Fooling With the Facts: Revisiting Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour

This paper reexamines Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play, The Children’s Hour , arguing that the issues it foregrounds, including good/evil, mercy/justice, mistreatment/revenge and lesbianism, can be subsumed by one at the heart of Hellman’s life - her controversial relationship with truth and reality. The study traces ‘the lie’ in The Children’s Hour , showing not only that this focus complements the other issues, but also that it illustrates the playwright’s creative attitude to truth - one that is highly relevant in the current ‘post-truth’ era. This analysis also discusses the appropriation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , embedded in The Children’s Hour through the paralleling and layering of the central relationship of Shakespeare’s play. This provides a canonical counterweight to the emotionalism and sentimentality commonly associated with melodrama and offers a stage for the clashing of different webs of belief. These two focuses highlight the playwright’s moral focus and her tendency to merge truth and fantasy on and off the stage.