Editing South Pacific (musical) (section)

=== Sex and gender roles ===
Nellie Forbush, in her journey from Little Rock, Arkansas, to serving as a Navy nurse and on to the domesticity of the final scene of ''South Pacific'', parallels the experience of many American women of the period. They entered the workforce during the war, only to find afterwards a societal expectation that they give up their jobs to men, with their best route to financial security being marriage and becoming a housewife. One means of securing audience acceptance of Nellie's choices was the sanitization of her sexual past from her counterpart in the Michener work&nbsp;– that character had a [[4-F (US Military)|4-F]] boyfriend back in Arkansas and a liaison with Bill Harbison while on the island.<ref>Lovensheimer, pp. 108–109</ref><ref>Michener 1967, p. 106</ref>

[[File:Billis and Nellie laundry.jpg|thumb|right|alt=A military scene.  A woman dressed as a nurse holds a skirt she has just received from an enlisted man; she is pleased while he appears self-deprecating. Other enlisted men, many bare-chested, watch.|Nellie (Martin) praises the laundry skills of Billis (McCormick) as his friends look on.]]
The male characters in ''South Pacific'' are intended to appear conventionally masculine.  In the aftermath of World War II, the masculinity of the American soldier was beyond public question.  Cable's virility with Liat is made evident to the audience.  Although Billis operates a laundry – Nellie particularly praises his pleats – and appears in a grass skirt in the "Thanksgiving Follies", these acts are consistent with his desire for money and are clearly intended to be comic.  His interest in the young women on Bali H'ai establishes his masculinity.  Lovensheimer writes that Billis is more defined by class than by sexuality, evidenced by the Seabee's assumption, on learning that Cable went to college in New Jersey, that it was [[Rutgers University|Rutgers]] (the state's flagship public university), rather than [[Ivy League]] Princeton, and by his delight on learning that the rescue operation for him had cost $600,000 when his uncle had told him he would never be worth a dime.<ref>Rodgers and Hammerstein, pp. 290, 353</ref><ref>Lovensheimer, pp. 109–111, 142–143</ref>

Meryle Secrest, in her biography of Rodgers, theorizes that ''South Pacific'' marks a transition for the pair "between heroes and heroines who are more or less evenly matched in age and stories about powerful older men and the younger women who are attracted to them".<ref>Secrest, p. 294</ref> Lovensheimer points out that this pattern only holds for two of their five subsequent musicals, ''The King and I'' and ''[[The Sound of Music]]'', and in the former, the love between Anna and the King is not expressed in words.  He believes a different transition took place: that their plots, beginning with  ''South Pacific'', involve a woman needing to enter and accept her love interest's world to be successful and accepted herself.  He notes that both ''Oklahoma!'' and ''Carousel'' involve a man entering his wife's world, Curly in ''Oklahoma!'' about to become a farmer with expectations of success, whereas Billy Bigelow in ''Carousel'' fails to find work after leaving his place as a barker.  Lovensheimer deems ''Allegro'' to be a transition, where the attempts of the lead female character to alter her husband Joe's world to suit her ambition lead to the breakup of their marriage.  He argues that the nurse Emily, who goes with Joe in his return to the small town where he was happy, is a forerunner of Nellie, uprooting her life in Chicago for Joe.<ref>Lovensheimer, pp. 111–115</ref>

Secrest notes that much is overlooked in the rush to have love conquer all in ''South Pacific'', "questions of the long-term survival of a marriage between a sophisticate who read Proust at bedtime and a girl who liked Dinah Shore and did not read anything were raised by Nellie Forbush only to be brushed aside.  As for the interracial complexities of raising two Polynesian children, all such issues were subsumed in the general euphoria of true love."<ref>Secrest, p. 293</ref>  Lovensheimer too wonders how Nellie will fare as the second Madame de Becque: "little Nellie Forbush from Arkansas ends up in a tropical paradise, far from her previous world, with a husband, a servant, and two children who speak a language she does not understand".<ref>Lovensheimer, p. 115</ref>