"The Children's Hour" and a Lesson
Posted: Friday, September 30, 2011
by Dianne Lehmann
Artisan Jewelry from SyZyGy
The Children's Hour is a 1934 stage play written by Lillian Hellman. It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers, relationships and lives. It's considerably more complex than described. If you want a better idea of how the plot unfolds, visit Wikipedia, but search out the movie rather than the play.
This is a story that is at least as old as the Salem witch trials and probably a lot older. The movie was shown on the Turner Classic Movie channel recently and my husband watched all of it. I only watched part of it. It sucked me in with a rosy beginning highlighting happy students and two content women running a boarding school for girls. From the title, I had no hint about where it would eventually end. Everything was peachy until one sour student decided to throw a monkey wrench into it. That's when it lost me. I've never enjoyed watching people purposely behaving malevolently. And age doesn't matter. The student was quite young but it was made perfectly clear that she knew what she was doing. It did make me think, though.
It is so very easy to create a negative opinion. It seems we are primed to take them in and run with them. And they spread like wildfire. Juicy little bits of mayhem that seem to have a life of their own. The young student's grandmother was the one to blow the whistle on the pair of women who were in reality not lesbians at all. It was all based on the whisperings of her petulant and spoiled granddaughter.
The movie, while well directed and acted, spiraled into a dismal pit of dismay for me and I stopped watching. But I could hear it from the den all the same. It did nothing to improve my mood.
Once the lie was out, the women were afraid to leave their home. The grocery delivery boy would ogle them and sneer at them. One of the women called off her engagement to her fiancé because he was threatened with losing his job if he did not end their relationship. The other woman eventually hanged herself to death and the movie ended on that note.
Even though the truth finally did come out and the grandmother apologized, the damage was done and events were set in motion that could never be taken back. Many lives were ruined and one lost.
It is ten times harder to delete a negative opinion than it is to create one. This movie reminded me that for this reason we should always be careful to consider the source of negative information and we should be doubly careful about passing it on.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)What a tragic story, Dianne. I think I saw the play and also couldn't get to the end. It's so depressing. It happens in real life, though, that kind of vitriol and destruction. It's true that we seem primed to take in negative stuff and run with it; I think we have to be really aware of that, and vigilant.Hi Jennifer.
To me the really sad thing is that adults knowingly spread disinformation for "evil" purposes as well. In children, you can sort of understand it. They have yet to learn all the rules that keep society running more or less smoothly. Children want what they want and get it however they can without thought for others. Thinking of others as well as oneself is one of the things I consider marks the onset of adulthood.
That said, I once worked with a 43 year old child and when I quit because I could not stand him any longer and made plain why I was leaving (that was probably a mistake in retrospect), he stooped to telling baseless lies about me that were very hurtful and caused many good acquaintances to look at me quite differently and not well.
That's probably another reason I found it hard to watch the movie.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
Hugs,
DianneI think you wrote about him once. Thank god you quit, but his response was revolting. It's awful when people tell lies about you and influence others.I did write about the experience.
His was a very childish approach. I hurt him and so he wanted to hurt me back. Believe me, I've learned that next time (hopefully never, though) this sort of thing happens, I'll just keep my mouth shut about why I'm leaving!I'm learning that lesson now - when people persecute they're actually trying to provoke you, aren't they? It's no use engaging with them. They can be so provocative though, it's hard to walk away. Well it is for me anyway!
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