The Square Root of Wonderful (Characters)

Characters

Hattie Brown

Hattie Brown is Paris Lovejoy's school friend. The stage directions note that she is "buxom" and a year older than thirteen-year-old Paris. Hattie is a plainspoken girl who is somewhat confused by the goings on at the Lovejoy house, but she still likes Paris and tells him so. She is afraid of Phillip, though, mostly because she has heard tales of his attempted suicide and that he has recently been in a sanatorium. Hattie's mother has told her never to go to the Lovejoy house, not because of Phillip but because Hattie told her about the time she and Paris took off their clothes and "looked at each other."

Loreena Lovejoy

See Sister

Mollie Lovejoy

Mollie Lovejoy has been married twice to Phillip but is currently divorced from him. A number of critics, including Sara Nalley writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, believe that Mollie is modeled after the playwright's mother, a woman who spent much of her life taking care of McCullers when she was ill. Mollie is described in the list of characters as "a beautiful young woman," and is in her thirties. Her attractiveness is noted in the play itself when she tells John that Phillip only wanted her for her looks. John assures her, after admitting that he does love her for her body, that he also loves her "for your wisdom of heart, and for your soul."

Mollie, though divorced from Phillip and dreading his return to the household, struggles during much of the play to separate herself emotionally from her ex-husband. She believes that ever since she met him at the age of fifteen and married him two days later, he has cast a spell over her. "I was under his spell," she says, and acknowledges that even as an adult, she still believes in spells. Halfway through the play, still entranced by Phillip but leaning toward John, she asks Paris, "If your mother told you she is in love with two people, what would you think?" She loves deeply and sees things with a "luminous" light because of the intensity of her love.

Mollie is a woman who does things on the spur of the moment, including picking up a stranger, John Tucker, on the road and bringing him back to the house. Ten days later, she is preparing to leave with John. Only after Phillip's suicide and John's gentle encouragement does she appear free of the power her ex-husband held over her.

Mother Lovejoy

Mother Lovejoy is Phillip's bossy mother, originally from Society City, Georgia. She has always believed that her son was special and musically gifted. "You crawled before any other child, walked before any other child, talked before any other child," she remembers. Much of her focus is on encouraging Phillip and defending his behavior, but she has never understood why he wanted to be a writer. Mother Lovejoy's husband left the family when Phillip and his sister were children. She had to work as a seamstress to make ends meet, but more recently she has come into a sizeable amount of money left to her by her Uncle Willie.

Mother Lovejoy tells Mollie that she never liked the idea of her son being married to Mollie but that by their second marriage she was "resigned" to it. In fact, she wants Mollie and Phillip to marry for a third time, possibly to secure Phillip's economic future — although how that might work is unclear. "Economics and common sense," she tells Mollie, are the two reasons she wishes to see Mollie and Phillip together.

Mother Lovejoy acts in a flighty and preoccupied manner about much of what goes on around the house. For example, she arranges for Sister and John to be alone together, even though John and Mollie are only hours away from running off together. However, there is the possibility that Mother Lovejoy is more devious than she immediately seems. Maybe she knows of the deepening relationship between John and Mollie and is simply trying to keep Mollie available for Phillip.

Paris Lovejoy

Paris Lovejoy is Mollie and Phillip's thirteen-year-old son. All during the play, he is forced to sleep on the living room couch because his aunt and grandmother are visiting and have taken his room. Twice he is woken up by one of his parents. The play opens with Mollie shaking him awake from a bad dream about his father as a burglar, and later in the play, Phillip wakes him up early in the morning.

Paris is more like a person the adult characters stumble upon than he is like a son or a grandson. His mother asks him for love advice, and Phillip comes to speak to Paris about ephemeral things early in the morning just minutes before he drives his car into the pond and dies. Paris does not have a strong relationship with his father and is especially sensitive to the fact that Phillip does not remember his age when sending him birthday gifts. In addition, he is resentful that all of the farm-related chores Phillip claims to look forward to doing around the house fall instead on his shoulders. He makes a deeper connection with John than with any of his relatives. Paris and John have a "man-to-man" talk in the play, and it is John, not Phillip, who expresses interest in Paris's new chess set.

Phillip Lovejoy

Phillip was a special child, according to his mother. When he was eighteen months old, he supposedly marched around the block waving an American flag and singing the "Marseillaise" (the French national anthem). Phillip arrives at Mollie's house after a brief stay at a local sanatorium to recover from the poor reviews his most recent play has received and from his subsequent suicide attempt. Mother Lovejoy and others make comments in the play that refer to his having an alcohol problem.

Even after his rest at the sanatorium, Phillip acts agitated and angry about his life as a writer. He wounds everyone around him with his spiteful words and behaves as if the world centers on him and his struggle to become a more successful writer. Mollie has always been there for Phillip when he needed help. "Take care of me now. You have always loved me," he pleads to Mollie. When she tells him that she once loved him but no longer does, he tells her, "Without you there is nothing." Much of his dialogue has him dramatically begging Mollie to support him and take care of him. John sums up Mollie and Phillip's relationship after Phillip's death, telling Mollie, "You were responsible for keeping life in a man who no longer wanted to live."

In addition to the attempted and then the successful suicide, there is an atmosphere of violence surrounding the writer. Mollie admits that he has hit her in the past, and when they argue about her feelings toward John, Phillip grabs her and she responds by picking up a knife.

Sister

Sister, or Loreena Lovejoy, is Mother Lovejoy's daughter and Phillip's sister. She has never married, even though, as her mother notes, she had the "best prepared debut of any girl in Georgia" at the Peachtree Cotillion. According to Mother Lovejoy, Sister ruined her presentation to society by wearing glasses and vomiting at the debut ball. Sister works as a librarian and dreams of imaginary lovers she follows from one exotic country to another.

Sister has a gentle personality and often tries to soothe people's feelings after they have been hurt. Mother Lovejoy conspires to set her up with "that good-looking Mr. Tucker" by leaving the two of them alone with each other. Sister and John have a sympathetic conversation in which she asks him how to meet people.

John Tucker

John Tucker is a divorced architect and nearly the exact opposite of Phillip; he is very stable and not given to dramatic statements and actions. He is honest with his emotions, and it is very clear to everyone involved that he loves Mollie. John admits, though, that when Mollie picked him up on the road and brought him back to her house, he expected a night of sex instead of an offer of room and board. He explains to Mollie that in such circumstances, "a man naturally anticipates." But after getting to know her, John appreciates Mollie's inner beauty as much as her outer beauty.

John's constancy is contrasted to Phillip's unreliability throughout the play. For example, when the two men meet for the first time, Mollie mentions that John was in the Navy. John adds information about the training he received, learning to "land on beachheads and slip into secret, dangerous places." Mollie mentions that Phillip was in the Army but had to leave after a "short time" because he had the mumps. Phillip claims that John is boring and that Mollie will lose interest in him very quickly.

In contrast to Phillip's obscure and self-centered statements, John shares painful past experiences with Mollie and with Paris, admitting that he has been hurt by love. In addition, he shares with Paris his theory of emotions, which involves calculating "the square root" of each one. John comforts Mollie after Phillip's death. He assures her that she is not responsible for her ex-husband's death, even though, as Mollie suggests, Phillip's suicide was in response to seeing her pack to leave with John.