The Young Man from Atlanta (Criticism)

Criticism

Dustie Robeson

Robeson is a freelance writer with a master's degree in English. In this essay, Robeson discusses the ways in which Lily Dale and Will Kidder inspire compassion and disdain in audiences and readers.

In The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote explores the issue of death and its impact on the lives of parents. In the process, he delves into the lives of his living characters and seems to ask the question, what type of a life is worth living? For Will and Lily Dale Kidder, life seems divorced from many realities. Michael Feingold, who reviewed the play in 1995 for the Village Voice, posed an interesting question. He asked, the "desperate desire not to face reality is certainly very American, but does Foote want us to indict it or empathize with it?" In the end, Foote creates two characters who inspire both empathy and contempt from audiences and readers.

For Lily Dale, living a life that is not grounded in reality is the status quo. Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times, calls her a "petulant, spoiled child bride." Indeed, Lily Dale's life is much like that of a spoiled child rather than a mature adult. She calls her husband "daddy" and tells Pete that "anything I ever wanted, Will got for me." Lily Dale so easily parts with $35,000 that one might easily criticize her for having a juvenile understanding of the value of money (particularly in light of the fact that the average annual salary in 1950 was less than $3,000). In addition to living a sheltered and pampered life that freed her from most adult responsibilities and thus adult realities, Lily Dale seems ill equipped to deal with some of life's larger and more serious issues, including civil rights and the nature of her son's death.

As alluded to in earlier commentary about the play's themes, Lily Dale has a superficial understanding of race relations. This lack of awareness surfaces when she discusses the Disappointment Clubs that she believes Eleanor Roosevelt started in Houston during World War II. For Lily Dale, Roosevelt was motivated by her desire to "disappoint white people" and she "took out all her personal unhappiness on the South." In reality, however, Roosevelt was deeply committed to social justice and the rights of black people in America. Clearly, Roosevelt's cause and the plight of black Americans are lost on the self-centered Lily Dale. When it comes to the death of her son, much seems similarly lost on her. When her friend Alice Temple questions her religious faith in light of Bill's suicide, Lily Dale is shocked. She insists, "His death was an accident" and fails to grasp the very real possibility that Bill did indeed take his own life.

Despite Lily Dale's narcissistic and sheltered life, audiences and readers are likely to feel some compassion for her. It is often said that the death of a child is one of the most difficult losses that a person can experience. Lily Dale's grief is palpable in her raw vulnerability and is expressed in her uncontrollable need to connect with Randy. Of her conversation with Alice she tells Pete,

And she upset me so, Pete, that I couldn't stop trembling and my heart started racing so, I thought I would have a heart attack. And I just had to call that sweet roommate of his in Atlanta, even though Daddy had told me never to, and I told him exactly what Alice had told me. He said there was not a world of truth in it. I felt very relieved after that, and I thanked God, got on my knees and thanked God for sending this sweet friend of Bill's to tell me once again of Bill's faith in God.

Lily Dale desperately misses her son and will do anything to touch a piece of him. In scene 2, she confides in Pete, "Every time I feel blue over missing Bill, I call his friend and I ask him to tell me again about Bill and his prayers and he does so so sweetly." Lily Dale's need to connect with someone that she believes was close to Bill is understandable. However, her actions are not without a cost — a cost that ends the empathy that most might initially feel for her.

Although Lily Dale's grief moves audiences to be somewhat forgiving of her childishness and self-centeredness, in the end, she does not inspire long-term empathy. Lily Dale's need to connect with Randy is understandable; however, her willful dishonesty with Will is not. Her relationship with

Randy and her donation to his questionable causes is damaging to her marriage, both emotionally and financially. For this, many audiences and readers tend to hold her accountable. Instead of looking vulnerable and grief stricken, her actions make her appear shallow, unintelligent, and gullible. Ironically, even when Lily Dale comes to grips with the error of her ways, it is difficult to feel compassion for her. She says, "I have been deceived, I have been so deceived it has broken my heart. I feel so betrayed, so hurt, so humiliated." Although she blames herself for Will's heart attack, she fails to recognize that her feelings of betrayal must be nothing compared to those that her husband might be feeling about her dishonesty with him. In the end, Will's assessment of her comes through as absolutely correct: she had "been taken for a fool," because of her unwillingness to accept some difficult truths about her son and Randy. Because of her selfishness and less than admirable handling of her relationship with her husband, Lily Dale's lowest moment in the play, is likely the time that audiences feel the least amount of compassion for her.

While audiences and readers come to dislike Lily Dale as the play progresses, Will seems to inspire a somewhat different reaction. At first, he lives in a world outside of reality that makes him come across as boastful and overly confident, particularly as it comes to his perceptions about his career. Despite Will's claims that his clients respect him and that he is "a born competitor," he can no longer perform in the competitive marketplace. As his boss, Ted, puts it, "It's a new age. It's a different ball game, Will. What worked forty years ago, or twenty, or ten, doesn't work anymore." Following his termination, Will's self-delusion persists. Although he left the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery to pursue his own business venture, Will is unable to secure funding from the banks. This is proof yet again that Will had an inflated, if not wholly inaccurate, understanding of his professional relationships. In this case, none of the financial institutions with whom he has worked over the years would extend credit to him for a new business.

In addition to the fact that Will has a professional life that is not grounded in reality, his personal life seems similarly tainted. In his initial conversation with Tom, Will boasts that he has "the best of everything." Will includes his career, his house, and his wife in this assessment. Sadly, as with his career, Will comes to find out that not everything in his life is what it appears to be on the surface. Not only does he realize that he has overestimated himself professionally, but the cost of building his house has put him in severe financial straits given his termination. Further, he learns that his wife, "the finest wife a man could have," has been dishonest with him. Ironically, these realizations help make Will a more likable character who is possibly more deserving of empathy than contempt.

As Will's world of artifice comes tumbling down, he becomes a more humble and honest man. In the midst of facing realities about his professional capabilities and prospects, he must also come to terms with his financial affairs, his marriage, and of course, the facts surrounding his son's life and death. Although Will comes to terms with all of these issues, one might argue that he falls a bit short when it comes to Bill. Although Will readily admits that he believed Bill's death was a suicide very early in the play, he refuses to explore the nature of his son's involvement with Randy. The unspoken assumption that permeates this play is that Bill and Randy were involved in a homosexual relationship. Of Bill, Will says to Lily Dale, "there was a Bill I knew and a Bill you knew and that's the only Bill I care to know about." He refuses to meet with Randy because he says, "there are things I'd have to ask him and I don't want to know the answers." One can read this final decision of Will's as the last vestige of denial that prevents him from living fully in reality. Were he to confront the issue of his son's sexuality, all that he had previously denied, ignored, or lied to himself about would be cleared up; however, he refuses the meeting and asks Lily Dale to send Randy away for the final time.

Interestingly, Will's refusal demonstrates his clear desire to stay in the dark about his son's sexuality, and in one sense this does indicate another way in which he will continue to live in a world that is not based in reality. At the same time, Will's admissions to Lily Dale indicate that he has to some extent already reached an understanding about his son's lifestyle and sexual preferences. By refusing to meet with Randy, Will demonstrates that he is indeed already aware that Bill and Randy's relationship was more than a simple friendship.

Lily Dale and Will inspire both compassion and disdain. They live within a shroud of ignorance and denial and are thus difficult to admire or even like. As the play progresses, however, each gives audiences and readers reasons to relate and empathize with them. But are these reasons enough to redeem them? In the end, Foote leaves that question for his viewers and readers to answer. Most likely, people who encounter this play will find themselves with divided opinions. Perhaps Foote's lasting point is that one's ability to face reality is not a consistent trait, and thus progress and failure to do so are both an inherent part of the reality in which everyone lives. In this way then, Lily Dale and Will are, in fact, more of a reflection of reality than an exception to it.

Source: Dustie Robeson, Critical Essay on The Young Man from Atlanta, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Tamara Fernando

Fernando is a freelance writer and editor in Seattle, Washington. In this essay, Fernando argues that Foote's play is a deconstruction of the American dream. The Young Man from Atlanta opens with Will Kidder, age 64, sitting in his office at the produce firm for which he has worked since his early twenties, examining the plans for a luxurious new home he has just finished building for himself and his wife, Lily Dale Kidder. When his colleague Tom questions him about the extravagance of the new house, Will answers "I want the best. The biggest and the best. I always have. Since I was a boy. We were dirt poor after my father died and I said to myself then I'm not going to live like this the rest of my life."

This short bit of dialogue succinctly and clearly establishes Will Kidder as a rags-to-riches character — that is, a person who has moved from poverty to material wealth and, therefore, happiness and fulfillment. The rags-to-riches character is a type that is echoed throughout American folklore and history — from the true story of Andrew Carnegie to the wildly successful early twentieth-century formulaic novels by Horatio Alger — and reflects the ideal of the American dream, which is that anyone, no matter what his/her background, has the equal opportunity to attain financial success. Kidder has indeed attained the American dream of material success. His attainment of wealth is merely a prologue to the plot of the play: Kidder's complete loss of that wealth and financial security and how this loss changes his life. In effect, Foote creates a riches-to-rags story, rather than a rags-to-riches story, thereby accomplishing a deconstruction of that mainstay of American storytelling. By turning upside-down the rags-to-riches convention, Foote effectively deconstructs two intertwined ideologies that it presumes: the virtuousness of the competitive drive for the acquisition of material wealth and the value placed on material wealth itself as the ultimate form of happiness. The pursuit of the happiness promised by wealth has not necessarily made the Kidders happy and has instead led them to emotional losses in their relationships with each other.

The opportunity to compete freely for business is an essential component of a free market economy like that of the United States. In the formulaic American rags-to-riches stories, the equal opportunity to compete for wealth is an assumed constant, and, most importantly, the ability to make the most of opportunity is regarded as a moral virtue and is therefore rewarded with material wealth. Will is a wholehearted believer in opportunism and the free competitive economic system. In the opening scene, Will admires the plans for his extravagant new home, as if basking in the wealth he has managed to amass during his career at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery. Will has been rewarded with wealth for succeeding in the competitive market. He says to his colleague Tom

We have the best products in the city of Houston, and those we don't have we just have to aggressively compete for. I'm a competitor, son. A born competitor. Nothing fires me up like competition. My brother, may his soul rest in peace, wasn't [competitive]. He didn't have a competitive bone in his body. All he ever thought about was where his next drink of whiskey was coming from.

Will's belief and participation in the system reveals his unquestioned belief not only that the economic system is morally and ethically sound but also that subscribing to it is a guaranteed way to attain financial success. On the other hand, he blames a lack of financial success on a lack of competitive drive, which he places on par with the vice of alcoholism. He sees the failure to attain financial success as a direct indication of a lack of the virtue of competitiveness.

Will's view of the competitive system is idealistic; it echoes the idealism with which other ragsto-riches stories exalt the opportunism of the competitive free market economy. But idealization, as is its nature, simplifies and narrows one's outlook. As soon as Will's idealization of the system is established, the play begins the deconstruction of his one-dimensional view of the competitive marketplace. The process of deconstruction is started when he is fired from his thirty-eight-year position at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery by Ted Cleveland Jr., the son of the first owner of the produce chain.

Ted says to Will: "It's a new age, Will. My father wouldn't recognize business the way it's done today. Very competitive." When Will protests that he is a proven competitor, Ted explains that he is no longer competitive enough: "My hands are tied, Will. We're not competing any longer. We need younger men in charge here."

In this conversation between Ted and Will, Foote employs a very blunt irony that contrasts Ted's particular language with Will's ideas regarding the competitive marketplace. This irony is a tool by which Foote begins the deconstruction of Will's unquestioning idealization of the economic system. In the quote above, Ted specifically cites the company's dwindling competitive edge — that very same competitive power that had brought Will his financial success — as the reason that Will must be fired from the company. Despite his belief that hard work and a competitive drive will continue to lead to financial success, Will gets handed a particularly brutal firing: he is 64 years of age and just months from retirement. He has just tied up all of his capital in the house he has just built, and he has just undergone another even more painful loss in the mysterious drowning of his son, Bill. Will now finds himself suddenly thrust from wealth and financial security to the brink of financial ruin. For the first time, the system has worked against him. And for the reader/viewer of the play, if not yet for Will, the virtue of this competitive work ethic that he extolled are directly brought into question by Ted's act.

Will's initial response to being fired is to stay optimistic and, rather than give up on the system he believes in, enter into competition against Ted's company by immediately opening his own produce business. He is, however, sadly set up for failure despite his experience in the business and, most importantly of all, despite his vision and competitiveness. Throughout the second and third scenes of the play, obstacles continually barrage him. It becomes obvious that he will fail to open his business. He has made the mistake of tying up his cash in his extravagant new home, and he is put in the humiliating position of having to ask his wife for her savings — only to find that she has been swindled out of most of her money by a con artist. Will is denied time and time again by the banks who he initially believed would "stand by me until I'm on my feet once again." Because of the stress of his sudden dire situation, Will has a serious heart attack and finds himself housebound, unable to work, for six months. By the end of the third scene, Will is transformed from the "burly man with lots of vitality" of the opening scene, to a housebound invalid facing sudden financial crisis.

He says to his family: "Thirty-eight years. Where did they go? I saw the city growing all around me. There was no stopping it, I thought, and there is no stopping anyone with vision and competitiveness." The system has failed to reward him with riches for his years of hard work and, most of all, for his vision and competitiveness. Instead, the system has brought him to ruin, and the experience has shattered his idealism.

By the end of the third scene of the play, Foote's complete reversal of the rags-to-riches plot is complete. Rather than be rewarded with wealth by the system for his competitiveness and hard work, Will has been fired from his job and has lost his wealth in the name of that system of competition. The story could have ended here, at the end of the third scene, as a tragedy closing with the embitterment of a man whose illusions have been crushed. But even though those fairy-tales inevitably end on a happily-ever-after note, Foote resists fulfilling a complete reversal by taking the play to such a dismally opposite end. Instead, throughout the remaining three scenes of the play, Will is transformed from the idealist he was before to a realist.

This transformation is indicated by Will's slowly and quietly realizing that he will need to accept the menial job at the produce company that Ted Cleveland Jr. has offered him. The most powerful moment of Will's transformation from idealist to realist occurs at the closing of the last scene. In a moment of completely open and honest conversation between Lily Dale and Will, Lily Dale reveals that, despite being provided with extravagant material comforts and a life of leisure, she has been lonely and unhappy, even to the point of considering unfaithfulness to her husband: "I get lonely, Will, you've always had your work, gone away so much of the time." Will confesses that, although their son Bill has recently died, Will had lost him long before his death, his long work hours not allowing him to ever get to really know his son: "I never tried to find out what he would want to do, what he would want to talk about. I was never close to him, Lily Dale."

Although this closing scene is an eye-opening admission of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and failure for both Lily Dale and Will, the play itself does not ultimately end on a note of fatality. Rather, Foote closes the play with a simple statement from Will to his wife: "Everything is going to be all right. If I go back to work and you start teaching, everything will be all right." His words reveal, despite the tragedies of loss he has experienced, a heartening resilience of spirit, and Foote thus closes the play with a redemptive glimmer of optimism.

Source: Tamara Fernando, Critical Essay on The Young Man from Atlanta, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.