SOURCE: Barlow, Judith E. “Into the Foxhole: Feminism, Realism, and Lillian Hellman.” In Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William W. Demastes, pp. 156-71. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Barlow contends, against widespread opinions to the contrary, that dramatic realism is a useful mode for social commentary and criticism, using Hellman's The Little Foxes as an example.

Realism has been under attack almost since it become the dominant mode of playwriting around the turn of the century—whether from Eugene O'Neill, who claimed that “most of the so-called realistic plays deal only with the appearance of things,”¹ or Thornton Wilder, who complained that realism robs drama of its magic by binding it to a particular “time and place.”² But realism has come under perhaps its greatest assault in recent years from materialist feminist critics who, following a variety of postmodern theories, question...