In O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, Arthur and Barbara Gelb describe an intriguing encounter between playwright and public: "Shortly before The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway, a reporter at a press conference asked if it was true that the play had a cast of fourteen men and `four tarts'" (246). The reporter's tally was mistaken, of course; the play includes three prostitutes: Margie, Pearl, and Cora. "O'Neill, intent on making a different point, ignored the error," continue the Gelbs, and offered the following rejoinder: "`Well, there are fourteen men and four—uh—ladies'" [original emphasis] (246). This incident occurred in 1946, when O'Neill was already in the doldrums of his affiliation with Broadway; and in many ways, this basic misunderstanding anticipated the failed production that followed and perhaps confirmed O'Neill's cynicism toward Broadway.¹

The truly intriguing question suggested by this occasion, though, is what other point? Nearly sixty, O'Neill may have been reminiscing about decades-old friendships with some of the "`hard' ladies" who frequented the Hell Hole or Jimmy-the-Priest's during his nights of drinking.² He may also have been worrying over what emerges, when his body of works is considered collectively, as a central crux in his writing for the stage. It is well known that O'Neill rejected the commercialization and conventionality of the melodrama that was ubiquitous during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; indeed, it is the premise of the Gelbs' biography. What remains less evident, though, is how the figure of the prostitute who is mentioned prominently in Welded, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Long Day's Journey into Night (among other plays) and who trods the boards in The Great God Brown, "Anna Christie," and The Iceman Cometh contributes to this rebellion. Several questions follow from O'Neill's correction of attitude rather than arithmetic. Why that correction? What is implied in blurring the otherwise sharp distinction between ladies and tarts? And most importantly, what does it mean for consideration of O'Neill's dramaturgy?

Answers to such questions have been anything but kind to O'Neill. Much of the scholarship dedicated to the prostitutes in O'Neill's menagerie of down-and-outs, in fact, paints the playwright as being much like the bartender Rocky from The Iceman Cometh: a man who pretends to care about these women only to exploit them toward his own ends. Jane Torrey's curiously mis-titled "O'Neill's Psychology of Oppression in Men and Women," for instance, begins by applauding O'Neill's dramatization of "social group oppression."³ But, Torrey contends, O'Neill's efforts are distinctly one-sided: "Although men struggling with circumstances is one of O'Neill's more persistent themes, and social group oppression is one of the oppressive circumstances, it is not for women"; instead, O'Neill's women are essentialized as nurturers or sexualized objects (166). Doris Nelson's "O'Neill's Women" only briefly mentions prostitutes in its litany of complaints about O'Neill's depiction of women, but when it does so, it emphasizes their value only within an economy of male desire: "The prostitutes serve many functions in the plays, providing escape for the Cabots and Jamie Tyrone to offering a kind of folk wisdom in Welded and The Great God Brown" (4). Citing John Henry Raleigh, Nelson reaffirms that prostitutes fulfill two complementary ends in O'Neill's plays: "`first, bawdy and therefore enjoyable conversation; and, second, guilt-ridden sexual intercourse.' The men go to prostitutes to punish themselves for their guilty feelings toward the chaste women in their lives" (4). Trudy Drucker, by far, is the most aggressive in her disapproval of O'Neill in "Sexuality as Destiny: The Shadow Lives of O'Neill's Women." She contends "O'Neill's notable inability to distinguish virgin from whore reflects the generally faulty sense of identity shared by most of his women," which evidences a "psychological myopia" on the part of the playwright (8). She decries his prostitutes as "so characterless they are hard to tell apart" because they are nothing but reflections of male—including O'Neill's—fantasies (8).

Needless to say, much of this criticism misses the mark. Such readings of O'Neill's prostitutes are flawed because they begin with a flawed premise. They wrongly conflate O'Neill's perspective with that of his plays and thereby fail to recognize the possibility of any distance, particularly any ironic distance, between playwright and play. That same logic applied to Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage would find Brecht in support of peasants, families, and entire villages consumed by war; applied to George Bernard Shaw's Widower's Houses, it would find Shaw in favor of tenement housing as sound investments for the aristocracy. O'Neill is hobbled by such readings more so than Brecht or Shaw due perhaps to the highly autobiographical nature of his plays. This is true not just of the late confessional plays, which often bring the "haunted"⁴ O'Neills to the stage; it's equally true of early works like the Glencairn plays, which are peopled with sailors whom O'Neill had known. O'Neill's dramaturgy, in other words, invites a certain amount of conflation of play and playwright. But the autobiography that influences the plays, when considered at any length, would seem to exonerate O'Neill from the aforementioned complaints rather than indict him. O'Neill spent years during his youth, as the Gelbs detail, associating with "`anarchists (recently out of jail or on their way in) deposed politicians, gamblers, touts, pimps, and `hard' ladies of the oldest profession'" (504). The formative years that would give rise to O'Neill's fondness for society's dregs, in fact, were spent with Terry Carlin, the former anarchist who was the model for Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh; and they often spent "long nights in the Hell Hole" talking about "the plight of the underdog and a mutual concern for prostitutes" (521). Additionally, O'Neill's friendship with John Reed, which would eventually lead him to Provincetown, meant spending nights in "the city's underbelly" where they "were immersed in sympathy for the downtrodden, especially prostitutes, and could listen with endless fascination to their tales of woe" (538).

This argument is not intended to rebut the litany of misdirected accusations against O'Neill, however. Rather, it intends to consider what results from these misreadings of O'Neill's depiction of prostitutes. Most notably, such misreadings foreclose the possibility of any social realism at work in O'Neill's plays (the references to Brecht and Shaw were quite deliberate); and consequently these readings overlook—and worse, even obfuscate—a noteworthy trend in the O'Neill canon that begins with his earliest one-act plays, continues through his Broadway successes of the 1920s, and resonates among the classics of his final years. This trend begins with O'Neill's rejection of the stock depiction of the fallen woman, the dramatic origins of which can be traced to Alexandre Dumas's La Dame aux Camelias or simply Camille. "The play's melodramatic conclusion, which has Camille dying of tuberculosis, neatly resolves the socially difficult issue of marriage to a former courtesan," writes Sheila Garvey. "Camille's tragic demise can also be viewed as a convenient convention used by the playwright for the purpose of punishing the `fallen' heroine with a painful but poetic death" (67). Well beyond being merely cliché, which was most likely enough to frustrate O'Neill in itself, these depictions encourage a largely culinary theater, with the transgressive woman punished for the approbation of audiences. Such punishment, happily consumed for decades, was, in fact, often the only rationale for bringing such women to the Victorian stage.⁵ The world of the prostitute was unseemly and best kept offstage and away from the delicate sensibilities of audiences, even if said audiences were frequently and enthusiastically titillated by euphemistic reference to such worlds. Shaw roundly decried this double-standard in Plays Unpleasant: "members of Mrs. Warren's profession shall be tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that they shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience, or step into the next room to commit suicide" (186).

Unlike many who staged the "poor, wicked lot," O'Neill does little to make them palatable for audiences.⁶ In "Anna Christie" and The Iceman Cometh, in fact, he overcame what Shaw saw as the central impediment to the social criticism of Mrs. Warren's Profession: "The mischief lies in the deliberate suppression of the other side of the case: the refusal to allow Mrs. Warren to expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire among coarse tedious drunkards" (187). O'Neill, in other words, rejects melodramatic conventions and the audience demand that these conventions—women beautifully dressed and quietly done away with—subsidized. The naturalism that informed O'Neill's writing underscores these women as victims of circumstances beyond their control and attempts to highlight their frustration with and helplessness against such circumstances. These efforts were almost certainly influenced by August Strindberg's iconoclasm, particularly his repudiation of bourgeois sentimentality evidenced in the "Preface" to Miss Julie: "I do not believe in simple stage characters, and the summary judgements [sic] that authors pass on people—this one is stupid, that one is brutal, this one jealous, that one mean—ought to be challenged by naturalists, who know how richly complicated the soul is, and who are aware that `vice' has a reverse side, which is very much like virtue" (59). The irony of evoking Strindberg in an argument defending O'Neill against charges of near-misogyny does not escape me. But what Strindberg demanded was the necessity of emancipating characterization from the conventionality of audience expectations. O'Neill extends such iconoclasm, I shall argue, toward the fallen woman, perhaps the most "simple" of stage characters during O'Neill's day. He seeks to represent prostitutes as not only more complex characters but additionally to deny the conventional expectations and culinary aspirations of late Victorian audiences by blurring the distinction between virtue and vice or, to return to O'Neill's own distinction, between "ladies" and "tarts."

Gail Finney's Women and Modern Drama begins by outlining the remarkable changes in European theater from the late 1870s to the early 1900s, particularly the characterization of women. By the turn of the century, theatergoers who had previously gorged themselves on the women of farce and melodrama were more often confronted by the likes of Strindberg's Laura and Miss Julie, Shaw's Major Barbara and Candida, or Ibsen's Nora Helmer or Hedda Gabler. Thus began not just the new dramatic roles for women emphasized by Finney but additionally new modes of audience reception. Such characterization of women, in other words, challenged the ways audiences perceived and conceived of women's roles on stage and in society, though not always to the benefit of the New Woman.⁷ O'Neill's Anna Christie and the "ladies" of The Iceman Cometh are certainly not of the same quality as these New Women, but they are of a kind. In fact, O'Neill's growth from melodrama to social realism to the late classics is reflected in—and perhaps even motivated by—his attempts to represent, or perhaps re-present, the prostitute in all her drudgery and misery. Ann C. Hall's "A Kind of Alaska": Women in the Plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard, which argues that these playwrights confront audiences with "female stereotypes they have taken for granted, only to find them misleading, inaccurate, and often displaced," has already laid the groundwork for this argument (16). Most importantly, Hall underscores the correlation between "shifts in female characterization" and "shifts in form" (15). That is, the depiction of women is central to the evolving dramaturgy of these playwrights who have often been criticized for their female characters. As welcome as Hall's study is, considering the landscape of criticism devoted to O'Neill's women, it doesn't highlight the prostitutes that are central to O'Neill's playwriting or the pattern of representation evident in O'Neill's plays. Over the course of his career, O'Neill undertakes successive, though not always successful, rebellions against the conventions of the fallen woman genre, efforts that when taken together suggest an interplay of characterization, audience reception, and social commentary as central to O'Neill's dramaturgy.

The Web, a one-act play written in 1913, reveals an O'Neill concerned with the lives of prostitutes from his earliest efforts at writing plays. Unfortunately, it also demonstrates the pervasiveness of melodramatic conventions surrounding the woman with a past that the young playwright simply could not overcome. The protagonist Rose, the prostitute with a heart of gold who is continually buffeted by the indifference of society, bears the mark of Cain for such transgressive women: the tuberculosis that was her dramatic inheritance from Camille. Steve, Rose's pimp, crude and callous, takes whatever money the sickly Rose—whose coughing at just the right moments is, of course, a clumsy attempt to win sympathy from the audience O'Neill must have imagined—can earn and spends it on gambling and drugs while she and her child go without food and milk. O'Neill, falling victim to the very oversimplified characterization denounced by Strindberg, even has Steve threaten to get rid of Rose's child when the baby won't stop crying. Tim, the escaped gangster, first comes to Rose's rescue by chasing Steve away but then becomes the means for her punishment when Steve shoots him and frames Rose for the murder. The plot of the play is completely contrived, depending almost entirely on the sorts of coincidences parodied in The Importance of Being Earnest. Tim just happens to be next-door so he can burst in and save Rose. The police just happen to be downstairs, closing in on Tim, so they can arrest Rose when the gun goes off. The only thing missing, it seems, is a child left in the cloakroom on the Brighton line. Given the many histrionic gestures—from Rose and Tim proclaiming their undying love for each other shortly after they meet to Rose's throwing herself on Tim's corpse and begging him to provide her alibi—it becomes clear that the play is highly melodramatic and not very stageworthy.

As a glimpse of the central concerns of O'Neill's depiction of prostitutes, however, The Web establishes a framework for the aforementioned interplay of characterization, reception, and commentary. Foremost among these concerns are O'Neill's efforts at rendering the physical and psychological abuse endured by these women and the feeling of hopelessness that follows. Such abuse is highlighted when Steve threatens another prostitute as a way of tormenting Rose: "I'm not so sure Jack is wise to Bessie holdin' out on him; but I'll tell him, and if he isn't wise to it, Bessie'll be in for a good beatin'" (16). When Rose begs Steve to leave Bessie alone, Steve's response epitomizes the attitudes toward prostitutes in the play: "she oughta be learned a lesson [. . .]. Us guys has got to stand together. What'ud we do if all youse dolls got holdin' out on the side?" (16). Women are, in other words, nothing but commodities that produce more commodities for men, but never for themselves. Any attempt to violate this basic premise is met with intimidation and violence. After Tim has chased Steve from the room, Rose demonstrates surprising awareness of how women are kept in such subservience: "What am I fit fur? [. . .] We can't work out of this life because we don't know how to work. We was never taught how" (22). Her language, though unrefined, echoes Nora's accusation against Torvald at the end of A Doll House: that women are denied the education necessary to make their own choices. Though clearly descended from Dumas's fallen woman rather than from Ibsen's New Woman, Rose still suggests something of Nora's understanding of her plight: "It's a bum game all round" (17). And by extension, this understanding suggests O'Neill's concern with depicting the psychological consequences of such maltreatment of women. Unlike Nora, though, Rose cannot distance herself from or overcome her circumstances.

O'Neill's efforts in The Web, interestingly enough, resemble the "problem play" approach that Shaw describes as central to his social realism. In Plays Unpleasant, Shaw writes, "only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem" (197). Such a definition speaks to O'Neill's indictment of society within his play. "I've looked fur decent work and I've starved at it," says Rose when Tim urges her toward redemption. "A year after I first hit this town I quit and tried to be on the level. I got a job at housework—workin' twelve hours a day for twenty-five dollars a month" (21). But her best efforts were always sabotaged: "One night they have a guy to dinner who's seen me some place when I was on the town. He tells the lady—his duty he said it was—and she fires me right off the reel. I tried the same thing a lot of times. But there was always someone who'd drag me back. And then I quit tryin'. There didn't seem to be no use" (21-22). It's not just the likes of Steve who keep Rose trapped in the world of prostitution through intimidation and abuse, in other words; it's additionally the respectable society that indifferently or deliberately condemns such (fallen) women to their socially-imposed fate. In the name of propriety, the pillars of society fire women such as Rose from respectable positions and thus prevent them from gaining the socioeconomic freedom necessary to change their lives. "They—all the good people—they got me where I am and they're goin' to keep me there. Reform? Take it from me it can't be done," she tells Tim (22). The parable underlying O'Neill's play (and most certainly his perspective), then, is that the circumstances of prostitution are historical rather than natural; and consequently, they can—and should—be changed.

The Web evidences O'Neill's understanding of the world of prostitution and his determination to confront audiences—albeit imagined audiences—with the desperation of circumstances that are frequently downplayed by fallen woman plays. It would take several years of cultivating his playwriting skills, though, before he could write a character and a play that would come closer to accomplishing these ends. In many ways, "Anna Christie" is a definitive break from the fallen woman genre: "`Anna Christie' is unique in being one of the first prostitute plays on Broadway in which the courtesan or fallen woman figure does not suffer some kind of negative ending, whether it be death (Camille, Olympe), societal scorn (The Deluge, The Easiest Way) or personal loss (Sapho and Mrs. Warren's Profession)," writes Katie Johnson; but, she adds significantly, "the play offers a mixed dramaturgical victory" (88). She hails Anna's entrance as "an important moment in the landscape of representing prostitution in American drama, showing a strong woman who is her `own boss,' as she herself puts it" (92). At the same time, she maintains serious reservations about the ending of the play and, by extension, about the play itself. "What is problematic with the `unsatisfactory last act,' as Walter Prichard Eaton called it, is not just that it offers contrived dramaturgical closure but rather that it relies so extensively on Anna's submission to patriarchal authority" (93). Arthur Holmberg, by contrast, reads the often-debated ending as much more ambiguous. Writing about the 1930 Hollywood film adaptation starring Greta Garbo, he contends that any happy ending inferred by audiences is mediated by "the menace of the visual image" of the sea; and, he continues, the ending evokes "different and irreconcilable emotions that should make the audience uncomfortable" (53). These readings epitomize the differing responses to "Anna Christie," but neither is truly satisfactory because each fails to consider how the depiction of Anna in the first and final acts suggests a surprising mode of reception for audiences teethed on melodrama.

Unlike many fallen woman plays, "Anna Christie" is only superficially about the revelation of Anna's past, though her confrontation of her father and future husband with that past in act 3 remains central to the plot. Much of the play, in fact, is more about underscoring what circumstances precipitated and followed from her descent into prostitution. Moments after Marthy guesses Anna's "number" in the opening act, Anna begins telling her story. She describes, not without recrimination, how her father "let them cousins of my Old Woman's keep me on their farm and work me to death like a dog" (972). Then, with more animosity, she adds, "It was one of the sons—the youngest—started me—when I was sixteen. After that I hated 'em so I'd killed 'em all if I'd stayed" (972). Anna may rationalize her decision to join a brothel, but O'Neill's play simultaneously works against the modes of reception endorsed by fallen woman plays. It does so by preempting much of the suspense felt by audiences, who are normally aligned with the male characters and thus encouraged to participate in the condemnation of the woman that follows from the discovery of her disreputable past. Anna's acknowledgement of being "started" wrong by her cousin is not met with outrage from Marthy, who becomes O'Neill's surrogate for the audience, but instead with empathy for the damage to Anna's psyche and her often uncontrollable and understandable anger toward men. She is clearly scarred and embittered by being abused by her family to the point that joining a brothel offered a better "chance" at having a life than remaining on the farm. Rather than being aligned with the men of the play, then, audiences are aligned with the women and thus are situated to appreciate the hypocrisy of Mat and Chris's indignation when they discover Anna's past. The play's rehearsing of Anna's history is not meant to condemn her as much as it condemns the society of men that victimized her.

"Anna Christie," in other words, maintains the basic framework of the fallen woman play—the inevitable build toward the revelation of Anna's secret past to the male characters—but it simultaneously attempts to dramatize what the genre traditionally obfuscates. It brings to the surface and unleashes with surprising ferocity the emotional and psychological trauma endured by women forced into the world of prostitution. Anna is possessed, like Hedda Gabler or Miss Julie, of a complicated and at times self-destructive psychology that epitomizes what Strindberg demanded from naturalist playwrights: the overlapping of virtue and vice within a single character. Her emotions swing between the yearning for succor and the impulse toward revenge, as evidenced throughout the play: in act 1, Anna nearly walks out of Johnny-the-Priest's and back to her former life, but then collapses sobbing into a chair and allows her father to take care of her; in act 2, she feels an exultation for the sea that is undercut by sudden bouts of anger toward her father; and so on. But Anna's conflictual nature, which is central to the play's social commentary, is best evidenced in her double-rehearsal of her past. When Anna first tells her story to Marthy, it is remarkable considering that Anna's experiences have obviously made her distrustful and suspicious of others. Apparently, though, she recognizes something trustworthy in Marthy; and her revealing her story so openly suggests just how desperately she needs consolation and understanding. When she confronts Chris and Mat, however, she is almost bludgeoning them with the truth: "I was in a house, that's what!—yes, that kind of a house—the kind sailors like you and Mat goes to in port" (1009). "You will too listen!" she shouts when her father tries to deny both the reality of and his own complicity in such maltreatment of women. She eagerly mocks Mat by reminding him of his promise that nothing (other than Anna already being married) would dissuade him from marrying her. And throughout much of this scene, she can hardly contain her Hedda Gabler-like impulses: "I hate 'em! Hate 'em!" (1009).

Such venom underscores the play's indictment of male exploitation of women: both through Anna's words and through the underlying emotional trauma suggested by those words. This indictment extends responsibility for the circumstances of Anna's degradation beyond the cousins who first took advantage of her and spins a web, recalling the metaphoric title of O'Neill's early play, of male desire that twists women into commodities and simultaneously devalues their individuality and autonomy. Such maltreatment is given a gestus when Mat and Chris argue over Anna just before she reveals her past.⁸ "We'll be seeing who'll win in the end," Mat says to Chris, with Anna going unnoticed thanks to their bravado (1006). They argue over her future—over her in the third person—even though she's standing right there, and O'Neill's stage directions indicate Anna's reaction: her face "freezes into the hardened sneer of experience" (1006). Shortly thereafter, she repudiates their objectification of her and demands her autonomy: "You're just like the rest of them—you two! Gawd, you'd think I was a piece of furniture!" (1007). In so doing, Anna frames the argument between Mat and Chris within the economy of male desire that victimizes the likes of Anna and Rose: two men arguing over possession of a woman who is little more than an object to be traded among men. Her interjection highlights the objectification of women by men so that audiences can appreciate the play's indictment. And then Anna provides the play's rejoinder: "You was going on's if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?—'cepting myself" (1007). She includes both of them in the long line of men, beginning with her cousins and extending through her many johns, who have temporarily "owned" her body. Audiences, in other words, are encouraged to recognize the complicity of Mat and Chris in the objectification of women and reject their indignation at Anna's past moments later.

Nearly all of Anna's defiance and determination, however, dissipates somewhere before the play's conclusion. When her father pleads for forgiveness at the beginning of act 4, she reassures him, "You ain't to blame. You're just—what you are—like me" (1017). When Mat returns soon thereafter, she pleads with him: "Can't you forgive what's dead and gone—and forget it?" (1020). She seeks, in other words, consolation for her father and through Mat from the opening of the final act. She goes on to willingly prostrate herself to win Mat's forgiveness and favor: "I'll do anything, anything you want to prove I'm not lying!" (1023). She even tries to convince him, in a highly melodramatic gesture that echoes the ending of The Web, that his love has redeemed her: "You hadn't come, and I'd gave up hope. But—in the station—I couldn't go. I'd bought a ticket and everything. But I got to thinking about you—and I couldn't take the train—I couldn't!" (1020). Such behavior almost belies the Anna of the first act with Marthy or of the third act with Mat and Chris, of course; indeed, it's hard to believe she is the same character at times. The Anna of the first three acts, after all, would not have so eagerly jumped at the opportunity to swear the demeaning oath that she never loved any of her johns that Mat demands; nor would she have been so happy with the prospects of their marriage: "I'll get a little house somewhere and I'll make a regular place for you two to come back to, —wait and see" (1026). Not surprisingly, Anna's wilting leads many critics, Katie Johnson foremost among them, to criticize the ending of O'Neill's play on two overlapping grounds. First, that the happy ending of Mat and Anna's marriage is hopelessly contrived. Second and more significantly, that such "dramaturgical framing requires female repentance, a redemption that only the whore undergoes" [original emphasis] (95). Thus, Johnson contends that O'Neill's play succumbs to the conventional and condescending paradigm of the "`penitent whore'" (94).

O'Neill found such sentimentalized readings of the ending of "Anna Christie"—beginning with Johnson's first grievance—particularly troubling. When O'Neill sent a copy of the manuscript to George Jean Nathan and Nathan complained of the happy ending, O'Neill's frustration was evident in his response: "The happy ending is merely a comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence unwritten" (qtd. in Floyd 200). The end of the plot, which is undoubtedly contrived if intended as denouement to the many knots O'Neill has fashioned, in other words, is hardly the end of the story of Anna and Mat. That story continues beyond the curtain and along the trajectory suggested by the play. And if the doubling of relationships in "Anna Christie" is any indication, then the marriage of Mat and Anna will be anything but a fairytale ending. The opening act, which is almost never discussed in conjunction with the play's conclusion, is especially important here. Before Anna arrives, Marthy summarizes her own history when she agrees to leave Chris's barge and bed: "after me campin' with barge men the last twenty years. I'm wise to the game [. . .]. There's plenty of other guys on the other barges waitin' for me" (966). Although Marthy makes a sharp distinction between her "campin'" with barge men and Anna's profession, Marthy too is at the mercy of an economy of desire that trades women among men. Her story, which characterizes her as a commodity passed amicably from one man to another whenever she becomes inconvenient or embarrassing, suggests a parallel to the world of prostitution. Anna recognizes this almost immediately, "You're me forty years from now" (970); but she has clearly forgotten by the play's end. O'Neill additionally doubles the marriage of Anna and Mat with that of Anna's mother and Chris, which left Anna's mother alone in Sweden, grieving for lost children and longing for a distant husband. The married life that awaits Anna is anything but happy or even hopeful considering what the play has established about the way men exploit and abandon women.

Johnson's central complaint about the ending of "Anna Christie" is more significant but in many ways more suspect. Like much of the scholarship on O'Neill's women, it begins from a flawed premise: That "Anna Christie" the play endorses the decisions of Anna Christie the character—which it does not. Yes, Anna wilts frustratingly before theatergoers' eyes, becoming a naïve and rather submissive woman in her desperation to be with Mat. Yes, she forgives her father and drops her anger about the wrongs done to her when she tells him, "You ain't to blame. You're just—what you are—like me" (1017). And yes, she accepts the sexual double standard of patriarchy when she forgives Mat his many indiscretions with the women he's known without demanding any oath from him. But the question remains: Is the audience expected or encouraged to agree with Anna's choices? Or does O'Neill intend something closer to what Brecht intended (but never truly achieved) with Mother Courage's return to the battlefield after Kattrin's death? O'Neill's letter to Nathan already locates the ending of the play, like the epic theater that Brecht would theorize more than a decade later, in the subjunctive mode: it is incomplete and awaiting the audience's judgment of Anna's decisions.⁹ In fact, O'Neill does everything he can in the play to cultivate audience skepticism toward Anna's enthusiasm in the final act. Mat's many brawls prior to his return to the barge suggests the potential for domestic abuse; Mat will live the same life that metaphorically widowed Anna's mother; and the "little house" that Anna envisions as home for Mat, Chris, and herself is made ironic by Anna's "yes, that kind of house." O'Neill's ending to "Anna Christie," in other words, anticipates the theater-audience paradigm of epic theater, which often succeeds by having audiences read against the ending of plays. O'Neill may have intended—but never succeeded in getting—audiences to recognize Anna's enthusiasm as further desperation for a woman caught in the "web" of male objectification and exploitation.

The prostitute represented, in other words, a central figure in O'Neill's rebellion against melodramatic convention and culinary modes of reception. He sought to challenge the sentimentalizing and moralizing depictions of the fallen woman and, like Shaw, to "expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire among coarse and tedious drunkards" (187). His efforts in "Anna Christie" were unsuccessful, however much the Anna of the first three acts exceeds the stock characterization of the fallen woman, because her story was still consumed—her (imagined) redemption rather than her punishment—by theatergoers. Such failure derives in part from the reality that modes of reception, as Brecht would often lament, are notoriously difficult to change.¹⁰ In addition, "Anna Christie's" failure owes as much to O'Neill's inability to fully extricate his play from the conventions of the fallen woman genre and embrace the naturalism that would foreground the circumstances and psychology of women like Anna and Rose. How to realize what Shaw describes as the "problem play" would become something of a crux for O'Neill, who would continue to fill his plays with references to prostitutes, but would keep them predominantly offstage for more than two decades. These absent-presences are more than incidental. They suggest O'Neill's determined, if largely unsuccessful, efforts toward cultivating more than just the naturalist characterization mandated by Strindberg; such renderings, by themselves, were obviously insufficient to overcome the culinary aspirations of audiences conditioned by the fallen woman genre. He was additionally attempting to devise a dramatic structure that would stipulate a more interrogatory mode of reception, one that would complement the play's critique of the world of prostitution rather than voyeuristically gratify theatergoers. It wasn't until The Iceman Cometh that O'Neill would again bring the prostitute to the stage as part of his iconoclasm, but in many ways, the play represents O'Neill's long sought-after refutation to fallen woman plays.

O'Neill shifts the staging of the prostitute from subject to subplot in The Iceman Cometh, which is first and foremost about men and their pipedreams. Nevertheless, O'Neill's correction of the reporter's attitude cited at the beginning of this argument corroborates the juxtaposition of the play with "Anna Christie." More significantly, The Iceman Cometh's subplot about Chuck and Cora reads like rebuttal to the sentimentalized readings of "Anna Christie's" conclusion. Chuck and Cora have long maintained, much to the amusement of Rocky, Margie, and Pearl, their intentions to leave Harry Hope's Saloon behind. "I'll bet dey been sittin' around kiddin' demselves wid dat old pipe dream about getting' married and settlin' down on a farm," Margie says, rehearsing the details (602). "Jees, can yuh picture a good barkeep like Chuck diggin' spuds?" Rocky adds more derisively, "And imagine a whore hustlin' de cows home!" (603). Already, the story of Chuck and Cora doubles that of Mat and Anna, but once Hickey arrives and cajoles everyone into pursuing his or her pipe dreams (and thereby destroying them), the fairytale ending collapses under just the sort of reality that would seem to await Anna. "[S]he beefs we won't be married a month," complains Chuck shortly after making his entrance, "before I'll trow it in her face she was a tart" (605). And Pearl's joke corroborates the likely animosity that would hound the couple (whether Mat and Anna or Chuck and Cora): "Imagine Cora a bride! [. . .] if all the guys you've stayed wid was side by side, yuh could walk on 'em from here to Texas!" (620). Such imagery, which remains largely euphemized in "Anna Christie," underscores the circumstances of prostitution: what the woman has had to endure while she is working, and how it haunts her emotionally and socially after attempted reform. The woman's past, in other words, cannot easily be forgotten; it lingers as real world consequence and helps poison the future of both couples. Thus O'Neill suggests that such fairytale endings, whether in The Iceman Cometh or "Anna Christie," are nothing more than "lousy pipe dream[s]" (683).

The Iceman Cometh goes beyond merely providing rebuttal to misreadings of "Anna Christie" and critiques the conventions of the fallen woman genre that endorse such misreadings. It does so by maintaining the revelation of the woman's past, easily the most significant of these conventions, but simultaneously nullifying its sensationalism. When Chuck says that he canceled the wedding, Rocky interjects with Cora's version of the story: "She says it was her told you to go to hell, because yuh'd started hittin' de booze" (683). Only then does Chuck evoke Cora's history, in language that echoes Pearl's joke: "I got tinkin' [. . .] won't I look sweet with a wife dat if yuh put all de guys she's stayed wid side by side, dey'd reach to Chicago." In case the point isn't self-evident, he adds, "De minute your back is turned, dey're cheatin' wid de iceman or someone" (683). Chuck basically attempts what the high society man does to Rose in The Web: divulge her disreputable past in order to bring about her public embarrassment or castigation—both in the dramatic world of the play and the real world of the theater. But no indignation follows Chuck's disclosure—in Hope's Saloon or the auditorium, I would wager—because everyone knows all about Cora's profession; indeed, Chuck has benefited from her working the streets. Chuck, in fact, is probably more embarrassed by this non-revelation than Cora.¹¹ Additionally, O'Neill locates the "revelation" of the woman's past within the petty squabbling and bruised egos of the down-and-outs from the bar who turn on each other, often with considerable violence, after their pipe dreams evaporate under Hickey's choreography. This convention of fallen woman plays, which remains crucial to "Anna Christie," is retained neither as plot-point nor as thematic concern in The Iceman Cometh. If anything, O'Neill deploys it ironically; it becomes a way of highlighting what fallen woman plays normally naturalize: the condemnation by men of the woman's past. O'Neill, in other words, foregrounds such "revelations" as nothing more than self-serving means for rationalizing Chuck's rejection (by Cora) and reestablishing his authority (over Cora).

Thus emerges within the subplot of The Iceman Cometh a pattern of narrative and counter-narrative that suggests O'Neill's rebuttal to the fallen woman genre. Rather than building teleologically toward the central narrative of revelation and recrimination, O'Neill continually juxtaposes several competing narratives that often undermine each other and, more importantly, destabilize (male) authority. Chuck's story does not destroy Cora, as such revelations of the woman's past typically do. Instead, Chuck's story is mediated by Cora's story and by the context of their argument. Ann C. Hall's consideration of Cora's interruption and disruption of Hickey's confession in the final act falls under this same pattern. When Hickey remarks how the prostitutes he'd known had always laughed at his jokes, Cora responds, "Jees, all de lousy jokes I've had to listen to and pretend was funny!" (697). "This interruption creates a gap in Hickey's monologue and the play's overall representation of these onstage women," contends Hall: "The play exposes her for what she is—a woman who must masquerade for men" (31-32). Cora, in other words, undermines the authority of Hickey's narrative during this interruption, and she does so again when Hickey describes having "picked up a nail from some tart in Altoona"—"Yeah. And she picked it up from some guy" (697). Cora highlights what Hickey's narrative would obfuscate: That the women laughing at his jokes or satisfying his sexual desires were playing their socially-determined roles in a society that values women not for themselves but as objects of male fantasy. The woman in Altoona from whom Hickey contracted the venereal disease is much more sinned against than sinning. She is, after all, traded among men by men; and her venereal disease is evidence of this exchange. But her story—the circumstances that women such as Cora and the other prostitutes have to endure—becomes evident for theatergoers through Cora's interruption and disruption, or her counter-narrative that stands in opposition and apposition to Hickey's narrative.

Such changes in O'Neill's dramaturgy correspond with (intended) changes in the modes of reception of O'Neill's audience. Instead of voyeuristically satiating themselves on the punishment or redemption of the woman with a past, neither of which occur in The Iceman Cometh, theatergoers are intended to engage with the play's interrogation of the world of the prostitute. Audiences, in other words, are encouraged by this pattern of narrative and counter-narrative to read against the attitudes and anecdotes about prostitution evident throughout the play's subplots and recognize the deceptions and delusions therein. Such interrogatory engagement begins by seeing through Rocky's pipe dream about his friendship with Margie and Pearl. Anything but the "pals" he insists they are, theirs is a fundamentally exploitative relationship when stripped of its euphemisms and obfuscations. Rocky not only takes their money, which becomes the gestus for their social relationship, but he additionally sustains the circumstances that keep Margie and Pearl trapped in prostitution. He bribes the police and threatens the women with violence. More significantly, this interrogatory engagement intends for audiences to read against the delusions of the prostitutes themselves. This means recognizing the nonsense distinction between "tart" and "whore" with which they placate themselves; it also means questioning what drove these women into lives where they knowingly put themselves in danger whenever they venture out of Hope's Saloon; and it means beginning to appreciate how much this life has damaged their self-worth. O'Neill's stage directions describe them as "sentimental, feather-brained, giggly, lazy, good-natured and reasonably contented with life" and they are; but the same directions indicate why: "the game is beginning to get to them" (50). Audiences are meant to be bothered, even appalled at how these women are treated and how they view themselves. Such engagement, where audiences feel emotions in reaction to characters rather than in sympathy with them, is much closer to the epic audience that Brecht envisioned.

This argument began by rehearsing some of the criticism that Eugene O'Neill has received from feminist writers; and the objective throughout was not so much to redeem O'Neill as a writer of long-misunderstood feminist plays. Instead, it was to consider how the interplay of characterization, audience reception, and social commentary that underlies O'Neill's depiction of the prostitute might serve feminist ends. These women are not brought to the stage with the intent of satisfying audiences' culinary aspirations. They are staged through a blending of naturalism's emphasis on circumstances and Shaw's definition of the "problem play," and such depictions challenge the voyeuristic modes of reception endorsed by the fallen woman genre. More importantly, staging the conflictual aspects of these women—who are normally flattened out through stock characterization and thereby made easier for audience consumption—overlaps with the concerns of feminism. Patricia Schroeder has argued against "prescriptive and exclusionary" definitions of feminism because they frequently exclude many noteworthy efforts toward challenging patriarchal attitudes regarding women's roles (67). She advocates instead a "healthy pluralism in defining feminist drama—to bridge the gaps between form and content, tradition and innovation, culture and the individual, rebellion and accommodation" (77-78). It's uncertain whether or not Schroeder would extend such pluralism to include O'Neill, but it would seem that such a definition of feminist drama would necessitate looking in unlikely places.¹² Sheila Garvey maintains that O'Neill's iconoclasm suggests that feminist productions of "Anna Christie" correspond perfectly with the playwright's ambitions (78). And it is in this rebellion against conventionality of characterization and audience reception that O'Neill's re-presentation of the prostitute converges with feminism. These women are certainly not feminist role models, but their failings—carefully historicized with a dose of irony—might be just as valuable toward feminist ends.

NOTES

1. Virginia Floyd attributes the failure of the 1946 production to the jubilation and optimism that followed the end of World War II; audiences simply weren't ready for O'Neill's dark play. See The Plays of Eugene O'Neill.

2. The years before O'Neill went to Provincetown were troubled years for the playwright; he spent many days drinking himself toward oblivion following his discovery of his mother's drug addiction. The quote and further biography comes from the Gelbs' O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo.

3. Torrey's article is interesting, if somewhat shortsighted. O'Neill's prostitutes would seem to be the most vulnerable of all O'Neill characters to "troubled circumstances." But curiously, Torrey doesn't include gender oppression with class and racial oppression.

4. O'Neill, of course, provides the adjective in the foreword to Long Day's Journey into Night when he describes the Tyrones.

5. In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), W.B. Worthen records what epitomizes the reaction to these women on the Victorian stage: "As Arthur Wing Pinero's biographer Hamilton Fyfe asked, characterizing much of the contemporary reception of The Second Mrs Tanqueray, `Why recognize the existence of women of Paula's class at all? These subjects are not for public discussion even by the preacher. We should be kept from all knowledge of such things'" (30).

6. The description is Mat Burke's ("Anna Christie" 990).

7. Susan A. Glenn's Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) records the considerable backlash marshaled against the New Woman and actresses in particular during the early decades of the twentieth century.

8. For Brecht, the "gestus" epitomizes and underscores a relationship among characters that is distinctly social; that is, it is defined through the (failings of) society and is expressed through the social interactions of characters. See "A Short Organum for the Theater," Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

9. Some of Brecht's earliest writings overlap with the staging of "Anna Christie," but the majority of his writing, including "A Short Organum for the Theater," which codifies much of his theory of epic theater, was written during the 1930s and 1940s.

10. See Brecht's commentary on the 1949 production of Mother Courage recorded in Brecht on Theatre 220.

11. Chuck, after all, changes his story in an effort to save face among the saloon's patrons. Cora not only remains consistent; she additionally seems unfazed by Chuck's attempts to embarrass her. See act 4.

12. Schroeder's essay begins, interestingly enough, with an anecdote about her professor who was convinced that American theater began and ended with Eugene O'Neill. The anecdote illustrates the "prescriptive and exclusionary" definitions of theater studies that the article argues stifle a healthy and vibrant feminist theater studies.

WORKS CITED

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Finney, Gail. Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Ungar, 1987.

Garvey, Sheila Hickey. "Anna Christie and the `Fallen Woman Genre.'" Eugene O'Neill Review 19 (1995): 67-80.

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause Books, 2000.

Hall, Ann C. "`What is a Man Without a Good Woman's Love?': O'Neill's Madonnas." "A Kind of Alaska": Women in the Plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 17-53.

Holmberg, Arthur. "Fallen Angels at Sea: Garbo, Ullman, Richardson, and the Contradictory Prostitute in `Anna Christie.'" Eugene O'Neill Review 20 (1996): 43-63.

Johnson, Katie N. "`Anna Christie': The Repentant Courtesan, Made Respectable." Eugene O'Neill Review 26 (2004): 87-104.

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_____. Complete Plays. Ed. Travis Bogard. 3 vols. New York: Library of America, 1988.

_____. The Iceman Cometh. Complete Plays 1932-1943. Vol 2. 560-711.

_____. The Web. Complete Plays 1913-1920. Vol. 1. 13-28.

Schroeder, Patricia. "American Drama, Feminist Discourse, and Dramatic Form: A Defense of Critical Pluralism." Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. 66-81.

Shaw, George Bernard. Plays Unpleasant. 1898. New York: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Strindberg, August. Preface. Miss Julie and Other Plays. By Strindberg. Trans. Michael Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Torrey, Jane. "O'Neill's Psychology of Oppression in Men and Women." Eugene O'Neill's Century: Centennial Views on America's Foremost Tragic Dramatist. Ed. Richard F. Moorton Jr. New York: Greenwood, 1991. 165-170.