Gender Subversion, Acceptance, and American Myths in William Inge’s Picnic

This paper revisits William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Picnic (1953), identifying a previously overlooked focus on gender subversion, acceptance, and the challenging of American small-town myths. Based on the earlier Front Porch (1946), Picnic questions the Midwestern culture in which Inge grew up, with its strict gender roles, worship of masculinity, projection of wholesomeness, and romanticization of the American movement myth. In contrast to the romantic escapism of the revised ending, inserted after much coercion from Joshua Logan, who directed the play and the 1955 film, Inge’s preferred ending, realized in Summer Brave (1962), endorses his own attitude of acceptance in the face of social disillusionment and matriarchal disappointment. Although Inge was criticized for his ‘men-taming’ female characters, his conventionality, and his focus on small-town issues, recent research is discovering new depths in his dramatic output. This paper suggests that Picnic represents a telling critique of social expectations and constraints, as it documents the angst of a postwar America emerging from the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s. It is proposed that Inge deserves to be reinstated as a Midwestern playwright who portrayed the psychological complexity and interdependent relationships of lonely, frustrated Americans.