Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship by Michael Manheim

Abstract

Reviews 85 Michael Manheim. Eugene O’NeilVs New Language of Kinship. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982. Pp. 240. $24.00 (hardcover); $12.95 (paper). When, in the early 1920s, O’Neill wrote the program notes to a pro­ duction of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death—a play he greatly admired— he remarked on what he saw and heard as a “new language of kinship” beneath and beyond the acerbic surface dialogue. If that observation has supplied Michael Manheim with his title and one-half of his thesis, Travis Bogard, in Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1971), at least hinted at the direction of the second half by showing that O’Neill tire­ lessly wrote and rewrote the same play, a book of himself culminating in the late, openly autobiographical works. Manheim likewise sees O’Neill as “writing versions of Long Day’s Journey throughout his entire career” —though he does not always discriminate carefully enough between the playwright’s family as it was in real life and as it exists transmuted into art. In this reading, every one of O’Neill’s plays is, to some degree, dis­ guised autobiography, and so surveying the entire repertoire results in something akin to a psychobiography of the dramatist. Whereas earlier critics, however, have been satisfied, for instance, to point out that O’Neill gives us aspects of himself in Eben (Desire Under the Elms) and Orin (Mourning Becomes Electro) and Edmund, Manheim suggests more extensive links, ones that even, at times somewhat tortuously, cross the gender gap: in Mourning, for example, Lavinia is also O’Neill and Ezra Mannon is O’Neill’s mother; while Seth in that play and Charlie Marsden in Strange Interlude are both regarded as Earth Mothers. Manheim’s contention that what interests him “fundamentally” is not the life but the plays, whose ultimate appeal is “existential” rather than autobiographical, would perhaps have been borne out better had he kept to the focus on language that his title promises. Yet even granting that language-based analysis of dramatic texts is difficult at best, the one chapter (on Journey) where Manheim does annotate long passages of dialogue is disappointingly pedestrian. He does, however, provide a vocabulary for analyzing the systole and diastole of love/hate that commentators have long noticed in O’Neill’s works and that Manheim finds revealed through the contrapuntal rhythms and gestures of “hos­ tility and affection” and “abuse and embrace” that always exist concur­ rently. O’Neill’s dialogue, Manheim argues, is finally “life-sustaining”; human interrelatedness (kinship) becomes the only available counter to meaninglessness. Manheim initially denotes three periods in the develop­ ment of O’Neill’s dramatic voice, but when discussing the plays actually refines that division into five: from the beginning through Anna Christie; from Hairy Ape through Desire; from Great God Brown through Mourning; from Days Without End through More Stately Mansions', and from Iceman Cometh through Moon for the Misbegotten. In the first period, hope survives in spite of life’s pain because of human kin­ ship; in the next two periods, desperation, violence, and isolation reflect O’Neill’s own “suicidal self-hatred” that is linked to the deaths, in fairly rapid sequence, of his father, mother, and brother; the fourth period functions as a transition into the last, wherein the dialogue gives evidence 86 Comparative Drama of a rarified form of kinship: human relationships, subject though they are to “chaotic” fluctuations of love and hate, are the last remaining value. In several works from periods after the first, Manheim discerns a motif of characters withdrawing into the self—a pattern reflecting the withdrawal of Ella O’Neill into madness. Although O’Neill considers withdrawal an absolute denial of kinship, it does, sometimes, accompany heroism. Ephraim’s heroic endurance in Desire coincides with a “with­ drawal into a half-life where all feeling is suppressed”; the characters’ longing for the South Sea Isles in Mourning is as much a withdrawal as Lavinia’s into the house/tomb at the end—though Manheim does not see her chosen entombment as an opportunity to expiate for her sins that she has only won because she...