The Eugene O'Neill Review

Refiguring O'Neill's Early Sea Plays:
Maritime Labor
Enters the Age of Modernity

Jason Berger
University of Connecticut

Eugene O'Neill's early one-act sea plays, for the most part, have been either ignored or relegated to second-class status in the criticism of the last half-century. Cast as "[deserving] little attention from anyone but a biographer"¹or read through the lenses of various literary paradigms commonly related to O'Neill's later celebrated work, the plays rarely have been viewed as meriting sustained analysis. Besides their ostensible artistic deficiency, however, the plays' political and social import have also been decried. Citing a 1930's critic, Joel Pfister writes, "O'Neill partly functioned as a tour guide for a middle and upper class fascinated by exhibits of `exotic' workers" (115). Scholars have supported this view by portraying how George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and the Provincetown Players embraced young Eugene O'Neill and his Bound East for Cardiff in the summer of 1916 in part because of his self-identification as a former common sailor. Coming off trips to Honduras, Buenos Aires, and England, O'Neill, donning his famous "American Line" sailor's jersey, embodied Cook's notion of a "native playwright" and allowed the genteel middle class Players, in the words of Harry Kemp, to "[. . . hear] the actual speech of men who go to sea; [. . . and share] the reality of their lives" (Wetzsteon 119). In his recent essay, "`Vital Contact': Eugene O'Neill and the Working Class," Patrick Chura builds on this notion, analyzing O'Neill's "staged working class identity" (521) and "the ways in which [. . . his] drama satisfied the needs of a middle class seeking self-validation in the laboring class" (526). Through historical analysis of O'Neill's relation to the concept of "vital contact,"² Chura works against reductive political categorization, arguing that in plays such as The Hairy Ape O'Neill "suggests the stark alienation of lower-class existence and views this alienation not as mitigated but as exacerbated by upper-class intrusions" (537).

Yet, what about O'Neill's early one-act sea plays? As productive and inclusive as studies like Chura's are, might their focus on the longer plays act to occlude considerations of these earlier and shorter works? This essay seeks to explore O'Neill's portrayal of labor in these plays by reading O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn series in the context of two other early one-act maritime plays (Ile and Where the Cross is Made). By aligning O'Neill's plays in the chronological order of their historical settings, I argue that O'Neill dramatizes a transference in the mode and conceptualization of maritime labor as the settings shift from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. In this schematic, I view O'Neill as depicting a historical transformation in terms of sailors' relations to their labor and each other, where they move from a position of potential fulfillment in activity and power in unity to a desolate, isolated identity wrought with what Pfister refers to as "professional-managerial-class angst" (119). Through an analysis of the ways these plays portray maritime labor, figure such labor in the past, and present waning vestiges of hope being replaced with various forms of attempted amelioratory forgetting, I seek to reveal how O'Neill's early plays may comment on the historical and social conditions of their age.

While O'Neill's involvement with the political left during his twenties lends credence to a serious analysis of representations of labor in his early work and several scholars have touched upon the political and economic content in the one-act sea plays, the inveterate notion that the Glencairn series is a self-contained "cycle" remains a major impediment to any such reconsideration of these pieces.³As Edwin Engel points out, Bound East for Cardiff was written in 1914 and its three "companion pieces" in 1917. At first, each play was performed separately, but in 1924 they were arranged on a single bill (11). According to Travis Bogard, the plays' "first performance as a cycle was [. . . produced] by a group called the Barnstormers in Provincetown on August 14, 1924." Importantly, Bogard asserts "[n]either O'Neill nor Cook ever appears to have considered the four as a unit, and no definitive order of the plays was ever established" (80). Bogard goes on to note, however, that O'Neill later co-produced this "cycle's" performance in New York that November and that he kept the order from the August production: The Moon of the Caribbees, The Long Voyage Home, In the Zone, and Bound East for Cardiff (fn 80). This historical context problematizes the practice of holding the Glencairn plays to the strict ordering of their production sequences of the 1920s. Yet, many scholars have done just this. For example, in Kelli Larson's "O'Neill's Tragic Quest for Belonging: Psychological Determinism in the S.S. Glencairn Quartet," she sets up her analysis of the plays based on what she describes as "O'Neill's final, 1929 order of the arrangement: The Moon of the Caribbees, In the Zone, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home" (15). Larson cites R. Dilworth Rust's defense of the final 1929 ordering of the plays to set up her reading. In "The Unity of the S.S. Glencairn," Rust justifies this ordering as "logical" by, in part, citing spurious accounts of critics who attended the original cycle's performance. These critics, according to Rust, reveal, "O'Neill had originally written the four short plays `in the confident hope they would be presented in a single bill'" (280). While the apocryphal basis and ambiguity of such claims need not be traced out here, the "logic" that supports them is obviously inconsistent with the historical fact that the four plays were written and produced separately, along with several other one-act sea plays. In addition to this discussion, however, Rust provides a cogent defense for part of this ordering based on the events of the plays, arguing that Yank's death at the end of Bound justifies this play being placed before Voyage (where Yank's character is absent) and similarly, Olson's abduction in Voyage necessitates its being read after Bound (where Olson appears) (15). While I agree with this rationale, the placement of In the Zone remains an important problematic. According to Rust, Moon has always been located first in the series, appearing as the opening and title play in O'Neill's 1919 publication of The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays of the Sea (281). Yet, in this very same edition, Rust cites that O'Neill placed In the Zone last and inserted, under the list of characters in Moon, the note that "With the exception of In the Zone, the action of all the plays following takes place in the years preceding the outbreak of the World War" (281). O'Neill's 1919 collection and its reference to the plays' historical positions is important for two reasons: first, it makes clear that O'Neill did not always view the Glencairn plays as definitely separate from his other short sea plays, and second, it posits O'Neill giving the plays a rough chronological ordering. Combining these considerations with O'Neill's characteristic meticulous attention to detail in stage directions, one might ask why we should, here, ignore his designation of historical setting. In this context, Rust's rationale for viewing the 1929 arrangement of the Glencairn plays as definitive as well as his case for their "unity" can be seen to be deeply flawed. For besides O'Neill's own placement of Zone as last in 1919—based, ostensibly, on its later historical position—the actual spatial location of the plays' settings might also complicate the 1929 arrangement.⁴ More important than its complication of the internal ordering of the series, however, refiguring the Glencairn cycle based on the notion of historical positioning opens up the space for potential intertextual readings of these plays with other early one-act sea plays set during similar time periods on ships and spaces other than the Glencairn. Among these are Ile, set in 1895 and first produced in 1917, and Where the Cross is Made, set in 1900 and first produced in 1918. In reading these plays with the Glencairn series, it is possible to see O'Neill presenting an interesting shift in the mode and representation of maritime labor as settings move out of the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. While early full-length plays such as Beyond the Horizon (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921) extend and complicate themes found in this selection of one-act plays—The Hairy Ape's juxtaposition of Paddy's longing for the clipper ships of the past and Yank's identification with coal-burning steam ships of the present for instance—an adequate consideration of their plots would both fall outside this essay's scope as well as require a truncation of the discussion of these earlier plays.

Ile is set on the "steam whaler Atlantic Queen" in the year 1895. Scholars such as Bogard have pointed out that this play differs from the Glencairn plays in its portrayal of Captain Keeney. According to Bogard, Keeney, as an Ahab figure, displays "a decisive act of will" in keeping the Atlantic Queen at sea and that this notion of agency denotes a "change" from the other sea plays where characters are bound by "fate" (91). Building on Bogard's premise, we might ask how this play, besides its portrayal of Keeney's monomaniacal-like drive to procure oil, qualitatively differs from other O'Neill sea plays set later in history. In this sense, Bogard aptly notes differences between Ile and the Glencairn plays; yet, he may not adequately address how the nineteenth-century historical positioning of the play may shape these important differences.

From the opening frame of Ile, it is apparent that the play portrays an historical break from the settings of the Glencairn plays. The title alone, gesturing toward the whaling industry, draws a stark contrast to the twentieth-century's maritime merchant service. By setting the play on a whaling ship, O'Neill not only connects the setting to the nineteenth century proper, but also to the rich popular and literary history of whaling narratives of that century. In so doing, the play evokes romantic images of the popularly conceived labor required to hunt and process whales, which, of course, differs immensely from the ambiguous activity required to run a tramp steamer like the Glencairn. While the play is located in the past, nonetheless, that past is a recent one. The 1895 setting places the action of the play only two decades before O'Neill's contemporary world of the Glencairn. In this sense, its position just before the turn of the century seems to place it, like the practice of whaling itself at this time, within an age that is coming to an end. This notion of portraying a time in transition can be seen in the figuration of the play's ship, itself. As a "steam whaler," the Atlantic Queen merges both the industrial age's push toward mechanization and an economically antiquated and socially romantic practice of "hunting" whales for oil. In this context of a transference between historical ages, Ile's portrayal of the crew's labor and social organization as well as the role that the past plays in characters' motivations makes this play an apt precursor to O'Neill's representation of modern twentieth-century labor and social practices.

Although Captain Keeney's actions drive the plot, as in the Glencairn series, the crew is a major focus of the play. In keeping with the 1895 transitional historical positioning, the Atlantic Queen's crew can be seen to exist in a tension-wrought dichotomy between both its potential power in unity against Keeney and its ultimate failure to carry through with mutiny as well as the ambiguous relation between its fulfillment in labor and desire to return home.

The first notion of the crew's potential power and unity is established early in the play with its anger over having completed the two years of contracted service yet still being forced to wait for the ice floes to break so Captain Keeney can procure his projected stock of oil. In a telling scene, the Mate warns Keeney that there will be "trouble with" "every blessed one o' them if [he] don't pull back" (495).⁵ Importantly, unlike the division seen between crew members of the Glencairn, the Atlantic Queen's crew is portrayed as a single, homogeneous body. In fact, Keeney soon questions if the Mate himself will join it, saying: "I hope, Mr. Slocum, you ain't agoin' to jine the men against me" (497). This potential power in unity, however, breaks down when the crew chooses to send a representative, in the person of Joe the harpooner, to communicate its demands to Keeney. Upon first entering the cabin, Keeney snaps at the "enormous six-[foot]" harpooner, telling him: "Don't be standin' there like a gawk [. . .]. Speak up!" (498). Such authority obviously shakes the harpooner, as he "confusedly" tells Keeney: "We want—the men, sir—they wants to send a depitation aft to have a word with you" (498). Joe's shift from the pronoun "we" to the qualification "the men, sir—they" evinces a telling transition toward capitulation. In fact, Joe's statement provides a remarkable semantic portrayal of the spurious nature of the crew's power and unity—where the force of authority makes it abandon its drive toward mutiny. This is seen when Keeney, after Joe exclaims that the men are "agoin' to mutiny and take the old hooker home [themselves]," punches the harpooner in the face and draws out his revolver. Confronted with such power, the men, after having pulled their "sheath-knives," stand in "sullen silence" before returning to work (499). Therefore, while O'Neill hints at the potential for power in unity, he qualifies this power by depicting the crew's inability to organize such unity into effective action.

Besides the dual nature of its unity and power, O'Neill also presents tension between the crew's desire to return home and its apparent enthusiasm for labor. This can be seen in its remarkably efficient return to normalized work after the aborted mutiny. For shortly after the men draw their knives against the captain, a call for whales is sounded and the Mate informs the Captain that they have already lowered boats for the chase. In fact, the captain's involvement with his wife forces the Mate to ask him: "Comin', sir?" (506). Instead of being in low spirits and, one would presume, derelict in duty, the crew is seen to take the lead in pursuing the "big" whales—a markedly ironic shift from the movement of the rest of the play. In this context, the source of the crew's discontent seems to lie not with remaining out at sea beyond the contracted time, but more in the lack of available labor while icebound.⁶ While this hopeful ending gestures toward a future of fulfilling labor activity, its message is tempered by the earlier absence of the whales (hinting that they won't last), the lack of power in the crew, and in Keeney's wife's descent into madness.

O'Neill's portrayal of this potential for unalienated labor and, in a rough sense, proletarian unity in the maritime practices of the past is unmistakably romantic. This utopian re-narration of what it was like to be a sailor in the nineteenth century is consistent throughout many of O'Neill's plays as well as in his own comments on the subject.⁷ As problematic as such romantic visions of the past may be, O'Neill clearly uses them to critique the modern labor practices of his own time. In this sense, instead of functioning as an ideological defense of the status quo, O'Neill's plays evoke a mythic maritime past in order to call the present order of things into question. Yet, his use of the past and his presentation of its relation to the present are by no means simplistic. In each of these sea plays, O'Neill portrays how characters uniformly respond to the negative conditions of the present through idealizing the past. In so doing, he dramatizes the vexed purposes and results of such remembering: the danger of living in, or desiring the complete return of, the past, as well as the anxiety that results from having to accept the present.

In Ile, romantic constructions of the past are shown to motivate the actions of both Captain and Mrs. Keeney, and, as a result, the play itself. In lamenting her condition of being icebound and trapped in a "prison cell of a room," Mrs. Keeney admits that she had falsely imagined that her husband and his job would be like "the old Vikings in the story-books" (500). She further explains that when at home she would "dream of the fine free life [he] must be leading" and that this made her "love the sea" (502). In this context, it was Mrs. Keeney's romanticized notions of sea life, based on "story-books" of the sailors of the past, that convinced her to come to sea with Keeney; the failure of this idealized world to materialize results in her hysterical rejection of the reality of sea life.

The past is similarly shown to drive the motivations and actions of Captain Keeney. After telling the Mate that he "don't give a damn 'bout the money" only about "git[ting] the ile" (497), Keeney explains his motivations to his wife, saying: "I've always done it—since my first voyage [. . .]. I always come back—with a full ship—and—it don't seem right not to—somehow" (502). This confession links Keeney's desire for the oil with his desire to adhere to and maintain a connection with an ideal past. Interestingly, it is the adverse conditions of the present, the lack of whales and the sea's closure with ice, that prevent him from fully aligning with and recreating the past, and, as we have seen, Keeney is willing to sacrifice both his and the crew's lives to unite the two. As mentioned, however, O'Neill clearly tempers the hope and elation of having the ice open and whales appear by doing so only after a near mutiny, Mrs. Keeney's madness, and the crew's having exhausted almost all provisions.

Like Ile, O'Neill's one-act Where the Cross is Made portrays an interesting transition into the modern age. Set in 1900, five years after the action on the Atlantic Queen and at the commencement of the twentieth century, the play dramatizes the traumatic events of characters' desperate attempts to square the present with the past. Like Keeney's practice of attempting to recreate the past, here, Captain Bartlett can be seen to desire a return to his days as a whale-ship captain in the nineteenth century. Unlike Keeney, whose historical material conditions still provide the possibility for his wish fulfillment, Bartlett exists in a world where the past has definitively passed. This fact can be seen to re-shape and sublimate his desire for his old crew and life, a union that is impossible, into a delusional desire for the retrieval of a mythical treasure. Through the character of Nat, Captain Bartlett's son, O'Neill further complicates this relation, depicting the tension between the desire for a romantic return of and to the past and the modern psychical need for forgetting, for leaving the past, in order to accept the present. The end of this play, unlike Ile's gesture toward hope, casts desire for the past as a displaced longing for "treasure" and, in the guise of the returning ghosts, figures the past, itself, as literally dead.

The setting for Cross, primarily a compartment "fitted up like the captain's cabin of a deep-sea sailing vessel," aptly conveys the fact that the present of the play is merely a mimetic representation of the past—an attempt to assuage Captain Bartlett's anxiety by recreating the semblance of the past in the present (695). The specifics of Bartlett's past are established when Nat tells Doctor Higgins that Bartlett had been a whaling captain and had wrecked his ship three years ago on the Indian Ocean. According to Nat, of the six crewmembers who made it to a "small island fringe," only three survived. Nat explains that some had "whispered" the possibility that the three dead men were "perhaps" "killed and eaten," "[b]ut gone—vanished—that, undeniably" (699). At the end of his story, Nat tells the doctor that his father and his remaining crew members seemed "a bit queer" when they returned, "mad, if you will." He closes by saying, "So much for the facts, Doctor. They leave off there and the dreams begin" (699). These "dreams," these fantasy structures that begin where the past ends, are shown to constitute Bartlett's current shore life.⁸ Such constructs are evident in the opening events when Nat tells how the old captain constantly stands on the roof, his mock poop deck, looking to sea for the return of "[h]is ship—the Mary Allen—named for [Nat's] dead mother" (697). Nat makes clear that such a return is impossible, for the ship was "lost in a hurricane"; yet, although his father knows this, Nat explains, "he won't believe" (697). Bartlett's longing for the impossible return of an object constituted by a confluence of his missing ship and deceased wife clearly presents a hysterical rejection of the present. This "madness," of course, prompts Nat's ostensible motivation to "get him to the asylum"—which, in itself, can be seen to portray the utter impossibility of any vestiges of the past surviving in the modern future. The asylum, as a form of a prison, is an apt symbol for O'Neill's figuration of modern maritime labor. In this sense, Bartlett's movement toward an asylum in the year 1900 can be seen to relate to the way the Glencairn or the ocean liner in The Hairy Ape are presented as prison-like.

Yet, O'Neill goes further than this, portraying, in the form of Bartlett's delusional fantasy, how memories and longing for a deceased past are distorted in the modern mind. For, as Nat makes clear, Bartlett's "dream" is for the Mary Allen to return with the treasure he and his crew had buried on the island. Besides casting this "dream" tropologically as "the same old dream" (700) of romantic narratives, O'Neill gestures toward how Bartlett's desire for treasure may be a displaced and sublimated desire for his lost crew members, and, by default, his past life as a sea captain. In this sense, the central trauma of losing his whaling vessel and his three crew members on the island forms a central locus around which all events of the past seem to revolve. After the "undeniable" fact that crew members died from cannibalism or natural occurrences, the "dreams" of treasure "begin" (699). The treasure, therefore, can be seen to fill the traumatic space opened by the loss of ship and crew—displacing a yearning for what can never be regained with a romanticized (through traditional narratives) and socially sanctioned (in the form of a desire for economic gain) fantasy. Interestingly, Nat explains that on the island, his father and his men decided to "bury" the treasure because, due to lack of food and water, they were "[beginning] to forget" things (700). O'Neill, therefore, directly links the act of forgetting and burying—setting up a Freudian-like scenario where the burying of the treasure can be associated with either the burying of the dead crew members or the metaphoric burying of the guilt in having killed and consumed them.

Bartlett's son, Nat, shares this desire for the return of the past. As the "heir to the secret," he shares in his father's fantasy of the treasure (700). Since Nat inherits the delusional, displaced version of his father's desire for the past, however, his motivation throughout the play revolves solely around monetary gain. This may, in part, account for the failure of the maritime life to fulfill him and for his disdain for "the sea that robbed [him] of [his] arm and made [him] the broken thing [he] is" (703). This trauma leads Nat to accept the fact that forgetting the past is a prerequisite for survival. This becomes apparent when he tells his sister that due to the neighbors' fear of their father's madness and the possible "haunt[ing]" of their house (703), "it would be better for [their father . . .] where he couldn't see the sea," where he could "forget his mad idea of waiting for a lost ship and [. . .] treasure that never was" (702). Yet, Nat reveals that his father's dream of the past is still alive in him as well, how his father "made [him] doubt [his] brain" and even though he "knew it was a dream—[he] couldn't kill it" (705). This anxiety-ridden tension between having to forget and holding on to desire for the return of the past causes him to lament that "[he's] got to free [himself]" from such beliefs (705).

Both Bartlett and his son's fantasies culminate at the end of the play when Bartlett's "Sail-ho" call ushers in the arrival of the ghost ship (706). Believing his father's claim that the Mary Allen has returned, Nat, with a "haunted" look in his eye, joins his father's delusion and sees the "red and green light at the mainmast-head" (708). Of course, Sue fails to see the phantom ship, and her exclamation, "[t]here's nothing there," sets up a baseline of sanity (708). This referential notion of sanity, however, is complicated when O'Neill has the crew's ghosts appear before the audience as phenomenal forms. By having these ghost men appear in their "rotten clothes," O'Neill creates a dialectical shift, whereby the audience is, in effect, placed in the position of madness.⁹In so doing, O'Neill can be seen to be attempting to comment on the modern audience's own fantasy of the present, a fantasy that views the past as dead and gone. In this sense, the bodily return of the seamen is not only a "return of the repressed" for Bartlett, but also for the broader audience itself. In relation to the plot, however, parading the dead sailors before the audience has a clear purpose: to draw attention to the form of Bartlett's fantasy. For despite all the previous talk of treasure, this scene focuses on the return of the men. Here, Bartlett welcomes them with a hearty, "come in!—and welcome home!" (709); interestingly, he acknowledges the treasure that they bear (in coffin-like "heavy [. . .] chests" [709]), but only in relation to their union, stating: "The treasure is ours only. We'll go away with it together" (italics mine 710). As in Ile, however, this hopeful ending is tempered by the obvious illusory nature of the reunion and by Bartlett's death. Yet, unlike in Ile, where Keeney and crew have legitimate grounds for optimism, Cross's denouement portrays Nat's hope for finding the treasure with his father's map as sheer madness. By 1900, therefore, O'Neill presents the "past"—and its romantic (in terms of fulfilling labor practices) as well as revolutionary potential (in terms of the power of the crew)—as dead, and any hope of retrieving it, no matter the form, seems to be a delusional impossibility.

In this context, O'Neill can be seen to portray a shift in labor from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, where by the onset of the "modern" age the past and the possibility for its existence has closed.¹⁰ By reading these plays with O'Neill's early Glencairn series, we may be able to bring context to O'Neill's portrayal of modern labor. For, as noted, the action of the Glencairn, according to O'Neill's note, occurs "in the years preceding the outbreak of the World War." In this sense, aligning the commonly closed Glencairn series with Ile and Cross completes a rough historical transition from 1895 through the opening of WWI. Instead of meaningless alienation, therefore, we might read the sailors' experiences on the Glencairn as a completion of the closure of the past and its romantic potential. This "modern" maritime labor experience, on the most basic level, is shown to shift from the clearly defined goals of whaling and retrieving treasure to a route-less wandering of the sea on a tramp steamer—whereby men are lost in the "fog" of arbitrary circulation between ports and, as Steven Colburn puts it, "dream[s], drunkenness, and death."¹¹ While apparently nihilistic, such a portrayal, as an indictment of modern labor practices, is quite poignant, especially considering the themes O'Neill presents: primarily the division between laborers, the unsatisfying practice of modern maritime labor, the romantic longing for mythologized labor of the past, and the desire for forgetting or escape. In consideration of the many readings of the basic plots of the Glencairn plays, I will look briefly at these plays only through their relations to the above themes. In discussing the plays, I will use the historical schematic that I set up earlier in the essay, which moves Zone from the second position of the 1929 ordering to fourth: Moon, Bound, Voyage, and Zone. While I view all of these plays as portraying salient aspects of all four labor-related themes, in order to focus my analysis, I will read each play primarily through one of these different topics.¹²

As previously mentioned, unlike the potential unity seen in the 1895 setting of Ile, the sailors on the Glencairn are consistently portrayed as divided. Although O'Neill at times figures their attempts at forming connections, these efforts ultimately prove futile, and the crew remains, according to Edwin Engel, "held together not by bonds of brotherhood but by an animal-like gregariousness" (10). This division can be seen in Bound in dying Yank's loneliness in a room of his snoring crew members, in Voyage in Driscoll, Ivan, and Cocky's inability to prevent Olson's abduction, as well as in Zone's depiction of the crew's violent interrogation of Smitty. In The Moon of the Caribbees, the first play of the series, this division manifests in several different forms, setting up subsequent notions of isolation and tension in the crew.

Moon is set on the main deck of the Glencairn, which is anchored off an unnamed West Indian island. Through the opening scene, O'Neill establishes the dominant theme of isolation. He calls for a moon "half-way up the sky" over the "motionless" anchored ship while a "far off" "melancholy negro chant [. . .] drifts [. . .] over the water" (527). All aspects, of course, portray a notion of separation and stasis: the moon between the earth and sky, the ship separated from the coast, and the crew removed from the source of the doleful music. More importantly, O'Neill presents the layout of the ship, itself, as necessitating a separation between the crewmembers, with different doorways and quarters for the sailors, firemen, carpenter, steward, etc. (527). This physical schematic mirrors divisions in the crew's modes of labor, divisions that eventually erupt in "a battle between seamen and firemen" (542). At the opening of the play's action this division also is seen in Smitty's "dreaming" isolating him from his crewmembers' discussions of the island. Scholars such as Kelli Larson have noted the central theme of Smitty's "outsider" status in the crew based on an ostensible class difference in "education, introspection, and refinement" (16). Yet, besides Smitty's commonly traced isolation, Moon also presents the division between the crew in terms of discordant notions of desire and the resultant eruption of violence. Besides Smitty and The Donkeyman's detachment from the crew's desire for revelry, O'Neill presents an interesting rift between Paddy and the main body of the crew over the issue of the native women. Here, after the girls board the ship, Paddy "roughly" retorts: "Never mind the girls. Where's the dhrink [sic]?" (535). This apparent repulsion with the women continues when he "snatches" a bottle from Bella's hand and "turns away" (536). Paddy's mysterious grievance later leads him to trip Cocky, who is dancing with Susie, which in turn incites the aforementioned brawl. Interestingly, Paddy's disdain for the crew's heterosexual activity can be read on two levels: as Paddy's failure or inability to share the crew's heterosexual desire (resulting from homosexual orientation, racial prejudices, or other factors), or as a more subtle portrayal of the crew's inability to seek and receive pleasure among and from themselves. In his study of nineteenth-century sea literature, Cesare Casarino finds that Moby-Dick's crew can be seen as a single "body" that "resists self-representation" and that, ultimately, symbolizes the locus of capital's potential failure (119).¹³ According to Casarino, "the rallying point for the counterattack against capital is a crisis of pleasure," one that may materialize through Marx's notion of "widening the sphere of [ . . .] pleasure," which includes a social and erotic reconfiguration of the relations between male bodies (179). In this context, might we read Paddy's frustration with his crew's actions as relating to its inability to give pleasure to and receive pleasure from each other? This can be seen to relate metaphorically to the ship's labor, with the crew turning to outsiders and recreational time for fulfillment and enjoyment. In Casarino's terms, a collective coupling of labor and pleasure provides the potential for a radical move against "capital" and common labor practices. On the Glencairn, however, the men exist in antagonistically strained relations, where their labor is figured offstage and their pleasure is derived from alcohol and prostitutes. O'Neill brings these conflicts to a head by having Paddy receive a stab wound in the scuffle, resulting in the Mate's forcing the women from the boat. With the crew's method for procuring pleasure eliminated, the men retreat from the common area of the deck to their separate quarters with the "haunted, saddened voice of that brooding music" accompanying them (544).

Another way that O'Neill figures modern labor on the Glencairn is through portrayals of characters' conscious dissatisfaction with their labor. In The Moon of the Caribbees this can be seen in the aforementioned inability of sailors' labor to provide sufficient pleasure, in The Long Voyage Home in Olson's lamentations that working as a sailor is "too much hard work for little money" (517) as well as the fact that sailors must be abducted to fill the labor needs of certain ships, and in the characters' anxiety about transporting ammunition in In the Zone. Through Yank's thoughts in Bound East for Cardiff, however, O'Neill directly comments on the salient ways that modern maritime labor may be lacking.

Set "on a foggy night midway on the voyage between New York and Cardiff," Bound depicts Yank's slow death after a fall from a ship's ladder (187). As critics such as Timo Tiusanen have noted, the play's use of the confined space of the forecastle, the repetition of the steamer's whistle, and Yank's occasional "modified monologue"—or speaking "in spite of another character, out of inner compulsion"—act to establish and maintain a haunting, ominous mood (46). The theme of isolation from and divisions within the crew is seen throughout the play, such as in Yank's aforementioned fear of dying "alone with everyone snoring" as well as the discord between Yank's anxiety about death and the watchman's call that "Aaall's well" (191). This theme is developed when Yank tells Driscoll that "[he] don't like to leave [him], [. . .] but—that's all" (195). He then directly connects such sentiments to the mode of maritime labor, itself, saying "[t]his sailor life ain't much to cry about leavin'" in part because there is "no one to care whether you're alive or dead" (195). Quite literally, then, the social division between crew members in maritime labor is one of the main reasons, in Yank's mind, that such activity "ain't much to cry about leavin'"—a division that creates an anxious void that Yank seeks to fill through Driscoll's presence. Yet, in addition to a lack of connection in the crew, Yank also figures the broader form of their labor as unfulfilling, lamenting how working in the merchant service entails "just one ship after another, hard work, small pay, and bum grub; and when you git into port, just a drunk endin' up in a fight, and your money gone, and then ship away again" (195). Besides a repetition of the theme of disunity in the form of fights, here, Yank refers to the apparent alienation such labor yields in its empty cycle of circulation: "one ship after another," "and then ship away again." Such sentiment is furthered when Yank refers to this circulation as relatively closed, saying "never getting' outa sailor-town, hardly, in any port; tavelin' all over the world and never seein' none of it" (195). In this sense, the movement of the tramp steamer is not open or free, as one might expect from a ship that travels the world without fixed schedules or routes, but hemmed in and walled off from the world. Unlike the Atlantic Queen with its two-year contract and specific quarry or the Mary Allen's defined task of retrieving "treasure," the tramp streamer's multifaceted function—its job to move products—casts it in perpetual motion. Like the fog that shrouds the Glencairn, giving the appearance of stagnant enclosure, the ship's meaningless and constant circulation acts to produce a similar stasis—a static repetition of empty movement and exchange. Within this cycle, labor is figured in an abstract, oblique manner; in fact, besides references to "watches" and names such as "sailor" and "fireman," O'Neill never portrays the crew of the Glencairn during acts of labor. Such a conspicuous absence seems to be evidence of further commentary—where the disconsolate crew's only semblance of life (as represented in action on the stage) is between cycles of work. In other words, labor is so alienating that it appears to be either beyond or below representation. In Bound, therefore, as well as the other plays in the series, O'Neill figures the crew's labor as an "absent cause" that structures its activity and, therefore, its discontent.¹⁴

Such sentiments clearly condemn the delimiting nature of modern maritime labor. Yet, O'Neill's presentation of the characters' responses to this negative condition also includes their complex attempts to palliate it. Here, O'Neill builds on the tendency seen in Captains Keeney and Bartlett to seek to maintain the past in a time of historical crisis or transition. Unlike these characters, however, the crew of the Glencairn is distanced from the social and economic structures of the nineteenth century, and, as a result, its desire to escape the present through the past takes on the form of nostalgic longing for a mythic and distant era. This can be seen in Moon when Driscoll laments that "[t]here's hardly a rale deep-water sailor lift on the seas, more's the pity" (531) and in Bound when Yank complains of the "damned whistle blowin'" and "wish[es] the stars was out, and the moon, too" so he could "lie out on the deck and look at them" (197). In both cases, the characters seem to equate the past with a more personal and visceral connection with the ocean (Driscoll with "deep-water" and Yank with the night sky). In a similar function to the way Captain Bartlett displaces his desire for his crew onto a longing for treasure, however, O'Neill depicts how the crew of the Glencairn at times replaces a longing for a mythic maritime past with a longing for a mythic agricultural past. Interestingly, such a move acts to push further back in time to the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century focus on a Jeffersonian-like paradigm of the yeoman farmer. Unlike Bartlett's displacement, one might argue that the modern sailors' agricultural fantasies are less a result of psychological trauma than a product of dissatisfaction with maritime labor. This romantic longing for an agricultural lifestyle is seen in Bound when Yank muses about his life-long desire to "stay on dry land [. . .] and have a farm" (195). This fantasy, replete with the domestic ideal of family, is also seen in The Long Voyage Home, a play where O'Neill moves these thematic constructs to the surface level of the plot.

The action of Voyage is composed of the set up and abduction of Olson, a Swedish sailor who has just ended his employment with the Glencairn, in order to force him to serve on the Amindra, a steamer that is to soon sail around Cape Horn. As critics have pointed out, the rather simple plot structure, utilizing elements of melodrama, establishes suspense early in the play, when O'Neill presents the nefarious plans of the workers at the bar, "a low dive on the London water-front" (509), to shanghai one of the Glencairn sailors. After Driscoll and Cocky take the drugged Ivan back to his bunk, Olson, with Freda's prodding, is left alone with the conspirators and is eventually incapacitated and forcefully shipped on the Amindra. The tragedy of the plot, however, comes with the fact that Olson was to return home to Stockholm as a passenger to work on his family's farm. Olson tells Freda how "[he] don't never ship on sea no more" with such labor consisting of "[j]ust work, work, work" and that he plans to return to his family's farm and "buy more land" with his earnings. As opposed to "hard work" at sea with "bum grub," working on the farm, as he did until he was eighteen, is shown to be "yust nice work" (517). Here, Yank's longing for a mythic agricultural experience is transfigured into a real-world possibility, with such a distant, historical past, shifted to a past in Olson's own life. While this desire for the farm remains a romantic alternative to the sea, moving it into the realm of Olson's childhood allows this alternative to become a viable option. Of course, O'Neill does so in order to cast a tragic hue on Olson's abduction and the subsequent erasure of such a possible life. In this sense, making this failed attempt at escaping maritime labor occur in the action of the play, as opposed to a sailor's wishful imagination, allows O'Neill to dramatize the illusory nature of any alternative to modern labor conditions.

The repeated inability of such fantasies of a romantic past to materialize and, therefore, for members of the crew to escape the confines of maritime labor leads many sailors on the Glencairn to seek to anesthetize their dis-ease through forgetting. In Moon this is evident in Smitty's desire to forget the "beastly memories" (537) engendered by the "melancholy negro chant" as well as in the motivation for the crew to seek revelry, drink, and women. In Bound this manifests in the metaphoric function of the fog; after Yank tells Driscoll of his dream of having a farm and admits that it is "too late" to achieve it, fog appears, causing him to ask Driscoll, "[w]hat was we talkin' of a minute ago?" (196). In Voyage such forgetting is cast in a different light; Driscoll's decision to leave the past criminal ways of the bar as "gone an' forgot" (512) and Olson's subsequent choice to let Freda convince him to forget his decision not to drink portray the dangers inherent in consciously choosing not to remember. It is in In the Zone, however, the last play of the series in terms of historical settings, where O'Neill carries this theme to its logical terminus.

As mentioned, Zone's setting, positioned at the commencement of WWI, places it at the end of the historical progression this essay has attempted to trace. Not only is this play the only one of the Glencairn series with a specified date per se, but this historical positioning critically influences the plot, with the anxiety of carrying ammunition heightening when the Glencairn enters the "war zone." This placement "in" the space of the war corresponds to a continuation and escalation of most of the previous issues. Here, the previous sporadic divisions between the crew, especially in terms of class, becomes the primary plot device, with, in Edwin Engel's words, "the man of feeling [suffering] at the hands of his stupid and insensitive companions" (13). As well, the crew's discontent with its labor is heightened while working on a ship that may explode at any moment: with Ivan slightly altering his earlier statement about the London bar, saying, "I don't li-ike dees voyage" (472). Most importantly, this discontent and anxiety is sublimated into a hysteria-driven suspicion that Smitty may be a German spy. While such suspicion and the subsequent group interrogation of Smitty's "black box" advances the notions of social division and anxiety about labor, it also functions in a similar manner to the previous plays' figuration of how the romantic maritime past is at times used to palliate sailors' discontent with the present. Instead of a mythic past, however, here, their suspicion of Smitty might be seen to evince a desire for elevated social significance. This can be seen when Davis answers Jack's question "[w]hat'd they want puttin' a spy on this old tub for?" by saying "there's a lot o' things a sailor'll see in the ports he puts in ought to be useful to 'em" (479). Fantasizing about having a spy onboard the Glencairn figures the crew as worthy of being a target as well as validates its activity and knowledge as "useful" to national powers.

The closing scene, however, can be viewed as the most indelible aspect of the play. After having the crew read Edith's last letter aloud, in which she tells Smitty that she is leaving him due to his alcoholism, O'Neill crafts a powerful scene of remorse and forgetting. Once the letter is read, Driscoll tells Davis and the crew that the last thing in the box is "[a] bit av a dried-up flower—a rose, maybe" and then closes the box and returns it to its hiding place under Smitty's mattress. After they untie and un-gag Smitty, who sobs violently into the wall, O'Neill describes the crew as being in "a moment of silence in which each man is in agony with the hopelessness of finding a word he can say." Driscoll then fills this silence with the question: "God stiffen us, are we never goin' to turn in fur a wink av sleep?" Here, the latent themes of the crew's social divisions, its dissatisfaction with its labor, and its reactionary fantasies culminate in a trauma that leaves it without words or recourse for an appropriate response. After Driscoll's suggestion, the men "start as if awakened from a bad dream and gratefully crawl into their bunks, [. . .] turning their faces to the wall" (488).

Similar to the possible function of the phenomenal ghosts that appear on stage in Cross, which force the audience to accept their own rejection of the past, here, the portrayal of the act of forgetting and desiring forgetting might be seen as a call for remembering. Ironically, such a theme can also be seen in O'Neill's use of the appellation "Glencairn." For "Glencairn" is the name of a highland Scottish earldom created by James III in the fifteenth century. Interestingly, William Cunningham, the ninth Earl of Glencairn, supported the interests of exiled Charles II in the seventeenth century.¹⁵ In this historical context, O'Neill's decision to name a British tramp steamer "Glencairn," a term that evokes Jacobite and Scottish nationalist sentiment, enacts a possible symbolic gesture towards a loss of revolutionary potential that mirrors the crew's own lack of agency. Zone's apt denouement, therefore, closes the Glencairn series with a poignant scene of attempted collective forgetting: positing the crewmembers' response to the adverse effects of their modern condition as an "awakening" to sleep in order to escape the "bad dream" of their real-world predicament.

In this essay I have attempted to show how loosening the rigid ordering of O'Neill's early Glencairn plays opens a productive discursive space—a space that may very well be more historically authentic—whereby these one-act plays might be re-situated and re-read in the context of other early sea plays. While only incipiently developed here, one reading afforded by such realignment includes O'Neill's presentation of a relative shift in maritime labor between 1895 and the commencement of WWI. In this context, focusing on the historical settings of these plays acts to open up methodological approaches to and, therefore, conceptual aspects of O'Neill's rich early work.

NOTES

1. Stephen A. Black, Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 142. Interestingly, despite this recent critical dismissal, R. Dilworth Rust, in "The Unity of O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn," makes clear that the cycle's performances received critical acclaim throughout the 1920s. There are, of course, many scholars who do cogently explore these early plays in the context of O'Neill's later work and biographical development. See, for example, Robert A. Richter's Eugene O'Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea: Maritime Influences in the Life and Works of Eugene O'Neill (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 2004). [Ironically, see Stephen Black's short essay in this volume for a serious treatment of O'Neill's tragic themes in Fog and other early sea plays—ed.]

2. See Chura 521-526 for a discussion of "vital contact" and the era's various "downclassing experiments" that attempted to "re-vivify" the upper class "through contact with supposedly simpler, hardier, more spirited people" (522).

3. See especially John Bak, "Eugene O'Neill and John Reed: Recording the Body Politic, 1913-1922," Eugene O'Neill Review 20.1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1996): 17-35. Bak traces O'Neill's close ties to John Reed and argues, "these years marked a noted similarity in the subject matter and style of their works" (18). In The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill, Edwin Engel discusses how the Glencairn sailors' "speech is tinctured by social radicalism, but they appear to be quite incapable of responding to such militant exhortations as O'Neill himself uttered in 1914" (14).

4. If we place Zone last based on its historical positioning, the three remaining plays—according to O'Neill "[taking] place in the years preceding the outbreak of the World War"—can be read as existing in approximately the same historical moment. Reading Moon first, which, again, was O'Neill's choice in 1919, we find the S.S. Glencairn in the West Indies. Might it be logical to place Bound East for Cardiff next, for its very title connotes a movement east toward England? Third, of course, would be The Long Voyage Home, which is set in London with Yank notoriously absent from the roster of characters. In this context, the series would be ordered: Moon, Bound, Voyage, and Zone. Interestingly, this is the very arrangement of the "cycle" as it appears in the "S.S. Glencairn" section of the early editions The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New York: Random House, 1934).

5. Due to the frequent colloquial phrases and intentional syntactic and semantic alterations in O'Neill's portrayal of sailors' accents and language usage, I will refrain from parenthetically correcting this language.

6. Besides the final scene's gesture toward the men's enthusiasm for the activity of hunting whales, O'Neill also provides a latent economic motivation when he has Keeney refer to the dividend system of the whaling industry. Here, Keeney asks the Mate: "What do the fools want to go home fur now? Their share o' the four hundred barrel wouldn't keep `em in chewin' terbacco" (497).

7. See, for example, O'Neill's comments on past maritime labor cited in Doris Alexander's "Eugene O'Neill as Social Critic," American Quarterly 6.4 (Winter 1954): 349-363. Here, O'Neill describes "the old spirit" of sea labor as being "more like the spirit of medieval guilds than anything that survives in this mechanistic age—the spirit of craftsmanship, of giving one's heart as well as one's hands to one's work, of doing it for the inner satisfaction of carrying out one's own ideals, not merely as obedience of orders" (351).

8. By "fantasy" I refer, essentially, to the basic notion of an imaginary construct. By "fantasy structure," I intend to gesture toward how such constructs function to create a schematic for reality. In so doing, I borrow from Slavoj Žižek's contention that "fantasy" structures our relationship to reality (our reality itself) and the world: it "mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the [. . .] objects we encounter in reality." In this sense, it "provides a `schema' according to which [. . .] objects in reality can function as objects of desire" (The Plague of Fantasies [New York: Verso, 1997] 7).

9.According to Timo Tiusanen in O'Neill's Scenic Images, O'Neill referred to this scene as "an amusing experiment in treating the audience as insane" (52). Bogard writes that this experiment did not go off well, as the "`live' ghosts caused an uproar at the playhouse" and were subsequently excised from the scene in Gold (103).

10. By using the term "modern," I do not intend to enter the debate about the historiography of the development of Modernism proper. Instead, using the schematic of O'Neill's plays, I seek to gesture toward how O'Neill figures and presents the development of modern maritime labor.

11. Steven E. Colburn, "The Long Voyage Home: Illusion and the Tragic Pattern of Fate in O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn Cycle," Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, ed. James J. Martine (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984) 57.

12. While I acknowledge that reading each of the Glencairn plays through a single theme limits my overall analysis, the fact that I view them as collectively portraying aspects of a single historical era justifies doing so.

13.My summary, with the intent to avoid doing injustice to Casarino's extensive and complex analysis, remains only a cursory gesture to one aspect of a larger argument. For the purpose of my analysis, "capital" can be seen to stand loosely in for the broader notion of "capitalism."

14. I use the term "alienation" here in its traditional Marxian sense of the constellation of deleterious effects of capitalism on human beings. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "alienation," for Marx, refers to man's separation from himself, others, and his potential powers ("species man") based on real-world activity and production (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2^nd ed. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978] 75). In this sense, the regimented abstract modality of labor on a tramp steamer, with its function to aid the perpetual motion of ships that carry random products to random ports, is either too intangible to figure or its lack of figuration evinces a commentary on its abstract nature. By "absent cause," I refer to labor's ability to structure the crew's physical and symbolic lives, including its discontent; yet, similar to the Žižekian notion of "symptom," it remains vaguely ambiguous and undefined. For an explication of the traditional critical use of the notion of "absent cause," see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 35.

15. See G.A.M. Wood and David Hewitt's "explanatory note" 87.6-7 in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet (New York: Penguin, 2000) 412.

WORKS CITED

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. 1972. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Chura, Patrick J. "`Vital Contact': Eugene O'Neill and the Working Class." Twentieth Century Literature 49.4 (Winter 2003): 520-546.

Engel, Edwin A. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Larson, Kelli A. "O'Neill's Tragic Quest for Belonging: Psychological Determinism in the S.S. Glencairn Quartet." Eugene O'Neill Review 13.2 (Fall 1989): 12-22.

O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1913-1920. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 1988.

Pfister, Joel. Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Rust, R. Dilworth. "The Unity of O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn." American Literature 37.3 (Nov. 1965): 280-290.

Tiusanen, Timo. O'Neill's Scenic Images. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Wetzsteon, Ross. Republic of Dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

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