Lillian Hellman’s Play the Children’s Hour

Lillian Hellman’s play “The children’s hour” is a story of a sweet little teacher done to death by cruel, lying child. Karen Wright and Martha Dobie are best friends who run a girl’s school together in the 1960’s with the help of Martha’s aunt Lily. Karen is engaged to Joe who is doctor. Everything was going just the way it was supposed to be, until a troublemaking student, Mary Tilford, at the girls' school accuses Karen and Martha of being lesbians to her grandmother. Lying and denial have a profound poisons effect on the characters.

Mary has always been a liar from the smallest things, like where she picks flowers and to the biggest things like why she told her grandma why shouldn’t go to school anymore. She is a very selfish girl who doesn’t care or think about anyone else but herself. Mary hates school and would do anything to get out of it. She runs away from the school and goes to her grandmother’s house where her grandmother tells her to go right back to school. On the way to the school Mary is thinking of everything she can think of for a reason not to go back so she tells her grandma vicious lies about the school. She starts off how she heard Martha and her aunt lily fighting about how “something isn’t right” with Martha (824). Then Mary goes on to tell her grandmother that Karen and Martha are Lesbians. Once Mary said that she got to go home with her grandmother and her friend came with her. She made her friend Rosalie lie by black mailing her. She got Rosalie to say she saw Karen and Martha kissing one night and that Karen always sneaks into Martha’s bedroom at night and she can hear Karen and Martha making funny noises. The girls weren’t the only ones that were lying throughout this play.