(IN THIS
ISSUE)
"CRITICAL
AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO O'NEILL'S LATER PLAYS": A Report
on An O'Neill Special Session at MLA, Chicago, Dec. 27, 1977.
A
group of over fifty O'Neillians gathered in the Palmer House on
December 27th for discussions of papers by Prof. Thomas F. Van Laan
(Rutgers University) and Professor Dan Isaac (SUNY-Purchase). Prof.
Letitia Dace (John Jay C.-CUNY) and Prof. Frank Cunningham
(University of South Dakota) chaired the proceedings, indicating at
the outset that their purpose in selecting the papers had been to
emphasize less frequently considered modes of approach to O'Neill
than the biographical and religious themes that had dominated
discussion in Special Sessions conducted by Prof. Cunningham in
recent years at MLA.
To
that end, Prof. Van Laan led off with a reading of his well-written
essay, "Singing in the Wilderness: The Dark Vision of O Neill's
Only Comedy," which considered previously unstressed images of
depression and regret in the Millers' emotional landscape. Van Laan
asserted that O'Neill chose to satirize his characters' unconscious
misperception of the
nature of their reality, and that the play "emphasizes three
familiar American clichés...the Norman Rockwell-like gallery of
sentimental stereotypes, the Fourth-of-July myth of independence and
equality, and the notion of family life as the ideal form of
existence." Van Laan suggested that the major characters are
like "key sentimental stereotypes readily found in the
wish-fulfillment fantasies of the middle class," and that
Richard Miller's posing resembles that of Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet. He concluded by explaining
O'Neill's affirmative ending as a result of the dramatist's failure
in detaching himself from the values the Millers attempt to believe
in. "The lightheartedness, sunniness, and sense of
self-satisfaction emphasized by the commentators in the play are for
the most part merely examples of singing in the wilderness--which is
a rough equivalent to whistling past a cemetery--by characters who
are no more able to face the desolate reality confronting them than
are the denizens of Harry Hope's saloon or the four haunted Tyrones."
After
a discussion of Van Laan's controversial reading of Wilderness
that, in the main, centered on O'Neill's expressed statements of his
motives in writing the play, Prof. Isaac offered his paper, a
psychoanalytic approach to "Matricide and the Late Plays of
O'Neill." Countering the majority view that would serve to
explain the final three great plays as Oedipally or religiously
inspired, Isaac asserted that O'Neill's achievement in the final plays
was in large measure a result of his having successfully dealt with
his previously subconscious wishes to commit matricide. Working from
Freud's Totem and Taboo and the analytic work of
Leon I. Jacobs, Isaac contended that the primal crime in O'Neill's
scheme is not the murder of the father, but the murder and devouring
of the mother, and exemplified his thesis with the examples of
Hickey's killing of Evelyn--a mother figure rather than a sexual
partner--Parritt's confession of his "matriarchal crime" to
Slade, the three men's feelings of hostility as well as protectiveness
toward Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey, and
Jamie's actions on his mother's funeral train in Moon for the Misbegotten. Isaac concluded by typifying O'Neill's
male figures in these plays as, in the main, existing in a state of
regression, of confused and angry infancy.
Isaac's
paper stimulated a discussion that extended thirty minutes past the
closing time for the Session, as participants advanced theories of
male characters' suppression of mature sexuality in favor of
submission to dominant women characters; parallels in O'Neill's own
life to such themes; and the influence of Adlerian
psychology--especially feelings of inferiority on the part of certain
male characters--on these psychological concerns in the plays.
Professors Vera Jiji (Brooklyn C.-CUNY) and Timo Tiusanen (Univ. of
Helsinki) spoke with particular eloquence on the need to consider
themes of love generally in O'Neill's work, and Profs. Cunningham and
Jiji planned to hold a Special Session in New York in 1978 devoted to
psychological perspectives in O'Neill, particularly themes of
sexuality and the various meanings of "love" in O'Neill's
canon. (Unfortunately
that session was cancelled, but the subject remains a vital one and
may find a place in the 1979 MLA Convention program. --Ed.)
--Frank
R. Cunningham
(IN THIS ISSUE)
