Since its New York premiere in 1944, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh has elicited a variety of responses, many of which, with the benefit of hindsight, appear to be fairly predictable. Initial reaction to the play tended to focus on its length. (“The main story is meant to have suspense but we are suspended so long we forget all about it,” wrote one reviewer [Bentley 334].) And even those who have more or less appreciated O’Neill’s realistic portrayal of life and all its inherent moral complexity have often criticized his playwriting technique. (Lionel Trilling, for example, referred to the “many failures of his art and thought” [Bloom, Eugene O’Neill 13].)

Critics who left the play’s length alone and focused their reviews/interpretations using a particular paradigm yielded much more constructive critiques. One common theme of Marxist interpretations of the play is the idea that Harry Hope’s bar is representative of some kind of post-revolutionary wasteland where alcohol functions as an equalizer, making pasts irrelevant and futures impossible. It has been posited that Iceman serves as an anti-Marxist tract— after all, the revolution has come and gone and, alas, no one in the bar is content, let alone cheerful. New Historicists have identified the characteristics of 1912 New York, the backdrop of the play—the bustling pre-World War I metropolis, its citizens overseen by politicians governed by graft and its order kept by law-enforcement officials with judgment ruled by bribes and undue personal discretion—so that more modern readers can appreciate O’Neill’s setting. John Henry Raleigh identified protracted nostalgia as both the prevalent theme of the play and the primary reason for the drinkers’ inaction. Cyrus Day explained the religious symbolism at work in the play, describing Iceman as a modern-day reworking of Christ’s parable, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, of the ten virgins who anticipate the bridegroom’s return (five of the virgins are forced to forsake their diligence due to poor planning and are absent from the triumphant event).

Feminist readings of The Iceman Cometh have been quite varied but have focused extensively on the overall negative portrayal of the play’s women. The men by turns classify the women both physically near them and in their nostalgia-prone memories as either noble and virtuous or silly and mischievous, depending on the general thrust of the conversation or whichever portrayal is more conducive to the attitude of the moment. However, a handful of critics (Robert J. Andreach and Rosamond Gilder, to cite two of them) suggest the possibility of a more contemporary feminist interpretation of Iceman by portraying the women in the play as the more moral or ethical characters. I will first attempt to offer a feminist reading of Iceman using the ideas of perhaps the quintessential twentieth-century feminist writer, Simone de Beauvoir, as my basis. After that, I will try to offer a more contemporary, deconstructive feminist interpretation of it, using a more modern lens through which to view the women in—and not in—the play. 

Part One: The Iceman Cometh in Light of Simone de Beauvoir

Despite O’Neill’s own statement that he attempted to write “a play where at the end you feel you know the souls of the seventeen men and women who appear—and the women who don’t appear—as well as if you’d read a play about each of them,” he has come under fire from feminist critics for falling prey to the age-old virgin-whore dichotomy (qtd. in Eisen 60). In fact, O’Neill has been susceptible to feminist ire for decades due to either his (perceived) unwillingness or inability to write a three-dimensional female character. His “virgins” are celebrated, former (often dead) wives or mothers, praised by their one-time husbands or surviving children for their devotion; and his “whores” are very often literally whores. This is precisely the case with the women in The Iceman Cometh: Don Parritt’s incarcerated mother (and more than likely Larry Slade’s one-time lover) and Harry Hope’s and Theodore Hickey’s deceased wives appear, at least at first, to fall into the former category, while Pearl, Margie, and Cora—the only women who appear on-stage—are prostitutes. (There exists the possibility that Cora will “settle down” with Chuck, but the general consensus among the barflies is that that possibility is a slim one at best.) It would appear from this angle that all of the women in Iceman can be rather easily pigeonholed.

In her epic feminist manifesto The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir expressed the idea that in order to give their own existences more meaning, men, as members of the dominant gender throughout human history, spanning both time and place, have a tendency to define women not as human beings in their own right but as not-men. As a result, paternalistic cultures have allowed men not only to dominate women but to define them, thus giving them some measure of creative power and instilling them with a sense of instinctive protection over their creation. For the women who have been, in a sense, re-created by men, it is their destiny to struggle with who they are and who they have been told that they are.

In philosophy as well as in literature, then, to use Beauvoir’s own words, “to pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being” (253). “Woman,” then, becomes something that is not only artificially constructed, but also denied its own autonomy or sovereignty. The concept of “woman” is held in place by actual men who, as authors and perpetrators of a masculinist discourse, then proceed to replace woman in reality with their constructed representation of “woman”—this replacement coming directly against, writes Beauvoir, “the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women” (253). The simulation is given precedence over the actual. (Jean Baudrillard, in his discussion of the modern-day prevalence of simulacra, uses the analogy of the map preceding the territory.) And when actual women have the audacity to break the mold assigned to them, they are labeled “bad women” and/or disregarded.

The molds employed by the men in The Iceman Cometh are classic ones; the male characters identify the females as virgins or whores, the ironic part being that the two labels are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is established early in the play when Willie sings:

“Jack, oh, Jack was a sailor lad
And he came to a tavern for gin.
He rapped and he rapped with a (Rap, rap, rap)
But never a soul seemed in.
He rapped and rapped, and tapped and tapped
Enough to wake the dead
Till he heard a damsel (Rap, rap, rap)
On a window right over his head.
‘Oh, come up,’ she cried, ‘my sailor lad,
and you and I’ll agree,
And I’ll show you the prettiest (Rap, rap, rap)
That ever you did see.’”        (31-32)

Willie’s Jack first identifies the woman in the song as a “damsel,” a term suggestive of her (sexual) purity, who invites young Jack inside for an encounter. And not only does she extend an invitation to Jack, she does so in the context of the song by means of the same onomatopoetic device that Jack uses; which suggests that she is not only compliant with Jack’s wishes and receptive to his needs, she is also just as crude and nonchalant about sex as he is—characteristics one typically looks for in a prostitute. Further, the damsel calls Jack her “sailor lad,” which hints at a maternal attitude on her part. It is important to recognize where these particular words—“damsel,” “my sailor lad,” and her “(Rap, rap, rap)”—appear in the song. They are not placed in an order that prioritizes the woman’s characteristics as a prostitute or temptress, or one that emphasizes her matronly qualities. First, she is a damsel, then a matronly figure, then a sexual co-conspirator. From stanza to stanza she is being reinvented, redefined according to Jack’s—Willie’s—needs at that particular moment.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the term “Other” does not imply that it has a static definition. There may be only two sexes, but Beauvoir’s notion is that what is defined as “Other” is, in fact, a spectrum of categorizations and tags. “Few myths,” she writes, “have been more advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of ‘woman’: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse” (255, single-quotes mine). It is not merely a matter of identifying females as not-males in a biological sense. Implying a multitude of gender differences according to which of those are deemed preferable (the male ones) in a paternalistic society is what gives gender-based bias its true power. This categorization based on preference is central to Beauvoir’s philosophy, and it is this very categorization that allows men (like those in Iceman) to alternatively praise and degrade women.

Obviously, Rocky’s relationship with Pearl and Margie falls into such a dichotomy-filled category. Rocky thinks of himself as an entrepreneur rather than a pimp, and responds violently when an insinuation is made to the contrary. But in order to maintain his business income, he must by turns placate and demean Pearl and Margie. They have an understanding: he does not refer to them as “hookers,” and they do not use the word “pimp.” However, Harry Hope himself is the best example of this alternation. It has been twenty years since his wife Bessie’s death. In all the intervening years he has not once set foot outside the bar, supposedly because he remains racked with grief. Early in the play, only the briefest of mentions of Bessie brings tears to Hope’s eyes:

Mosher: “But you said you couldn’t bear the flat because it was one of those nights when memory brought poor old Bessie back to you.”

Hope (His face instantly becoming long and sad and sentimental—mournfully): “Yes, that’s right boys. I remember now. I could almost see her in every room just as she used to be—and it’s twenty years since she—” (His throat and eyes fill up.) (39)

Later, Hope invokes his wife’s name again when he announces, “Never thought I’d see the day when Harry Hope’s would have tarts rooming in it. What’d Bessie think?” (49). Here she is directly juxtaposed against Pearl, Margie, and Cora—the angel (virgin) against the whores. However, Larry complicates matters by remarking quietly to Don Parritt after the exchange between Mosher (Bessie’s brother) and Hope that “By all accounts, Bessie nagged the hell out of [Hope]” (39). Thereafter, the audience is forced to consider these conflicting reports of Bessie’s treatment of her husband every time she is mentioned in the context of her marriage. When Hope sets her up in contrast to the prostitutes and wonders aloud what she would think, we cannot help but wonder if Hope is romanticizing his relationship with her. The fallacy of nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Another version of the truth surfaces in Act Two, when Mosher and McGloin (Mosher’s best friend) discuss what they perceive as misplaced nostalgia on Hope’s part. McGloin refers to Bessie as a bitch, and Mosher, replying with “a flash of his usual humor—rebukingly,” says that “Dear Bessie wasn’t a bitch. She was a God-damned bitch!” (101). Finally, in Act Three, when expressing his growing frustration with the talkative Hickey, Hope blurts out between drinks, “Close that big clam of yours, Hickey. Bejees, you’re a worse gabber than that nagging bitch, Bessie, was” (151). Bessie’s personality changes as the situation demands, running the gamut from devoted to nagging. She is constantly being reinvented, re-“other”-ized whenever necessary, not only by her former husband but by her brother and even men with whom she had had no significant contact. Because Bessie never physically appears in The Iceman Cometh, we are left with only impressions of her; but those impressions are undependable as bases from which we can construct her true nature. Our idea of what kind of person Bessie was is no clearer by the final curtain than it was at the play’s beginning.

Much feminist criticism of the play has centered on O’Neill’s tendency (not just in Iceman but in his other plays as well) to write women characters who are poorly defined and often “otherized” and categorized. Doris Nelson writes that O’Neill’s “female characters, with few exceptions, are defined only by their biological roles—in other words, by their relationships to the men in their lives. Other than being daughters, wives, mothers, or lovers, [most of O’Neill’s] women have no significant careers” (3). Of course, the women represented in Iceman have careers but, as Nelson is quick to point out, they are careers which are dependent upon the favors and management of men. She goes on to argue that O’Neill’s plays tend to feature men who seek out existential answers but women who are only concerned with things less universally significant: “Men seek the larger goals: the meaning of the universe and man’s place in it; women pursue more personal goals—usually, fulfillment in love” (5). Men depend upon women to fulfill biological roles while they themselves search for answers on intellectual journeys, all the while reinventing the women in their lives as the situation demands in order that they might retain their higher state of prominence. Men exist as subjects, women as domesticized “others” always defined in contrast to the men.

In “Absence as Presence: The Second Sex in The Iceman Cometh,” Bette Mandl speaks to the “otherness” in O’Neill’s play, but in a rather unorthodox way. While identifying the women in the play as generalized “others” who figure rather less than significantly against the backdrop of men’s quests for meaning—“What these women as protagonists in their own dreams might have been like, we can’t know from The Iceman Cometh, because in this work, as in so many others, the women tend to be merely representative of that which men struggle with and against in enacting their destinies” (11)—she also attempts to redefine slightly the role of women in Iceman. While she admits to the invisibility of the play’s most significant women, Bessie Hope and Rosa Parritt, she suggests that the women, specifically these two, function as something else. She cites Don Parritt’s turning his mother over to the police as an act akin to matricide, which “in this context is also the ultimate embodiment of the varying degrees of hostility toward women that find expression throughout the play” (13). She also mentions Hickey’s ambivalence toward his wife, Evelyn—ambivalence that is only revealed in the play’s final moments.

For all of her unique insight, however, Mandl stops short of interpreting these feelings of hatred, these acts of violence, toward women in a paradigm­shattering way. Like so many critics before her, she continues to use Beauvoir’s phraseology in order to interpret Iceman. Employing this paradigm—the idea of the subject/object or “self/other” dichotomy—it is difficult to reach any other interpretation of the play, or of O’Neill, as misogynist. Viewing the play through a different feminist lens, one not prescribed by Simone de Beauvoir or her followers, allows for another kind of reading. In order for that to happen, however, several of Beauvoir’s ideas should be revised or even deconstructed.

More modern feminist thinkers have used Beauvoir as a starting point but have left her limiting paradigm behind. For one thing, she has been accused of ascribing to a kind of phallogocentrism. Her musings quite often seem to unwittingly return to Freud as a touchstone for thought and theory about women vis-à-vis men—a decision that in the twenty-first century should be strongly reconsidered. Beauvoir writes: “Woman can be defined by her consciousness of her own femininity no more satisfactorily than by saying that she is a female, for she acquires this consciousness under circumstances dependent upon the society of which she is a member” (49). While her diagnosis of women’s roles and potential as immanent within the masculinist discourse may be only descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive), it seems clear that she at times employs a masculinist bias. Furthermore, modern thinkers such as Julia Kristeva and many ethnic feminists have attacked Beauvoir’s tendency to extrapolate the experiences of women across the racial and sociological spectra from her own limited experience as a white middle-class woman. Thus, her use of terms like “liberation” and “tradition” may not necessarily be, as she tries to make them, universally applicable. Finally, her term “other” runs the risk of becoming a kind of buzzword, and its overuse serves to stifle consideration of any kind of objective femininity. “Other” has too negative a connotation for many modern critics.

The women in Eugene O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, then, should not be hastily categorized as “others”; such an interpretation is too obvious and quite constricting. Instead, we should view them merely as individuals not represented to the extent that the play’s men are represented. If O’Neill truly wanted to write a play in which we should, as he said, “know the souls of the seventeen men and women who appear—and the women who don’t appear,” then we need to dispense with Beauvoir’s paradigm in order to discover the female souls. Interestingly, if we reorient the women (taking a cue from Derrida) as the primary characters in the play, they emerge as external consciences of the respective men with whom they are associated. The attitude that the men have a tendency to disregard as “bitchiness” or “nagging” becomes something much more positive. 

Part Two: A More (Post)Modern Feminist Reading of the Play

Charles A. Carpenter records that two of O’Neill’s earliest New York playgoing experiences were to see Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1907 and John Synge’s Riders to the Sea in 1911 (par. 11, 18). With respect to how they deal with women characters, these two works are very different. Ibsen’s story of a wife who, after years of patronizing treatment from her husband, finally acts of her own accord, exerts her independence, and leaves him in a state of utter confusion contrasts sharply with Synge’s tale of a mother who has no choice but to watch her sons each, by turns, decide to leave her and go to sea only to meet their deaths seemingly immediately once they get there. Ibsen’s Hedda is her play’s protagonist: every thought and action of hers is on display for the audience as we watch her develop from a childlike, second-class citizen into an autonomous adult. We know little of Synge’s Maurya, however, despite the fact that she occupies the stage for a great deal of the play’s duration. We can only watch her fret and worry as she begs her sons not to leave but all the while knowing that they must leave and what fate they will meet when they do. The fact that Synge’s play is not “about” Maurya, per se, does not mean that she is any less strong a character—a woman —than is Hedda.

That O’Neill’s formative years were influenced to a degree by his exposure to these two plays may lend credence to the idea that O’Neill knew of various ways to depict moral, strong-willed women. While Iceman does not portray any women except the three prostitutes, it mentions others; and although these characters do not appear onstage, we can extrapolate from telling statements by the men with whom they are associated what kind of women they are/ were. The men’s comments about them may be negative or positive depending on the general thrust of a particular episode of reminiscence, but some objective truths about them can also be gathered if the audience looks beyond those comments and if feminist critics of the play do away with their tendency to dismiss the women as “others.” Judith L. Stephens writes of the traditional demon-angel dichotomy and its limitations for women and interpretations of women; she speaks of the need to “trace the persistence of [this] particular limiting pattern of female representation in twentieth-century drama and demonstrate a feminist intervention which challenges further repetition of the pattern” (53). A more complex paradigm is required, one which, if put to use in viewing Iceman, causes the women to emerge as elements more crucial to a fuller understanding of the play than applicants of older theories were able to realize.

Evelyn Hickey loved her husband without regret. Hickey is a traveling salesman who in the past had been prone to what he called “periodicals”— extraordinary drinking episodes with friends and colleagues. He also admitted to being unfaithful to her, even infecting her with venereal disease, which he contracted from a companion while on the road. Despite the myth that Hickey circulates in Hope’s bar by insinuating on numerous occasions that she and the iceman had probably gone for a “roll in de hay,” we know that this is probably more of a projection on Hickey’s part than it is actual truth. Evelyn’s fidelity may not be necessarily certain, but Hickey’s guilt over his own dalliances nags him constantly: “Even when I’d admit things and ask her forgiveness, she’d make excuses for me and defend me against myself,” he says (174). He cannot believe that she would continue to love him and support him despite his lecherous tendencies. Hickey tells the barflies that he got up the courage one day to tell her to leave him for her own good. “’You’d better forget me, Evelyn, for your own sake. I’m no good and never will be. I’m not worthy to wipe your shoes,’” he says to her through his tears (175). She loved Hickey even though he repeatedly cheated on her, making him feel like “such a rotten skunk—her always forgiving me” (177).

It is this guilt which ultimately drives Hickey to insanity. He murders Evelyn because her love was constant. She is the personification of his conscience, always forgiving him when he is sincerely penitent but not relenting in her desire to see him improve on his inability to stand strong against temptation. One gets the notion that she could have left him had she chosen to do so, and in fact Hickey suggested to her many times that she should. Her choice to remain with him was hers and hers alone. It is ironic that Hickey enters the play spouting a “Know thyself”-type maxim and attempting to awaken the men from their pipe dreams while he does not understand his own driving force, guilt, for what it is, and as a result he has created the pipe dream about Evelyn and the iceman in order to mask his inadequacy, infidelity. Her stubbornly increasing love drove his incessantly increasing shame until he reached his breaking point and killed her, remembering her words that “nothing but death could stop my loving you” (176).

Rosa Parritt is a political activist, a woman alienated from her son due to the latter’s belief that she failed to show him the affection and attention he deserved from his mother, especially when he lacked a father. Don annoys Larry by repeatedly trying to force him to be the father he never had. Whether Larry is actually Don’s father makes no difference, especially when Don knows that his mother thought very highly of Larry. “I’m sure she really must have loved you, Larry,” he says. “As much as she could love anyone besides herself” (96). This last bitter phrase is significant because it is indicative of misdirected hate, hate toward his mother and toward Larry. Later, Don admits that Rosa spoiled him when he was a child and grudgingly allows himself to remember that she loved him. This admission comes much too late, however, as he has sold his mother out to the police for a sum of money which he promptly spent on a prostitute. In Act Three the horror of his actions settles into his consciousness and he feels deep regret. Rosa is to Don what Evelyn is to Hickey: a strong, loving woman, yes, but also a ghostly reminder of a horrific mistake.

Finally, Bessie, twenty years dead, is still “nagging.” About her personality we know nothing. Hope recalls her love for him, a love so strong that two decades after her passing he remains unable to bury her. He has not stepped outside the bar in all that time, choosing instead to wallow in self-pity inside the dark, dank back room and drink with his wallowing friends. But Bessie’s presence in his life is still significant: she is “nagging” him, but only to move on with his life rather than drink away whatever is left of it. Hope turns sixty during the course of the play, having spent the last twenty years of his life growing from relatively young to somewhat old while accomplishing nothing. The more Hickey prods him to go on his walk around the ward, the more Hope compares him to his former wife. Bessie is speaking to Hope through Hickey, prompting him to leave his stupor of alcohol-induced and -maintained, self­indulgent, paralyzing pity behind. Even though she is dead, she is a manifestation of his conscience. By endowing Bessie, Rosa, and Evelyn with such power, O’Neill has written three women who are not only “good” women; they supersede anyone else in the play in terms of the morality they possess. What the men perceive as classical feminine nagging is actually the prompting or compunction of their own consciences.

In her book Gynesis: Configuration of Women in Modernity, Alice Jardine identifies several traditional roles as they appear in the classic male-female dichotomy and contribute to the construction of “woman”:

Male		Female
Mind	vs.	Body
Culture	vs.	Nature
Techne	vs.	Physis
Intelligible	vs.	Sensible
Activity	vs.	Passivity
Sun	vs.	Moon
Day	vs.	Night
Father	vs.	Mother
Intellect	vs.	Sentiment
Logos	vs.	Pathos
Form	vs.	Matter
Same	vs.	Other (72)

O’Neill breaks with this tradition in Iceman on several of these contrasts. With the exception of Hickey, none of the men is particularly “active”; on the contrary, if anything, the women’s nagging, at times from beyond the grave, represents their refusal to be passive participants in their husbands’ downfalls. The terms “intelligible,” “intellect,” and “logos” all fail to describe the men. Comparatively, the women appear to be of superior intellect than their male counterparts, and they appear to have greater autonomy than the men as well. If we read/view Iceman without considering Beauvoir as the definitive theorist in feminist thinking, the women in the play are by far the more favorable and positive characters—even though the most important ones do not appear. A more discriminating interpretation than the one mandated by the idea of the “other”—even though that idea may be difficult to forsake—yields a much more positive reading of the play.

WORKS CITED

Andreach, Robert J. “O’Neill’s Women in The Iceman Cometh.” Renascence: A Critical Journal of Letters XVIII.2 (Winter 1966): 89-97.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacrum and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988: 166-184.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.

Bentley, Eric. “Trying to Like O’Neill,” in O’Neill and His Plays, eds. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. New York: New York UP, 1961: 331-345.

Carpenter, Charles A. “Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive Chronology.” Eoneill.com. 1 Dec 2001. (www.eoneill.com/library/essays/carpenter.htm).

Day, Cyrus. “The Iceman and the Bridegroom: Some Observations on the Death of O’Neill’s Salesman.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Iceman Cometh: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. John Henry Raleigh. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968: 79-86.

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Eisen, Kurt. “’The Writing on the Wall’: Novelization and the Critique of History in The Iceman Cometh.” Modern Drama XXXIV.1 (March 1991): 59-73.

Falk, Doris V. Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays. New York: Rutgers UP, 1958.

Gilder, Rosamond. “The Iceman Cometh.” O’Neill and His Plays, eds. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. New York: New York UP: 1961: 203­208. Rpt. of “Each in His Own Way.” Theatre Arts (December 1946).

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Jouve, Nicole Ward. “To Become or Not to Become; or, Must Two Be Second? Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex in Conversation,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Ruth Evans. New York: Manchester UP, 1998: 180-207.

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MacKenzie, Catriona. “A Certain Lack of Symmetry: Beauvoir on Autonomous Agency and Women’s Embodiment,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Ruth Evans. New York: Manchester UP, 1998: 122-158.

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