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
I think it's so ironic that a piece that seems to be pretty clearly about homophobia was so drastically altered to comply with the rigidly homophobic content laws of the 60's. Even if you were choosing to read into the much broader themes of "not judging others for being different." This makes me think that whoever chose to adapt this into a movie did not understand what Hellman was trying to do with her piece, and it makes me wonder whether she would have approved of the adaptation of her work
ReplyDeleteI think Amy makes a very good point when she speaks of the irony involved in this situation. Although, on another note, I think it was incredibly brave of her to write such on such a controversial topic at the time she did. Women's rights have come a long way and we still have further to go, unfortunately, but it sounds like she jumped right into the topic of homophobia and at the time, that was a very touchy subject. To be a woman and talk about such a thing was probably unheard of, so I applaud her on going for it and writing, despite what society most likely thought. Have you gotten a chance to see either one of the film adaptations?
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