The Little Foxes (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole L. Hamilton

Hamilton is an educator with significant experience in drama and secondary curricula. In this essay she compares Hellman’s play to classic Greek drama.

In interviews Hellman has acknowledged her debt to Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov as models of dramatic structure (she even edited an anthology of Chekhov’s letters), but she never articulated her ties to classic Greek theater, the ultimate source of the genre called tragedy. Yet the two plays of her planned but uncompleted trilogy, The Little Foxes andits “prequel,” AnotherPartoj’theForest, show considerable resemblance to classic Greek tragedy, especially to Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Orestiea. At the same time, Hellman’s plays truly represent their time period, the modernist era, in their cynicism and their lack of a true heroic figure. On top of that, the quietly disturbing condemnation of passivity in the face of social ills move the play beyond the realm of pure tragedy to a unique dramatic genre that combines the best of classic tragedy with the best of the morality play.

As in Greek staging, what Aristotle termed the three unities of time, place, and action are respected in The Little Foxes: all of the events take place in one setting, over a short three-week period, and no extraneous incidents mar the relentless action of the lean plot. Hellman’s trilogy contains a father’s betrayal of his children, interference in betrothals, deceit, and murder, all themes common to Greek mythology and drama. There is cyclical revenge whose stoppage is central to the trilogy, and there is at least one character who wishes to end the familial cycle of revenge. But, unlike the typical classic Greek story, no character appears capable of ending generations of deception and revenge.

In the Greek myth that most closely resembles the structure and story of Hellman’s planned trilogy, Orestes and his sister Electra put a stop to several generations of vengeance murders in their family, the House of Atreus, by themselves murdering their own mother and her lover. Aeschylus dramatized their story in the Oresteia, which begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Their motive is not to rid themselves of an unwelcome spouse, but revenge for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, an act that her mother Clytemestra never forgave. Child killing goes back to Agamemnon’s paternal ancestors, when a father killed his son and served him at a banquet. In another case Atreus (Agamemnon’s father) serves his brother a dish of his own children as an act of revenge. In a slight departure from this motif, Agamemnon kills his daughter to solicit the gods’ help in the Trojan War. He tells Iphigenia she is setting sail to marry Achilles, but she is bound for a sacrificial, not a wedding altar. The cycle of betrayal, child murder, and revenge ends when Orestes and Electra avenge their father Agamemnon’s murder through matricide.

The story of the House of Atreus and the plays of Aeschylus would have been familiar to well-educated writers like Hellman. Just a few years before Hellman began to design her Southern tragic trilogy, Eugene O’Neill reworked the last part of this myth into a New England setting. O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) is also a dramatic trilogy, and it contains a virtuous character named Lavinia, who, like the Lavinia in Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, helps a family avenger. Hellman apparently decided to make her affinities to Greek tragedy more clear when she wrote Another Part of the Forest, because she includes numerous references to Aristotle, father of literary criticism about tragedy. She also alluded to her essential departure from Greek purism when she described the Marcus Hubbard mansion as “something too austere, too pretended Greek,” in Another Part of the Forest.

Hellman’s malovolent Hubbard family is a veritable House of Atreus when it comes to revenge and intrigue. However, in place of corporal murder of child or parent, Hellman substitutes financial and emotional “murder,” a topic more in keeping with the modernist period in which she wrote. As in the Greek myth, the curse is patrilineal, coming from the line of the father. Marcus, like a depraved king, rules and dominates his Southern domain, which he has won through a relentless siege upon his neighbors’ money and land. His worst sin (betraying the location of confederate troops and lying about it) is revisited upon his offspring, who vie with each other over who will prevail as the most devious backstabber. Hellman makes other adjustments to the Greek model of tragedy as well. In her modern story characters seek after power as did Greek characters, but they do so by waging economic war as predatory capitalists cheating the poor, not by conquering lands as mighty warriors battling equally mighty foes. In addition, sacrifice has evolved from a religious sacrament to an empty habit. Animals are “sacrificed” in The Little Foxes, not to appease the gods but for base entertainment. Birdie tells Oscar, “I don’t like to see animals and birds killed just for the killing. You only throw them away.” The theme of a marriage derailed also appears in Hellman’s two plays, but, again, with a difference. A father (Marcus) obstructs the marriage of his daughter, but whereas Agamemnon offers his daughter to the gods, she (Regina) performs her own “sacrifice,” offering herself to a man she cannot love (Horace) in order to gain access to his money.

In Hellman’s play, money is a source of wealth and also a marker of power. As Hellman said, in an interview reprinted in Conversations with Lillian Hellman:“Money’s been the subject of a great deal of literature because it . . . isn’t only money, of course, it’s power, it’s sex; it’s a great many other things.” To Regina money equals mobility — with the profits from the cotton mill, she will escape the stifling Southern town to Chicago and belong to a smarter social circle, one that measures the status of its members by the clothes and jewels they wear. To her brother Oscar, money is a way to reclaim power from Ben, the older and shrewder brother who pauperized his siblings and their father in Another Part of the Forest using blackmail. Power is important to Oscar; he compensates for his submission to his father and Ben by bullying economically and socially stymied black people. Money in and of itself does not answer any of Ben’s needs; he intends to remain a bachelor and already owns more than he spends. To Ben, money is an end in itself, and his form of depraved capitalistic dynasty-building is the ultimate target of the Marxist criticism Hellman levels in this play.

The correspondences between Hellman’s Hubbard family and Greek myths about the family Atreus drift apart when the last generations are compared. Orestes and Electra are heroes who dare to put a stop to generations of revenge through their courage and perseverance. In The Little Foxes, Alexandra corresponds to Electra; however, Alexandra does not live up to Electra’s courageous moral standards. At the end of the play, Alexandra threatens to fight the “eaters of the earth,” but her threat is aimed vaguely and indirectly “some place” instead of right here where the eaters have taken hold. Alexandra mumbles her suspicion that Regina killed Horace, but has led too sheltered a life to stand up to Regina in court, or impede her from going to Chicago, nor can she stop her uncle Ben from continuing to cheat the townspeople. Alexandra expresses Hellman’s Marxist philosophy, but she lacks the vitality to achieve a revolution. Hellman said of her, in an interview in Conversations with Lillian Hellman: “She did have courage enough to leave, but would never have the force or vigor of her mother’s family.” Even more significantly, there is no corresponding Orestes figure in The Little Foxes to avenge Horace’s death and end the cycle for good. Alexandra she has no siblings to assist her as did Electra, because Regina has not slept with Horace in 10 years. That Hellman deprives her audience of a strong avenging figure suggests a cynical attitude toward the state of affairs in the South of 1900, the year of the play’s setting, an attitude one may easily extend to include the present of 1939 when the play opened, as well as the present of the 1990s. As Ben says early in the play, “Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”

The single remaining male Hubbard heir is Leo, son of Oscar and Birdie, who combines the weaknesses of his mother and the lost Southern aristocracy (ineffectiveness in a ruthless world) with the grasping rapacity of his father and the rising class of capitalist merchants (who compromise ethics for wealth). Leo may exceed his father in evilmindeness, but he lacks the family shrewdness and vitality necessary for financial success in the New South. It appears that the family vigor, though dissipated, will not disappear, however, since Leo enjoys his “elegant worldly ladies” in Mobile, and through whoring will populate a world of Hubbards. Even without Leo’s contribution, the Hubbard syndrome is already pervasive in the world portrayed by Hellman in The Little Foxes. Ben warns that “there are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country. All their names aren’t Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country some day.” The Hubbards are like an impersonal scourge on the earth that Addie compares to the locusts of the Bible, and she wonders whether one can consider oneself virtuous while ignoring their presence. She concludes: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it. . . . Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. . . . Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.” The passivity Addie deplores but shares is a theme that Hellman will return to again and again in later plays. In The Little Foxes a moral message quietly threads its way through the spectacle of the Hubbards’ acts of deceit and revenge. In this respect Hellman’s work seems more aligned with the morality play than tragedy. In a morality play, allegorical figures representing human vices such as greed and malice struggle for possession of a human soul. To the extent certain Hellman’s characters are categorically evil, they fit the description of the flat, one-dimensional characters of the morality play.

The title of Hellman’s play comes from the Bible, an idea consistent with a pervasive moralizing tone expressed mostly by Addie. Hellman includes in the inscription the whole passage from the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes.” The lines imply that if no one catches them, the little foxes will despoil the newly budded vines of precious grapes. In Hellman’s play, the Hubbards are “little foxes” despoiling the lost glory of the New South in their greedy rise to power, and they are poised to rise even further on the wave of industrialization that swept over the New South in 1900. The Little Foxes is what one critic has called a social melodrama, a tragedy with a moral. Aristotle defined tragedy as a dramatic action that excited and then purged pity and fear, a spectacle that cleansed the audience of these emotions. But The Little Foxes provides no such service. It contains all of the elements of classic tragedy, but instead of a cathartic action, the play leaves the audience with a nagging sense of unfulfilled moral obligation. Critic Louis Kronenberger’s 1939 review in Stage magazine said that the play “denies us all sense of tragedy,” leaving the audience feeling “not purged, not released, but still aroused and indignant.” It leaves audiences feeling sullied, fearing that they, like the latent and unprovidential heroes Horace, Addie, and Alexandra, lack the fortitude to involve themselves in stopping the plundering of the “little foxes” of the world, and can only stand idly by, being entertained by the spectacle of their rapacity. Herein lies the power of The Little Foxes, a play that concerns an age 100 years past and that is formatted in a dramatic structure, the tragedy, that predates Christ. This social melodrama, or whatever term one applies to it, continues to captivate audiences no longer enmeshed in the debate between Marxism and capitalism. The underlying themes of greed and revenge continue to strike a responsive chord in audiences whenever the play is revived, and its terse, witty dialogue and tense, streamlined plot draw each new audience under its remarkable power.

Source: Carole L. Hamilton, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• In Another Part of the Forest, the “prequel” to The Little Foxes, Hellman jumps back 20 years to show the genesis of the family revenge cycle. It portrays a dominating father (Marcus) whom Ben blackmails (with evidence of Marcus’s betrayal of neighbor soldiers during the Civil War) to obtain full ownership of his estate, leaving Regina and Oscar virtually penniless.
• Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) was a model of social realism for Hellman. In it a dutiful wife leaves her husband when she discovers that he has never seen her as a human being, but as little more than a doll.
• All My Sons, the 1947 play by Hellman’s contemporary and rival Arthur Miller, portrays Joe Keller, a manufacturer who knowingly ships defective airplane parts that kill twenty — two American pilots in World War II, and lets his partner take the jail sentence for it.
• In Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), Willie Loman sacrifices his integrity for expected riches.
• The son of Big Daddy, the wealthy cotton plantation owner of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), turns to alcoholism rather than follow in his father’s footsteps in this intense drama.
• Aeschylus’s Orestiea, a Greek trilogy concerning a family’s heritage of malice and revenge is a fine representative of Greek tragic theater.
• Historian Edward L. Ayers’s Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906 (Oxford University Press, 1995), is a concise account of the daily, public, and cultural life in the South during the years from post-Reconstruction into the Progressive period, including the turn of the century portrayed by Hellman’s play.