Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams

First published: 1914, as And So They Were Married

First produced: 1917, at the Astor Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Satire; women’s

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: A country estate

Principal Characters:

• John, a wealthy industrialist
• Lucy, his wife
• Jean, his youngest sister, a socialite
• Helen, his eldest sister, a scientist
• Ernest, a scientist courting Helen
• Rex, a wealthy playboy courting Jean
• Uncle Everett, a wise judge
• Theodore, a poor clergyman cousin

The Play

This three-act play occurs entirely on John’s well-furnished estate. It is the story of five couples who represent five divergent views of marriage. The primary couple, Ernest and Helen, form the center of the play’s action. They represent options other than marriage for two people to express their love and respect for one another. They enjoy each other’s company, share in each other’s professional work, and are both ready to commit emotionally to each other, yet they feel no great compulsion to formalize their bond with a legal contract. Ernest is a famous scientist whose medical research has saved thousands of lives. Helen is a brilliant scientist in her own right and her assistance to Ernest has been a primary factor in his success and renown. They view each other as equals in all things. The characters’ exchanges—Helen and Ernest’s discussions of the pros and cons of marriage and their coy shyness about declaring their love, and John’s machinations to force Helen and Ernest either apart or into marriage—give the play an objective. John’s interest in the pair stems from his desire to see his sister, Helen, marry a monied man instead of a poor scientist. His primary leverage is his position as a trustee in the institute that employs Ernest. John alternates between trying to lure Ernest to Paris, where his research can go forward, but with the stipulation that Helen remains behind, to threatening to fire Ernest and leaving him without visible means of support, should he persist in courting Helen.

A further complication is that John is likewise determined to marry off his other sister, Jean, to Rex, a womanizer whose wealth and family connections make the pairing a better business deal than an emotionally satisfying match. Rex and Jean do feel an occasional and fleeting passion for each other, but both are mature enough to know that their desire is a poor foundation for marriage. Nevertheless, they are willing to consider marriage for the sake of appeasing the expectations of their families.

John sees himself as the prototypical man-of-the-house, accustomed to making the decisions for his two sisters, Helen and Jean, as well as for his wife, Lucy. He and Lucy have, to his belief, a perfect marriage. He provides the money and she provides a clean and well-ordered house, a totally traditional arrangement within the parameters of what society expects. He has bought and paid for everything in his life, including his wife, but Lucy is miserable, suffering in silence under John’s bullying. During the course of the play, Lucy asks John for a divorce.

The Judge, Uncle Everett, has been married for twenty-five years to Julia, who is offstage for the duration of the play. To all observers, Everett and Julia have a perfect marriage, but she is in Reno filing for a divorce because, as Everett explains it, “She likes her beefsteak well done; I like mine underdone. . . . She loves the opera and hates the theater; I love the theater and hate the opera.”

The fifth couple is Theodore, the impoverished clergyman and his wife, Mary, who is also offstage for the duration of the play. She is convalescing at a sanitorium for undisclosed reasons, but the fact that she has had to care for five children under extreme financial privation is hinted to be a factor. They represent couples who stay together through sickness and poverty according to the highest ideals of faith.

Dramatic Devices

Why Marry? is in the tradition of George Bernard Shaw, with an emphasis on dialogue and repartee and with little concern for developing a plot. Neither is there a clear-cut antagonist or protagonist, nor does anything actually happen onstage that would require physical movement (except for the opening scene of Rex forcing his affections on Jean over her protests). There is a type of climax as Uncle Everett tricks Helen and Ernest into declaring their love for each other in the presence of witnesses, then surprisingly produces a license and declares them man and wife.

The set is simple and basic, acting as the terrace of a country house. The only changes necessary are lighting shifts to indicate different times of day.

As a Shavian drama—one that follows in the vein of those written by George Bernard Shaw—Why Marry? values the stage as a platform for the communication of ideas: It confronts the audience with issues of social and political importance, aiming to stimulate not just the hearts but also the minds of New York’s theatergoers. One of the major innovations of Shavian drama was the unusually large role given to thought and debate enlivened with a love of wordplay and paradox. The success or failure of such plays depends on the facility with which such ideas are presented and incorporated into a smooth flow of dialogue. The danger is for the characters to pontificate and wax overly didactic. Why Marry? successfully escapes these dangers by remaining always lighthearted and somewhat sardonic.

Critical Context

Why Marry? has a secure place in history as the first drama to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The play began as prose, but Williams decided on a dramatic format and published it in 1914 as And So They Were Married through Charles Scribner’s Sons. It took three years before Broadway would produce it because, Williams once noted, it was written ahead of its time. It ran for 120 performances at New York’s Astor Theater and was made into a silent film in 1924.

Why Marry? addresses a host of issues brought on by the early twentieth century’s feminist movement. The movement was fueled not only by suffrage but also by the gradual need of the United States’ nascent industrial economy, which was in need of a type of worker who did not require tremendous upper-body strength. Between 1900 and 1920, the percentage of American women employed in clerical and sales positions rose dramatically, as did the number of women enrolled in public colleges and universities. The debates that stemmed from this empowered generation of women saturated the newspapers, journals, novels, movies, and dramas of the day: Would the New Women stay at home to become wives and mothers? With financial independence, could emotional independence be far behind? Once women had been freed from their dependencies, what was to become of society? Images of the New Woman were legion: Caricatures of women as cigarette-smoking, bicycle-riding, bob-haired flappers whose bloomers are exposed were among the images ingrained in Americans’ consciousness.

Along with addressing the concerns of this new feminism, Williams managed to incorporate into his play a great deal of discussion about economic equity. Time and again, the problems of social institutions are interwoven with the disparity of pay between men and women as well as between the creative and healing professions versus that of industry. In the play, John and Uncle Everett have the following exchange regarding scientists’ meager two-thousand-dollar-a-year income:

Judge: Well, why not give the young man a raise?

John: Oh, that’s not a bad salary for scientists, college professors, and that sort of thing. Why, even the head of the institute himself gets less than the superintendent of my mills. No future in science.

Judge: Perfectly practical. . . . The superintendent of John’s mills saves the company thousands of dollars. These bacteriologists merely save the nation thousands of babies. All our laws, written and unwritten, value private property above human life. I’m a distinguished jurist and I always render my decisions accordingly.

The issues addressed by Why Marry? remain uncannily modern even today. Yet at the same time, the attitudes espoused by even the most enlightened of its characters are rooted in an unsettling worldview that would be intolerable in a contemporary setting. The opening scene between Rex and Jean is nothing less than a sexual assault. She says “no” repeatedly and is ignored. Rex only stops after they are interrupted by Lucy, and the entire incident is brushed aside. Jean is flippant and later confides to her sister that at first Rex’s kisses were distasteful but, after a while, she began to enjoy them. This play provides stark evidence that American society has made advances, but it also acts as a subtle reminder about how much more remains to be done.

Sources for Further Study

Chothia, Jean, ed. The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Marks, Patricia. Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Newlin, Keith, ed. American Plays of the New Woman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.

Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis, eds. The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Wilmeth, Don, and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II, 1870-1945. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000.