71 pages • 2 hours read
Joseph KesselringArsenic and Old Lace
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Act IIAct Summaries & Analyses
Act II Summary
The curtain rises on Jonathan catching his aunts up on his last five years in Chicago. Einstein alludes to their recent trip to South Bend, Indiana, but is quickly silenced. As Abby tries to force Jonathan to leave, they are interrupted by Teddy. Teddy approaches Einstein, addressing him as General Goethals and instructing Einstein to accompany him to the Panama Canal downstairs. While Einstein and Teddy are gone, Jonathan tells his aunts that he and Einstein have no hotel and must stay at the house. He threatens them by recalling that “as a boy” he could be “disagreeable” (43), and Martha caves to his demands, offering him a room for one night. Jonathan also announces his intentions for his grandfather’s laboratory, and says he expects it to be the site of a very fruitful business.
When Abby and Martha leave to prepare Jonathan’s lodging, Einstein reappears and tells him about the Panama Canal. The hole Teddy dug just so happens to be six feet tall and four feet wide, and is the perfect amount of space to house Mr. Spenalzo’s body. They resolve to bury Spenalzo after the sisters go to bed. In the meantime, Abby and Martha lament that they were unable to give Mr. Hoskins timely funeral rites. They inform Teddy about their latest “Yellow Fever victim” and tell him to take the body to the cellar once Jonathan and Einstein go to bed. Jonathan interrupts their planning while carrying Mr. Spenalzo through the window. Each duo is eager to bury their respective victim, and hurriedly try to send the other away.
Jonathan finally intimidates the sisters into going upstairs, and he and Einstein stash Mr. Spenalzo in the window seat. He is once again interrupted, this time by Elaine. Elaine explains that she came by to check on Abby and Martha, and questions Jonathan’s reasons for being in the house. Jonathan fears that Elaine saw him with Mr. Spenalzo’s body, and attacks her. The commotion prompts Abby and Martha to return to the living room. They are quickly followed by Mortimer, who left the play he was supposed to attend after one act. Mortimer is horrified to see Jonathan and is upset to learn that he is spending the night. Einstein tells Mortimer that he will sleep on the window seat in order to be out of his way. Mortimer, who believes Mr. Hoskins is stored there alone, insists they take his room. Their back and forth continues until Jonathan and Einstein head upstairs to get their bags.
Elaine, now alone with Mortimer and the sisters, tells them about Jonathan’s attack and says she feared for her life. When the clock strikes 12, Mortimer recalls the 12 bodies in the basement and begins acting erratically. As Abby and Martha attempt to salvage their engagement dinner, Elaine questions Mortimer’s feelings for her. Mortimer’s anxieties about his family are at an all-time high, and he tells Elaine he can no longer marry her. He tells her about the generations of violent Brewsters, beginning with “the first Brewster who came over on the Mayflower” and “used to scalp the Indians” (55). This tendency toward violence and instability passed throughout generations, culminating with Teddy and Jonathan. Struck by the conversation, Mortimer peeks into the window seat while Elaine is facing away from him and is shocked to see Mr. Spenalzo. Mortimer, thinking his aunts claimed another victim, sends a deeply hurt Elaine away. Abby returns after Elaine leaves, and Mortimer immediately confronts her about Mr. Spenalzo’s body. Abby swears that she and Martha had nothing to do with him, and says that Teddy must have moved Mr. Hoskins’ body to Panama. They realize that Mr. Spenalzo is Jonathan’s victim.
Jonathan notices the two talking, and rushes down to confront them. Mortimer tries to kick him out, but Jonathan insinuates that Mortimer will meet the same end as Mr. Spenalzo unless he gives up his room in the house. The commotion attracts Officer O’Hara, who heard the noise on his nightly patrol and wanted to make sure all was well. He notes that Jonathan looks familiar, and Mortimer tells him it is likely his resemblance to Boris Karloff. This prompts O’Hara to discuss his distaste for the movies, and Mortimer brings up his job as a dramatic critic. O’Hara asks Mortimer to help him write a play. Mortimer is eager to stall him until he can figure out what to do about the bodies, but Jonathan and Abby both begin attempting to move their respective victims. Mortimer attempts to rush O’Hara out of the house, but O’Hara refuses to leave until he can discuss his play in depth. Mortimer insists O’Hara wait in the kitchen.
While everyone is distracted entertaining O’Hara, Jonathan and Einstein try to move Mr. Spenalzo into the cellar. Einstein is surprised to see Mr. Hoskins’ body in the hole he found earlier. Jonathan realizes that someone in the house must also be a murderer. When Mortimer returns to the living room and threatens to tell O’Hara about Mr. Spenalzo, Jonathan counters by threatening to reveal Mr. Hoskins. Mortimer quickly sends O’Hara out of the house, promising to meet him at a nearby bar to talk about his play.
As Mortimer briefly leaves to escort O’Hara, Jonathan tells Abby and Martha that he plans to blackmail Mortimer into leaving the house by telling the authorities about the man he killed. A confused Abby tells Jonathan that Mortimer hasn’t killed anyone, and asks if he could be referring to Mr. Hoskins. She explains that he’s “one of our gentlemen” and insists that she “won’t have any strangers buried in our cellar” (67). The sisters tell Jonathan that there will be no room for Mr. Spenalzo in the cellar, since it is already filled with 12 graves. Jonathan is shocked, and Einstein points out that his body count is tied with Abby and Martha’s. Jonathan vows to claim a 13th victim as Mortimer returns.
Act II Analysis
In Act II, Kesselring reveals more about Jonathan’s past to increase the dramatic tension of the present events, and the physical comedy grows wilder and more complex. Jonathan routinely brings up the past in order to intimidate his family. He reminds his aunts of his “disagreeable” nature in childhood, and taunts Mortimer with the memory of sticking “needles under [his] fingernails” (52). While his remarks successfully intimidate Abby and Martha into letting him spend the night against their will, Mortimer appears impervious to Jonathan’s tactics. Mortimer mentions remembering Jonathan as “the most detestable, vicious, venomous form of animal life” that he ever had the misfortune of encountering (52). On the surface, this demonstrates that Jonathan and Mortimer’s contentious relationship has lasted into adulthood, and that Jonathan’s influence directly contributed to Mortimer’s desire to separate from the family. In contrast to Teddy’s benign alternate reality and the aunts’ well-meaning murders, Jonathan is intentionally cruel and enjoys doing harm to others. This helps establish Jonathan as the true villain of the play, and his acts of violence are not treated with the humor that Kesselring uses to describe Abby and Martha’s murders.
In Act II, Jonathan is able to briefly fracture Mortimer’s engagement by exacerbating Mortimer’s anxieties about the family. Elaine is described as being frightened of Jonathan from the start. Kesselring’s stage directions instruct the actress portraying Elaine to “[draw] back almost with fright” upon confirming Jonathan’s identity, and says that he is able to “[stop] her with a gesture” (49). When she confides in Mortimer, Abby, and Martha about the attack, she says she’s “almost been killed” and is deeply afraid of Jonathan (54). After hearing Elaine’s fears, Mortimer finally tells her about the violent Brewster legacy. While this is an attempt to explain Jonathan’s actions, Mortimer also uses it to justify his own anxieties about his family and considers them worthy justifications to end his relationship with Elaine. This choice ends up hurting the both of them: Elaine expresses that her love for him remains unchanged, but Mortimer ends their engagement out of concern for her safety.
Act II is also rife with the humorous contradictions that define Arsenic and Old Lace. For example, Einstein shares a name with renowned physicist Albert Einstein, but is silly, squeamish, and often drunk. Kesselring makes his intentions for Einstein obvious by providing him with such an obviously different namesake. Other contradictions are more drawn out. While they have comedic purposes, they also reveal interesting qualities about the characters. The best example of this is Jonathan and his aunts’ confrontation about the bodies. While all three are killers, they are oddly polite when discussing their victims. Upon discovering Mr. Hoskins’ body, Jonathan refers to him as “Mortimer’s friend” and says that he will “get along fine” with Mr. Spenalzo (67). Similarly, Abby and Martha call Hoskins one of “our gentlemen” and refuse to “have any strangers buried in our cellar” (67). All three of them personify their victims by talking about them as if they were living, breathing guests. All of them also insist on addressing the victims by their honorific titles, thus maintaining some level of respect. The care and kindness they show their victims in death is in stark contradiction with the fact that they chose to murder them in the first place, a typical ironic contradiction of black comedy. Kesselring couples this ominous-but-humorous tone with increased choreography of corpses. Farces famously feature rapid entrances and exits of various characters, and Kesselring puts a dark twist on this convention by describing the movement of the victims’ bodies between the basement and the window seat, and the physical contortions as the Brewsters attempt to conceal the bodies from Elaine and O’Hara.
