Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale

First published: 1921

First produced: 1920, at the Belmont Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Comedy of manners

Time of work: 1920

Locale: A middle-class home in a small American town

Principal Characters:

• Lulu Bett, a thirty-three-year-old spinster who cooks and cleans for her sister’s family
• Dwight Herbert Deacon, her brother-in-law, a dentist and justice of the peace
• Ina Deacon, her sister, Dwight’s wife
• Mrs. Bett, mother of Lulu and Ina
• Ninian Deacon, Dwight’s brother, an adventurer
• Monona, Dwight’s younger daughter
• Di, Dwight’s older daughter
• Mr. Cornish, a family friend of the Deacons

The Play

Dwight Deacon looks forward to capping his day as a dentist and justice of the peace by sitting down to a family meal cooked by his wife’s sister Lulu, a spinster who drudges for his family to earn her keep. However, his spoiled younger daughter Monona has been snitching cookies and refuses the creamed salmon. Lulu is asked to prepare milk toast for Monona, is reprimanded for buying a pink tulip in a pot for the center of the table, and is squelched when she tries to answer Dwight’s question about the price of canned salmon. The crotchety Mrs. Bett, mother of Lulu and Dwight’s wife Ina, has to be coaxed to the table. Elder daughter Di finally arrives, accompanied by Mr. Cornish, with whom she is flirting at the expense of her infatuated schoolmate Bobby. The tongue-tied Cornish clumsily tries to express his respect for Lulu, but every compliment misfires. Dwight announces that next week will bring a visit from Ninian, a brother he has not seen in twenty years.

A week later, Lulu is making apple pies and Ninian engages her in conversation. He sees how shabbily the others treat her. Lulu’s responses show both a quick wit and feelings of inferiority. Ninian invites her out to dinner and a show that evening. Dwight and Ina agree to come along. As the family gathers, Ninian jokingly passes the time by reciting marriage vows and Lulu plays along. It dawns on them that since Dwight is a justice of the peace, they are now legally married. Ninian proposes that he and Lulu depart for Savannah together right after the theater.

Act 2 is set on the Deacons’ side porch a month later. Dwight and Ina are manipulated by their daughters, whose behavior has become more obnoxious without Lulu’s steadying influence. Suddenly, Lulu arrives. She left Ninian when he confessed that he might have a long-lost wife somewhere. Yet she insists that she loves him still and that he loves her. Dwight sets a condition for taking her back into the household: She must not disgrace the family by revealing the possible bigamy but must let people think that she is to blame for the failure of her marriage to Ninian.

The following evening Dwight lies to his daughters: “The truth is Lulu’s husband has tired of her and sent her home.” Then Lulu enters and asks Dwight for his brother’s address in Oregon. Lulu displays a new assertiveness as she presses Dwight to write a letter asking Ninian to confirm whether he was indeed previously married.

A week later Lulu and Cornish sing together at the piano. She can express herself while Dwight and Ina are away on a trip. An unopened letter from Ninian awaits Dwight’s return, but Mrs. Bett opens it to reveal Ninian’s proof that he had indeed been married and thus that he really wanted Lulu and had not invented an excuse to get rid of her. Cornish proposes marriage, but Lulu is evasive. Lulu prevents Di’s attempt to elope with Bobby. When Dwight and Ina return, Lulu stands up to Dwight to salvage her pride, but he reduces her to silence again by saying that Ninian could be jailed for bigamy if others learn the truth.

The published play offers two versions of act 3. In the revised text, written two weeks into the run and substituted for an ending that audiences had found too dark, Lulu leaves the house determined to make her own way in the world. Ninian arrives in time to catch her. Having tracked down proof that his first wife died, Ninian can offer Lulu an honest future as his wife. The original act 3 is set in Cornish’s piano store. Lulu comes to say good-bye on her way out of town. In this version, the letter from Ninian includes a lawyer’s letter testifying that his first wife is alive. Cornish proposes marriage, and Lulu will consider it eventually, but first she must go away to see life through her own eyes and to make her own choices.

Dramatic Devices

As a political and social activist involved in reform movements, Zona Gale had a broad agenda to create a climate in which people could be enlightened and uplifted. Yet, her dramatic method avoided didacticism. She allowed her characters to be themselves in ordinary circumstances, and audiences could draw their own moral lessons from the attitudes and behaviors on display. It could be argued that Miss Lulu Bett approaches melodrama in the polarity between unsympathetic and sympathetic characters.

Dwight might be a stock melodramatic villain, except that he is blissfully unaware of how awful he is. His mask of joviality allows him to get away with mendacity, vulgarity, hypocrisy, insults, and patronizing exploitation of others. His lack of self-awareness is laughable even as it is horrifying in the hurt it causes him to inflict. Even when he is most cruel, he sees himself as a paragon of generosity. The docile Lulu appears to be little match for him at first, especially as she sees herself as having nothing to offer anyone, apart from her cooking. Yet her finer impulses as well as the mettle that lies dormant within her are suggested early in the play. Dwight criticizes her for spending money on the potted pink tulip she has placed in the center of the table. Later in the scene, while Dwight is ranting about something else, Lulu reenters and calmly throws the flowerpot out the window. Still later, Lulu wears the tulip, which she has picked and pinned to her dress, a small act of defiance that prepares for her growing self-confidence once Ninian begins paying attention to her. The play abounds with many such artful bits of business that work subtly to enhance characterizations and plot points, but Gale was also not above deploying such time-tested melodramatic devices as keeping a crucial letter unopened and visible to the audience throughout a scene. The mock marriage that turns out to be binding is another hokey device that proves both credible and theatrically amusing in Gale’s hands.

Critical Context

In its basic plot structure, Miss Lulu Bett is a Cinderella story: The good-hearted young woman has been virtually enslaved by her domineering, self-serving brother-in-law and sister, with the passive assistance of the other family members. Her trap is sprung by a Prince Charming of sorts, but a truly happy ending depends upon her learning to make her own choices, whether or not they will involve a man. The dramatic arc of Lulu’s gradual progress toward discovering her own self-worth—not defined in terms of what she contributes to the domestic comfort of others, but as an individual—has led some critics to compare the character to Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880; also known as A Doll House).

In 1920 Miss Lulu Bett was hailed as innovative in several respects and was the first Pulitzer Prize-winning play by a woman. In his foreword to the published play, Robert C. Benchley commented:

Zona Gale is the first author, to my knowledge, who has dared to write genuinely dull dialogue . . . [b]ut Miss Gale saw the truth and kept it whole. She was depicting uninspired American family life (almost for the first time in our literature) and she held fast to the ideals of American family conversation.

Benchley also signaled the originality of the “old lady who is not sweet, and a child who is not cute.” Ludwig Lewisohn declared that “no other American dramatist has succeeded in so fully and richly transferring to the stage the exact moral atmosphere of a class, a section, and a period, as Miss Gale.”

Sources for Further Study

Barlow, Judith E. Plays by American Women, 1900-1930. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1985.

Schroeder, Patricia R. “Realism and Feminism in the Progressive Era.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, edited by Brenda Murphy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights, 1900-1950. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Simonson, Harold P. Zona Gale. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962.