The Children's Hour (to ruin lives!)

However beautifully written, for obvious reasons, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, I found difficult to stomach. Seeing such evil nature portrayed in a young child, along with watching a person mask her own sexual identity, is hard to handle. This is another play that fits along with the well-made play structure relatively well, minus a few parts. The place in the play that I found deterred the most from this structure was in the final act. In a state of complete pessimism, Karen ends things with Cardin and refuses to go to Vienna with him, saying that these troubles will continue to follow them. Afterwards, Mrs. Tilford comes to the scene, telling Karen that she now knows the truth and has already made arrangements to fix the situation. If the play fit perfectly with the well-made play structure, the character of Karen would take this news and use it to motivate some sort of action, like going back to Cardin, and living  “happily ever after.” Instead, when Mrs. Tilford tells Karen to go back to Cardin, Karen responds, clearly unmotivated, with a simple “Perhaps.” Mrs. Tilford leaves and asks Karen to write her, to which Karen replies with, “If I ever have anything to say.” This final act leaves the audience with a high level of uncertainty, which is not a characteristic of the well-made play structure. I definitely thing Hellman made this stray from the well-made play structure deliberate. I think this choice was intended to give the audience an idea of just a little gossip can ruin an entire person’s life; that sometimes even when the truth is revealed, the person’s personal state can still not be fixed. Homosexuality, especially in the time this play was written, was something people were highly ashamed of, and with good reason, with society’s prejudice for it being so high. If Lillian Hellman would have ended the play with Karen going back to Cardin, I think it would have diminished the play’s disheartening effect on the audience.