Miss Lulu Bett General Background Miss Lulu Bett is a 1920 novel by American writer Zona Gale and later adapted for the stage It was a bestseller at the time of its initial publication but gradually fell out of favor with changing tastes and social conditions Synoposis Lulu Bett and her mother live with her sister Ina and brother in law Dwight and their two daughters Diana an older teenager and a younger daughter Monona the typical pesky adolescent Lulu is the housekeeper cook and all around drudge for the household and although a relative is treated with no more compassion than hired help and possibly with more disdain Her domineering brother in law apparently takes great pleasure in cruel teasing even his own children His teasing toward Lulu is a constant reminder that she is not attractive and has no suitors One day Dwight s world traveling brother Ninian comes along after 20 years absence and falls for Lulu Basically as an I ll show you reaction to her brother in law s teasing she agrees to Ninian s marriage proposal Later however he reveals that his wife left him 15 years ago and he is not sure if she is alive or not Lulu decides to go back home rather than risk living with a bigamist This only intensifies the difficult situation at home as she has now embarrassed the family a fact Dwight wants to keep quiet The handsome schoolteacher Neil Cornish begins to show an interest in her but Dwight does not approve after all Lulu may still be married Lulu tells Neil about her marriage and the dilemma of not knowing if she s legally married or not This does not dissuade him and he continues to see Lulu Diana is just as dissatisfied with the home as Lulu and decides to elope with Bobby Larkin When Lulu learns of this she goes to the train station and convinces Diana to come home She promises not to tell Diwght and Ina At home Diana has gone to her room when Dwight and Ina come in and see Lulu wearing her hat and holding Diana s suitcase They immediately assume she is running away with Neil and begin to berate her for trying to further disgrace the family Dwight orders her to leave Lulu s life seems to be crashing down all around her she doesn t know if she s legally married or not she can t return Neil s love for her and she has no home or means of income The novella s original ending which saw Lulu wedded to a neighbor after her first marriage was voided by her husband s prior marriage was changed so that Lulu went off in the world on her own telling her family I thought I wanted someone of my own but maybe it was just myself I wanted Gale asserted she had changed the novella s ending because it would stretch the audience s credulity to have one woman marry two men in the course of two hours However the second ending caused an uproar among theater goers who craved a happy resolution Obligingly Gale wrote a new ending in which Lulu s first marriage turns out to be legitimate and she and her husband are happily reunited The audience if not the critics were thus satisfied and Miss Lulu Bett went on to enjoy a successful run and immense popularity For this play Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama Despite the controversy over the ending Miss Lulu Bett shows a woman who makes the choice to assert her identity and independence As such the play conveyed Gale s feminist politics which she made an important part of her fictional work The play also is significant in Gale s body of work marking her transition from sentimental works of fiction to more realistic sharp edged works of fiction Miss Lulu Bett can be found in Plays by American Women 1900 1930 1990 edited by Judith Barlow THEMES Family Relationships The play is set within the Deacon family home where three generations of the BettDeacon family live together Dwight regularly extols the virtues of family life and relationships speaking often of the solidarity among kin He remarks that people don t know what living is if they don t belong in a little family circle crows of the joys of family life as Ina and I live it and speaks in platitudes such as there is no place like home However the way the family members treat each other belies his words For fifteen years Dwight and Ina have used Lulu like a household drudge Ina berates her for burning Monona s toast and Dwight berates her for spending his money 25 cents of it on fresh flowers Dwight also uses the sanctity of the family to make others submit to his will He orders Lulu not to let the townspeople know that Ninian may be a bigamist because of the disgrace that it will bring upon himself and his family What about my pride he asks Lulu Do you think I want everyone to know that my brother did a thing like that Despite this rhetoric Dwight is convinced that Ninian made up the story about a previous marriage to get free from a life with Lulu Impact Gale received the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for drama for this work Link to the play http www gutenberg org files 10429 10429 h 10429 h htm The Oresteia Background Written by Aeschylus Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed the others being Sophocles and Euripides He is often described as the father of tragedy Our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays According to Aristotle he expanded the number of characters in plays to allow conflict among them whereas characters previously had interacted only with the chorus Synoposis A generation before the Trojan War two brothers Atreus and Thyestes contended for the throne of Argos Thyestes seduced his brother s wife and was driven out of Argos by Atreus who then established himself as sole king Eventually Thyestes returned and asked to be forgiven Atreus pretended to be reconciled with his brother but secretly planned to avenge the seduction of his wife and at the same time to eliminate a rival for the crown by rendering Thyestes unclean in the eyes of the citizens of Argos Atreus murdered the two young sons of Thyestes cut their bodies into unrecognizable pieces and had them served to their father at a banquet given in honor of his return Thyestes was horrified when he learned what he had dined on He cursed Atreus and all his descendants and fled from Argos with his only remaining child the infant Aegisthus When Atreus died the throne of Argos was inherited by his son Agamemnon who married Clytaemestra the