The Little Foxes

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1939

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Passive Violence Against Oppressed Communities

One of the major themes of The Little Foxes is the dangers of passive violence to oppressed communities. In this play, the victims of passive violence are women, Black people, and poor white people. While some of the characters actively work to make the existing systemic injustice work even more in their favor, other characters sit back and let the system work for them on its own. These types of people are condemned in the play. Alexandra tells Regina, “Addie said there are people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it” (78). Lillian Hellman takes a clear stance on what it means to benefit from a system that exploits others, and that it is just as evil as actively exploiting people.

The character of Ben is the embodiment of this theme in the play. While Oscar, Regina, and Leo all take active steps to push the scheme against Horace forward, Ben sits back and lets the system do its work. He hates conflict, and often serves as the mediator of the group. He does what he can to stay on everyone’s good side, and refuses to know certain details of the plan so he can’t be held accountable. When Regina blackmails him, he shrugs it off. He tells her, “Then, too, one loses today and wins tomorrow” (78). He knows that if he waits long enough, the system that was set up to benefit him as a white man, combined with his deep-seated greed, will eventually pay off.

The women also feel the effects of covert social and economic violence. Birdie endures not just outright physical violence from her husband, but more subtle emotional and verbal abuse that she spends most of the play trying to hide from others, knowing that her options for resisting her husband are limited. Regina endures sexist jeers from her brothers, and references having been cut out of her father’s will simply on account of her gender. Alexandra is nearly married off to Leo without her knowledge or consent as part of a cynical business deal between her mother and uncles. Thus, even when the women are not subjected to physical violence, they are still violated emotionally, economically, and socially.

The oppression of African Americans is subtly underscored through the characters of Addie and Cal, the two Black servants in the Hubbard household. They are relegated to the background, their voices muted, embodying the systemic racism of the era. Addie, despite being caring and morally upright, is often ignored and dismissed. Both she and Cal function as silent observers of the white characters' machinations, hinting at the racial divide that oppresses and marginalizes them. In these ways, The Little Foxes exposes multiple layers of oppression, each intertwined with the others, reflecting the societal injustices of the period.

The Difficulties of Female Agency

The difficulties of female agency, especially in the conservative southern society of the play, is one of the driving themes of The Little Foxes. The three women in the Giddens/Hubbard family demonstrate three different aspects to the inequality faced by women in this time period, and the obstacles they face when trying to gain control over their own lives.

Regina’s greed, while not excusable, originates from the favoritism she endured from her father. She recalls, “Everything in this house was so busy and there was so little lace for what I wanted. I wanted the world. Then, and then—(Smiles.) Papa died and left the money to Ben and Oscar” (65). In being cut out of the paternal will and left out of her brother’s schemes, Regina learned to hone her own business skills to eventually outsmart her brothers and come out with more money than any of them. She does everything she can to prove she’s just as good at business, telling Horace, “You will see what I’ve done while you’ve been away. How I watched your interests” (44). Regina is intelligent and cunning, but her ruthlessness harms her even as she succeeds in gaining what she wanted: Her marriage to her husband remains broken and she becomes complicit in his death, while her greed ultimately destroys her relationships with both her brothers and her daughter.

Birdie, the only family member who belongs to the old Southern aristocracy, represents how “new money” married into “old money”: The marriage between Oscar and Birdie is first and foremost a business transaction. Ben brags to Marshall, “Twenty years ago we took over their land, their cotton, and their daughter” (12, emphasis added). In equating “their daughter”—Birdie—with her family’s “land” and their “cotton,” Ben reduces Birdie to a commodity that could be bought and sold, just like real estate and products. Oscar was kind to Birdie until he married her. Once he got what he wanted, he turned abusive, and Birdie ended up with an alcohol dependency as her only means of escape. Birdie recognizes that Oscar’s treatment is cruel, but she feels helpless to resist him: In her conservative Southern society at the turn of the 20th century, there are few options for a woman to defy or leave even an abusive husband. Birdie fails to assert agency in her own life, but she does show strength of character in trying to save Alexandra by warning her about the marriage to Leo.

Finally, Alexandra is the one woman who truly takes agency of her life without sacrificing what she knows is right. From the beginning, Alexandra demonstrates an air of independence. When Birdie warns her about the proposed marriage between her and Leo, Alexandra assures her, “I’m grown now. Nobody can make me do anything” (27, emphasis added). The ideals of society that dictated what direction Birdie’s and Regina’s life went have much less control over Alexandra. While the men in her life still try to treat her as property to be traded for shares in a deal, Alexandra is more aware of her agency than her aunt and mother. At the play’s close, Alexandra comes into her own when she defies her mother, rejecting her offer of a lavish new life in Chicago and choosing to leave with Addie instead. In choosing to follow her conscience and to make her own way in the world, Alexandra escapes both the cycles of greed and the female oppression that blighted her aunt and mother’s lives.

The Isolation of Greed

Greed is one of the primary things with which the characters in The Little Foxes must grapple. What they have to learn the hard way is that the price of greed is community and family. The title of the play is a Biblical allusion to the Song of Solomon 2:15: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” This serves as a symbolic warning against the destructive power of greed—the “little foxes” that can ruin even the most fruitful “vines” or relationships. In the play, pursuing wealth through greed severs familial relationships, leaving little of true value in the characters’ lives.

Greed is the Hubbard brothers’ modus operandi. Oscar says outright, “It’s every man’s duty to think of himself” (32, emphasis added), thereby rejecting the idea of caring for others or the greater good. None of the siblings have the others’ interest at heart, even when they work together. They consistently cheat each other out of money, treat their children as pawns in a business deal, and betray each other all to get ahead. While they present themselves to Marshall as devoted, united, and loving to secure his confidence and assent to the deal, they soon reveal themselves behind the scenes to have a toxic and even abusive dynamic with one another.

The marital relationships in the play are as marred by greed as the sibling dynamics. Regina's relationship with her husband Horace is loveless and strained due to her relentless pursuit of wealth, and her final act of refusing medical help to her dying husband underscores the extent of her avarice. Oscar's marriage to Birdie was a calculated move designed to secure her family’s land and wealth for himself. Their marriage embodies greed at the cost of genuine love and respect. Even the proposed match between Leo and Alexandra represents an attempted continuation of this materialistic ethos, as Alexandra is treated as a bargaining chip to secure a business deal.

This bottomless greed ultimately destroys each of the materialistic characters, revealing the emptiness and self-defeating nature of their pursuit of wealth. Ben and Oscar's scheming is exposed and they are forced to part with the majority of their expected profits from the sister they tried to cheat. Leo loses his chance of securing more wealth once the marriage plans with Alexandra crumble. Finally, Regina gets all the money she dreamed of having by the play’s end, but she does so at the expense of destroying her marriage, her ties to her brothers, and her relationship with her only child. Early in the play, when Marshall leaves the house, Regina comments, “He seems a lonely man. Imagine being lonely with all that money” (15)—this moment foreshadows the ending of the play, when Regina is left wealthy but without any of her loved ones to enjoy it with.