The Little Foxes (1939)

"The Little Foxes" opened on Feb 15 1939 at the National Theatre and ran for 410 performances. It's a chilling story of the financial and psychological conflicts within a wealthy Southern family Hubbard. Regina Hubbard Giddens and her brothers, Oscar and Ben, plan to get rich from a cotton mill. To fulfill their ambitions, they attempt to tap into (or steal) the wealth of Horace Giddens, Regina's sickly husband. And they have another plan to marry Regina's daughter Alexandra to Oscar's son Leo. 

BIRDIE: ......in twenty years you'll be like me. They'll do all the same things to you. You know what? In twenty-two years I haven't had a whole day of happiness. Oh, a little, like today with you all. But never a single, whole day. I say to myself, if only I had one more whole day, then-And that's the way you'll be. And you'll trail after them, just like me, hoping they won't be so mean that day or say something to make you feel so bad-only you'll be worse off because you haven't got my Mama to remember-

ALEXANDRA: I guess we were all trying to make a happy day. You know, we sit around and try to pretend nothing's happened. We try to pretend we are not here. We make believe we are just by ourselves, some place else, and it doesn't seem to work. Come now, Aunt Birdie, I'll walk you home. You and me.

ADDIE: (After a minute) Well, First time I ever heard Miss Birdie say a word. *Quotes from Act Three

PHOTO from "World Literature" published by Asahi Newspaper, (c) Martha Swope, Time Inc.

Regina did not help Horace to have a medicine when he had a heart attack, just watching him die.

REGINA: There are people who can never go back, who must finish what they start, I am one of those people.

Alexandra noticed what her mother did to her father. 

Alexandra: ...there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it. ......I'm not going to stand around and watch you do it...I'll be fighting as hard as he'll be fighting some place where people don't just stand around and watch. 

The main part Lillian wanted to tell us may be the following speech by Ben. 

Ben: Well, I say to myself, what's the good? You and I aren't like Oscar. We're not sour people. I think that comes from a good digestion. Then, too, one loses today and wins tomorrow. I say to myself, years of planning and I get what I want. Then I don't get it. But I'm not discouraged. The century's turning, the world is open. Open for people like you and me. Ready for us, waiting for us. After all this is just the beginning. There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country. All their names aren't Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country some day...

"The Little Foxes" was the most difficult play Lillian Hellman ever wrote, because it had a far connection to her maternal family. She described about it in the Introduction of "Three."

I had meant to half mock my own youthful high-class innocence in Alexandra, the young girl in the play; I had meant people to smile at, and to sympathize with, the sad, weak Birdie, certainly I had not meant them to cry; I had meant the audience to recognize some part of themselves in the money-dominated Hubbards; I had not meant people to think of them as villains to whom they had no connection.