murder there would have been very few of the masterpieces of tragedy, 85

but murder is the most respectable of the offenses in this play. It is filled with lust in its most de­ graded form, and the theme is as repellent as that of "The Cenci."37

Some c r itic s , however, did see the play as a comment on the destructive power of illicit sexual passion. Thomas H. Dickinson says of the characters of Desire Under the Elms:

These are hungry men and women. They are hungry for the beauty of the sky, for gold and distant places; they are hungry for home, for companionship, for mother love, for love of child, but all their hunger is dominated and overcome by sex passion. And when they get food they gorge themselves and die.

In Welded39 (1924) O'Neill deals exclusively with the problem of adultery and married love. The play tells the story of Michael

Cape and his wife Eleanor, who have been married five years. He

is a playwright, she an actress in his plays. According to her, he is always talking about "Another Grand Ideal for our marriage."

Needless to say, his ideal is never attained by their marriage, which is filled with violent quarrels. Michael's first night home

after a period of writing in the country ends in a violent quarrel

because Eleanor spoils her husband's passionate mood by answering

the doorbell. After the visitor, John, a producer-friend of

Eleanor's, leaves, they quarrel bitterly. They are cruel when they

fight-so cruel that Eleanor lies to her husband and te lls him that

John was her lover while he was in the country. Michael almost

strangles her to death upon hearing that;

Gone! Ail our beauty gone! And you don't love him! You lie! You did this out of hatred for me! You dragged our ideal in the gutter--with 86

delight! And you pride yourself you've killed ita do you, you actress; you barren soul? But 1 tell you only a creator can really destroy! And I will! I will! I won't give your hatred the satisfaction of seeing our love live on in me--to torture me! I'll drag it lower than you! I ' l l stamp it into the v ile st depths! I ' l l leave i t dead! I ' l l murder it--and be free! (460).

Both of them storm out of the apartment. Michael goes to a

hotel room with a prostitute and Eleanor to John's apartment. Neither

can go through with adultery. They both return to their apartment where Eleanor says they must release each other, not by hate but by

love. She starts to leave but turns back at the door. The stage

directions are:

They stare into each other's eyes. It Is as if now by a sudden flash from within they recognize them­ selves, shorn of all the ideas, attitudes, cheating gestures which constitute the vanity of personality. Everything, for this second, becomes simple for them-- serenely unquestionable. It becomes impossible that they should ever deny life, through each other, again (487-488).

They admit that they will hate again and torture and tear each other,

but that their marriage will fail with joy because they love. The

final stage directions read:

He moves close to her and his hands reach out for hers. For a moment as th eir hands touch they form together one cross. Then their arms go about each other and their lips meet (489).

The play is important for several reasons. First, O'Neill has

made the sexual act one which can only be completely fulfilled

within the bond of marriage. He implies, especially in the failure

of Michael to consummate his relationship with the prostitute, that 87 sexual intercouse Is by nature a spiritual as well as physical act and that the complete exposure of the ego demanded by sexual re­

lations is possible only by married couples. In O'Neill's terms the sexual act is the Holy Communion of marriage, hence the religious symbolism in the closing scene and his treatment throughout the play of sexual love as sacramental in nature. Doris Falk, in Eugene

O'Neill and the Tragic Tension says about the forming of the cross

in the final scene;

In this traditionally connotative blending of sexual and religious imagery O'Neill was trying to convey the essence of Welded. The passion on the cross unites within itself the pain and sacrifice demanded by love, and the resurrection is love i t s e l f . ^

W. David Sievers, in his excellent study, Freud on Broadway;

A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama, comments on the

cross and on the dynamic tension of Michael and Eleanor's relation­

ship ;

They each seek another person--Michae1, a prostitute, whom he ends up calling "sister" and kissing tenderly on the forehead; Eleanor goes to an older man, a father-image. Each returns, however, realizing that they are welded inevitably together, that their am­ bivalent h o s tility and love are but reverse sides of the same coin. At the end when the husband leads her upstairs there is no interruption; they join their outstretched arms to form a cross, a symbolic gesture suggesting the unconscious association of sexual union with religious sanctity.^

The title of the play, then, is significant. Michael and Eleanor are

held together by all the underground cables that Ben and Belle Stark

of Odets' Rocket to the Moon find they are held by, with this

difference: neither can surrender to the other, and complete unity 88 comes only with the sexual act. They feel compelled to fight each other constantly but never to win that fight. Doris Falk says of their relationship:

Both characters are torn by a need for freedom and self-fulfillment on one hand, and a need for love on the other. Their mutual dread of being possessed by or absorbed in each other leads to a series of battles, culminating in a final quarrel and the decision to "kill" the love which binds them to each other. Their attempt to do so is a failure, and the couple come back together determined to accept their relationship as inevitable. Pride may be their sin, but is is also their redemption; it represents the separate personality each must be in order to live. The pain and possessiveness of love are only the opposite masks of its joy and fulfillment, parts of the whole, parts of "unity.

Barrett Clark, in An Hour of American Drama, makes the comment

that year by year the boundary lines of American drama are being ex­

tended so that the theater can be used for "whatever purpose the

artist sees fit."^ He goes on to cite the case of Strange Inter­

lude mentioned ea rlier a9 having been banned in Boston. Certainly

O'Neill's 1928 play would have been impossible to produce a decade

earlier, but by 1928 it was possible to speak frankly and deal

honestly with the problem of marital infidelity. The play is not

only staggering in its length (two hundred pages of text in nine

acts, taking over four hours on stage) but also in its use of in­

terior monologue--of allowing the action on stage to "freeze" while

a character speaks his psychological thoughts.

Strange Interlude is the story of Nina Leeds' adulterous affair

with Ned Darrell and the consequence of their sin. Although O'Neill 89 provides Nina originally with a worthy purpose for committing the sin of infidelity--to provide her and her husband with a child and to insure the emotional and spiritual health of each--he shows that the act arouses a latent passion within the lovers and ultimately is destructive. O'Neill's thesis is that the sexual act is never permissible outside the marriage bond, and this, of course, changes the complexion of the play. Later, we shall see Phillip Barry treat the same situation in the opposite way; in Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Barry shows that In fid elity is sometimes necessary. O 'N eill, as a moral conservative, is limited by his orthodox bias.

As the play opens, Nina is despondent over the death of her fianc^ Gordon Shaw, who has been killed in the war. She especially regrets that they did not consummate their relationship before

Gordon left for overseas, but her father, a college professor, had convinced Gordon that it would be unfair for Nina to be married to a man who might not return to her. Nina feels she has been unneces­ sarily deprived of her sexual and reproductive satisfaction, At the end of Act 1 she departs to become a nurse in a hospital for wounded soldiers where, we later learn, she gives her body to the men

in the hospital to atone for her "moral" behavior with Gordon. In

Act II, a year later, she returns home because of the death of her

father. Charlie Marsden, a prissy novelist who is an old family

friend, is there to greet her. Charlie loves Nina, but he lives in

such a protected, false, and sexless world that he does not stand 90 much of a chance as a suitor. Nina is accompanied by Sam Evans, a college friend of Gordon's, who worships the memory of his more virile classmate as much as Nina does herself. Then Dr. Ned Darrell arrives, a friend of Nina's from the hospital, who tells Charlie of Nina's promiscuity and advises that Charlie encourage her to marry Sam. Charlie agrees to help.

In Act I II Nina and Sam are married and are v isitin g Sam's mother. Nina is pregnant, though she has not revealed this fact to her husband. Mrs. Evans senses her secret and warns her that the baby must not come to life because insanity is congenital in the

Evans family, though Sam does not know this. Moreover, the mother insists that it would prove dangerous were Sam to find out. Nina does not know what to do, especially since the baby is needed for the couple's emotional health. Mrs. Evans says;

There must be a way--somehow. I remember when I was carrying Sam, sometimes I'd forget I was a wife, I'd only remember the child in me. And then I used to wish I'd gone out deliberate in our first year, without my husband knowing, and picked a man, a healthy male to breed by, same's we do with stock, to give the man I loved a healthy child. And if I didn't love that other man nor him me where would be the harm? Then God would whisper: "It'd be a sin, adultery, the worst sin!" But after He'd gone I'd argue back again to myself, then we'd have a healthy child, I needn't be afraid! And maybe my husband would feel without ever knowing how he felt it, that I wasn't afraid and that child wasn't cursed and so he needn't fear and I could save him. But I was too afraid of God then to have ever done it! (163).

Nina considers finding a father for her child while she is re­

covering from her secret abortion, especially since Sam feels guilty 91 because he has not, he thinks, made her pregnant. She thinks;

. . . i t seems cowardly. . . to betray poor Sam. . . and vile to give myself. . .without love or desire. . . and yet I've given myself to men before without a thought just to give them a moment’s happiness. . . can't I do that again? . . . when it's a case of Sam's happiness? . . . and my own? . . . (72).

When she decides to go through with Mrs. Evans's suggestion, Nina selects Ned Darrell for her partner. She mentions her plan to him as if she were talking about a friend and were just herself acting as an intermediary between doctor and patient. The real problem of the whole plan, she says, is that it is morally wrong, i t isadultery, and i t makes the woman feel ashamed. Ned says;

Wrong! Would she rather see her husband wind up in an insane asylum? Would she rather face the prospect of going to pot mentally, morally, physically herself through year after year of devilling herself and him? Really, Madame, if you can't throw overboard a ll such i r ­ relevant moral ideas, I ' l l have to give up this case here and now! (87).

The plan, however, does not work out exactly asMrs. Evans had outlined--Nina and Ned fall desperately in love and continue with their project even after Nina has become pregnant. For Ned, the affair begins to affect his work as well as his conscience. He thinks;

Sometimes I almost hate her!. . . if it wasn't for her I'd have kept my peace of mind. . . no good for anything lately, damn it!. . . but it's idiotic to feel guilty, . . . if Sam only didn't tru st me! . . . (96) .

By Act VI the child, named Gordon a fter Nina's f ir s t love, has been 92 born. The change in Sam from self-conscious in fe rio rity to de­ termined self-confidence is remarkable. Charlie is still in love with Nina, who continues to refer to him as "dear old Charlie,"

Charlie resents it; he thinks:

Dear old Rover, nice old doggie, we've had him for years, he's so affectionate and faithful but he's growing old, he's getting cross, w e'll have to get rid of him soon! . . . (120).

With Ned's arriv al from Europe, Nina feels complete in her circle of male admirers;

My three men! . . . I feel their desires converge in me! . . . to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb. . . and am whole. . . they dissolve in me, their life is my life. . . I am pregnant with the three! . . . husband! . . . lover! . . . father! . . . and the fourth man! . . . l i t t l e man! . . . l i t t l e Gordon! . . . he is mine tool . . . that makes it perfect! . . . (135).

Act VII takes place eleven years later. Nina and Ned can now

only stand each other for short spans of time, after which he goes

away to dabble in biology as a kind of scientific dilettante. He

tells Nina his life's work is to rust--nicely and unobtrusively;

My work was finished twelve years ago. As I believe you know, I ended i t with an experiment which resulted so successfully that any further meddling with human lives would have been superfluous! (140).

Little Gordon, now eleven years of age, subconsciously realizes that

Ned is his father and rival for his mother's love and shows his

hatred in almost violent ways. The adulterous affair has already

taken its toll in the bitterness apparent in the household. Ten 93 years later all of the men have more or less turned against Nina--

even Gordon is withdrawing his love in order to give it to the girl

he planB to marry. Nina and Ned are especially b itte r toward each

other, so much so that Nina feels she has been punished s a tis ­

factorily for her sin of infidelity. She thinks;

Hy old lover. . . how well and young he looks. . . now we no longer love each other at all. . . out account with God the Father is settled. . . after­ noons of happiness paid for with years of pain. . . love, passion, ecstasy. . . in what a far-off life were they live! . . . the only living life is in the past and future. . . the present is an inter­ lude. . . strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living! . . . (165).

She and Ned, in fact, cannot even remain friends. She attempts at

this point to tell Gordon's fiancee what Mrs. Evans told her about

congenital insanity in the family. Her story, of course, would be

untrue, but she is desperate enough to attempt to keep one of her

four men. Ned interrupts her before she can lie to the girl. At

this point Sam suffers a fatal heart attack.

In the last act Gordon has definite wedding plans, Sam is dead,

and Nina and Ned can never recapture their lost love. Only Charlie

is left, good, old, passionless Charlie, who asks Nina to marryhim.

For hismany years of loyal and devoted service, she will become his wife.

The play, of course, owes much to Freudian psychology in the

conflicts it presents and in the probing nature of its technique of

in terio r monologue. Elmer Rice, in The Living Theatre, says of the 94 influence of Freud:

The emphasis placed by Freud on the sexual motivation of behavior prompted a searching re-examination of human character and relationships. The growing con­ viction that things are seldom as they seem, and that every l i t t l e movement has a meaning of its own, re­ sulted in an ever-widening search for concealed motives and suppressed desires.^

That O'Neill was not consistently profound in the psychological asides is not as important, it seems to me, as the fact that he was able to reach a psychological depth heretofore untouched by American dramatists. There are few women characters in our drama whom we know as well as we know Nina Leeds. Francis R. Bellamy in a review of Strange Interlude saw something of her complexity:

In particular, it is a play of woman--possessive woman; four-sided woman. In this case, a pitiful woman because, while outwardly she is a devil who ruins four males by tying them to her with the tentacles of her split emotions, inwardly she is an infinitely tragic human being struggling to attain some kind of emotional wholeness, same unification--a thing which is impossible to her, because her real lover is dead forever and only her ideal remains.46

The Catholic World commented that Nina Leeds would be "beyond

forbearance" in the hands of anyone but Lynn Fontanne, who played

the part, and that even then the actress is unable to make Nina

"other than despicable as the evening goes on."^ Outlook said;

You cannot escape the reality of these people. You may call Nina Leeds ero tic , a pathological case, unfairly dealt with, or merely a composite picture of all women struggling to find and express her emotional necessities--needing father, lover, husband, son; being in turn daughter, prostitute, wife, mistress, mother. But the reality is soul-shaking; and the action compelling.^® 95

Critical comment on the play is concerned mostly with the

character of Nina and the device of in te rio r monologue. Of

O'Neill's morality or of the moral implications of the play little

is said, but the dramatist's point is obvious; thou shalt not

commit adultery. When the moral guardians of Boston felt they did

not need whatever O'Neill had to say in Strange Interlude, the ab­

surdity of their censorial action is apparent; and strange as it may seem, O'Neill was often criticized for the lack of positive moral comment in his plays. Strange Interlude, however, in spite

of its nearly five hours on stage, beginning in the afternoon and

continuing after a dinner intermission, ran for a total of 426

performances and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Although Nina Leeds suffers considerably for her sin of

adultery, her misery never reaches the point that members of the

Mannon family suffer in Mourning Becomes Electra^ (1931). The

play, a modern treatment of the Oresteian story, is one which te lls

of complete decay and destruction. To summarize the story briefly,

Christine Mannon, wife to Ezra and mother to Lavinia and Orin, is

having an affair with Captain Adam Brant. Lavinia discovers her

mother's unfaithfulness and threatens to expose her to her father,

returning soon from the Civil War. When he does arrive, Christine

tells him herself, then poisons him so that she can run away with

Brant. Lavinia discovers this too and tries to convince her brother

of the murder and adultery. He refuses to believe either story until

he and his sister follow their mother to Brant one night. After 96

Christine leaves, Orin kills Brant and tortures his mother with what he has done. She k ills herself out of grief for Brant's loss, and Orin eventually kills himself for his complicity in his mother's suicide.Lavinia is left to await the punishment as the last

Mannon.

The summary necessarily neglects the Oedipal and Electral com­ plexes of Orin and Lavinia, which O'Neill uses as a modern counterpart to the Greek Furies. Although the complexes have nothing to do with

O'Neill's treatment of adultery, they are indicative of his great interest in sexual passion as a destructive force. Mourning Becomes

Electra ran for 150 performances despite the critics who, for the most p art, decried the violence and decadence inherent in the theme.

H. S. Canby called his review "Scarlet Becomes Crimson" and said;

This is the kind of alternative that Byron used to offer a shuddering Europe. It was excess then, it is excess now. The dramatist has tortured his situation until it becomes an abnormality, and his tragedy suffers from the law of diminishing returns. I submit that by every literary and historical test this is decadence, the sensationalism of decadence, the reversals of decadence by which the recessive abnormalities of character become the mainsprings of the plot.50

The critics were no more enthusiastic about Days Without End^l

(1934), in which the main character destroys his baser self, saves his marriage, and undergoes religious conversion. In this play,

O'Neill becomes explicit about the punishment for marital infidelity, though John Loving is able to stop himself on the road to complete destruction. In an interesting experimental technique O'Neill has 97 two characters form the complete John Loving: John, handsome businessman and would-be-novelist, and Loving, his ugly alter ego.

The stage directions indicate that Loving wears a mask which re­ produces John's facial features but which represents "the death mask of a John who has died with a sneer of scornful mockery on his

lips" (16). Although John and Loving converse, none of the other characters sees Loving, and when the alter ego speaks, to the other

characters i t is as if John himself has spoken.

As the play opens, John is obviously distressed over an act of

adultery he has committed. At the office he is visited by his uncle,

Father Baird, a Roman Catholic priest. John invites him home to meet his wife Elsa. At home, meanwhile, Elsa is being visited by

Lucy Hillman, the woman with whom John has had an a ffa ir. Lucy te lls

Elsa that everyone knows her husband Walter "chases" but what is not

known is that Walter gave her equal liberty to indulge her sexual

whims. Lucy explains:

Yes, I went in for a little fleeting adultery. And I must say, as a love substitute or even a pleasur­ able diversion, it's greatly overrated (68).

Elsa is shocked by the behavior of her friend and adds that she is

glad she did not "disfigure" herself when she found that her first

husband was unfaithful to her. Lucy says:

You hit it when you say disfigure. That's how I've felt ever since. Cheap! Ugly! As if I 'd deliberate­ ly disfigured myself. And not only myself--the man-- and others I wouldn't hurt for anything in the world-- i f I was in my right mind. But I wasn't (69). 98

She then tells Elsa that when her husband left with another woman at a party, she picked out a man to seduce for revenge on her husband. Lucy asks Elsa what she would do If John were unfaithful.

Elsa is Indignant at first but then explains that John is an old- fashioned romantic idealist about love and marriage:

I know he loves me. I know he knows how much I love him. He knows what that would do to me. I t would kill forever all my faith in life--all truth, all beauty, all love! I wouldn't want to live! (72).

She explains John's ideal of marriage:

He said no matter if every other marriage on earth were rotten and a lie , our love could make ours into a true sacrament--sacrament was the word he used— a sacrament of faith in which each of us would find the completest self-expression in making our union a beautiful thing. You see, all this was what I had longed to hear the man I loved say about the spiritual depth of his love for me--what every woman dreams of hearing her lover say, I think (73-73).

John (and Loving) come home, and for a moment they are alone with Lucy. John knows that the night of their affa ir she was reveng­ ing herself on Walter. Lucy wonders on whom he was revenging himself. Loving answers; "Who knows? Perhaps on love. Perhaps, in my soul, I hate love!" (79). Lucy tells him not to hate her but to hate himself. John answers: "As if I didn't! Good God, if you only knew!" (80). He decides he must tell Elsa himself to save her

from the humiliation of hearing about his adventures through gossip, but he cannot bring himself to tell. John calls himself a "God­

damned rotten swine." Loving agrees and recommends suicide. John

pleads with his alter ego to let him alone. 99

That night John (and Loving) te ll Elsa and Father Baird about

John's novel, obviously autobiographical, which deals with the loss of faith, with finding love,and with the main character's secret fear;

Yes, he—he came to be afraid of his happiness. His love made him feel at the mercy of that mocking Something he dreaded. And the more peace and security he found in his w ife's love, the more he was haunted by fits of horrible foreboding--the recurrent dread that she might die and he would be left alone again, without love. So great was the force of this obcession at times that he felt caught in a trap, desperate--(98).

Then he tells how his character was unfaithful to his wife. The storyis Identical to the one Lucy told Elsa earlier. Loving breaks into the story and sneers;

As for the adultery itself, the truth is that this poor fool was making a great fuss about nothing—and act as meaningless as that of one fly with another, of equal importance to life! (102).

Elsa tells John, who she thinks uttered the statement, that he is disgusting. John continues with the plot;

Well I -- I know you can imagine the h ell he went through from the moment he came to himself and realized the vileness he had been guilty of. He couldn't forgive himself--and that's what his whole being now cried out for--forgiveness! (103).

John asks Elsa if the wife could have forgiven him. When she answers negatively, John says that in the novel the wife dies of pneumonia.

Elsa, who has been ill and who knows that the "character" is John, goes out for a walk in the cold and rain.

When she returns from her walk she talks of John and Lucy; 100

She must have been laughing at me for a fool, sneering to herself about my stupid faith in you. And you gave her that chance--you! You made our love a smutty joke for her and every one like her--you whom I loved so! And all the time I was loving you, you were only wait­ ing for this chance to kill that love, you were hating me underneath, hating our happiness, hating the ideal of our marriage you had given me, which had become a ll the beauty and truth of life to me! (123).

Then she collapses and is carried to bed. John tries to pray for her

recovery, but Loving mocks him. One week later Elsa is near death,

and John is almost insane from accusations made by Loving that he murdered his wife. Finally he goes to the church, in spite of Loving's protests, to see the cross again. Just as he leaves, Elsa comes out

of her coma and says she w ill forgive him. At the church John asks

for mercy and forgiveness as Loving slowly weakens and dies. The

stage directions read;

John Loving--he, who had been only John--remains standing with his arms stretched up to the Cross, an expression of mystical exaltation on his face. The corpse of Loving lies at the foot of the Cross, like a cured cripple's testimonial offering in a shrine (156).

The noble part of John triumphs finally over the base in human nature,

and John returns, penitent, to Elsa, who is forgiving.

It is convenient here to refer to reviews of the play which

appeared in The Christian Century and The Catholic World--periodicals

which dealt for the most part with the moral and theological im­

plications of the drama. Other reviewers and critics, Joseph Wood

Krutch for example, objected to the play's treatment of "casual

adultery" as symbol and religious conversion as a reality. Krutch 101

said;

One difficulty is that Mr. O'Neill has not solved the notoriously hard problem of making virtue attra ctiv e , and that the pure woman appears only as a dull perfec­ tion. Another and more serious one Is that the fable seems hardly relevant to any discussion of that "sickness of today" which always before has concerned him so deeply. We may grant that this sickness In­ volves a loss of faith and a sense of sin; but the faith we lack Is something more inclusive than the kind of faith we lose when our prayers are not answered, and a casual adultery will hardly stand for the most characteristic of our s i n s . 52

To The Christian Century the play was a "mirror held up to the

to struggles of our own souls";to The Catholic World, in the judg­ ment of "all normally moral and religious persons," it was O'Neill’s best work thus f a r . 54- The latter reviewer, a priest, was primarily

concerned with what O'Neill said about adultery. The woman sitting

behind him in the theater objected to Elsa's revulsion at unfaith­

fulness-- that adultery was not significant enough to warrant the

decay of John Loving or the almost suicidal walk by Elsa into the rain.

He said:

The woman behind us doubtless considered Elsa's sick repulsion ridiculous--perhaps affected. One may in­ deed feel that adultery is a peccadillo, or a morally neutral action like taking a drink, but be it said for the information of the lady in F3 that there still are persons in this world who consider adultery a calamity and that to them the anguish of John and Elsa is not absurd but only too genuinely tragic. To John and Elsa adultery was horrible because their marriage was, as Elsa explains to Lucy, a "sac­ rament." Of course that view of marriage is, to those who don't believe in the soul and hence in the sp iritu al nature of men and women, only one more "ancient super­ stitio n . "55 102

We have already noted Joseph Wood Krutch's objection to adultery as symbol and the woman in F3's objection to adultery as sufficient cause for decay. W. David Sievers, however, in Freud on

Broadway quotes from an explanation by Dr. Martin W. Peck, a psychoanalyst, on why devoted husbands like John experiment in in­ fidelity. In terms of medical information, O'Neill seems to put forward in Days Without End not only a personal conviction but a scientific truth as well. The psychological explanation reads;

In his youth death had rudely deprived him of parental love. To his anxious mind, a happy marriage brought with it the danger that this early sorrow and anguish would be repeated. On the basis of well established medical psychology, this sense of danger precipitated the hatred which may be understood in the nature of self-defense against a new injury.56

Virgil Geddes says in an article on O'Neill that we had no dramatist worthy of the name before O'Neill because drama, which grows out of the cultural conflicts of a people, had to wait until our instincts, ideas, and mentalities coordinated and unified against one another. What he has in mind, I think, is what Max Lerner has

called the great difference between our professed and our operative moral codes. Both critics agree that the drama makes a worthy con­

tribution to American thought. Geddes says;

We are beginning, in America, to feel those problems which can be met fairly only through approaches to the mind such as the drama offers. And with this we are beginning to realize that the concerns of the artist's mind are striking nearer and nearer our growing needs; that the artistic relation to the scheme of things is more and more a major o n e .57 103

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER I I I

1-Elraer Rice, The Adding Machine (New York: S, French, 1923).

^Ludwig Lewisohn, "Creative I r o n y The Nation, CXVI (April 4, 1923), 399.

^Edmund Wilson J r ., "The Theatre," The D ial, LXXIV (May 1923), 527.

4Elmer Rice, Street Scene (New York: S. French, 1929).

SElmer Rice, Counsellor-At-Law (New York; S. French, 1931).

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Counsellor-At-Law," The Catholic World, CXXXIV (January 1932), 470.

^Elmer Rice, The Left Bank (New York: S. French, 1931).

^Francis Fergusson, "The New Group and Others," The Book­ man, LXXIV (November 1931), 302.

^Joseph Wood Krutch, American Drama Since 1918 (New York; Random House, 1939).

lOsidney Howard, They Knew What They Wanted (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925).

1LQuinn, I I, 229.

12Joseph Wood Krutch, "Sidney Howard, Storyteller," Theatre Arts Monthly, XLI (February 1957), 32.

l^ciark, "His Voice Was American," p. 30.

l^Dickinson, pp. 302-303.

l^Clark, Hour, p. 103.

l^Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Dramatic Variety of Sidney Howard," The Nation, CXXXVII (September 13, 1933), 294.

l^Edmund Wilson, "Comedy, Classical and American," Theatre Arts Monthly, IX (February 1925) , 78.

l^Sidney Howard, Ned McCobb’s Daughter (New York: S. French, 1931) . 104

Sidney Howard, S inclair Lewie’s Dodsworth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and C o., 1934).

^®Barrett H. Clark, "His Voice Was American," Theatre Arts Monthly. XXXIII (April 1949), 27.

2lEllis, p. 42.

^Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing. In Six Plays of Clifford Odets (New York: The Modern Library, 1939).

23stark Young, "Awake and Whistle at Least," The New Republic, LXXXII (March 13, 1935), 134.

24Grenville Vernon, "Awake and Sing." Commonweal. XXI (March, 15, 1935), 570.

25ciifford Odets, Rocket to the Moon (New York: Random House, 1939).

^Gagey, p. 173.

27Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Rocket to the Moon." The Catholic World. CXLVIII (January 1939), 476.

28r. Baird Shuman, C lifford Odets (New York: Twayne Pub­ lishers, 1962), p. 92.

29Koster, p. 13.

3®Grenville Vernon, "Rocket to the Moon." Commonweal. XXIX (December 9, 1938) 190.

31,1 People," Time. LXXVIII (November 17, 1961), 34.

32Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Strange Interlude." The Catholic World. CXXVII (April 1928), 79.

33Fred Eastman, "Eugene O'Neill and Religion," The Christian Century . L (July 26, 1933), 957.

3^Stark Young, "Days Without End." The New Republic. LXXVII (January 24, 1934), 312.

33Eugene O'Neill, Desire Under the Elms. In The Plays of Eugene O 'N eill. Vol. I (New York: Random House, 1934). 105

36"'Records1 of a Tragedy," The Literary Digest, LXXXVI (August 8, 1925), 23.

37ibld. , p. 24.

3®Dickinson, p. 119.

3®Eugene O’Neill, Welded. In The Plays of Eugene O’N e ill. Vol. I l l (New York: Random House, 1933).

^Doris V. Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1958), p. 87,

41w. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psycho­ analysis and the American Drama (New York: Hermitage House, 1955), pp. 104-105.

^2Falk, p. 85.

lark Hour, p. 119.

^Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude. In The Plays of Eugene O 'N eill. Vol. I (New York: Random House, 1934).

^Rice, Living Theatre, p. 124.

^ g ra n c is R. Bellamy, "Lights Down," The Outlook. CXLVIII (February 22, 1928), 305.

^Euphemia Van Rensslaer Wyatt, "Strange Interlude." The Catholic World. CXXVII (April 1928), 78.

^Bellamy, p. 305.

^Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1931).

^®Henry Seidel Canby, "Scarlet Becomes Crimson," Saturday Review of L ite ra tu re , VIII (November 7, 1931), 258.

^Eugene O’Neill, Days Without End (New York: Random House, 1934).

32Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Sickness of Today," The Nation. CXXXVIII (January 24, 1934), 111.

53Fred Eastman, "O'Neill Discovers the CrossJ," The Christian Century, LI (February 7, 1934), 192. 106

^"Critics Out of Their Element," The Catholic World, CXXXVIII (February 1934), 517.

55Ibid. , p. 516.

^Sievers, p. 126.

^V irgil Geddes, "Eugene O'Neill, II," Theatre Arts Monthly. XV (November 1931), 946. CHAPTER IV

ADULTERY IN THE COMEDIES OF RACHEL CROTHERS, MAXWELL ANDERSON , PHILLIP BARRY, S. N. BEHRMAN, ROBERT E. SHERWOOD AND CLARE BOOTHE

According to Edmond Gagey, American comedy between the two

world wars was predominantly bourgeois and was mainly concerned with

marriage and the family.! The generalization is fair enough, though

we have seen earlier that sociological developments of the post

World War I period more or less determined that the course our drama

should take was in the general area of marriage and family problems.

Both serious drama and co medy moved in this direction, and the result

was that some plays, They Knew What They Wanted for example, are

comedies only in that the endings are not tragic. In treatment of

theme and seriousness of action, Howard's play is not comedy--at

least not comedy in the laughing or w itty sense of the term. Almost

all of the plays in this chapter attempt to come to terms with the

problem of adultery and to offer some solution. Again the solution

varies from liberal to conservative, from advanced to conventional,

and again we find only one playwright who is a moral conservative.

Rachel Crothers' conservative position stands alone among writers of

comedy just as Eugene O'Neill's conservatism stands alone among

serious dramatists.

Albert Ellis has argued that adultery is frequently and en­

thusiastically endorsed in humorous treatments of plays and other

mass m e d i a . ^ With the exception of Robert Sherwood's The Road to Rome,

107 108 in which adultery is part of the plot machinery, E llis ' argument does not hold up in connection with the plays treated in this chapter. Adultery is never endorsed, though it is often accepted as a kind of evil less significant than the sin of divorce. The whole issue of marital infidelity, in fact, seems rather out of place in comedy, but as John Gassner points out in his essay on the twenties called "An American Decade," our drama-- serious and comic--had finally achieved a criticism of life:

We began to explore human nature with the lantern of philosophy and the scalpel of modern surgery. The lantern revealed the richness of our resources, dreams, and strivings; the scalpel probed our in testin al tumors of complacency, intolerance, and acquisitiveness. In short, we achieved a criticism of life without which the drama is nothing but evanescent showmanship.3

It is not surprising that sex morality and marriage were

"probed"; it is surprising, however, that plays which treated these problems were pejoratively referred to by the c ritic s as "sex plays," because nothing ever occurs or is spoken on stage to offend the righteous or satisfy the prurient. It is true that the points of view argued were not always in keeping with the se n sib ilitie s of a ll of the audience, but the term "sex play" has connotations which are not valid in describing the plays of Barry or Behrman or the other writers of comedy of the period. Edmond Gagey believes that this new play had its roots in the prewar drama:

The prewar bedroom farces and the timid discussions of trial marriage or feminism became more closely wedded 109

to domestic drama and developed Into what may loosely be called "sex plays," concerned with such topics as marriage, divorce, and the Younger Generation.^

John Van Druten also objected to the term and somewhat critically

stated in an article, "The Sex Play," that the name given to plays about love and marriage was indicative of the modern theater's attitude toward life. He is especially harsh on the separation that

Americans make between romantic and physical sex:

We are reaping the harvest of a long period of suppression in this absurd separation. In a normally minded community, the phrase "Sex Play" would be almost Incomprehensible. The Elizabethans were nasty-minded, according to our ideas, but at least they saw life whole. We must leave out of account prurient imaginations; pornography will find a market in every age, but for less, one imagines, under conditions when The Country Wife or Pericles can be played normally, and not as a novelty entertainmnet for the smart s e t . *

The smart set was amused by the sex play--especially when they

saw themselves portrayed on stage in the Barry or Behrman comedy

of manners. What is important in this study, however, is not that

comedy dealt with people of wealth, education, position, and in­

telligence so much as that the milieu of high society enabled our

w riters of comedy to use a different approach to problems. In Gagey1s

words, it was an intellectual approach where "irony and satire, and

brilliance of style take the place of the broader comic devices on

the one hand and sentim entality on the other."** To use John Gassner's

metaphor, the writer of comedy sliced into the marriage relationship

with the scalpel of irony and satire.

Of the thirteen plays to be discussed in this chapter, all but 110 one, Phillip Barry's In A Garden, are among Mantle's Best Plays of the Year. Of those best plays, all ran for more than 100 perfor­ mances, eight ran for more than 200, four for more than 300, and one, Clare Boothe's The Women, for a total of 657. Admittedly a considerable portion of the audience at such plays was attracted merely because the plays dealt with sex or talked about it amusingly.

Nevertheless, these statistics are, I think, indicative of the serious concern on the part of Americans for some kind of solution to the problem of m arital in fid elity . Since plays do not succeed with a wide audience if they offend what that general audience fundamentally believes, one may conclude also that the popularity of these plays indicates that the majority of the theatergoers of the period agreed with these dramatists who felt that while adultery might be bad, divorce was certainly much worse.

RACHEL CROTHERS

The comedies of Rachel Crothers present a view in opposition to the other comedies of the period. Miss Crothers consistently took an orthodox view of morality and a disparaging one of adultery and divorce. She was able to present these views successfully, moreover,

because of her artistic ability. Edmond Gagey says of her plays:

No one was more skillful at straddling the current moral issues than Rachel Crothers, a prolific writer of sentimental and problem comedies. A keen and sagacious playwright, Miss Crothers in her long and successful career showed an unerring gift for selecting a timely subject, treating it with apparent daring, properly diluted with sentimentality, and ending with the conventional--or at least the matinee audience-- viewpoint,7 Ill

Because she was able to reflect so well the contemporary attitudes toward social and moral issues, the author of the essay "Rachel

Crothers; Pacemaker for American Social Comedy" suggests that the total of her plays might well be called "A History of Women, Early

Twentieth Century";

When, in some future day, some scholar begins his research on the social history of our times, he may well turn to the dramas of Rachel Crothers to build at least one angle of his many-sided structure. For the last quarter of a century, Miss Crothers has been writing successful plays, popular hits, and her work covers the progress of that period, in our social sense at least, more thoroughly and more represent­ atively than that of any other dramatist.®

For the most part, the characters in a Rachel Crothers comedy are of the smart-set. This does much to give the plays an aura of sophistication as does the playwright's interest in marriage and adultery. The substance of the plays, however, is always conserva­ tive and conventional, like the serious plays of Eugene O'Neill.

Thomas Dickinson says of Miss Crothers;

She is light in the saddle; she easily recovers herself; she rides gracefully, but she must be "significant." It occurs that she is a first-rate technician and a second-rate commentator on the world; even her sk ill has not been able to pass off her profundity.9

Miss Crothers dates back further than the other major dramatists considered in this study. According to A. H. Quinn, her first work professionally performed was a one-act play, The Rector, in 1902.^

The playwright's main concern has always revolved around the problems of marriage and morality. In her plays before World War I, A Man1s 112

World (1909) tre ats the double standard of morality; He and She

(1911) the b a ttle of a husband and wife for supremacy; Ourselves

(1913), the responsibility of a good woman in regard to the double standard; and Young Wisdom (1914), the triumph of decency over an attempt at trial marriage.

After the war, Nice People (1920) deals with the hedonistic conduct of the Younger Generation; Mary the Third (1923), the points of view toward marriage of three successive generations of women; and A Lady’s Virtue (1925), the character of the eternal courtesan.

All of these plays antedate her plays of adultery (Let Us Be Gay,

As Husbands Go, and When Ladies Meet) but her approach to this problem remains the same as her approach to e a rlie r problems. Quinn says about her comedies:

Writing for a quarter of a century, she has had few stage failures, and to another school of critics this almost unvarying success seems suspicious. It must, they argue, be because of her acceptance of standards which have sent other playwrights to the wa 11.11-

In Let Us Be Gay*^ (1929), K itty Brown is divorcing her husband

Bob for his affair with a girl he claims he cares nothing about. She

refuses to listen to his arguments on the effect that a divorce will have on their three children. Bob pleads with her, in the Prologue,

to reconsider:

It's horrible what you're doing. Killing everything, busting i t a ll up. You're doing a great deal worse thing now than I ever did in ray life. I never meant 113

to hurt you--never--and you're hurting me as much as you can. You're smashing up the only thing in the world I care a hang about and the only thing that means a damned thing anyway (10-11).

In Act I they are divorced and have gone th eir separate ways. Bob ends up in C alifornia at Mrs. Boucicault's home, where the elderly lady's granddaughter, Dierdre, has fallen in love with him. Mrs.

Boucicault calls on Kitty, who calls herself Mrs. Courtland Brown, to vamp Bob away from the g irl. She te lls Kitty:

I always knew my husband wasn't faith fu l to me, but I lived in hell with him for fifty years because divorce wasn't possible. My only daughter had three divorces--which I was tickled to death to see her get--and here's my grandchild in the middle of this modern revolution and I'm hopeless--can't do a thing for her (32).

When Kitty and Bob meet, she pretends she doesn't know him and makes him promise not to tell of their previous relationship. She appears rather "vampish" with the other male guests in the house, which ir r ita te s Bob, who s t i l l loves her. He does not te ll anyone of his former marriage to Kitty until she is falsely accused of sleeping with one of the guests. His defense of her throws them together again. 'He wants her to remarry him, but she says as much as she has "travelled around," she still has old-fashioned ideas about marriage: "Bob, marriage means just one thing--complete and absolute fidelity or it's the biggest farce on earth" (165). When he promises to make their marriage now what she thought i t ought to have been before, she asks that he take her back.

That the play had a strong element of preaching was not denied. 114

The Catholic World said that Let Us Be Gay was a play in which Kitty

"discovers that the ties of marriage are stronger than the legal

scissors of divorce";^ for Robert Littell of Theatre Arts Monthly,

the preachment was a "little loud":

Our comedies of week-ends, evening dresses and boiled shirts are inclined to slide into farce at one end, and into serious discussion of "problems" at the other. Miss Crothers' highly diverting play keeps clear of farce, but it does, more than once, ring a little loud with its author's very positive convictions about love and marriage.^

Commonweal was not altogether certain that it approved of Miss

Crothers1 approach to the problems of adultery and marriage; the

reviewer found no definite point-of-view in the play:

It is inclined to float in that convenient twilight of emotions which regards morals very largely as a matter of cycles and conventions. But that effect may be Miss Crother's method of trying to establish a sympathy of modern audience preening itself with sophistication. ^-5

The magazine did, however, take pleasure in the concern that Mrs.

Boucicault had for the moral character of her granddaughter.

As Husbands Go^ (1931) departs from the usual comedy of the upper social set and treats instead middle-class people from Dubuque,

Iowa. In the Prologue, Lucile Lingard, married but childless, and

Emmie Sykes, a widow, are in Paris and have fallen in love with

European men. Lucile's problem is that she must te ll her husband

when she returns home; Emmie must break the news to her very critical

teen-age daughter. Lucile te lls her companion, Ronnie Derbyshire,

what the summer has meant to her: 115

I'v e been awfully good, Ronnie. I haven't even flirted. You're the little dream deep down in my heart come true. The little dream I've never dared even whisper to myself. You've given my soul wings (175).

She decides that she must te ll her husband as soon as she arrives

in Dubuque;

I'm going to tell him, decently and honestly. I know I owe it to life to take care of this. I owe it to you--I owe it to myself--I owe it to him--to be strong-- and honest (177) . t In Act I the ladies are home, Emmie has brought her man, Hip-

politus (Hippie) Lomi, with her; neither Emmie's daughter nor Lucile's

husband, Charles, likes him. When Charles comments that he will find

Emmie's money "companionable," Lucile says;

Of course he w ill. She knows that. But there's some­ thing else--far more important. He understands her-- and that kindles something in her that nothing else ever has. He lifts her out of the humdrum routine everybody else pokes her into--and makes her something she didn't even know herself--she could be. What else does life mean anyway? (186-187).

Five weeks later, Ronnie has come for Lucile, who still has not

told Charles about her unconsummated love affair in Paris. The ladies make up the story that the new visitor is also interested in Emmie,

but Charles, after meeting Ronnie, knows he is in love with his wife,

Charles loves Lucile himself, so he invites Ronnie to go fishing,

then to have a drink. The two men find they are fond of each other,

and the more they drink the more they become close friends. Lucile,

who is waiting for Ronnie to escort her to a party, is furious when

she finds them drunk and leaves for the party alone. Charles tells

his friend and rival; 116

I love her. I don't want a woman just because she happens to be married to me--to miss what would fill out her life for her (198).

Ronnie replies:

I think any man that had the nerve to think he's more of a man than you are--and to crash into what you've made out of your love for a woman--oughtn't to be shot-- but, just kicked to death--and kicked long and hard and slow--so he'd have time to know what a bloody--low down skunk he is (199).

Ronnie leaves for England and sends a letter to Lucile, saying in part:

1 have seen the magnificent simplicity of a big man-- the shining glory of a selfless love that has en­ veloped you and made you perfect in its own beauty (203).

Lucile, who thinks Charles never suspected anything, tries to tell him about her relationship with Ronnie, but he refuses to listen.

She too realizes now how much her husband means to her. As the curtain falls, she asks him to hold her close.

From the reviews, it is evident that many theatergoers found the play a refreshing change-of-pace from the Phillip Barry type of comedy of manners. Commonweal, for example, approached As Husbands Go as a rejoinder to B arry's Tomorrow and Tomorrow:

As modern plays go--not to mention husbands--this one has many exceptional qualities, not the least of which is that its characters all have, at bottom, and when sufficiently probed, some trace of honor and decent instinct. Compared to the utter caddishness of the doctor in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," even Ronald Derbyshire is a man of worth. There is just enough sim ilarity in underlying theme betweenthese two plays to make Miss Crothers's story the best possible indictment of Barry's spurious "romance." 117

John Hutchens, the reviewer for Theatre Arts Monthly, found that the middle-class characters of the play were new and refreshing:

Miss Crothers' la te st comedy, As Husbands Go, might have been w ritten three months or ten years ago; i t follows the rules, as her plays have generally done, with good humor, neat dialogue, pat characterizations and conclusions gratifying to a comfortable belief in one's neighbors. . . . One imagines that Miss Crothers, looking about her at a theatre of desperate sophis­ tication, sees that the average, solid character has been offstage so long that i t may come back almost as new; and that a lively old-fashioned sort of humor may, in revival, be testy and refreshing.01 A

The Catholic World, understandably, called attention to characteristics other than artistic. As Husbands Go, it said, "is a nice play, amusing and interesting and mellow. (Yet whiter than 19 the whitest list ever bleached.)"

When Ladies Meet^^ (1932) returns to the social set of novelists, publishers, and their wealthy associates. The framework of the play is the novel that one of the characters, Mary Howard, is working on which deals with a love triangle. Mary's plot outline is that a

"decent woman" takes a husband away from his wife. The man wants to divorce his wife, but the woman insists that they live together for a year and then decide if the man loves her enough to dissolve his marriage. At the end of the year the woman goes to the wife, explains how much she loves the husband, and the wife gives him up. The play is an acting out of the imaginary novel--at least an attempt at acting out the plot.

When Mary finishes explaining what happens in the novel, her 118 friend, Jimmie Lee, also a novelist, insists that the story does not ring true because "decent women" do not "fool around" with married men. Mary does not think this is a valid criticism, especially since she considers herself decent even though she is carrying on an a ffa ir with her publisher, Rogers Woodruff, a married man. Mary persuades her friend Bridget Drake to invite her and Rogers to

Bridget's country home for the weekend. Her friend sees the point of this invitation, though Mary insists it is just for "work." t Bridget says:

I teli you this is an awfully hard age for a good woman to live in. I mean one who wants to have any fun. If you've still got the instincts for right and wrong that were pounded into you when you were a girl--what are you going to do with 'em? Nobody else seems to have 'em. And they just get you mixed up--and hold you back--so you're neither one thing nor the other. Neither happy--and bad--nor good and contented. You're just discontentedly decent-- and i t doesn't get you anywhere (23-24).

Mary does have the in stin cts for right and wrong. She has worried

about Rogers' wife and two children and has tried before to break

off with him and just remain friends. Rogers, however, will not

agree to this.

In Act II, at the country home, Mary has decided that she cannot

let Rogers go through with the divorce he has talked about. Using

the plot for her novel, she says;

But Rogers--let1s not fool ourselves. Other people have thought they were sure of their love too--and look at them! You've made one mistake. I don't want you to make another. I will not let you get a divorce till we know our love is what we think it is (56). 119

This pleases the publisher; it does not please him that in her

novel the "other woman" confronts the man's wife. He condemns

that as useless and not real, but what he really objects to is that

Mary might actually go to his own wife. Before he can pursue this matter further, he is called into town on business. While he is

gone, Jimmie Lee, pleasure riding with Rogers' wife, Claire, stops

at the house. Because he is in love with Mary and wants to make

her jealous, he introduces Mrs. Woodruff as his cousin. Marydoes

not believe this, but she never suspects that Claire is Rogers' wife.

It is obvious too that Claire does not know of the relationship

between Mary and her husband.

A severe storm forces Claire to spend the night at the country

home, and she and Mary become good friends. When Mary explains the

plot of the novel she is writing, Claire remarks;

I'm afraid I'm not a very good judge of this story because I happen to be married to a man who can no more help attracting women than he can help breathing. And of course each one thinks she is the love of his life and that he's going to divorce me and marry her. But he doesn't seem to--somehow (112).

Mary finds it hard to believe that any man could stop loving Claire

and asksher about her woman character going honestly to the wife

to explain how much she loves the husband. Claire answers;

I'd loathe her with a deadly hate that would shrivel her up. I'd call her a vile brazen slut I suppose-- and tell her to get out. But I don't believe she'd come (114).

When Mary tells what her publisher "Roge" thinks, Claire re­

alizes exactly what the situation is. Just then Rogers comes into 120 the room. Claire says;

Miss Howard asked me if I thought the two women could talk to each other.--But it seems to me i t ’s up to the man to do the talking.--Don1t you think so Rogers? Don't you think he ought to te ll both women which one he wants to spend the rest of his life with? (118).

Rogers is stunned. He pretends that his relationship with Mary is just a business one. Mary leaves in shame and disgust. Claire, who has seen what her husband has done to Mary, says that he need not ever return to her. And Mary, who has seen Claire's love for her husband destroyed, says:

She doesn't want him now. That's what I'v e done to her. i ' l l never forget her eyes--what she saw (135).

About these lines The Catholic World said;

We may rob and steal and murder human bodies and face the tribunal of human justice for our sins but in killing the faith in another human heart we are directly responsible to God. 21L

Commonweal was not at a ll sure that i t had sympathy for Mary Howard:

The weakness of Mary Howard, for example, lies in the fact that she cannot see the wrong in the abstract of something which becomes fu tile and even repellent the moment i t comes down to cases and personalities. A very human failing? Certainly. But likewise a badge of m ediocrity.22

The best criticism of the play, however, was by Joseph Wood

Krutch, who called his review "Mother Was Right." He argued that though the playwright was "the enlightened defender of the conven­ tionalvirtues,,r she never had anything to say about the complexity of life and morality--she merely submitted an opposite set of 121 platitudes and glib generalities;

But Miss Crothers is so eager to preach that she cannot let the thing stand merely for itself. She is determined to draw general conclusions and to advance a sweeping dogma as dubious as the dogma of her priggish heroine. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Married men who make love to other women never really mean it. Women who fool themselves into believing that they can live with a man without forfeiting his respect are always wrong. Experiments like that which the heroine is about to make always fail. Decent women and loose women belong to different tribes, forever separate. Et cetera, et cetera.

The critical reputation of the plays of Rachel Crothers has suffered greatly since World War II. A. H. Quinn, for example, in the early 1940's concluded that Miss Crothers

has steadily declined to take the superficial currents of opinion seriously and she has in consequence been called conventional and con­ servative. But in the fin a l judgment of the discriminating she will have her r e w a r d . 24

In 1949, on the other hand, Joseph Mersand in his book The American

Drama Since 1930 sums up the critical reputation of her comedies after the war. In answer to the question of what the reaction is to seeing When Ladies Meet or any other Crothers play, he answers; 2S "Much ado about nothing." J

MAXWELL ANDERSON

Like Elmer Rice's Street Scene and S. N. Behrman's Brief Moment,

O £ Maxwell Anderson, in his comedy Saturday's Children (1927), shows that extra-marital affairs are somehow more meaningful than activities within the marriage bond. The characters with whom he is concerned 122 are representatives o£ the new Younger Generation, Bobby and Rims

O’Neill In the first act of the play, Bobby, using advice from her sister, tricks Rims into proposing marriage. Both of them are young, and when we see them in the second act they are having marital problems--mostly financial. Instead of the romance they expected to find in their marriage, they have found dirty dishes, quarrels, and grocery bills. Bobby says:

1 even wish you never had to see me doing dishes. I almost wish I was somebody else's wife--so you could be my lover--and come to see me when he wasn't home-- (80).

Bobby’s sister Florrie again comes to her aid. Her advice this time is to have a child, the successful way to hold on to a husband.

Florrie explains the formula for tricking a husband into fatherhood, but Bobby, who has Rims in the correct frame of mind to spring the trap, cannot go through with it. In talking to her father about marriage, she finds that he (like Mr. Prince of Odets' Rocket to the

Moon) prefers affairs, not marriage:

Marriage is no love a ffa ir, my dear. I t's l i t t l e old last year's love affair. It's a house and bills and dishpans and family quarrels. That's the system that beats you. They bait the wedding with a romance and they hang a three-hundred-pound landlord around your neck and drown you in grocery bills. If I'd talked to you that night I'd have said --if you're in love with him, why have your l i t t l e a ffa ir, sow a few oats. Why the devil should the boys have a monopoly on wild oats? (107-108).

After an especially violent quarrel, Bobby walks out of the house and claims she w ill not return; Rims does the same. She takes a 123 room in a cheap boarding house where the landlady, Mrs. Gorllck, Is very suspicious about gentlemen callers. When Bobby begins to date her old employer, Rims comes to tell her that he knows she has been seeing other men. Although he thinks the worst, he begs her to come back to him. She refuses, but his offer removes the g u ilt she feels in having tricked him into marriage. She says;

No. . . . You see--Oh, I wonder if I can te ll you-- What we wanted was a love a ffa ir, wasn't it? Just to be together and let the rest go hang--and what we got was a house and b ills and general h ell. Do you know what I think a love a ffa ir is, Rims? I t 's when the whole world is trying to keep two people apart--and they insist on being together. And when they get married the whole world pushes them to­ gether so they just naturally fa ll apart. I want my love a ffa ir back. I wanted hurried kisses and clandestine meetings, and a secret lover. I don't want a house. I don't want a husband. I want a lover (458-459).

Mrs. Gorlick chases Rims out of the roam at 10:00 PM, but he sneaks in the window, and he and Bobby, whispering in the dark, begin to put a bolt on the door as the curtain falls.

The ending of the play is not, it seems to me, very satisfactory.

Not only is it juvenile, but it offers no solution to the problems of the newly married. The fact that the play offered no solution, however, led the critics to praise Saturday's Children almost unan­ imously. Joseph Wood Krutch said that he knew of no play which

reflected "so exactly the manners and the souls of that section of

'the younger generation' with which it deals," and commented; 124

Without ever completely leaving the plane of comedy, he has gripped sincerely with their problem as it appears both to them and to him, and refusing the merely sentimental conclusion of the John Golden school, he leaves it in that state of confusion characteristic of the times. Here is no mere question of a lovers' quarrel to be made up over a c r i b . ^

In the light of Maxwell Anderson's career as a writer of tragedy and poetic drama, however, that the playwright should write so successful a comedy puzzled some theater scholars. In an article "Maxwell

Anderson: Poet and Champion," Carl Carmer said:

Picturing truthfully and poignantly the adjustment that contemporary life and thought forces upon the young and married, the appeal of Saturday's Children was so general, its conclusions so popular that it won wide recognition and serious approval for Anderson, though it would seem, in the light of later developments, to have been a sport, blossoming inconsistently from the straight trunk of his endeavor.

Finally, Stark Young, I think, implied his dislike of the play by giving this summary in The New Republic:

It tells the story of a little typist who, with what might seem very bold advice on her father's part, follows out her own life . She marries, but wants neither housekeeping nor children, and the dally living together brings only rows to herself and her young husband. She runs off to a lodging-house, takes up her old job, does as she pleases, and will have her husband back again only as a lover, romantically met and passionately dreamed about.^

The play, however, is not quite that simple. One of the strong im­

plications of Saturday's Children is that the romantic idea of marriage is all false, and for that reason young people should not

enter into a theoretically permanent relationship without making

certain that their love goes beyond romarttic illusions. For romance, 125

Anderson's spokesman says in Che person of Bobby's father, affairs

are preferable to the more permanent legal relationship. Later,

however, we shall see that in Samson Raphelson's Young Love, a test

of love is not the solution either.

Carl Carmer's comment that Anderson's comedy might well have

been "a sport" also applies to the dramatist's interest in sex

morality and adultery, for his other plays do not deal seriously

with these themes. Adultery occurs in some of the historical plays--

Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of Scotland (1933), Valley ForRe

(1934), The Masque of Kings (1937), and Anne of the Thousand Days

(1948)--but it is merely used as part of the plot machinery. In

The Masque of Kings, for example, the adultery of the court is just

another manifestation of the broader decadence of the nobility.

A more valid representation of Maxwell Anderson's interests and

main motifs is to be found in his war plays, What Price Glory? (1924)

and Eve of St. Mark (1942); his play of political dishonesty, Both

Your Houses (1933); and one of his plays concerned with espousing a

liberal cause, Winterset (1935), which deals with the Sacco-Vanzetti

case.

PHILLIP BARRY

The institution of marriage and the sin of adultery receive the

most consistent treatment in the plays of Hiillip Barry. In A Garden,

Paris Bound, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and The Animal Kingdom are con­

cerned specifically with adultery, and in plays in which adultery does 126 not occur, Barry deals with related themes. Holiday (1928), for example, treats an upper-class girl in rebellion against her family's conservative standards, and The Philadelphia Story (1939) is con­ cerned with convincing a wealthy divorced that she should remarry her ex-husband, who still loves her. Among Barry’s serious attempts,

Hotel Universe (1930) deals with Freudian personality types and Here

Come the Clowns (1938) with the necessity for man to fight, instead of compromise with, evil in the world.

Like Eugene O'Neill, Barry was a Roman Catholic, although O’Neill defended the position of the church on social and moral issues much more consistently than did Barry. W. David Sievers in his book discusses the plays of Barry under the heading "Religion and Psycho­ analysis." It is his contention that feelings of guilt over the playwright's rejection of the conventional dogmas of the church played an important part in his life and in his work.^® Barry's view of marriage and fidelity does differ from that of the church. To this playwright, marriage is primarily a spiritual relationship which takes precedence over the physical one. This idea is not new, by any means, and we have seen many of the writers of serious drama argue in this manner. But Barry, unlike the other dram atists, in sists with

regularity upon preserving or destroying the marriage on the basis of

the spiritual relationship present. In the light of a play like The

Animal Kingdom, the Roman Catholic Church can hardly be accused of

influencing Barry's views, although some critics, notably Edmond Gagey, 127 have seen the dramatist as a social conservative with views on marriage colored by his Catholicism. 31

In In A G a r d e n ^ Z (1925) the marriage of Adrian and Lissa Terry is dissolved because finally there is no deep spiritual bond but initially because Adrian, a playwright, is disillusioned by what he fears has been psychological adultery on the part of his wife. As the play begins, Adrian, who is proud that "th ere's never been anyone else" for him or his wife Lissa, is shocked to learn that his wife once spent an evening in a garden with Norrle Bliss, who is coming to visit. Roger Compton, Adrian’s producer, who is trying to convince him to write another play, suggests a thesis for a new work: every wife is at heart another man's mistress.

Lissa has made the claim that Adrian does not make the proper distinction between art and real life--a charge that proves true. The playwright sets the stage to replay the evening Lissa and Norrie spent together before he knew either of them. He borrows photographs of the garden and constructs a similar scene with theater sets, lights, and props. He hopes that Lissa can give up the ghost of that romantic evening on the thesis that "romantic incidents don't bear repeating."

His plan, however, backfires. He maneuvers Lissa and Norrie alone in the stage-garden, but he finds there is danger that the two may go away together. Although the past garden episode is not as important to Lissa as Adrian thinks it is, nevertheless she believes it was the only important thing ever to happen to her without reason or plan. 128

Adrian, who is now worried, cancels the phony engagement that would have taken him out of town overnight.

At the small party in the stage-garden Lissa discovers that

Norrie on that night long ago was following a chapter in a novel he had read, step by step. Her one planless memory is shattered, and shediscovers that Adrian has arranged this current scene in

the same way he writes one of his plays. Norrie wants her to go

away with him but she refuses. Adrian wants her to stay on with him, but she refuses to do that too:

You-your f ir s t in stin ct was to put me through my paces, as if I were a creature of your mind, without will, without hope, but to go through the motions of a life you'd created forme (81).

Adrian again has been confusing high comedy with real life and has been playing with people as if they were names on his cast of

characters list. She leaves alone, without any indication that

she will ever return.

Barrett Clark agrees that Lissa is justified in leaving Adrian, who has destroyed his own marriage by "analyzing the situation and

characters with all the sinister glee of an artist playing with

human beings"33 He learns what Ned Darrell learns in Strange

Interlude; human life is much too important a thing to try to inter­

fere with, to reshape, to improve, or to distort.

In dealing with Barry's next play, it is important to use as a

frame of reference the contemporary attitu d e toward divorce. One of

the conclusions of Roster's study on divorce and the drama is; 129

The general public's attitute toward divorce seems to have undergone a change since the World War, in that people appear to be more tolerant of it, possibly because it has touched so many. If divorce has not come to be regarded as one of the incidents in the normal course of events in a modern man's life , at least it is no longer looked upon as extraordinary, wicked, or an ti-so cial. That the wealthy have used it as an adjunct to fashion and an antidote to boredom seems indubitable.

For Jim and Mary Hutton in Paris Bound-^ (1927), the trip to Paris for a fashionable divorce is narrowly averted. Like Saturday1s

Children, the play treats the younger generation, as Theatre Arts noted, "with its desperate frankness, its heroic effort to control sentiment and to ridicule sentimentality, its love of nonsense,"^ but with the wealthy set instead of the middle-class one.

That the play attempts to comment on marriage and adultery is evidenced in the "Publicity Notes" at the end of the Samuel French edition:

"Paris Bound" is something more than a brilliant comedy of manners. It is an extraordinarily keen study of marriage. Through all its delightful scenes and underlying cleverness runs an absorbingly in­ teresting problem: to what extent, and under what circumstances should a young married couple continue to live together if one of the two is unfaithful? Mr. Barry rings the changes on this theme, and con­ cludes (so far as this particular couple are concerned) that the family is more Important than the pride of the "injured" party (no pagination).

The play begins at the wedding of Jim and Mary Hutton, where

Jim's divorced parents meet after an interval of several years. Mr.

Hutton still resents the fact that his wife divorced him. Now that she has remarried she asks him who was "in the wrong" for their 130 marriage failure. He says: "You were. I may have committed adult­ ery, Helen, but I never committed divorce" (19). She claims that he was responsible for the divorce, but he Insists that she destroyed their marriage and that his act of adultery was not significant:

"Because, you know, all that we had- you and I--our province was never touched by it" (19). He explains:

For following a physical Impulse which I share with the rest of the animal kingdom, you destroyed a sp iritu al relationship which belonged only to us. For an act which in re a lity was of l i t t l e or no importance to you, you did me out of my marriage and my home, of the daughter I've always longed for--very nearly out of the son I already had. You did a good, thorough job (22).

Mary, the bride, has talked with Jim's father about marriage and has equally modern views. She tells her matron of honor that

Jim has a right to know as many women as he wants to, in "every sense." The newlyweds are going to do everything possible to make their marriage endure. Before they leave on their honeymoon,

Jim tries to console Noel Farley, who is hopelessly in love with him and quite despondent over losing him.

Act II takes place six years later. The Huttons have two children by this time. Jim is planning another European business trip , and Mary is busy working on a b allet with a composer friend of hers, Richard Parrish. Before Jim leaves, Mary learns that during the last business trip Jim had an affair with Noel Farley. All of her modern theories vanish, and she thinks she should divorce Jim, who does not know of her recent information. Mr. Hutton tries to dissuade her by reminding her that Jim loves her as few women are 131 loved. She replies that she will not "share" him. Mr. Hutton says:

"You'll never be called upon to share what you and Jim have" (110).

He advises her to say nothing about her discovery. She does not mention it to Jim before he goes on his trip.

Six weeks later, when Jim is scheduled to arrive home, she has decided to go ahead with the divorce. Mr. Hutton again attempts to dissuade her, pointing out that she has lost nothing because of Jim's affa ir:

If your hatred of the Farley girl or your jealousy of Jim is stronger than anything else you feel, all right. But this sense of grievance--personal injury--good heavens, what can Noel Farley do to you? If Jim has been anything to her--he may lose by i t , but what you lose, I can't see (129).

He says that the physical relationship is the least important in Jim and Mary's marriage--that sex holds a high place among other forms of intoxication but love is something else, and marriage is "still another thing." Mary claims that she could feel differently if Jim had been honest and told her about his affair. Mr. Hutton says:

Jim is as honest as the day is long; you know that. The fact that he didn't tell you--the fact that you felt nothing in your bones, as you say--isn't that evidence enough for you that in his eyes it encroached in no way upon your province? (132).

Mary explains to her father-in-law that his arguments are of no use. His parting shot is:

No?--Then a ll th a t's le ft for me to say is that a most uncomnon marriage is about to go to smash because a once wise woman has become vain and selfish, because a good, hard mind has nicked its edge off on as rotten and false a conception as 132

ever yet existed. You're going to quit Jim because he had "relations" with another woman—well, suppose he did, what of it? How big a part does that play in your life? Do you describe your marriage in those terms alone? I'm appalled you set so slight a value on yourself. I'm appalled that you accept defeat so easily, and on such a count (135).

After Mr. Hutton leaves, Richard Parrish comes to say goodbye.

He loves Mary and wants to consummate their relationship. She is tempted so much by the prospect of having an affair with Parrish that she cannot understand how she could love her husband yet s t i l lfeel strongly toward her friend. Parrish te lls her that her husband has nothing to do with the relationship between Mary and himself:

But we aren't three people--you and he and I. We're four people: you and he, and you and I. His you can't ever in the world be mine, any more than my you can be his (149).

He te lls her that the love she gives him w ill not be taken from Jim because she has enough love in her to give to both of them. He will go out of the apartment and come back later to find out her decision.

When he does return, however, Jim has arrived home just in time to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Mary knows now that she loves her husband and can understand his extramarital affair. They leave

in the middle of the night to get the children from the country.

Because of the seriousness of the theme, the play aroused more c ritic a l comment than most. John Mason Brown called Paris

Bound "one of the most adult and engaging comedies yet to come from

the pen of an American," and said that while it seems an unabashed and unconventional play, it really "preaches a most conservative and 133 churchly sermon against divorce."3? The Saturday Review of

Literature thought that Barry had got beneath the surface of marriage "to the hidden emotional and psychological wellsprings from which surge a ll the happiness and pain which the union of one man and one woman is capable of yielding" but felt that the dramatist did not preach:

Barry's meaning never approaches the self-centered, bigoted limitations of propaganda. He sees before, behind, and on both sides of his subject. But he is patently favorable to tolerance in the marriage re­ lationship, not necessarily arguing the advantages of laxity in the tie but constantly holding firm and clear the greater good that may be endangered by too minute and selfish an attention to the lesser e v i l . 38

Barrett Clark, in An Hour of American Drama, includes a lengthy discussion of the play. What he objectsto about Paris Bound is not

Barry'sthesis -that sexual infidelity is a lesser sin than divorce but rather that the playwright is overconcerned with the thesis and discusses it to a length excessive for comedy of manners:

Now did Mr, Barry care more for his thesis than he did for his comedy as a human document? This would be only an academic question if the play were entirely con­ vincing, but it isn't. Just as a comedy of manners there is far too much discussion, and as a plea for a new standard of sex morals it is based on a situation that is_not _quite typical. In other words, Jack and Helen £ sic_/ are too human, and Mr. Barry has fallen between two s t o o l s . 3 9

The adultery in Tomorrow and Tomorrow^ (1931) was less well received. The play treats the same situation O'Neill presented in

Strange Interlude: a woman, who needs a child to fulfill herself, becomes pregnant with a child by a doctor, with whom she falls in 134 love. The husband, Gail Redman in this case, is weak like O'Neill's

Sam Evans, but his wife Eve, unlike Nina Leeds, does not give in to passion and carry the adulterous affair over an extended period of time. It is as if Eve has been able to follow, for the most part, the advice that Nina received from her mother-in-law.

The Redmans live in a college town in Indiana. Because Gail is away from home so often, Eve, out of boredom, invites a v isitin g lecturer to the college to live at the Redman home during his brief stay. We know that Eve desperately wants a child; she tells her husband:

Listen to me, Gail: I'm speaking honestly: I must have a child, or in a little while I shan't be good for any­ thing at all. Help me to life, Gail. Hold fast to it with your strong hands and bring me to it (20).

But Gail has fallen asleep and has not heard her plea. When Dr.

Nicholas Hay, the lecturer and a psychiatrist, arrives, Eve falls in love with him and he fathers her child. At the end of his visit he begs her to go away with him, but she refuses because she loves her husband. He says that has nothing to do with him. She answers with a line that could well have been written into Paris Bound: "My love for you has not. My going away with you would" (79).

Ten years later her son, Christian (a name Dr. Hay suggested were she ever to have a son), is c r itic a lly i l l . When the local physicians are unable to cure the boy, Eve calls for her old lover and the boy's real father. She te lls Hay: "It was you who gave him to me--give him back'" (146). After Christian recovers, the doctor 135 again wants her to came away with him, this time with their son.

Again she refuses:

If I go, it will break Gail's heart.--And if I take Christian, it will be the end of him.--It's one thing, believing that love overtook us suddenly, in a day or two, just now. It's another to know that day after day for years, one has been--Oh, but I never felt the deception--I promise you I didn't! It hasn't been at all what you'd call "living a lie." If you knew how happy and proud he's been--how satisfied with life, how--to think he had a son of his own! (155-156).

He understands. Not only is he talented like Dr. Ned Darrell of

Strange Interlude but he is also strong. Her explanation as to why she cannot leave Gail is sim ilar to the reason that Nina Leeds gives for not leaving her husband:

But now to as much as say to him; "Look you, you've got no chi Id--you never had. This is another man's-- And the wife you thought was yours--she's his, too." I t would destroy him.--No. Heaven's own judgment could not destroy you, Nicholas (156).

Eve te lls Hay that even i f there were not the child, she could not leave her husband. The curtain falls as the doctor pulls away in his car.

The story of the play, as Sievers points out, is a modern treat­ ment of the B iblical account of Elisha and the Shunammite woman, a barren woman made pregnant by the magic powers of the prophet.

Notwithstanding the religious source, Catholic periodicals attacked the play from the standpoint of its parallel characters (especially the psychiatrist as a modern day prophet) and its theme. The Catholic

World said: 136

There will be much discussion of the morals of Tomorrow and Tomorrow. We regret that Mr. Barry found inspira­ tion in the old story only to muddy it. For, though moonlight and love, etc., are very lovely, adultery remains adultery despite the poignancy of Mr. Barry's sentiment. And we do think his version of Kings is a bit hard on Eliseus.^

Commonweal was equally severe on the moral implications of the play, but it objected most to the fact that Eve had never repented for her sin of adultery but rather seemed proud of it:

It is only in the extreme puritan tradition that wrong­ doing can never be mitigated by repentance. But a moral wrong, involving the added implications of disloyalty, which not only goes unrepented but becomes a source of secret pride is quite another matter. . . . If ever a well-written play showed complete topsyturvydom of moral and spiritual values, it is this one.

In the light of these reviews, we can hardly agree with Edmon Gagey, who sees Barry as a spokesman for the church and a social con­ servative. It is true that the dramatist insists in this play that the marriage be kept intact, but a year later, in The Animal Kingdom, he takes care of that matter.

C ritical comments on The Animal Kingdom^ (1932) are sharply divided between the clergy and the secular critics. The play deals with the marriage of Tom and Cecilia Collier. Tom is an editor and the son of wealthy Rufus C ollier, who has found it impossible to bribe

Tom into being bourgeois. On the night that the engagement is announced, Tom receives a telegram from a woman with whom he has had an a ffa ir, Daisy Sage, who a9ks that he meet her upon her arrival 137 home from abroad. Tom's new fiancee knows nothing about the other woman. He te lls her: "C, for quite a long time I've known--known

intimately--a girl who's very important to me--" (28). He adds that

this g irl w ill always be important to him; then he leaves Cecilia to

te ll Daisy of his engagement. Before he has a chance to te ll Daisy, however, she asks him to marry her. When he explains why he cannot marry her, she thinks that their seeing one another again is im­

possible. Tom is shocked at her reaction: "Daisy.1 There's to be

no nonsense about not seeing each other as friends again, or any of

that, you know--" (53). He says there is no danger that they would

have an affair because they stopped the "physical stuff" long ago.

We learn that their relationship is spiritual--not physical. Daisy

says:

It's true, that side of it was never so much to us, was it? Not in comparison--not after those first crazy months. But I thought that was natural. I was even glad of it--glad to find it was--other needs that held us together (54).

She insists, nevertheless, that they not see each other again.

After the marriage Cecilia has redone Tom's house and has

started on Tom. She has convinced him to publish shoddy, but best­

selling authors, and has made things so uncomfortable for Tom's

butler, Red Regan, an old prizefighting friend, that Red quits before

Tom can carry out Cecilia's request that he fire him. When Tom sees

Daisy again, he almost begs her to allow him to see her. He says

that they need each other: 138

There never were such friends as you and me. I t 's wicked to give that up, to lose anything so fine for no good reason.--Why you, of all people, for a shabby, lowdown question of convention, fit only to be considered by shabby, lowdown--(121).

She promises to lunch with him the next day, but as soon as he leaves she orders boat tickets for Nova Scotia. She still loves Tom and is obviously frightened at the risk they would necessarily take by seeing each other again.

Six months later Daisy is back from her trip , Tom's prizefighting

Butler, Red, whom Tom found ill and brought home, is back in service, and Tom himself is remarkably changed and bourgeois. He is so changed that when Cecilia invites Daisy and his other old friends to their country home, Tom can hardly communicate with them. After an embarrassing scene, Daisy te lls Tom that she p ities him; then she leaves. That night Cecilia, who is trying to persuade Tom to accept a large check from his father (his latest bribe) and to accept an invitation to live with him, insults both Tom and Daisy. His refusal to accept the check, she says, is his "damned integrity"; about living with his father she says:

It's only for a few months--and I think to refuse his present would be extremely bad manners--just about in a class with those of your l i t t l e lady of easy virtue, this morning (188).

If he will endorse the check and accept the other offer, she promises to unlock her bedroom door than night and keep it unlocked.

She retires to wait for him. Tom signs the check and makes a present of it to Red, who is leaving again; then Tom gets his coat. 139

Tom: I'm going back to my wife, Red. Regap; To your? Tom: To my w ife, I said.

He leaves the house to return to his spiritual wife--the woman he should have married in the first place.

Sievers comments that the play treats a conflict of the younger generation between "cloying sentimentality and the search for self- realization."^-* Theatre Arts Monthly felt that the play was one of

Barry's best:

By several standards it is his best play since Hotel Universe, chiefly for the directness with which it communicates its feeling; for its beauty which is not merely talk about beauty; for its willingness to chance a serious discussion of a theme Mr. Barry has approached only obliquely, banteringly, in earlier comedies--a theme of social and spiritual values . ^

The Catholic World, on the other hand, objected again to the moral implications of the play:

Phillip Barry seems to advance faster in the study of dramatic technique than of ethics. It is rather alarming how the instability and selfishness of his hero is so cleverly_glossed over by the charm and popularity of Mr. Howard j_ L eslie Howard, who played Tom C o llier_ /. '

Conmonweal objected to the manipulations Barry used to give sympathy to Daisy, although to the reviewer, Richard Dana Skinner,

Tom Collier was not a sympathetic character in spite of the author's attempt to make him one;

The character of Daisy is so sympathetically drawn (allowing of course for the utterly amoral attitude which Mr. Barry presupposes for all of his characters) that a ll sympathy for the wife ceases a t once and a ll 140

sympathy for Tom Collier should cease, although Mr. Barry, with that curious blindness which allowed him to make a hero of a cad in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," tries to keep the perspective of Tom as a victim of others rather than the victim of his own misjudgment and lack of understanding.48

John Hutchens, the reviewer for Theatre Arts. did not see Tom as a victim of his own misjudgment. Rather, he felt that Barry solved the problem of what to do with a marriage which exists only in legal and physical terms:

No apology is necessary for entering upon a situation so familiar as that of the triangle relationship, in­ genious as Mr. Barry has been in a rearrangement which finds the wife become a mistress and the mistress a wife. . . . And in the tangled relationship of Tom Collier, his mistress, and his wife, Mr. Barry is more sure than he has ever been before in handling and solving a complex, serious problem.49

As a whole, the plays of Phillip Barry present an advanced view on the problem of adultery and a mixed view on the problem of divorce, though his main thesis serves as his solution to both. He contends, as evidenced from the plays, that a marriage cannot be based on physical terms alone. Fidelity has really nothing to do with the more important fact of a spiritual love, which neccesitates the retention of marriage where it exists, the dissolution of marriage where it is absent. Whether one accepts the thesis or not, at least

Barry attempts to come to terms with the problems of his time. This fact more than any other leads some drama scholars to conclude that

Barry is an important playwright. W. David Sievers, for example, concludes, taking into account the serious plays but emphasizing the comedies: 141

Certainly it falls short to dismiss Barry as a witty writer of high comedy of manners, bantering, facile and superficial. He was that and more. Beneath his flippancy and his "chit-chat" was a sensitive and deeply spiritual writer coming to grips with the psychology of his times and expressing a yearning for maturity and emotional wholeness.

S. N. BEHRMAN

The plays of S. N. Behrman do not come to terms with the problem of adultery. Although he treats the wealthy social set in the same manner as Phillip Barry, and his plays are filled with characters who are sexually promiscuous, Behrman never discusses the problem. He does, in The Second Man (1927) and Biography (1932), for example, imply that our conventions are too s tr ic t, but his main con­ cern is broader: he argues for liberal causes and against fascism.

Brief Moment^ (193 1) comes close to offering a solution to the problem of marriage boredom (though the marriage in this case is hardly a typical one), but the solution is the same as Maxwell Anderson suggested in Saturday's Children: affairs are in many respects pre­ ferable to marriage. In the Behrman play, Roderick Dean, a million­ aire's son, has fallen in love with a night club performer, Abby Fane, and has asked her to marry him. The day after the proposal she comes to his apartment to accept his offer, but she is puzzled:

Why do you want to marry me? It was the surprise of my young life when you asked me. You're so nice. If you'd asked me to live with you I'd have said okay. Perhaps you'd rather--(54).

He thinks that their marriage should be exciting because they have nothing in common. She informs him that he need never be ashamed of 142

her; she Is a "wonderful mimic" and can learn to Imitate his friends.

Eighteen months later she is the perfect lady, busy giving dinners

for all the current social lions. One, a Russian film director, wants

her to go away with him. Abby reminds him that she has a husband.

The Russian says:

My country has the only civilized divorce laws. There-- once a marriage has outlasted its spiritual significance-- you have only to ask for a divorce to get it (81).

At this point it appears that their marriage has outlasted

its spiritual significance. Roderick, who married Abby because she

represented a different way of life from the one to which he was

accustomed, finds that she has come to representall the things of

the wealthy set that he abhors. Cass Worthing, however, Abby's old

lover who threw her over before her marriage, likes the new role she

is playing. Abby toys with him out of revenge. Cass says:

For God's sake, Abby, chuck this God-damn pose and be yourself. If you want to be respectable, I ' l l marry you (127).

When she refuses, Cass te lls Roderick that he and Abby were lovers

once and still are; he adds that they have,a date that night. Abby

denies that they are still lovers and insists that while she agreed

to go out with Cass, she never had any intentionof doing so. Her

husband says she should keep her date: "I thinkit would be honest to

establish your integ rity in one respect, at least--and keep your en­

gagement" (171). Angrily she says she w ill and storms out of the

apartment. The stage directions for Roderick are: "He is aware of 143 the vast and painful discrepancy between his attitude and his instinct" (177).

Three weeks later she has yet to return. Roderick's friends try to convince him that what he thinks about Abby's relationship to Cass is "the bunk," but Roderick in sists they must be divorced.

Abby returns and asks her husband;

Can't you say something nice to me? You know you could win me over i f you used the right method. All I want is wooing--just a little wooing and I'm yours (214).

He does not woo. Cass comes to take her away, but because she loves her husband, she refuses. She tells Roderick; "Perhaps that's the solution for me, Rod, to divorce you and became your mistress"

(228). He gives in and predicts he will "convert her." She says;

All right. Convert me. It’s so late, Rod, I think I ' l l spend the night here. I s n 't i t awful to think-- that it's perfectly legal? (233).

They embrace as the curtain fa lls .

The critics in general did not like the play or the character of

Roderick Dean. The Catholic World called the characters and the philosophy "inherently cheap" but admitted that as a document of Fifth

Avenue penthouse life the play had "a good deal of underlying tragedy."52 Commonweal opened with the comment "Would that 'B rief

Moment' were b rie fer s ti l l ! " and went on to say:

Now the simple truth is that you cannot take dull and uninteresting and unimportant people of the type of this man and make a really Interesting play about them. You have no sympathy with his alleged troubles and when his 144

wife returns to him in the last act, you simply wonder what else, short of a strong sense of duty, could make her want to see the situation through.53

Joseph Wood Krutch, in an essay "The Comic Wisdom of S. N.

Behrman," points out the main objection to the play and implies that the play can hardly offer a solution to any problem except one for the ennui of Roderick Dean:

Its hero is an inhabitant of that Wasteland described by so many contemporary poems and novels. He is the heir of all our culture, the end product of education and privilege, eclectically familiar with so many enthusiasms and faiths that there is none to which he can give a real allegiance.54

No Time for Comedy55(1939) is primarily about the personal problem Behrman faced in writing diverting comedy for Americans while

Jews were being persecuted in Europe. This dilemma shows up in the character of Gaylord Esterbrook, a playwright of high comedy, who comes to believe he should be doing something more significant than merely making people laugh. At the same time, however, Gay is trying desperately to be unfaithful to his wife; as sophisticated as he is, he cannot bring himself to commit adultery. We have seen earlier

that at this point, when the moral liberal took a stand against in­

fidelity, Joseph Wood Krutch argued that the whole issue of adultery

in the drama had become hopelessly muddled.

As the play opens, Gaylord (Gay) is "between ideas," though his wife Linda, who stars in his comedies, would like to get back

to work. He meets Mrs. Philo Smith (Mandy), who, as Philo explains 145 to Linda, "has a passion for developing latent powers. When they are not there she invents them" (232). She does just that for Gay when she persuades him that he is wasting himself, writing about nothing in a time of real crisis. Under her urging he begins to write

Dilemma, a terrible play about death and immortality. The more

Mandy inspires him the more affection he feels for her and the less for his wife, who now annoys him. He te lls Mandy:

The thing about Linda I can stand least is the subconscious censorship she exercises over me. Something damnable in our relationship which makes it impossible for me to be unfaithful to her (93).

Although he would like to have an affair with Mandy, he cannot bring himself to conmit adultery. He tells her about his first marriage:

I don't know whether you cheated.--I did. And i t does--whatever you may say --it does something to the fabric of a marriage, coarsens it, robs it. Does that sound Victorian? Why the hell shouldn't I sound Victorian if I want to? (94).

Linda is not quite so Victorian. She goes to see Mandy to te ll her she would rather have her sleep with Gay than "ruin his style" by having him write plays about immortality. Gay claims that he and

Mandy are engaged; but Linda, who knows he still loves her and is just

trying to hurt her for her indifference toward his serious writing bent, says she will fight for him. Linda tells Mandy: "I’m afraid,

Mandy, that, where marriage is concerned, I belong to the willy-nilly

school" (170). Gay explains that he must marry Mandy because it is

the only way he can be unfaithful to his wife. She says that that is a sweet sentiment. Gay thinks Linda is being facetious, but she says: 146

Not at a ll. I had no Idea we were so close. 1 had no idea we were in a closet together, I really didn't. 1 thought you were unfaithful to me regularly and with ease. I'm delighted to discover you have to marry to achieve it. It seems d rastic--a cumbersome method--but 1 must say I find it highly flattering. Thank you, darling.1 (182).

Finally Linda can see that he knows his serious play is badly written and that he is in a new dilemma over how to get out of marrying Mandy. She suggests to him that he write a play about a dramatist who is caught between two women of different playwriting philosophies. He likes the idea and decides on the title No Time for Comedy. When Mandy calls for him to come and take her away, he does not know what to te ll her. Linda says: "You ought to know.

You've got to write it. It’s the curtain for your last act, isn't it?" (215). And so it is. The sophisticates carry on their marriage like true moral conservatives.

Behrman dealt with the theme of sexual morality i n Amphitryon 38

(1937), an adaptation of the French play by Jean Giraudoux and about which Burns Mantle commented that no matter how classic the source, a bedroom farce was a bedroom farce,56 in other plays, Behrman makes a plea for tolerance, and if he does treat sexual themes, as in Biography, they are subordinate to his more basic point. He especially likes to deal with fanatics on one kind or another:

Richard Kurt in Biography. Hobart Eldridge in Rain from Heaven (1934), and Raphael Lord in Meteor (1929). S. N. Behrman was not, like

Phillip Barry, seriously concerned with marriage or sexual morality 147 at all. In fact, Robert E. Sherwood in his only play on the subject of marital infidelity displays a greater concern with sexual morality than does the entire Behrman canon.

ROBERT E. SHERWOOD

Robert E. Sherwood's The Road to R o m e57 (1927) is an anti-war play primarily, but, as John Gassner comments in his introduction to the play, it also constitutes

a summation of the effervescent theatre of the twenties by virtue of its irreverence toward historical reputations, anti-heroic outlook, and Freudian concern with repression and com­ pensation mechanisms, with sex the object of suppression and the drive to power and glory as the compensation (294).

The play does not attempt to arrive at a solution to the problem of adultery, but it is one of the few comedies in American drama in which infidelity is treated entirely humorously.

The three main characters in the play are Fabius Maximus, recently elected dictator of Rome; his Athenian-born wife, Amytis; and Hannibal, leader of the Carthaginian army. Amytis leads a very dull life in Rome. Her husband is the type who refuses to take her to Oedipus Rex: "To te ll you the truth, Amytis. I've never seen the play, but I've heard that it's--well, that it's rather questionable"

(300). There is some excitement when news reaches Rome that the city, virtually defenseless, is surrounded by Hannibal's army. Amytis is

Interested in Hannibal as a person and thinks it would be fun to be

"despoiled" by the Carthaginian soldiers. As for dying for the glory of Rome, she is not interested; she leaves the city before the attack 148

can begin.

She does not te ll her husband that she plans to meet Hannibal and talk him out of destroying Rome. She allows herself to be captured and sentenced to death by Hannibal himself, but she asks him to grant one final request:

Amytis: But isn't this very unusual? Hannibal: The execution of an enemy? I'm sorry to say that it is entirely according to regulations. Amytis: Oh, I know that. But you ought not to kill me at once, without--without-- Hannibal: Without what? I've given you a meal, I've answered your damned questions-- what more can 1 do? Amytis: There's a certain--a certain ceremony to be gone through with isn't there? Hannibal: What sort of a ceremony? Amytis: But i t - - i t 's so embarrassing to put into words (321).

That night her request is granted and she is "despoiled" by him. In the morning Hannibal gives her a choice of escaping with her husband or going back to Carthage with him. In either case Rome is to be destroyed. When she tries to persuade him to forget about victories and think of the "human equation," he accuses her of caring only for

Rome. She says: "I'm not trying to save Rome, Hannibal. I'm trying

to save you"(329).

Finally Fabius comes, under a flag of truce, to convince

Hannibal that Rome is strongly defended and that he should not attack.

Hannibal knows that this is a lie,but he agrees, in spite of the ob­

jections of his officers, and bids Fabius and Amytis goodbye: 149

Hannibal: . . . Fabius, I wish happiness and prosperity to you, your wife, and your sons. Fabius: Thank you--but 1 have no sons. Hannibal: You may have. . . and if you do, X hope that your first-born will inherit the qualities of greatness that were so evident in his father-- that he will duplicate his father's signal triumphs and that he, too, will ultimately discover the human equation. . . . It is so much more beautiful than war (322).

Amytis has made her point and saved Rome. And for Sherwood, the historical mystery of Hannibal's unexplained departure from the gates of Rome has been solved.

A play which pokes fun at war, the armed services, p o litic s, patriotism, and moral conventions can only be successful if it estab­ lishes at the outset that the audience or the reader can disregard his moral se n sib ilitie s and judgments and enjoy the wit and the fun of an abnormal world. Charles Lamb called this kind of play " a r tif ic ia l comedy," and Oliver Goldsmith, "laughing comedy." In any event, the world that this type of play presents, like Sherwood's Roman world, does not exist. It is not unusual, then, that c ritic s were not prone to judge the moral implications of the play. Stark Young described it in terms of how the play would have been received in ancient Greece:

"The Road to Rome" may be described as the kind of play that, if it had been given in Amytis's Athens in Socrates' day, would have brought Aristophanes down on its head, as subversive of social stability, national morality, character and patriotism, as flippant and harmful to citizens.58

There is, of course, a great difference between ancient Greece and twentieth century America. This difference is pointed out by R.

Baird Shuman, in his book Robert E. Sherwood; Shuman amusingly predicts 150 the punlshaient Amytis w ill receive for her sin of adultery:

If there is aiy vengeance against Amytis for her deceit, it is in the fact that for the rest of her life she will have to endure listening to Fabius as he makes such pronouncements as "Hannibal, with a ll his elephants and a ll his men, could not subdue the high moral purpose of Rome," and "Virtue, my dear, is the one perfect defense against all the evil forces on this earth.". . , and she w ill not be permitted to laugh at them .^

The c ritic a l reception of Reunion in Vienna^Q. Sherwood's anti-

Freudian play of marital infidelity, was less enthusiastic. The

Roman Catholic periodicals violently attacked the play, and when a company traveled to Toronto, the police stopped the production, claiming that Reunion in Vienna preached vice and falsehood clothed in beautiful language.61 T h e play deals with the marriage of Pro­ fessor Anton Krug of Vienna and his beautiful wife Elena. Krug is a psychiatrist and, according to one of his students, "the most en­

lightened scientist in Austria" (27). To a Pennsylvania woman, for example, who has been measuring her husband in terms of her f ir s t

love, he prescribes finding the first lover, taking a good look at him as he is now, and then curing herself of him forever. It will be

recalled that his prescription is the same as Adrian Terry's thesis

in Phillip Barry's In A Garden: romantic incidents do not bear re­

peating. And like the playwright in Barry’s play, Dr. Krug's plan

goes astray when he advises his wife to do what he asked the

Pennsylvania woman to do.

The advice is necessary after some of Elena's old friends call

to invite her to a dinner celebrating the one hundredth anniversary 151 of the birth of the late Emperor Franz Joseph 1. All the guests are to be nobility from the period before the revolution. Elena agrees to attend un til she is told that the Archduke Rudolf Maximillian von

Habsburg, her former lover who now lives in exile as a taxi-driver in Nice, may sneak into the country to be there. Anton thinks she should go. She asks if he is prescribing for her. He says:

Yes, th a t's exactly what I'm doing. The tender spot has been uncovered. Now we can take measures to cure it. . . . Elena, as your family physician, as well as your husband, I order you to go to Lucher's to-night, and do the inane things you used to do, and that you still secretly think were gloriously romantic (67).

She is, in short, to "let herself go."

At the party, Rudolf does arrive, though the Austrian police are on the watch for him. He is only interested in picking up where he and Elena left off. He is told: "She isn't the same one you used to make free with. Her husband is a very fine man--a big man, too, and.

. ." (118), but when he sees Elena he slaps her, then kisses her passionately. She does not respond, which arouses his a risto c ra tic anger, as does the fact that she wears a wedding ring:

Of all the bourgeois adornments. On you, it is a gross anachronism. Like a brassiere on the Venus de Milo. It offends me. We must remove it (120).

He confesses to her that all the women he has had for the past ten years have been proxies for her. Although she in sists she feels nothing for him, he wants her to love him again "as the echos of a voice that enchanted you when you were innocent and impressionable and young" (139). He carries her into the bedroom, but Elena goes into 152 the bathroom where she climbs out the window and escapes home.

Rudolf chases after her.

At the beginning of Act 111 Rudolfbarges into the Krug home.

Anton says he is glad to see his w ife's former lover:

1 should think you could imagine why. You've been something of a presence in my home, for a long time, ever since Elena and I were married. Not an entirely agreeable presence, 1 might add. But one that we could never quite get rid of. At times, you've stalked about this house as if you owned it (160-161).

The aristocrat explains that the sudden revolution ten years earlier denied him and Elena the privilege of parting as most lovers do.

Rudolf says:

For ten years I have felt the lack of her. So 1 decided to return to Vienna, and have one more look at her, and let my youthful illusions be shattered once and for all (166).

Anton, of course, thinks this was a wise decision, but Rudolf adds

that i t was wise only in theory; he has found that his desire for

Elena was no romantic illusion and that only the doctor can furnish

the nourishment his ego needs for another ten years in exile. Anton

invites him to look at his wife to his heart's content, but Rudolf

claims he needs to do more than just look. Anton objects and plays

the role of the jealous husband. The nobleman asks:

Do you imagine that I want to take her away from you for good and all? 1 can reassure you on that point. I want her for one night only. That will give me enough to live on for another ten years--by which time I ' l l hardly be a serious menace to you or to any one. Now-- surely-- you can have no objection to that? (174).

Antoi.i oes object. Rudolf insults him by saying that as a 153 scientist he should know that jealousy is only a manifestation of fear--an emotion which a sc ie n tist should have banished from his feelings. Before a fight ensues, word is brought that the police have surrounded the house. Anton is persuaded by one of Rudolf's friends to go to the prefect and obtain permission for the former prince to leave the country safely. The doctor agrees, but he must leave for the night. He tells Elena:

You saw the truth, Elena. You saw it, at last, when he goaded me into behaving lik e--lik e a vindictive ape. You are the only one who can settle it. If you can look at him, and laugh at him, and pity him, as you'd pity a deluded child; if you can see him for what he is , and not for what your memory tells you that he was--then you're free. He can never hurt you, whatever he does, or what­ ever you do (185).

When the two old lovers are alone, Rudolf says he has been tricked into her husband's debt and put on his honor. He has finally come to realize, he adds, that he is no longer an Archduke but a

"taxi-driver, dressed up." As for Elena, he has had the revelation that she is a wife--"and consequently unprepossessing." Elena is happy over th is news and te lls him: "And you know that I can face you, and laugh at you, and pity you, as I'd pity a deluded child.'"

(189).He retires to the guest room, where he says he will stay all night and keep "the faith." She turns out the lights and goes to her door, where she pauses to call his name. He answers. She enters her room and closes the door, as the curtain comes down to indicate the passage of the night.

In the morning Rudolf is deliriously happy. He eats Anton's 154 breakfast and comments:

You know, the more I hear about that gifted scientist, the more I know him to be a gentleman of discernment and taste. He and I obviously appreciate the same delicacies (195).

As he gets ready to leave for the border he says:

Rudolf: A dutiful wife, Herr Professor. I commend her to you--and you to her. It is a remarkable union, and it will give me satisfaction to the end of my days to think that perhaps I, in my small way, have contributed something to it, Elena: It's time to go, Rudolf. Rudolf: I know it is. But before 1 depart, Herr Professor, let me say that I call your roof tree blessed.' For beneath it, a Habsburg has been entertained--royally entertained-- and has been granted, into the bargain, a superb demonstration of applied psychology. . . . (202).

Rudolf leaves. Elena says there is something she wants to tell her husband. He says: "No there isn't, Elena. You have nothing to say

to me. I have only to look at you" (203). It is obvious that Dr.

Krug has been hoist with his own petard, which is what the Theatre

Arts Monthly implied when it called the play a "robust, satiric

prank."62

Commonweal was much harsher on the play than on Barry's The

Animal Kingdom. Its reviewer, Richard Dana Skinner, said:

I do not know why i t is that Mr. Sherwood frequently comes very close to writing plays of fine discrimination and constructive satire only to end up in a mire of cheap filth. For the first two acts, the character of Elena is well drawn and there is every reason to believe that, with her vast reserve of common sense, she will end up by preferring the scientific stodginess of her present existence to the empty glamor of the past. But 155

Mr. Sherwood seems bent upon reducing his potentially fine characters to the average level of an A. H. Woods bedroom farce.^3

Skinner goes on to attack the theme of the play--the important part of awork of a rt, which affects public opinion. Sherwood's theme, he insists, is "the condoning of adultery," and the author has no way of pleading innocent to that charge:

It is perfectly ridiculous. . . for the playwright to plead his own neutrality. . . and to say that he is - - simply providing a character study. The playwright has in his power a hundred different ways by which he can throw the emotional sympathy of the audience for or against the action of his main characters. In the present instance, by making Dr. Krug a self-satisfied and dust-dry scientist, by making Elena an attractive though spurious rom anticist, and by making the arch­ duke highly diverting for all his egotism, Mr. Sherwood has closed against himself all possible pleas of neutrality. In spite of its atmosphere of airy satire and quick-spoken comedy, the theme of his play is nothing more nor less than the condoning of adultery.64

The Catholic World was not as hostile to Reunion in Vienna. In fact, it pointed out that while the play had no "morals," it was superior to plays which had perverted morals. The reviewer looked for

the good points of the play but found only two: that the actorswho

playedElena and Rudolf (the Lunts) were married in real life, and

that the play slapped out at the Freudians. Of the performances by

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne it said:

Certainly in th eir clever hands, Reunion in Vienna is highly subversive of standards for they grace a shame­ less situation with so much style that even the censor must admit that their humor is infectious. One also has the consolation, as one young woman naively remarked, of knowing the Lunts are really married. From which you might gather that the comedy is of the type that once 156

was thought untranslatable and reserved for Paris or Vienna before New York had lost her sense of reticence. It makes rather pitiless game of the ruined Viennese aristocracy but is a broad burlesque of Dr. Freud. From that standpoint it serves a worthy en d .65

Certainly Reunion in Vienna is reminiscent of P hillip Barry's

In A Garden, except that in the latter play adultery does not occur.

The difference between the two plays is that Dr. Krug of Reunion in

Vienna insists to the very end upon his thesis that romantic incidents do notbear repeating, while Adrian Terry in Barry's play sees that he isbeaten well before the crisis develops, and he cancels the

engagement that would have taken him out of town that night and left

Norrie and his wife alone.

It is interesting to note that the closing dialogue between the

doctor and Rudolf is typical of Sherwood’s love for making fun of the

cuckold; The Road to Rome ends similarly with Hannibal's comments

to Fabius.

In other Sherwood plays adultery is not central, though it does

enter into The Petrified Forest (1934), when Mrs. Chisholm, bored with

her married life, offers to "crawl into the hay" with the fugitive

Duke Mantee. Id io t's Delight (1936) and There Shall Be No Night

(1940) are anti-fascist war plays, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois

(1938), the first play produced by the newly formed Playwrights'

Company (Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, and

Sidney Howard), is s tric tly h isto rical drama. Robert E. Sherwood was

not, like P hillip Barry, v ita lly interested in the problem of m arital 157

Infidelity.

CLARE BOOTHE

The most popular play of the period which treated adultery and

divorce was Clare Boothe's The Women66 (1936), which ran for 657

performances and was the object of many critical attacks. The play was called coarse, vulgar, d irty , venomous, and shocking to have

been written by a woman. On this latter charge Joseph Mersand, in

his book The American Drama Since 1930. explains why such a play

could have been written only by a woman of Miss Boothe's social

standing and financial independence. The explanation is in terms of

some of the sociological factors discussed in Chapter I:

No man, even though he might want to, would have dared to have been so caustic in his satire. Neither would he have been accepted. His view would have been con­ sidered prejudiced, colored by his own misadventures, and thoroughly condemned. Hiss Boothe, being of the same sex, firmly established in the Park Avenue set, married to wealthy Henry R. Luce, editor of Time, Fortune. and L ife . can afford to say what she thinks. . . . She does not depend on her plays for her daily susten­ ance and so can afford to run the risk of offending large blocs of stay-at-homers .^

As it turned out, the dramatist obviously pleased more theatergoers

than she offended.

In theme, The Women is much like Phillip Barry's Paris Bound:

marriage is basically a spiritual relationship, and the infidelity of

one of its partners is less serious than the dissolution of the whole

relationship. Another characteristic which links the play to Paris

Bound is a parent's advice to the faithful wife that she must avoid 158 confronting the erring husband with his sin. In Barry's play the advice is given by the husband's father and in The Women by the wife's mother. The difference between the plays lies in the fact that

Mary Hutton of Paris Bound finally accepts the advice; Mary Haines of The Women does not, and, consequently, she loses her husband to

Crystal Allen.

As the play opens, Mrs. Howard Fowler (Sylvia), Mrs. John Day

(Peggy), Mrs. Phelps Potter (Edith), and Nancy Blake, an unmarried novelist, are playing bridge at the home of Mary Haines. The women are brutal--especially Sylvia, who has heard stories about Edith's husband ("Oh, Fhelps has made passes at a ll us g irls. I do think it's bad taste for a man to try to make his wife's friends, especially when he's bald and fat" (7).) and about Mary's husband. She advises

Mary to go to the beauty parlor and have the new manicurist do her nails in the new color, "Jungle-red." Mary does. The manicurist does not know who Mary is, so she goes on with a ll the dirty gossip she knows, including the a ffa ir between Crystal Allen and Stephen

Haines. Mary rushes out of the beauty parlor in tears.

At home she calls her mother, Mrs. Morehead, and asks her what

she should say to Stephen. Her mother tells her to say nothing; she had the same problem with Mary' s father, and she explains th at, a fter

all, Stephen is a man who has been married for twelve years. Mary wonders if her husband is tired of her. Mrs. Moreland says:

Stephen's tired of himself. Tired of feeling the same things in himself year after year. Time comes when 159

every man's got to feel something new--when he's got to feel young again, ju st because he's growing old. Women are ju st the same. But when we get that way we change our h air dress. Or get a new cook. Or redecorate the house from stem to stern. But a man can't do over his office, or fire his secretary. Not even change the style of his hair. And the urge usually hits him hardest just when he's beginning to lose his hair. No, dear, a man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self--in the mirror of some woman's eyes (56).

She adds exactly what Mr. Hutton told Mary in Paris Bound:

'V Stephen's_/ not giving anything to her that belongs to you, or you would have fe lt that yourself long ago" (56) . Mary thinks if he had told her she could have forgiven him. Mrs. Morehead says;

"Forgive him? For what? For being a man? Accuse him, and y o u 'll never get a chance to forgive him. He'd have to ju stify him self--"

(57). Mary says he could not justify himself. Her mother says;

He can 't and he can. Don't make him try. Either way you'd lose him. And remember, dear, i t 's being together in the end that really matters (57-58).

Mary accepts the advice for the time being, but two months later she and Sylvia are in a dress shop where they meet Crystal Allen.

Sylvia advises Mary to confront her:

You've caught her cold. I t 's your chance to humiliate her. Just say a few quiet words. Tell her you'll make Stephen's life hell until he gives her up (73).

When Mary refuses, Sylvia tells her that Stephen, Crystal, and the two Haines children were seen lunching in the park while Mary was out of town. This infuriates her, and she storms into Crystal’s dressing booth, where Mary gets the worst of the exchange. Crystal tells her she would break up their marriage if she could, but she doesn't stand 160 a chance. Mary replies she is glad Crystal knows where she stands.

Crystal explains:

You're not what*s stopping him--You’re just an old habit with him. It's just those brats he's a£rald of losing. If he weren't such a sentimental fool about those kids( he'd have walked out on you years ago (79) .

As a final blow the m istress says;

The longer you stay in here, the more confident I get. Saint or no saint, Mrs. Haines, you are a hell of a dull woman (80).

Act II takes place two weeks later. Mary has decided to divorce

Stephen, though her mother is still trying to convince her otherwise;

"It's never too late when you love, Mary, why don't you call this thing off? I'm sure that's what Stephen is waiting for" (113). She goes on to attack "these modem laws" which make divorce so easy;

Damn them I say! Fifty years ago, when women couldn't get divorces, they made the best of situations like this. And sometimes, out of situations like this they made very good things indeed! (114).

Complications arise when the older Haines child, Mary, asks; "But,

Mother, when you love somebody I thought you loved them u n til the day you die!" (126). The child begins to cry and beat her fists against

the chair.

Two months later Mary is at Reno hotel with Peggy, who has

quarreled with her husband; Sylvia, who has been caught with another man; and Miriam, the woman Sylvia's husband w ill marry a fter both

their divorces are final. Peggy does not really want a divorce; she

is pregnant, but she says she has her pride. Mary replies bitterly

that Reno is full of women "who have their pride." Peggy calls her 161 husband, packs, and leaves for home. Mary does not want a divorce either. She discusses the matter with Miriam, who walked out on her husband for the same reason that Mary left Stephen. Miriam knows now what she should have done: "I should have licked that g irl where she licked me--in the hay" (156). But before Mary can call Stephen, he phones to tell her he is marrying Crystal. Mary congratulates him and says goodbye; then she fin a lly realizes what she has done:

Oh, God, why did I let this happen? We were married. We had a good life. Oh, God, I've been a fool! (158).

When the last act opens, two years later, Crystal is playing the lady of leisure. She is comfortable as a woman of means, but she dislikes Stephen's son and daughter, who visit occasionally. Sylvia c alls and te lls Crystal what her psychiatrist said about her and

Stephen’s marriage:

He says men of Stephen's generation were brought up to believe that infidelity is a sin. That's why he allowed Mary to divorce him, and th a t's why he married you, Crystal. He had to marry you just to convince himself he was not a sexual monster (168).

By this time Crystal is sleeping with Buck Winston, a Hollywood cowboy, married to one of Mary's friends from Reno. She is satisfied with her life, but Stephen and Mary are unhappy. Little Mary tells her mother: "I think Daddy doesn't love her as much as you any more"

(190), The girl has overheard bits of Crystal's telephone conversa­ tion with Buck Winston, which leads Mary to suspect that the present

Mrs. Haines is an adulteress. Mary, who is miserable living alone, decides to attend a party at which Stephen and his wife will be 162

present.

When Mary meets C rystal in the powder room of the h o tel, she

accuses her of being unfaithful to Stephen and threatens to tell her

ex-husband. Crystal says Mary can have her "leftovers"; Mary says

she will take them. Sylvia is appalled that Mary has no pride; but

Mary says: "That's right. No, no pride; that's a luxury a woman

in love can't afford" (213). The women are interrupted by a messenger

who announces that Mr. Haines is waiting for his wife.

Mary: Tell him _I am coming. Sylvia: Mary, what a d irty female trick.' Crystal: Yes' From the great, noble little woman) You're just a cat, like all the rest of us) Mary: Well, I've had two years to sharpen my claws. Jungle-red, Sylvia) Good night, ladies) (213).

Mary has turned into a beast in order to survive in the jungle of

upper-class female society.

The Catholic World thought the play coarse but admitted it had

moments of "clean sincerity":

Sections of the dialogue are almost coarser if not so dirty as The Country Wife, plus modern tawdriness, and yet there are some moments of clean sincerity when the older woman counsels her daughter to do everything to avoid forcing an issue with her husband, and when the little girl suddenly finds her home fallen in pieces.68

Given the author's comments on the play in her foreword to the reading

edition, it is difficult to believe that she was not sincere in her

handling of the themes of divorce and adultery. Her b itte rn e ss

toward the women in the play, even toward Mary at times, seems to have

been sincere rather than artistically clever. Miss Boothe says about 163 the characters In the play (there are no men in the cast) and their real life models:

The women who inspired this play deserved to be smacked across the head with a meat-axe. And that, 1 flatter myself, is exactly what I smacked them with. They are vulgar and dirty-minded, and alien to grace, and I would not if I could--which, I hasten to say I cannot--gloss their obscenities with a wit which is foreign to them, and gild th eir f u tilitie s with a glamour which by birth and breeding and performance they do not possess. They are the advocates of the hackneyed, devotees of the wise­ crack, high priestesses of the banal. . . . Everything they say and do is in deplorable taste, because every­ thing I have ever heard such women say and do _is in deplorable taste. But indeed, if one is not susceptible to their ludicrousness, tickled by their gargantuan absurdities, one is quite justified in being either bored or appalled by them (xii).

The Catholic World was appalled by them and especially appalled

that the solution the dramatist gives for Mary Haines is to become

one of "the women":

Perhaps Miss Clare Boothe might call her play moral propaganda in that the folly of Reno is exposed and virtue triumphs, but if so, the antidote is about as poisonous as the poison.69

According to Henry R. Luce, the playwright's husband, Miss

Boothe "dashed off" The Women in three days, to release energy and

anger over her unsuccessful attempt to work on one of his magazines.^

One can believe that the bitterness of the play could have been

sustained for three days, but to write such witty and polished

dialogue in so short a time seems almost impossible. Miss Boothe in

1936 had written only one other play and was hardly an experienced

dramatist. Her f ir s t play, Abide With Me (1935) was both a c ritic a l 164 and a popular failure. It was so bad a play, in fact, that she wrote her own review of it in Time. She said, about the death of her main character: "This event brings relief from much tedious psychiatry and gratifies those spectators who like melodrama."71

Abide With Me deals with the domestic problems created by an alcholic husband, a rather tenuous connection with The Women. Her other two plays, Kiss the Boys Good-Bye, (1938) and Margin for Error

(1939), were both selected by Burns Mantle as best plays of the year, but both deal with a more important contemporary issue than adultery.

Kiss the Boys Good-Bye, for example, is on one level a sa tire on

Hollywood's attempt to find an actress to play S carlett O'Hara in the screen version of Gone With the Wind (Velvet O'Toole is the part the producers are trying to fill). On another level, and according to the playwright's intention, Kiss the Boys is a political allegory of

Fascism in America. Miss Boothe says, in her foreword to the play;

Indeed "Southernism" may possibly have been the in sp ir­ ation or forerunner of Fascism. At any rate those who like to draw political analogies. . . may surely with profit trace the Black or Brown Shirt idea to the White Shirts of the Ku Klux K l a n . 7 2

Margin for Error, a play about the Nazis, is equally serious in

intention. Henry Luce, in his introduction to the reading version, says:

But her peculiar success does not really lie in having got National Socialism on stage. Her success--or rather what will later be defined as her half success--is her 165

success in dramatizing the democrat's rebuttal to National Socialism. For in all these years of failure the difficulty has not in fact been to get National Socialism on stage. The real difficulty has been to get on stage a convincing rebuttal to National Socialism.

Both Kiss the Boys Good-Bye and Margin for Error are as bitter as The Women, but for most readers and playgoers, her venom is more profitably spent on fascists than on upper-class women. 166

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER IV

^agey, p. 179.

^ E llis, p. 43.

3john Gassner, "An American Decade," Introduction to Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre (New York; Crown Publishers Inc., 1932), p. vii.

^Gagey, p. 175.

Sjohn Van Druten, "The Sex Play," Theatre Arts Monthly, XI (January 1927), 24-25.

^Gagey, p. 201.

?Ibid. , p. 188.

8"Rachel Crothers; Pacemaker for American Social Comedy ,,r Theatre Arts Monthly, XVI (December 1933), 971.

^Dickinson, p. 183.

lOQuinn, I I , 51.

u Ib id . , 60.

^ R a c h e l Crothers, Let Us Be Gay (New York: S. French, 1935).

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Let Us Be Gay," The Catholic World. CXXIX (April 1929), 83.

^Robert Littell, "Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts Monthly, XIII (May 1929), 330.

l^Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal, IX (May l, 1929), 750.

^Rachel Crothers, As Husbands Go. In Frank W. Chandler and Richard A. Cordell, eds., Twentieth Century Plays (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1934).

^ R i c h a r d Dana Skinner, "The Play and the Screen," Common­ weal, XIII (March 18, 1931), 553. 167

l®John Hutchens, "Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts Monthly, XV (May 1931), 370.

l^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "A Good American Comedy," The Catholic World. CXXXIII (May 1931), 205.

^R achel Crothers, When Ladies Meet (New York: S. French, 1932).

^lEuphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "When Ladies Meet," The Catholic World, CXXXVI (November 1932), 208.

22r ichard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal, XVI (October 26, 1932), 621.

23j0seph Wood Krutch, "Mother Was Right," The Nation, CXXXV (October 26, 1932), 408.

^Q uinn, I I , 61.

2^Mersand, p. 159.

2&Maxwell Anderson, Saturday’s C hildren (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927).

27j0seph Wood Krutch, "Contemporaneity," The Nation, CXXIV (February 16, 1927) , 194.

2Scarl Carmer, "Maxwell Anderson: Poet and Champion," Theatre Arts Monthly, XVII (June 1933), 442.

29stark Young, "Saturday's Children and Trelawney," The New Republic, XLIX (February 16, 1927), 357.

30sievers, p. 199.

3iGagey, p. 201.

32phillip Barry, In A Garden (New York; S. French, 1926).

33ciark, Hour, p. 103.

34Koster, p. 15.

35phillip Barry, Paris Bound (New York; S. French, 1929). 168

36carl Carmer, "Phillip Barry," Theatre Arts Monthly, XIII (November 1929), 822-823.

37John Mason Brown, "New York Goes Native,"" Theatre Arts Monthly, XII (February 1928), 166.

3®0liver M. Sayler, "The Play of the Week," The Saturday Review of Literature, IV (January 14, 1928), 516.

39clark, Hour, p. 112.

^ P h i l l i p Barry, Tomorrow and Tomorrow (New York: S. French, 1931).

^ S ie v e rs , p. 201.

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," The Catholic World. CXXXII (March 1931), 718.

4 ^Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal , XIII (January 28, 1931), 388.

^ P h i l l i p Barry, The Animal Kingdom (New York; S. French, 1932).

levers, p. 198.

4®John Hutchens, "Looking Up: Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts Monthly, XVI (March 1932), 187.

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "The Animal Kingdom," The Catholic World. CXXIV (March 1932), 715.

4®Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal, XV (February 17, 1932), 441.

^Hutchens, p. 188.

^Sievers, p. 211.

S^-S. N. Behrman, B rief Moment (New York: Farrar and Rine­ h a rt, 1931).

52Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Brief Moment," The Catholic World. CXXXIV (January 1932), 470.

^R ichard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal, XV (December 2, 1931), 134. 169

SAjoseph Wood Krutch, "The Comic Wisdom of S. N. Behrman," The Nation, CXXXVII (July 19, 1933), 75.

55S. N. Behrman, No Time for Comedy (New York: Random House, 1939).

5&Burns Mantle, The Best Plays of 1937-1938 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1942), p. 262.

57Robert £. Sherwood, The Road to Rome. In John Gassner, ed., Twenty-five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. Early S eries (New York: Crown P u b lish e rs, 1949).

58stark Young, "The Road to Rome," The New Republic, L (March 9, 1927), 71.

^9R. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood (New York; Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964), p. 43.

^R obert E. Sherwood, Reunion in Vienna (New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932).

61shuman, Sherwood, p. 140.

6 ^John Hutchens, "Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts Monthly, XVI (February 1932), 96.

^^Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal, XV (December 9, 1931) , 160.

64 Ibid.

65Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Reunion in V ienna," The Catholic World, CXXXIV (January 1932), 467.

66 ciare Boothe, The Women (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1939).

67Joseph Mersand, The American Drama Since 1930 (New York: The Modem Chapbooks, 1949), p. 49.

6 ®Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "The Women," The Catholic World, CXLIV (February 1937), 599-600.

69Ibid., p. 600. 170

70john Kobler, "The F irs t Tycoon and the Power of His Press," The Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXVIII (January 16, 1965), 44.

^"T h eatre," Time, XXVI (December 2, 1935), 68.

^Quoted in Burns Mantle, The Best Plays of 1938-1939 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1939), p. 357.

^Quoted i n Burns Mantle, The Best Plays of 1939-1940 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1940), p. 317. CHAPTER V

ADULTERY IN OTHER PLAYS BETWEEN THE WARS

THE INFLUENCE OF SIDNEY HOWARD AND ELMER RICE

It is not surprising to find that minor playwrights between the wars followed the lead set by the major dramatists in their con­ cern with adultery, marriage, divorce, and other problems related to sexual morality. Nowhere is the influence of the major playwright on the minor one more in evidence than in the plays which preceded and followed Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. Several months before Howard's play, Zona Gale's Mr. P itt* (1924) was produced; several months a fte r They Knew What They Wanted, Patrick Kearney presented A Han's Man^ (1925). In both plays a woman is unfaithful to her husband, but a comparison of the two points out the extent of Sidney Howard's influence on American drama of the middle 1920's.

In Mr. P itt. Barbara Ellsworth has been left, upon the death of her father, with home and business debts. When Marshall Pitt, a simple, kind, but unsophisticated salesman comes to town Barbara marries him. On their honeymoon Barbara is disillusioned by his lack of social grace and his pathetic kindness. She meets a musician,

Max Bayard, who dances with her while the new bridegroom looks on.

He does not know how to dance, and he is grateful that Max can show

Barbara a good time. Max must leave the country for a year to go on tour with an orchestra, but he promises to return to Barbara.

171 172

When he does return, she Is In post-natal depression and Is no longer in love with Pitt. She promises to meet Max the next night in Chicago. She goes to him, but he was not aware that she would bring a child and is not interested in taking both her and the baby away. Barbara takes the baby home, drops it off, and leaves by herself. She tells her friend: "I tell you 1 won't live for other people. 1 belong to myself. It's wicked for me to live here with

Marshall when l--hate him" (156). Barbara goes away and is never heard from again. The rest of the play treats the effect of her adultery and desertion on her pathetic husband and the child. The boy grows up to be an a r tis t and a snob who cannot stand his father;

Marshall, typically, blames himself for the boy's shortcomings. The adulteress, however, never appears on stage once she decides to

leave her family.

A Man' s Man. however, follows the formula of forgiveness for adultery established by Sidney Howard. In this play about the marriage of Melville and Edie Tuttle, the dramatist depicts a middle-

class couple bent on the romantic notion of going from rags to riches.

Mel, the husband, has spent what little money he has on "improving himself." He has taken the Master Key Course, is wading through the

Five Foot Shelf of Books, and is, with the help of his friend Charlie

Graff, trying to get into the Elks. Charlie is "taking care" of the

Elk membership and Mel's money at the same time.

On Mel's wife Edie, Charlie uses another approach. He is in 173 the movie business, he tells her, (he is a shipping clerk for

Wonder Films) and can get her into plctures--especially since she looks like Mary Pickford. She agrees to his terms--to sleep with him--and afterwards says:

Oh, you just gotta get me in the movies, Charlie. I've went and done everything for you now; everything you wanted. If I don't get to be a star--I'll juat--I'll just kill myself (76-77).

When Mel comes home from work he has a funny story that Charlie has been telling the other men, about a married woman he promised to get into the movies if she would "come across." Mel envies his friend:

Charlie's the boy to get away with that, all right. A married woman, too. Takes a real fine fellow to get a married woman, you bet. And her husband don't know nothin' about it.' He sure is a great fellow, Charlie is. Gotta hand it to him a ll right. Can you imagine that dame thinkln1 she looks like Mary Pickford? Can't you see how funny it is? (92).

Edie does not see the humor. Charlie comes over that night to getanother $100 for the Elks. When he is convinced that Mel does not have the money and w ill not be able to get i t , he te lls him he has been milking him with the Elks scheme. Charlie challenges Mel to dosomething about it. When Edie interferes, Charlie tells her husband that she is the one he is getting into pictures. Then he leaves. Edie asks for forgiveness and puts her arms around her husband, who shouts: "Get your hands offa me. . . don't you touch me.'

Get outa here!" (111). Mel gets a gun and goes out to kill Charlie.

When he returns, bruised and bloody, he says he beat Charlie; then he 174 packs to leave. At the door he begins to sob and tells Edie of his unworthiness. He did not beat Charlie; he was beaten himself. The two embrace, forget the past, and plan for a son, who will go to college and become Grand Master of the Elks.

Such a reconciliation is, of course, now rather frequent in the drama. But i t could only came a fter the precedent set by Sidney

Howard, who argued more plausibly and effectively for less concern with fidelity and more concern with marriage.

The same argument about the influence of Howardand others can be advanced for the dramatization of Edith Wharton's novel Ethan

Frome (1911). We have seen earlier that for a number of reasons the novel was able to keep ahead of the drama in treating social and moral issues. It is perhaps significant that it was not until 1936 that Owen and Donald Davis presented Ethan Frome** as a play--a very moving play at that. Even The Catholic World fe ltthat Ethan was not responsible for falling in love with Mattie;

What escape could there be for Ethan and Mattie when Zenia brought Mattie to live with her? Humanly speak­ ing, Ethan could no more stifle his feeling than a parched field can help absorbing the rain. There have been very few tragedies so apparently inevitable and conelusive

A play in which adultery is the logical outcome of a situation could not possibly have found its way to the stage until after 1924.

The influence of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, in both theme and technique, is best shown as i t concerns Sophie Treadwell's

Machinal** (1928) . Both plays deal with sexual frustrations in an age 175 where the machine is supreme, and both present their views in ex- pressionistic form. The institution of marriage in Machinal. moreover, comes out as badly as it does in Rice's earlier play. Miss

Treadwell's main characters are named simply Young Woman, Husband, and Man. Perhaps the best summary of the f irs t half of the play is that by W. David Sievers, who interprets the drama in psychoanalytic terms:

The heroine, simply named The Young Woman, is a gentle, tender, sexually baffled creature in a hard, mechanized civ ilizatio n teeming with sexual threats which arouse her anxiety. Craving emotional satisfaction yet having been brought up to view sex as loathsome, the Young Girl is in constant panic at her libidinous urges which threaten to break through wherever she turns, in her mechanized office or the closely packed subway train. Her boss has fa t, flabby hands which she fears, and her mother has a drab mind that can discuss only garbage and potatoes while the Young Girl probes her about love and marriage. . . . Her honeymoon with an earthy, lusty man is a magnificent depiction of em­ barrassment, sexual panic and hysteria; she undresses in the bathroom and cries for her mother as her husband approaches her.6

After the Young Woman's marriage, she feels as if she is

"drowning." Her relationship with her husband is, like Mr. Zero's relationship with his wife, one of non-communication. All of her responses to her husband's words or actions are by rote. When the husband has just put over a big business deal, for example, he demands that she ask him about it. 176

Young Woman (by rote): Did you put it over? Husband: Sure I put it over. Young Woman: Did you swing it? Husband: Sure I swung it. Young Woman: Did they come through? Husband: Sure They came through. Young Woman: Did They sign? Husband: I'll say they signed. Young Woman: On the dotted line? Husband: On the dotted line (517).

Her drab existence at home is in marked contrast, however, to her adulterous affair. She allows herself to be picked up at a speakeasy by a complete stranger, and after she has slept with him says: "I never knew anything like this way! I never knew that I could feel like this! So,--so purified!" (516). Then she goes home and murders her husband. She is convicted of the murder and sentenced to die. Before she is strapped into the electric chair she hears an airplane overhead. She tells the priest who is attend­ ing to her:

He has wings--but he isn't free! I've been free, Father! For one moment--down on earth --I have been free! When I did what 1 did I was free! Free and not afraid! How is that, Father? How can that be? A great sin--a mortal sin--for which I must die and go to hell--but i t made me free! One moment I was free! How is that, Father? Tell me that? (528).

The reporters covering the execution are worried about the electric chair--a machine which, combined with a ll others, symbolizes modern society.

1st Reporter: Suppose the machine shouldn't work! 2nd Reporter: I t ' l l w ork!--It always works! (529).

Like Mr. Zero, the Young Girl dies without really having known what 177 it was to live.

Most critics liked the play. John Gassner, in his introduction to Machinal. especially liked the expressionism:

By giving the story an expressive form, Miss Treadwell transfigured the commonplaces of adultery and murder we encounter in newspapers and popular fiction into something considerably more humanly meaningful and socially suggestive (494).

Stark Young liked the play for the variety of themes with which it dealt:

There is a kind of bravery of these themes, that, for instance, of the husband's relation to his wife, his laughing, naive satisfaction with himself, his refusal to be in terested in woman's music, his liking for her shudder a t his touch, which to his mind is a height of purity th at marks her out from the other women he knows and which is only one more field for his con­ quest and big dealing.'

It is significant, I think, that one of the objections raised against the play was the Young Woman's anxiousness to commit adultery.

George Jean Nathan, for example, saw this as a flaw in the technique of Machinal:

So sketchy is the technique, indeed, that at times it becomes burlesque as, for example, in the episode where-in the woman, ostensibly and even assiduously presented as a sympathetic character, decides to copulate with a strange man three or four minutes after she has been introduced to him.

From what we are given about the married life of the Young Woman, however, the episode does not seem burlesque at all. At any rate, the influence of Elmer Rice in theme (the drabness of marriage and the sexual frustrations of Americans) and technique (expressionism) 178 is obvious.

MORAL CONSERVATISM AND THE MINOR DRAMATIST

We have seen e a rlier that most of the serious plays and comedies between the wars present an advanced or liberal view of adultery. There are several other plays, however, which present a conservative view. The Intruder^ (1928), for example, by Paul

Eldridge handles adultery in the same manner as the plays of

Eugene O'Neill: adultery is destructive to a marriage and to the guilty partner. In Eldridge's play, Dr. John Weston has had a one- night affair with his servant, Katy. The affair results in a child.

By the second act six years have past, and Katy returns to in sist that the doctor divorce his wife and marry her. Their child, she says, needs a father and she needs John.

The doctor is changed from the contented man of the f ir s t act.

He blames the change on Katy and her son:

Doctor: He has spoiled my peace of mind. He has made a lia r and a coward of me. He has destroyed my happiness. My life was a perfect symphony-- a harmonious piece of music. You came, and the music changed into an infernal noise. Katy: Oh-- Doctor: I could keep my head high. 1 could look the world straight in the face. Now I dare not face any one. I am leading a double life. To my wife I claimed it was wrong to bring other human beings into the world, but with another woman I have a child. My wife 1 deprived of motherhood (92).

He says that not only is he living a lie, but he cannot love even

his wife any longer: 179

Katy: What do you mean, John? Doctor: You loveonly me. You never loved another. You cannot understand the horrible sensation when kissing the lips of one to feel the lips of another mingle with them. Katy: You feel my llps--mlngle? Doctor: Yes, you Interpose your face between my face and hers and then I t 's neither you nor she I kiss, but the air--empty air. You cannot Imagine the meaning of emptiness (95).

Katy demands that he either divorce his wife or kill her so that they will be free to marry. If he does not do either one, she will bring about a paternity suit that will ruin his reputation and his medical practice.

The playwright offers two third acts to the play. In one version, Mrs. Weston agrees to divorce John to save his reputation, but Katy, who senses that the doctor needs the protection of a mother figure more than he needs a woman, suddenly says to Mrs.

Weston: "You needn't go away any more. I understand It a ll now.

. . . He belongs to you!" (131). In the alternate version John kills his wife and later kills himself. Neither ending is satis­ factory, though the first is more contrived than the second.

Eldridge's thesis, however, is evident: John Weston's adultery is destructive.

This conservative message is more explicit in Susan G laspell's

P ulitizer Prize play, Alison's House*^ (1930), which deals with the

Emily Dickinson story. In the play, Alison Stanhope, a recluse

poet, has been dead for eighteen years, though her presence is s t i l l

felt throughout the old Stanhope home, now being vacated by the 180 family. In the last act, same unpublished poems are discovered which point to the reason why Alison had never married; she had been in love with a married man. The poet's brother, father Stan­ hope, toasts to his deceased sister, in an obvious slam at his daughter Elsa, who has just run away with a married man, and in an obvious message for the audience and readers of the play: "To my s is te r, who loved to the uttermost, and denied, because i t was right" (689).

For Mark Van Doren the message was too much. He called the play a "false, sentimental piece" and said; "Emily Dickinson has suffered many indignities from her biographers, but none so heavy- handed as this."^ Commonweal felt that Alison's House was the best play of the y e a r , ^ and The Catholic World emphasized the moral comment of the play by contrasting Alison's sacrifice with Elsa's adultery:

The real moments in the play come in the last act in Alison's bed chamber where her family learn her secret from some unpublished poems. To save her honor, Alison sacrificed her heart. Her niece has taken the easier and more modern path. Was Alison a fool? Is sacrifice worth while? The spiritual serenity that yet fills Alison's room seems the answer. Elsa has found no peace. She has been the flame of inspiration for one man; her Aunt is for mankind.

Another conservative or conventional message is offered in

A. E. Thomas' No More Ladies^ (1934), a play which, according to

TheCatholic World, "circulates around the Commandment whichsome wag suggested J_ that_/ Moses had made for the movies.The drama­

tist admitted that he did not intend his comedy to be accepted as 181 entertainment and nothing more. Burns Mantle, In his Introduction

to No More Ladles, quotes Thomas as saying about the play:

1 believe It says something worth saying about the problem of marriage as it confronts the younger generation. . . . Is success in marriage worth a struggle, or, if it is not at once successful, should one discard i t as if i t were an unbecoming h at, and casually provide one's self with another? One point of view shows character, I think. The other has lamentable e ffects upon human souls (292).

In Act I of the play, before Marcia Townsend agrees to marry playboy Sherry Warren, she makes sure that he is aware of the risks

of marriage. She says that getting married is easy, but it is making it work that is the "catch,,; people expect too much from marriage:

Sherry: Yeh. The rock-bound coast is strewn with wrecks. Marcia: And the more sophisticated the people the heavier the odds against them. Now take a truck driver and a waitress from Childs. They'll marry, raise a family of from four to eight kids, quarrel happily for half a century and pass out from hardening of the a rte rie s, s t i l l husband and wife. . . (299).

On the other hand, she thinks perhaps marriages fail because people

expect too little:

If they really expect a Paradise on earth, they're going to give everything they've got to make it come true, if only to save their self-respect. Most of them are disillusioned about marriage before they marry. A fat chance they have (300).

They decide that the odds are against their marriage succeeding,

but they w ill go ahead and bet every d o llar they have that i t w ill

endure. 182

In Act II the two have been married for seven months. Sherry is already back in his role of playboy and has been seen with a night club performer, Teresa German. He has not been home for several days. When he does return, Marcia asks him if he has been unfaithful to her. He has. She is neither angry nor forgiving,

though she feels that there really is "something in the broken heart idea." Marcia gets together a party of Sherry's old loves, including Teresa German, his present interest. After a boring evening of bridge, Marcia goes off with one of the guests and does not return until the following noon. Sherry tells Marcia's grand­ mother that he will not take her behavior "sitting down." The elderly woman tells him that in an ideal state, he and Marcia could be "wild horses" with nothing to do but make love and roam the prairies. But in the society in which they actually live, there is

not only love to be made but work to be done as well:

You and Marcia are a pair of two-year olds, being broken to double harness. Can't be done in a minute. Bound to be a lot ofkicking and a run­ away or two. But a fine team is the very best thing in the world. Never forget it. . . (309).

Sherry is unable to find out exactly what happened the night

before between his wife and her companion. Both Sherry and Marcia

appear to be planning to divorce the other for adultery. The grand­

mother tells Marcia:

I thought you were a couple of thoroughbreds, but now I apologize to all horses--you're nothing but a pair of mules--and mules, as you recall, are creatures with no pride of ancestry and no hope of posterity!!! (312). 183

Marcia and her husband decide that because they are in love they will continue their marriage. Sherry thinks perhaps she is pregnant, but she in sists that she w ill not have a child un til she can be

"perfectly sure there'd be a father for that child, more or less regularly around the house" (315). Of the thousands of married couples in "exactly this situation at the present moment," Marcia says that most of them will let their marriages "go to smash" and their spirits go "crippled and scarred to the grave." Sherry decides that once a man has seen his wife suffer on his account, as he has seen Marcia suffer, he could not bear the thought of doing it again.

Sherry: Marcia' Marcia! My darling! I--I cannot hurt you any more. Never again--you must believe that, do you, my darling? Marcia: Almost. Sherry: Then--is there any more to say? Marcia: Do you s t i l l wish to know what happened last night? Sherry: As you like. Marcia: Then I ' l l te ll you-- Sherry: Wait--I'm not sure, I--I-- Marcia: --Don't worry, I'll tell you on our Golden Wedding Day! (316).

There is good reason to believe that the two will still be together at that time. They embrace as the curtain fa lls. We have seen

earlier that Joseph Wood Krutch did not see the play as offering any solution to the problem of adultery; he felt that for sophis­

ticates to argue against adultery was to muddy the whole dramatic

argument.

This same conclusion by sophisticates was reached in Joseph

Carole and Alan Dinehart's Separate Rooas^ (1940), a hit comedy 184 which ran for over 600 performances. The play deals with Jim Stack­ house, a cynical newspaper columnist, and his brother Don, a playwright. To insure that Don will not marry actress Pamela Barry,

Jim arranges for a rich man-about-town, Gary Brice, to produce Don's latest play (a very bad one we are told) and to hire Pamela to star in the play. Jim's plan is that the play will get such terrible reviews that Pam will quit the stage and marry Gary Brice. Like most plans made in a comedy, this one fails. The play receives rave reviews, and Pam, to insure her theatrical career, agrees to marry

Don, Jim and Pam hate each other so much that Jim threatens to publicize her rather shady past if she goes through with the marriage to his brother. His co -jo u rn alist, Linda Roberts, convinces him that he should wait for three months to see how the marriage works out.

Two months later Jim has been driven out of the apartment he previously shared with his brother, and Pamela is proving to be an extremely bad wife. She has run her husband deeply into debt with her purchases of jewelry, mink coats, fancy cars, and horses. The couple even have separate rooms. Jim wonders about the wisdom of sleeping apart:

Don: Well, a lot of married couples have separate bed­ rooms. It's--m odern and smart. Jim: It may be modern, but it's not smart. Don: All right, then, it1s--hygienic (53).

When the three months' probationary period ends, Jim begins to gather material for his expose^ of Pam's past--especially the evidence 185 which shows that she is having a current a ffa ir with Gary Brice.

Jim and Linda have another quarrel over the ethics of such a story, and Jim, reluctantly, goes to Pam. He tells her he will not publish

the story if she sells all her expensive things, stops seeing

Brice, trades her foreign car in for a Ford, lets Don move into her room, and starts playing the role of a good and faithful wife-- complete with bringing slippers and pipe and having a baby ("by golly you'll go to work on it tonight"). Pam can do nothing except agree

to the terms; Jim will move back in the apartment to see that she

carries out her part of the bargain.

One month later Pam is the perfect wife. She tells Linda that

Jim kicked her "right smack into happiness:"

But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing it. Take it from me, there's nothing like being a good wife to the man who loves you. It's the greatest thrill a woman can have (114).

When Pam realizes that Jim and Linda are in love with each other but

w ill not admit i t , she has Linda feign pregnancy while she threatens

Jim as he threatened her ea rlie r. Pam te lls him that if he does not

marry Linda, quit drinking, and stop writing his venomous column,

she w ill smear his name across every front page of every newspaper

in the country. Jim and Linda make wedding plans, and Pam announces

that she w ill soon be a mother, as the curtain fa lls.

ADULTERY AND OTHER SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

Many of the plays between the wars treat adultery in conjunction

with some of the sociological problems discussed in Chapter I; the 186 emergence of the new woman, the rig id ity of divorce laws, the double standard of morality, and the Younger Generation. In addition, a popular theme was the relationship of sexual passion with the religious revivalism which swept America in the twenties and thirties.

John Geoffrey Hartman in his study The Development of American

Social Comedy from 1787 to 1936 found that the women of post World

War 1 comedy had taken a prominent part in activities in America and abroad, just as American women in real life had done. The problems created by this "new woman" were subjects which concerned many dramatists:

Thus we find the playwrights of the post war period of comedy dealing with the question of careers for women, and what happens to th eir husbands and children when they are left to their own devices. Out of this grew logically enough the amazing free­ dom with which the younger generation decided its own course of life. This reached the proportions of an upheaval, and so swiftly did it come that parents were le ft gasping.1?

The Judge's H u sb an d (1926) by William Hodge deals with this exact situation. No adultery occurs in the play, but the woman judge begins divorce proceedings against her husband because he has been seen in somepeculiar places in New York and will not explain a two- day absence from home. As it turns out, he had spent the time searching for their daughter, who, without the necessary guidance of her career-minded mother, had attended a party which developed into a two-day drunk. When the daughter confesses that she was responsible for her father's absence from home, the judge has second thoughts 187 about a career In law and politics, and everyone is reconciled.

This same theme is treated in an earlier serious play, The

Famous Mrs. F alr^ (1919) by James Forbes. In this play, Mrs.

Nancy Fair, a major in the armed forces, is just returning from

France, where she received the Croix de Guerre for driving an ambu­ lance under fire. She is received home as a hero by the press and her old friends. During her absence, her husband Jeffrey and daughter Sylvia have looked for companionship to their next door neighbor, Angy Brice, a widow.

Even before Nancy F air's a rriv al home, E. Dudley G illette, a business agent for war heroes, has been pestering the family. He has a contract, ready to book Mrs. Fair for a cross-country lecture tour. Angy makes the best of this situation. She tells the daughter, in Jeff's presence:

It is n 't as though Mrs. Fair were a home body like me, just content to make a man comfortable and happy. You can't expect any one so brilliant as your mother not to get bored with her home and her family. Not that I'm insinuating that she is (397).

When Nancv arrives home and expresses an interest in the tour, her

husband forbids her to go.

In the last act, Jeff is in a New York apartment. Nancy is

just now returning from her tour and is contemplating another one.

During her absence her husband has been seeing Angy Brice, and her

daughter has become involved with the "wrong crowd," headed by

Dudley G ille tte , Nancy's manager. When Nancy finds out about Sylvia,

she cancels the new tour and demands that Gillette pay her the 188

$15>000 she has coining and that he say goodbye to Sylvia. Because he does not have the money, he convinces Sylvia to run away and marry him. He tells the girl that no one loves her and that her parents will be divorced as soon as Mrs. Fair hears of her husband's a ffa ir.

When Jeffrey comes home, he and Nancy quarrel over Angy. Nancy

says she will divorce him. Her husband says: "Surely you don't

think my affair with Mrs. Brice was a greater sin against our love

than your craving for a career?" (414), and "Do you think you can

starve my affections, my passion, for years, without moral guilt?"

(414). The argument ends when they discover that Sylvia has run

away. The police find the girl, but she insists she cannot stay with her parents if they are contemplating separation or divorce.

Nancy says there is no truth to that story, and everyone is recon­

ciled. Moreover, it appears that the family w ill have a full-tim e

mother from now on.

Current Opinion liked the position that the play took. The

magazine said:

It may be objected that a wife's craving for a career cannot in any circumstances be classes as a sin, or that a husband should have the right to be unfaithful simply because his wife embraced an opportunity to go to California on a lecture tour. But the Henry Miller Theater has held few, if any, audiences but would clear Mr. Forbes of any such charge.20

We have seen earlier that the strict divorce laws of New York

found th eir way into the drama in the one act play "The Unknown Lady." 189

Jesse Lynch Williams dealt with the same topic in Why Not?21 (1922), a comedy, the playwright said, of "Human Nature versus Human

Institutions."22 In Why Not?, Williams attacks the absurdities of divorce laws by presenting two married couples who wish to exchange partners legally but find it almost impossible to do so. When the play opens, Mary, a very p ra c tica l woman, and her husband Leonard, a poet, are working as new servants in the home of Evadne and Bill

Thompson. Evadne is impractical but rich; Bill is a very practical businessman. The four discover that Leonard was once in love with

Evadne and Bill with Mary. As their marriages now stand neither couple is happy. Leonard cannot write poetry because he has to work for a living, and Bill cannot stop drinking because of his unhappy home life. They decide, for their childrens' sakes and for their own, to divorce and remarry correctly.

They find, however, that the state of New York will only grant a divorce for adultery. The men decide that the women must go to Reno and sue for divorce on the grounds of desertion. Leonard says:

In this state there's no decent way to be honest nor honest way to be decent, so we have to be dishonest if we want to remain decent (87).

But aproblem arises. Mary is an Episcopalian and can remarry only

if her husband commits adultery. He refuses:

For fifteen years I'v e lived for you, lied for you, and to-day would have died for you, but I ' l l be damned if I'll sin for you (93).

Mary, then, decides to become a Presbyterian and go through with the 190 desertion suit.

In Act III , a year la te r, everyone is happy except the husbands and the children, who can see each other only infrequently. The children decide that if both families were to live in opposite wings of the same house (with the middle as neutral ground), the arrangement would satisfy the law and their desire to be with their real fathers as often as they like. The four adults, after con­ sidering the ltgal implications of such an arrangement, agree to try the children's plan. The law, it appears is the only stumbling block to an Individual's happiness.

I t is true that Mary and Evadne are modern women, and "about the new woman of the 1920's Frederick J. Hoffman, in The Twenties:

American Writing in the Postwar Decade, says:

Women followed up their successful campaign for suffrage with additional demands that they be allowed to imitate men in appearance, in style, in freedom of movement, to extinguish forever the b elief held by men that they were sweet, fra il young things who needed to be coddled and pampered.23

One of the main points that the new woman insisted upon making was

that the double standard of morality should not exist. A very

popular play of the twenties (478 performances) was Russell Medcraft

and Norma M itchell's Cradle Snatchers^ (1925), which deals with this

main feminist point. The play was even advertised as taking the

feminist point of view toward the double standard. The "Press

Matter" at the end of the Samuel French edition refers to the "real

lesson behind all the merriment" and the "wholesome moral of the play." 191

One of the publishing blurbs reads: "Women are rapidly learning to do more than housework. They are teaching their husbands deserved lessons, now and then" (83).

The play deals with Susan Martin, Ethel Drake, and Kitty Ladd, who are being left at home again while their husbands enjoy their annual hunting party (which occurs every three months). After the husbands leave for the hunt, the women get together for bridge.

Kitty has invited a college fraternity boy, Henry, to make the foursome. Moreover, she has hired him for six months to make her husband, Roy, jealous. Roy, she says, has been playing around with

"flappers." One of the women questions the wisdom of her plan:

Ethel: Yes--but is it worth it, Kitty? After all, a man is only a man. Kitty: Yes, but some men are husbands. And until a few months ago Roy was a very efficien t one in every way (24).

When the women exchange information, they find that a ll of their husbands have been seen with flappers. K itty convinces

Susan and Ethel to hire some of Henry's friends too. Susan rather likes the idea. She tells another friend:

Susan: I'm going to have a boy. Anne: Oh, Susan, darling! You never told me. When, Susan? Susan: Tonight! (33).

They ready themselves to spend the week-end at the Ladds's summer cottage with the college boys, Henry, Jose, and Oscar. At the

cottage they just begin the party when the husbands arrive, furious at their wives, and denying all the stories about their relationships 192 with flappers. Susand does not believe her husband: "What's sauce for the goose Is applesauce for the gander" (62). Kitty and Ethel are just about to succumb when three girls arrive who had been sent away by the husbands. The wives retire upstairs.

At this point the husbands and the boys begin to quarrel.

George Martin says that they really love their wives, but the boys doubt it:

Henry: Then why don't you treat them as If you did? George: Well, we will, if we ever getthem back again. Jose: You don't know how to treat your wife. She is young--too beautiful to be neglected as you have done. She wants romance--music--the sweet lush-scent of the big red roses--under the moon--(70).

The women come down and demand that their new companions take them dancing. George forbids Susan to leave the cottage, but she says she is merely going on a hunting trip . Her husband te lls her she has said enough. She replies:

Oh, no, 1 haven't. Adios, George.’ I may be gone a day--I may be gone a week--and while I'm gone you can wait, as I have waited--for ten years! Come, Jose! (73).

Next, he wants her to listen to him.

Susan: Listen to you? I've listened to you for years. And now it's your turn: you've a ll three had a flash of second childhood energy, and instead of giving us the benefit of it you made yourselves ridiculous by selling your senile effo rts to a bunch of flappers, who've bored themselves with your antics in exchange for a few motor-rides and meal tickets (74).

As the ladies exit with the "cake-eatersSusan's parting shot to 193

George is: "It's unbelievable that you could have taken such chances with our happiness" (74).

Another play which deals with the flapper generation is

Samson Raphaelson's Young Love^ (1928), though it is concerned more with the Younger Generation than with the double standard per se. To

Max Lerner, young people of the twenties were products of the moral revolut ion:

In the 1920's the American moralists were shocked at the "revolt of the younger generation," with new freedoms of smoking, drinking, petting, and premarital sex. Some saw it as the end of the world, others as a passing rebellious whim. Actually it was neither, but a phase of a con­ tinuing revolution in morals.^®

Young Love treats, in one way or another, all of the freedoms that Lerner mentions, which leads tf. David Sievers to call the play

"one of the most tender and intimate explorations of the emotions of the flapper generation faced with a conflict between idealism and skepticism toward the sanctity of marriage." 2 7 Of all the new freedoms, the playwright is most concerned with the attitu d e toward marriage. According to Frederick J. Hoffman, the young people of the twenties did not know exactly what to make of the institution of marriage. As he sees the period, the combination of the moral revolution and the emergence of the new woman led to a free criticism of the whole idea of the family unit. There was, he says, 194

a search for alternative arrangements between the sexes, within and without marital bonds. In many respects the attacks upon marriage seemed a new variation upon female aggressiveness, a new demonstration of the woman's wish to free herself from her traditional status.2®

Anita Block, however, places the blame for premarital sex on the war period, when young people took sexual satisfaction where and when they could. After the war, she maintains, when "this new moral code added to the even more acute economic factors, pre­ marital sex experience had become more or less openly accepted fa c t." 29

As the play opens, David Hallowell, age twenty-three, and Fay

Hilary, age twenty, have just spent the niglit together and are in love. They are in the company of Peter and Nancy Bird, the young people's ideal of a happily married couple. The Birds have been married for ten years. Because David is leaving soon to begin a diplomatic job in Africa, he suggests (.and Fay agrees) that they be married iamediately. Fay learns, however, that her idol, Peter, has cheated on Nancy before and that he would like to seduce Kay herself. David realizes that Nancy excites him and learns that he excites her. With a ll of these discoveries, Fay wonders if their love for each other is as intense and potentially long- lasting as they think it is. David is hurt by her remark, and when she proposes a test of their love, he suggests, insultingly, that they have affairs with Nancy and Peter. Fay thinks that this would be good for both of them. 195

When the second act opens, one week later, Fay has Just spent the night with Peter at his studio. Peter says that she is

"wonderful": "No love stuff--no hanging of the head in the hands with shame. Wonderful" (60). He tells Fay that he will even divorce his wife for her. Fay explains that she loves David and tells Peter why she came to him the night before:

Four different times we were going to get married. And each time we stopped--we couldn't. We couldn't endure the uncertainty of suppose he should meet another woman or I should meet another man. Well, we had a week of it. The beautiful thing between us was rotting. . . . At ten o'clock last night we decided to have our in fid e lity in advance. . . . David with Nancy and I with you. . . and then meet this morning and see if we could endure each other-- see if our love would be bigger or u tterly destroyed (66).

Peter is not happy with her explanation, especially the part about

David and his wife.

When David arriv es at the studio, the young people question each other about their affairs. David is obviously lying when he te lls Fay that he slept with Nancy, and he hates both Fay and

Peter for going through with the play. He asks her if she is ashamed. She says:

Ashamed? No, David. It was a peculiar feeling. I felt sick, as if I had eaten something that didn’t agree with me. But 1 felt sort of big in my heart. Proud. As if I had eaten it in a good cause. . . . I was determined to be casual with Peter, In a way 1 hated him. I couldn't really hate him, though, because he's such a baby (74).

David lies that he took Nancy to the l i t t l e glade which was Fay's 196 favorite place. She wonders how he could have done such a thing.

David: Does one have to have an ugly se ttin g ju s t because one is doing-- Fay: An ugly thing? David: Yes--a hideous thing! (79-80).

David decides th at he cannot marry Fay now;

I can't do it! I can't! Oh, my God! How can you stand there and look so pure!. . . I could never look at you without thinking of him! I couldn't touch you! (81).

He tells Peter:

God damn you! You knew she loved me and I loved her. She didn't mean anything to you last night except something to play with (83).

Then he leaves alone for his ship to A frica, which s a ils that afternoon.

In the last act, that afternoon, Fay is resting and Nancy and

Peter are on stage. Nancy tells her husband that Fay has recom­ mended she divorce him:

She felt it was a very good thing for me that you had your little affair last night. It helped us to "discover the Vital Truth about ourselves." Now we know, if you please, that we should not remain married (95).

The more the two talk, the madder Nancy becomes. She did not

realize that her husband knew all along of Fay's love for David:

You mean you took her, knowing th at she and David were in love with each other--or at least not knowing th at they w eren 't?

Peter; Yes. Nancy: I think I will divorce you, Peter (98). 197

She tells him that he is "like something--wretched—lying in the gutter." David returns to get Fay, though he claims he will de­ liberately make her miserable for the rest of her life. They leave, as Nancy says, "to live unhappily ever after." Then the older couple settle the matter of adultery between them.

Nancy: I think I 'l l have a baby. If I have a baby, do you think we'll be true to each other? Peter: So help me God£ Nancy: I don't believe you. But I 'l l have a baby anyway (121-122).

Maxwell Anderson, in Saturday's Children, argued the year before (1927) that a lovers' quarrel could not be made up over a crib. Whether this one can or not is not as Important to the dramatist as the future of David and Fay, who can never recapture the intense love that they lost through Fay's act of premarital un­ faithfulness. In one respect, the play anticipates O'Neill's

Days Without End (1934) in that Fay, like John Loving, commits an act of infidelity herself before the love that she shares with

David can be destroyed by his unfaithfulness. W. David Stevers sees her act as the consequence of the divorce of Fay's parents (briefly alluded to In the play). The divorce, Sievers feels, gives Fay

"an unconscious compulsion to destroy love as her parents did— destroy it before the infidelity of the one she loves can destroy h e r . " ^

Joseph Wood Krutch rewrote his review of Young Love to serve as the introduction to the reading edition of the play. He begins 198

his introduction with ironic comments about the critical reception

that the play enjoyed:

Certain dramatic reviewers have, I believe, professed to be shocked by "Young Love." Living that particular­ ly cloistered sort of life common to newspaper men and being members of a profession notoriously loath to acknowledge the existence of misconduct, they have held up their hands in horror and they have declared furthermore their righteous conviction that such things cannot possibly be. Fresh from the reading of th e ir own Sunday supplements, they come to the theater with minds attuned to the ideal world and, having sweetened their souls by scanning the head­ lines which announce the latest discoveries in adultery, seduction and rape, they promptly assume the pot's privilege and loudly proclaim Mr. Raphaelson (a quite different sort of kettle) very black indeed (v i).

He goes on to say that the whole action of the play is de­

pendent upon the contemporary manners and morals, and he makes a

d istin c tio n between the treatm ent of "an etern al theme" and a con-

. temporary one. Krutch admits that young lovers on the stage and in

real lif e

have an ticipated the wedding ceremony before now, and a good many married men have made love to girls before the present play was written. But the reasons why they do so in "Young Love" and the situ atio n s precipitated by their actions are quite different from those which would have been possible at any other time, because they are everywhere conditioned by contemporary manners and by the psychology, not of general human nature, but of very self-consciously "modern" people living in this changing age (ix).

The play, then, is RaphaeIson's attempt to come to terms with the

problems--especially sexual problems--of his time.

We have seen earlier that many people in America during the

twenties felt that the country had suffered a moral breakdown. 199

Everything seemed to them to have turned to the worse in terms of sex morals, women's dress, the new woman, the increasing number of divorces, the younger generation, and speakeasies. What was needed, many thought, was a return to God, and, consequently, America experienced a new wave of religious revivalism. John D. Hicks in

Republican Ascendancy. 1921-1933 says about the result of the moral breakdown of the period:

Thunder on the right found in these departures from the puritanical tra d itio n the basic fault in American society. To some the trouble stemmed chiefly from the wholesale way in which Americans had abandoned the fundamental teachings of Christianity, both in doctrine and in conduct. "Billy" Sunday, the evangelist, preached the old-time religion all over the nation; . . . to m illions of distraught Americans this was still the way to salvation.

It is not surprising, then, to find two plays within the years

1926 to 1930 treating the relationship between religious ecstasy

and sexual passion. Neither of the plays was a box-office success,

though both of them, like the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Rachel

Crothers, treat the destruction or feelings of guilt which ac­

company an adulterous act. The earlier play, William Hurlbut's

Bride of the Lamb^ (1926) deals with the Reverend Sanderson T.

Albaugh, a tent evangelist, who comes to stay with Ina and Roy

Bowman while his crusade is in town. Ina is delighted to have a

house guest. Her home life is rather drab, especially when her

alcholic husband goes on one of his periodical drunks. It does not

take Ina long to fa ll in love with Reverend Mr. Albaugh as a result 200 of her religious ecstasy. The two try to fight off their feelings for one another, but the night before Albaugh is to leave town they have an a ffa ir. The next morning Ina hates her husband: "I hate him* 1 loathe him--great big soft-bellied old hulk! I'd die if

I had to touch him again!" (83).

That day Ina takes a ll of the money from her husband's pockets and from her daughter's bank and buys Albaugh a ninety dollar watch.

Then she wants to go away with him. He insists that he has the

Lord's work to do and that she is not "free" to leave with him.

He goes on to the last revival meeting alone. During his absence a woman comes to the house--Albaugh' s wife who he thinks is dead.

Ina begins to laugh convulsively, then to scream. Albaugh enters

and sends the daughter to get her father, whom Ina has poisoned with

a bottle of shoe polish.

In the last scene Ina is completely psychotic. She enters with

a mosquito netting for a wedding veil and introduces everyone to

her imaginary bridegroom, Mr. Christ. The sheriff takes her away

as she hums the wedding march. Albaugh sinks to the floor, cover­

ing his face and crying "God forgive me--God forgive me!" (141).

Torch Song33 ( 1930), by Kenyon Nicholson, deals with a woman

revival worker, Ivy Stevens, instead of a man. When the play opens,

Ivy is a night club dancer who is carrying on an affair with Howard

Palmer, a salesman. She is in love with him, but he leaves her to

marry the daughter of his employer. When they see each other again, 201 in a small town hotel, she Is a Salvation Army worker and he is on his way to a party with one of the local girls he has picked up.

Ivy tries to persuade him not to go, but he insists that his

friends are "counting on him." She answers;

And so is your sweet little wife. . . it's as if. . . it's as if you took a garment, a wonderful garment made of the finest silk, which was made for you by someone who loves you. . . someone you're very precious to. . . it's like you took this gift made for you out of great kindness. . . and dragged it in the mud (86).

He agrees to stay at the hotel like a good husband.

That night Ivy, who is really sincere in her newly found

religious convictions, tries to convert Howard, but as it turns out

she falls into his arms and spends the night in his room. The next

morning she is completely broken. She is going to quit the Army

because she no longer believes in God. Howard is miserable when he

seeswhat he has done to her, so he trie s to convert her. What he

is ableto do finally is to get Carl Loomis, the Salvation Army

worker who converted Ivy, to see that he loves her sexually as well

as spiritually. Carl and Ivy will marry and continue their work--

the affair the night before was all God's manipulation. The

Catholic World, however, felt that the manipulation was more on the

part of the dramatist, and decided that Torch Song was "an ugly

p la y ."34

PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS

The last two plays to be considered are important in pointing

out the progress of the revolution in manners and morals. The 202 threatened adultery in The Changelings (1923) is met with attitudes which range from calm acceptance to hysteria--indicative of the revolution in the beginning stages, while actual adultery in

Goodbye Again (1932) ends with the innocent husband accusing his wife of being old-fashioned in her refusal to run off with the man she has slept with. By this time, we may presume, the revolution was well established.

In Lee Wilson Dodd's The Changelings^^, Fenwick and Dora Faber and Wallace and Karen Aldcroft are old friends and are united through the marriage of their children, Kay Aldcroft and Wicky

Faber. In terms of moral attitudes, the couples are not properly mated, Mr. Faber and Mrs. Aldcroft hold "modern" views of sex and morality, while Mr. Aldcroft and Mrs. Faber have conventional opinions. Both the son and the daughter of the two families have followed the lead set by the parent with the advanced or liberal views--especially Kay, who is, like her mother, a modem woman.

The complication arises when Wicky, an English instructor at

Yale, comes in to announce that Kay has left him for another man.

The couples split over the ensuing argument with Mr. Faber and

Mrs. Aldcroft taking a cool view of the situation and Mrs. Faber and

Mr. Aldcroft taking the conventional and hysterical one. When Mrs.

Faber takes her son home and Mr. Aldcroft leaves to find his daughter, the modernists embrace. Kay enters and, seeing her mother

in the arms of her father-in-law, turns and runs away. Kay had 203 backed out of her elopement with the novelist Clyde Halstead, but now she changes her mind and goes to his room. The old-fashioned couple find out where Kay is and leave for Halstead's room--Mr.

Aldcroft to thrash the novelist and Mrs. Faber to protect her friend. While they are gone, Wicky tells his father and mother-in- law:

So far as your instinctive emotions go, you're all married to the wrong persons--whether you're aware of it or not. Any good Freudian would tell you to change partners and be happy. W ell,--but I'm not a good Freudian. If you did change partners, you wouldn't be happy (62-63).

When Mr. Aldcroft and Mrs. Faber find out about the embrace that

Kay observed, they are afraid that their spouses may run away to­ gether. They admit that the two of them are (in the "new-fangled lingo for being decent") inhibited. Mrs. Faber says:

Only--we mustn't try to be up-to-date, Wally. It doesn't become us. No. . . . Let's put it in the simple, old-fashioned way. Let's say we believe in being--good (98).

Kay, on second thought, is not so distressed over what she has seen.

She tells her father and Mrs. Faber that they should not sacrifice themselves to "Idiotic, old-fashioned, used-up ideas," but then her emotions get the best of her:

Daddy, Daddy, promise me not to change* I'm se lfish -- I'm frightened, . . I want something to hang on to. . . Something bigger than--Oh, Daddy, I can 't help it.' I don't want you to be happy. Not if it means losing you--as you a r e '- -I want to feel you back of me-- standing fast (133-134). 204

By Act III all the couples have been reconciled. Mrs, Aldcroft,

the modern woman, tells her husband:

I'm not here with you now because I'm a coward. I'm not here because of any sense of duty--to you--or society. . . I don't seem to give that for morality--the conventions. . . . I suppose I should--but it's not In me. 1 belong to my times.--Yes--but more than anything, Wally, I belong to you (137).

After all this, young Kay is no longer modern. She is now distressed

over her mother's ideas of freedom and self-expression and wonders:

"Oh, Wicky, what's the matter with us nowadays? Wht can't we be

sim pler, somehow--decenter?" (144). Like Mary Howard of Rachel

Crothers' When Ladles Meet. Kay can accept "self-expression" in the

abstract but not in an actual situation.

The play, finally, is a plea on behalf of the conventions. A. H.

Quinn says of it:

After three married couples, parents and children, have skirted the very edge of destruction, the powerful clutch of decency draws them back.36

W. David Sievers, however, points out about The Changelings, what

Joseph Wood Krutch points out about the plays of Rachel Crothers:

the dramatist ignores the complexity of the issue and the possible

tenable position between the liberal and conservative extremes,

and merely offers a set of conventional platitudes:

In championing the side of conventional morality, the author sees no middle ground between being "a sensual, self-worshipping little beast" and being morally in­ hibited and finding God.37 205

By 1932 the conservatives had lost out; and, for the better or the worse, sexual attachments were often more casual than before.

Goodbye Again,3** by Allan Scott and George Haight treats just such an attachment between Ken Bixby, a novelist and lecturer, and Anne

Rogers, who is his secretary, mistress, and traveling companion.

When the two stop in Cleveland for a lecture engagement, Ken is pursued by Mrs. Julia Wilson, who is reliving an old experience when she made love to Ken in th e ir college days. She is under the

Impression that Ken has suffered since she became married six years ago and that she was the model for Miriam ("the one who couldn't have the child") in his first novel. As Ken explains to Anne, who

is jealous:

She seems to th in k th a t a f te r we l e f t co lleg e she was to go home and sit on her fanny and wait for me until I--but she didn't sit--she got married--and now she believes I'm suffering from a broken heart because she's been unfaithful to me with her husband (33).

Ken's plan is to see Julia again and to be such an "absolute beast"

that she will go running back to her husband. But Ken does not act

and Julia does not run.

Julia's sister and her fiance, Arthur, try to keep the two

apart but are unsuccessful. Ken and Julia spend the night together

in an abandoned farmhouse. When the lovers return, everyone agrees

that Ken must marry Julia, that is everyone except Ken, who refuses

to sign the divorce documents that Arthur draws up. Julia is willing

to go away with Ken whether they are married or not. The whole 206

problem seems without solution until a small boy wanders Into the

room. Anne pretends th a t the boy Is Ren's son by some woman along

the way, which makes J u lia h e s ita te . Moreover, Anne l i e s , the mother of the child was the fictional Miriam of Ken's first novel.

This completely destroys Julia's romantic notions, and she asks her husband, Harvey, to take her home. Harvey does so, reluctant­

ly, accusing her of being too old-fashioned and not broadminded

enough. Anne has saved the day, but now she plans to leave Ken.

He goes out on the window ledge and th re aten s to jump, u n til she

agrees to stay with him on his "terms.”

All of the plays treated in this chapter are Indicative of

what Alan Downer feels Is the most important element in the new

drama--realism of theme. The old dramatist, he says, fitted the

action of a play to a moral truism. The themes of the postwar play­

w rig h t, howeve r ,

are the immediate concerns of the audience, and their selection indicates the theatre's growing seriousness of purpose and the playwright's growing awareness of his responsibility. No longer is his view of life bounded by the rising and falling of a velvet curtain. The crumbling of beliefs, the withering of conventions, and the ideological and political conflicts have become inescap ab le.39 207

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER V

^Zona Gale, Mr. P itt (New York: Appleton and C o ., 1925).

^Patrick Kearney, A Man's Man (New York: Brentano's, 1925).

^(Ven and Donald Davis, Ethan Frome: A Dramatization of Edith Wharton1s Novel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936).

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Ethan Frome," The C atholic World. CXLII (March 1936), 723.

^Sophie Treadwell, Machinal. In John Gassner, ed., Twenty- Five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. Early Series (New York: Crown P u b lish ers, 1949).

^Sievers, pp. 90-91.

^Stark Young, "Joy on the Mountains," The New Republic, LVI (October 31, 1928), 300.

^George Jean Nathan, "A Pretentious Zero," American M ercury. XV (November 1928), 376.

®Paul Eldridge, The Intruder (New York: The Macaulay Co., 1928).

^■^Susan Glaspell, Alison's House. In Coe, Kathryn and William H. Cordell, eds,, A New Edition of the Pulitzer Prize Plays (New York: Random House, 1935).

^Mark Van Doren, "Drama," The Nation. CXXXII (May 27, 1931), 591.

^ R ich ard Dana Skinner, "The Play," Commonweal. X III (December 17, 1930), 188.

^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Alison's House," The Catholic World. CXXXII (February 1931), 592.

E. Thomas, No More L adies. In Burns M antle, e d ., The Best Plays of 1933-1934 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1944).

15gupheinia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "No More Ladies," The Catholic World. CXXXVIII (March 1934), 733. 208

16joseph Carole and Alan Dlnehart, Separate Rooms (New York: S. French, 1942).

John Geoffrey Hartman, The Development of American Social Comedy from 1787 to 1936 (Philadelphia, Univ. of Penn., 1939), p. 38.

^®William Hodge, The Judge's Husband. In The Plays of William Hodge, I (New York: S. French, 1928).

l^james Forbes, The Famous Mr. Fair. In Hoses, Montrose J. and Joseph Wood Krutch, eds., Representative American Dramas (Boston: L ittle, Brown and Co., 1941).

^Unsigned, "'The Famous Mrs. Fair'--A Serio-Comedy of War Work and Domestic Relations," Current Opinion, LXIX (August 1920), 192.

^iJesse Lynch Williams, Why Not? (Boston: Walter H. Baker Co., 1924).

^ Q u in n , I I , 73.

^Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: The Viking Press, 1955), p. 197.

^Russell G. Medcraft and Norma Mitchell, Cradle Snatchers (New York: S. French, 1931).

^Samson Raphaelson, Young Love (New York: Brentano's, 1928).

^Lerner, u , 667.

2 7 sie v er s, p. 341.

28Hoffman, p. 196.

29giock, p. 102.

^Ogievers, P* 3^1* 31john D. Hicks, Republican Acendancy. 1921-1933. The New American Nation Series (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), p. 182. 209

^W illiam Hurlbut, Bride of the Lamb (New York: Bonl and Liveright, 1926).

^Kenyon N icholson, Torch Song (New York: S. French, 1930).

^^Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, ’’Torch Song," The Catholic World. CXXXII (November 1930), 206.

•*^Lee Wilson Dodd, The Changelings (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1924).

■^Quinn, II, 79.

^ S ie v e r s , p. 80.

3®Allan Scott and George Haight, Goodbye Again (New York: S. French, 1933).

•^Downer, p. 46. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

The Burns Mantle Best Play of the Year and the Year Book of the Drama in America series lists over four hundred productions of plays between the 1919-1920 and 1941-1942 seasons which deal with the issue of real or suspected marital infidelity. Many of these plays, of course, were not successful as theater pieces, and most of them were not published. In terms of the large number of plays treating a single theme, however, the amount is staggering.

Frederick J . Hoffman has commented:

If literature is important to history, it is not because it serves as a social document or as a footnote to political or intellectual history, but primarily because it is a culmination, a genuine means of realizing the major issues of i t s tim e.^

In the light of Hoffman's remark, the issue of sexual morality was vital to the American people in the period between the two world wars.

While it is true that adultery was treated in the drama before

World War I, the issue was not handled with honesty and complexity.

Theater audiences of the prewar period preferred to be entertained with the smiling aspects of life and happy endings. Adultery as

part of a play's plot machinery or punishment of an adulteress to

evoke a sentimental response was common, but plays did not attempt to

210 211 come to terms with the problem. The audience of the prewar theater was very conventional In Its manners and morals and would not allow the frank discussion of a problem of sexual morality. Developments in American life after the war, however, reshaped the nature of the theater, hence also the drama, to the extent that the change has been called a revolution.

The most significant development after the war was the change in the theater audience. The war period permanently established silent films as a vehicle for popular entertainment, and the part of the theater audience who had sought only entertainment was lost.

The audience that remained would not tolerate being bored by the expected and was anxious to have the world outside the theater in­ terpreted and shaped into a work of art. It demanded, moreover, logical endings rather than happy ones and honestly treated dramatic themes rather than pleasant ones.

At the same time that the change in the theater audience per­ mitted the playwright to deal with previously forbidden subject matter, the revolution in manners and morals had progressed suf­ ficiently to have called into question our nation's whole moral code.

The younger generation, aware of the great difference between pro­ fessed morality and that which actually was operative, refused to accept the sexual standards of the past, and the new woman refused

to submit to the double standard of morality. The result of this

revolution was that the playwright, now able to treat Issues frankly, 212 attempted to make a significant comment on problems of American life--social, political, and sexual. One of the more popular sexual problems to be discussed was that of marital infidelity.

American playwrights between the wars for the most part offered a solution to the problem by first rejecting the older attitudes toward i t .

Of the major dramatists treated in this study, only one, Sidney

Howard, adopts a middle-of-the-road approach to adultery. In

Dodsworth and They Knew What They Wanted, the playw right is w illin g

to forgive a single adulterous affair in order to preserve a marriage, provided that the guilty partner resolve to behave better

in the future. Other dramatists adhere more closely to a strictly

liberal (advanced) or conservative (conventional) view of sexual morality. In serious drama, for example, Elmer Rice endorses

adultery in Street Scene, by showing how a woman is driven to in­

fidelity but is punished too severely for her infraction of the

moral code; in The Adding Machine, by presenting a character who did

not commit ad u ltery but who should have; and in The L eft Bank, by

implying that adultery has nothing to do with the success or failure

of a marriage. Clifford Odets almost demands adultery in Rocket to

the Moon and permits his characters in Awake and Sing to break with

the moral code successfully.

On the other hand, Eugene O'Neill, a defender of the conven­

tions, never deviates from his morally conservative position. In

Welded he shows th a t ad u ltery is never accep tab le; in D esire Under 213 the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Strange Interlude, that adultery is a step toward complete decay and destruction; and In

Days Without End, that only through the power of the cross can an adulterer atone for his sin.

Marital infidelity is never endorsed in comedy as it is in serious drama, but it is frequently accepted as an evil less de­ structive than the evil of divorce. For Phillip Barry (Paris Bound,

Tomorrow and Tomorrow) , Robert E. Sherwood (Reunion In Vienna) , and

Clare Boothe (The Women) , marriage is basically a spiritual relation­ ship which transcends the "business of sleeping together." In fact, for Barry in The Animal Kingdom and In A Garden a marriage must be retained or dissolved, depending upon the spiritual relationship which exists between husband and wife.

Rachel Crothers, however, in Let Us Be Gay, As Husbands Go, and

When Ladies Meet, defends the conventions; in her plays neither divorce nor adultery is ever acceptable.

It is significant that neither of the morally conservative play­ wrights was as successful in his moral message as his liberal counterpart. We have seen earlier that Eugene O'Neill was frequently misinterpreted and that Rachel Crothers was criticized for her lack of profundity. If our drama does reflect the attitudes of the period in which it was written, we must conclude that the theater­ goers of the twenties and thirties did not see adultery as so horrible a sin as O'Neill and Crothers would have led them to 214 believe. The fact that adultery was discussed so oftenf however, leads one to conclude that the issue was still vital and subject to debate and analysis, as, indeed, it is today. For W. David

Sievers, who considers all "sex plays" as psychoanalytic dramas, the analysis was the therapy which theatergoers of the period desperately needed, and consequently the drama made an important contribution to American life;

The drama is the most persuasive of art-forms and the most satisfying of therapies. The complex, bewildering, ambivalent, groping human animal is still the only subject for the drama; his coming to consciousness, his discovery of himself and his unconscious impulses, and his Integration of them into a meaningful whole will remain the great theme of the psychoanalytic drama--as well as the principal motive for the play­ goer to attend the theatre.2 FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER VI

^Hof£man, p. x.

^ S ie v e rs, p. 453. 216

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Plays

Akins, Zoe. Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. In p/class/e: Daddy's Gone A-Hunting: and Greatness--A Comedy. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.

______. Dtfc lassie. In Declassee: Daddy's Gone-A-Hun ting: and Greatness-“A Comedy. New York; Boni and Liveright, 1924.

Anderson, Maxwell. Saturday's Children. New York; Longmans, Green and Co., 1927.

Barry, Phillip. The Animal Kingdom. New York; Samuel French, 1932.

______. In A Garden. New York; Samuel French, 1926.

______, Paris Bound. New York: Samuel French, 1929.

______. Tomorrow and Tomorrow. New York: Samuel French, 1931.

Behnnan, S. N. Brief Moment. New York; Farrar and Rinehart, 1931.

______, No Time fo r Comedy. New York; Random House, 1939.

Boothe, Clare. The Women. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1939.

Carole, Joseph and Alan Dinehart. Separate Rooms. New York: Samuel French, 1942.

Crothers, Rachel. As Husbands Go. In Twentieth Century Plays, Frank W. Chandler and Richard A. Cordell, eds. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1934.

______. Let Us Be Gay. New York: Samuel French, 1935.

______. When Ladles Meet. New York; Samuel French, 1932.

Davis, Owen and Donald. Ethan Frome; A Dramatization of Edith Wharton's Novel. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936.

Dodd, Lee W ilson. The C hangelings. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1924.

Eldridge, Paul. The Intruder. New York; The Macaulay Co., 1928. 217

F orbes, James. The Famous Mrs. F a i r . In R ep resen tativ e American Dramas, Montrose J. Moses and Joseph Wood Krutch, eds. Boston: L ittle, Brown and Co., 1941.

Gale, Zona. Mr. P itt. New York: Appleton and Co., 1925.

Glaspell, Susan. Alison's House. In A New Edition of The Pulitzer P riz e P la y s . New York: Random House, 1935.

Hodge, William. The Judge's Husband. In The Plays of William Hodge. Volume I . New York: Samuel French, 1928.

Howard, Sidney. Ned McCobb's Daughter. New York: Samuel French, 1931.

. Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934.

. They Knew What They W anted. Garden C ity , N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and C o., 1925.

Hurlbut, William. Bride of the Lamb. New York; Boni and Liveright, 1926.

Kearney, Patrick. A Man's Man. New York; Brentano's, 1925.

Medcraft, Russell G. and Norma Mitchell. Cradle Snatchers. New York: Samuel French, 1931.

M iddleton, George. "The Unknown Lady." T heatre M agazine, XXXIX (January 1924), 24, 26, 28, 48.

Nicholson, Kenyon. Torch Song. New York: Samuel French, 1930.

Odets, Clifford. Awake and Sing. In Six Plays of Clifford Odets. New York; The Modern Library, 1939.

. Rocket to the Moon. New York: Random House, 1939.

O'Neill, Eugene. Days Without End. New York: Random House, 1934.

______. Desire Under the Elms. In The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Volume I. New York: Random House, 1934.

______. Mourning Becomes Electra. New York: Horace Liveright, I n c . , 1931. 218

. Strange Interlude. In The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Volume I . New York: Random House, 1934.

______. Welded. In The Plays of Eugene O 'N e ill. Volume I I I . New York; Random House, 1933.

Raphaelson, Samson. Young Love. New York: Brentano's, 1928.

Rice, Elmer. The Adding Machine. New York: Samuel French, 1923.

______. Counse1lor-At-Law. New York; Samuel French, 1931.

______. The Left Bank. New York: Samuel French, 1931.

______. Street Scene. New York; Samuel French, 1929.

Scott, Allan and George Haight. Goodbye Again. New York: Samuel French, 1933.

Sherwood, Robert E. Reunion in Vienna. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932.

. The Road to Rome. In Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modem American Theatre, John Gassner, ed. Early Series. New York: Crown P u b lish e rs, 1949.

Thomas, A. E. No More Ladies. In The Best Plays of 1933-1934, Bums Mantle, ed. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1944.

Treadwell, Sophie. Machinal. In Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre, John Gassner, ed. Early Series. New York: Crown Publishers, 1949.

Williams, Jesse Lynch. Why Not? Boston; Walter H. Baker Co., 1924.

Books

Block, Anita. The Changing World in Plays and Theatre. Boston: L ittle, Brown and Co., 1939.

Brown, John Mason. Broadway in Review. New York: W. W. Norton and C o., 1940. 219

Clark, Barrett H. An Hour of American Drama. Philadelphia: J . B. L ip p in co tt Co., 1930.

Dickinson, Thomas H. Playwrights of the New American Theatre. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925.

Downer, Alan S. F ifty Years of American Drama: 1900-1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1951.

E llis, Albert. The American Sexual Tragedy. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1959.

______. The Folklore of Sex. New York: Charles Boni, 1951.

Falk, Doris V. Eugene (^Neill and the Tragic Tension. New Bruns­ wick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958.

Gagey, Edmond M. Revolution in American Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947.

Gassner, John. irAn American Decade." In Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. New York: Crown Publishers, 1939.

Hartman, John Geoffrey. The Development of American Social Comedy from 1787 to 1936. Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn., 1939.

Hicks, John D. Republican Ascendancy, 1921-1933. The New American Nation Series. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

Hoffman, Frederick J. The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade. New York: The Viking Press, 1955.

Koster, Donald Nelson. The Theme of Divorce in American Drama, 1871-1939. Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn., 1942.

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a The Best Plays of 1925-1926 and the Year Book of the Drama in America. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1941,

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* The Best Plays of 1932-1933 and the Year Book of the Drama in America. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1941.

* The B est P lays of 1933-1934 and the Year Book of the Drama in America. New York; Dodd, Mead and Co., 1934.

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■ The Best Plays of 1940-1941 and the Year Book of the Drama in America. New York; Dodd, Mead and Co., 1963.

The B est P lay s of 1941-1942 and the Year Book of the Drama in America. New York; Dodd, Mead and Co., 1950.

Mersand, Joseph. The American Drama Since 1930. New York; The Modem Chapbooks, 1949.

Moses, Montrose and John Mason Brown. The American Theatre As Seen By Its Critics, 1752-1934. New York; W. W. Norton and C o., 1934.

Nathan, George Jean. Passing Judgments. New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama From the Civil War to the Present. Volume II. New York; Appleton- Century-Crofts, Inc., 1936.

______. ed. Representative American Plays from 1767 to the Present Day. Seventh Edition. New York; Appleton-Century- Crofts, Inc., 1953.

Rice, Elmer. The Living Theatre. New York; Harper and Brothers, 1959.

Shuman, R. Baird. Clifford Odets. New York; Twayne Publishers, 1962.

______. R obert E. Sherwood. New York; Twayne Publishers, 1964.

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______. "Phillip Barry," Theatre Arts Monthly, XII (November 1929), 819-126.

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"Critics Out of Their Element," The Catholic World, CXXXVIII (F ebruary 1934), 513-517.

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. "O'Neill Discovers the Cross!," The Christian Century, LI (February 7, 1934), 191-192.

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"Days Without End," The New Republic, LXXVII (January 24, 1934), 312.

. "Joy on the Mountains," The New Republic, LVI (October 31, 1928), 299-300.

"The Road to Rome," The New Republic, L (March 9, 1927), 70-71.

______. "Saturday's Children and Trelawney," The New Republic, XLIX (February 16, 1927), 357-358. 227

VITA

James M orris Salem was bom in P ortage, Wisconsin on November

15, 1937. After attending public schools in Portage and Delavan,

Wisconsin, he enrolled in Wisconsin State University-LaCrosse, where he received the Bachelor of Science degree in 1961. He was awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship in 1962 to work

toward a Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at Louisiana State

University. EXAMINATION AND THESIS REPORT

Candidate: James Morris Salem

Major Field: English

Title of Thesis: Revolution in Manners and Morals: The Treatment of Adultery in American Drama Between the Wars

Approved:

Major Professor and Chairman

the Graduate School

EXAMINING COMMITTEE: 7

Date of Examination:

July l._1265_ _