We will not live to attain a useful perspective on how western theatre is responding to the turn of a millennium. Scholars are just  beginning to discern what happened a hundred years ago, when dramatic artists struggled to find new forms for a view of life that, for good or ill, was replacing nineteenth-century optimism. Playwrights of that time, restlessly experimenting, discovered new techniques and new uses for old techniques. In the latter category was the unseen character: the character, living or dead, who is never seen but who nonetheless causes onstage reactions and can even become a presence-in-absence. Strindberg, Ibsen, and especially Chekhov developed this device in the European theatre. In America, the first major writer to vigorously explore and use the unseen character was Eugene O’Neill.

Rudolph Stamm has described O’Neill’s struggle with theatrical form. He points out that the unseen character was one technique in the heightened naturalism which O’Neill developed and in which he wrought much of his greatest work.¹ However, Stamm does not analyze the particular uses of the unseen character in O’Neill’s works, nor does he suggest how, specifically, this technique served O’Neill’s dramatic purposes. In this essay, I will undertake such an analysis and suggestion.

The unseen character was not a new element in O’Neill’s writing when he broke through to his heightened naturalism. It had been there all along. Indeed, if the unseen character had appeared only a few times in O’Neill’s late plays, it would be possible to dismiss it as a part of his experimentation with technique, a device on a par with his use of the mask in The Great God Brown or the interior monologue in Strange Interlude: something tested, then discarded as artistically unfulfilling to him. However, the unseen character is so recurrent in his works, from the first sketches to the final masterpieces, that a researcher must conclude that this technique served the playwright’s major concerns in an important, even indispensable way. To explore how O’Neill used this device, I first turn to one of his most Chekhovian plays: Desire Under the Elms.

O’Neill began Desire Under the Elms (hereinafter Desire) in the fall of 1923, not long after the Moscow Art Theatre’s first American visit.² In a number of ways the play echoes Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Both dramas have characters who live under the influence of a dead parent. A surviving son is victimized. A household is disturbed by misalliance, new birth, and departure. Characters compare life in the country with an imagined and yearned-for life in other places. Divisions and boundaries are emphasized. And there is a vigorous use of unseen characters. The dominant unseen figures in The Three Sisters are the sinister Protopopov and the dead father of the Prozorovs; in Desire, the major unseen figures are Maw and Min.

Desire is a play of dialectical opposites. Male and female intermix. The living relate to the dead. The near participates with the far, and the unseen engages the seen. Maw’s high activity in this dialectic makes her a dominant character. Like the “somethin’” perceived by Ephraim, she is “droppin’ off the elums, climbin’ up the roof, sneakin’ down the chimney, pokin’ in the corners.” She pervades. Now beneficent, now destructive; now dead, now eerily alive; now manifested as female, now as male, she is as divided as any of the seen characters.

But how is Maw evoked? How created for the audience? As O’Neill makes clear in his notes on the stage setting, her revelation begins at the rise of the curtain: 

Two enormous elms are on each side of the house. They bend their trailing branches down over the roof. They appear to protect and at the same time subdue. There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption.... They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on [the house’s] roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles.³

Murray Hartman has characterized Maw as a “nature goddess.”⁴ The metaphor is apt: Maw is largely evoked for the audience in combination with natural forces. Carried by heredity, she persists in her son Eben: he incarnates her, ringing the dinner bell as she had once done and then, again in her stead, serving food to his brothers. Eben declares to his brothers “I am Maw,” and tells them how, as he goes about his chores, he senses Maw’s life within him. In Desire’s most powerful scene, Maw fuses with sexual and Oedipal urges, driving Eben and Abbie together.⁵ In this sequence (II.iii), Eben first suffers contact with Maw’s dark, vengeful aspect; then, reacting, he recites a litany of praise. As he chants Maw’s virtues, Abbie joins him, claiming Maw’s qualities for herself, attempting to incarnate the dead woman as Eben does. The scene plays like a Mass for the Dead in reverse, a ritual of resurrection. After this moment in the play, Maw seems to live partly in the darkness within Abbie and partly in the simplicity of Abbie’s child. When this division in Maw’s spirit is resolved, her hard, vengeful side claims the victory: Abbie kills the child. And now, just as Maw’s negativity finds its fullest onstage expression, her polarity reverses: Abbie and Eben discover a new dimension in themselves and go willingly to their punishment. And reverses again: Ephraim, once the slave­driver, is now the slave; he will be bound to the farm, maintaining it as Maw’s shrine.

Maw is also evoked for the audience as onstage characters unpack their memories: her image flickers and mutates as she is filtered through the temperaments and needs of those who remember her. Her stepsons, building courage to leave the farm and start afresh, need to see her as the victim in a melodrama.⁶ Maw was “good t’ everyone,” and their father was and is a slave­driver. They assure themselves that they, like she, are victims. Eben, eager to be rid of his brothers, ratifies this view. When Ephraim, the father, appears, the audience sees Maw through a different filter. To Ephraim, Maw was “soft and simple,” albeit desirable because “purty.” She tried to be hard, but failed at that. In Ephraim’s self-serving view, Maw had limited intelligence and needed leadership; she admired “hardness” but couldn’t achieve it.

Through the figure of Maw, O’Neill is in part exploring the limitations of forgiveness and mercy—an issue that will be re-explored in the unseen and murdered Evelyn of The Iceman Cometh. Maw, presented in Desire as an epitome of kindness and uncomplaining compassion, is also revealed as an immobilizing force. Her sorrowing forgiveness enmeshes like the limbs of elms; her sympathetic tears paralyze and burn. Because she is unseen, she can work through various forces, be seen from a variety of viewpoints—and thus be present to audience consciousness more insistently and in more complexity than could an onstage character. Even Ephraim, a man who has conquered both the land and himself, cannot stand up to Maw, because she is everywhere.

Beyond her uses as a theatrical character, Maw is a symbol, a relatively fixed one. She is the Past; she is the House.⁷ By contrast, Min, the other unseen character in Desire, is symbolically fluid. This prostitute has a past with Ephraim and also a present with Eben. She seems associated with softness and compassion, but charges for her time. Only her place (in the village) is fixed, but that position is itself intermediate between the confines of the farm and the greater world beyond. But how does Min function as a dramatic character? She serves O’Neill’s purposes in five ways. First, she elicits Eben’s sexual needs without diluting Abbie’s impact, as Min would do by appearing onstage in this otherwise all-male cast.⁸ Second, Min foreshadows the Oedipal tensions that Abbie will raise to a crisis: Min, after all, has copulated with father and son. Third, Min elicits Eben’s longing for the kindness that his mother once provided, a yearning that Abbie is able to use for her own purposes. Fourth, O’Neill uses Min to express one of his favorite themes, the tension between illusion and reality. The work of a prostitute is, after all, illusionistic. Further, the audience of Desire is forced to perceive Min as it perceives Maw: through the viewpoints of several men. To these particular men, Min is not quite real. She is a screen onto which they project their yearnings for another life. When Eben, the last of her onstage clients, turns away from fantasy to real passion and concrete plans for the future, Min becomes superfluous and is dropped from the action. Min’s fifth and final function is to echo Desire’s cow imagery. Min is mature and undemanding, warm in a simple way like Josie of A Moon for the Misbegotten and Cybel of The Great God Brown.⁹ Min’s bovine qualities answer to certain elements in Eben, who has been called a “calf,” and who says, in describing an evening with Min, “I begun t’ beller like a calf....”¹⁰

This brief analysis will serve, I hope, to introduce the reader to O’Neill’s ingenious uses of the unseen character, if only in one play. However, we are still to confront two principal questions. What does the unseen character accomplish, for O’Neill, that a seen character would not? And what does its use reveal about O’Neill’s dramaturgy? To find answers, we must consider a number of O’Neill’s works.

At the outset, a researcher must acknowledge that, given the long time-lines and multiple settings of many of O’Neill’s plays, most of his unseen characters could have been brought onto the stage. For example, O’Neill could easily have transformed Gordon Shaw and Marie Brantôme into onstage characters while revising, respectively, Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra. Why did he not? Because O’Neill recognized that Shaw and Brantôme’s theatrical impact would follow not from their deeds in life, but from their persistence after death, i.e., in their manner of limiting, distorting, and haunting the lives of people who survive them. Shaw and Brantôme’s paradoxical presence-in-absence is what makes them dramatically effective. They allow O’Neill to demonstrate how the past is subjected to endless recollection and revision; how the past becomes a stubborn factor in the present. No seen characters could enable this so forcefully.

I should emphasize that not all of O’Neill’s unseen characters emerge from the halls of death. Many, indeed the majority, are living. One of these living offstage figures is found in O’Neill’s earliest play, A Wife for a Life, and many more are found in his later works. The reader will recall Simon and his father in A Touch of the Poet, Rosa Parritt and the offstage bosses of The Iceman Cometh, and various women in Hughie. Some of these are merely plot devices or brief references that amplify an onstage characterization; but many are important for their ability to affect onstage figures. O’Neill uses these characters to demonstrate how certain personalities, though not physically present, can dominate other people.¹¹

O’Neill’s plays also dramatize how people can be haunted by earlier versions of themselves. Perhaps the most vivid example of this is found in A Touch of the Poet. Con Melody yearns so strongly for his younger self that the latter almost becomes a character in the play. Harry Hope of The Iceman Cometh suffers in the same way, as does Mary Tyrone of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The memories conjured by these characters, as they resurrect their former selves, are populated by an array of unseen characters. Failed or incomplete relationships with these ghostly figures intensify the onstage characters’ longing for their earlier years. The pain and futility of their longings would be diluted if O’Neill provided flashbacks in which his seen characters appeared on the stage with important acquaintances and loved ones.

This last point suggests another significant function of the unseen character: its ability to heighten empathy between audience member and onstage character. When an onstage character is haunted by an unseen figure, living or dead, the seen character is relating not to a real person but to the contents of his imagination. The audience members, who also encounter the unseen figure through imagination, are enmeshed in the same psychological activity. Audience members imagine with the onstage characters, picture the unseen with them, suffer with them, and thereby enter more deeply into the life of the play.

“Imagination” is, of course, a key word in understanding why O’Neill, on so many occasions, would favor unseen over seen figures. O’Neill was the inheritor of a theatrical tradition in which the unseen character was a long­standing if neglected device. As a master of theatrical techniques, O’Neill understood that theatre reveals the small to evoke the great, displays the partial to suggest the whole. Unseen characters, because they are evoked by minimal means—mostly through the words of onstage characters—engage the audience in the active imagining that is at the heart of theatre.

Parenthetically, the student of O’Neill must bear in mind that another of O’Neill’s favorite theatrical techniques is mirroring: the sharing of personality traits or life problems among several characters. The unseen character allows O’Neill not only to increase the amplitude of the mirroring in his plays but also to endow that mirroring—in a number of cases— with an unusual mood. For example, the insane Aunt Bessie of Strange Interlude, who partly mirrors Nina, would draw too much attention if brought onstage; or she could damage the mood of the play by provoking laughter. Her evocation as an unseen figure inspires an atmosphere of dread, an enveloping cloud of fear that moves Strange Interlude toward the evocative and religious power of theatre in its primal mode. In like manner and as briefly mentioned above, Min, the offstage prostitute of Desire, would damage the play if she were to appear onstage—and not only by diminishing the impact of Abbie. She would shatter the incompleteness and tension that is created in the first three scenes by having only male characters in view. Also, by being present, Min would disrupt the impression that this little world of the Cabot farm is one from which female tenderness is absent and from which a man might wish to flee. By being remote, unseen, immediately unavailable, Min exerts a powerful attraction and acquires a symbolic charge that her literal presence would not afford. Created in just a few lines of dialogue, she is a telling mirror not only of the dead Maw but also of the sensual Abbie.

Unseen characters also provide O’Neill with a measure of necessary dramatic contrast. In certain of his plays, as in Chekhov’s, characters participate in offstage events that are highly dramatic, these activities underscoring, through contrast, the passivity or paralysis of onstage figures. Unseen characters are often used to be or fill out the casts of these offstage events. In The Iceman Cometh, for example, the despondency of the various alcoholics is set in contrast to the lively street tales brought in by the prostitutes. If these activities, and their unseen participants, were brought onstage, they would of course provide contrast. However, their violent or lurid nature would likely distort the tone of the play and turn contrasts into distractions.

In considering our second question—what the unseen character reveals about O’Neill’s dramaturgy—the reader is referred to a famous passage in which O’Neill expresses objections to the focus of realism:

We have endured too much from the banality of surfaces. We are ashamed of having peeked through so many keyholes, squinting always at heavy, uninspired bodies—the fat facts—with not a nude spirit among them; we have been sick with appearances and are convalescing; we “wipe out and pass on” to some as yet unrealized region where our souls, maddened by loneliness and the ignoble inarticulateness of flesh, are slowly evolving their new language of kinship.¹²

This dissatisfaction, which echoes Chekhov’s, was solved in a Chekhovian manner: O’Neill used the unseen character to attain the unrealized regions. When an onstage character, be it Nina, Hickey or Eben, retreats into a tortured communion with unseen figures, the audience is drawn away from the surface of the performance and set inside the invisible world that O’Neill wishes it to contemplate. O’Neill reinforced this focus, this pointing beyond, through symbolic scenery and a resourceful use of sound and light. The invisible realm into which the audience is invited seems to have a double nature. On the one hand, it is a spiritual space in which cosmic forces are expressed.¹³ But, further, the invisible realm is also the hidden or mysterious part of the human mind. Here, in this zone in which O’Neill was so interested, unseen characters are not so much themselves as they are the conflicts, obsessions, fixations, transformations and devotions of the human personality.¹⁴ Marie Brantôme is not just a woman who once lived in the Mannon home of Mourning Becomes Electra; she is the sexual impulse that, warring with the superego, divides the mind of Lavinia. In Desire, Maw is not just the dead mother of Eben; she is also his tenderness, which he has almost killed in a struggle to survive within his father’s house. Likewise, in Hughie, Erie is in mourning not only for a person who has died, but also for parts of his spirit that time and failure have withered. In A Touch of the Poet, the elder Harford is not just a local rich man; he is the projection of Con Melody’s arrogance. Con Melody calls off his war against Henry Harford when he realizes that the enemy is within him.

The student of O’Neill could observe, finally, that O’Neill’s use of the unseen character is an example of a great artist reaching for the particular technical device that allows him to transmute and formalize emotionally significant moments in his life. O’Neill’s childhood was spent with elusive parents, his mother slipping into morphine dreams and his father departing for theatrical tours. And then, accompanied by Jamie, they eluded him into death. O’Neill said that he could neither face nor feel these losses; but, in his art, he did. Using the unseen character, he infused his plays with the ache of deprivation, the reach to something lost and sorely missed, that cursed his life. Some critics have suggested that the offstage women in O’Neill’s plays represent aspects of O’Neill’s own mother. They are certainly correct, but they do not go far enough. The unseen character itself, the very device, was O’Neill’s transmutation of painful biography.

NOTES

¹ Rudolf Stamm, The Shaping Powers at Work: Fifteen Essays on Poetic Transmutation (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1967): 274.

² Travis Bogard, Countour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford, UP 1988): 199-200.

³ Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms, in Nine Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1941; New York: Modern Library, 1959): 136. Subsequent quotations from the play will be from this edition.

⁴ Murray Hartman, “Desire Under the Elms in the Light of Strindberg’s Influence,” American Literature 33.3 (1961): 365. Wayne Narey calls her a “love goddess” in “Eugene O’Neill’s Attic Spirit: Desire Under the Elms,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 16.1 (1992): 50.