Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations That is known as the Children's Hour. __ Henry Wadsworth. Longfellow, "The Children's Hour" And every word will have a new meaning. You think we'll be able to run away from that? Woman, child, love, lawyer -- no words that we can use in safety anymore. Sick, high-tragic people. That's what we'll be. __ Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Children's Hour" as quoted above eulogizes the happy hour for the children to play "between dark and daylight", Lillian Hellman's play by the same name deals with a dark hour when children, particularly one child of fourteen years old, gets what she wants which results in the end of her teachers' boarding school for girls and the suicide of one of them. The Children's Hour (1934) is the first play written by Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), "the sole woman considered a major playwright during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, an era when Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams reigns." (Burke, 104). Running for 691 performances, it enjoys the longest run of any of Hellman's plays. Theatre critics in New York hail it and becomes only so furious to see its miss of Pulitzer Prize in 1935 only for its lesbian theme that they instantly form an award of their own -- New York Dramatists Award. Also for the lesbian charges, it was banned in Boston, Chicago and London. Yet it was revived in 1950s with Hellman herself as the director shortly after Hellman's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committees when Hellman is heroically known as saying she won't cut... ... middle of paper ... ...Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History. Twayne Publishers. 1996. Griffrin, Alice and Thorsten, Geraldine. Understanding Lillian Hellman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Hellman, Lillian. The Collected Plays. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 7th edition, 1979. (quotations from The Children's Hour are directly marked with their page numbers in brackets in the text.) Murphy, Brenda. ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Langue Education Press. 2001. Robinson, Lillian S., ed. Modern Women Writers. Vol.2. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1996. Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, New Heaven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. Wright, William. Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Gill, Glenda Eloise. No Surrender! No Retreat! : African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. Print.
Pellegrini, Ann. “The Plays of Paula Vogel.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Ed. David Krasner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 473-84.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 11 May 2011.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 348-350. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol A. New York: W.
Gilbert, Susan, and Sandra Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.
Even with the advancement of women in society, their roles and societal expectations have not changed. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” are two stories with varied elements set in different periods in history, that show the role society has deemed as belonging to women. "The Story of an Hour" was written in the year 1894, almost a century before Kincaid wrote "Girl". However, despite the large gap in the times of the authors, a common theme emerges and that is the theme of the oppression of women and the role they are expected to assume in society.
Society continually places specific and often restrictive standards on the female gender. While modern women have overcome many unfair prejudices, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women were forced to deal with a less than understanding culture. Different people had various ways of voicing their opinions concerning gender inequalities, including expressing themselves through literature. By writing a fictional story, authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James were given the opportunity to let readers understand and develop their own ideas on such a serious topic.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. 1945. The Bedford Introduction to Drama. 5th ed. Lee A. Jacobus, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.
...ble to see that it actually incorporates themes of women’s rights. Gilman mainly used the setting to support her themes. This short story was written in 1892, at that time, there was only one women's suffrage law. Now, because of many determinant feminists, speakers, teachers, and writers, the women’s rights movement has grown increasing large and is still in progress today. This quite recent movement took over more then a century to grant women the rights they deserve to allow them to be seen as equals to men. This story was a creative and moving way to really show how life may have been as a woman in the nineteenth century.
Throughout various mediums, queer and gender portrayals are not shown in the best light. Majority of media show clear negative connotations of homosexuals and queens while constantly being a target of discrimination and ridicule. Though as time went on many writers decided to speak up and gain awareness for queer and gender biases by incorporating messages of societal discrimination in their plays. Much of their ideals were that of how sexual/gender identity portrayal, lifestyle stigma, and preconceived notions of the homosexual community. These ideals were combined in what is called gender studies and queer literary theory. Some of these concepts and ideas of queer and gender theory can be seen throughout the play
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Essay date 1935." Twentieth-Century Litirary Criticism 9. Ed. Dennis Poupond. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. 316-317
The emergence of black women writers on the American literary scene was not a sudden or a fortuitous event.Their bursting on to the scene was a result of the new found consciousness of black American women.They were increasingly becoming conscious of the racist and patriarchal oppression that they were being subjected to in America.By the 1970's the black women had the knowledge that both-The Civil Rights Movement and The Feminist Movement were neglecting the issues relating to black women.Despite being active participants in both the move...