CHAPTER - III
THE LITTLE FOXES:
Indictment of Acquisitiveness
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III
THE LITTLE FOXES:
Indictment of Acquisitiveness
In The Little Foxes the theme of social degradation and moral
decay is illustrated with considerable skill. The play offers a scathing
criticism of a class of people who manipulate society with a ruthless eye
toward greater personal wealth and power. Lillian Heilman looks at the
family and capital with relentless realism in The Little Foxes.
Set in the home of Regina and Horace Giddens in a small Southern
town in 1900, the play concerns the conflicts which grow out of a business
deal between a Chicago industrialist and Ben and Oscar Hubbard, and their
sister, Regina Giddens. The two brothers have inherited their father’s
wealth and are anxious to conclude the deal — the building of a cotton mill
nearby which can exploit the region’s poor as a cheap labour force. Horace
Giddens, Regina’s husband whom she married for his money, is away in
Baltimore recovering from a heart ailment and has not come up with his
one third of the money necessary to complete the transaction. The first
major conflict in the play involves struggle between Ben and Regina who
counters his forceful personality with cunning and deceit. Horace has not
agreed to the deal and Regina tells Ben that her husband is reluctant
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because he wants a bigger share of the profits. Ben agrees to her terms,
taking the extra money from Oscar’s share. Although he is not happy with
the arrangement, Oscar finally agrees that Leo, Oscar’s son, will marry
Alexandra, Horace and Regina’s daughter, thus keeping all the profits in
the family. In the first Act, therefore, Heilman draws a picture of greed and
corruption among middle class characters whose only thoughts are of
profits and personal gains.
There are really no heroes in The Little Foxes. In this allegory of a
contest between good and evil, good is hardly given equal place. The
second conflict in the play occurs when Regina, worried about Horace’s
continued silence regarding the business deal, sends Alexandra to bring
him home in spite of his illness. But Horace, now close to death, has no
interest in joining Regina and her brothers in exploiting the town’s cheap
labour force. The other characters are defeated by their own greed and
ambition. Ben and Regina’s conflict will continue. They hold each other at
bay through mutual blackmail. The attempt to gain greater wealth and more
power has brought all of them down, including Birdie, who is a hopeless
alcoholic. Ironically, however, the cotton mill will be built in any case and
the town’s labour will be subjugated by these capitalists even in their
defeat. The Little Foxes is a compact, realistic drama in the tradition of
the Ibsen’s Ghosts which presents a criticism of society through a strong
conflict within the family.
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O’Hara in Today in American Drama comments that the story of
the Hubbards is the story of a new way of life foisted upon an older way of
life, or a new way perhaps growing out of the older way. Birdie Hubbard, a
woman approaching forty “with a pretty, well-bred, faded face” is an echo
of the old South of plantation aristocracy. Birdie knows her place among
these Hubbards. There is Ben Hubbard, the unmarried brother in his mid­
fifties, using each new opportunity as a bridge from yesterday’s success to
tomorrow’s, not caring upon whose backs the piles of his bridges rest.
There is Regina, handsome, self-assured, and shrewd. Horace, her husband,
has been a successful man. But he belongs to the old school. His ways and
his values are outside the Hubbard ken. Oscar Hubbard, Birdies’ husband,
has less fitness than his brother Ben or his sister Regina. Leo, the son of
Oscar and Birdie, has the weakness of both, without his mother’s
sensitivity or his father’s determination. The contrast in the younger
generation is exemplified in the contrast between him and Alexandra.1
The entire first Act is a fine example of dramatic exposition. The
revelation of the past is woven naturally and unobtrusively into the opening
dialogue. From the moment of Birdie’s breathless, gay entrance and
Oscar’s sadistic smashing of her pleasure, the strains of personal
antagonism become immediately clear. In front of their guest they display
their ignorance, their hypocrisy and their greed. Marshall, the outsider,
serves as a catalyst to bring out details the audience must know. The
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remaining Acts maintain this well-built structure as each scene furthers
intensifies that which has already been established.
Addie
: You look pretty this evening. Miss Birdie,
and young.
Birdie
: (laughing) Me, young? (Turns back to cal)
Maybe you better find Simon and tell him to
do it himself. He’s to look in my desk, the left
drawer, and bring my Music album right
away. Mr. Marshall is very anxious to see it
because of his father and the opera in
Chicago. ... Imagine going all the way to
Europe just to listen to Music. Wouldn ’t that
be nice, Addie? ...
Oscar
: Why do you leave the dining table and go
running about like a child?
Birdie
: (Trying to be gay) But, Oscar, Mr.Marshall
said most specially he wanted to see my album
...we had such a nice talk and -
Oscar
: (Taking a step to her) You have been
chattering to him like a magpie. You haven't
let him be for a second. / can’t think he came
south to be bored with you.
(3-4)
The characters of The Little Foxes remain as a natural part of the
society in which they live, unattractive and repugnant as human beings,
fascinating in their horror as snarling beasts. Outside influences work on
them with great strength. But there is no evidence of any compulsion or
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raw force of nature that has placed them where they are, contrary to their
own desires. Nothing around them in their physical or social world
compels them to act as they do. As vicious opportunists without
conscience, they proceed entirely on their own, make their own decisions,
and have no one but themselves to whom they render account.2
Few would argue with the deftness of Heilman’s plot : Regina and
her two brothers, Oscar and Ben, have a chance at an investment that is
certain to make them rich. Each must put up $75,000 for a one-third
interest. Regina will get her third from her husband, Horace, who has
$83,000 in Union Pacific bonds in a strong box at the bank where their
nephew, Ben’s son, Leo, works. Because of the heart condition of Horace,
for her deal, she has sent her daughter, Alexandra, to bring him home.
Once home, Horace flummoxes Regina by refusing to advance the
money. Her brothers tell her that they will go elsewhere for the third, but
would prefer not to bring in an outsider. When the brothers learn from Leo
that Horace’s bonds are available and could be “borrowed” with no fear of
discovery, they take the bonds and tell Regina she is out of the deal.
Learning of the theft, Regina uses the information to blackmail her
brothers into giving her a 75 per cent interest for her unauthorised
“investment”. When she makes it clear that their alternative is jail, they are
forced to comply. When Horace discovers that the bonds are missing and
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leams of his wife’s greedy trickery, he overturns her triumph by saying that
he will claim that he loaned the bonds to his brother-in-law. Regina is
incited to a scathing attack on Horace, which brings on a heart attack. Since
his death will eliminate her problems and make her rich, she stands
immobile when he pleads with her for his medicine. She coldly watches his
desperate struggle up the stairs that will end in his death. Since the bonds
now belong to her, Regina is once again victorious. The only cloud comes
from her daughter, Alexandra, who, suspecting her mother’s complicity in
her father’s death, voices her disgust and leaves home. At the end of the
play, the dissatisfaction bothers Regina to some extent, but not much.
In the theatre however the events seem to unfold with a believable
logic, a logic on which Heilman worked assiduously. For instance, Leo has
tempted his father and uncle into the theft of the bonds by assuring them
that Horace never checks his strong box. But when the bonds kept there
become an issue between Regina and Horace, he has reason to break his
custom, thus discovering the theft very soon after it occurs. In a similar
fashion, Heilman has nailed down all the loose ends in her construction,
and the result is action that moves forward swiftly, yet makes frequent
turns, sudden and unexpected, that -result in major shifts in the power
balance between the contenders. Not only is it a virtuoso display of plotting
on the part of the author, but the “plotting” of her characters turns the three
hours spent with them into a virtuoso display of human cunning.
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A more interesting distinction is made between serious theatre and
melodrama when the term “serious” is reserved for plays in which the
events lead the characters, and by extension the audience, into deeper
understanding of the world or of themselves. In this, The Little Foxes
seems to fall short of the expectations. There is almost no introspection on
the Hubbards’ part nor does the author reveal much dimension in them
other than the depth of their evil. However, the play can make an
alternative claim for this sort of seriousness. While we are not led by the
action into a larger perception of the characters at hand, we are given an
alternative broadening of vision by the characters’ throwing light on the
culture from which they have sprung. We are not necessarily given a
deeper understanding of the human condition but a deep understanding of
American Society as a moulder of individuals. And this society, after
nearly a decade of the Depression, was subjecting itself to an excoriating
re-examination of its values.
There are two problems with this analysis. Foremost is that Heilman
herself denies that her play aims at making a broad statement on capitalism
or on the industrialization of the South. Second, and surely an outgrowth of
the first, there is no question that we are far more worried about the
relationship of her characters with each other than their relationship to
society. They are too forcefully drawn as individuals.
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Another problem the play presents is the fascination of the audience
with characters of such unmitigated venality. In most of the great classic
dramas, heroes or heroines do battle with evil. They are characters with
whom audience can align their righteous impulses. In The Little Foxes,
only the incapacitated Horace tries to thwart the evil, and he is destroyed.
Heilman’s conflict is evil versus evil, and evil triumphs, with the decent
characters as merely impotent onlookers. Of course, that is one of
Heilman’s primary points as borne out in the maid Addie’s speech :
Well, there are people who eat the earth and
eat all the people on it.... and others who stand
around and watch them do it.3
If that is the way Heilman viewed the world, it would be a serious
compromise for her to alter her vision to accommodate a rule of
dramaturgical construction. Addie goes on to say “sometimes I think it aint
right to stand and watch them do it” (110). But that is about as moralistic as
the play gets.
The Little Foxes presents another problem for serious critics. It lies
in the character of Regina. She is the “heroine” of the play, yet allows her
husband to die. So she is, in effect, a murderess. And we cannot applaud
murderesses. But Regina’s hold over audiences raises the suggestion that
we can applaud them from a theatre seat. Heilman has created perhaps her
most vivid character in Regina. She is smart, good-looking, and funny with
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all winning attributes in a heroine. She is strong, allows no one to push her
around and is resourceful in getting what she wants. Those too are qualities
to be admired. Regina is trapped in a hate-filled marriage and stifled in a
small town that offers her nothing. She desperately wants romance and the
stimulations of a large city while she is still young enough to enjoy them.
A Broadway theatre audience is not likely to scorn her for that.
The character who has intrigued us and made us want to see her win
is at the point of victory when she has it snatched from her by a husband
acting, at least to some degree, from spite. Seeing herself about to lose her
last chance at getting what she wants from the world, Regina does
something desperate. Audiences can also identify with that. Regina does
not plan her husband’s death. She merely permits it to happen. And
Heilman further softens the crime by portraying Horace as tired of life and
already close to death. It is this ability on Heilman’s part to make us follow
with fascination the play’s central character upto and into murder which is
the hidden strength of The Little Foxes.
Heilman took great care in the preparation of The Little Foxes. The
title, as suggested by Dorothy Parker, comes from the Song of Solomon, 2 :
15. The “foxes” who despoil the land of the South are the Hubbard family.
Heilman makes the point that they are aggressive ones, but there had been
and would be many others after them just as bad as they are - those who
would stand by and watch them “eat the earth”.
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Heilman did her home work on the rise of the Southern industry
which was beginning at that time to compete with the industry of New
England. The Industrial Revolution is the backdrop against, which the
“foxes” play their human or inhuman roles.4
Regina Giddens and her brothers, Oscar and Ben Hubbard, plan to
build a cotton factory in partnership with Mr. Marshall, a Chicago,
businessman. Marshall has put up fortynine per cent of the money and the
three Hubbards will add the remaining fifty one percent. Regina’s, of
course, will come from her banker husband, Horace.
Regina (slowly):
And what does that mean ? (Ben shrugs,
looks towards Oscar).
Oscar :
(Looks at Ben, clears throat) well,
Regina, it’s like this. For forty-nine per
cent Marshall will put up four hundred
thousand dollars. For fifty one per cent
(smiles archly) a controlling interest,
mind you, we will put up two hundred
and twenty Jive thousand dollars besides
offering him certain benefits that our
(looks at Ben) local position allows us to
manage. Ben means that two hundred
and twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot
of money.
Regina:
/ know the terms and I know its ’ a lot of
money.
Ben:
(Nodding) It is.
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Oscar:
Ben means that we are ready with our
two-thirds of the money. Your third,
Horace’s I mean, doesn’t seem to be
ready. (Raises his hand as Regina starts
to speak). Ben has written to Horace, I
have written, and you have written. He
answers.
But he never mentions this business. (30)
But Horace, who is being treated for a heart ailment in the hospital
at Johns Hopkins has not come up with his share of money. The brothers
threaten to cut Regina out and find another partner if the money is not
forthcoming, but Regina knows that they do not want to take in a stranger.
When the brothers put pressure on Regina, she sends her daughter
Alexandra to Baltimore to bring Horace home. She bargains with the
brothers for a larger share. She and Ben agree that it will come from
Oscar’s share. When Oscar objects, they suggest to him that Alexandra
may marry his son Leo.
Oscar:
I’ve asked before : Where is this extra share
comingfrom ?
Ben :
(Pleasantly) From you. From your share.
Oscar:
(Furiously) From me, is it ? That’s just fine and
dandy. That’s my reward. For thirty-five years I
have worked my hands to the bone for you. For
thirty-five years I’ve done all the things you didn 't
want to do. And this is what I-
(37)
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Birdie, Oscar’s aristocrat wife whom Oscar married for the cotton
and the land, overhears this conversation. Horace comes home and is
informed about the Hubbard machinations by the faithful servant Addie.
Horace:
(Then slowly) Addie, before / see anybody else, I
want to know why Zan came to fetch me home.
She’s tried to tell me, but she doesn’t seem to
know herself
Addie :
(Turns away) I don’t know.
All I know is big things are going on. Every body
going to be high-tone rich. Big rich. You too. All
because smoke’s going to start out of a building
that aint even up yet...
(70)
He refuses to give Regina the money. With Leo’s help, the brothers
steal bonds worth $88,000 from Horace’s safe - deposit box, bonds which
are as negotiable as money, and Oscar takes them to Chicago to make up
the missing third of the investment.
Ben :
(Smiling) Why not ? Why not (Laughs) Good. We
are lucky. We ’ll take the loan from Leo’s friend -1
think he will make a safer partner than our sister.
(Nods towards stairs. Turns to Leo) How soon can
you get them ?
Leo :
Today. Right now. They ’re in the safe-deposit box
and.
Ben :
(Sharply) / don’t want to know where they are.
Oscar:
(Laughs) We will keep it secret from you. (Pats
Ben’s arm).......
Leo:
I’m entitled to Uncle Horace's share. I’d enjoy
being partner —
Ben :
(Turns to stare at him) You would ? You can go to
hell, you little - (Starts towards Leo).
(94-95)
1 . o
o a
co <£
Horace discovers the theft but prevents Regina’s getting the upper
hand by telling her he will say he lent the bonds to the Hubbard brothers.
Regina will get only the bonds in his will.
But I won‘t let you punish me. If you won’t do
anything, I will. Now. (She starts for door).
(121)
Regina is trapped. She will receive nothing from her brothers expect as
they choose. But the next move is hers. In the course of their quarrel, she
and Horace go over their past. She tells Horace that she has always had
only contempt for him. Horace has a heart attack, reaches for medicine, but
spills it. He asks Regina to call the maid, Addie, to get the other bottle
upstairs. But Regina just looks at him. He calls Addie in panic, then tries to
climb the stairs, and collapses. When she is sure that he is unconscious, she
calls the servants.
Regina :
I told you I married you for something. It turned
out it was only for this (carefully). This wasn’t
what I wanted, but it was something. I never
thought about it much but ifI had (Horace puts his
hand to his throat) I’d have known that you would
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die before I would. But I couldn 't have known that
you would get heart trouble so early and so bad.
I’m lucky, Horace. I’ve always been lucky.
(Horace, turns slowly to the medicine) ........ He
reaches for the medicine, takes out the cork, picks
up the spoon. The bottle slips and smashes on the
table. He draws in his breath, gasps).
(125)
The brothers arrive. Leo tells them that Horace knows about the
theft. Regina tells them that she knows about it also. She confronts her
brothers with the theft and threatens to send them to jail unless she gets the
lion’s share of the new business. Now she has the upper hand :
I’m smiling, Ben. I’m smiling because you are quite
safe while Horace lives. But I don’t think Horace will
live. And if he doesn’t live I shall want seventy-five
percent in exchange for the bonds.... And if I don‘t
get what I want, I am going to put all three ofyou in
jail.
(141-142)
Regina apparently wins, but at the end of the play Alexandra asks
her mother, “what was papa doing on the staircase?” (144). The
implications of her questions are not lost on Ben who threatens to use them
eventually against the sister. But Regina is still the queen. Alexandra
refuses to stay with her to watch the foxes “eat the earth”. The only
suggestion of vulnerability in Regina now is her invitation to Alexandra to
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sleep in the same room with her. To this her daughter replies, “Are you
afraid, Mama?” (153).
Although the playwright omitted the working class from the drama,
the critics for the Marxist Press, John Cambridge and Ruth McKenny, were
content that Heilman had implicitly destroyed the myth that family fortunes
were founded on sheer ability and hard work.5 The communist spectators
saw the characters primarily as typical capitalists - just as the author
seemed to suggest in her script. But the non-partisan audience saw Regina
and her brothers chiefly as evil but fascinating individuals. The Little
Foxes owed its long run to an exciting plot, brilliant characterization, and a
stunning performance — not to the expose of capitalism.
Like Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, The Little Foxes deals with the
transition from an old to a new South. The bourbon tradition has become
enfeebled. Its self-deceiving ways have made it easy prey to the amoralism
of the new capitalism. Its own materialism has been cloaked in a myth
which has eventually insulated it. Denying historicism, it turned history
itself into an icon, seeking, like the mentally damaged Benjy in The Sound
and the Fury, to stop time. But to deny time is to risk personal and
cultural infantilism. The new generation, unhampered by caviliar myths,
takes a vindictive pleasure in the destruction and parodying of the old
values, appropriating the public form of a decaying system as conscious
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cover for rapacity. For Tennessee Williams the process is more direct and
transposed into sexual terms. For Faulkner and Heilman, power is a
substitute for sexuality.
The Hubbard family, Ben, Oscar and Regina, like the Snopeses have
appropriated the wealth of the old aristocracy through marriage. As Ben
explains to a northern industrialist in a rather too explicit expository
passage, the old plantation had been ruined by the American Civil War. By
contrast, the Hubbards have proved infinitely adaptable. Birdie, Oscar
Hubbard’s wife, is a symbol of that defected aristocracy, a diminishing
asset in the Hubbard drive for wealth and influence, a trophy of their
inexorable rise. Regina Hubbard has also married money by allying herself
to Horace Giddens, a local banker, but this is a bargain on which she has
swiftly reneged, withdrawing her sexual favours some ten years before the
play’s action. Her own growing callousness coincided with his increasing
success. Now he has realised his mistake. Knowing himself to be dying
from a heart condition he has come to recognise some of the dangers which
the Hubbards represent. Accordingly he refuses to collaborate with them in
a scheme to bring a textile factory to the South, thus preventing his wife
from sharing in the expected profits and endangering the project. But he is
out-manoeuvered by Oscar’s son Leo, a spendthrift and worthless product
of the new order, who appropriates the bonds which Horace keeps in his
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bank safe-deposit box. When he discovers this but, before he can make use
of the information, he has a heart attack.
In many ways the play is a melodrama. The characters are painted in
primary colours. The young Leo has no redeeming features. He lacks both
grace and intelligence. Father Oscar is allowed no motives and no thoughts
which do not bubble to the surface in language. Regina is willing to
bargain her daughter’s future happiness, and in all probability, seduce their
Northern partner. Birdie Hubbard is totally ineffective, a fluttering bird-like
creature, wholly cowed by her husband. The neat turn of the plot,
depending as it does on the theft of the bonds and the convenient discovery
of that fact a few days later, suggests a weakness in Heilman’s work which
is characteristic. But beyond the level of the melodramatic encounter is a
play whose moral scope extends beyond a simple clash between greed and
virtue. The play’s concerns go beyond the simplicities of the mechanical
plotting.
On one level it is a Chekovian account of a culture caught in a
moment of transition. Power has decisively shifted already, but the moral
world is still in a state of flux. Like Checkhov, Heilman has little sympathy
for the world which has been displaced. Its moral failures were simply too
great, though again like Chekhov, Heilman was not immune to the
civilities with which it surrounds itself.
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Beauty is not destroyed by its proximity to decay. Indeed the risk is
that it will be enhanced. But where Chekhov saw certain honest vigour in
the world which would replace the old, Heilman recoils with horror. Apart
from the negro characters, in whose conventionalisation the playwright
shares responsibility with the society which she wishes to indict, the only
character who stands aside from the consumption is Regina’s daughter,
Alexandra. She is given the crucial insight but neither the strength of
character nor the means to enforce it. Her father has proved inadequate to
the task of directing the Hubbards and there is nothing to suggest that
Alexandra will prove any more capable. Indeed that failure is at the heart
of the play’s concern.
The Little Foxes is in many senses close to The Cherry Orchard.
Both plays are concerned with dispossession, with the collapse of old
myths and the denial of supposed verities. Both are set in a cotton growing
area sometime after the freeing of the slaves but at a time when the
transformation of slave into domestic servant had not yet softened the guilt
and the suffering which had been the underpinning of gentility and cultural
life. Both plays bring the old and New worlds into confrontation by the
simple device of having the former plebeian displace the aristocrat from his
own home. Thus, Ben announces that he had bought Lionet, the plantation,
and taken over “their land, their cotton, and their daughter,” just as
Lopahkin, in Chekhov’s play, had announced that he had “bought the very
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state where they weren’t even admitted to the kitchen”. But where
Lopahkin is an ambiguous figure who shows respect and compassion for
those he is displacing, Heilman’s Hubbards are single - mindedly cruel.
The ambiguity with which the two plays conclude is fundamentally
different. In Chekhov’s case it lies in a recognition of the native energy. In
Heilman’s case it derives from a simple failure to establish the potential
and capacity of Alexandra who, besides the minor negro characters, is the
only figure to show any humanity. In other words, for Chekhov it is a
willed ambiguity, a doubt bom in the self and expanding to a cultural fact.
For Heilman it is a consequence of a sensibility which presses character to
extremes, which precipitates evil and good until neither carry real
conviction. It is a difference which enables Chekhov to call his play a
comedy but which makes Heilman’s a melodrama.
It is true that Chekhov himself had a melodramatic imagination and
that he too offered expository speeches and had a weakness for the
clarifying act of violence. If his work was, in any way, a model, it would
hardly be surprising if these faults were reflected and even magnified in
Heilman’s own. But if this influence is strong it remains clear that Lillian
Heilman’s world is recognizably American, and in particular, recognizably
Southern. The constant intersection of past and present myth and history,
social custom and sexual behaviour is interesting. Sensual brio and
financial rapacity are compounded. But the control is too clear and too
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tight. For Lillian Heilman, time is the enemy and hidden motives and
desires have to be rushed to the surface and displayed and in the process
they lose their power to disturb. The urge to expose is indulged at the
expense of dramatic tension.
Seven years after The Little Foxes Heilman returned to the
Hubbard family producing Another Part of the Forest (1951) which is set
in 1880. As she said, “I believed that I could now make clear that I had
meant the first play as a kind of satire”.6 The weaknesses of this former
play are re-exaggerated in this one which locates the Hubbards at an earlier
stage but which does not come any closer to explaining the origin of their
destructive egotism.
John Gassner, attempting to describe the tone of the play, uses the
phrase “dark comedies”.
The play exists, indeed, on many levels — as
character drama, melodrama, and comedy. This is so
decidedly the case that it is less easy than one would
imagine to define the nature and ultimate effect of the
play ... For an equivalent type of writing in the older
drama one may have to go back to the dark comedies
ofShakespeare.7
One must remember that in Heilman’s work the “tone” is all
important. The Little Foxes is ironic in the way Birdie and Horace pass
judgement on themselves. In the choral comments of Zan and Addie and in
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the gathering of the clan for dinners and for Horace’s home coming we
notice the ironic tone. The Little Foxes is also ironic in the revelation of
the story in terms of a number of people, rather than a single protagonist.
Heilman’s titles are either thematic or symbolic references to a group of
characters. In addition, the plot conflict in The Little Foxes revolves not so
much round whether the foxes will defeat the decent people but around
Q
who among the foxes will get the upper hand.
In a note book in which Heilman kept background notes, plot
outlines, and tentative character descriptions, she describes Ben as “rather
jolly and far less solemn than the others and far more dangerous.9 Full of
false joviality and platitudes which mask the shrewdness with which Ben
operates, he blandly tells Zan goodbye before Alexandra’s trip to bring
Horace home from Baltimore. When Horace arrives unexpectedly in the
middle of Hubbard’s breakfast, only Ben can mask his surprise and
irritation at the late arrival. Deciding that it would be polite to leave the
agitated Horace along with Regina, Ben returns to his breakfast saying,
“never leave a meal unfinished. Fine to have you back” (75). Ben and
Regina find each other amusing, even when one is being outwitted by the
other. Oscar often has to interpret Ben to not-too-quick-witted Leo. In turn,
Ben interprets their sister to Oscar, much to his own and Regina’s
amusement.
10
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As the theme of social degradation and moral decay unfolds in
sordid plans and conspiracies, the depth of each character is simultaneously
revealed. Unattractive and repugnant in their behaviour as snarling beasts,
Oscar and Ben Hubbard and their sister, Regina Giddens, are in complete
control of their own destinies. They proceed as opportunists without
conscience. The drama of their ugly lives is forcefully real. All emerge in
logical fashion as characters with more qualities than just surface evil to
define them. Regina, for instance, is more than a mere vixen in this den of
predators. She carries understandable human qualities as a woman. She is a
beautiful, gracious and dignified hostess seeking elegance, social position,
and public respect. Even the pitiful Birdie has well-expounded reasons for
what she has become. Her ineffectual attempts to stem this irresistible
machine of evil, which threatens to make Alexandra’s life a duplicate of
her own, make her sympathetic and dramatically important. Once the
background is established, the ruthless infighting of Ben and Oscar and
their blackmailing of Oscar’s son, Leo, evolve from realistically credible
premises.
The acceptability of the characters and the logical plot development,
from the opening overtures to Marshall, through the badgering of the dying
Horace, to the triumph, temporary as it may be, of Regina over her
brothers, save The Little Foxes from becoming simply a melodrama of
good and evil in the nineteenth century sense. In the first place, the justice
101
implied in traditional melodrama does not occur. The greatest force of
good is Horace Giddens, but in order to achieve any kind of justice he must
play by the same vicious rules and die before all the injustices can be
corrected.
None of this prevents Heilman’s use of some vivid and not
inappropriate melodramatic scenes. The first begins in Act 2 with the tense
exchange between Regina and Horace and ends in the violent upstairs
exchange of shouts while the other jungle beasts plan to divide the spoils.
The second is the heart attack, a harrowing event of pure melodrama from
the start of the argument to the broken bottle as Horace collapses on the
stairs. But Heilman avoids pulling everything together in traditional
melodramatic fashion. The play has no definitive ending. There is triumph
and defeat on both sides. No body emerges on top. The conclusion affirms,
if anything, that there will always be Reginas, Oscars, and Bens in some
form among us, and nobody, playwright or audience, knows how it will all
come out. The last line in the play, Alexandra’s response to her mother’s
invitation to sleep in her room, “Are you afraid, Mama?” is more
foreboding to Regina than she can admit. The curtain comes down in a
fitting, if indeterminate, conclusion.
It would not entirely be proper to regard The Little Foxes as a kind
of document of social reform. It does represent the fate of all human beings
deprived of self-respect, unable to regain the strength of confidence to
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oppose evil. Heilman herself claimed that she “might be a moral writer,”
but she wanted “no truck with moralistic types”.11 Addie and Alexandra,
neither of whom can be considered mere moralizers, provide very good
evidence of her claim. Confusion does exist as to the play’s social
importance. Some critics found the Hubbards too specialized to represent a
norm. To Joseph Wood Krutch, “The wickedness of the central characters
is somehow connected with the social system.... Plainly the play is directed
against contemporary society which is assumed to have acquisitiveness as
its mainspring, and yet the action seems almost too extraordinary as well as
too artificially contrived to serve as a very effective indictment, and one is
again driven back upon whatever satisfaction can be obtained from the
contemplation
of
unadulterated
meanness
and
villainy
wholly
triumphant”12. If the Hubbards did not exactly represent the larger world,
which Heilman perhaps intended, she created a realistic, mercenary
Southern family, as well as one of the most outstanding parts for an actress
in all of American drama.13
Each member of this family is an animal in a lawless jungle where
he is expected to look out for himself. As Oscar advises his son Leo :
“It's every man’s duty to think of himself
(57)
Like the Snopeses of Faulkner and Babbitt of Sinclair Lewis, the
Hubbards are the new generation of animalistic Adams who are ruthlessly
exploiting and destroying the innocence and weakness of the lesser animals
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of the jungle. The situation is slightly redeemed by people like Alexandra
who declares at the end that she will fight those who eat up the earth and its
people like the locusts. Heilman added another jungle image to the play in
her description of the Hubbard family. In this kind of vicious set-up, the
loss of an original arcadia is symbolized by the cotton estate that was once
owned by Birdie’s family. As Birdie describes it:
the lawn was so smooth all the way down to the
river, with the trims of zinnias and red-feather
plush. And the jigs and blue little plums and the
scuppernongs...(26).
Symbolically the little foxes have plundered this fruitful garden and
destroyed its “tender vines”.
The two plays, In Another Part of the Forest and The Little
Foxes, contain an unrelieved view of an evil universe. In Heilman’s vision
a complete jungle existence now prevails where there might once have
been real innocence and its surrounding arcadia. This is not to say that her
view of life is totally bleak or pessimistic. These plays were written in the
years following the Great Depression and are socially relevant as they were
meant to expose the evils of materialism in a competitive society. The
exposure of a society bitterly engaged in self-aggrandizement is a social
comment of no ordinary dimension. Such exposure establishes the
playwright’s faith in the traditional values of society. Therein lies the
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peculiar role of the myth. The image of garden implies the traditional
gentility and placidity of an old-fashioned Southern society and the image
of foxes denotes the new generation of competing, devouring creatures
who prowl around the “garden”.14
Heilman attempts to demonstrate that in the process of amassing
wealth the individual goes through the parallel process of decivilizing
himself and of losing ground as a human being and falling into the way of
the jungle. Moreover, the promise of contentment is not fulfilled, for at the
close Regina is entirely alone, having alienated her daughter Alexandra, the
one remaining person from whom, had she been less egocentric, she might
have derived some comfort. Like Amelia Tilford and Andrew Rodman,
Regina at the close, speaking with her daughter, tries to make up for her
offences of the past, only to be rebuffed.15
Regina is envious of Ben and Oscar who inherited their father’s
money. She envies Mrs. Marshall and the attractive ladies in Chicago who
do the things Regina wants them to do. Regina was forced to marry Horace
because her father left all the money to the boys. She has as good a head
for business as Ben, but in 1900 in Alabama, there was no outlet for
ambition in a woman, except through her husband, who in Regina’s case
was not successful enough. He did not have enough drive. Regina despises
Horace for his weakness and for his “fancy women”. Regina is almost
masculine in her drive for power. Before women’s liberation, Regina
105
would have been considered masculine. If anything she is, like lady
Macbeth, unsexed.16
Heilman’s woman take the centre of the stage of ideas only at the
play’s conclusion, although women’s longings and needs govern the play
from its inception. The spectator may be impressed by Ben’s mordant wit
and may feel a stock sympathy for the pieties. Horace speaks from his
conventional podium, the sickbed. He provides paternal support for
Alexandra’s idealism only through proxies like Addie. It is only after the
spectator learns all the complications of these people’s interrelationships
and their business dealings that he sees a complex double mouse trap plot
in the dramaturgy of this play. It is the women who make The Little Foxes
a complex classic. Alexandra’s socialist conversion at the end helps bear
Heilman’s visionary message. Her aunt and mother serve as female foils to
her awakening, but they paradoxically put it in partial shadow. Ultimately
they show that awakening is not something that only women ought to have,
but it is the goal of the race.
Birdie’s contribution is some what stereotypical, since the abuse
heaped on her repeats conventions about the fate of ineffective women.
Hers is the plight of those who depend too much on their weak position and
good breeding when they oppose ruthless aggressors of either sex. What is
fresh about this battered woman is her self-awareness and the degree of
positive spirit that she has kept alive. When she is sober, she delivers
106
Alexandra her most important insight in Act 3. Here Birdie insists that
Alexandra not love her, if the result is that Alexandra will grow to
resemble her, and suffer the same abuse. This is a lesson Alexandra applies
directly in her final confrontation with Regina when she rejects her
mother’s appeals to sympathize with her own stifled desires and refuses to
seek or offer solace. This Brechtian gesture made before Heilman had
heard of Brecht’s antiempathetic theories is certainly her own hallmark,
one that clarifies the uneasy tone maintained in most of her drama.
17
Man’s chief weapon is unwavering self-interest. Economic life is a
battle (people like Ben “struggled and fought” to bring northern - style
prosperity to the south, which he calls patriotism”) (15) in which the
decisive weapon is innovation. Ben’s real toast to Marshall, delivered
behind his back, holds that “God forgives those who invent what they
need”(23). Heilman renders this more than as a tract. Actually she makes
us admire the chief manipulators for their skill and wit, and impresses on
us the ironic dictum that for their time and situation, these protocapitalists
represent the most highly developed social species whose greed, for them,
constitutes a life force. Even Oscar gains momentary sympathy when he
tells his son “it’s every man’s duty to think of himself’ (57) though this
means spying into Horace’s strong box. They are merely supporting their
existence while the weaker men around them uphold the values of a dying
class, or seek to die economically or developmentally.
107
Horace has
human
reasons
for resisting the
new cotton
development. He argues about this with Ben and Regina in Act 2 in
speeches exposing the social misery their project will yield. He denounces
exploitative wages and class warfare between poor whites and unlanded
blacks. The Hubbards’ opposition to unions and their dividend derived
incomes are all themes that make this play’s Thirties’ context explicit. But
the Hubbards will not need these higher values partly because they float
above the economic base of self-interest. Regina localizes the attitude by
perceiving that Horace’s refusal to let her join the mill development
constitutes his revenge against her schemes. The social theory has been
embedded dramatically in confrontations about thievery, confessions of
lost dreams, and calls to resistance at the immediate level. Even Addie’s
credo about the active ones who eat the earth while the others stand around
watching (her biblical association refers us back to the play’s title) springs
from her desire to protect Alexandra and help her resist her family.
Not surprisingly for a political play, Alexandra undergoes a
conversion as a result of promotings from her mummy, aunt and father.
This is particularly so because she observes how the Hubbards’ plots have
extended to designs against her freedom. But her ultimate decisions come
within a context of female awakening, one which she does not directly
undergo herself. The play lets her proclaim the awakening at the end and
articulate it as a collective and social goal. Her intention is to oppose the
108
earth’s devouring and not “stand around and watch you (Regina) do it”
(153). The author never tells us what course Alexandra would adopt. This
constitutes the major gesture Heilman makes in transferring the solution of
this play’s problems to the audience. This constitutes the core of the play.
Heilman’s refusal to depict the resolution for Alexandra’s predicament
makes her drama closer to Brecht’s dramaturgy than we find in the other
plays of the thirties.
The characters in The Little Foxes are much more sharply
differentiated by their speeches than are characters in The Children’s
Hour or Days to Come. Heilman accomplishes this difference by the
subtle manipulation of rhythm and idiom. Oscar’s speech is jerky in
rhythm, whiney in tone. Ben’s is more expansive, more public in tone.
Birdie, the lost alcoholic Southern lady, is more lyrical and repetitive than
the other:
/ remember. It was my first big party at Lionnet I
mean, and I was so excited, and there I was with
hiccoughs and Mama laughing.
(109)
As Birdie drinks wine and continues to reminisce in that leisurely scene
with Horace, Addie and Zan, she ceases to repeat herself as she realizes
what has become of her life and warns Zan not to commit the same
mistake.
109
And that’s the way you ’ll be. And you ’ll trail after
them, just like me, hoping they won’t be so mean that
day or say something to make you feel so bad. (113)
The plot employs an irony which boomrangs. The stolen bonds
which temporarily free Ben and Oscar from Regina put them in her control
when Horace dies. And Regina, apparently freeing herself completely by
allowing Horace to die, is left at the end with the threat of disclosure when
Alexandra’s question “what was papa doing on the stairs?”(144) arouses
Ben’s suspicion. Even Horace’s effort to outwit Regina boomrangs.
Returning to the Hubbard motivation, one may feel that money
rather than sex as a driving force is comic. In fact, envy and greed replace
the desire for sexual satisfaction in Ben and Regina. Envy and greed are
anti-social vices and lend themselves to comic treatment. Obviously, envy,
along with greed, motivates the Hubbards. We learn that they have always
been snubbed by “good families”.
Timothy Wiles observes that Lillian Heilman’s analysis of
American society is essentially Marxist. It emphasises environmental
conditioning and conflict among classes. Heilman shared with other writers
of the thirties a belief in collective action and the socialist ideal. Marxists
say that her works’ manifest content is the same as theirs- strikes,
industrial expansion, class warfare, opposition to fascism. A simple
account of her plays, when compared with their thirties counterparts,
110
however, would indicate to the readers familiar with this literature how
much more complex are Heilman’s variants of these popular forms. For the
strike play, her Days to Come presents a truer social history then
Stevedore, Black Pit, Marching Song or even Waiting for Lefty. All her
plays indict the dominant social structure. But the Hubbard plays, The
Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest along with The Autumn
Garden, are matched only by Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost in
respect of artistic maturity. These plays demonstrate that political art is
both a product of its age and a force of innovation, one which can lead to
wider speculations about the genre.18
In reading the play The Little Foxes we may be disturbed by the
trappings of melodrama : strongboxes, stolen bonds, spilled medicine,
death on the stairs. The strength of the play derives from its melodramatic
qualities. Yet in total the play is not a melodrama. Heilman provided no
reward for virtue, no punishment for vice, the stock-in-trade of melodrama.
Nor should she be labelled a sensationalist because she dared to depict
unpleasant and mean characters who suppressed their humanity. Many
playwrights have become frightened of the word melodrama and thus have
forgotten the power and excitement to be stirred by the genuine drama of
character and will. They have shied away from evil and malice and turned
their backs on grim and unpleasant situations. Heilman knew that
Ill
“America was melodrama in 1900,”19 and she capitalized on what other
playwrights had neglected.
Heilman calls her plays morality plays. She says:
In the particular case of The Little Foxes I
wanted especially to write about people's
beginnings, to deal with the material which in
most play construction is antecedent to the
action, to show how characters more frequently
shown in the maturity of their careers get that
way. I like to think there is a moral in the play
because I believe there is a certain amount of
morality, of propaganda, if you prefer, but
propaganda in the proper use of the word, in
all good writing, and I like to imagine my plays
are good writing. That is, of course, open to
debate.
It seemed to me, in The Little Foxes an essay in
dramatic technique as well as an interesting
business to depict a family just as it was on the
way to the achievements which were to bring in
wealth or failure, fame or obliquy. At the final
curtain the Hubbards are just starting to get on
in the world in a big way, but their various
futures, individually and collectively, I like to
think I leave to the imagination of the audience.
I meant to be neither misanthropic nor cynical
merely truthful and realistic. (Pentimento, 180)
112
Some critics have seen in The Little Foxes social implications
beyond the story of the Hubbards. Richard Watts Jr. says of the play,
“through its thoughtful indignation it becomes a scornful and heartfelt
parable of the rise of the industrial South in all its ruthlessness, its savage
sense of realism and its fine scorn for the older trappings of confederate
romanticism.”
Although Lillian Heilman seems more interested in the
devastating effects upon the people - both the old families and the wealthy
new families — of socio-economic changes, she does, nevertheless,
indicate strongly the nature and importance of these changes. And
assuredly she makes them the cause of the isolation of her characters.
Assuming the play to be an expression of Heilman’s political views,
critics have considered it an attack on capitalism. When The Little Foxes
was revived, the Time reviewer wrote thus:
Its angle of vision is the leftism of the ‘30s. A
1939 audience would have understood the play
as an attack on predatory capitalist morality. A
1967 audience is more likely to relish it as an
indictment of greed, hate, and the lust for
power at any time, in any place.21
As Barret Clark observes, The Little Foxes is a very mature play in
which “the artist is nearly always in command of the moralist, or shall we
say that the moral backbone of the play is completely fused with the
skeleton of the plot.”22
113
REFERENCES
1. Frank Hurburt O’Hara, Today In American Drama (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1969), 84-85.
2. Jordan Y. Miller, “The Little Foxes: An Introduction,” American
Dramatic Literature: Ten Modern Plays in Historical Perspective
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1961), 86.
3. Lillian Heilman, The Little Foxes (New York: Viking Press, 1939),
110. Subsequent references are to this edition.
4. Doris V. Falk, Lillian Heilman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978),
51.
5. Ruth McKenny, “The Little Foxes (NM Feb. 28, 1939), 29-30. Cited
in Morgan Y. Himelstein, Drama Was a Weapon (West Port:
Greenwood Press, 1976), 209.
6. C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century
American Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
285.
7. John Gassner, ed., A Treasury of the Theatre. From Henrick Ibsen
to Eugene Ionesco (New York, 1964), 984. Cited in Katharene
Lederer, Lillian Heilman (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 40,41.
8. Katherene Lederer, Lillian Heilman (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 41.
9. New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 24, 1939, 10. Cited in Lillian
Heilman, Katherene Lederer (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 42.
10. Katherene Lederer, Lillian Heilman (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 42.
11. Richard Moody, Lillian Heilman Playwright (New York, Pegasus,
1972), 16.
114
12. Cited in Jordan Y. Miller, American Drama Between the Wars: A
Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 203.
13. Jordan Y. Miller American Drama between the Wars: A Critical
History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 201-203.
14. N.S. Pradhan Modern American Drama (Arnold - Heinemann, 1978),
24-26.
15. Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage. American Drama and
Theatre of the Great Depression, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 402-403.
16. Katherene Lederer, Lillian Heilman (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 48.
17. Timothy J. Wiles, “Lillian Heilman’s American Political Theatre: The
Thirties and Beyond.” Cited in Critical Essays on Lillian Heilman,
ed., Mark W. Estrin (Boston: G.K.Hall & Co., 1989), 107.
18. Timothy J. Wiles, “Lillian Heilman’s American Political Theatre: The
Thirties and Beyond.” Cited in Critical Essays on Lillian Heilman,
ed., Mark W. Estrin (Boston: G.K.Hall & Co., 1989), 90-92.
19. Richard Moody, Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 18, 221.
20. The Best Plays of 1938-1939, 75-76. Cited in The Theme of
Loneliness In Modern American Drama, Winfred L. Dusenbury
Gainesville, (University of Florida Press, 1967), 145.
21. Reviewer, Time (Nov. 3, 1967), 69. Cited in Lillian Heilman,
Katherene Lederer (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 48-49.
22. Barrett H. Clark, “Lillian Heilman”, College English, Vol.6, No.3,
Dec. 1944, 130.