O'Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, "Death Instincts," and the Trauma of Birth

Abstract

O'Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, "Death Instincts," and the Trauma of Birth Stephen Watt "You were born afraid." Mary Tyrone to Edmund "But he's dead now [Major Melody]. And I ain't tired a bit. I'm fresh as a man new born." Con Melody "She loves me. I'm not afraid! . . . She is warmly around me! She is my skin! She is my armor! Now I am born — I — the I! — one and indivisible." Dion Anthony In one extremely defensive interior monologue in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), Charles Marsden contemplates the widespread influence of Sigmund Freud's thought on the American intelligentsia. In doing so, Marsden also predicts what interpretive tools many readers of O'Neill's plays will employ when digging through characters' psychological strata: "O Oedipus, O my king! The world is adopting you" (I, 34).1 Blithely dismissing the Freudian emphases on dream interpretation and "sex" as constitutive of an "easy cure-all," Marsden also anticipates O'Neill's own frustration with the unrelenting stream of Freudian, especially Oedipal, readings of his plays.2 The literary critical "world," insofar as O'Neill is concerned, has indeed adopted "Herr Freud," as Marsden refers to him, and King Oedipus as well. Even in studies only remotely psychoanalytic , Freud and Oedipus often appear as "givens," figures STEPHEN M. WATT, a member of the English Department at Indiana University , is chiefly interested in modern and Renaissance drama and critical theory. He has previously published in a number of journals, including Comparative Drama. 211 212Comparative Drama who on the basis of admittedly very persuasive biographical evidence must be acknowledged.3 Perhaps the most valuable addition to current understanding of O'Neill's appropriation from and manipulation of Freudian psychoanalysis is Robert Feldman's recent examination of the "death-instinct" in Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).4 First elaborated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the "death-instinct"—an "expression of the conservative nature of living substance" to "restore an earlier [inorganic] state of things"5—becomes for O'Neill's Nina Leeds and Orin Mannon not an instinct but a choice. As Feldman argues, correctly I think, these characters consciously choose to escape the pain of life by a sterile marriage in Nina's case and suicide in Orin's. And Feldman's point might be amplified to include a host of O'Neill characters who freely select either death—John Brown in the early Bread and Butter (1914), Reuben Light in Dynamo (1928), and others—or seclusion from the world of "life"—Orin's sister Lavinia, Deborah Harford in More Stately Mansions (1938; reconstructed and published in 1962), and of course Mary Tyrone. For a variety of reasons, some of them biographical, this fact overshadows the presence of the Oedipal project in the plays of O'Neill's middle and later periods.6 My purpose here is twofold: to describe the determinative effect of this non-Oedipal problematic in O'Neill's plays—one which concerns desire for a regressive, oral return to the mother and, in several cases, prompts character splitting or "doubling"—and to suggest the interpretive value of Otto Rank's work in undertaking such investigations of O'Neill's drama. Readers of Contour in Time (1972) might recall Travis Bogard's supposition that the "possible implications" of Rank's The Double (1914; abstracted in The Psychoanalytic Review, 1919) for "an understanding of the complex personality of Eugene O'Neill are many." Fascinated by O'Neill's representations of a man divided into "opposed but clearly bound beings" in plays such as Mourning Become Electra, Bogard discovered in Rank's work an especially appealing explanation of "fraternal rivalry toward the hated competitor in love for the mother and ultimately the death-wish of the subject."7 Nevertheless, fraternal rivalry over the love-object and the so-called "death wish of the subject" are two rather different phenomena. Moreover, the fraternal rivalry over the love-object (Mother, Mother surrogate, Stephen Watt213 or not) so prominent in, say, Bread and Butter, Beyond the Horizon (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Great God Brown (1925) recedes into the background...