The Emotional Miss Vaughn

Summary

In this sophisticated 1917 satire, the domestic tranquility of Jimmie, a man tethered to the mundane comforts of marriage and progeny, is jeopardized by a rekindled fascination with a former paramour who has ascended to the heights of theatrical notoriety. This titular 'emotional' Miss Vaughn, recognizing the puerile nature of Jimmie's infatuation, orchestrates a masterfully meta-theatrical intervention. Rather than rebuffing him with conventional disdain, she adopts the persona of a radical bohemian, feigning a reciprocal passion that is less about romantic devotion and more about the iconoclastic 'free love' doctrines embedded in her latest dramatic endeavor. As she regales him with a performative deluge of avant-garde rhetoric—blurring the lines between the stage and the drawing room—Jimmie is confronted with the terrifying reality of his own desires. The specter of a life unmoored from societal convention and the exhausting intensity of a woman living in a state of constant 'emoting' sends him scurrying back to the safety of his hearth, effectively cured of his nostalgic malaise by the very artifice he once admired.

Synopsis

Jimmie gets interested in an actress who was a former sweetheart, with the emoting lady finally deciding to cure him by pretending to reciprocate and, in so doing, recites to him a long speech of romantic flavor, intermixed with free love doctrines from her next play. Jimmie gets alarmed when he finds himself apparently accepted, and beats a hasty retreat back home to wife and babies.