The repentant courtesan, as James Agate reminds us, was resurrected by scores of playwrights ever since Dumas fils penned the character  of Camille in 1852. If the so-called repentant courtesan was a figure so familiar to the theatrical canon that she could be tossed down the theatrical row, then it was hardly shocking that Eugene O’Neill would, to use Agate’s metaphor, put his dent in the old tin can. After all, one of O’Neill’s very first plays, a one-act called The Web (1913), involved a prostitute character as did several of his later full-length plays (e.g., The Great God Brown, Welded, Ah, Wilderness!, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Long Day’s Journey into Night).¹ As Arthur and Barbara Gelb point out in their biography of O’Neill, “a total of fourteen streetwalkers ply their trade in seven other of his published plays; additional prostitutes figure as offstage characters in another five plays” (126). While much has been written about O’Neill’s fascination with prostitutes, the most common interpretation of O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” is that he recycled the familiar French courtesan plot with an American twist, adding, as Agate put it, “a new milieu, a new setting and something that looks like a new technique to tell us an old and moving story” (532). Most critics agreed with the British reviewer in the Daily Mail, who claimed O’Neill had reinvented the fallen figure “so that this poor lost Anna Christie is not a stock type but a live creature, whose common little woes are for the given hour the all-important.” But was Anna more than a stock type?

If it were true, as Francis Hackett remarked in 1921, that “[a] prostitute to him [O’Neill] has great romantic values,” then it was especially important that this character had to be what Hackett called “the right kind of prostitute” (26). O’Neill’s reinvention of the courtesan figure emerged at a significant cultural moment: just as red light districts in most major American cities were being closed. Perceived as a victory for reformists, the prostitution problem appeared, in the early 1920s, to have been solved. After 1920, as Timothy Gilfoyle has noted, “the public decline of prostitution, with its increasing marginalization, reflected the rise of new institutions of leisure, changing heterosexual relations, and new boundaries of acceptable behavior. New York’s century of prostitution had ended” (315). While commercialized vice had been thought to have been effectively eradicated from the streets, it was still playing on the New York stage, created by the country’s most prominent playwrights.

What is most noteworthy about “Anna Christie,” given the history of censorship of prostitute plays on the New York stage, is that O’Neill achieved a kind of strange respectability by garnering the Pulitzer Prize for the 1921­22 season. Yet, unlike Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw’s great play about prostitution that was shut down for obscenity in 1905 in New York, or Eugene Walter’s The Easiest Way, a tale about an actress turned prostitute that was banned in Boston in 1911, “Anna Christie” not only escaped the attention of New York censors, but also captured one of the most legitimating prizes in the theater.² By 1921, the prostitute play had captured an uncannily respectable presence in mainstream theater.

As Sheila Hickey Garvey has shown, Anna Christie is “one of the most poignant of dramatic literature’s ‘fallen women,’” a character who has followed in the footsteps of countless courtesan figures that harken back at least to Camille (68). While “Anna Christie” is unique in being one of the first prostitute plays on Broadway in which the courtesan or fallen woman figure does not suffer some kind of negative ending, whether it be death (Camille, Olympe), societal scorn (The Deluge, The Easiest Way) or personal loss (Sapho and Mrs Warren’s Profession), the play offers a mixed dramaturgical victory. In clarifying Anna Christie’s position within the rather long history of staging the prostitute, I shall focus on two points. First, although O’Neill does create a kind of “sentimental sympathy for whores,” as the Gelbs put it (127), by breaking away from the tragedy of Camille-like narratives, he does so by recycling the “old tin can” of dramaturgy in prostitute plays. Though I arrive at my conclusions by different means, I quite agree with Zander Brietzke’s assessment of “Anna Christie” when he writes, “O’Neill attempts to transcend nineteenth-century melodrama but lacks the means to do it” (44). Second, part of what made “Anna Christie” palatable to New York audiences was the curious response to actress Pauline Lord’s unconventional looks. Coupled with Lord’s positioning of herself as naive and respectable, Anna’s character was ghosted, to use Marvin Carlson’s term, by a kind of innocence that rendered her non-threatening.

With these two points in mind, I argue that the mainstream acceptance of “Anna Christie” echoed the containment of the prostitute figure in the Progressive Era. Anna is, in fact, the embodiment of reform. That the play garnered the Pulitzer signals not just that Anna is a “repentant courtesan,” as Agate would have it, but more so a reformed prostitute. She is not Kitty Warren, who proudly defends her profession, nor is she a hooker with a heart of gold, nor merely a victim of desperate circumstances. The centrifugal force of Anna’s story spins toward what Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick call “the force field of the marital proscenium” (11). Such a story made great sense to Progressive reformers in what we might call the zenith of their work in 1921, when the battle against prostitution appeared to have been won.

But the question still remains: at what price does this reform come? In the early twentieth century, there was significant slippage between women who worked the counter and those who worked the street. As Barbara Meil Hobson’s research reveals, many women supplemented their jobs with part­time prostitution or hooked for a short period, rather than devoting their lives to it. What is striking, then, is the repeated effort in the theater, just as in popular culture, to fossilize the fluid nature of this work to mark indelibly prostitutes as separate from their salvation sisters. In “Anna Christie” we see a similar slide from working girl to whore in the development of Anna’s character. As originally written in an earlier version called Chris Christophersen (often called Chris by critics and O’Neill himself), Anna was “a respectable British typist,” as Travis Bogard notes, “whose greatest oath was ‘By jimminy,’ and who eagerly refreshed herself after the fatigues of an Atlantic crossing with a cup of her father’s tea.”³ In the change “from typist to trollop” in the development of the script, “Anna’s decline and fall was as rapid as it was remarkable” (152).

Initially, it may appear that as a typist, Anna had more independence than her harlot counterpart. For instance, in Chris, rather than being defeated by life experience, Anna arrives with a sense of optimism about being a career girl: “I dreamed of the big opportunities for a woman over here in America,” she says (825). Chris’s Anna needn’t turn to the brothel because she can make a living as a typist. Like many women who were then entering the work force, this earlier Anna can make “enough to live on my own and be myself,” as she puts it (824). This Anna is also not dependent on her father, but rather intends to support him. She remarks: “There’ll be no excuse for you keeping this position, once I’m at work. [. . .] It’s time you had a good rest. Let me do the working from now on” (828). Chris convinces Anna to wait to look for work until after a voyage at sea, and once Anna gets a taste of the sea and fog, she is hooked for good. Yet, in spite of Anna’s initial independence in Chris, her character soon loses interest in work. When Chris suggests she resume her “yob” when they return inland, Anna replies, “All those things, all my plans seem so far away now—and dead!” (837). Later, she repeats this to Andersen (the former incarnation of Mat Burke): “But they [her old plans and dreams] seemed too dreadful—and stupid—and such a waste of life” (879).

While in Chris Christophersen Anna appears as a tea-sipping typist, in “Anna Christie” she is streetwise and much stronger for it. In locating the character on this side of the Atlantic (rather than having arrived from London) and the other side of the underworld, O’Neill not only creates a compelling native character, but also does so by using the gritty Tenderloin—like many writers of the day—to authenticate her. Because the revised Anna has experienced more than her share of trauma (rape by her Minnesota cousins, prostitution, and illness) she also has more depth. Consequently, the lead character in “Anna Christie” has more interesting things to say than her prototype in Chris (such as the rather banal “I’m a full-fledged typist now, Father” [823]). O’Neill, like other playwrights before him, realized that prim stenographers make less interesting subjects than their brothel sisters.

In “Anna Christie,” from her first entrance, Anna is portrayed as an independent, though exhausted and rough-edged, woman. In Act 1, fresh from medical prison to visit her long-lost father, Anna enters a waterfront saloon, uttering the lines made memorable by Garbo in the 1930 film version (they were her first spoken lines on celluloid): “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby” (968).⁴ Here, Anna meets Marthy, described by one critic as “the drink-soaked mistress of [Chris’s] domicile” (“‘Anna Christie’ Has Its Premiere at Vanderbilt”). The same critic dubbed this setting, complete with the separate ladies’ entrance that likely borrowed from Belasco’s staging of Salvation Nell in 1908, as “the acme of realism.” Designed by Robert Edmond Jones, the ladies’ section of a bar is, in short, a perfect setting for two fallen women to meet and discuss their lives. In this scene, Anna comes across unlike previous prostitute figures on the stage. Rather than expressing love or dependence on men, as was common for the repentant courtesan prototype, she instead reveals her bitter hatred of them:

It was all men’s fault—the whole business. It was men on the farm ordering and beating me—and giving me the wrong start. Then I was a nurse, it was men again hanging around, bothering me, trying to see what they could get. (She gives a hard laugh.) And now it’s men all the time. Gawd, I hate ‘em all, every mother’s son of ‘em! Don’t you? (972-73)

However, Anna’s rage is quickly checked by Marthy, who responds more temperately with, “Oh, I dunno. There’s good ones and bad ones, kid. You’ve just had a run of bad luck with ‘em, that’s all. Your Old Man, now—old Chris— he’s a good one” (973). As Ann Hall points out, Marthy functions as a defender of patriarchy, “someone to rescue it and Anna from anti-male sentiments” (177).

Just as female anger can only take up a small amount of dramaturgical space, so too Marthy and Anna are given only a brief scene together. In Chris Christophersen this bar scene was originally written as a conversation between Chris’s sailor friends, and Marthy and Anna exchange just one or two lines. In “Anna Christie,” however, the two women have a meaningful, if short conversation about “the life” from their differing perspectives as wizened sea hag and worn-out twenty-something prostitute. Yet, like other dramatists who featured scenes with prostitutes (Eugene Walter and Edward Sheldon, for instance), O’Neill is less interested in creating lengthy scenes between two women of the streets than those in which the women interact with the men in her lives.⁵ Marthy therefore makes her exit just as Chris arrives, allowing the action to center on the triangular relationship between the principal characters: Anna, Chris, and Mat Burke.

Critics have pointed out Anna’s independence, and her “surprisingly militant assertion[s] of feminism,” as Barbara Voglino has claimed (37). In many respects, this is true. Anna’s wrath at patriarchy erupts most powerfully in Act 3, after Mat and Chris fight over possessing her. As Mat tells Chris, “She’ll do what I say! You’ve had your hold on her long enough. It’s my turn now” (1006). Upon hearing this, Anna stops their brawl by laughing wildly and exclaiming:

You’re just like all the rest of them—you two! Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture! [. . .] You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?—‘cepting myself. I’ll do what I please and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do! I ain’t asking either of you for a living. I can make it myself—one way or another. I’m my own boss. So put that in your pipe and smoke it! (1007)

Anna’s speech, and its feminist insight into men’s desire to own her, was not lost on critic Maida Castellun of the New York Call, who described the scene as follows: “an electric thrill passed through the audience. It was like an echo of Nora in The Doll’s House—this cry that she, who had sold herself many times, at least would not be ‘owned’ by any man.” Percy Hammond lauded this monologue as “a fine speech with a wallop in every syllable, spoken in the racy lingo and flat monotonous tones of the Minnesota underworld, by a desperate, forthright, forlorn and reluctant practitioner of sin.” And Ernest Boyd of the Freeman praised both the writing and the acting: “This third act is one of the most effective pieces of dramatic writing I have seen in the modern theatre, and Miss Pauline Lord rises to the situation with the art of a great actress.” Anna’s monologue is indeed an important moment in the landscape of representing prostitution in American drama, showing a strong woman who is her “own boss,” as she herself puts it. Unfortunately, however, Anna too quickly gives up her anger and independence and, unlike Nora, does not walk out of the door. After her “frenzy of disgust,” as Boyd called it, it is the men who walk out to bury their burden in drink, leaving Anna alone. As Hall notes, “any resistance to convention is suppressed by the heterosexual happy ending,” though this was not O’Neill’s intention (172). In spite of O’Neill’s desires to have the ending function like a comma in a larger sentence yet to be completed, his dramaturgical grammar was riddled with syntax problems. Brenda Murphy writes, “O’Neill had not yet found a away to take his audience beyond the introductory clause and into the larger rhythm of the sentence” (119).

This brings us to the problematic fourth act. While the majority of reviews from the original production called “Anna Christie” a success, most also agreed that the last act was “full of bogus things” (Woollcott 1). As the reviewer for the Dial put it, the end of Act 3 “is where good plays end. This one goes on to a so-called happy conclusion” (C. S. 725). Another review likewise criticized “that wretched and illogical last act,” faulting it for “the Broadway happy ending taint,” claiming “the last act was quite unworthy of O’Neill and sounded as though it had been evolved in a Broadway manager’s office” (“ ‘Anna Christie’ Has Its Premiere”). Robert Benchley of Life mused, “The author would have done well to put that fourth act in an open boat with food and water for three days and turn it out into the sea off Provincetown before sending the play into New York” (18). Maida Castellun wrote that O’Neill nearly missed writing a great play, having butchered the ending: “Such an ending to such a beginning is tragic beyond expression. It is worse than a blunder. It is a crime against artistic truth as well as against life.” American critics were not alone in the denunciation of the last act. As G. H. Mair of the Evening Standard put it, “‘Anna Christie’ had no business to have a happy ending any more than King Lear.” Indeed, the last act seemed so dispensable that when the script was reprinted in Theatre Magazine in 1922, the editors simply summarized the final act in a paragraph.⁶ As the performance history of “Anna Christie” suggests, the play encountered a modest success, running 177 performances at the Vanderbilt Theatre. In fact, O’Neill considered “Anna Christie” one of his failures and resisted publishers’ efforts to include it in a collection of his plays.

Some critics, like James Agate of London’s Saturday Review, disagreed: “Happy endings are not necessarily bad art. This play called for a happy ending, though perhaps not in the particular manner devised by Mr. O’Neill.”Agate stressed that “If Anna had not been taken to her lover’s arms at the end, I believe that every member of that crowded audience would have left the theatre in genuine distress” (532). Francis Hackett agreed that it was necessary for O’Neill to “cheat” with the inferior fourth act with its “somewhat inglorious happy ending” (26).

While much has been written about the “inexcusably banal” ending, as one reviewer put it (Castellun), I wish to interpret it somewhat differently. What is problematic with the “unsatisfactory last act,” as Walter Prichard Eaton called it (425), is not just that it offers contrived dramaturgical closure, but rather that it relies so extensively on Anna’s submission to patriarchal authority. That the play revolves around the men in Anna’s life is hardly surprising. We must remember that this is a story that was not originally about Anna at all, but rather her father. As Bogard notes, O’Neill “reluctantly gave up the old man as the central figure” as Anna assumed more dramaturgical importance (153). What intrigues me is not that the fourth act resorts to anti-climax, but rather that the climax and denouement are negotiated by the men in Anna’s life. As Boyd observed: “Anna Christie becomes a mere bone of selfish contention over which these two animals snarl and fight” (304). She is an object of exchange between men, to use Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick’s words. Indeed, Pauline Lord, the actress who originated the role, observed, “her situation is both touching and dreadful, between those two ranting self­centered men who never think of anything but their own feelings” (37).⁷ In the final scene, Mat appears back at the boat, drunk and with “an expression in his eyes of wild mental turmoil, of impotent animal rage baffled by its own abject misery.” He announces, “’tis well you know I’d have a right to come back and murder you” (1017). Of course, the threat to murder fallen women was hardly new (in fact, whores regularly died on stage, just as they did in real life, at the hands of lovers or johns). Mat has already threatened to kill her in the previous act, shrieking, “You slut, you, I’ll be killing you now!” (1010). The audience had to wonder whether Anna would indeed meet the fate of her tragic courtesan predecessors.

One surprising twist in the action is that when Mat returns, Anna confronts him with a gun and a cold, callous tone, asking, “What are you doing here?” (1018). In spite of this potentially powerful moment, Anna’s credibility is dubious, given that there are so few female predecessors in drama who have ever wielded a weapon against a man (Hedda uses it on herself, after all). Castellun saw through this contrived moment, writing, “The pistol which was dragged into the last act was merely a stage toy.” And Alexander Woollcott wrote that Anna “brandish[ed] a revolver for no other conceivable purpose than that of jouncing the nervous playgoer into a state of receptive agitation” (qtd. in Houchin 30). Tellingly, the gun is missing altogether from the 1930 film version. If this was (and is) a world in which men kill fallen women (the shocking pistol scene in Olympe is just one example), it is no less true in the drama when O’Neill was writing. Mat’s threatening of Anna, surely a kind of violence that many prostitutes and other women suffered at the hand of their lovers, is quickly forgiven by all characters in the play, including Anna. After just a few lines of dialogue she gives in, “letting the revolver drop to the floor, as if her fingers had no strength to hold it” (1018-19). The gun, defying Chekhov’s old rule, slips into oblivion, as the action revolves around the question of Anna’s true love for Mat. If Anna loved only Mat, he says, then he could absolve her: “If I was believing—that you’d never had love for any other man in the world but me—I could be forgetting the rest, maybe” (1023).

At this point in the drama, Anna’s character assumes some characteristics of what Lesley Ferris calls “the penitent whore.” This courtesan figure must not only recant her previous sins, but also suffer, often by sacrificing her desires to the needs of patriarchal authority, leading usually to death. Such a narrative, Ferris writes, “rewards and celebrates such self-sacrifice” (92). Just like Camille, Anna must prove that her love is “pure,” not something to be bought and paid for (though unlike Camille, she will not die). The play hinges, in other words, on whether Anna can be recuperated—and in a sense become “virginal” again, as Gary A. Vena maintains—by her love for Mat (133). Anna demonstrates her unequivocal love by swearing “a terrible, fearful oath” on Mat’s crucifix (1023). Only then does Mat believe her, even after discovering that Anna is not Catholic and that he will “have to be taking [Anna’s] naked word for it” (1025). Anna is thus “redeemed by the purity of her love for him,” as the reviewer for Variety noted, cleansed not only by the fog, but more importantly, by her lover’s forgiveness (“Anna Christie”). Anna’s “gesture of humility with which, at the end, she abased her head before her lover,” Agate observed, “was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen” (533). This one-sided repentance—or, to use Agate’s words, abasement—is noteworthy, for Mat does not swear upon the Bible, even though he has frequented not too few port-side brothels himself. I therefore disagree with Ann Hall’s interpretation that Anna wants Mat on her own terms and that Mat must make compromises as well. This dramaturgical framing requires female repentance, a redemption that only the whore undergoes. As Sheila Garvey points out, Mat’s “eventual absolution of her past life brings a punishment, however. He will marry her but she must understand that he will be gone for years at a time, living the ‘life of a sailor’” (69). While Anna’s future is dubious at best, it’s not punishment but rather penance that characterizes her journey and this atonement is not constituted by being left alone, but rather by being ensnared in the “inevitable—if overworked—comedic conclusion” of marriage (Voglino 38).⁸

What follows is a kind of “superstitious dread,” as O’Neill put it (Gelb 481), not only because of the old devil sea, but also because Anna and Mat’s union is framed, if not eclipsed, by Chris and Mat’s feuding relationship. Feminist film critic Molly Haskell’s description of “the old romance in a new bottle” to describe the intense relationships between men on film (epitomized by Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) may best explain the stormy relationship between Mat and Chris (187). Although we are quite used to recognizing this “buddy bond,” or what Sharon Willis has identified as “homoerotics embedded in the male adversaries’ struggle” in American film, I’d like to use this term to examine the tumultuous and strange relationship between Chris and Mat (57). While on the surface “Anna Christie” is about the two heterosexual lovers (Anna and Mat), the play in fact portrays a love triangle in which the buddy bond between Chris and Mat factors prominently. For if it is true, as Doris Nelson has written, that O’Neill’s “female characters, with few exceptions, are defined only by their biological roles—in other words, by their relations to the men in their lives,” then it is extremely clear in “Anna Christie’s” final scene (3). Directly after Anna and Mat reconcile, Chris stumbles back into the room. Mat “takes a step toward Chris threateningly,” but Anna says significantly, “it’s about time for you and Mat to kiss and make up” (1025). The drama cannot conclude, in other words, before the men in the story reconcile. What’s more, both men, unbeknownst to each other, have signed up as shipmates on the same vessel, which soon sets sail for a long journey at sea. While Anna is destined to wait alone on shore, it appears as if the two men will have a honeymoon. Anna therefore resumes the role of a typical woman whose man (men) belong to the sea, claiming, “And as for me being alone, that runs in the family, and I’ll get used to it. I’ll get a little house somewhere and I’ll make a regular place for you two to come back to,—wait and see. And now you drink up and be friends” (1025-26). This peculiar closure is even remarked upon by Chris in the final few lines of the play: “It’s funny. It’s queer, yes—you and me shipping on same boat dat vay. It ain’t right” (1026). And it isn’t right—not only because it is a queer kind of happy end (in both senses of that term), but also because it first requires Anna’s repentance and reformation to respectability.

But why, precisely, was O’Neill invested in respectability? O’Neill never intended the trope of purity to factor so prominently with Anna’s character. In response to winning the Pulitzer for “Anna Christie” O’Neill commented, “When the Police Dept. isn’t pinning the Obscenity Medal on my Hairy Ape chest, why, then it’s Columbia adorning the brazen bosom of Anna with the Cross of Purity. I begin to feel that there is either something all wrong with me or something all right. . . . ‘It’s a mad world, my masters!’” (qtd. in Gelb 508). Yet, critical reception reveals that audiences did seize upon the “cross of purity,” unable to shake the old repentant courtesan theme. While O’Neill introduced some innovative aspects to the characterization of a prostitute, “Anna Christie’s” commercial success,” noted Variety in 1921, “will depend upon whether the public is prepared to accept a heroine who is a graduate from a brothel” (“Anna Christie”). By all accounts, they did accept her, as Agate observed: “we know from the actress’s face that Anna is no essential prostitute . . .” (532).

If “Anna Christie’s” commercial success depended upon whether audiences embraced this prostitute character, as the Variety quote posited, it depended equally on the actress’s ability to appeal to audiences. Key in understanding how Anna was perceived were Pauline Lord’s acting style, body performativity, and her efforts to construct a respectable public persona (see photograph). As Ronald Wainscott has noted, “It was Lord’s interpretation of Anna, however, which stamped this production with unusual power” (101). Indeed Pauline Lord made her mark with the role of Anna, achieving new heights in naturalistic acting. The Independent’s Robert Allerton Parker wrote that Pauline Lord was “the ideal interpreter” of the role, reminiscent of “great continental actresses” (236). Robert Benchley of Life Magazine likewise praised Lord’s acting, writing: “Every once in a while Pauline Lord comes along and shows us what real acting is like” (18).

Not surprisingly, reviewers compared Lord’s Anna to another reformed figure: Fiske’s charwoman from Salvation Nell (1908). Kenneth Macgowan of Vogue Magazine commented: “Miss Lord’s ‘Anna Christie’ is the most perfect piece of naturalism I have ever seen on the American stage. Mrs. Fiske’s Salvation Nell comes no where near it in the suggestion of reality.” Macgowan repeated this observation in Theatre Arts Magazine: “she plays this particular role as no other American actress of a generation has played anything remotely approaching it. I do not forget Mrs. Fiske in Salvation Nell” (6). This comparison was not accidental. Associating these two actresses made great sense given that both characters—and, both plays—shared the interconnected themes of prostitution and salvation. What is most interesting about these reviews is that they situate Mrs. Fiske’s acting style against Lord’s, thirteen years later. Of course, Fiske’s role was legendary, one to rival. But I believe that the press was getting at something else: a shift in acting iconography.

One noticeable aspect of this shift can be seen in how the press characterized Lord as “plain.” British reviewer Sydney W. Carroll, for instance, called Lord an actress “with a homely face . . . and a liberal supply of Yankee technique.” What interests me here is not Carroll’s derision of Lord’s “Yankee” acting style, but rather his description of Lord as “homely.” Other reviewers also noted Lord’s plain features, like May Herschel Clarke of the Picture Show, who wrote bluntly:

Pauline Lord is not a beautiful woman, or a handsome woman, or even a pretty woman. She is undeniably what her countrymen call “homely.” All the critics have said so, she has remarked the same thing herself— thousands of times. And it is true. (20)

Lord herself commented that she did not have conventional goods looks. In one interview, she remarked: “‘I am not at all sure that I am suited to film work. You see’—and here she smiled a little—‘I am not good looking, not pretty’” (qtd. in Clarke 20). As Lord tells the story, O’Neill wrote “Anna Christie” “with a different girl in mind. She was to be big, with magnificent hair . . . an Olympian beauty.” Lord added, “I am not exactly that way. . . . She was to be a goddess of the flesh, of deep bosomed strength and golden hair. I couldn’t manage that” (Lord 36). The Gelbs describe Lord as anything but an Olympian goddess: “thirty-one, delicate, almost fragile, with a tiny waist, small hands and feet, a pale oval face, and tragic brown eyes” (476-477). In fact, O’Neill was not initially happy with Lord cast in the role, according to Nelda Balch (558), although the Gelbs report that he was ultimately “delighted with her” (477). In another interview, Lord described how she compensated for her appearance:

I wasn’t the type wanted to fill the big leading parts, I wasn’t very beautiful . . . and I had no physique worth speaking about. . . . So I had to work hard to make up for all my deficiencies. . . . My advice to young actresses setting out on the same road is: “Study and work hard, and above all, be yourself.” (“Her Big Effort”)

Another review underscores this point: “She has learned her business as an actress, and has been compelled to, for she cannot rely on good looks in a conventional way” (Baughan).

Whether Pauline Lord was beautiful or not is less interesting to me than why there was so much discourse about her looks, especially by Lord herself. It seems apparent, as Margaret Ranald has observed, “As an actress, she is said to have lacked self-confidence” (390). What is to be gained by interrogating beauty, by denouncing beauty, by rejecting one’s “to-be-looked­at-ness” in a profession that has always placed women center stage as visual spectacles?⁹ One answer is that Lord’s unconventional looks freed her from some of the traps of representation in which many other actresses found themselves. For an actress playing a prostitute, this freedom worked surprisingly well. Unlike Olga Nethersole, whose sexuality was explosive— and thus needed to be contained—Lord’s plainness subdued the role of Anna. Just as Mrs. Leslie Carter’s maternal body type worked against Zaza’s sultry character, so too Pauline Lord’s “homeliness” diffused the potential for unchecked female sexuality (she was playing a prostitute, after all).¹⁰ Instead of being read as a fetish, Lord could be taken seriously as an actress.

And Lord did take her work seriously as an actress. As part of her research for the role of Anna, she ventured into the red light district. Just as Mrs. Leslie Carter researched French music hall actresses for her role of Zaza, so too Lord observed real prostitutes on 10th Avenue. As she put it, “I thought I ought to meet some of these women and find out what they are like” (Lord 37). Lord’s research was not unlike the work of Progressive Era citizens, who relentlessly sought to understand the workings of the underworld. What is especially intriguing is how Lord spun her research, acting choices, and public personae, as respectable even while immersed in the underworld. After interviewing prostitutes while researching the role of Anna, Lord eventually “modeled the character on a department store clerk who waited on her and who projected a ‘beaten soul . . . tired to death’” (Balch 560). Why a shop girl, we might ask, and not a prostitute? In early twentieth-century American culture, the shop girl signified ambiguously as one who might work either (or both) sides of the counter. Lord’s choice to model Anna on a shop girl suggests a desire to distance herself from prostitution proper.

In fact, Lord consciously downplayed her investment in playing a prostitute both on and off the stage. This was especially important, for Lord had previously played the role of a prostitute in the doomed production of The Deluge in 1917.¹¹ Actresses regularly represented themselves as conforming to middle-class notions of domesticity and ideal womanhood in the nineteenth century, as Mary Jean Corbett has shown in her study of Victorian and Edwardian actresses. While that kind of identity construction was not uncommon then, what is unusual here is that Lord works so hard to distance herself from the stigma of performing prostitution well into the 1920s. In one interview, for instance, Lord revealed that she was shocked when she first read O’Neill’s script: “and even now there are times when I feel I must run into a corner and hide my face at the thought of portraying such a character. Especially when I see some venerable lady in the stalls” (qtd. in Clarke 20). With this remark, Lord not only consciously infantilizes herself; she also suggests her affinity with esteemed women, the very benchmark for respectability (even for theaters themselves). “Then I notice the venerable lady is having a little cry,” Lord continued, “and I know that the essential nobility of Anna’s nature has ‘got’ her as it has ‘got’ me, and won her whole-hearted sympathy” (20). It is not, therefore, Anna’s plight that awakes sympathy, but rather Anna’s “essential nobility.”

To paraphrase the Variety quote, the commercial success of “Anna Christie” depended not so much upon whether the public was prepared to accept a heroine who was a graduate from a brothel, but rather whether she was respectable or noble enough once she left it. As Brietzke points out, by the end of the play “the ‘sign’ of the prostitute has been erased from her” (57). As we consider, then, why “Anna Christie” won the Pulitzer in a season of “sex plays,” according to Robert Benchley, we can see that its success had more to do with respectability than with the underworld (18). Focusing on Anna’s integrity was a way of displacing a critical examination of prostitution as a systemic socio-economic problem. Passing out of the Progressive Era, and its tedious reform policies, American audiences wanted, perhaps, to believe they were “post-prostitution.” Lord’s positioning of herself as respectable and even naive recuperated Anna’s character, much like Carter did in Zaza. All of these factors contributed to the resurrection of the repentant courtesan, respectable at last. It may have appeared that O’Neill gave the prostitute-figure a dramaturgical face-lift, but in many respects Anna is the same repentant courtesan-figure audiences had seen so many times before. Her moments of female rage and independence are important ruptures in the American theatrical canon. Yet, like her dramaturgical sisters-in-sin, Anna swallows her anger and self-determination to live with Mat (who has threatened to kill her) and Chris (who has abandoned her). With such grim realities framing the heterosexual closure, I quite agree with O’Neill that audiences misunderstood the happy end. But what the plot confirms is not only a contrived resolution at the hand of the heteronormative order, but also a story which revolves around men who will feud, but eventually bond, while on a voyage of “dat ole davil sea.”

NOTES

¹ See also Vena 129-37. It’s worth noting that O’Neill interacted with prostitutes in his early days hanging out in New York dives such as the Hell Hole, Jimmy-the-Priests, as well as in brothels in Buenos Aires and Liverpool (see Gelb 129, 152, 161, 166). The Gelbs reported that during O’Neill’s days on the New York waterfront “once again his female companions were mainly whores” (163). O’Neill once tried to get back at his father by inviting “a girl from a French bordello” as his companion in the theater, hoping his breach would be reported back to James (129). It was. And, to facilitate his divorce with his first wife, Kathleen, O’Neill agreed to be caught in a brothel on 148 West 45th Street (173). O’Neill and his brother Jamie also had at least one notable drunken “trium­phant siege of a bordello” before attending the theater and disrupting their father’s per­formance (183).

² The Easiest Way was censored in Boston in April 1911. Life praised this action: “It remained for Boston to come to the rescue by suppressing . . . the naughty drama” (“Boston Gets Busy With the Naughty Drama,” 6 April 1911: 682).

³ As Bogard points out, in a previous version of “Anna Christie” called The Ole Davil, “the spelling of the family name was changed to the Swedish form, ‘Christopherson’” (152 [f.n.]).

⁴ According to Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill based Anna on Marie, one of his acquaintances from the Hell Hole, and companion to Terry Carlin (on whom the character Larry Slade in Long Day’s Journey into Night was modeled). See Gelb 290.

⁵ In the 1930 film adaptation of “Anna Christie” an additional scene was added between Anna and Marthy in which they meet up again during an outing to a state fair (allowing more screen time, no doubt, for Marie Dressler’s stellar performance). A German version also appeared in 1930, directed by Jacques Feyder. Both featured Greta Garbo. A prior version appeared in 1923, directed by John Griffith Wray and Thomas H. Ince, and featured Blanche Sweet in the title role.

⁶ When the play appeared in an abbreviated version in a magazine a month earlier, it included the last act. See Hearst’s 41 (March 1922): 45-7; 56-7.

⁷ With the title of her article, “My Anna Christie,” Lord may have intentionally been referencing Mary Shaw’s influential article about playing the role of prostitute Kitty Warren, called “My Immoral Play,” McClure’s 38 (1912): 684-94. If so, Lord’s title might both reference and distance itself from the supposed immorality of Mrs Warren’s Profession.

⁸ O’Neill felt that audiences misunderstood the reconciliation between Anna and Mat, which ignored the bleaker ending he intended. In a letter to the New York Times, O’Neill wrote, “A kiss in the last act, a word about marriage, and the audience grow blind and deaf to what follows” (qtd. in Gelb 481).

⁹ Here I refer to Laura Mulvey’s term that describes how women are objectified through a voyeuristic male gaze. See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-15.

¹⁰ For more about how Mrs. Leslie Carter cultivated the trope of maternalness while playing a fallen woman, see Katie Johnson, “Zaza: That ‘Obtruding Harlot’ of the Stage,” Theatre Journal 54 (May 2002): 223-43.

¹¹The Deluge lasted only 16 performances, but it is an interesting play nonetheless. Originally by Henning Berger, it was adapted by Frank Allen and produced and staged by Arthur Hopkins at the Hudson Theatre, New York, on 10 August 1917. Lord played the part of Sadie. It was revived on 22 January 1922.

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