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Part 2: On the Lawn
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fefu and Her Friends, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Abstract Representation and Interpretation
Empowerment, Female Independence, and Feminism
Attraction, Romance, and Companionship
Friendship and Mutual Support
Suffering, Repression, and Violence
Summary
Analysis
Sitting in the study, Christina reads a French textbook and practices her French while Cindy flips through a magazine and tells bad jokes (“A lady in Africa divorced her husband because he was a cheetah,” she says). The two women start talking about Fefu, since Cindy wants to know what Christina thinks of her. Speaking honestly, Christina says that Fefu confuses her. She isn’t sure whether or not Fefu is authentic. It’s clear that she likes to be adventurous, but Christina can’t tell if this is just an act. At the same time, Christina recognizes that she herself is somewhat conventional and conformist, so encountering an unconventional person like Fefu is inherently fraught, since she feels as if people like Fefu challenge her conformist worldview, though she also recognizes that such people are probably good for society.
Again, Christina struggles with Fefu’s abrasiveness. Fefu herself has already made clear that she likes to “grapple” with challenging ideas, and she seems to model the way she treats others off of this provocative attitude. Unsurprisingly, then, Christina—who considers herself something of a conformist—feels uncomfortable around Fefu. What’s particularly interesting, though, is that she questions whether or not Fefu’s thorny, provocative personality is actually authentic—a question that subtly invites the audience to wonder if Fefu’s bold way of interacting with others is actually some kind of defense mechanism designed to hide her own troubles and suffering.
Themes
Cindy narrates a dream she had. She was at a dance and saw a doctor she’d recently visited. The doctor approached her and said he had spoken to her husband and that everything was fine, but she didn’t understand why he’d felt the need to talk to her husband. Then two policemen tried to force a singing teacher to fix somebody’s voice, but he couldn’t do it, so one of the policemen grabbed him and threw him out. The policeman then took hold of Cindy from behind and felt her nipples before pushing her away, at which point the doctor started swearing at her, but she said, “Stop and listen to me.” It worked, but what she really wanted to tell him was to respect her.
Cindy’s dream is strange, and it doesn’t do anything to advance the plot or action of the play. However, certain elements of the dream do feed into the play’s central themes, like the fact that a policeman sexually assaults her and that, though she stands up for herself, she fails to say what she really means. It’s almost as if asking the people in her dream to respect her is too difficult, which is a possible representation of how hard it is for women to get the respect they deserve in the patriarchal world of 1930s American society.
Themes
In Cindy’s dream, a man told her to run or else risk getting killed by a young man in attendance. She jumped into a taxi and sped away, but the young man who wanted to kill her somehow caught up. He was just about to open the door when she woke up.
Cindy’s dream is ominous, especially because it ends on an open-ended but decidedly sinister note. As Cindy desperately runs away from a violent man in her dream, the play underhandedly suggests that the women in Fefu and her Friends are all tasked with trying to outrun the violence and animosity of a sexist society.
Themes
