Daughters of the American Revolution

The Daughters of the American Revolution (D.A.R.) appears in Amanda Wingfield’s life as both a social affiliation and a public role she hopes to occupy. Its meetings and her expected induction into an office promise a form of respectable participation, but the organization’s standing in her account contrasts with the financial and family pressures that consume her attention. The D.A.R. is not presented through its formal structure or political work; it is seen through Amanda’s membership, her social performance, and the uses she makes of its connections.

Membership and Social Standing

Amanda treats attendance at D.A.R. gatherings as a regular part of her respectable identity. When she returns home in her full-dress outfit, she is wearing the clothes she usually wears to the D.A.R.; her old cloche hat, imitation-fur-collared coat, and large black pocketbook make the social occasion visible even as her expression signals distress. Laura asks whether she went to the meeting, and Amanda initially presents her absence as a consequence of lacking the strength and courage to face the day.

The planned induction into an office shows that Amanda’s involvement is more than an occasional visit. She tells Laura she was supposed to be inducted that afternoon, an appointment she abandons after stopping at the business college to ask about Laura’s progress. The sequence makes the organization part of the family’s immediate circumstances: Amanda relinquishes a public occasion to investigate the failure of the future she had planned for her daughter.

A Network for Conversation and Sales

Amanda also invokes the D.A.R. as a network of acquaintances. On the telephone she calls Ida Scott, notes that Scott was missed at the previous Monday’s meeting, and asks after her sinus condition before turning to the purpose of the call: a magazine subscription about to expire. Amanda pitches a new serial and compares it to Gone with the Wind, presenting the subscription as something Scott should not miss. The exchange shows Amanda moving from the language of sociable concern to a sales appeal without leaving the conversational register of the organization’s circle.

That call sits alongside Amanda’s broader insistence that she can manage domestic and social presentation. With a gentleman caller expected, she orders the wedding silver polished, monogrammed table linen laundered, windows washed, and fresh curtains put up. The D.A.R. itself is not identified as the source of these standards, but Amanda’s membership belongs to the same effort to sustain respectability amid the Wingfield family’s insecurity.

The Organization in Amanda’s Recollections

Amanda’s account of her youth offers a sharp contrast to her present-day D.A.R. activity. She recalls a Sunday in Blue Mountain when seventeen gentlemen callers came to her mother’s house, and says that chairs had to be brought from the parish house. She describes her callers as prominent young planters and sons of planters from the Mississippi Delta, naming young men whose later fortunes, marriages, and deaths she remembers in detail. In this remembered world, status comes through family, courtship, and inherited wealth; in her current life, organizational membership and committee-like duties offer a smaller, more precarious form of public standing.

Her memories also disclose the limits of that old social promise. Amanda had expected to marry a planter and raise a family on a large estate with servants, but instead married a telephone-company worker, represented onstage by the father’s photograph. She says he fell in love with long-distance travel and left her without knowing where he was. Her D.A.R. identity therefore sits beside an imagined past of Southern gentility and an actual present in which she must improvise income and security.

Family Pressures and Significance

Amanda’s involvement with the D.A.R. is entangled with her effort to secure Laura’s future. She fears that Laura is drifting, recalls that business college frightened her daughter into illness, and frames marriage and an independent home as the condition that would allow Tom to leave. She imagines unmarried women as dependent on reluctant relatives, confined to cramped rooms and living on what she calls the crust of humility. In that account, respectable social affiliation does not remove the economic vulnerability shaping women’s choices.

The organization’s significance in the play lies in this doubleness. It gives Amanda a public role, familiar acquaintances, and occasions to perform confidence, yet it cannot resolve her daughter’s isolation or the family’s dependence. Her abandoned induction and her later subscription call expose the distance between the status she claims and the precarious work required to maintain it; the D.A.R. is both a remnant of social aspiration and one of the practical settings through which Amanda tries to keep that aspiration alive.