Eugene O’Neill’s eleven-play historical cycle, A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, was an undertaking of enormous scope and complexity, taking as its task the tracking of social, political, and economic developments from 1755 to the 1930s as they played out in the lives of two families across six generations. Although these plays, had he completed them, would have encompassed a range of themes, O’Neill’s primary focus was the destructive power of greed, which he saw as America’s defining characteristic.¹ He regarded the Depression, which was in full swing as he began writing the cycle plays, as the culmination of our national obsession with acquisition. “What shall it profit a man,” O’Neill would say, quoting Scripture, “if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

The fact that Americans are materialistic was hardly news, then or now. What O’Neill brings to this subject, however, is an understanding of the ways in which the desire to possess leads to self-dispossession. Though the object of desire differs from character to character in the cycle, in the end all the characters find themselves bereft of that which they once had, potentially or actually—a condition that they bring on themselves. Moreover, though they seek ownership as a means to freedom, not an end in itself, the final result, paradoxically, is that they themselves are “owned” by the object of their desire. Simon Harford, the protagonist of More Stately Mansions, for instance, in building his empire of land, railroads, ships, and slaves, strives to assemble a self-contained universe, since, as he puts it, “possession alone gives you the liberty to be free!” (Mansions 301). Sara, his wife, seeks to own herself by owning Simon, commanding his total love and devotion. Ethan, their oldest son, is obsessed with breaking the world record for sailing around Cape Horn. Just as Simon and Sara are shaped by that which lies outside them, the other, which they seek to internalize and make their own, so Ethan is shaped by his goal of mastering nature.

What is noteworthy about these three instances of greed is how fundamentally similar they are. While we progress from the material world (wealth) to greater levels of abstraction (love and nature), the mechanism is the same. All proceed from a rationalistic, subject-object Weltanschauung. The world is divided into the me and the not me in a dualism that sets the stage for agonistic relationships. Although Simon is passionately committed to his pursuit of wealth; Sara, to her mastery of Simon; and Ethan, to nature, all are ironically owned by that which they seek to possess just as they are defined by the object of their desire. In these same plays, as well as in his autobiographically derived masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, which he is writing at approximately the same time, O’Neill also explores a quite different pathway to peace. If mastery of the other, whatever or whoever that other is, does not lead to fulfillment and a harmonious relationship with the universe, what about a total abdication of self? What happens, these plays ask, if rather than seeking to own and control, one relinquishes one’s autonomy, even one’s identity to some larger whole? I would like to explore three instances of this phenomenon—Simon at the end of More Stately Mansions, the bums in Iceman and Erie Smith and Charlie Hughes in Hughie, and Edmund in Long Day’s Journey, in order to understand the implications of this attempt to achieve peace, which seems, at least at first, to be at odds with the desire to possess.

In The Banished Prince I have written about Simon’s psychic split being projected symbolically outward onto Deborah, his mother, who is associated with the past and a life of the imagination, and Sara, his wife, a pragmatist linked with the present and the future.² When Sara and Deborah, formerly bitter enemies, unite as mother and grandmother in the middle section of the play, Simon is relegated to the role of outrider and outsider. In an effort to regain what he regards as his rightful place at the center of the family constellation, he drives a wedge between them, inviting Sara to his office and selling her stock in the company in return for sexual favors and re-instituting his former garden visits to his mother. When this results in a kind of psychological schizophrenia that threatens to drive him mad, to the extent that he suggests to each that she kill the other, he determines that he has to choose one or the other. Sara, associated with linear time, the world of the office and the future, is too threatening, so he turns to Deborah in a desperate effort to reenter a childlike state of innocence and forgetfulness. The symbol for his reentry into total union with Deborah is the door to her garden summerhouse (what her father-in-law Evan Harford a generation before called his Temple of Liberty). Coming to Deborah in her garden and pleading with her to take him into her forbidden “Temple of Love,” as she calls it, Simon says, “We have gone back [. . .] before Sara existed in me and I in her. [. . .] We are back here in your garden on the day you told me that story” (O’Neill, Mansions 529). The story he refers to is that of the banished prince, cast out of his kingdom by a wicked enchantress. Deborah thus becomes the wicked enchantress who can reverse this banishment from paradise and take Simon back into prelapsarian bliss. “We shall have gone back beyond separations,” he says. “We shall be one again” (533).

In seeking total submersion in a symbolic union with Deborah, Simon hopes to achieve the peace he associates with oblivion: a relinquishment of his identity and autonomy in exchange for the absence of self-awareness and therefore, guilt. This desire to escape the harsh realities of his present existence operates on several levels. Biographically, one can argue that it reflects the playwright’s longing to assuage the sense of homelessness that haunted him since his exile to St. Vincent’s prep school at the tender age of seven. In terms of the dramatic action, it represents Simon’s desire to resolve his inner conflict by escaping into memory. From a spiritual perspective, it represents an effort to eradicate guilt by returning to Eden (hence, the garden setting).

Whatever the case, at the climax of this play in which Simon at first attempts to secure peace by self-determination, controlling both the material world and those he loves, he at length turns to the opposite strategy of total self-abnegation. If he can lose himself in a union with Deborah, his mother, he can once again be at peace. Or so he believes. His strategy, as we know, is doomed to fail. At the last minute Sara appears on the scene, and, realizing that Simon’s entry into the summerhouse would lead to his madness, offers to give him up. Stung, Deborah changes her mind, not to be outdone by her rival, and pushing Simon away with the ominous words, “Do not dare to touch me” (words that Mary Tyrone will also use at the conclusion of a later play), enters the summerhouse alone.

These words, which insist on her separateness, her decision to “keep my spirit pure and untouched and unpossessed,” pose a problem for Simon (543). If Deborah’s strategy for achieving peace is to eschew emotional entanglements, owning herself as an autonomous agent, Simon’s is just the opposite. Seeking a state of total union with Deborah, he is willing to trade individual identity for the innocence he associates with childhood. This can only be achieved by stepping outside chronological time—in this case, through madness. This state is symbolized by the summerhouse, the site of Deborah’s imaginary eighteenth-century trysts with King Louis XIV and associated with her world of fantasy, one which even she acknowledges is dangerous. Early in the play, when her son Joel and lawyer Nicholas Gadsby come to the garden to discuss the terms of her husband’s will, she emerges from the summerhouse with a shudder and says, “I am glad you came, Nicholas. I must never go in there again.” When he asks if there is something inside that frightens her, she responds, “No, nothing is there but I. My mind. The past, Dreams. [. . .] A very frightening prison, it becomes at last, full of ghosts and corpses” (244).

The door to the summerhouse, painted a Chinese lacquer red, functions as a kind of liminal space, marking the border between sanity and madness.³ In Contour in Time, Travis Bogard, pointing out that in all but two of O’Neill’s last plays, doors perform an important symbolic function, makes the connection between the door to Deborah’s summerhouse and that of Harry Hope’s saloon and Erie Smith’s hotel room, as well as those through which Lavinia Mannon makes her self-immolating final exit into the family mansion in Mourning Becomes Electra and Con Melody into the bar in A Touch of the Poet (371). It is Mikhail Bakhtin’s threshold, “the chronotope of crisis and break in a life [. . .] the decision that changes a life” (248). Thus Deborah, stepping over the threshold into her summerhouse, leaves the world of reality behind. Simon, denied entry by Deborah, falls from her push and hits his head. When he comes to, he has entered an amnesiac state, saying to Sara “dazedly—like a little boy, ‘I fell and hit my head, Mother. It hurts’”(549). He has secured peace at last, at least for the time being, but at a steep price, relinquishing all connection with reality.⁴ He is no longer Simon the successful entrepreneur and ruthless business executive, but Simon the little boy.

Though outwardly they could not present more of a contrast with Simon, the bums in Harry Hope’s saloon seek peace in similar ways. In the opening scene of The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill immediately establishes the unspoken rule of membership in this club. All the “inmates,” as Larry Slade calls them, have implicitly agreed not to challenge one another’s pipe dream. Although each privately regards the others’ dreams as self-delusion, clinging stubbornly to the truth of his or her own, in public they play along with each other’s beliefs that “tomorrow” their ship will come in, their dreams will come true. It is the sine qua non of this community, the glue that holds them together. Like Simon Harford, they have traded their connection with reality and the outside world for the security that comes from belonging to something larger than them. Though it may not seem like much, it does provide a modicum of peace, as Larry explains to the newcomer, Don Parritt. Calling the saloon the “End of the Line Cafe” and the “Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller,” he says, “Don’t you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? That’s because it’s the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go. It’s a great comfort to them” (Complete Plays 577-78).⁵

When Hickey arrives and forces them out of their protective cocoon into the harsh world of daylight, they resume their individuality and autonomy. As they brush off their old suits, shine their shoes, and re-enter the world of time and change, they trade the security of mutuality for the hope of individual achievement. The bickering and hostile exchanges that characterize their interactions at this point in the play are an inevitable outcome of this choice. In violating the code and scoffing at one another’s pipe dreams, they have relinquished their membership in the group. It is only when Hickey, having wrenched them into the present, is finally expelled from their midst that they can return to a state of drunken oblivion. As the detectives take Hickey away, Harry Hope says that they all went along with Hickey because—as he looks around at the others, then plunges on “defiantly”—“we hoped he’d come out of it if we kidded him along and humored him” (702). As if on cue, the bums, previously at one another’s throats, “burst into a chorus of eager assent,” agreeing with Harry that none of them really took Hickey seriously. They can return to the bottom of the sea, relinquishing for good, this time, any pretense of individual autonomy and free will. My point is that in assembling this odd assortment of misfits and losers, O’Neill explores a similar phenomenon to that we witnessed in Simon Harford, seeking peace not in self-assertion but self-abnegation.

In Hughie, a miniature version of Iceman, O’Neill pursues a similar strategy. While Iceman is set in a seedy bar in New York’s West Side in 1912, Hughie’s action takes place in a run-down hotel near Times Square in 1928. There are fifteen social dropouts in Iceman; in Hughie there are only two. But the rules are the same. The bums at Harry’s have formed a family to ward off the desperation that threatens to engulf them, just as Erie Smith, a small­time gambler, seeks comfort in the companionship of the new hotel night clerk, Charlie Hughes. In each case, the common denominator is the need for a pipe dream, since in the world of these plays life cannot be sustained without a protective shield of illusion.

The action of this play revolves around Erie’s increasingly desperate attempts to draw Charlie into a relationship that will ward off loneliness and death. Since the death of the previous night clerk, Hughie, who buoyed his self-confidence by his naive admiration, Erie has had a streak of bad luck and can’t raise the money he owes his gangster-friends for the expensive flower arrangement he sent to Hughie’s funeral: a “big-time send-off,” he calls it (Complete Plays 848). If he doesn’t find someone to believe in him as Hughie did, his luck will run out. Charlie Hughes, likewise, needs someone to get him through the boredom of this night and all the other nights that stretch endlessly before him. Late in the play, grasping for something to hold on to, Hughes recalls Erie talking about his idol Arnold Rothstein, the big-time gambler, and asks Erie if he knows him. The link is established. Erie has someone to serve as chorus to his pipe dreams, and Charlie can use the gambler as a vehicle for his own fantasies. Once again, the emphasis is not on individual agency, but a mutually accepted, though unspoken, agreement to pretend belief in the other’s lies, forging a union that promises to bring comfort, if not salvation.

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill’s masterpiece, he examines this issue from still another perspective, using as his vehicle, interestingly, Edmund Tyrone, his own biographical counterpart in the play. Act 4 of this play is structured as a series of confessions, with each of the four Tyrones explicitly or implicitly telling stories that embody lost hopes and ideals. After Tyrone’s speech to Edmund about his triumph as a Shakespearean actor and Edwin Booth’s praise, the “high spot in my career,” as he says, when “I had life where I wanted it” (Complete Plays 809), Edmund shares his peak moments with his father. What follows is the well-known passage in which he describes his experiences with the sea, one of the most poetic in O’Neill’s entire canon. I’d like to spend a moment analyzing the imagery of that passage, since it bears directly on the point I’m trying to make here.

Speaking of lying on the bowsprit, with the water foaming into spume under him, Edmund says,

For a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. (811-12)

Describing another experience, swimming far out or lying alone on the beach, he says he “became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. .For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!” (812). Whether one sees this passage as emerging from transcendentalism or eastern mysticism, both the water and the uterine imagery are significant. The seaweed anchored to a rock but swaying in the tide suggests the reconciliation of opposite states represented by the fetus, which is both anchored and free, cushioned by warm amniotic fluid from all of life’s blows. Edmund’s desire to merge with the cosmos, as earlier in the evening he “lost himself” in the fog (another water image), suggests the lure of oblivion which also appeals to Simon Harford, the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon, and Erie and Charlie Smith. If life’s challenges threaten to overwhelm, one can respond by either trying to master the other, the outside forces that stand in the way of happiness, or to withdraw from the struggle altogether into a state of non-being, a kind of psychological suspended animation. The tension between these opposing ideals, the assertion or relinquishment of identity, becomes an important structural principle in O’Neill’s late dramas. As he plays out the implications of pursuing first one, then the other alternative, sometimes, as in More Stately Mansions, within the course of a single play, O’Neill explores the possibilities and limitations inherent in each. The first emerges from a dualistic view of the universe, informed by a rational, empirical, either-or ontology; the second, from a non-rational, even mystical desire to transcend oppositions and discover an underlying unity. This dialectical opposition becomes a lightning rod around which the other issues revolve.

It is important to note that while these two positions appear to be diametrically opposed, the one implying self-sufficiency and self­determination and the other, the abdication of self, on a deeper level they can be seen as two sides of the same coin, both attesting to O’Neill’s enduring search for peace. That this is an ideal which eluded him, both in his life and in his plays (with the exception of A Moon for the Misbegotten), should not be surprising. It is the very nature of ideals that they reconcile opposite states. Democracy proceeds from the theory that all are equal, hence the same, and yet all are individuals, hence different; our legal system promises to recognize equally the rights of the individual and those of the group. Thus by definition ideals must exist outside time as we know it. As Fitzgerald understood, once they enter the stream of history, like the Dutch sailors first setting foot on the “green breast” of the new world, they are corrupted, taking on new shapes and forms. Yet we strive to alter them, “boats beating against the current” (182). As Edmund puts it as he describes his transcendental moments at sea, these experiences bring moments of “ecstatic freedom [. . .] the end of the quest, the last harbor” (812). Though they cannot be sustained, they beckon from afar, promising peace and surcease of pain.

As we track this theme through the cycle plays as well as O’Neill’s autobiographical cycle, we are then able to counter-balance the motif of greed and acquisition with the need for transcendence which is its other half. For as many critics have noted, all of O’Neill’s dramas but especially the late plays are ultimately spiritual in nature, reflecting the playwright’s deep longing for peace.

NOTES

1. O’Neill was never to complete all eleven plays. He worked steadily on the ever­expanding cycle from 1935 to 1939. As late as May 1941 he notes in his Work Diary his plan to expand the first two plays into four, which he outlines, later rewriting A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions in light of this new prospectus. Finally, however, in 1949 he admitted defeat, succumbing at last to the tremor in his hands and his generally poor health. In 1951 (some sources say 1953) he destroyed most of the notes and drafts of the cycle plays. Only A Touch of the Poet, revised and completed in 1942, survived intact. A typed early version of Mansions, inadvertently included in a box of materials sent to the O’Neill archives at Yale, escaped destruction, along with a scenario for The Calms of Capricorn.

2. See chapter 4 in Laurin Porter, The Banished Prince: Time, Memory, and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988) 28-29, 41-47.

3. Interestingly, all the interior doors of Tao House, designed and decorated by Carlotta O’Neill, were painted a Chinese lacquer red or orange.

4. In the epilogue of Bower’s unexpurgated edition of the play, Simon recovers from “brain fever” on the day of his mother’s funeral.

5. The water imagery is interesting here and brings to mind O’Neill’s use of it in Long Day’s Journey to suggest a state of forgetfulness (“drowning” in morphine or alcohol) or undifferentiated being (the fog and Edmund Tyrone’s bowsprit speech are two instances of this).