The Open Window  by Saki (H.H.Munro)

THE LITERARY WORK  

A short story set in an upper-class estate in the English countryside between 1880 and 1905; published in 1914.

SYNOPSIS

As a prank, an English girl of the upper class fabricates a tale about ghosts and madness in her family for a gentleman visitor who is suffering from a nervous condition.
 
ANALYSIS

H.H. Munro took the pen name Saki when his first work was published in the Westminster Gazette, a London literary journal. He had a tendency towards dark humor in much of his writing.  This tendency is reflected in The Open Window and in many other of his short stories.

Saki's particular brand of morbid storytelling was due, in large part, to his secluded upbringing by his two unmarried aunts in the countryside of West England in the 1870s and 1880s.  As does Vera, the girl in The Open Window, Saki often resorted to telling outlandish tales and planning practical jokes to entertain himself when left alone at his aunts' estate. Saki's biting wit demonstrates a frustrated critique of the pretensions of the upper class in which he was raised.
 
EVENTS IN HISTORY AT THE TIME OF THE WORK

Dawn of Liberalism in government:

The characters about whom Saki wrote were often in upper class society.  Saki wrote at a time in which a transition was occurring. The long endured class system dividing rich and poor was being destabilized by social mobility and the creation of a middle class as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
 
Following the long span of Queen Victoria's monarchy, King Edward's succession marked the beginning of a change in economics and politics in England. Although still respected and emulated, the upper class nobility born into wealth was no longer the only section of the population with political influence and access to education and art. 
 
Although he himself was a member of the upper class, Saki tended to parody it in his stories.  The class consciousness of the rich seemed increasingly ridiculous and removed from the harsh realities of a modernizing society confronted with increased poverty, disease, economic expansion and war.   The disconnected complacency of the wealthy was an accessible and tempting subject for Saki's parody.

little foxes  by Lillian Hellman 

THE LITERARY WORK

A play set in a wealthy home in the Deep South in the Spring of 1900; written and published in 1934. 

SYNOPSIS  

A woman attempts to invest her ailing husband's money in the construction and operation of a cotton mill on their property against his will.  Along with her two brothers, she attempts to convince, and later deceive, her husband about the venture.

ANALYSIS

Lillian Hellman was born and lived as a child in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Her family moved to New York when she was five years old. She traveled between the two locations throughout her childhood and adolescence, attending schools and associating with family in both the South and the Northeast.

The play The Little Foxes is set in the South but involves the impact which the urban industrialized North had on Southern rural tradition and lifestyle.  This contrast between Northern and Southern attitudes was made very apparent to Hellman throughout her early life. She claimed to have at least loosely based the characters in The Little Foxes and their interaction on memories of her relatives in Louisiana. 

EVENTS IN HISTORY AT THE TIME OF THE WORK

The "New South":

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the South faced economic destabilization. Property and production were affected by the war.  The industrialization of the North made competition for market and investment shares stiff.  The South had to modernize if it was to remain stable and keep up with the financial markets and expansion in the North that affected the Southern economy.

The Old South had existed as a slavery-based agrarian society.  Even though the South experienced extreme poverty after the Civil War, it remained rural and largely agricultural.  A stubborn inflexibility existed among the failing Southern aristocracy of plantation owners and cotton growers.  They insisted that traditional labor hierarchies could be maintained through oppression.

The "New South" was a phrase used by economists and educators at this time. It was used to advocate for embracing modernization and partnering with Northern industrialists to stimulate and encourage lasting and wider spread economic development in the South.