Blue Mountain

Blue Mountain is the Mississippi Delta setting through which Amanda Wingfield recalls the social world of her youth: planter families, numerous gentleman callers, dances, and jonquils. In the play’s memory-driven structure, it is more than a former home. Amanda’s recollections make it an imagined contrast to the Wingfields’ present life in St. Louis, preserving a lost sense of status and possibility while exposing how little of that world can secure her family’s future.

Identity and remembered setting

Amanda evokes Blue Mountain as a place of social abundance. She recalls that one Sunday afternoon she received seventeen gentleman callers, so many that there were not enough chairs and additional folding chairs had to be brought from the parish house. The number gives her story the scale of a public occasion, while the callers’ designation as gentlemen establishes courtship and social standing as central to the world she remembers.

Her callers, she says, included prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta, as well as planters’ sons. The list of admirers turns Blue Mountain into a remembered network of families, reputations, and prospects. Amanda singles out Champ Laughlin, who later became vice-president of the Delta Planters Bank, and Hadley Stevenson, who drowned in Moon Lake and left his widow government bonds. These details give the stories a particular social and economic texture: the young men’s later fortunes and fates remain part of the recollection, even as Amanda presents the gathering of suitors as evidence of her own former desirability.

The recollection also contains less triumphant stories. Amanda describes Bates Cutrere as one of her beaux and recounts his quarrel with Wainwright at Moon Lake Casino, his death on the way to Memphis, and his widow’s inheritance of thousands of acres. She adds that the widow had married Bates on the rebound and that he carried Amanda’s picture when he died. The anecdote folds violence, property, romantic disappointment, and Amanda’s own place in the dead man’s memory into the same account. Her conversational recollections do not preserve the past as a simple idyll: they make it lively and socially legible, but also show how abruptly lives and prospects could change.

Courtship, class, and the remembered past

Amanda’s stories make courtship inseparable from class. The young men she names belong to planter families, and she remembers their prominence, land, and connections alongside their attention to her. She also recalls the young Fitzhugh boy, whom every girl in the Delta supposedly admired, then corrects Tom’s assumption that the men she describes all died: Fitzhugh never married. The exchange shows Tom testing the elaborate recollection with practical questions, while Amanda’s answers keep its atmosphere of distinction and romantic possibility intact.

In this account, marriage appears as both personal aspiration and a route into a particular social order. Amanda tells Jim O’Connor that she had assumed she would marry a planter and raise a family on a large estate with servants. Instead, she married a telephone-company worker, the man whose photograph remains in the Wingfields’ home, and says he fell in love with long-distance travel. The contrast sets her youthful expectation against the marriage she actually made and the present absence of her husband. Blue Mountain thus names not only a location but the social future Amanda believed her courtship might bring.

That remembered future shapes her plans for Laura. Amanda regards business college as having failed her daughter and describes Laura as drifting without a settled occupation. She fears that, without preparation for a position, an unmarried woman might become dependent on relatives and endure a diminished life. Against that prospect she raises marriage to a suitable man as an alternative, telling Laura that girls unsuited to business careers may marry. Her insistence on gentleman callers therefore links the courtship culture she associates with Blue Mountain to a practical, if uncertain, strategy for Laura’s security.

Objects, performance, and recollection

Amanda does not invoke Blue Mountain only through stories. She puts on a yellowed voile dress with a blue silk sash, identifying it as the dress she wore for a cotillion, the Governor’s Ball in Jackson, and visits from gentleman callers. She describes dancing in it and remembers wearing it when she met Mr. Wingfield. The old dress makes the past visible in the present, but its faded condition also marks the distance between youthful display and the family’s current circumstances.

Jonquils carry the same double function. Amanda remembers a spring in which she went to dances, parties, rides, and picnics despite a mild fever, and says she became so attached to jonquils that she gathered them wherever she saw them. With no vases left, she recalls holding the flowers herself. She then connects the flowers and the feverish social season to meeting Mr. Wingfield. In the present, she places jonquils in a bowl on the table while waiting for Jim O’Connor and hopes that he and Tom will arrive before the rain. The flower, once part of an expansive season of invitations and courtship, is now arranged for a single hoped-for caller.

The theatrical form makes this return to Blue Mountain a performance shaped by memory. Tom introduces the play as a memory play, where events are dimly lit, sentimental, and accompanied by music; during Amanda’s recollections, he signals for music and a spot of light, and her face and voice change as she recalls her former admirers. The stage presentation does not offer Blue Mountain as a neutral, independently verified portrait. It shows the past as Amanda remembers and performs it, with Tom’s framing making the act of remembering visible.

Distance from the present and narrative significance

The Blue Mountain Amanda describes stands in tension with the Wingfields’ present-day vulnerability. In St. Louis, Laura’s business-college experience has ended in failure, and Amanda says the family has abandoned the prospect of a business career because it made Laura ill. She fears a future of dependence for her daughter and presses Tom to help arrange a gentleman caller before he can leave. The family’s immediate concerns include household expenses: Amanda reminds Tom about the overdue light bill, while his warehouse wage is described as sixty-five dollars a month. The contrast with the remembered callers and planter households is not merely geographical; it is a difference between remembered social abundance and present economic constraint.

Amanda’s account of Blue Mountain is selective, but its selectivity is part of its meaning. She remembers crowded visits, prominent suitors, dances, and flowers; she also remembers that her anticipated marriage to a planter never happened. Her past supplies a standard against which she judges her present and a script she tries to adapt for Laura. The result is neither a secure refuge nor a purely decorative nostalgia: Blue Mountain gives Amanda a language of status and possibility, while the gap between that language and her family’s circumstances reveals the limits of what recollection can restore.