ARTicles vol. 3 i.3b: O’Neill’s Tragic Vision

When Eugene O’Neill received the Nobel Prize in 1936, critic Brooks Atkinson proclaimed him “a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama.” Not everyone shared this appreciation. In a letter, O’Neill noted his uneven critical reception, complaining of those who failed to see what he was trying to do. He struggled to create a new dramatic form for the American stage, one which transcended melodrama and achieved tragedy. O’Neill’s understanding of tragedy stemmed from his reading of Nietzsche, according to whom the Greeks used theater to cope with fear. The world is a dark abyss; man suffers because he cannot penetrate this darkness. The tragic hero makes the attempt. He stares into the void. Ultimately, he stumbles and falls, for in striving he dooms himself to failure. The attempt, however, ennobles him. O’Neill tried to adapt Greek tragedy into a twentieth-century model. In his own words, “I’m always acutely aware of the Force behind – (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it – Mystery certainly) – and the eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. . . . This is the only subject worth writing about and . . . it is possible – or can be – to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theater.” To aid this transfiguration, he looked to psychoanalysis. Man’s struggle for understanding turned inwards, a search to penetrate the dark of his soul. Thus in The Emperor Jones, the title character flees into a jungle to escape an angry mob only to face nightmares of his imagination. Archetypes from the collective unconscious shatter his mask of identity. O’Neill’s plays consistently circle around the theme of unmasking. Most of his characters hide behind an idealized self, but the plays chug inexorably towards exposure. This theme is most evident in The Great God Brown: the actors wear masks onstage. When Margaret marries Dion Anthony, she loves his persona, his outer mask, which stifles the inner, unmasked Dion. Craving release from this prison, he runs to a prostitute and in the end dies in a drunken bender. Self-destruction frees him from his mask, but it is picked up by William Brown, Dion’s employer and rival. Jealous of him, Brown assumes the now-abandoned persona, and the destructive cycle begins again. This theme also fuels plays that do not use physical masks. The Iceman Cometh opens with a group of drunks at a bar; all hide behind alcohol and “pipe-dreams.” Hickey, one of their friends, arrives and shreds their illusions, stopping only when he himself is exposed. O’Neill merged Greek and modern in other ways. Mourning Becomes Electra sets the Orestes myth in New England after the Civil War. The wife kills her husband, a general returning triumphant from battle; the daughter loves her father and despises her mother; the son idolizes his mother and fears his father. This trilogy even features a chorus of townspeople who comment on the great family. However, unlike the heroes of Greek tragedy, whose actions were painfully public, the aim of the Mannons is secrecy. They hide their actions from the chorus, which only murmurs about “somethin’ queer.” The Neoclassical façade of their mansion covers their saga. Desire Under the Elms, too, borrows extensively from Greek drama, using archetypes from Euripides’ Hipploytus and Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus. The sexual attraction between step-mother and step-son drives the play, an infanticide closes it, and a son’s love for his mother provides the setting. Through these experiments, O’Neill tries to create a genre that rivals the theatricality of melodrama while maintaining the complexity of tragedy. David Belasco’s production poster for Under the Gaslight (1867) typifies the easy polarities of melodrama. The heroine rushing to save her fiancé is placed directly opposite a speeding train. The man is tied to the tracks between them. Who will get there first, the force of good or the force of evil? Characters in melodrama can be true to themselves, for there is a solid, knowable self to be true to. In Desire Under the Elms, desire provides the melodramatic lure, impelling action that appears simple. Eben, Abbie, and Cabot compose a love-triangle. They desire land but succumb to the desire for each other. Their lust unfolds with excessive openness. A mystery lurks in this play, however, a mystery that obscures a simple melodramatic interpretation of the story. After Abbie moves into the house, Cabot moves to the barn, complaining that “it’s cold in this house. It’s oneasy. They’s thin’s pokin’ about in the dark – in the corners.” Earlier in the play, Simeon counters Eben’s accusation that Cabot killed his mother: “No one never kills nobody. It’s allus somethin’.” This “it,” this something “pokin’ about in the dark,” symbolizes O’Neill’s tragic vision. Eben cannot see himself clearly: though he professes to be only his mother’s son, the other characters constantly see his father in him. Cabot, too, is nearly blind both physically (he is nearsighted) and figuratively (he cannot see the adultery in his home). In the end, however, he perseveres – steadfast and strong. His lonely struggle gives him stature. So, too, O’Neill and his tragic vision of America. “Where the theatre is concerned,” he said, “one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever!” John Herndon is a first–year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.