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

Themes

Feminism and “Having it All”

At Lisa’s baby shower in the first scene of Act II, Denise worries whether she will manage to have children while she has time, asking, “I mean, isn’t that what you guys fought for? So we could ‘have it all’”? (211). Heidi’s chronicles follow her journey through the evolution of second-wave feminism, which focused on patriarchal social structures and misogynistic legalities that worked to hold women back, often in indirect ways. Denise’s question resonates throughout the play and continued to resonate for audiences in 1989, who were on the cusp of third-wave feminism’s rise—which has a broader emphasis on diversity, intersectionality, and the rights of women who are not straight or cisgender—after the second wave began to decline in the early 1980s with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. The phrase “having it all” became popularized in the late 1970s and early 1980s, placing the demand on women that if they want feminism, equal rights, and equal careers, they must manage these rights on top of their domestic duties. In 1980, Joyce Gabriel and Bettye Baldwin published Having it All: A Practical Guide to Managing Home and a Career, which offered such (seemingly incongruent) “time-saving” tips as suggesting that women paint their nails while simultaneously blowing their hair dry. “Having it all” evolved as a feminist goal for energetic go-getters who didn’t want to make compromises, but purveyors of the notion neglected to scrutinize its unjust roots, since men were not also challenged to juggle a successful career with a thriving domestic life.

At the meeting of the alumni association that invited Heidi to speak, the theme is “Women, Where Are We Going,” notably with no question mark in the text. Heidi’s speech describes the impossible standards that a woman who is “having it all” is expected to uphold. They involve a level of projected perfection and personal sacrifice that, unsurprisingly, leads to burned-out women. Heidi resents the other women in her exercise class, because she can see the polished bits of their lives that they share openly, and she can’t help but take these successes as a condemnation of her own shortcomings. Thus, what was meant to liberate women and tear down the patriarchy has placed women in competition against each other, because women, unlike men, are constantly forced to prove their worth and earn their place in the room. Feminist critics have expressed disapproval of Heidi’s character as a protagonist in a play that was celebrated for bringing feminism to mainstream popular theater for various reasons. For example, Heidi is often passive, an observer who frequently allows the men around her to speak over her. These critics also saw Heidi’s decision to achieve fulfillment by adopting a baby as a cop-out, suggesting that it’s problematic that she isn’t happy until she resorts to a traditional feminine role. However, what these critiques highlight is that Heidi is, despite her high level of intelligence and achievement, an average and relatable woman. She is vulnerable to oppressive patriarchal systems and voices, and that vulnerability isn’t a matter of failing or weakness.

Additionally, Heidi’s ultimate version of “having it all” is different from the standard vision sold by guides and magazines written to urge women to constantly hold themselves up to impossible standards. She adopts a child, presumably giving a home to a baby girl who needs one, which echoes the moment in the consciousness-raising meeting in Act I in which Jill unhesitatingly offers Becky a place to stay to get her out of a bad living situation. When she met Fran, Jill, and Becky, Heidi was unsure about committing to the idea of feminism, but what drew her in was the camaraderie that formed between four very different women who then welcomed her into the fold. For each woman in the group, feminism has a very different face, but the personal is political, and every choice—from unshaved body hair to adopting a child—is a political act that is shaped by or rebels against a patriarchal political system. The controversy in response to Heidi’s decision simply demonstrates that women are constantly under a microscope for their choices, and the notion of “having it all” necessarily manifests differently for different women. In Heidi’s case, she not only provides a safe home for a baby girl, but she also envisions the child’s feminist upbringing. She sees Judy as the next generation of feminism, who, unlike Heidi, won’t let a man “tell her it’s either/or” and will “never think she’s worthless unless he lets her have it all. And maybe, just maybe, things will be a little better” (246-47).

Women as Artists and Observers

As an art historian, Heidi focuses her scholarship on women painters who have been sidelined and forgotten in history in favor of their more famous, but not necessarily more accomplished or talented, male counterparts within the same movements. Although the women’s liberation movement allowed more women in more types of workplaces, the play depicts the tacit line of demarcation between the way men and women are viewed in the same professions. Both Scoop and Susan go to law school and show the same promise and ambition, but Susan’s law career lands her in the Montana Women’s Health and Legal Collective where Scoop claims her “brilliance is irrelevant” (195), while Scoop goes to a prominent New York law firm. When Heidi tells Scoop that she is in school to become an art historian, he scoffs, “That’s really suburban” (171), dismissing the legitimacy of the intense work and original research that are required to earn a doctorate and become a scholar. Heidi’s mission as a scholar is to bring these women artists into the canon and change the way the art world represents and values women’s contributions, a goal that could have a profound impact on future woman artists.

But Heidi’s friends don’t take her work particularly seriously. Scoop undermines her expertise and focus on women artists by countering them with Josef Albers, a male artist whom he deems ideologically and intellectually superior. Peter makes fun of her protest and minimizes her activism by coming out and demanding she give equal attention to him as to “a couple of goddamn paintings [that] happened to be signed by someone named Nancy, Gladys, or Gilda” (189). Susan tries to lure Heidi away from her career and can’t be bothered to listen to her talk about the art show she has gotten a grant to stage. Nor does Scoop take his own wife seriously as an artist, although she is successful and well-known. He sees drawing art for children as an acceptable profession for a wife and mother, but Heidi’s career of writing and teaching about art is too threatening to his masculinity and competitive nature. Susan expresses disinterest in the real women artists whom Heidi is trying to bring to the world’s attention—real women who were at the forefront of their field—but she puts her efforts and attention into a show about fictional women artists who are concerned about career success, a choice that causes them to make the same “mistakes” as Heidi’s generation by “forgetting” to have families. The nation will pay attention to women artists as long as they are also focused on their roles as women.

Heidi notes that the women in the portraits she teaches share the same particularly female quality of acting as observers, remaining removed from the action they are watching, even as the subjects of their own portraits. She sees herself as a similar observer in her role as historian, suggesting that there is something more participatory about generative action, as in painting or reproducing, than in teaching and interpretation. However, her painters are also observers, interpreting the women they paint and creating assertions through style. In the baby shower scene, Heidi and the other women demonstrate the tendency to observe when they choose to stand back and gossip when faced with the information that Scoop is having an affair. Even Lisa knows, according to Denise, but she watches his affairs continue without taking action. This is the play’s fundamental criticism of feminism’s shortcomings: Women are socialized to be pleasant and agreeable, rather than to fight the status quo. As the active era of women’s protests winds down, this means that women are hiding their struggles and serious issues on an individual level instead of leaning on groups of women and cultivating a sense of community.

Mortality and the Passage of Time

In less than two hours of stage time, Wasserstein compresses two-and-one-half decades of Heidi’s life, using an episodic structure to highlight significant moments and representing the way that time passes alarmingly quickly. In the first act’s prologue, Heidi shows her students the painting “We Both Must Fade” (1869) by Lily Martin Spencer, commenting, “This portrait can be perceived as a mediation on the brevity of youth, beauty, and life. But what can’t?” (161) The play provides the same reminder in its portrait of Heidi, who is 16 at the beginning of the evening and 40 by the end. The paintings themselves are memento mori, or reminders of death, because the women who painted them are dead, and their work has been forgotten. Heidi’s protests for equal representation for women artists at the museum; her show of Lilla Cabot Perry’s work; her organization, Women’s Art; and the slide at the end of the play in which she is finally successful at convincing the museum to hold a Georgia O’Keefe retrospective are Heidi’s attempts to give these women a measure of the immortality she feels they deserve. In this sense, she is, as she identifies, an observer in her own life, because she devotes it to the legacies of other women rather than to her own.

Women are particularly criticized for aging, and the play demonstrates the way the specter of the biological clock is placed as a threat over women’s heads. Even though, as Peter volunteers in the interview with April, women over 40 frequently have healthy pregnancies, the myth pervades that women have an innate alarm that makes them panic when they are in their 30s and still single. Denise refers to ignoring this supposed clock as one of the mistakes that their generation has made, leaving many women regretful and unhappy. April talks about the anxiety spreading through women she knows due to not having reproduced yet. Even someone like Lisa, who follows the rules and has two children with her husband in a timely manner, has a husband who cheats on her with much younger women. Within this patriarchal power structure that devalues women as they age, it becomes difficult for women to leave due to the fear that they are no longer desirable. Although critics complained about Heidi’s decision to find happiness by adopting a baby, Heidi manages to fulfill her desire to have a family and raise a child by cheating the patriarchal system that punishes women for aging. She doesn’t have to rely on a man for companionship or insemination to have a baby, because she realizes that Peter is partner enough, even without a romantic entanglement.

Amid Heidi’s concerns that life is running short, and she hasn’t found happiness, Peter is hit especially hard by the recognition of mortality as a doctor and a gay man in the first years of the AIDS crisis. Peter criticizes her for her self-indulgence in her own concerns about contentment while he is watching his friends and loved ones die suddenly and young. Peter serves as a reminder that the second-wave feminist movement happened concurrently with the gay rights movement, which fought and protested while President Ronald Reagan’s administration not only refused to act in the early years of the AIDS epidemic but also failed to acknowledge it. The play drives home the notion that life is impermanent and sometimes ends even earlier than expected. John Lennon died at 40, leaving a devastated widow and a world mourning his loss—the same age at which Heidi decides to adopt. In his pediatric AIDS ward, Peter is faced daily with the even more insufficiently short lives of children, who endure not only dying but also the cruel ostracism perpetuated by bigots around them. The play argues that life moves too quickly to waste time observing or worrying about whether one’s happiness will be acceptable to others.