The Square Root of Wonderful (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

McCullers's second play, The Square Root of Wonderful, was much anticipated before it opened on Broadway in 1957. Her stage adaptation of The Member of the Wedding had been a huge success, winning the 1951 New York Drama Critics Circle Award as well as other prestigious awards. The Square Root of Wonderful, however, did not fare as well. In fact, even with a well-known cast and a prominent director, the play closed in about six weeks.

Sara Nalley, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, joins many other critics in calling the play "a dismal failure." She also notes that The Member of the Wedding can be described as "virtually plotless, consisting of a series of vignettes in which the three characters share their memories and fantasies." Much the same criticism was leveled at The Square Root of Wonderful, a play in which most of the dialogue is devoted less to moving the action along than to exposing how the characters came to be who they are.

Many critics have charged that the faults of The Square Root of Wonderful lie in its characters. Nalley writes that many of the play's failures can be blamed on its "lifeless characters." Margaret B. McDowell, writing in her book Carson McCullers, also criticizes the play's characters. Aside from Mollie, according to McDowell, they "reveal little emotion and psychic complexity."

Many critics suggest that the play's problems can be blamed on its clumsy effort to blend tragedy and comedy. Oliver Evans, in a collection of critical essays entitled Carson McCullers, argues that the play "has a good many faults," including "a rather low level" of humor and a reliance on too many "gag lines." Despite these problems, the play is not a total disaster, Evans concludes, writing, "It is a better play than the reviewers, by and large, gave her credit for and very few of them bothered to look beneath its surface." According to Evans, the play stands out because its themes are different from those in McCullers's earlier work.

McDowell comes to a similar conclusion about the mix of tragedy and comedy. She notes that McCullers adapted the play from her short story entitled "Who Has Seen the Wind?" The short story focuses solely on how alcohol destroys a husband and his marriage and does not attempt to mix tragedy with comedy. Even more damaging than weak characterizations, McDowell writes, is that the play lacks "an adequate synthesis of the comic and the tragic elements that had been so insistent in her original conception of the work."

Evans also writes in his The Ballad of Carson McCullers that the play is McCullers's "weakest performance," primarily because "she is still too close to her materials." Phillip reflects the life of Reeves McCullers; Mollie is based on McCullers's own mother, Marguerite Smith; and the author herself identifies with both characters at various points in the play. The play's failure can be blamed on the fact that McCullers is writing not about a young girl with typical adolescent challenges (as in The Member of the Wedding) but about the pains of a writer — "too specialized an area of human interest and experience" to capture the imagination of the typical theater audience, Evans claims.

Critics have noted a variety of themes in the play, including loneliness, love, and life and death. The theme of love is approached "rationalistically," according to McDowell. She asserts that John's character offers a love to Mollie that is logical, as opposed to the magical but destructive version of love Phillip has to give. Lynne Greeley's article in Theatre History Studies examines McCullers's life and how it is reflected in her body of work. Greeley notes that the play is "dominated by a life and death theme" and is "generally seen by critics to be the expression of her grief about Reeves," the author's deceased husband.

Irving H. Buchen comments on an additional theme, void and nothingness. In his Dalhousie Review article, Buchen notes that John tells Mollie that his life had "no back or front or depth. No design or meaning" before he met her. Phillip, pleading with Mollie to stay with him, tells her that, "Without you, there is nothing. And nothing resembles nothing. But nothing is not blank. It is configured hell." From this dialogue, Buchen asserts, it is obvious that "the great terror for McCullers is the void."

Ultimately, the play may be more a curiosity than a great piece of theater, according to Amy Verner. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Verner writes that the play "is notable not for its dramatic value but because of the insights it offers about McCullers's personal life."

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1950s: Most middle-class families who buy new homes buy them in the suburbs. Eighty-five percent of the thirteen million homes built in the 1950s are in suburbs.
  Today: The 2000 United States Census shows a slight shift in American population patterns. While there has been a 14 percent increase in suburban population over the last decade, growth was not consistent across all suburbs; 37 percent of suburbs either lost residents or did not change in population. In fact, many cities seem to be on the rebound, population-wise; nearly three-quarters of American cities grew during the 1990s.
• 1950s:Peyton Place (1956) is not only a huge best-seller but also a social phenomenon. Grace Metalious's novel exposes the secrets and scandals of a fictional small town in New England. For the time, the novel's relatively candid presentation of teenage and adult sex is groundbreaking. The film adaptation of the novel also causes a stir at the box office.
  Today: The inclusion of sexual issues or material in books and films is much more common than it was in the 1950s. Entertainment featuring extramarital sex and homosexuality are becoming more common.
• 1950s: The number of cars on the road grows from 40 million in 1950 to 60 million in 1960.
  Today: The number of registered cars in the United States surpasses 132.4 million, more than double the number on the road in 1960.
• 1950s: The United States birth rate peaks in 1957, when a baby is born every seven seconds, for a total of about 4.3 million babies.
  Today: Four million babies are born in the United States in 2000, an increase of 3 percent from the previous year.
• 1950s: More and more women are entering the job market. By 1960, almost two out of five women with school-age children hold jobs.
  Today: Forty-six percent of the workforce in the United States is female; this figure is expected to increase to 48 percent by 2008. Women's participation in the American labor force has steadily increased since the 1950s, with a short reversal period in the early 1990s.