The drama opens with a young girl's exuberant letter
to a friend back in New York City. Harriet Bangle
is visiting relatives in a western frontier community,
where the noise of frogs and toads drowns out "civilization."
Harriet is not oppressed by her surroundings, however,
for she intends to create some excitement. Somewhat
miffed because the eligible bachelor schoolteacher
Master William Horner does not respond to her flirtations,
Harriet writes letters to him but signs them by the
name of the country girl he does admire, Ellen Kingsbury.
Harriet enlists the aid of her mischievous cousin,
Joe, in hiding the letters in the schoolmaster's desk.
The first note asks him to reply and to leave his
letters in a hiding place from which the cousin retrieves
them and returns them to Harriet. Each letter that
Harriet creates becomes progressively more bold, and
the encouraged schoolmaster follows her lead, expressing
his feelings for Ellen, whom he believes to be his
secret sweetheart.
In
the drama, the playing of the piano signals the sending
of each letter and provides a sense of the increase
in intensity in the escalating affair. Harriet's letters
themselves are wonderfully contrived to stir the amorous
as well as the intellectual interests of the somewhat
stuffy young teacher. The story's early scene of the
spelling bee, in which he first becomes smitten with
Ellen, is a comic yet telling ex-amination of American
language usage, how words begin to reflect the uneasy
alliance between frontier and civilization in a new
country. The schoolmaster has a foot in both worlds.
Harriet, even more an outsider, mocks the country
bumpkins yet ends up the shamed scapegoat. After the
trading of several letters, she realizes she has gone
too far, but it is too late. She contrives to join
the schoolmaster and Ellen at a rehearsal where Ellen
will play the part of Mary, Queen of Scots. Appropriately,
Harriet gets to be the villainess, Queen Elizabeth,
in the scene. All her machinations go awry. Her cousin
and cohort in the plot turns traitor, contriving to
get Horner and Ellen alone together, where the schoolmaster's
presumption that the shy country girl returns his
affections makes him far too bold. Ellen's enraged
father accuses Horner of lechery at the school program
in which the students are reciting their pieces from
famous historical literature. The young lady's letters,
which the schoolmaster needs to exonerate himself,
turn up in the ceiling of the stage, and Harriet,
due to her fancy penmanship and ornate diction, is
exposed as their creator. Banished back to New York,
Harriet receives an invitation to a wedding. The schoolmaster
and his fiancee toy with the idea of addressing it
to "Miss Bungle." -Lucinda H. MacKethan
Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress
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