Picnic

The younger daughter of Flo Owens, Millie is 16 years old. She is smart and precocious as well as artistically talented, but she feels overshadowed by her beautiful older sister, whom she has shaped herself in reaction against. She rejects trappings of femininity like delicate clothing, proscribed passivity, and the association of worth with beauty. As long as Millie maintains the pretense that she prefers to be seen as a tomboy, she doesn’t have to be compared to her sister.

Millie is on the edge of adulthood, and she wants to be an adult—to read what she wants without question, to be taken seriously by adults, and to have the agency to escape small-town life. She secretly smokes as a way of asserting her adulthood and sneakily drinks whiskey when the others aren’t looking. However, in trying to be an adult, she learns what Madge already knows: Becoming a woman is a double-edged sword. Within the culture around her, growing up means making herself more feminine. When she suddenly has a date, the picnic becomes a rite of passage. She allows herself to be beautiful, but this comes with the uncomfortable attention of others and the knowledge that she is being valued differently as a woman. She still falls short of her sister, whose easy manner with boys and lithe dancing has come from experience that Millie doesn’t have. In the end, Millie learns that she still has time to grow and develop, and her evolving attitude towards her sister reflects this realization: Millie defends her sister from Bomber’s rude comments and attempts—unsuccessfully—to cover for her sister’s absence to Alan.

At first, Hal seems like a humble, down-on-his-luck young drifter who happened to find a kind woman to feed him in exchange for doing some work around the house. Underneath the dirt, though, Hal is extremely handsome and not as shiftless as he seems: He has come to this particular town on purpose to find his old friend Alan.

Hal’s beauty leads others to fabricate their own ideas of who he is. Helen Potts sees him as a diamond in the rough who just needs a shower and a leg up. Flo sees him as a deceptively charming scoundrel. Alan sees him as a womanizer with no scruples. Hal isn’t calculating or malicious, however. He has simply always been an outsider and wants nothing more than to belong. His parents struggled with substance abuse and neglected him. His talent on the football field landed him in college, but he didn’t fit in with the other students. His handsome face nearly garnered him a film career, but he would have had to submit to invasive dental work for the sake of aesthetics. He returns to Alan because Alan is the one person who ever treated him like he was worth befriending. Hal believes sincerely in his own future potential, but he can’t seem to catch a break. He sees Madge as someone who loves him for more than his beauty and understands how he can be physically attractive and still feel like he doesn’t belong. With Madge, he can admit to himself that he doesn’t need to set the world on fire and be happy with a steady job and a stable life.

Helen Potts is an older widow who lives with and cares for her elderly, ailing mother. When she was younger, Helen eloped with a man named Potts, but her mother forced her to immediately annul the marriage. Helen has kept the name Potts all of these years, supposedly out of spite, but also possibly for the sake of hanging on to her romantic dreams. Helen is kind and optimistic, and she often annoys her neighbors by inviting attractive young men who are down on their luck to do work around her house and property. Helen seems enamored with Hal but understands that she is too old to do more than imagine anything with him. As she explains to Flo, having Hal around makes her feel like she has a man in the house, however briefly. Unlike other characters, Helen has come to terms with the disappointments of her life. She understands that she made choices in her youth that she cannot change, just as she understands that Madge will make her own choices and have her own disappointments.

Flo is a widow of about 40 and a single mother to two teenage girls. Although she gives few details about her past, she was likely around Madge’s age when she married. Her husband was a doting father for Madge’s first years, but by the time Millie was born two years later, he was more and more absent, drinking with his wild friends at roadhouses. He died at some unspecified point, making Flo a widow.

Flo has therefore largely raised her daughters by herself and can seem strict—almost unreasonably so—with them. However, she built an independent life for herself and her daughters by rising out of poverty, and she still needs to rent rooms in her house to make ends meet. Flo wants badly for Madge to marry Alan, whom she sees as an opportunity to elevate her daughter—and by extension the rest of the family—to a higher social and financial level. Flo recognizes Hal as a threat to this plan as soon as she lays eyes on him and likely also sees (or imagines she sees) her late husband in him. She wants to protect her daughters from following in her footsteps, and she knows that someone like Hal has the ability to awaken passion and recklessness in her usually obedient daughter.

A young man from a wealthy family, Alan Seymour is dating Madge Owens and is intent on marrying her. At first, Alan seems like a good person who loves Madge. When he sees his old friend Hal, he is genuinely thrilled. In his fraternity, Alan was the only person who accepted Hal and befriended him. However, Alan also gives subtle signals that he sees Hal as lesser. Alan brings up the money he loaned to Hal for what he clearly saw as an impossible pipe dream of becoming a movie star. He corrects Hal’s behavior when he says things that aren’t blandly polite. When Hal asks Alan to help him get an office job, Alan decides instead to get him a job doing manual labor on the oil pipeline—a job that Hal could likely have gotten himself, and which is unlikely to lead to any real advancement. Alan easily blames Hal for Millie drinking and for Madge cheating on him, demonstrating that he sees Hal as a corrupting influence who can never rise above the class he was born into. Alan becomes petty and mean when he uses his family’s clout to turn Hal into a wanted fugitive. He reacts badly to being denied something that he wants, even insulting Madge by saying that marriage with her would have meant nothing but looking at her face.

Rosemary is an unmarried school teacher, likely in her thirties, who rents a room in the Owens house. She claims that when she was 18, she was just as beautiful as Madge, and she warns Madge that she will age quickly and no longer be sought after. For reasons that aren’t explained in the play, Rosemary didn’t marry any of her presumed suitors. Within the confines of small-town life, respectable women only have the options of marriage or “spinsterhood”—a role Rosemary finds herself diverted into. Rosemary claims very vocally that she prefers the independence of being single, but she becomes desperate when she confronts the reality that she will likely be waiting forever for marriage if she isn’t proactive. Rosemary’s character demonstrates how difficult it was for women in this era, particularly in small towns, to make satisfying and respected lives for themselves without the protection of marriage.