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    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes
    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes
    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes
    Ebook36 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781535838009
    A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes - Gale

      3

      The Little Foxes

      Lillian Hellman

      1939

      Introduction

      Lillian Hellman’s cynical play of family greed and revenge, The Little Foxes, is her most popular piece of drama, and it is the one most frequently revived. It was acclaimed an instant hit after a hugely successful opening night in 1939, even though drama and literary critics then, as now, disagreed over whether the melodramatic story of the greed-driven Hubbard family succeeds either as a morality play or as a satire. Certainly moral dissembling lies at the heart of the play: the Hubbard siblings steal, deceive, and plot against each other in their efforts to invest in one of the first cotton mills to industrialize the New South, a plan that stands to win them millions of dollars. Regina, temporarily cheated out of her share by her brothers, even murders her sick husband by refusing to fetch his medicine when he threatens to obstruct her from taking part in the investment. Their daughter serves as a moral standard who dislikes the family machinations. Unfortunately, Alexandra is too young to defy them. Nor can her Aunt Birdie, who drinks to anesthetize the pain of having married a bully and lost her family’s plantation to the rapacious Hubbards. The satiric element of the play consists of its condemnation of the Hubbards’s crimes against society. The Hubbards are a family prone to deceit, caught in a cycle of revenge not unlike Greek classical tragedies. The family forbears harvested their merchant profits by overcharging the newly freed slaves, and now the Hubbards will create a larger dynasty on the toil of poor workers, who will flock to the cotton mill for its paltry wages. The play voices Marxist disapproval of the Hubbard form of capitalism.

      Author Biography

      Until she was 16, Lillian Hellman lived half of her time in the South—New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was born in 1906—and half in New York City. Once she married and began her career as a writer, she never returned to the South, which housed the rapacious immorality she denounced in The Little Foxes, its prequel, Another Part of the Forest, and Toys in the Attic. Nor did she reserve her harsh moralizing for the South—most of her plays attack universal

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