SOURCE: Lenker, Lagretta Tallent. “The Foxes in Hellman's Family Forest.” The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker, pp. 241-53. New York: Insight Books, 1991.

In the following essay, Lenker argues that the major theme of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest is the crippling effects of family violence.

American literature's reliance on themes and situations of family life to weave stories that graphically reflect the human condition has become legendary. Lillian Hellman's entry into the ranks of “cultural familiars” such as William Faulkner's Snopeses and John Steinbeck's Joads is the Hubbards (Wright 1986, 143), a family bonded by mutual greed, distrust, and manipulation. Hellman presents this clan in The Little Foxes [hereafter abbreviated as LF] (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946), plays that constitute an unfinished trilogy¹ set in Bowden, Alabama, beginning in 1880. Hellman emphatically denied that...