When the Children Are Asleep: Carousel in 1957

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel tells the story of Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan's troubled marriage, which ends tragically when Billy dies in a botched robbery attempt. The musical opened in 1945, near the end of World War II, and it expressed the loss that many women and families experienced during the war; it also comforted these families with a message that love transcends death and reassured them that You'll Never Walk Alone. It was a timely and powerful statement. In 1957, however, when the musical received its second New York revival, the secondary plot concerning the upwardly mobile Enoch Snow and his wife Carrie, who is Julie's best friend, had far more cultural resonance than it did twelve years earlier. This essay contextualizes the romance of Snow and Carrie within mid-century American middle-class culture and examines the changes in postwar American life that are reflected, and even reinforced, by these two characters.