Overview

The play portrays the dramatic fissures that appear in family structures and individuals founded on rigid Puritanism when they clash with a free spirit. Julia, an orphan, pregnant with a son by an American hero who died in France in the World War I, is separated from her child by the father's family and completely ostracized. The play takes place eighteen years later and she has since established a "House of Pleasure" in the same, small American town where her son and the family live, breaking entirely with respectable society. Her son must visit her once when he reaches eighteen as a term of a family will, and that visit triggers the end to the precarious refuge she has created. Julia feels the return of raw love and pain, and others feel it for the first time, in this exploration of sensuality and morality, framed by themes of family loyalty. In Selected Plays by James Purdy