Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten (hereafter Misbegotten) is well known to be highly autobiographical. It is often viewed as a sequel to Long Day's Journey into Night (hereafter Journey), undoubtedly an autobiographical play, in which O'Neill depicts the Tyrone family faithfully reflecting his own family. Jamie, who is modeled after the author's actual brother, first appears in Journey, set in 1912, and reappears as Jim Tyrone in Misbegotten, set eleven years later in September 1923, approximately two months before the death of Jamie O'Neill. If the autobiographical aspects of the material were emphasized as they are in Stephen Black's elaborate biographical studies on O'Neill, the play would be regarded as a requiem to pacify the spirit of the playwright's late brother.[1]

I do not have the slightest intention of denying the existence of such qualities in the play, as we shall see them most clearly in the final scene. On the other hand, however, one should focus in greater detail on what the rest of the play tells us, while also paying proper attention to the author's interests and themes addressed in his preceding plays when necessary. Then, it will turn out that the most profound theme in the play is that of the rebirth of spiritually dead human beings in modern, materialistic civilization cut off from nature or the cosmos. O'Neill insists that not only reconciliation between civilization and nature, but also empowerment of the Mother, disrespected under the dominance of the Father, will be required for such a miraculous human rebirth to happen.

Unfortunately, this fundamental theme in the play has been blurred by some feminist critics who have overemphasized the tragedy of heroine Josie Hogan abandoning her own hopes and desires in favor of playing the sacrificial role of mother for Jim Tyrone. Investigating carefully the above-mentioned theme of rebirth, however, one will find that Josie's real tragedy is that, in spite of all her plans and expectations, she is unable to become the "mother" who gives new life to Jim, himself a representative of modern humanity. Studying Misbegotten in detail from this point of view gives wider significance to this requiem play as well as challenges the established image of O'Neill as a sexist playwright who stereotypes women in his works.[2]

Misbegotten is set in Irish-American Phil Hogan's tenant farm in Connecticut. The first act starts with Hogan's daughter, Josie, helping her brother, Mike, to run away from home. Just as the other two brothers, John and Thomas, already left, Mike is about to do the same in order to avoid being forced to work hard by Hogan any further. Here, one can note that this last completed play of O'Neill follows Beyond the Horizon (hereafter Horizon) and Desire Under the Elms (hereafter Elms) in what one could call his farm trilogy. The situation in which the sons escape the dominance of their rigid father immediately reminds us of O'Neill's second farm play, Elms, in which, refusing to slave for their strict father, Ephraim Cabot, two of his three sons leave home with a scheme for making a fortune from gold mines in California.[3] By digging up stones and piling them into walls, Cabot, for his part, has made a beautiful farm in rugged New England, an area essentially not suitable for farming in the mid-nineteenth century. Cabot, who believes in the "hard" God "in the stones" (349), strives diligently and greedily to dominate his family and the land in the birthplace of America. He embodies the principles that led the country to today's material prosperity and which produced the wealthy such as Hogan's millionaire neighbor, Harder, in Misbegotten. The Cabot house exists as a topos to show paternal American civilization in miniature.

Less than a century later, leaving Cabot's jim-dandy New England spread, the Hogan tenant farm in Misbegotten has turned into a wasteland. The farm is in an extremely poor state; as Hogan says, "If cows could eat them [rocks] this place would make a grand dairy farm" (875). It is milkweeds, thistles and poison ivies alone that are in thriving condition. Curiously, apart from the ruggedness of the land, there is no particular reason given for this low productivity of the farm. One can find the key to understanding this barren situation of the Hogan farm in O'Neill's first farm play Horizon. "Wedded to the soil," Andrew Mayo in the play is "as much a product of it [soil] as an ear of corn is, or a tree" (576), and has lived and worked as an inborn farmer in complete harmony with nature. But he leaves home for South America, turning the family farm over to his younger brother Robert, who has "a touch of a poet" (573) and is not suited for farming. Thereafter the farm goes on producing less and less until Robert is finally laid up with a deadly lung disease. In the meantime, Andrew has turned into a shrewd businessman engaged in crop speculation. Upon Andrew's return home, Robert, in a confused and ill state, but still as a surrogate voice of the playwright, denounces his brother:

You've spent eight years running away from yourself. Do you see what I mean? You used to be a creator when you loved the farm. You and life were in harmonious partnership. And now—(He stops as if seeking vainly for words.) My brain is muddled. But part of what I mean is that your gambling with the thing you used to love to create proves how far astray you've gotten from the truth. So you'll be punished. You'll have to suffer to win back—. (647)

Andrew's trajectory represents the process through which human beings cut themselves off from nature by objectifying, operating and exploiting it in the pursuit of material wealth. As shown in the play, nature will not show the spiritual power of producing rich harvest to insolent humankind. The fall and devastation of the Mayo farm symbolizes the essential situation in modern civilization where, having lost love and reverence for nature, people drift aimlessly as rootless self-dispossessors. Horizon is important as one of the first American plays to use a desolate farm as a metaphor to express the status quo of modern civilization alienated from nature.[4] O'Neill pioneered the literary topos of the modern wasteland.[5]

The barren Hogan farm in Misbegotten, created from the playwright's same literary imagination, ultimately reflects this critical condition in the modern civilized age. While the offstage world of prospective wealth, to which the sons have run away and from which the wealthy neighbor Harder later appears, is the unseen space of materially thriving American civilization, the sterile Hogan farm on stage is a negative image to show its sick essence in depth. "Themes of desolation and alienation from nature" (Tiusanen 304) are visualized in the exhausted Hogan house, which, according to O'Neill's description, "is not, to speak mildly, a fine example of New England architecture, placed so perfectly in its setting that it appears a harmonious part of the landscape, rooted in the earth" (856). Furthermore, Josie's bedroom, clumsily added to the main house, also serves as an effective visual image. A bedroom is a place generally reserved for private feelings and intimacies and has much to do with inner nature in terms of body, sex, passion, the unconscious, etc., and, as it becomes clear later in the play, inner as well as outer nature also plays an important theme.

Comparing Misbegotten with Elms, both Cabot and Hogan are rigorous fathers who force their sons to work hard, but their similarities vanish almost immediately, as it turns out in no time as the play unfolds that Hogan is a much softer, quite different version than the other consistently strict patriarch. Knowing that Josie helped Mike to leave home by giving him her father's money, one would expect Hogan to be furious with his daughter. But Hogan only acts as if he were as hard as Cabot. It is true that Hogan and Josie talk bluntly to each other. Unlike the cold, brutal relationships between Cabot and his sons, however, Hogan and Josie are, in fact, firmly connected with each other by mutual familial affection and love. Hogan's softness is also shown by the fact that he turns his back on the paternal God that Cabot in Elms has faith in as the absolute champion of patriarchal power. Losing his beloved wife when she gave birth to Mike, Hogan has "never set foot in a church since, and never will" (865). It is his escaped son Mike who has belief in the paternal God. Through this caricatured son called "one of the elite of Almighty God" (857) or "a priest's pet" (859), the faith in the Father is made fun of from the outset. To begin with, it is the wealthy neighbor Harder who represents dominant cultural norms in America, not Hogan, who is of non-Puritan, persecuted Irish stock. Different from his sons who have been tamely assimilated into the dominant Yankee culture, Hogan is rather determined to rebel against it yet.

What Hogan worships is not the paternal God, but "the ground you [Josie] walk[s] on" (918). Praying that Mother Earth, currently turned into matter and kept silent in the material age, may be benevolent and fertile again, Hogan works on the farm day by day. The present situation in the Hogan family, with the departure of all the sons and the sole presence of the daughter, explores the prospective state of America following the wasteland wreaked by its male-side paternal civilization. Such being the case, it is natural that Josie totally differs from a traditional daughter of the father, for instance, such as Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra, who thoroughly internalizes the values in paternal civilization.[6] Some of these differences are clearly indicated by Josie's independence expressed in the following dialogue:

HOGAN: [. . .] I learned long since to let you go your own way because there's no controlling you.

JOSIE: I do my work and I earn my keep and I've a right to be free.

HOGAN: You have. I've never denied it. (866)

It is not the typical quality of a "daughter of the father" that one finds in Josie. As many scholars have pointed out, it is that of a nurturing "mother." Replacing her deceased mother, Josie has taken care of her father and brothers; her occasionally rough character comes from her bold mother, who possessed the ability to put Hogan in his place even when he'd "come home drunk and want to tear down the house for the fun of it" (865). In addition, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that Josie is "so oversize for a woman" and "more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labor of two ordinary men" but "there is no mannish quality about her" (857). She appears with bare feet, "the soles earth-stained" (857), which suggestively shows us that she has an affinity with the land corresponding to Hogan's worship for it. To put it another way, O'Neill undoubtedly depicts his oversize heroine as a great earth mother who is the incarnation of land or nature. The onstage Hogan house is, so to speak, the last fort in civilization cut off from nature, where they fight alone to regain ties with nature. And it is this conflict that ultimately lies in the plot of the competition between the Hogans and Harder for the ownership of the tenant farm. By depicting the Hogan family on stage as such, O'Neill tries to find a way out of the "dead end" he saw in Horizon where modern human beings are stuck. In this sense, though the Hogan house is apparently a negative image of modern civilization, it provides simultaneously a topos to explore whether the rebirth of modern civilization is possible or not.

It is Jim Tyrone, the landlord of the Hogan farm, who appears a while after Mike has left. Oddly enough, Hogan, who used to be on friendly terms with Jim's late father, gets along with the son as well. They immediately begin to entertain themselves with comic verbal exchanges "like players at an old familiar game" (875). Then, after a while, Jim informs the Hogans of the news from an inn that the wealthy neighbor Harder will visit Hogan. Harder, "Standard Oil's sappiest child" (880), is a born winner and "standard" person (as his company name suggests) in American society, where material prosperity is highly valued. However, he is never as formidable as Cabot in Elms, who embodies the value of hard work that is indispensable to the rapid progress of material civilization in America. Taking over the huge family business, Harder does not have any particular ambition. Mildly contented as a husband and father, Harder is only a country gentleman who is "simply immature, naturally lethargic, a bit stupid" (884). On the other hand, the fact that this man of little ambition, energy and intelligence can still lead a well-to-do life proves that materialism is even more rampant in American society than in the time of Cabot. There follows a farcical scene where this little caricatured "descendant" of Cabot appears and confronts the Hogans.

The reason why the standard Yankee neighbor visits the Irish family is as follows: there is an ice pond on Harder's estate not far from Hogan's pigsty, and, strangely, Harder's fence in the vicinity of the pond habitually breaks down, in spite of dozens of repairs, allowing the pigs to stroll there. Harder comes to Hogan to complain about it, since he "doesn't look forward to the taste of pig in next summer's ice water" (881). Hogan and Josie feign ignorance, stating, "It must be the bad fairies" (881) that have broken down the fence. This is a rather apt expression, given that it is Hogan, the little mischievous trickster, who has been breaking down the fence for the purpose of reminding Harder, who rides around "with his snoot in the air" (881), of the taste of the earth. Harder appears in high spirits, but he is no match for the cunning Hogans. Treated like a child and beaten thoroughly, Harder runs away in no time. It is quite a sight to see Hogan shrewdly leading Harder by the nose and throwing him into confusion. It is equally amusing to see Josie teaming up with her father, spoiling Harder's start by making use of an assumed "lady" image, and depriving him of his dignity as a gentleman at the end by pretending to seduce him as an idiotic slut. It is because from the first she takes no account of any image of women produced in male culture, whether it's affirmative or not, that Josie is capable of engaging in such kaleidoscopic roles. Also, it is for the same reason that she has no hesitation at all in declaring that she is the promiscuous "scandal of the neighborhood" (859). Josie has the natural wholeness of woman, which is well suited for her as she is given the image of the Earth Mother beyond patriarchal control.[7] Thus, the early confrontation between the neighbors in act 1 ends with overwhelming victory for "the poor and oppressed" (889).

Having overheard the whole fight between them in Josie's bedroom, Jim Tyrone, who is also of Irish stock, cheers the Hogans for their victory. According to Mike, Jim is "nothing but a drunken bum who never done a tap of work in his life, except acting on the stage while his father [who was an actor] was alive to get him the jobs" (861). One can infer something of Jim's character from the story of how he was expelled from college just before graduation for bringing a prostitute to school as a joke under the pretext that she was his sister. As is shown by this episode of his making fun of the authority of the Fathers at college, Jim is willing and proud to ridicule patriarchal culture and society. One also finds his rebellious spirit against cultural norms in the fact that he continues to speak insultingly about his late father, stating, for instance, "he was a lousy tightwad bastard" (920), or "I'm glad he's dead" (920), for his late father's miserliness is a byproduct of materialistic culture. The first act is written in the farcical style, and to Jim's taste, it ridicules aspects of patriarchal culture and society, ranging from Mike, the "virtuous" believer in the paternal God, to Harder, the unintelligent wealthy man beaten by the Hogans. With a sudden change from this uproarious, theatrical tone, however, the silent romance between Jim and Josie in the moonlit night unfolds in the following second and third acts, with a curiously powerful reality resulting from a sharp contrast with the first act.

The second act begins that night, when Josie has already been waiting in vain for Jim to show up for an arranged date and finally loses her temper. Then Hogan, who was in high spirits at the end of the first act, returns home from the inn, strangely in a bad mood. He finally starts speaking in leaden tones about a lamentable betrayal put upon him by Jim, whom Hogan almost regards as his real son. According to Hogan, Harder has approached Jim with an exceptionally high purchase price for the Hogan tenant farm, with the likely intention of getting rid of Hogan by way of revenge. Although Jim originally planned to sell only to Hogan at a much lower price, Jim has now changed his mind, according to Hogan, and agreed to sell it to Harder. Listening dubiously to her father in the beginning, Josie, angered doubly on account of the broken date, finally begins to take the initiative to plan a revenge on Jim. She suggests to Hogan that she will offer Jim a lot of drinks until he becomes drunk and falls asleep, and then carry him to her bedroom, so that he can be discovered with her in bed the next morning and they can cheat him out of his money by making him believe that he has slept with her. A little while after, Jim himself nonchalantly arrives much too late for the appointed date. Josie, though still feeling drawn to him, eagerly recommends that he drink more in order to carry out the planned revenge. However, she soon discovers that Hogan made up the story of Jim's betrayal. Though he sometimes "talks like a Broadway crook, who'd sell his soul for a price" (872), Jim in reality did not surrender to the materialism Harder represents. Josie then admires him all the more through knowing the truth, which in fact was already figured by the scheming Hogan.

Hogan's real intention in deceiving his daughter, or "the scheme behind [his] scheme" (936), is to give her an opportunity to be alone with Jim so that they can admit their love and marry. In order to understand the significant meaning of Hogan's real trick, it is useful to compare Misbegotten and Strange Interlude.[8] Professor Leeds in Strange Interlude, the heroine Nina's father, would not allow her to be united in love with Gordon Shaw because he was shortly to be called up for active military service in the First World War. Gordon was killed in the war, and his death leaves Nina with a great sense of loss, hostile hatred toward her father, who prevented her from giving herself to Gordon, and remorse for not having opposed her father. Having repudiated being a "daughter of the father" since then, Nina instead seeks to be a "mother" throughout her whole life. In contrast to Professor Leeds in Strange Interlude, Hogan in Misbegotten is playing a tricky rough cupid trying whatever measures available to help his daughter find love with Jim and, ultimately, to be a "mother." In this sense, one can say that Hogan functions as a surrogate playwright to devise tricks for O'Neill. For, as is inferred from the fact that the blissful life Andrew had once led in Horizon was expressed as his "marital" relationship with Mother Earth, O'Neill is groping, in the union and completion of love between Jim and Josie, for the vision of ultimate reconciliation between civilization and nature—or that of rebirth of modern humanity cut off from nature and adrift without origin or destination.

Kevin Spacey and Eve Best in A Moon for the Misbegotten, directed by Howard Davies, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York. The 2007 production, which originated at the Old Vic in London, also features Colm Meaney as Phil Hogan. Photo: Lorenzo Agius.

It is clear how Josie, who is given the incarnate image of Mother Earth, contributes to these visions. What about Jim, then, who is defiantly against patriarchal culture and society and who has never sided with the materialism that the wealthy Harder represents? How can he represent man living in such modern civilization? For that matter, a little further consideration is required.

The moonlight romance between Jim and Josie does not develop easily, partly because Jim somehow tries to put brakes on it. Late as he was, Jim did come to see Josie, since he was driven by "some nutty idea" that he would get in bed with her just to lie with his head on her breast (909). One can find a death instinct lurking in the idea, as he quotes from Keats a little later, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain, / In such an ecstasy!" (909). Where there already seem many difficulties lying ahead of them, another ominous cloud arises when Jim's patriarchal consciousness that intrinsically desires "to clear things up" (924) raises its head, rips stillness in the night and breaks a sense of togetherness in silent moonlight.

Whenever Josie pretends to be a slut or talks about "the pretty little tarts" on Broadway, Jim interrupts irritably by stating, for instance, "To hell with the rough stuff, Josie!" (910). It is because Jim would "like tonight to be different" from any of his past nights that he wants Josie to act like a "lady" (910). However, Josie is by nature not a woman who bothers with female images produced by male culture such as "lady" or "slut." Her bold character descends from her mother. Her interest in "the pretty little tarts" on Broadway and her pretence of slutty behavior must partly result from some jealousy or admiration toward the women with whom Jim plays. Josie is not willing to change her attitude at all. Impatient with her, Jim finally knocks her glass down and exclaims, "I've slept with drunken tramps on too many nights!" (917). Too startled and bewildered to be angry, Josie meekly stops drinking. However, this does not satisfy Jim's desire for Josie to come clean with the truth. As if he were a police detective questioning a criminal in an interrogation room, Jim obstinately probes into "the scandalous Josie" and asserts that it is a lie deriving from her "pride" (923). Free and uninhibited as she was in the fight with Harder in the first act, Josie finally confesses that she has never known a man in reality and is still a virgin.

One might sympathize with Jim at this point, for he is trying to let Josie, who disparages herself as "a big, rough, ugly cow of a woman" (915), know that she is "real and healthy and clean and fine and warm and strong and kind" (915) and is actually much more attractive to him than any other woman, let alone the countless prostitutes from New York. Just after the ironic truth about her "loose" sexual life comes out, Josie confesses her love for Jim and invites him to her bedroom. It is then that, all of a sudden, Jim dramatically transforms into a cynical lecher and destroys her gift of love and their romantic potential by attacking her as an object of casual, cruel, impersonal sexual desire. Unable to embrace the sexual act with Josie as anything other than degrading, the "poison" lurking in Jim's patriarchal consciousness finally takes effect.

TYRONE: (A strange change has come over his face. He looks her over now with a sneering cynical lust. He speaks thickly as if he was suddenly very drunk.) Sure thing, Kiddo. What the hell else do you suppose I came for? I've been kidding myself. (He steps up beside her and puts his arm around her and presses his body to hers.) You're the goods, Kid. I've wanted you all along. Love, nuts! I'll show you what love is. I know what you want, Bright Eyes. (She is staring at him now with a look of frightened horror. He kisses her roughly.) Come on, Baby Doll, let's hit the hay. (He pushes her back in the doorway.)

JOSIE: (Strickenly) Jim! Don't! [. . .] Jim! I'm not a whore. (925)

As Jim himself explains immediately after, this horrible change in him occurred as he was seeing an illusion of a "blonde-pig" prostitute due to his alcoholic delirium. But what one has to understand here is, of course, not how clinically dreadful his illness is at all, but rather that "[f]or Jamie [Jim], sex means the woman is a prostitute" and that "it is an automatic or natural response" (Hall 49-50). In other words, a few moments after he categorizes Josie as a virginal girl, Jim switches abruptly and labels her a whore.

Behind Jim's grotesque transformation into a lecher lies the cultural milieu of patriarchal Christianity, in which the body is unilaterally looked down on as low and devoid of any spirituality and sex is debased as vile.[9] This is another sort of materialism, since the body as inner nature is viewed merely as matter. Now it figures why Jim's face has "a certain Mephistophelian quality" (875); in another O'Neill play, The Great God Brown, Dion Anthony, obviously named after Dionysus, transforms into a Mephistopheles, showing how the joyous, sexual, celebrative aspects of life are disregarded under Christian value systems.[10]

The excessive separation of the spiritual from the bodily, as well as the contempt for sex (which in itself should be hailed as the act of giving birth to new life), ultimately means degrading the mystical life-giving force of the Mother. It has the same roots as modern humanity's arrogant behavior toward Mother Earth. Through Jim's attempted act of roughness with Josie in this scene, one can see, metaphorically, the disrespectful treatment of Mother Earth solely as matter in modern, material civilization. Thus, it turns out that Jim, who ridicules and revolts against patriarchal culture, is ironically affected by its anti-Dionysian, life-denying poison. And through the blonde-pig episode that Jim confides to Josie a little later, we come to see more clearly that he has been already so poisoned that there seems little hope for him to be cured.

What is revealed in the blonde-pig episode relates to the final phase of Oedipal circumstances in Jim's life. His unsolved Oedipal circumstances have been clearly suggested by the fact that his hatred and rebellious spirit toward his late father have not weakened while he still retains a strong attachment to his late mother. For Jim, the happiest time in his life was when he lived alone with his mother after his father's death. Jim goes to California with his mother to sell a piece of property his father had bought, but there she suddenly has a serious stroke and dies. It was when his mother died that Jim's Oedipal conflict reached the final stage. Unable to face up to the reality of his most beloved mother's death, Jim loses himself in liquor. On the train to bring her body to the East "to be buried beside the Old Man" (931), Jim nightly sleeps with "a blonde pig" with "a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear's feet" (931) for fifty dollars per night.

Jim begins to explain to Josie why he disgraced his own mother's death, stating that he vaguely thought that the prostitute could make him forget his pain. But he immediately denies it, and says, as follows:

It was like some plot I had to carry out. The blonde—she didn't matter. She was only something that belonged in the plot. It was as if I wanted revenge—because I'd be left alone—because I knew I was lost, without any hope left—that all I could do would be drink myself to death, because no one was left who could help me. (931-32)

Thus, his mother leaves him for his father. This experience of the final defeat in his Oedipal conflict against his father made the son unable to control himself and led him to carry out the revenge plan on his mother for her "betrayal." It is of note here that, as James A. Robinson points out, the word "plot" in the above speech is used as a pun, so that it can be interpreted either as a scheme or as a way of designing a dramatic action (72-73). Namely, in the former meaning, "the revenge on his mother" was a "scheme" Jim had planned, but in the latter meaning, it was at the same time a "scenario" in which the self-professed "lousy ham" (931) had to play a role. This interestingly suggests that Jim's profane act was caused by the same cultural poison that transformed him into a cynical lecher in the preceding scene. One can rightly infer that two icy female bodies must have been lying before Jim's eyes when he was executing his revenge plan. Thereupon, for the love of his mother, he was able to substitute a sexual desire for the prostitute. What is skillfully crystallized in this quite personal episode of Jim's revenge is essential morbidness in paternal civilization where its anti-Dionysian, life-denying principle mars the mystic dignity of the Mother. Since then, as he himself allows, Jim has been drowning himself in heavy drink. Behind his cynical mask, there is no face but one of a hollow, dead man "walking slow behind his own coffin" (874). Indeed, what he drinks is not a joyous Dionysian libation, but Mephistophelean liquor that leads him to death.

Knowing the whole picture of the blonde-pig story, even Josie instinctively "draws away" (931). Then, naturally, as Rolf Scheibler states, some of us might "withdraw in disgust and pity from this sick person [Jim]" (82). One should not forget, however, that Jim's disease is that of modern paternal civilization. In this sense, however grotesque his transformation into a lecher or his action described in the blonde-pig episode may be, Jim is a representation of modern civilization. Therefore, if a member of the living dead were brought back to life again, a true vision of modern spiritual rebirth would emerge.[11]

Also importantly, Jim's Oedipal state of mind of having both strong rebellion against his father and strong attachment for his mother, which triggered his act of revenge on his mother, is itself a product of patriarchal culture. In Elms, the patriarchal order that Cabot reigns over induces a sudden burst of incestuous passion between his wife and son, and then makes them form a rebellious mother-son alliance against the father.[12] An excessively patriarchal order inevitably results in the Oedipal situation. Under the circumstances, it becomes important to somehow break away from or to overcome the situation. Considering the overall composition of Misbegotten again here, one can notice that it is well-arranged and well-prepared to solve the Oedipal complex still smoldering in Jim: Hogan used to be a good friend of Jim's late father and affectionately thinks of Jim as his real son now. This man, who also "loves to play tightwad" (918) like Jim's father but is actually very generous, is an ideal father-like male figure to help Jim to resolve his inner conflict over his real father. And no explanation is necessary about Josie, who reminds Jim of his late mother. The realization of Jim and Josie as a union in love has been expected also as a "mother-son" union for Jim to escape from the Oedipal mentality produced in patriarchal culture. O'Neill thus gives multi-layered symbolic significance to the completion of their love, so that it is compared with that ultimate vision of harmonious human beings in nature or the universe in Horizon that is poetically expressed as an incestuous, marital relationship between Mother Earth and her son.

However, since the cultural illness that Jim contracts is already advanced onto its incurable, terminal stage, their romance remains deadlocked. After the blonde-pig episode is blurted out in detail, Josie draws back from Jim. It seems that she has given up on him and their relationship cannot be repaired any further. But when Jim is just about to leave, Josie stops him and tenderly presses him onto her bosom. Forgiving Jim and standing in place of his mother's soul "wrapped in it [the moonlight] like a silver mantle" (933), Josie provides him reconciliation with his late mother. One can say that beyond this personal dimension, his mother's "soul" poetically articulated on a cosmic scale must also represent the great spirit of Mother Nature. Thus, through Jim, who is crying his heart out on Josie's bosom, we unexpectedly see modern humanity sobbing for temporary reconciliation, and regaining, at least momentarily, a sense of oneness with Mother Nature or the universe.[13]

Josie holds Jim as if he were her own child, forgives him, and grants him a peaceful sleep until dawn. As Tiusanen calls it "one of the most memorable scenic images in all of O'Neill" (310-311), it is indeed the finest, most impressive scene in Misbegotten. This scene is often called "O'Neill's Pieta," given the circumstances that, first, Josie shows boundless maternal love, and, second, the man she is holding is almost dead. It would be possible to find here "the difficulties that women face when accepting such [Madonna-like] roles" (Hall 46) as Josie, who has given up realizing love and is now, like the Virgin Mary in grief, holding a "dead" man. Indeed, there is no denying the impression that here again Jim's patriarchal consciousness fixes Josie in the image of the Madonna, a virgin and mother, the ideal female figure in patriarchal Christian culture which degrades sexuality as well as physicality. However, it seems rather rash to see O'Neill's own "parochial view of woman" (Barlow, O'Neill's Many Mothers 14) in this scenic image, or to regard it as O'Neill's own "immature comment on the meaning of love" (Falk 177-178). As Barlow herself rightly put it later, "to assume that he [O'Neill] simply speaks through them [his male characters] is to underestimate the complexity of his artistic vision" (Barlow, O'Neill's Female Characters 170). Certainly, Jim Tyrone, who is modeled after the playwright's real brother, is more a part of the playwright than that of modern humans in general, to the extent that he can be regarded as the playwright's double.[14] However, what should never be misunderstood is that with a sense of cautioning himself all the more for it, O'Neill describes Jim's patriarchal consciousness as a cultural construct to be criticized. This critical attitude of the playwright does not change at all, even in the Pieta scene. This becomes evident as Josie laughingly presents a self-effacing, humorous and ironical point of view from which to see the final circumstances of their romance:

God forgive me, it's a fine end to all my scheming, to sit here with the dead hugged to my breast, and the silly mug of the moon grinning down, enjoying the joke! (934)

The feminist approach for analyzing the "suffering of being, or playing a role of, a mother" in Josie (to which all the views of the above three scholars, including Hall, are inseparably connected) does not help in getting to the core of the play. It should already be clear from the metaphorical layer of the play considered thus far that had the love between Jim and Josie been realized, it should have been the secret initiation for Josie to become a "mother" who gives a new life to Jim. Her transformation, however, into a "mother," in which to see a possibility of the revival of the fertility goddess as well as the rebirth of modern humanity, was not successfully accomplished in this tragedy. As she looks back on their romance in the fourth act and describes the action of the play, "A virgin who bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn finds her still a virgin" (936), Josie clearly alludes to the Virgin Mary. Nevertheless, unlike the Virgin Mary, Josie fails to become a "mother" and remains a virginal daughter. What lies at the core of the play is nothing other than this sharp irony. The final impossibility of her being a "mother" causes more crucial suffering than her playing a role of a mother. The suffering of modern humanity also lies here.

There is another thing to point out regarding the Madonna image given to Josie. Namely, the image of the Virgin Mary has been customarily regarded as the ideal female image devoid of sexuality and physicality, which are both detestable in the patriarchal Christian value system, but, paradoxical as this may sound, it is simultaneously the almost sole image which can mutually connect two dimensions of the spiritual and the bodily separated and split in Christianity.[15] In 1950, seven years after O'Neill's completion of this play, the Pope officially admitted that the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven with her body so that physicality was regained in the image of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism. In likening Josie, who is richly endowed with the earth-mother image, to the Virgin Mary, O'Neill must have been clearly conscious of this real nature of the Virgin Mary as a mediator between the spiritual and the physical. In other words, by comparing his heroine to both the Virgin Mary and the Earth Mother, thereby giving her a coexisting, unified image of spirituality and earthliness, O'Neill attempted to see a solution to save modern paternal Christian civilization in her image.

The function of a mediator between the spiritual and the physical is, to put it another way, to urge human beings to recover their spiritual force deadly exhausted under the total dominance of materialism in the modern age. The change seen in Jim in the fourth act at dawn has much to do with this. Jim is bewildered when he wakes because he feels strangely "[s]ort of at peace with [himself] and this lousy life—as if all [his] sins had been forgiven" (942). Then, he is deeply moved to see a beautiful dawn different from gray ones he has seen with prostitutes. Becoming aware that such a reaction does not suit him, Jim tries to sneer it off with his typical cynicism, stating, "God seems to be putting on quite a display. I like Belasco better. Rise of curtain, Act-Four stuff" (942). This remark reminds us that in the third act, he likewise spat out, "Nuts for the moon! I'd rather have one light on Broadway than all the moons" (921). His self-awareness as a "ham," in which he prefers "one light on Broadway" to the moon and "Belasco" to the beautiful dawn, is a faithful reflection of the essential situation in which modern humanity is estranged from transcendental nature or the cosmos, rootlessly drifting without any meaning or purpose. This morning, however, Jim shows a difference from the self that he has had in himself until now: he immediately takes off his cynical mask and withdraws his words, "God damn it! Why do I have to pull that lousy stuff? (With genuine deep feeling) God, it's beautiful, Josie! I—I'll never forget it—here with you" (942). Supported by Josie, the mediator unifying the spiritual with the physical, Jim does truly feel the beauty of the dawn or nature. In front of him, Mother Nature must be making its sublime, spiritual appearance. What Jim experiences at this moment is similar to the blissful experience Edmund in Journey had in the sea at night or dawn, of being momentarily identified with transcendental nature or the universe itself. Jim has certainly touched upon a glimpse of spiritual nature or the cosmos from which he originates and to which he is destined. The play ends when Josie prays for a peaceful death for Jim after he makes farewell and leaves. Her prayer is, of course, also simultaneously that of O'Neill's for his real brother's soul. Readers and spectators are thus led to imagine Jim returning peacefully to death, to the domain also known as the womb of Mother Nature that gives birth to all life.

Misbegotten thus ends as a requiem as mentioned in the beginning of this essay. With such a conclusion, however, it would be difficult for us to see the ultimate harmonious vision of civilization and nature, or the ultimate vision of salvation of modern humanity. For we have already seen the romance between Jim and Josie as far from arriving at an ideal and successful completion. Jim's return to the womb of death also suggests that it will take a long while before modern humanity is to be reborn and to arise once more in a true sense. Casting the "rebirth" of modern humanity and civilization as a "hopeless hope," the tragic poet O'Neill quietly put down the pencil he was holding in his trembling hand.[16]

NOTES

1. Black convincingly argues in his book that the successive deaths of his parents and brother between 1920 and 1923 deeply affected O'Neill's entire creative activity thereafter.

2. O'Neill's depiction of women has attracted a lot of criticism from feminist scholars. For examples, see Trudy Decker, "Sexuality as Destiny: The Shadow Lives of O'Neill's Women," Eugene O'Neill Newsletter 6.2 (1982); also, in that same issue, see Doris Nelson, "O'Neill's Women." More recently, see Jane Torrey, "The Role of Women in O'Neill's Plays," Readings on Eugene O'Neill, ed. Thomas Siebold (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999).

3. A comparative study between Elms and Misbegotten has already been carried out in Michael Hinden, "Desire and Forgiveness: O'Neill's Diptych," Comparative Drama 14 (1980): 240-250.

4. Interestingly, Sam Shepard is also obsessed with this desolate farm image. The farm set in Illinois in his play Buried Child also acts as a similar, metaphorical site. Shepard's uniqueness in the play is that he attempts to describe the productivity of Mother Nature as the mysterious force beyond our rational intellect or control. For a detailed discussion on this point, see Yuji Omori, "Sam Shepard's Buried Child—Beyond Logocentrism," Ronkyu: The Journal of the Faculty of Literature, Graduate School of Chuo University 24 (1997): 1-11.

5. See Yuji Omori, "The Discovery of Modern `Wasteland'—Rereading Beyond the Horizon," Amerika Engeki [American Drama] 18 (Tokyo: Hosei UP, 2006) 120-131, for my full discussion on Horizon that details the essential thematic connection to Misbegotten.

6. More strictly, what is depicted in Mourning Becomes Electra is the process through which Lavinia, a "daughter of the father," gradually becomes aware of her other repressed nature as a "daughter of the mother," while her brother Orin, originally a "son of the mother," is transformed into a "son of the father."

7. There are some other scholars who see wholeness as a woman in Josie. See, for example, Donald P. Costello, "Forgiveness in O'Neill," Modern Drama 34 (1991): 505.

8. As for Strange Interlude, which thematically has much to do with Misbegotten, I took a great deal from Mitsunobu Osada, Amerika Engeki to "Saisei" [American Drama and "Rebirth"] (Tokyo: Chuo UP, 2004) 88-119.

9. Nancy Qualls-Corbett extensively discusses the split between sexuality and spirituality in Western civilization in The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1988). This book also greatly helped to learn about the image of the Virgin Mary, which I refer to later in the essay.

10. About the meaning of changes in Dion's mask as well as his real face behind it, see Osada 70-87.

11. Indeed, one can rightly ask how it is ever possible for Jim to be spiritually reborn when he is described as a "dead man walking" even before his first appearance on stage. But O'Neill is nevertheless exploring the "hopeless" possibility of his rebirth with his heroine until she finally finds it impossible, as she says later, "I thought there was still hope. I didn't know he'd died already" (937). This attempt to reach an almost unattainable goal makes the play truly tragic.

12. See Osada 45-70 for more detailed discussion on this point.

13. As we shall see it at the end, the full reconciliation between modern man and nature is not successfully realized in this "tragedy." Ah, Wilderness!, O'Neill's only comedy, is an exception among his works because it provides a truly harmonious vision of humanity and nature at its ending scene in the shiny moonlight.

14. According to Carlotta as quoted by the Gelbs, while O'Neill was sometimes as innocent as a small child, he was, on other occasions, a savage sadist who closely resembled the lecherous Jim Tyrone. See Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 849.

15. In addition to Qualls-Corbett, see Michiyoshi Hayashi, Jung to Manabu Meiga to Meikyoku [A Jungian Study of Masterpieces of Western Paintings and Music] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Company, 2003) 93-130, for another image of the Virgin Mary.

16. I am grateful to Professor Mitsunobu Osada of Chuo University for allowing me to work collaboratively as a researcher for his project, "American Plays from the Late-Nineteenth Century to the Early-Twentieth Century," and to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for providing a grant-in-aid for the project. This research was carried out as a part of the project. The original version of the essay in Japanese was published in The Journal of Humanities and Sciences 12 (Tokyo: Institute for Research in the Humanities, Takushoku University, 2004): 17-32.

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