Hay Fever (Criticism)

Criticism

Erika M. Kreger

Kreger is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, and has served as a guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. In this essay she discusses how Coward’s comedic touch in Hay Fever reveals the artifice of both social and theatrical conventions, putting a uniquely humorous spin on the anxiety over loss of meaning expressed so seriously by many of his modernist contemporaries.

“None of us ever mean anything.” So the character Sorel Bliss describes her family in the second act of Noel Coward’s 1925 comedy of manners Hay Fever. In context, her words explain the Blisses’ endless play-acting, the cause of the work’s humorously chaotic situations. Yet her statement also echoes the cultural anxiety expressed in many other forums during the post-World War I era, a time when many artists articulated concerns about the increasing hollowness and meaninglessness of the modern world. Disillusioned by the awful realities of total war, influenced by new psychological and scientific theories, and dissatisfied with traditional aesthetic forms, modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf experimented with stream of consciousness narratives and contemplated the frightening possibility of an unstable world where all reality was relative, constructed by the subjective view of an individual. Such deep and dreary thoughts might seem unrelated to Coward’s light and sophisticated comedy, yet the very same idea that was a source of anxiety for such artists serves as the main source of humor in Hay Fever.

Coward’s perfectly balanced play places the four unrestrained and idiosyncratic members of the Bliss family opposite the four unimaginative and conventional people they have invited for the weekend. During the course of the resulting comedic action, the playwright pokes fun at artistic pretensions as well as ordinary habits, revealing the artifice inherent in both. In the midst of all the good fun, we find a subtle critique of not only excessive individualism but also hypocritical propriety. The unsuspecting visitors arrive at the country house expecting to be entertained by their vibrant and celebrated hosts but instead end up feeling tricked and tortured as the Blisses repeatedly profess false emotions and create imaginary relationships.

This unexpected behavior confuses the guests, who are unsure how to respond in the face of such irrational behavior. It is not — as some critics suggest — that they find themselves unable to distinguish between truth and illusion. Rather, they recognize fairly quickly that they are witnessing “acts” of different kinds, but they resist changing the accepted social rules about when and where it is appropriate to “act.” So it is not that the visitors fail to see that the Blisses are speaking untruths and constructing false situations; it is more that the guests have trouble figuring out why this is happening all of a sudden in the living room. In a theater, they would know what such actions meant. Removed from the traditional dramatic arena, however, they do not know what anything means. Coward skillfully turns this loss of meaning into a joke. He plays with the audience’s definition of what is “real” and what is “illusion,” ironically revealing that perhaps there is more honesty in the Blisses’ unapologetic theatricality than in their guests’ repressed normalcy.

The comedy’s situational humor comes from the juxtaposition of these two contrasting modes of behavior; yet each is equally open to ridicule. Hay Fever depicts a world devoid of true meaning or genuine feeling, taking modernist fears to a ludicrous extreme and cleverly making us laugh at the futility and falseness of it all.

Judith and David Bliss are celebrities, she having won fame as a stage actress, he as a romance novelist. Each understands, just as Coward himself did, what the public expects and how to live up to these expectations. Long before theorists began writing about the idea of personality as a fictional construct, Coward was well aware of the artificiality of public identity, having taken great pains to construct his own. As Christopher Innes commented in Modern British Drama, 1890-1990, many commentators have considered “Coward’s public image — the appearance of upper class elegance, inscrutable poise, cocktail party wit elevated to epigram — to be the most brilliant of his artistic creations. Like Oscar Wilde, Coward is judged to have put his genius into his life” as well as to have “notoriously put his personality into his plays — writing major roles for himself to act — and the characters he played were a pose that disguised the reality of his life.”

In the early-twentieth century, with the increasing variety and availability of all kinds of communication media, performance was no longer restricted to the stage. Whether in a radio interview, a fan magazine photo, or a newspaper gossip column, celebrity images were widely distributed. The public had a sense of what a given star was like; they expected the star — in person or in performance — to live up to that image. In Hay Fever, Judith acknowledges this dynamic. As she says, “it isn’t me really, it’s my Celebrated Actress glamor” that her young infatuated visitor loves, but this does not trouble her a bit. To her, theatrical glamor is as good as the real thing. It is of no matter if she is not truly beautiful because, as she tells her children, “I made thousands think I was.” If a good act earns the same rewards as the genuine article, what is the difference? The public is ready to accept false images, so long as they are pleasing. Celebrity itself has an attraction that for some reason goes beyond talent or substance.

Although Judith admits the plays that made her famous were often terrible, and David states plainly that he writes “bad novels,” each still garners wealth and admiration. Sandy has fallen in love with Judith’s on-stage persona; and Myra has been longing to meet David because she likes his books. Coward underscores that the Blisses are not true artists, but merely spoiled and egoistic celebrities. The play emphasizes how misguided their young admirers are to be fooled by unsubstantial public images.

Coward takes pains to show that the Blisses are not creative individuals who deserve to have their eccentricities indulged for the sake of their great art. He stresses that they produce nothing of value, are utterly self-absorbed, and possess no personal philosophy beyond enjoying themselves. Unlike the admirable individualists of the American literary tradition who cause no harm and serve as potential role models for others, the Blisses do cause harm and could care less. They exploit their privilege to amuse themselves and torment others, avoiding responsibility through affecting absent-mindedness and blindness.

Judith claims that “if dabbling gives me pleasure, I don’t see why I shouldn’t dabble.” But the play reveals that others might be able to offer her many reasons why she should not dabble with people’s lives. Judith may say that the arrival of a houseful of unexpected guests was inevitable since “everything that happens is fate,” but the housekeeper Clara — who suffers the consequences of all the extra work — correctly adds that it is “more like arrant selfishness.” Just like the unrepentant characters who sing the song “Regency Rakes” in Coward’s 1934 play Conversation Piece, the Blisses could say of themselves, “each of us takes/A personal pride/In the thickness of hide/That prevents us from seeing/How vulgar we’re being.”

Sorel’s attempts at self-reform throw into stark relief the absolute blindness — or thickness of hide — of the rest of the family. She knows she is “entirely lacking in restraint,” thanks to being raised by parents who have “spent their lives cultivating their arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things,” but her efforts at improvement are only partly successful.

Although Sorel, in her desire to change, is charmed by her guest Richard’s proper and conventional manners, neither he nor the other visitors are held up as a particularly appealing alternative to the Blisses. While the hosts bring spectacle and drama into ordinary life, the visitors engage in the everyday theater of “good manners,” hiding their true feelings and motives behind polite behavior. Each has accepted the weekend invitation with some kind of personal agenda, hoping to meet a celebrity or consummate a romance (or both). Sandy tells Judith, “I’ve been planning to know you for ages.” Myra confesses she accepted Simon’s invitation only to meet David. Such plans and schemes are comically thwarted by the Blisses’ inconvenient spontaneity.

Coward contrasts the Blisses’ lack of self-awareness with the outsiders’ self-consciousness: Richard’s careful propriety, Jackie’s painful shyness, Sandy’s awkward nervousness, Myra’s worldly calculation. The visitors’ false presentation of self is paired with their false perception of their hosts. Richard expresses the romanticized view that seems to have attracted them all to the house; he thinks the Blisses are “a very Bohemian family,” “so alive and vital and different than other people.” But perhaps the visitors are not so very different from their hosts after all. Complimenting Richard, Sorel unwittingly makes clear that his ways are no more transparently understandable than her mother’s over-the-top theatricality. She tells him, “You always do the right thing, and no one knows a bit what you’re really thinking.” Later Judith comments on what she views as his excessive restraint, saying “do stop being noncommittal.” Coward makes being habitually noncommittal seem as false as offering phony expressions of commitment. By the end of the play, the audience might acknowledge that Myra’s angry description of her hosts could just as well apply to them all: “You’re the most infuriating set of hypocrites I’ve ever seen. This house is a complete featherbed of false emotions — you’re posing, self-centered egotists.”

Yet the very self-centered, egocentric behavior that torments the on-stage guests, entertains the on-looking audience. Although outrageous and unpredictable acts cause problems in daily life, they remains the stuff of good theater. So although Hay Fever reflects what could be a frightening concept — the total absence of meaning in modern life — the play remains in comedic territory because its substanceless spectacle is safely contained in the sphere or performance. The audience gets a pleasurably voyeuristic glimpse of the leisure-class, while also getting to feel comfortably superior when noticing the foibles the characters do not recognize in themselves.

Although the viewers, too, might engage in daily deceptions and worship substanceless celebrities, the extreme scenarios on stage seem removed from their lives, keeping the parody from hitting too close to home. If, as Coward wrote in his lyrics to the 1923 song “London Calling,” “Life is nothing but a game of make-believe,” then the world would be as pointless and chaotic as the Bliss household. But having perfected the art of maintaining comic distance, the playwright is able to offer gentle critique in an entertaining, rather than alarming, package.

Coward himself — despite repeatedly stating he had no intention for his plays to do anything more than make people laugh — at times admitted that his work did address more substantial themes. In 1925 he wrote that he wanted his plays to deal with “the hard facts of existence,” to “concentrate on psychological impulses” and to “enlighten.” Later, in a 1956 diary entry, he noted “I am a better writer than I am given credit for being. It is fairly natural that my writing should be casually appreciated because my personality, performances, music, and legend get in the way. Some day... my works may be adequately assessed.”

Today, when we place a play such as Hay Fever in historical context, it is possible to acknowledge not only Coward’s skills in constructing situational comedy but also his clever response to the literary and philosophical debates of his era.

Source: Erika M. Kreger, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Collected Short Stories, a 1962 collection that brings together all of Coward’s short fiction. Like his better plays, the author’s short stories showcase his skill with wordplay and considerable wit.
• Poems by Dorothy Parker, an American contemporary of Coward’s. Her work also captures much of the same irreverent wit and high energy that defined the 1920s artistic world in which they both circulated. Two notable collections are Enough Rope and Death and Taxes.
• Private Lives, Coward’s 1929 comedy about a divorced couple who meet again when both are honeymooning with new spouses. As in Hay Fever, the main characters’ behavior befuddles and confuses their new spouses. Some consider this to be Coward’s best play.
• Pygmalion, a play by influential British playwright George Bernard Shaw. The story deals with the transformation of a lower-class woman to fit upper-class ideals; it was later adapted into the popular stage musical and film My Fair Lady.
• Quicksand, Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel depicts the “Roaring ‘20s” from another perspective, that of a black woman trying to negotiate her racial identity as she travels between Europe and America.
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a 1962 award-winning play by Edward Albee that is much indebted to Hay Fever for its dramatic situation of a married couple tormenting guests who do not understand the familial tensions and deceptions that are being played out in front of the them. Unlike Coward’s play, however, Albee’s work also deals with a deeper theme of marital discord.