The Children's Hour (play)

:"This article is about the stage play by Lillian Hellman. For other articles with the same name, see The Children's Hour (disambiguation)."

"The Children's Hour" is a 1934 stage play written by Lillian Hellman. It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers, relationships and lives.

The play was first staged on Broadway at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in 1934, where it ran for over 2 years, and in 1936 was put on at London's Gate Theatre Studio and Dublin's Gate Theatre.

Synopsis

Two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, have worked hard to build a girls' boarding school in a refurbished farmhouse. They run and teach the school with the somewhat unwelcome help of Lily Mortar, Martha's aunt. One pupil, Mary Tilford, is mischievous, disobedient and untruthful, and often leads the other girls into trouble.

One day, when Mary feigns illness and is being examined by Joe, a physician who is also Karen's fiancé, Martha asks Lily whether she would like to go back to traveling to the places she misses now that they can afford it. Sensing that her niece is trying to get her out of the way, Lily becomes angry and starts shouting about how, whenever Joe is around, Martha becomes irritable, unreasonable and jealous, taking her jealousy out on Lily. Two of Mary's friends, who are listening at the door trying to discover Mary's condition, overhear Lily's outburst.

When Mary is found to be healthy and is sent to her room, she squeezes the information out of the girls. Mary plans to ask her grandmother, Amelia Tilford -- who not only indulges her but who also helped Karen and Martha a great deal in setting up the school -- to allow her not to return. When Amelia refuses, Mary cleverly twists what the girls had overheard. With the help of several well-crafted lies and a book that the girls have been reading in secret, Mary convinces her grandmother that Karen and Martha are having a lesbian affair. On hearing this, Amelia Tilford begins contacting the parents of Mary's classmates. Shortly, most of Mary's friends have been pulled out of school. Rosalie Wells, a student whose mother is abroad, stays with Mary.

On discovering that Rosalie is vulnerable, Mary blackmails her into corroborating everything she says. When Karen and Martha realize why all their pupils were pulled out of their school in a single night, they go to Mrs. Tilford's residence to confront her. Amelia tells Mary to repeat her story. When Karen points out an inconsistency, Mary pretends to have been covering for Rosalie, who reluctantly corroborates Mary's story for fear of being exposed herself. Resolving to take Amelia to court, Martha and Karen leave.

Several months later, after Martha and Karen have lost the case, everyone still believes that they were lovers. When Lily returns from abroad to take care of her niece, the women are angry with her for not having stayed in the country in order to testify to their innocence. Meanwhile Joe, who has remained loyal throughout, has found a job in a distant location. He tries to convince Karen and Martha to come with him and start over. As Martha goes to prepare dinner, Joe continues his attempts to persuade Karen, who now believes that she has ruined his life and destroyed everything that she and Martha had worked so hard to achieve.

At Karen's insistence, Joe reluctantly asks her whether she and Martha had ever been lovers. When Karen says that they were not, he readily believes her. Nevertheless, Karen decides that she and Joe must part. She explains that things can never be the same between them after all that they have been through. She asks him to leave and when he refuses, she insists that he go and think things over on his own.

When Martha returns and finds out from Karen what has happened, she is consumed with guilt. Her discovery that she might indeed have feelings for Karen overwhelms and terrifies her. Karen responds dismissively, saying that Martha is simply tired and needs to rest. Despondent, Martha leaves the room. A shot is heard. Lily hurries downstairs and discovers her niece dead by her own hand.

Amelia Tilford arrives to beg Karen's forgiveness, since Mary's lies have now been uncovered. Karen explains to her that it is too late: Mary's lies, together with the community's willingness to believe and spread malicious gossip, have destroyed three innocent lives.

Source information

"Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods V. Dame Cumming Gordon" (1983), by Lillian Faderman (author of "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers"), recounts the historical incident on which Hellman based her play. In 1810 in Edinburgh, Scotland, a pupil named Jane Cumming accused her schoolmistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, of having an affair in the presence of their pupils. Dame Cumming Gordon, the accuser's influential grandmother, advised her friends to remove their daughters from the boarding school. Within days the school was deserted and the two women had lost their livelihood. Pirie and Woods eventually won, both in court and on appeal, but given the damage done to their lives, their victory was considered hollow.

Adaptations

In 1936 the play was made into a film directed by William Wyler. However, because of the Production Code, the story was adapted into a heterosexual love triangle, the controversial name of the play was changed and the movie eventually released as "These Three". Hellman reportedly worked on the screenplay, virtually all of the play's original dialogue was kept, and she was satisfied with the result, saying the play's central theme of gossip was unaffected by the changes. In 1961 the play was adapted, with its lesbian theme intact, for the film "The Children's Hour", also directed by Wyler.

External links

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* [http://www.hellmanwyler.com "The Children's Hour" and "These Three" celebrated at Hellman Wyler Festival in Alabama]