The plays of Eugene O’Neill have proven invaluable both as literature and as teaching tools. In my dramatic literature syllabus, I have included The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones as distinct examples of American Expressionism. In my introductory theatre course, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, his rarely performed drama about miscegenation, was a popular choice for the term paper. Some students studied the violent audience reaction to its 1924 premiere. Others designed sets or costumes for the play. One student examined modern film interpretations of fallen women for her project on Anna Christie, O’Neill’s play about a reformed prostitute.

But the plays have proved most valuable in my American literature classes. We studied The Hairy Ape to discuss labor in America. Students are deeply affected by the prison imagery and the scene on Fifth Avenue, where Yank is invisible to the rich until he interferes with their plans. The play almost teaches itself. Analyzing The Emperor Jones has led to discussions of the African American experience—and that hot new topic, the use of the word “nigger.” Long Day’s Journey Into Night allowed us to consider a powerful depiction of the dysfunctional family, an American literary genre.

This semester immigration was the theme of the independent project in my American literature classes. Students worked in teams on plays that addressed problems of specific ethnic groups. Their selections included FOB, Henry David Hwang’s depiction of Chinese immigrants; Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge about Italian Americans; A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, for African American (im)migration north instead of immigration; Conversations with My Father, Herb Gardener’s tragicomedy about Jewish immigrants; Sarita by Maria Irene Fornes about the Latin experience; and A Touch of the Poet, the story of Major Cornelius Melody and his family who emigrated after he lost his fortune in Ireland.

Their assignment was to identify the specific immigrant experience in each text and then uncover the historical background through research. This trained them as literary detectives and researchers and stimulated a creative, intensive reading of the plays. The project enabled them to understand the immigrant experience as a paradigm, from persecution and privation in the old country, to dreams of freedom and wealth, and the obstacles to success which America itself presented. Often students would tell me about family involvement in the project. The literature became very personal to them.

As the group that read A Touch of the Poet began to study Irish immigration patterns, the play took on a new depth and tone. We had opened the semester by reading “The Declaration of Independence.” The study of Ireland taught them other aspects of colonialism and the ways in which economic and political oppression are transformed into literature. They discovered that Irish emigration was considerable even in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. From 1816 to 1818, over 30,000 Irish immigrated to the United States. Some were comfortable and educated, but most were laborers. Many worked at building canals and later on railroads. So Con Melody’s interest in the expanding railroad takes on an added irony since the contractors would have perceived him as manual labor, not the gentleman investor he imagined himself to be. It was not surprising to learn that many of the immigrants were illiterate; what was surprising was how many did not speak English.

Another surprise was how the Irish sponges must have seen Con Melody. As an American audience, we immediately perceive the squalor of the once­prosperous but neglected tavern Melody purchased from the Yankees with its “flimsy partition ... painted to imitate the old paneled walls [which] ... makes it more of an eyesore.” But in Ireland, the peasants lived in damp, cold and smoky one-room huts, where they reared large broods of children, and where, in some instances, the family pig also slept. Upon their arrival in America, the Irish crowded into tenements, sometimes twenty or more families living in one house. These apartments were hardly more than “human rookeries.” Con, of course, with his memories of Melody Castle, saw himself as fallen upon hard times. But the Irish barflies saw him as a great man with a two-story residence and an endless stock of liquor. His image is not solely dependent upon his speaking eloquently and without a brogue, nor upon his owning a fancy dress uniform and putting on airs, but also because he controls the symbols of prosperity.

I attended a Liberty Fund colloquium on O’Neill with several Irish scholars who were distressed about his depiction of Patch Riley, Dan Roche, and Paddy O’Dowd, the Irish Chorus. The others felt they were vaudeville sketches. It seems there is historical validity for these comic portraits—although they are probably misunderstood by contemporary audiences. The portraits explain, to some extent, Con’s desire to distance himself from his poor brethren. Thus, there is more than self-hatred in his reaction: there is his continual longing for individuation and the fear that he may be absorbed by the stereotype.

This desire for distancing and acceptance through assimilation—coexisting with a pride of heritage—is common to all immigrant groups. It can be found with particular virulence in FOB, Conversations with My Father, and Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West, about African Americans who settled the West. This shock of recognition of shared acculturation patterns offered the students insight into both American history and literature. Many also came to admire the discrete contributions of other groups.

Although the date of Poet is July 1828—just before the Andrew Jackson­John Quincy Adams election—it is hard not to read the play against the enormity of the Great Famine of 1846, when the potato crop failed. Despite extensive remedial measures, almost one million Irish starved to death while another million emigrated to America on what were called “coffin” ships. James O’Neill and his family emigrated soon after the Famine (1850), and the stories of his poverty in America became for his son the story of the Irish, while O’Neill Sr.’s success colored and deepened in the biography of Con Melody. Louis Sheaffer pointed out that for James O’Neill the centuries of English oppression and Irish suffering were “not simply a fact of history but a lasting grievance, a matter of emotional concern” (Son and Playwright 8). The play reverberates with ironies. Sara adopted a peasant cunning to secure Simon even as she usurped Con’s high dream of recreating Melody Castle in America. In addition to the literary twist, there is the historical imperative—that the Irish Catholics would transform Massachusetts into a stronghold, and that Irish intermarriage would become common. In “Immigrants and Identities in the Old South,” Kerby A. Miller found that almost one-quarter of white Southerners identified their ancestry as Irish, although most Irish immigrants settled in the North.

I want to end with a few comments on the brogue in Poet. A repeating motif in O’Neill’s Irish plays is losing the brogue—which, of course, is metonymic for cultural assimilation and a lowering of the barriers to achieving the American Dream. But O’Neill, prescient as always, recognized the collateral damage of the loss. His depiction of James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night illustrated how pride in his Irish heritage gave the father the confidence he needed to succeed as he rose from poverty to become a matinee idol. Con’s love for Nora, who never lost her peasant ways, and the company of his down­and-out exiled countrymen saved him from suicidal despair. This “Ireland of the heart” was their secret weapon and northern star, even as the more outward forms of national identity were being eradicated.