Critics generally praised the opening of “Anna Christie” at the Vanderbilt Theatre on 2 November 1921, but they balked at what they considered a contrived marriage agreement between the heroine and her stoker lover, Mat Burke. The drama editor of The Evening Post, J. Rankin Towse, declared that “At the end of it all the impression remains that what has been witnessed is not a near tragedy of human hearts and real circumstances but the unusual play of adroitly maneuvered stage puppets” (Jiji 74). A couple of weeks later, still referring to the improbability of the last act, Alexander Woollcott of The New York Times added: “We may yet live to see O’Neill write a play in which a crook turns out in the last act to be a detective.” O’Neill challenged his detractors in a letter printed on December 18 in the Times by arguing that audiences had misunderstood his play and that the proposed marriage at the end represented only a pause before a new storm of problems could swell.¹ After this initial outburst, however, O’Neill gradually accepted more responsibility for the unwanted reactions to his work. Although “Anna Christie” enjoyed popular success, had a long run of 177 performances and earned O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize, he began to despise the play and to rank it among his most conventional works. Later in the decade he even tried to exclude it from among his published “representative plays” (Gelb 482).

Defending his play in a letter to George Jean Nathan, O’Neill rationalized Anna’s actions at the end by saying that “in moments of great stress life copies melodrama” (Roberts 44). As a fictional character, however, Anna’s problems become the playwright’s. O’Neill hides behind Anna’s skirts instead of admitting that in moments of great stress in which a playwright does not know how to solve a dramatic problem he resorts to the time proven formulas that will guarantee theatrical success—in this case, melodrama. I agree with the first half of Kurt Eisen’s assessment that “for O’Neill melodrama had become an ideology artistically untenable but psychologically necessary to the art of living” (38); but I would amend the last word to argue that O’Neill, at that time in his career, found melodrama psychologically necessary to the art of playwriting. Melodrama, with its heightened language, physicality and black and white morality, offered a compelling and convenient form for a playwright who must, above all else, portray events. My departure from Eisen’s convincing central thesis that O’Neill uniquely combines melodramatic theatricality with avant-garde novelistic techniques starts with an interpretation of “Anna Christie.” Eisen calls this play an “artistic dead end” (38), while I see it as a momentary stop on the road toward artistic breakthrough. I agree with Walt Whitman that “it is to collect a ten-fold impetus that any halt is made.” O’Neill attempts to transcend nineteenth century melodrama but lacks the means to do it. The surprise ending in “Anna Christie” signifies that failure, but it also anticipates the solution to O’Neill’s dramatic problem that he discovered in his last great masterpieces.²

The salty fable presents two low class characters, a prostitute and a ship’s stoker, who meet on a barge, fall in love, separate, and appear to reunite at play’s end. Anna Christopherson embodies conflicting qualities of youth and age, softness and hardness, innocence and experience, prettiness and plainness, that remain discrete among earlier O’Neill female characters:

She is a tall, blond, fully-developed girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion but now run down in health and plainly showing all the outward evidences of belonging to the world’s oldest profession. Her youthful face is already hard and cynical beneath its layer of makeup. (CP1 968).³

Once aboard the barge and away from the land that defiled her, Anna undergoes a spiritual transformation. The enveloping fog invigorates her and washes her clean again. The water offers freedom and redemption and an opportunity to start life over. This near religious experience prepares her to meet Mat Burke, the prime stoker of a shipwrecked vessel whom she literally fishes out of the sea. For his part, Burke resembles seamen such as Driscoll in Bound East For Cardiff, “a brawny Irishman with the battered features of a prizefighter,” (CP1 188) far more than any autobiographical artistic male familiar to the early O’Neill romances: “He [Burke] is about thirty, in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength. His dark eyes are bloodshot and wild from sleeplessness. The muscles of his arms and shoulders are lumped in knots and bunches, the veins of his forearms stand out like blue cords” (984). An almost instant attraction between Anna and Burke dominates the second half of the action.

Comparisons between O’Neill’s play and a popular melodrama such as La Dame aux Camélias reveal a dramatic shift in the stability of visual signs from the nineteenth-century tradition that O’Neill inherited (a legacy that includes O’Neill’s early plays) and the twentieth-century drama that he created. Both plays feature a “fallen woman” as protagonist and present a triangle of two lovers and a father as central characters. Dumas fils’ play (1852), the story of the demi-monde heroine Marguerite Gautier, a role made famous by Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, is one of the first to deal explicitly with a sexual theme. In both plays, the woman meets a lover who is different from all the other men she has known. In both plays, the woman, too, sacrifices her love. Anna first tells Burke that she can’t marry him and later admits that she’s not good enough, on account of her shameful past, to marry him. In La Dame aux Camélias, the young man’s father, concerned about his son’s reputation and future, visits Marguerite in a crucial scene and implores her to renounce her love for his son. She agrees to send Armand away and in the interim her health, which had been weak from the beginning, possibly due to tuberculosis and certainly a palpable sign of a degenerate lifestyle, takes a turn for the worse. Lovers return in each play, Armand and Burke, but only in “Anna Christie” does the boy get the girl. The so called happy ending of this play subverts the anticipated end that a play such as La Dame aux Camélias fulfills. O’Neill frustrates his audience by failing to produce a body at the end.

MGM versions of the two plays, each starring Greta Garbo, contrast tragic and comic endings. In Camille ⁴ (1936), the final scene begins with the last rites of Marguerite as Armand (Robert Taylor) waits anxiously in her anteroom. Then, upon a signal that he may enter, he rushes to her bedside. There, Garbo, as Marguerite, weak and out of breath, suffers. A tight close-up frames the concluding moments of the film in which Armand vows to take her away to the country where she can rest and regain her strength. She rises in his arms, but that’s as far as she goes. After more protestations of eternal love, Garbo rolls her eyes back in her head to signify death. Armand sobs as the music swells, the camera pulls back, and the movie ends. Born in romanticism, Marguerite’s death brings tears to the most jaded of audience members even today.⁵ Ironically, the good cry and enjoyment of the event stems from a ruthless demand for Marguerite’s death in retribution for past sins. The fable punishes overt sexuality and presents self-sacrifice as a supreme virtue. Woman wins honor by setting her man free.

In Anna Christie (1930) it’s Charles Bickford who wraps his big mitts around Garbo at the end and claims her for his own. Instead of dying in his arms, Anna looks up joyfully into his eyes and the reuniting of the couple suggests that marriage and a new beginning will unfold. John Orlandello points out in O ’Neill on Film, however, that the movie deletes key passages from the play that offset the happy ending and complicate an easy interpretation. One perspicuous omission occurs in Act Four as Anna awaits the return of Burke from his drunken sojourn and tries to explain to her father that no one is responsible for the unhappy state of affairs. Chris begs Anna for forgiveness, but she says to him, “Don’t bawl about it. There ain’t nothing to forgive, anyway. It ain’t your fault, and it ain’t mine, and it ain’t his neither. We’re all poor nuts, and things happen, and we yust get mixed in wrong, that’s all” (1015). Here, in a nutshell, O’Neill conceptualizes notions of tragedy and tragic fate. People don’t know where they’re going, but they struggle nonetheless and the nature of the struggle defines tragic experience. Chris, the third member of the triangle, voices the somber last lines of the play as he looks out to sea: “Fog, fog, fog, all bloody time. You can’t see vhere you vas going, no. Only dat ole davil, sea—she knows!” (1027). If Anna speaks of the regenerative force of water and its power to make her clean again, then Chris speaks of it as dark fate and blind justice that lead to some unknown and unknowable destination.

Unfortunately for O’Neill, and to his great and utter stupefaction, audiences failed to heed Chris’s warning. “Anna Christie” remains an anomaly, “a comedy-in-spite-of-itself” in the words of Travis Bogard (164), precisely because of the gap between what O’Neill intended and what audiences perceived on stage. In The Times, O’Neill lamented his play’s critical failure to satisfy audience expectations:

But granting for the moment the absurdity that the ending is happy, why the objections to it raised on all sides? Have I not been told constantly that gloom is my failing, that I should see the brighter side, that I should grant my helpless human beings their 100 per cent. [sic] right to happiness? Well, in “Anna Christie” haven’t I? You claim I have and yet you will have none of it. You say it is unconvincing. Why? Is it, as I suspect, on moral grounds? Does the idea that two such “disreputable” folk as Anna and Burke are, as you think, going to be happy, disturb your sense of the proper fitness of things in this best of all possible worlds? Or is your reason, as I more than suspect, simply that you prefer the obvious to the inevitable? It would have been so obvious and easy—in the case of this play, conventional even—to have made my last act a tragic one. It could have been done in ten different ways, any one of them superficially right. But looking deep into the hearts of my people, I saw it couldn’t be done. It would not have been true. They were not that kind. They would act in just the silly, immature, compromising way that I have made them act; and I thought that they would appear to others as they do to me, a bit tragically humorous in their vacillating weakness. But evidently not. Evidently they are all happy—and unconvincing. No wonder. Their groping clutch at happiness is taken as a deadly finality.

I speculate that audiences didn’t hear Chris at the end because they literally didn’t see him. In order to show Anna’s transformation, O’Neill draws Mat Burke out of the sea to fall in love with Anna in Act Two. Visually and theatrically, the power of their romance erases all of the subtlety and ambiguity that O’Neill tried to plant in the play. The visual attractiveness of the couple, their sexuality, stories of Anna’s sordid past, Burke’s muscularity and later his drunkenness, the sea and the fog—these captivate audience perception and imagination. Old Chris, so important in the first part of the play, virtually disappears in the wake of colliding sexual passions and the emotional tumult that satisfies demands of great melodrama. The rich theatrics at the end, however, contradict any attempt by the playwright to circumvent typical melodrama. It would be a far more pleasing melodrama if, for example, Anna actually fired the pistol that she wields cavalierly throughout the final act. In such a play, she might even shoot Burke and then herself and then fall over his body in a final tableau. The fact that O’Neill did not write such an ending, but allowed Burke and Anna to embrace and look to the future, is a sure sign that he had something else in mind. The fact that his ending perplexed audiences and critics and that he later agreed with them further indicates that he was not able to achieve the effect that he wanted.

Writing “Anna Christie” created two visual problems for O’Neill. Throughout the play, he had to show the change in Anna’s character within the compact action of dramatic form. Secondly, that action needed to lead to an effective conclusion that corresponded to his own world view and tragic vision. O’Neill attempted to solve this visual problem by knotting two distinct patterns from his early plays into a complex whole. A typical O’Neill romance turns out badly and follows a simple formula. An artist chooses a pretty girl for a mate instead of a career that can sustain him. As a result, the artist’s dreams atrophy, his spirit dissolves over time, and death by suicide or consumption marks the end of the play. The male protagonist shoots himself in Bread and Butter and Abortion (both unproduced), and slits his wrists in Before Breakfast (1916).⁶ In The Personal Equation (unproduced), a father accidentally shoots his son in the head and leaves him brain damaged and in custody of his socialist wife. Robert Mayo dies from consumption in Beyond the Horizon (1920) with arms stretched out to the sky in the company of his long suffering wife and long lost brother. Only The Straw (1921), in a gender reversal, features a woman who suffers from tuberculosis and whose death seems certain at the curtain.⁷

Endings among O’Neill’s several sea plays differ greatly from those of the dramatic romances. While Thirst (1916) resembles the above plays because the female dancer goes mad and dies and the two other castaways aboard the tiny lifeboat fight and feed each other to hungry sharks, O’Neill’s first important play, Bound East for Cardiff (1916), creates an arresting alternative to the melodramatic conclusion. This play details a dying seaman’s life but does not end with his death. Instead, the last moments of the play depict the hard working crew returning to their watch and work on deck. The title poetically suggests what the dramatic action portrays: a ship’s passage shuttling between ports. In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917) and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), the three other one-acts that make up the cycle later produced as S.S. Glencairn (1924), present a communal experience among men at sea. The Moon of the Caribbees, the most innovative of the bunch, is a mood play of light, sound, silence and rhythm that dispenses with plot altogether and does not resort to any sort of stagey conclusion.

Setting, plot, and characterization in “Anna Christie” reveal a hybrid form culled from the two distinct prototypes outlined above. The first act on shore at “Johnny-the-Priest’s” recalls a saloon in which O’Neill himself lived on the lower east side of Manhattan, the same sort of establishment that later became the setting for The Iceman Cometh (1946). Subsequent acts take place on Chris Christopherson’s barge on the water, a vessel that occupies a liminal space in the narrow river channel separating land from sea. Most of the action occurs in the living quarters of Chris’s cabin, replete with kitchen stove and dining table, and creates the atmosphere of an ordinary apartment. At the same time, the sound and rhythm of the water compete with domestic routine.

The stress of Chris Christophersen⁸ , which closed in an out of town tryout in 1920, and “Anna Christie,” a successful revision of the same play, lies on the respective titular characters, one who lives by the sea and in fear of the sea, the other who looks to the sea as a viable means of escape from the land from which she’s come. The earlier version concerns an old seaman who has “swallowed the anchor,” a constant refrain that refers to the fact that Old Chris has stopped living because fear, remorse and regret have overtaken him. The sea, “dat ole davil,” represents an evil fate that he is intent upon avoiding. After having spent most of a lifetime on the open seas, he vows never to sail again and assumes a safe job as captain of a barge. He has kept his daughter, Anna, at a distance from him because he believes that his profession will poison her. She works as a school teacher in Leeds and the action of the play commences when a letter arrives announcing her imminent visit. Reunited with her father, she convinces him to allow her to travel on the barge with him, and once she’s aboard and traveling up the sound, she falls in love with the sea. Unfortunately, their tow ship accidentally cuts the barge loose at night and sets it adrift in dense fog where a large ocean-going vessel runs it down and sinks it. Rescued by the crew, Anna and her father board the big ship headed for South America. Chris recovers some of his old seafaring skills but reacts violently when he sees the first mate, Peter Andersen, courting Anna. He vows to prevent her from marrying any seaman. In one theatrical scene, Chris hovers behind the lovers with drawn blade and murderous intent. Like Chris, Andersen, too, swallowed the anchor by taking an easy job with few responsibilities. Anna, though, breaks through his pathology and inspires him to seek a captain’s chair of his own, a position from which he can assert the prerogative of asking Anna to sail with him. Such mirroring of youth and age stirs Chris to accept their marriage plans and pull up his own anchor and return to a life on the open sea with the acknowledgment that the sea will be his destiny.

Anna is no longer a school teacher from Leeds in the play that bears her name. Instead, she’s come from a farm in Minnesota where she lived among Chris’s relatives. She did not earn a living as a nurse in St. Paul, but as a prostitute, and she comes to New York to stay with her father in the hope of getting some rest because she has been ill. Once aboard the barge, she, too, discovers romance on the sea. The barge in “Anna Christie,” however, does not drift to sea; it anchors on the outer harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Instead of being rescued by the Londonderry, Chris and Anna save a band of sailors who have been shipwrecked for several days. Only one of them, Mat Burke, can still walk, and he replaces Peter Andersen as the love interest for Anna. In the earlier play, Anna’s relationship with Andersen spurred Chris to action and revelation. Andersen possessed qualities to which Chris could only aspire and which made him a very convenient match for Anna: “He is a tall, broad-shouldered, blond young fellow of about twenty-five with a strong-featured, handsome face marred by a self-indulgent mouth continually relaxed in a smile of lazy good humor. His blue eyes, large and intelligent, have a dreamy, absent-minded expression” (CP1 847). While Andersen bears psychological kinship to Old Chris, Mat Burke embodies physical resemblance. He’s not scrubbed and good looking like Peter Andersen, and he’s not a will away from captaining his own boat either. Instead, he’s from the nether world of the engine room in league with the characters whom O’Neill portrayed in his earlier sea plays and very much like Yank Smith in the yet to be written Hairy Ape (1922). Unlike Mildred Douglas in that later play, dressed in white and out of place among the stokers, one who screams and runs from Yank, Anna’s experiences and background draw her to a very unusual romantic hero.

The principal male character in a traditional O’Neill romance looks very much like a self-portrait of the author (Bogard 439). He is an artist by profession, such as John Brown in Bread and Butter, Stephen Murray in The Straw, and David Roylston in Servitude (unproduced), or an artist by temperament, such as Robert Mayo, whose initial description reads: “There is a touch of the poet about him expressed in his high forehead and wide, dark eyes. His features are delicate and refined, leaning to weakness in the mouth and chin” (CP1 573). Copious stage directions portray John Brown similarly, as “an altogether different type from the other members of the family; a finer, more sensitive organization.... His mouth is full lipped and small, almost weak in it’s [sic] general character; his nose straight and thin with the nostrils of the enthusiast. When he experiences any emotion his whole face lights up with it” ( CP1 123). David Roylston, too, “is a tall, slender, dark­haired man of thirty-five with large handsome features, a strong, ironical mouth half-hidden by a black mustache, and keenly-intelligent dark eyes” (CP1 237). Perhaps not coincidentally, O’Neill lavishes the most descriptive attention upon a writer who is a patient at a sanitarium suffering from a slight case of tuberculosis:

Murray is thirty years old—a tall, slender, rather unusual looking fellow with a pale face, sunken under high cheek bones, lined about the eyes and mouth, jaded and worn for one still so young. His intelligent, large hazel eyes have a tired, dispirited expression in repose, but can quicken instantly with a concealment mechanism of mocking, careless humor whenever his inner privacy is threatened. His large mouth aids this process of protection by a quick change from its set apathy to a cheerful grin of cynical good nature. (CP1 732)

Women who love these men fall into two camps. In one stand Maud Steele of Bread and Butter, Ruth from Beyond the Horizon, and Mrs. Rowland from Before Breakfast, young women who gravitate to the exoticism of the artist because he’s different from everyone else. Maud is a “remarkably pretty girl of twenty with great blue eyes, golden brown hair, and small delicate features. Of medium height her figure is lithe and graceful” (CP1 132). Ruth, too, “is a healthy, blonde, out-of-door girl of twenty, with a graceful, slender figure. Her face, though inclined to roundness, is undeniably pretty, its large eyes of a deep blue set off strikingly by the sun-bronzed complexion” (CP1 578). These healthy and “normal” young girls lose their looks over time in their respective plays because they cannot understand the men whom they married. Before Breakfast, an imitative sketch of Strindberg’s The Stronger, focuses on a young woman who berates her offstage husband (whose hand originally belonged to Eugene G. O’Neill!). The physical description of the woman evidences the incompatibility of the marriage:

Mrs. Rowland enters from the bedroom, yawning, her hands still busy putting the finishing touches on a slovenly toilet by sticking hairpins into her hair which is bunched up in a drab-colored mass on top of her round head. She is of medium height and inclined to a shapeless stoutness, accentuated by her formless blue dress, shabby and worn. Her face is characterless, with small regular features and eyes of nondescript blue. There is a pinched expression about her eyes and nose and her weak, spiteful mouth. She is in her early twenties but looks much older. (CP1 391)

Maud’s physical change over time, too, reveals the history of an unhappy relationship: “She is still pretty but has faded, grown prim and hardened, has lines of fretful irritation about her eyes and mouth, and wears the air of one who has been cheated in the game of life and knows it; but will even up the scale by making those around her as wretched as possible” (CP1 166). The effect of time passing in the third act of Beyond the Horizon tells an even sadder story on the face of Ruth:

She has aged horribly. Her pale, deeply lined face has the stony lack of expression of one to whom nothing more can ever happen, whose capacity for emotion has been exhausted. When she speaks her voice is without timbre, low and monotonous. The negligent disorder of her dress, the slovenly arrangement of her hair, now streaked with gray, her muddied shoes run down at the heel, give full evidence of the apathy in which she lives. (CP1 631)

When a “strikingly beautiful” young woman, Mrs. Frazier, intrudes upon writer David Roylston in Servitude and persuades him that his wife, whom he threatens to abandon, loves him incomparably and unconditionally, O’Neill sets his stage for a second type of woman to appear. Not as beautiful nor nearly as dynamic a character as her Ibsenite visitor, Mrs. Roylston nevertheless voices the play’s theme that servitude to her husband has been the source of her great happiness and represents her finest accomplishment in life. The rapprochement that concludes Servitude fails to recur, however, in The Straw. While a patient at a sanitarium, Eileen Carmody encourages down-at-his-heels writer Stephen Murray to pursue his talents. She inspires him, types for him, and falls in love with him. But because she is not beautiful he does not return her love. O’Neill’s description of Eileen contrasts greatly with those of young Maud and Ruth: “Her wavy mass of dark hair is parted in the middle and combed low on her forehead, covering her ears, to a knot at the back of her head. The oval of her face is spoiled by a long, rather heavy, Irish jaw contrasting with the delicacy of her other features” (CP1 729). Rejected by Stephen, Eileen’s health withers and she loses her will to live. To comfort her before she dies, Stephen tells her that he loves her and in that final proclamation he realizes that he does love her and that he truly wants to marry her. The end of the play, however, forecasts this desire as a “hopeless hope,” and Murray’s realization seems to arrive too late to produce a profound change in Eileen’s condition.

Romantic entanglements in the early plays result in youthful folly and lead to dire consequences. To his physically attractive female characters, O’Neill imparts qualities of youth, vanity, materialism, conformity and middle-class values. He lends much more attractive characteristics to less physically attractive characters such as Mrs. Roylston and Eileen Carmody. He displays a kind of puritan sensibility regarding the flesh and the spirit. Youth and fresh looks distract the artist, and woman’s sexuality derails him from his lofty life purpose. Significantly, these unfruitful unions produce no children. Robert’s and Ruth’s only child, Mary, dies in Beyond the Horizon. Robert’s last lines in that play read: “Ruth has suffered—remember, Andy—only through sacrifice—the secret beyond there—[pointing to the horizon] The sun!” (CP1 652). Robert’s reference to the sun evokes an interesting irony. Clearly, the conclusion quotes that of Ibsen’s Ghosts. But while the earlier play created quite a sensation among audiences of its day, and thematically dealt with the effects of old thinking and shopworn ideas and conventional attitudes encrusted upon modern life, particularly regarding sexuality and, even more so, feminine sexuality, O’Neill’s play repudiates sexuality in favor of an ascetic and artistic ideal in the body of the male hero. Robert tries to teach his brother that he must sacrifice in order to love, a variation on the Aeschylean theme that all knowledge comes through suffering. Physically ravaged, supported by wife and brother, Robert’s final stand recalls the romantic death of Marguerite in La Dame aux Camélias. Back on the same section of highway where the play began, Robert again looks past the countryside to the point of desire beyond physical reach, an attempt to struggle past physical limitations. The final tableau creates a visceral, memorable and, most important of all, an unmistakable visual thematic statement. Sexual desire comes to no good end: flesh wears out, but the spirit endures.

Examples from plays preceding “Anna Christie” suggest that O’Neill took great pains to provide visual clarity in terms of character and action. Visual signs remain stable and constant and allow the audience to interpret the plays rather easily. From O’Neill’s copious descriptions alone, it is rather easy to infer character identity. Physical characteristics serve as a useful technique for the writer to reveal hidden inner life and motives of character. Furthermore, repetition of similar patterns reinforces the visual code from play to play.

“Anna Christie” breaks the previous mold and represents O’Neill’s first attempt to mix up the standard visual signs from earlier plays and match them in a unique drama. Anna is the main character, a sexually desirable woman, prostitute, ill, reformable, angry and hurt, tenacious, and vulnerable. Burke is capable of love, passionate, bigger than life, noble, sexy, comic, a far cry from the typical O’Neill hero and nothing like the author’s typical self-representations. Old Chris, too, embodies a multitude of striking and conflicting qualities: guilt, fear, pride, ignorance, humility, pettiness, vengefulness, and tenderness. For the first time, O’Neill creates three fully individuated roles as opposed to one or two roles that satisfy demands of a pre-determined end. The play resonates with living, breathing characters.

Anna’s sweeping visual theatrics, however, upset the balance between herself and Chris, whose only place at the end is to repeat earlier warnings about the sea as fate. While theatrically interesting and compelling, Anna violates the tenets of realism even as she steals focus from Chris. Realism as a theatrical style attempts to show changes in everyday life that occur gradually, almost imperceptibly, over and through time and must often resort to narrative devices in order to tell that which cannot be shown. Articulating problems of dramatic form, Georg Lukács cites a prime example in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (125). Central to the meaning of that play is the effect of past history and time upon the protagonists, Rosmer and Rebecca West. In the crucial scene of reckoning, Rebecca tells Rosmer of the profound changes that have occurred within her soul. She resorts to telling him because she cannot show him, nor can Ibsen show the profound changes that have taken place. The audience must accept or reject Rebecca’s account of these changes as she narrates the events to Rosmer. In order to bring the past into the present moment of the dramatic representation, Ibsen relied upon chiefly narrative techniques. Addressing this same play, Raymond Williams comments:

For what a novel has, and this kind of play has not, is the faculty of commentary and analysis. Even where the action and characters of a novel are presented in a generally naturalistic way, the novelist can at any moment use a different voice, introduce different kinds of evidence, bring in facts other than those communicable in direct or probable speech. (60)

Lukács and Williams cite the impossibility of a particular genre (drama) to achieve a desired style (realism) without borrowing techniques found in the novel. If the subject of realism is everday life, gradual change over an extended period of time is inherently undramatic and “telling” begins to replace “showing.” The story that O’Neill needs to tell in “Anna Christie” does not fit the compactness of dramatic form. The third act, the high point of the play, finds Anna between her father and Burke and produces the moment in which she must clear the air and come clean with who she is and what she has done. Anna describes her fate on land and the cost of having been abandoned by her own father:

Your bunk about the farm being so fine! Didn’t I write you year after year how rotten it was and what a dirty slave them cousins made of me? What’d you care? Nothing! Not even enough to come out and see me! That crazy bull about wanting to keep me away from the sea don’t go down with me!... But one thing I never wrote you. It was one of them cousins that you think is such nice people—the youngest one—Paul—that started me wrong. (Loudly ) It wasn’t none of my fault. I hated him worse’n hell and he knew it. But he was strong—(pointing to Burke )—like you! (1008)

In the quoted speech above, part of a much longer diatribe in which Anna sits her men down and details her life story of abuse and hardship, O’Neill loads an extensive narrative into his play to supply Anna’s past. Still, from the very beginning Anna has left her world in St. Paul behind and the audience can’t see that world. Scenically, the playwright tries to solve the problem of bringing the unseen past into the dramatic present by beginning the play in a seedy tavern. Upon her entrance, Anna speaks a memorable first line that establishes who she is and where she has been: “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby” (968). Her mass of physical contradictions, which O’Neill takes great pains to describe, attempt to prepare the audience for the psychological changes that will follow; but once on boat, Anna’s quick transformation from a hardened girl of the streets to a young maiden in the eyes of Burke defies credibility. The problem with the ending of “Anna Christie” ultimately has less to do with a happy ending than with the dramatic time necessary to produce it.

Responding to the critical charge against the suddenness of the attraction between Anna and Mat and the abruptness of Anna’s transformation, O’Neill subsequently novelizes Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) to develop romantic attractions over time; and the epic length of the plays, whether in nine acts, nine months, or an entire trilogy, creates the illusion of time passing. Narrative elements permeate dramatic structure in these plays. Spoken subtext in Strange Interlude, a chorus of townspeople in Mourning Becomes Electra, and neighboring farmers in Desire Under the Elms serve important narrative functions that make O’Neill’s dramas possible. Passion burns up Eben and Abby, burns out in Nina, and smolders under cover in Lavinia, but the end of these plays of desire features a return to the beginning: Eben and Abby finally assume responsibility for their actions and gaze out at their “purty farm” beyond the horizon; Nina falls into Charlie’s arms, back in the arms of father again; Lavinia goes back inside the Mannon mansion and closes the doors forever.

Repetition motifs, rather than final tableaux of death and dying, create dramatic impact in O’Neill’s mature plays. The novelistic techniques that he employs to tell his stories are not nearly as significant as his discovery of a means to show dramatically that things and events repeat themselves, and that repetition is not merely a neutral fact of life, but a cross to bear. O’Neill works neither toward the exclusion of the individual from society nor the reintegration of that individual back into society. Instead, he dramatizes a continuous struggle to stumble on without a destination in sight. He attempts to write a new form that dodges the classical completeness of comedy and tragedy (ending, typically, in marriage or death), in favor of an “open” ending that remains unresolved, ambiguous and ironic. Dying is easy for O’Neill, but living remains difficult. His conception of tragedy has nothing to do with reaching destinations that a death provides—terminal stopping places—but in recognitions and revelations that humanity never reaches the place of desire. Failure is the only guarantee.

O’Neill’s great plays achieve a form unique to the twentieth-century by showing, in a compressed period of time, that the life-force endures under the pressures of almost unimaginable burdens. A question that remains unanswered even at the end is simply this: How will characters bear such burdens in the future? Cornelius Melody stands bruised and bloody in his red, torn and tattered uniform and reverts back to his thick Irish peasant brogue and says that he’s awakened to his true identity. But how will he bear the loss of his prize mare? Larry Slade’s last line in The Iceman Cometh reads, “Be God, I’m the only real convert to death Hickey made here. From the bottom of my coward’s heart I mean that now!” (CP3 710). The last lines of that play, a stage direction, indicate that “In his chair by the window, Larry stares in front of him, oblivious to their racket” [the cacophony of voices in the bar] (CP3 711). Larry may be ready for death, but how will he live with himself until that day comes? Similarly, in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jim walks away from Josie at the end. He does not die within the action of the play, but Josie says to herself as he leaves her, in the last lines of that play: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace” (CP3 946). The emotional power at the end derives from the simple fact that peace has not yet come.

A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill’s last plays, perfect what he had first tried to do in “Anna Christie.” He narrows his scope and focuses on a single temporal event. The anniversary of Wellington’s great victory at Talavera provides an opportunity for Con Melody to don his glorious uniform again in A Touch of the Poet. The Iceman Cometh centers around the annual return of salesman Hickey to Harry Hope’s saloon. After an innocent beginning, the discovery that Mary’s begun taking dope again colors the rest of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Josie waits for her date with Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten. The titles of the last two plays indicate that the action has been compressed into a single day, and the endings of all these plays share none of the melodramatic finality of earlier plays. O’Neill solves a dramatic problem by hinging his drama on a single event in the future—a celebration, a date with Jim, Hickey’s arrival—and provides simultaneously an occasion (waiting) to reflect on past events. In Long Day’s Journey, the play ends with fog rolling in upon the harbor town once again and enveloping the little house—metaphoric, of course, for the state of Mary’s mental condition, but also for every member of that house, in which the love they share for each other fights with hate, admiration with disgust, affection with disdain. Indeed, all are messed up, it’s nobody’s fault, and they keep going in a direction that they cannot determine, always banging into each other, always hurting each other, mostly unintentionally, but unavoidably. The night will bring a new day and the torments will begin again, as the fog will roll in once more.

The constant strain of repetition makes a comparison between O’Neill and another Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, not as unlikely as it might first appear. Norman Berlind sums up his essay, “The Beckettian O’Neill,” with the following observation: “But what O’Neill and Beckett share most insistently is a nihilistic despair relieved slightly by kinship and fellowship, a vision of life without sustaining illusion, in which mankind is born to suffer ‘for reasons unknown’ [Godot 28B] and in which we hear ‘all the dead voices’ [40B] (34).” At the end of Waiting For Godot, Vladimir asks: “Well? Shall we go?” The stage direction that follows, a repetition of the first act, reads “They do not move”(60B). Beckett couches in the existential stage metaphor what O’Neill portrays in a realistic vein: there is no place to go.

As in Beckett, too, there’s great humor in O’Neill, though seldom the belly-laugh variety. The juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy underscores the life-like conviction of O’Neill’s plays. In “Anna Christie” the romantic comedy comes to an end in the midst of a joke at the end of the play. From the moment of his dramatic rescue from sea at the beginning of the play, woozy head and all, Burke professes love for Anna and claims that she’s the only woman for him. He produces a magnificent proclamation by the end of the act: “Glory be to God, is it holding my arm about your neck you are! Anna! Anna! Sure it’s a sweet name is suited to you.... I’ll be roaring it out like a fog horn over the sea! You’re the girl of the world and we’ll be marrying soon and I don’t care who knows it!” (992). What’s clear from what Burke says is that he’s never seen a “rale woman” before, and by that he means that Anna is not a “cow” or prostitute like all the other females he’s known on the waterfront. An irony is in place, then, but one that reinforces the theme that Anna has already undergone a transformation in her new environment on the water. The “sign” of the prostitute has been erased from her. The fact that Burke cannot see the moral “taint” on her is both the proof of her essential innocence, and sign of her moral transformation, and also the cause for Burke’s doubt of her real love for him. If she does not look like a prostitute, of what can he be sure? He begs Anna to tell him that it is all a lie, that she’s not what she said she was, but Anna refuses to give him that comfort. Finally, in desperation, he admits that he might be able to forgive her if she can swear that he’s the only man she’s ever truly loved. She accedes to this request, but Burke demands that she swear on his rosary. It turns out, comically, that Anna is not Catholic, she’s a Lutheran, and so Burke must take her at her word and accept her as she is: “I was loving you in spite of it all and wanting to be with you, God forgive me, no matter what you are. I’d go mad if I’d not have you! I’d be killing the world— ... If your oath is no proper oath at all, I’ll have to be taking your naked word for it and have you anyway, I’m thinking—I’m needing you that bad!” (1025). In her essay, “O’Neill and Absurdity,” Linda Ben-Zvi emphasizes: “The moment is comic, as O’Neill, aware of the blend of the comic and the tragic in life, intended it to be. However, it also marks the recognition of the impossibility of surety— particularly of religious or iconic surety—in the modern world, a realization that is not so funny and that is at the heart of most absurdist works” (42). The proof that Mat Burke desperately seeks, which can only be found in the finality of death or marriage, eludes him. The ending underscores ambiguity when Burke determines that he has no choice but to act without proof. Forced to act without certainty, the moment of decision hallmarks O’Neill as a twentieth­century writer.

“Anna Christie” is O’Neill’s earliest attempt to integrate this mature vision into a full length drama. Critical reaction to a recent production at the Roundabout Theatre in New York starring Natasha Richardson, Liam Neeson and Rip Torn suggests that a contemporary production can infuse the play with some of the ambiguity that O’Neill intended. John Lahr, concluding a very positive review, said (p. 102) that 

Leveaux [director David Leveaux] elegantly manages the final, controversial “happy ending” in a tableau of proper English irony. As fog billows out over the thrust stage, and the old salt Chris turns away from the new couple to look out to sea, Burke takes hold of Anna’s wrist, but Anna is turned away from him, gazing upstage into a gray horizon.

Leveaux manifests an ending that puts a more overt spin on the last stage direction in the play as Anna and Mat stare at Chris: “From the harbor comes the muffled, mournful wail of steamers’ whistles” (1027). Frank Rich foresaw the future in his glowing review: “Any happiness that attends to Anna, Mat and Chris at the end of this nominal comedy is as ephemeral and illusory as the booze and morphine that anesthetize the tragic protagonists of O’Neill’s late masterpieces” (sec. C: 15). While all of the reviews did not value the production as highly as Rich and Lahr, enough did to validate a serious reconsideration of the play as a part of the American repertory.

The conclusion invites an audience to celebrate the primitive life force that crashes Anna and Mat, land and sea, together without speculating about the permanence of the embrace. Long prior to the inciting moment of the drama—Anna’s arrival—her father abandoned his life on the sea in hopes of beating “dat ole davil.” Chris insisted that his daughter would never marry a seaman and live the seaman’s life, but that resistance to fate condemned Anna to perhaps a far worse life on land. Chris’s pride and joy, his daughter, the one thing untainted in his life, turns out to be the most defiled of all. Worse, the dramatic action of the play ends with Anna in the arms of Burke, another version, perhaps, of her carnal, brutish, and incestuous cousin who enslaved her to a life of prostitution. Both Chris and Mat sign up at the end to work aboard an ocean going vessel called the Londonderry which is set to sail for Cape Town, South Africa. Chris pulls up the anchor, then, to sail away again, and both he and the proposed bridegroom prepare to leave Anna by herself to run the household. Given this scenario, how will Anna manage to fend for herself? Even as characters propose a new union, they reenact old patterns. In light of the great plays that had a similar ending two decades later, it is now possible to look back on that earlier play and see two characters fighting for what they want and what represents their “happiness” and admire their struggle for each other even as they repeat the sins of their fathers and fall prey to a destiny that they cannot foresee and certainly have no will to prevent.⁹

NOTES

¹ In a letter to George Jean Nathan, O’Neill wrote: “The happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten” (Roberts 44). He even thought at one time of calling the play Comma.

² Students in my class, “O’Neill and His Contemporaries,” inspired the occasion and development of my thesis. This essay originally appeared in short form as a paper called “The Happy Ending and the Death of the Romantic Ideal in ‘Anna Christie’,” which I delivered as a panel member of the Eugene O’Neill Society at the American Literature Association conference in San Diego on 1 June 1996. ¹ In a letter to George Jean Nathan, O’Neill wrote: “The happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten” (Roberts 44). He even thought at one time of calling the play Comma.

³ All quotations from O’Neill’s works refer to the 1988 three-volume edition of his Complete Plays. CP1 is the abbreviation for Complete Plays: 1913-1920, CP2 refers to Complete Plays: 1920-1931, and CP3 corresponds to Complete Plays: 1932­1943. References to “Anna Christie” are from the first volume of Complete Plays and will be cited subsequently by page number only.

⁴ The prosaic title resulted from an error by the first English translator of the play in 1853 according to Stephen S. Stanton’s introduction in ‘Camille’ and Other Plays, (1957; New York: Hill and Wang-Mermaid, 1990), xxv.

⁵ See Stanton’s summary: “The latter-day consensus is, in fine, that Camille is the threadbare romanticism of a bygone day and that any grown-up theatregoer would feel ashamed to be caught tolerating it” (xxv). Warm hearts, however, may betray what our cool heads do know. Of Charles Ludlam’s interpretation of Marguerite, in which he appeared in drag with his hairy chest exposed, Steven Samuels reported in the introduction to The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam, (New York: Perennial Library, 1989) that “at every one of the more than 500 performances he gave over seven years, he brought his audiences directly from laughter to tears” (xiv). Ludlam subtitled his adaptation of Camille “A Tearjerker.”

⁶ Dates in parentheses indicate year of first production.

⁷ O’Neill wrote The Straw in 1918-1919, but it premiered at the Greenwich Village Theatre on 10 November 1921, eight days after the opening of “Anna Christie.”

⁸ O’Neill later learned, according to Travis Bogard’s notes, that the proper Swedish spelling of the surname is “Christopherson,” and he made the change when he wrote “Anna Christie” (CP1 1101).

⁹ I am grateful to Professors Raymond McCall and Stephen A. Black, who generously provided comments, suggestions and much needed editorial advice on drafts of this essay.