A funny thing happened on the way to both the end of 1995 and the completion of that year's double issue of the Eugene O'Neill Review—which now, at last, you have in hand.  Actually, it wasn't all that funny.  Returning near November's end from supposedly restorative rustication and turkey time feasting near Lake Champlain (Middlebury, Burlington and Jeffersonville, Vermont, to be specific), I succumbed, after a roadside repast, to a bout of cardiac arrhythmia—“sudden cardiac death,” as the subsequent medical report had it.  Fortunately a registered nurse at a nearby table performed CPR with the assistance of a kitchen staffer, an ambulance responded promptly to the restauranteur's SOS, and I began sixty-five days, from intensive care to rehabilitation, in a total of three Boston-area hospitals, before finally returning home at the very end of January, cured of all except a continuing numbness in my typing hand that recent “carpal tunnel syndrome” surgery has so far not relieved.  But mentally, at least, I am fully back in metaphoric harness and could regale you self-indulgently at far greater length.  But this should suffice to explain the long spell between issues, which I trust and pray will not have to happen again.

 

We are all spared a full-blown preamble by the general editor this time, for at last (and why, oh why, didn't I think of such long ago?)  I have a splendid coeditorial collaborator, Bette Mandl, who had the original idea for this very special issue on O'Neill and Gender, contacted a particularly fine array of experts in that burgeoning field of study, and pretty much created the entire issue with her usual diligence and grace, leaving numb-handed but happy-hearted me with little to do but sit back and marvel at the splendor of the whole package, which I hope and think justifies the tardiness of its arrival.  I must admit that I've learned a lot during this endeavor—both about O'Neill's fathomless and ever-rewarding work, and about the relations within and between what used to be called the sexes.  It would be hard, now, to lose Bette's companionship at the helm.  Perhaps I can persuade her to consider a permanent position near or at the tiller.  It's been more than earned.

 

Turning from the past to the present and immediate future, I must tearfully announce the departure of Publication Coordinator Bernadette Smyth, who will shortly begin her new roles as graduate and teaching assistant in English at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, after completing her current work with Travis Bogard on the manuscript of Edna Kenton's memoir of the early days of the Provincetown Players, which will be the centerpiece of a forthcoming issue of the Review.  Everyone who got to know Berni through her splendid work on the Review and her inspiring leadership of the 1995 O'Neill conference in Boston realizes what a very special person she is.  We wish her godspeed in her new endeavors.  We will miss her sorely, but I am confident that she will never be far from the O'Neillian fold.  It is a concurrent pleasure to welcome her successor as Publication Coordinator, Ingrid Bandle, a 1996 graduate of Suffolk University with a major in English, whom Berni guided through the intricacies of coordinatorship, and who has in turn guided this, her first issue, to a burnished glow that rivals its predecessors.  Farewell, Berni; welcome, Ingrid; and my deepest thanks to all for your love, patience and good wishes.  I now turn the mike over to Bette Mandl, and I'll see you all again some time soon thereafter.

 

Fred Wilkins

 

 

Guest Editor’s Foreword

 

It is in a particularly celebratory mood  that I follow Fred Wilkins in introducing this special issue on O'Neill and gender.  As Fred makes apparent in his own preface, in spite of our happy launching last fall, there was much buffeting about during this literary excursion.  But Fred recovered marvelously from his cardiac episode, and within a very short time after his long hospital stay, made a medically remarkable comeback as the superb editor of the EOR.  It was exhilarating to have a stint as a guest editor just as Fred moved swiftly to full speed at the helm of the EOR—and to get some idea of how he transforms manuscripts into splendid journal issues for O'Neillians, with the assistance of his praiseworthy publications coordinators, Bernadette Smyth and Ingrid Bandle.

 

My collaboration with Fred on this collection of essays, which had the working title “Shifting Ground: Gender in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill,”  began more than five years ago.  Elaine Showalter has pointed out, “One of the most striking changes in the humanities ... has been the rise of gender as a category of analysis.”  As far back as 1982, Fred had included  a special section of essays entitled “O'Neill's Women” in the Eugene O'Neill Newsletter that preceded the Review.  It seemed time to look closely at the ways in which new critical approaches that take gender into account were influencing current O'Neill criticism.  Conference presentations we heard on O'Neill by such scholars as Judith Barlow, Deborah Holton, Susan Harris Smith, and Robert Vorlicky convinced us that the profound shifts in the theoretical context for dramatic criticism were inspiring a  re-visioning of the plays, and the life of the playwright.  Aware of  the continuum of perspectives the field of gender studies now affords, as well as the charged nature of its debates, we planned a collection of essays that would be inclusive.  In the selections we ultimately made, contributors invoke a range of theorists, from Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan to Luce Irigaray and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and reflect on gender in relation to culture; to language and race and class, as well as to individual psychology.

 

The overview of O'Neill and gender that emerges here is richly complex.  Some of the pieces offer a critique of the politics of gender that inevitably colors the work and life of O'Neill as a man of his time.  Laurin Porter, for example, suggests that in More Stately Mansions, Deborah and Sara are less women living out their own destinies than they are two aspects of Simon Harford, symbolically linked with his interior struggle.  Deborah Holton balances an appreciation for O'Neill's pioneering efforts to introduce black characters into serious American drama with an analysis of the limitations of his portrayal of black female characters in such plays as The Dreamy Kid and All God's Chillun Got Wings.  Some of the theoretical frameworks the  scholars employ tend to highlight the authenticity of O'Neill's characterizations, as is the case in the essays of  Susan Harris Smith and Glenda Frank, who each write about Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra.  Smith, who finds material on anorexia nervosa useful for developing her perspective, suggests a Foucauldian approach to a reading of Lavinia's body.   Frank's focus is on the complexity of Lavinia's role as daughter.  Sheila Hickey Garvey's essay, in which she envisions alternative versions of Anna Christie as a work of the “fallen woman genre,” appropriately brings issues of gender and performance to center stage.

 

O'Neill's male characters are seen in terms of cultural conceptions of masculinity in several of the papers.  Employing discourse analysis in his study of Hughie, Robert Vorlicky finds that the failure of the two male characters to achieve successful communication, a pattern he traces in male cast drama, is the very basis of the play.  James Robinson relates the models of gender in O'Neill's family, as well as in the culture, to both the anti-bourgeois rebelliousness of O'Neill's youth and his dramatic conceptions of masculinity in such plays as The Hairy Ape, where “natural man”  is pitted against the larger social forces.  Judith Barlow acknowledges the difficulties O'Neill had in developing female characters with full subjectivity, but points out that O'Neill's heroes tend not to provoke our critical resistance.  She suggests that an O'Neill hero, who is more likely to be a dreamer and artist than a model of financial success or sexual prowess,  is less directly implicated in domination and violence than is the male figure in many of the works of other American writers.  In my own paper, I question whether Strange Interlude is a “woman play,” and suggest that O'Neill's focus on the sexual ambiguity of Charles Marsden is a challenge to the gender arrangements of his day.

 

The biographical, which has always figured significantly in an un- derstanding of O'Neill's plays, is an influence in this collection as well, and is central to two of the articles. The close friendship that O'Neill had with Susan Glaspell when they were connected with the Provincetown Players is the subject of Linda Ben-Zvi's study.  She documents the vital exchange of the two innovative artists, suggesting their considerable mutual influence, and claiming a place alongside of O'Neill for Glaspell as a foreparent of American drama. Martha Bower offers a view of the gender dynamics in O'Neill's relationship with Carlotta.  Making use of the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage of development, she suggests psychoanalytic ways of understanding the nature of the bond between Carlotta and O'Neill, which endured even when acute tensions surfaced in their life together.

 

The far-reaching essays in this issue provide compelling evidence that O'Neill's imaginative work, and the experience in which it was  grounded,  are an extraordinary register of the seismic changes in gender roles, and the relations between the sexes, in the modernist period.  O'Neill's nuanced reading of his own gendered culture anticipates contemporary insights and anxieties. O'Neillians who make use of new comprehensions of “gender trouble” in their dramatic criticism will continue to find rich terrain for their explorations.

 

Bette Mandl