"The Children’s Hour" Synechode

“The fictional Mademoiselle de Maupin, from Six Drawings Illustrating Theophile Gautier's Romance Mademoiselle de Maupin by Aubrey Beardsley, 1898”

What critics and New Yorkers are willing to accept in a play and what producers feel a general audience will be ready for are not always the same thing. The Children’s Hour, Lillian Hellman’s 1934 drama is a prime example. The show, complete with overt (albeit nameless) references to lesibianism, was a huge success in New York, running for over two years, while at the same time it was banned in both Boston and Chicago. While the New York success was chalked up to masterful writing, superb cast, etc, it was also certainly a function of the controversial subject matter and accompanying sense of taboo.

This relationship between stigma and commercial success seems in some ways to be an illustration of Michel Foucault’s theory of discursive explosion. If we were really so concerned with censoring sexuality, why the extreme proliferation of discourses surrounding the topic? And why the overwhelming popularity and fervor with which we consumed, and continue to consume them? That lesbian sexuality is a police matter within The Children’s Hour seems to support this theory.

But THAT is a topic for another day. Today, I want to look at the ways that The Children's Hour was censored for a mass audience in the 1936 film adaptation, These Three, and, the (perhaps not so mysterious) way that Hellman seems to have actually prophesied this event within the very pages of play.  

For those who are not familiar with the work, the play takes place at a girl’s boarding school run by two young women, Karen and Martha. Striving for financial independence, the women pour their life savings into converting an old farm house into a school. (There are of course feminist undertones to the relationship these women have to labor, certainly another source of the play’s notoriety in 1934...) So anyway, one inexplicably bitter young pupil, Mary, decides to seek revenge for punishment and lie to her wealthy grandmother, claiming that Karen and Martha are lovers. (Of course she never says this explicitly, but finds a thousand ways to imply it. Discursive explosion!)

We are supposed to believe that Mary gets the idea for this lie by overhearing a heated conversation between Martha and her aunt, who accuses her of being jealous of Karen’s relationship with her fiance, Joe. However, there is another more oblique way that Hellman implies Mary may have learned of lesbianism. The girls of the school, it turns out, have been circulating a certain bawdy book, as girls are wont to do in boarding school. The novel is Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Rather than paraphrasing my extremely limited knowledge on this subject, I leave it to the authorities of Wikipedia:

Check out Theophile Gautier’s cool hat!

Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle Maupin, who was a first-rate swordswoman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical la Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. Gautier instead turned the plot into a simple love triangle between a man, d'Albert, and his mistress, Rosette, who both fall in love with Madelaine de Maupin, who is disguised as a man named Théodore. The message behind Gautier's version of the infamous legend is the fundamental pessimism about the human identity, and perhaps the entire Romantic age. The novel consists of seventeen chapters, most in the form of letters written by d'Albert or Madelaine. Most critics focus on the preface of the novel, which preached about Art for art's sake through its dictum that "everything useful is ugly. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier#Novels

And so Gautier translated a radical queer life (and a totally badass one- she stole the body of a dead nun, put it in her lover’s bed, and then set the convent on fire so they could escape together?!) into a bawdy, phallocentric novel. (Note: I don’t mean to discount the political currency of crossdressing, or furthermore the exciting implications of a male homosexual gaze issued towards a crossdressing lesbian in an 1835 novel, but this certainly does shift the focus…away from the convent and the woman in it, for example...right…? Is it a stretch to say that this adaptation would have been a comfort compared to Maupin’s real life, insofar as it renders lesbian existence somewhat dependant on masculinity, and masculine presentation?)

One hundred years later, Hellman’s quietly political lesbian drama was translated into a similarly simple love triangle, into Karen and Martha fighting over the same dude…. (It apparently took even less in the mid-twentieth century to scare an audience than in the mid-nineteenth. Which period was more repressed again?)

I believe the word is synechode, when a part of something refers back to the whole. The novel, adapted from a subversive historical source, seems in some ways to preemptively reference the adaptation of Hellman’s play into These Three. When read this way, the small but essential role that the novel plays in the action of the play feels almost like a wink from Hellman.

Works Cited

"Theophile Gautier." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2013.
"Julie d'Aubigny." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2013.