The Heidi Chronicles

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1988

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Portraits of Women

Heidi’s research, as she explains at the feminist consciousness-raising meeting, focuses on the representation of women in portraits throughout history, “from the Renaissance Madonna to the present” (180). In the lectures she delivers in the prologues of the acts, Heidi focuses on paintings by women artists, including their portraits of themselves and other women. She comments on the uniquely female qualities in these portraits by women, as women artists seem to recognize the way their subjects are standing back and watching rather than joining in. The painters she teaches speak in different voices through differing styles. Lilla Cabot Perry uses Impressionism, and when she commits to the style, she “is willing to lose her edges in favor of paint and light” (206). In contrast, the accidental slide of “Judith Beheading Holofernes” by Artemisia Gentileschi is fierce and bold, with dramatic shadows and lighting, a brief warning that women don’t always hesitate to act. The play itself is semi-autobiographical, so it is, in a sense, is a self-portrait of the playwright Wendy Wasserstein in which Heidi admits that she recognizes the tendency in herself to be an observer. Even the main character’s namesake, Heidi, is the central figure in the portrait created by Johanna Spyri, a woman writer, in the 1880 children’s novel Heidi. Spyri shapes her young female protagonist as someone who changes the world and the people around her through love and kindness. In the play, Heidi studies the lovingly crafted portraits by women of women, but her own dramatic portrait is riddled with men who try to shape her through their male gaze.

At 16, Susan tells Heidi that she needs to learn to take men seriously after Heidi scares a boy away with her unique, wry sense of humor. When Peter approaches, the first thing he does is tell Heidi that she is intelligent and bored. She follows his lead as he jokingly fabricates a fictional scenario to make their meeting dramatic. With feigned melodrama, he tries to give Heidi a name of his choosing and shushes her when she tries to offer her real one, asserting, “No, don’t tell me. I want to remember you as you are” (166). Despite the obvious silliness of their encounter, Peter does freeze his image of her 16-year-old self for the next two decades, becoming frustrated with her own creation of an independent self and infantilizing her by trivializing her issues. When Heidi goes to his hospital, obviously in crisis, Peter dismisses her struggles as compared to his and likens her to Heidi, the child from the German book. When she acknowledges his pain and promises not to abandon him, Peter asks if the friend who is staying is “the sad one or the one [he] spotted twenty-five years ago at a Miss Crain’s School dance” (238). When Heidi and Peter reenact their original encounter, it allows them a fresh start, and she is no longer confined to his interpretation of her within their friendship. Scoop also creates a portrait of Heidi by telling her who she is when they meet. Unlike Peter, who turns her into something romantic and literary, Scoop tries to make her less than she is. When Scoop finally decides that Heidi will always be more than the portrait he created, he decides to marry someone less intimidating and easier to shape

Love Songs

Music is a significant motif in the play, and most of the scenes incorporate some type of love song. As the play represents the passage of time, the songs mark the era, describing in some sense the state of love and relationships, particularly in relation to the status of women, in each moment. The first scene is a school dance in 1965, and it opens and closes with “The Shoop Shoop Song,” in which one woman advises another, less experienced woman, that the only way to know if a man really loves her is to feel it in the way he kisses her. The music shifts far too quickly to play much of each song, suggesting that the music is an impressionistic representation of Heidi’s memory and the way she felt. After the first boy approaches her and then walks away, The Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” narrates that Heidi feels like she’ll never find someone who fulfills her. Then “Play with Fire” comes on because she finds herself liking Peter, which is a dangerous type of vulnerability. Finally, “The Shoop Shoop Song” comes back on—reinforcing the notion that Heidi’s memory filters the songs—to remind Heidi that she can find out if he loves her only by kissing him. Notably, it remains a secret for the time being, like Peter’s sexuality, because they don’t kiss. When Heidi meets Scoop, “Take a Piece of My Heart” foreshadows that all Scoop will do to her is break her heart and return over and over to steal more pieces. When they kiss, “White Rabbit” swells because the experience is intoxicating, arousing feelings that will lead her to act against her better judgment for a decade before he finally lets her go.

At the feminist consciousness-raising meeting, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” provides the inspirational soundtrack for a group of women who are trying to learn to command proper respect from men, especially—aside from Fran—from their partners. It’s a modern anthem of self-love and demanding that love from others be accompanied by their respect. In contrast to the rest of the songs in the play, which are primarily top hits from the wedding’s era, Scoop and Lisa’s wedding song, “You Send Me,” is 20 years old and old-fashioned. The song is sweet but impersonal, focusing on the feelings of the singer, with no information about the subject of the song. It’s meant to be Scoop’s dance with his new wife, but he replaces Lisa with Heidi, and Lisa replaces Scoop with Peter. The song implies that Scoop (or perhaps Heidi, through her subjectivity), views Lisa as generic and replaceable. In the second act, at Lisa’s baby shower, the group listens to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” expressing grief and shock at the recent murder of the former Beatle, and Heidi enters after attending Yoko Ono’s vigil for her husband at Central Park. Their love for Lennon is of his public persona, at the level of superficial crushes from fans, which is in deep contrast with Yoko Ono’s personal mourning for her loss and also juxtaposed against Scoop’s betrayal of Lisa by cheating openly on his pregnant wife with a younger woman. For the majority of the second act, there are no more love songs in the text, as Heidi grapples with the choices she will make for the next phase of her life. However, when she adopts the baby, Heidi sings “You Send Me” to her, shifting the meaning of the love in the song, and turning the generic nature of the lyrics into open love for the baby, whose infant personality is entirely made up of the potential for who she will be.

Men Speaking Over Women

Heidi is an intelligent and accomplished woman who is respected in her field, which she reflects in the lectures she gives in class at the start of both acts. She speaks with confidence about her area of scholarship, even improvising wry jokes when the technology fails her. It’s difficult to reconcile this self-assured professor with the character whom critics complained was too much of an observer in her own life and allowed the men around her to speak over her and shape her as a person. Of course, the Heidi in the lectures is the final product who is remembering the prior experiences that brought her to this point. Since the narrative is from her perspective and she lectures about Impressionism, her story likely has impressionistic qualities and magnifies the moments when she felt insecure or afraid to speak. At the dance, teenaged Susan tells her how to act and what to want, and Heidi agrees but then frustrates Susan by doing the opposite. But when Peter tells her who she is, she likes how he sees her, and she lets him continue the game. Scoop does the same, but with insults, and although Heidi tries to give Susan’s name at first, she is shaped by Scoop’s disrespect and his subsequent criticism of her for allowing him to treat her that way. For years, Heidi endures Scoop’s disrespect and tries to shape herself into the type of partner he wants, allowing him to treat her dismissively if he allows her to maintain some level of relationship with him. What critics called a flaw in representation is a common experience for young women who fall for selfish but charismatic young men, learning from their first relationship what to expect from a partner. Before Heidi can build mature expectations for a healthy relationship, she must let Scoop go, which she can’t seem to do until he willingly leaves her. Her sense of self and the understanding of her own agency are first shaped by her early relationships, and Heidi must spend the next decades relearning these concepts.

Peter also speaks over Heidi, chastising her for bringing her own needs and desires to the relationship when his feel more pressing. He belittles her protest at the art museum and treats her coldly when she visits the hospital to give away her belongings. Both Scoop and Peter constantly rename Heidi with diminutive nicknames. Scoop passes endless judgment on her and everyone else by grading her, which is demeaning and dehumanizing. The climax of their disregard for her voice occurs when they all appear on Good Morning, New York. Although Heidi was the original guest invited by April through Denise, in the two years between the initial invitation and their appearance, Scoop and Peter are added to the roster to round out a diverse cross-section of guests. The two men interrupt nearly everything Heidi says, even responding to questions that are directed at her and monopolizing the conversation when April asks Heidi how women are feeling about their biological clocks. Afterward, Scoop commends her for being more neutral than the two men, not even noticing that they dominated the conversation. Peter is similarly unaware of his actions, accusing Heidi of not speaking at all. Neither man demonstrates remorse when Heidi explodes at them and leaves. Then, after being treated with similar disregard during lunch with Susan, Heidi decides to rethink her life and the way she subverts her own will for others. Although she stays in the city because Peter needs her, she makes this choice for herself, just as she makes the choice to adopt a child.