A recent New Yorker cartoon shows two American soldiers in a desert setting dressed in camouflage, awkwardly carrying bayoneted rifles. One says to the other, “I never cared much for apple pie, and, as for mother, the less said the better” (Weber). In this essay, I am concerned with an even more sentimental icon from American culture—the dead mother. I want to discuss its ever-presence in American drama, its possible meanings, and its apotheosis in the late plays of O’Neill. A comparison of A Moon for the Misbegotten with Camus’s novel The Stranger, which begins with the famous lines, “Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure,” will end the discussion.

Scholars have commented on the unnerving persistence of the dead mother motif in early American drama. Jeffrey Richards says, “The absent mother motif makes up one of the curiosities of the early stage. If Mother is mentioned, she is spoken of as dead” (xxxi). And O’Neill scholars have also noticed the persistence of this motif. Louis Sheaffer refers to the “legion of dead wives and mothers in O’Neill’s writings, a class larger than one may realize, since many of its ghostly members died before the plays begin and are referred to only fleetingly” (500).

What does the concept of the dead mother mean psychologically? Personally, of course, to lose one’s mother is, in a sense, to lose everything: one’s origin, one’s source of life, all of life as a given, as opposed to what one makes of it. And if Mother stands for the unconscious background of one’s life, then how much more unconscious must the dead mother be— perhaps hopelessly so!

What one might call the Romantic iconography of the Mother-as­Unconscious is depicted in Act 1, Part 2, of Goethe’s Faust. In order to conjure the ghosts of Paris and Helen for the entertainment of the Emperor, Faust must, with the aid of Mephistopheles, descend to the Realm of the Mothers. It is a place of emptiness and barrenness. There one finds, according to Mephisto:

. . . Formation, transformation,
The eternal mind’s eternal recreation,
Enswathed in likenesses of manifold entity;
They see you not, for only wraiths they see.
Then arm your heart, for peril here is great. . . (158)

Faust follows Mephisto’s instructions and succeeds in materializing Paris and Helen, but when he goes too far and tries to grasp these figures physically, there is an explosion and they disappear. Goethe scholars interpret this scene as a descent into the Self in search of inspiration (Brown 169). Intellectual heirs of Goethe, Jung and his disciple Erich Neumann, think of the Mother­Unconscious as an archetypal structure of experience that underlies and creates one’s sense of reality. So the archetype of the Mother, the Great Round of Maternal Being, is the psychological dynamic of death and rebirth (Neumann 25).

One can see how a playwright might mold almost any subject matter into this form. Here are two brief examples: one nineteenth-century melodrama and one realistic play from the early twentieth century. Metamora (1829) is an Indian melodrama with a double plot. One tells the story of the defeat of the title character, who represents “King Philip” in the last war of the Indian uprising in 1675. He thus stands, in the European-American imagination, for all Indians who, though noble, must yield to the Manifest Destiny of white European settlers. The second plot is a story of romantic love triumphing over arranged marriage. Oceana is promised to a corrupt English aristocrat, but with Metamora’s help she is able to marry her true love, a new world American. Scholar Werner Sollors explains the connection between these two plots:

The oceanic daughters of England received a “legitimate” blessing for their decision to break out of the arranged marriages with old-world aristocracy and rank in order to wed the “natural” republican system of America they so dearly loved. The romance conflict thus supported the argument for independence, autonomy, and a fresh start in the name of supposedly ancient Indian traditions. (123)

This play begins and ends at the tomb of Oceana’s mother. In the last scene, Metamora actually emerges from that tomb by way of a secret passage from his place of English captivity. In this way, through the iconography of the dead mother, history becomes myth.

When American dramatists turned to realism, they brought the dead mother right along with them. They continued to find ways to chart the treacherous passage from old world to new on stage by way of the symbolism of the dead mother, who is often present—like the tomb in Metamora—as a sort of background. In He and She (1911) Rachel Crothers examines the Woman Question—career vs. motherhood—in a play about a married couple, Ann and Tom Herford, who are both sculptors. When the wife wins a prestigious commission and her husband comes in second, the family is thrown into crisis. But when Ann discovers that her daughter Millicent has become involved with a chauffeur at her boarding school, the mother gives up her commission in order to take her to Europe, hoping to win her away from the chauffeur. The wisdom figure in this play is Ann’s father, a physician called Dr. Remington, and presumably a widower. His wife, Ann’s mother, is conspicuously absent, but she is present symbolically in the cave-like studio where Ann is sculpting her masterpiece of a female nude. Her father, a rather metaphysical physician, recalls in these words the day he delivered Ann’s baby daughter: “Ann, I put her in your arms first—and the look that came into your eyes then was as near divinity as we ever get. Oh, my daughter—don’t let the new restlessness and strife of the world about you blind you to the old things—the real things” (330).

This play is not quite the cop-out it seems in plot summary. Other female characters work out their needs vis-á-vis the Woman Question in mature, modern conversations. And both sides receive a hearing. It is clear that the future holds for women many of the same old problems, and along with them some new ones to accompany new opportunities. But still, the dead mother as symbol of underworld rite of passage is as present in this realistic play as it was in Metamora.

With realism, though, as He and She suggests, motherhood would increasingly be seen not as a cultural or religious ideal so much as a real-life biological, social, and political condition that women and men would begin to question. And by the time of World War II, some of the characterizations of old-fashioned motherhood were not only iconoclastic but also grotesque. The “cult of motherhood” was taken to task by Philip Wylie in an influential book called Generation of Vipers (1942). He claimed that American society is “too much an institution built to appease the rapacity of loving mothers” (203).

In 1960, Leslie A. Fiedler psychoanalyzed the American mother’s role in what he saw as an Oedipally fixated culture whose novelists demonstrate a “failure [. . .] to deal with adult heterosexual love and a consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality” (12). According to Fiedler, American marriages are psychologically incestuous: wives act like mothers to their son-husbands, who in turn, never grow up. Ann Douglas, writing in 1977, sees the vapidity of American popular culture to be an inheritance of the Victorian alliance between timid protestant clergy and women trying to make Mother’s Day into a perpetual public ideal. At the same time, it has been pointed out that American humor, from Tom Sawyer to the Marx Brothers, has always been that of “bad boys defying a civilization seen as feminine” (Habbeger 119). Some of the most perceptive recent scholarship examining the ways American culture experiences motherhood—as melodramatic fantasy and as real-life experience—has been done in film studies. Ann Kaplan argues that twentieth-century movies derive from nineteenth-century melodramas. So we find all kinds of extreme representations of women entombed in mother imagery—“the all-sacrificing ‘angel in the house,’ the over-indulgent mother satisfying her own needs, and finally the evil, possessive, and destructive all-devouring [mother]” (48).

One measure of a writer’s success as a realist is how well his or her characters resist being defined as types, especially types of ideal gender roles (Habegger x). Still, it must be remembered that realism often works alongside and in tension with other forms of dramatic representation. O’Neill is a case in point. His plays seem most powerful when his realism merges with an underlying mother symbolism of death and rebirth. But in O’Neill’s plays the rebirth is frustrated, delayed, or ironically configured. At the end of an O’Neill drama, we do not find a restoration of social order or heroic self­transcendence. But neither do we find merely cynical capitulation to life as meaningless chaos. O’Neill achieves a fusion of the archetypal and the realistic that is profoundly satisfying dramatically. The drama itself becomes the domain of the Mothers for the audience to ponder directly in all its mystery and terror.

Looking at O’Neill’s work, we see in each play an embracing Mother archetype which serves as the precondition for the play’s dramatic action. This is not the same as a dramatic situation or expository background. It is the World of the play: the reality behind the realism. In O’Neill’s early plays, it is the Sea. In the sea plays we see realism in the depiction of man against nature, the economic exploitation of the sailors and prostitutes, etc. But we also feel the underlying rhythms of life and death as the sailors, like many before and after them, voyage out into Mother Ocean where their individual personal concerns become only momentary, like patterns formed by wind and wave. We find the same timeless expanse of Ocean in “Anna Christie,” but in that play in a kind of dramatic dialogue with the land. Anna finally marries Mat Burke, but this conventional resolution is undercut by his going back to sea on the same ship as Anna’s father, suggesting the ongoing generational domination of Mother Ocean, “the ole davil,” in this play written by a playwright who referred to himself as the Sea Mother’s Son. In Beyond the Horizon, both land and sea serve as maternal principles, alternatively and in ironic-tragic vacillation. Each brother is fated to experience the maternal archetype that will leave him unfulfilled.

In Desire Under the Elms (1924), with its maternal elms brooding over the set throughout, the land subsumes all other images of the maternal, even Eben’s Dead Ma, whose spirit he successfully sends back to her grave when Abbie becomes his living lover/mother in the dead mother’s parlor. The farmland, not Eben’s personal mother, inspires such greed and suspicion that the new baby is sacrificed in a tragedy of Wagnerian intensity.

In Strange Interlude (1927), Nina Leeds, the central female figure whose name sounds a little like Mona Lisa, embodies the mysterious, elusive archetype of the Feminine. Through a series of bizarre events, Nina Leeds becomes a blank screen for the projections of the various men in her life. Believing Sam Evans’s mother, who tells Nina that she must abort Sam’s baby or risk transmitting madness that runs in their family, Nina aborts her baby and engages Ned Darrell as stud-lover to supply a healthy baby in its place. Sam has the kind of relationship with Nina—mother-wife/son-husband that Leslie Fiedler sees as typically American. Ned sees her as a bitch-lover, too controlling and intense to be a full-time partner. And Charlie Marsden ultimately marries Nina—his Platonic love-companion. Meanwhile, her son Gordon simple-mindedly sees her only as MOM, without grasping any of the psychological and relational complexities in the background. Nina Leeds never really gets to have a coherent psychological life of her own. When her first lover, Gordon Shaw, was killed in the war, she began to be buried alive under daughter-wife-lover-mother projections that were placed upon her. She manipulates men through these roles, to be sure, but she is equally controlled and trapped herself.

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a retelling of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, is born of that story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes. One could say that the Greek vision of tragedy and the story of the House of Atreus, in particular, was very much the Realm of the Mothers for O’Neill. In O’Neill’s version, it is the archetypal Mother that prevails, not the archetypal Father, represented by Apollo and Athena in Aeschylus. Orin-Orestes is not equal to the task of matricide. The guilt of having “caused” his mother’s suicide drives him to take his own life. And Lavinia-Electra closes herself up in the tomb-like Mannon home to bear the knowledge of events and their meaning alone until she dies. Lavinia, like Anna Christie before her and Josie Hogan after, must bear witness alone to the inability of their men to live without the support of the unconscious mother background.

The alcoholic domain of the barroom is another realm of the dead mother in O’Neill. The bar is where men go when they can’t stand the company of women any longer. And in The Iceman Cometh (1939), the men have entered that domain more or less permanently. This play’s Orestes, Don Parritt, has buried his mother by turning her in to the police. The same woman, Larry Slade’s former lover, is now “dead” to him. And Larry wants no resurrections, so he gives Parritt the permission he asks for to kill himself. Hickey has murdered his wife-mother Evelyn—not being able to bear any more rebirths in her forgiveness. The love of death—the choice of unconsciousness—that pervades this play reflects the double bind of the dead mother. To love and serve her, on the one hand, or to kill and try to flee from her, on the other, amounts to the same thing. She is inescapable, just as alcohol in its illusion of escapist freedom only increases the bondage of the tenants of Harry Hope’s Saloon to their addictions.

Mary Tyrone is herself the Domain of the Mothers in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941). Although there are several dead mothers in the play— James’ sainted mother, Mary’s personal mother, Mother Elizabeth, and the Virgin Mary—Mary Tyrone herself is the central one who refuses to die in spite of all her sufferings. As Ann Hall chillingly puts it, “(Mary) is literally entombed in (an) early image of herself (as a young woman who has just met James Tyrone)” (46). Mary will not be, cannot be, the mother all the men want her to be: a sober companion for James who will overlook his drinking, a patient, nurturing mother for Jamie and Edmund. The ending of this play is the most frustrating of all O’Neill’s endings. There is no suicide and yet no recovery for Mary (as there was, in fact, for Ella O’Neill in real life). In the play, life simply goes on—or rather stops without stopping. Perhaps the year 1912 was for O’Neill the last time in his life he could live in the containment and anguish of his wholly unconscious relationship with his mother. After he attempted suicide and, ironically, soon thereafter wanted desperately to live when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, he began to be sustained not by his mother and all her surrogates, but increasingly by his own writing, his own efforts at consciousness.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is really the end—and the beginning— of the Eugene O’Neill Story. But there is an epilogue, A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), in which O’Neill puts to rest that version of himself, his brother, who could not live without his mother. This is the Mother of all Dead Mother plays. In addition to Jim Tyrone’s personal mother, Mary Tyrone again, now deceased, we find the Tyrone’s Irish background speaking with the voice of a giantess, Josie Hogan. Like Mary Tyrone, but much more consciously, Josie refuses to commodify herself for the men that surround her. She masquerades as the town whore in order to carve out a place of freedom for herself. And when she realizes that her love cannot save Jim Tyrone, she surrenders—but with full consciousness—to channeling his dead mother back to him so he can experience one last moment of forgiveness. Jim’s dead mother, Ireland, the New World of America, the Moon, the Virgin Mary, Josie’s large breasts on which Jim rests throughout the night—all combine to carry Jim back to his maternal origin and destiny. And Josie forecloses on any rebirth with her shocking final words to him—now absent, as he has left the stage—“May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace” (409).

One scene recalled by Jim which reveals his psychology quite nakedly is worth analyzing because it parallels so impressively another work of modern literature in which a dead mother features prominently—The Stranger (1942), by Albert Camus. Jim recounts for Josie what it was like for him at his mother’s funeral, when he was standing over his mother’s casket not being able to cry. He says of her body, “I couldn’t hardly recognize her. She looked young and pretty like someone I remembered meeting long ago. Practically a stranger” (390-1). Jim feels nothing, but he believes that others expect him to show emotion, so he pretends to cry: “I flopped on my knees and hid my face in my hands and faked some sobs and cried, ‘Mama! My dear mother!’ But all the time I kept saying to myself, ‘You lousy ham! You God-damned lousy ham! Christ, in a minute you’ll start singing ‘Mother Macree!’” (391).

Jamie, an actor by profession, does not realize how deeply he is embedded in theatrical modes of existence. It does not seem to occur to him that as an autonomous adult person he should have the right to experience his own emotions or their absence without apology or pretense.

Camus’s novel, The Stranger, begins with these still shocking words spoken by Meursault, the novel’s central character: “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure” (1). Meursault takes off work, goes to his mother’s funeral, feels no emotion and shows none. Later he kills an Arab man in ambiguous circumstances that are hard to describe. The sun struck Meursault’s eye, reflecting off the Arab’s knife. Meursault is tried in court, found guilty and sentenced to death. Much is made at his trial of his failure to demonstrate grief at his mother’s funeral. In fact, it seems to be the deciding factor in the decision of judge and jury to find him guilty: a horrific reversal of the conclusion of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, when Apollo, sun god, accepts responsibility for ordering Orestes to kill Clytemnestra, and Athena supports the “prerogative of the male” (Aeschylus 185).

Camus, in his preface to the American edition of L’Estranger, claims the unfair inference that Meursault is guilty of premeditated murder because he failed to show emotion at his mother’s funeral as “deeply significant for a reading of the novel and the society that it reflects.” “In our society, a man who does not cry at the funeral of his mother is likely to be sentenced to death,” says Camus (Lyrical and Critical Essays 335). This is exactly, is it not, what has happened to Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten? Why is the symbol of the dead mother so powerful that it could galvanize a jury and send a man to his death—an execution that, as it approaches, paradoxically frees Meursault to experience himself as happy and at one with himself? In his brilliant study of Meursault, Robert Champigny draws this comparison between Meursault and Orestes: “Meursault has killed his mother symbolically, he has not made a public sacrifice before the idol of the mother. He has killed the myth of the mother within himself” (75). Society operates theatrically. Champigny explains: “Rejecting theatricality, Meursault cannot participate in the society of masks. And since the collective myth has taken the place of nature, since there are no longer living individuals but only masks, whoever rejects mask and myth reduces himself to zero. Punishing him by death is nothing other than a rite that consecrates what has already become established” (75-6). Champigny sees Meursault as a pagan hero, a simple man who lives life close to his senses, without hypocrisy. He is certainly not a stranger in his own eyes. He becomes a stranger in the eyes of everyone except himself when he admits that he did not cry over his dead mother. Meursault’s encounter with society’s theatricality allows him to experience a consummation of his entire life:

What Meursault discovers is not the value of life in general terms but of his own life in particular. Until then there was the consciousness of Meursault as he witnesses things happening to him, pleasures and trouble. He now reaches an awareness of his life which is at once enveloping and intimate. He unites himself to his life, and totalizes it. (94)

An awareness of one’s life both enveloping and intimate, to which one unites oneself totally: this sounds very much like Erich Neumann’s Great Round of the Maternal (25). In other words, Meursault has wrested from the unconscious social theatricality in which he lives that very energy that gives the mob its power. He has taken the energy of the dead mother and claimed it for his own. In contrast, Jim Tyrone seems to be a kind of heroic martyr, a person true to his source of spiritual life even as it destroys him. The two characters, Meursault and Jim Tyrone, are complementary images of humanity struggling in a world where mask and myth have the power to reduce people to zero.

The dead mother can symbolize the unconscious background of any dramatic situation, whether historical, cultural, familial, or personal. It seems particularly apt to convey those myths that operate in the background of a people’s psychology through their memories, whether for good or ill. (In Faust, Goethe sometimes plays on the German words for mother and myth, Mutter and Mythe, which sound almost identical [Hamlin 328].) In his plays, O’Neill dares to enter the domain of the Mothers to bring dramatic images to life that are profound, yet always elusive, open to many interpretations. O’Neill brought the dead mother out of the cultural margins and placed her center stage. In O’Neill the dead mother really becomes the stage just as she is theatricality itself for Camus. In a way, the dead mother is simply the unconscious, and there is nothing simple about that. For as Erich Neumann reminds us, everything depends upon how humanity relates to that domain: “The health and creativity of every [person] depends very largely on whether his (or her) consciousness can live at peace with this stratum of the unconscious or consumes itself in strife with it” (44).

WORKS CITED

Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Ted Hughes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Brown, Jane K. Goethe’s Faust: The German Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Ed. Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Knopf, 1968.

_____. The Stranger. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1946.

Champigny, Robert J. A Pagan Hero: An Interpretation of Meursault in Camus’s ‘The Stranger.’ Trans Rowe Portis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969.

Crothers, Rachel. He and She. Watt and Richardson 301-335.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Edinger, Edward F. Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Notes for a Jungian Commentary. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. Ed. Cyrus Hamlin. New York: Norton, 1976.

Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.