Bibliography

The New York Times. "Lillian Hellman, Playwright, Author, and Rebel, Dies at 77." The New York Times 1 July 1984: n. pag. Nytimes.com. The New York Times, July 2010. Web. 4 Mar. 2015.

Hellman, Lillian. The Children's Hour. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1981. Print.

Armato, Philip M. ""Good and Evil" in Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour"" Educational Theatre Journal 25.4 (1973): 443-47. JSTOR. Web. 28 Mar. 2015.

Hellman, Lillian. "An Evening with Lillian Hellman." Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 27.7 (1974): 11-35. JSTOR. Web. 28 Mar. 2015.

Titus, Mary. "Murdering the Lesbian: Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 10.2 (1991): 215-32. JSTOR. Web. 28 Mar. 2015.

Hellman, Lillian. The Little Foxes. New York: Random House, 1939. Print.

"About Lillian Hellman." PBS. PBS, 30 Dec. 2001. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.

Corrigan, Maureen. "Lillian Hellman: A 'Difficult,' Vilified Woman." Npr.org. N.p., 26 Apr. 2012. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.

Rollyson, Carl. "The Lives and Lies of Lillian Hellman." The New York Sun. The New York Sun, 25 Nov. 2005. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.

Billington, Michael. "The Children's Hour - Review." Theguardian.com. Guardian News, 9 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

Scholarly Article

In her article, Murdering the Lesbian: Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, Mary Titus argues that while Hellman may have anticipated her first play to expose the social injustices of society against homosexuals, she failed.  Rather, through the way lesbianism is presented, leading to one woman’s suicide, Hellman created a piece that once again confirmed “contemporary sexual ideology”.

Mary Titus', "Murdering the Lesbian: Lillian Hellman's 'The Children's Hour'"

Fun Facts

• After the success of The Children’s Hour, Hellman wrote Days to Come, which essentially failed.  She then travelled to Europe and studied the Spanish Civil War alongside her buddy, Ernest Hemingway.

• According to Npr.com, “Hellman drank like a fish, swore like a sailor and slept around like, well, like most of the men in her literary circle…”

• A review of the 1961 remake of The Children’s Hour:
• “Today, when every form of perversion except masturbation and bestiality have been shown on the screen, Hellman, Wyler and the Mirisch Co. apparently thought a re-do of The Children's Hour would sell tickets if lesbianism were not only restored as the charge the evil child falsely brings, but also condoned... There is an explicit line of dialogue which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it — a claim disapproved by the number of lesbians who become insane and/or commit suicide.”

      Films in Review (April 1962)

• According to nytimes.com, “She [Hellman] fled New York after the Broadway opening of [The Children’s Hour]; she explained that she was frightened by success and what it did to people.”

• Lillian Hellman wrote in her piece, An evening with Lillian Hellman, that she “was so drunk on the opening night of The Children’s Hour”, and when the audience chanted “’author, author’, it was not all modesty that kept [her] from the curtain call”, she was simply too drunk to walk out on stage.

The Little Foxes

          The Little Foxes was written by Lillian Hellman in 1939.  The play takes place in the South, where Hellman grew up.  It follows the Hubbards family who continually fall victim to a greed that costs Regina Hubbard, the main character, all but money in the end.  Through murder, blackmail and deceit she manages to push everyone in her family away, obtaining money but ultimately losing everything.  Lillian Hellman was said to have based the family on her own extended relatives who she observed throughout her childhood. 

            Through this play Hellman once again explores the idea of “good versus evil characters” and pushes the definition of both.  Each members of the Hubbards family appears more venomous than the next one, so when they are blackmailed and lied to we have a difficult time defining what we may call sympathy.  The only true victim could be Horace, who simply denies Regina investment money and then begins to have a heart attack while Regina simply watches.

          
The voice of reason heard at the end is Regina’s daughter, Alexandria.  While reading the play, the young girl seems to be a catalyst for Hellman to speak to the reader.  Alexandria explains the importance of not sitting idly by while watching evil occur.  Hellman wrote this as a direct criticism of America at the time who was watching Hitler reign in Germany and failing to take action, like she thought we could.  Like most of Hellman’s plays, she used a simpler plot to expose a much larger problem.

Quotes

The following is a Youtube video compiling nearly five minutes of Lillian Hellman's quotes.  While it is not necessary to watch all five minutes of changing words, take a few seconds to read a few.  Hellman was so far ahead of her time and her strength is truly embodied in these quotes.

The Children's Hour

The Children’s Hour was based on a true incident in Scotland.  It follows two women who run a boarding school, Martha Dobie and Karen Wright.  Mary Tilford, one of the students, leads her grandmother to believe that there is something “unnatural” going on between the women.  The grandmother quickly pulls Mary out of the school and advises all of the other parents to do the same, resulting in a witch hunt that ultimately destroys both Karen and her fiancé’s relationship, and leads to Martha’s suicide.

While the play focuses on homophobia and is an important piece for LGBT theater, it more clearly addresses the cruelness of our society to judge too soon, destroy the innocent, and ultimately ostracize whatever or whoever is viewed as “different”.

In 1936 the play was adapted for the screen, but due to the production code it involved a heterosexual love triangle instead of the two women.  In 1962 another more faithful film adaptation was created, starring Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner.


A (relatively) recent review of The Children's Hour

Critics

Lillian Hellman addressed many issues in her writing from gender to social injustices.  However many critics claim her works are more melodramatic than anything else.  Hellman fought these claims in a 1965 interview, stating, “You [the author] have no right to see your characters as good or bad.  Such words have nothing to do with people you write about.”  Hellman basically explained how it is the audience who interprets melodrama, but that is not what her writing is intended to be.

Nearing the 1960s Lillian Hellman parted from drama and focused on writing numerous memoirs.  These works have come under immense scrutiny from critics, who question the very validity of her claims, past accounts and stories.  Fellow Writer, Mary McCarthy, famously declared on The Dick Cavett Show that "every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."  From that point on people have tried to decipher the truth from the lies in these memoirs.

Who was she?

   Lillian Hellman was born on June 20^th, 1905 in New Orleans, Louisiana.  In her childhood years she spent half her year at boarding school in New Orleans and the other half in New York City.  She attended New York University.  In 1925 and the age of 20 she married another playwright, Arthur Kober.

Lillian began her career in Hollywood as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, otherwise known as MGM.  This consisted of reading novels and other literature to then summarize them for potential screenplays.  She then met Dashiell Hammett and divorced her husband.  In 1932 she came back to New York City and continued her affair with Hammett, who was 12 years older than her at the time.

Hellman’s first hit play, The Children’s Hour, was written and staged on Broadway in 1934.  The play’s subject matter dealt with homosexuality, which at the time was illegal to put on stage.  But because of the play’s success this law was not enforced.

Lillian Hellman’s other notable pieces include Days to Come, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, Another Part of the Forest, and The Autumn Garden.  Hellman later combined these plays into one collective book with the fitting title, Six Plays By Lillian Hellman.

Lillian died in 1984 at the age of 79, still travelling, lecturing and promoting her political beliefs.

Opinion

Lillian Hellman was truly a bad bitch.  In a time when women had very little respect, she simply didn’t care.  I read that Lillian is an artist better understood through her work than through history, but I would like to disagree.  She was fiercely passionate about everything she said and did and whether or not you agree or disagree with her, you have to respect that.  She was a firm leftist activist and didn’t let the witch hunt red-scare deter her from her beliefs.  And while blacklisted in Hollywood she pretty much gave the middle finger to them and decided she’d much rather spend her time at her home in Martha’s Vineyard.

                        In her book, An Evening with Lillian Hellman, she reflects on different moments in her life with a critical eye and a good sense of humor.  She preaches the need to not be fixed from the past but indulge in every mistake you ever made.  She also is self-aware of her downfalls yet accepts them with good grace.  She is basically the kind of person everyone should aspire to be.