On its surface, Fefu and Her Friends explores a day in the life of eight friends who have gathered to plan a fundraiser, but the play goes deeper by hinting at the ways in which these women privately suffer in their personal lives. At the beginning of the play, Fefu insists that her husband, Phillip, married her “to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” By saying this, she foregrounds the play with an acknowledgment of the animosity women face not just in society at large, but in their daily lives. Her husband, it seems, is an embodiment of the rampant and hateful sexism of 1930s American society. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that the play is, in many ways, a celebration of female independence, but Fefu’s fraught relationship with her husband still hovers in the background, creating a sense of sustained turmoil. In fact, this turmoil expresses itself in rather violent ways. For instance, the main way Fefu connects with her husband is by pretending to shoot him every time he approaches the house. The couple’s strange joke startles Fefu’s friends, since Fefu legitimately shoots at Phillip with a rifle—meaning that, though the rifle is loaded with blanks, the violent gesture itself is very real. Despite Fefu’s insistence that she depends on her husband’s companionship, then, it becomes clear that there’s something sinister and violent in their bond.
What’s more, Fefu admits that she’s in “constant pain,” though not in any sort of physical way. The suffering she experiences is abstract, and the play never fully clarifies the nature of her pain. Similarly, Julia’s “hallucinations” give the audience a glimpse into a whole world of suffering, though the actual circumstances of this suffering are never explained—except that Julia thinks there are malicious “judges” forcing her to internalize the idea that the world is made for men. She even says during one hallucination that women eventually go to hell, where “through suffering” they purify themselves and “return to earth as man.” Needless to say, such ideas are highly abstract and not intended to make perfect sense, but they do illustrate how the sexist, male-oriented world can cause terrible private suffering for women. And this suffering, in turn, can lead to forms of violence that are difficult to fully comprehend, as evidenced by the play’s bizarre ending, in which Fefu shoots a rabbit and ends up killing Julia without even hitting her with the bullet—a possible representation of the unexpected and potentially catastrophic ways in which internalized sexism and repressed suffering can manifest themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Suffering, Repression, and Violence ThemeTracker
Suffering, Repression, and Violence Quotes in Fefu and Her Friends
FEFU: My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.
CINDY: What?
FEFU: Yup.
CINDY: That’s just awful.
[…]
FEFU: Don’t be offended. I don’t take enough care to be tactful. I know I don’t. But don’t be offended. Cindy is not offended. She pretends to be, but she isn’t really. She understands what I mean.
CINDY: I do not.
FEFU: Yes, you do.—I like exciting ideas. They give me energy.
CHRISTINA: And how is women being loathsome an exciting idea?
FEFU: (With mischief.) It revolts me.
FEFU: That’s all right. I scare myself too, sometimes. But there’s nothing wrong with being scared . . . it makes you stronger.—It does me.—He won’t put real bullets in the guns.—It suits our relationship . . . the game, I mean. If I didn’t shoot him with blanks, I might shoot him for real. Do you see the sense of it?
CINDY: He shot. Julia and the deer fell. The deer was dead . . . dying. Julia was unconscious. She had convulsions . . . like the deer. He died and she didn’t. I screamed for help and the hunter came and examined Julia. He said, “She is not hurt.” Julia’s forehead was bleeding. He said, “It is a surface wound. I didn’t hurt her.” I know it wasn’t he who hurt her. It was someone else. He went for help and Julia started talking. She was delirious.—Apparently there was a spinal nerve injury. She hit her head and she suffered a concussion. She blanks out and that is caused by the blow on the head. It’s a scar in the brain. It’s called the petit mal.
([…] Julia goes to the gun, takes it and smells the mouth of the barrel. She looks at Cindy.)
CINDY: It’s a blank.
(Julia takes the remaining slug out of the gun. She lets it fall on the floor.)
JULIA: She’s hurting herself. (Julia looks blank and is motionless. Cindy picks up the slug. She notices Julia’s condition.)
CINDY: Julia. (To Christina.) She’s absent.
CHRISTINA: What do we do?
CINDY: Nothing, she’ll be all right in a moment. (She takes the gun from Julia. Julia comes to.)
JULIA: It’s a blank . . .
CINDY: It is.
JULIA: She’s hurting herself. (Julia lets out a strange whimper. She goes to the coffee table, takes a piece of chocolate, puts it in her mouth and goes toward her room. After she crosses the threshold, she stops.) I must lie down.
FEFU: […] I am in constant pain. I don’t want to give in to it. If I do I am afraid I will never recover. . . . It’s not physical, and it’s not sorrow. It’s very strange Emma, I can’t describe it, and it’s very frightening. . . . It is as if normally there is a lubricant . . . not in the body . . . a spiritual lubricant . . . it’s hard to describe . . . and without it, life is a nightmare, and everything is distorted.
JULIA: […] Why do you have to kill Fefu, for she’s only a joker? (With a gravelly voice.) “Not kill, cure. Cure her.” Will it hurt?
(She whimpers.)
Oh, dear, dear, my dear, they want your light. Your light my dear. Your precious light. Oh dear, my dear.
The human being is of the masculine gender. The human being is a boy as a child and a grown up he is a man. Everything on earth is for the human being, which is man. To nourish him. […] Woman is not a human being. She is: 1—A mystery. 2—Another species. 3—As yet undefined. 4—Unpredictable; therefore wicked and gentle and evil and good which is evil.
PAULA: I felt small in your presence . . . I haven’t done all that I could have. All I wanted to do. Our lives have gone in such different directions I cannot help but review what those years have been for me. I gave up, almost gave up. I have missed you in my life. . . . I became lazy. I lost the drive. You abandoned me and I kept going. But after a while I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know how to go on. I knew why when I was with you. To give you pleasure. So we could laugh together. So we could rejoice together. To bring beauty to the world. . . . Now we look at each other like strangers. We are guarded. I speak and you don’t understand my words. I remember every day.
JULIA: […] My hallucinations are madness, of course, but I wish I could be with others who hallucinate also. I would still know I am mad but I would not feel so isolated.—Hallucinations are real, you know. They are not like dreams. They are as real as all of you here. I have actually asked to be hospitalized so I could be with other nuts. But the doctors don’t want to. They can’t diagnose me. That makes me even more isolated. (There is a moment’s silence.) You see, right now, it’s an awful moment because you don’t know what to say or do. If I were with others who hallucinate, they would say, “Oh yeah. Sure. It’s awful. Those dummies, they don’t see anything.” (The others begin to relax.) It’s not so bad, really. I can laugh at it. . . .
EMMA: After a few visits the psychiatrist said: Don’t you think you know me well enough now that you can tell me the truth about the paper? He almost drove her crazy. They just couldn’t believe she was so smart.
JULIA: He loves you.
FEFU: He can’t stand me.
JULIA: He loves you.
FEFU: He’s left me. His body is here but the rest is gone. I exhaust him. I torment him and I torment myself. I need him, Julia.
JULIA: I know you do.
FEFU: I need his touch. I need his kiss. I need the person he is. I can’t give him up. […]
