Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Abstract

Staging Depth has become a classic in O’Neill studies due not just to Joel Pfister’s analyses of the plays but also to the breadth of his scholarship on American culture. His central point is that conceptions of personal identity—and thus their characterization in dramas—can be understood only within the specific cultural ideologies that surround them. O’Neill’s plays revealed nascent tensions in long-held American mores and beliefs. These tensions arose from, among other sources, the advent of Freudianism in America and the growth of a professional managerial class with new psychological needs engendered by the rise of complex, corporate, mass-market capitalism in the early decades of the twentieth century. O’Neill’s plays identified these new tensions and helped shape the public discussion about them, but the plays themselves also were enclosed in the culture to which they responded. O’Neill helped give birth to a new vision of the self in American culture, but that culture also created the vision he cherished of himself. O’Neill was made by the culture as much as he was a maker of it.In his 2016 book Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis, Pfister adapted Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power” as opposed to military or economic might in international relations and posited the role of literature in American “soft capitalism” (31). Where hard capitalism is the dynamic of economic forces that determines the structure of the society, soft capitalism is the collection of mores, attitudes, and beliefs that arise as people try to cope with living in that economic system. Soft capitalism provides the “fuel that propels and lubricates hard capitalism,” enabling capitalist societies to function smoothly despite inherent tensions by shaping the narratives people share to explain, guide, and justify their actions (34). Pfister argues that often these guiding narratives are presented as if they were grounded in objective, universal facts that had been discovered about the world, while in reality they are localized social constructs: ideologies. In taking this approach Pfister is working in a postmodernist mode like Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton: literary analysis is a specialty within cultural and political critique, and literary writers are prescient in their sensitivity to rising tensions in the surrounding cultural myths. By revealing these tensions, writers help to define them and to shape the narrative that positions them within a culture.Like Hawthorne, about whom Pfister wrote in his first book (1992), Eugene O’Neill is a cultural surveyor. As Alan Trachtenberg says in his foreword to Staging Depth, Pfister offers “an interpretation of [O’Neill’s] works from the perspective of the [social] fictions that sustained them” and asks us to consider O’Neill’s role in shaping and popularizing these fictions (xi). The depth to which Pfister refers in his title is psychological: “a particular kind of ‘inside’ whose ‘essence’ is defined against an ‘outside’” (12). In an essay he wrote for his co-edited anthology Inventing the Psychological (1997), Pfister described this depth as a third phase in the evolving American conceptions of selfhood that first were proposed by Warren Sussman (174). Sussman had argued that in the small-scale producer-entrepreneur capitalism that sustained most Americans prior to the twentieth century, a person’s self was understood in the context of the moral virtues of character such as self-control, work ethic, reliability and so on, the traits that made people good providers for their families and honorable members of a community.The rise of industrial capitalism and broad consumer markets facilitated the emergence of a new managerial class, comprising college-educated bureaucrats who could orchestrate complex legal, financial, and logistical corporate transactions. These were the people, Pfister asserts, who became the core of O’Neill’s audience, and they were people for whom the new form of capitalism encouraged a culture of personality—the public display of success and appeal to others. Personality became the core of the self that aspirants to this class strove to cultivate. This is the culture that Dale Carnegie celebrates in his 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People and that deludes Willy Loman into failure and tragedy in Arthur Miller’s 1949 Death of a Salesman. The problem is that the outward display can feel superficial and insincere, a mere response to external demands rather than a true expression of self; it leaves people struggling to regain a sense of authenticity. Depth is the concept of a true inner self that provides that sense of authenticity behind the outward appearance: the “inside” defined against the “outside.” Pfister argues that O’Neill recognized an incipient longing for authenticity in the changing capitalist culture of the early twentieth century and that his plays dramatize depth as a way of focusing and shaping the public discourse about this need.He begins with an introductory discussion of O’Neill’s attentiveness to the ways in which he was photographed, his conscious construction of a public persona as a serious professional who courageously confronted the demons of his own inner depths and, like the Freudian psychoanalysts who were gaining stature in American culture during these decades, would guide the rest of us to this new, heightened state of self-understanding. O’Neill constructed a public image of himself as the creator of plays that explored the new kind of self he depicted himself as embodying. Both the plays and the public man were constructions in response to the same cultural pressures. The four main chapters in Staging Depth are devoted to distinct cultural areas in which this new sensitivity to the subjective experience of self is revealed and critiqued.In chapter 1, following John Demos, Pfister argues that by the early twentieth-century social and psychological stresses had produced the “hothouse family”: people were placing “an even greater concentration of emotional needs and expectations within the private rather than the ‘impersonal’ public sphere” (25–26). With the increasing acceptance of Freudianism in America after Freud’s lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, family relationships came to be seen as the hidden and yet primary forces shaping individuals, especially children. This psychoanalytic turn led American drama away from depicting melodramatic clashes of stylized forces of good and evil, as in the plays of O’Neill’s father’s theater, to depictions of a character’s personal past as grounded in family relationships and social forces that shaped a path to an inescapable and often tragic future. O’Neill’s protagonists are new kinds of tragic heroes: “aristocrats of subjectivity” (31). For Pfister, however, this psychologized vision of tragedy should not be seen as grounded in something objective and universal about the human condition:Pfister then positions O’Neill’s plays in the context of this cultural moment. Although Welded may reveal tensions specific to O’Neill’s marriage to Agnes Boulton, its broader theme concerns “the inflated psychological expectations” of the “hothouse family.” Michael and Eleanor Cape’s hopes that their marriage will be an inner sanctuary secure from the alienating demands of the outer world are “impossible to satisfy” (33). Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and the various wives described in The Iceman Cometh depict an ongoing trope of the American family on which Tocqueville had commented in the 1830s. Men were seen as going into the amoral wildness of the workplace, while women were idealized as forces of morality and domesticity who maintained their civilizing control by manipulating their love and approbation to induce “restraining agonies of guilt” (38). In Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill took Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which for the Greeks had dramatized the tension between public and private realms and the foundations of political order, and made it a story of a Freudian “hothouse family” (40–42). More Stately Mansions is a critique of the way capitalism places demands on people that lead to a sense of self-alienation and loss of authenticity, ailments for which the intimacy of the family is sought as therapy (42–47).In discussing these plays in the context of the historical development of the American family, Pfister holds that O’Neill was reflecting the hopes, desires, needs, and expectations of his audience. He was giving them narratives of self that they wanted to embrace and that enhanced their sense of sophistication and superior social standing (48, 50). Pfister suggests that O’Neill knew he had this cultural role: he understood the “authorial making of ‘depth’ . . . [and began] to think through how its meaning was made and perhaps how he too played a role in making it—and sometimes in ‘unmaking’ it—by staging it” (51).Pfister next turns from the private, familial realm to the public: O’Neill’s plays as a response to the “changing identity of the white-collar work force”—that is, the emerging managerial class of the new large-scale corporate capitalism, the people who were buying tickets to his plays. Here again, Pfister represents O’Neill’s psychological insights as expressions of American culture, not insights into universal truths. “The psychological” for Pfister is “a [cultural] category so taken for granted and internalized as natural that its social origins and ideological uses are unquestioned and therefore rendered invisible.” The category is most subtle and powerful when it is represented as a discovered human essence, rather than as a created idea that changes over time and across cultures (53).The increasing influence of psychoanalysis in American popular culture helped generate a self-conscious “theatre of yearning” that sought to bring its audience to catharsis by enabling them to unmask and confront personal needs (59). Thus did O’Neill put exploring the social construction of the “psychological self” at “the heart of the modernist project” (61). This yearning to grasp a true self was not limited to high-brow culture; it pervaded popular culture in general, driven by a market of “the growing population of university-educated white-collar workers”—the new managerial class. The drawback of the old nineteenth-century culture of character and its ideals of stoic self-control was that people “needed to ‘repress’ their desires in order to be successful; whereas Freud’s psychoanalysis introduces the utopian possibility of capitalist accumulation without surplus repression” (65). Good-bye Poor Richard’s Almanack—we’re on our way to Playboy as a media guide to success in a modern America.With this cultural setup, it becomes easy to understand how theater audiences and the Pulitzer committee were primed in 1928 for the sexually charged, revelatory soliloquies of Strange Interlude, in which characters reveal their inner chaos and longing despite their outward appearance of having achieved capitalist well-being. O’Neill’s critique was not a direct assault on hard capitalism as the American economic system. Rather, he critiqued soft capitalism’s spiritual defects, which this class already was feeling: capitalism’s inability to make good on its promise of personal fulfilment. O’Neill was not Mike Gold or the Clifford Odets of Waiting for Lefty. He was focused on the hollowness and the longing that capitalism engendered in people, not on the abusiveness of class exploitation.Thus does O’Neill lampoon Marco Polo in Marco Millions for his crass spiritual banality, and thus do Dion Anthony and William Brown in The Great God Brown depict the supposed shallowness of the skills needed for worldly success and their inability to effect a deeper, more authentic self. Desire Under the Elms contrasts the repression, loneliness, and sadness of Ephraim Cabot’s life with the power of primitive desire that Abbie Putnam brings to the farm. In Days Without End John Loving accounts for Americans’ sense of alienation in their lives not with a Marxist critique of control of the means of production but with criticism of spiritual shallowness:This celebration of the new, deeper psychological selfhood—an answer to a broad cultural sense of alienation and inauthenticity—gave O’Neill’s work popular appeal in the 1920s. But by the late 1930s at Tao House, Pfister points out, O’Neill himself was having second thoughts (see 98–104). In one of his most insightful analyses, Pfister argues that O’Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh to suggest that this deep dive into the “true self,” which he had encouraged in his earlier plays, comes at a high price. Iceman questions whether psychological depth is always beneficial and shows us how humans often must cling to life-giving delusions—to “pipe dreams”—to make their way through the world. The Tao House plays are significant for Pfister not primarily because O’Neill turns to examine his own family and personal experience but rather because by doing so he questions the central assumptions about psychological truth, its sources, and the way it is encountered that were the foundation of his earlier works’ popularity.Despite this new view, O’Neill’s continuing focus on personal psychology explains why leftist critics often dismissed him as another apologist for the bourgeoisie who obfuscated the real issues of class, race, gender, and economic exploitation—despite the fact that O’Neill often dramatized these topics in his plays. Pfister discusses this criticism in his third chapter and in part agrees with it. In discussing The Hairy Ape, for example, he argues that “O’Neill’s main interest seems to be other than politics. . . . [His] deep interest seems to be in creating a working-class seaman who has been converted to professional-managerial-class angst” (118–19). Pfister has similar criticism for O’Neill’s explorations of American racism in The Dreamy Kid, The Emperor Jones, and All God’s Chillun Got Wings: “O’Neill’s 1920s infusion of ‘psychology’ into stage blacks often exhibited them as fate-driven primitives, sunk by the ‘depth’ within” (137).Certainly, O’Neill was justified in considering himself a progressive on racial issues in his America; Pfister acknowledges that his work did find support from African American luminaries such as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke. Nonetheless, as Pfister points out, amid the racist backlash against All God’s Chillun when it premiered in 1924, O’Neill replied, “the racial factor is incidental. . . . The play is a study of two human beings” (qtd. 123). Pfister argues that O’Neill saw Brutus Jones, Ella Downey, and Jim Harris as people whose “subjectivity has been structured by history and partly colonized by the ideologies of American racism” (135). For O’Neill, the central issue in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun is not racism but the broader idea of the power of social ideologies.O’Neill shared with the ancient Greek dramatists a vision of fate as the driving force in tragedy. In adapting this vision for modern American audiences, he replaced Greek beliefs about cosmic destiny with ideas about what he took to be people’s inherent psychological needs as they play out amid unquestioned social attitudes and mores. In this way, Pfister suggests, O’Neill continued the intellectual anarchism of his youth throughout his life; this, he asserts, should be understood as the playwright’s response to leftist critics such as Michael Blankfort, Virgil Geddes, Charmion Von Wiegand, and Samuel Sillen of the Daily Worker (166). For O’Neill, Marxism and progressivism, like capitalism, are ideologies, and, as with all ideologies, their effects on human lives and experience need to be examined. As a dramatist O’Neill sought to reveal the truths of what he called “life”—the personal experiences people have as they engage with other individuals and their societies. To approach this sociologically at a collective level beyond the individual inevitably introduces a bias that for O’Neill reduced art to propaganda (see 155). O’Neill was not trying to find and endorse the correct ideology but to question all ideologies and social conventions and to examine them in terms of their consequences for personal experience—for “life.” Pfister argues that, for O’Neill,Pfister shows O’Neill doing this kind of criticism even in a play that often is trivialized as “O’Neill’s only comedy”: Ah, Wilderness! Pfister reminds us that the play opens with Richard’s political critique of July Fourth celebrations before focusing on his feelings for Muriel and the confusions arising from his burgeoning sexual awareness. Pfister sees the play as “a subtle critique of how a producer-culture middle-class family reproduces its subjectivity” (168). The play lampoons Richard’s political criticism; his emotional confusion about Muriel becomes his family’s central concern. Thus, the play reveals how middle-class conventionality maintains its hold across generations by accepting some kinds of confusion and rebellion as permissible and marginalizing others as ridiculous. This “comedy,” that is, pivots from political concerns to “desire as the essence of the self, the problem of the self, and the liberation of the self redirects attention from social reality to ‘life’ [personal experience] and convention” (179). Citing Frederick Lewis Allen, Pfister argues that Ah, Wilderness! explores the tension between competing revolutionary ideas about the self and society that were gaining Americans’ attention in the early decades of the twentieth century. The winning side, he declares, was “not from Moscow, but from Vienna” (180). O’Neill’s plays have a political perspective that his leftist critics often failed to acknowledge (see 220–21).Pfister asserts that for O’Neill politics as lived experience ultimately is about the “cultural making of forms of selfhood” (188), an idea explosively displayed in the tribalistic identity politics of America today. Turning to this theme in chapter 4, Pfister discusses Susan Glaspell, whose explorations of the cultural stereotyping of women served O’Neill as a model for his own analysis of soft capitalism’s influence on Americans’ creation of personal identity—the cultural “colonization” of their subjectivity (135). The background for both writers is the mainstreaming of Freudianism in America, its liberation of desire, and the “resignification of sexuality in America’s modern ‘therapeutic’ culture of consumption” (189). Glaspell’s goal in such plays as Suppressed Desires (written with George Cram Cook), Trifles, Woman’s Honor, and The Verge is not to celebrate accepted ideas of “womanly depth” but “to demystify the ideological invention of it” (198). For Pfister, Claire Archer in The Verge is “a powerful, frustrated woman who knows that she lacks the critical vocabulary to name [her] pain.” Citing Richard Ohmann, he argues that Glaspell’s plays demonstrate “the way social roles and power relationships translate into personal illness” (199).Like Glaspell, O’Neill sought to demystify social norms and fantasies and reveal their consequences in people’s lives. Both playwrights were motivated by an appreciation of “the subtle effects theatre and fiction have on the making of subjectivity” (203). We make sense of our lives through stories, and we model our personal stories on stories that surround us in our culture. Writers like Glaspell and O’Neill are able to change cultural stories and thus to offer people new ways of envisioning themselves. Pfister argues that where Glaspell dramatized women by challenging their stereotyping, thus undermining a cultural ideology, O’Neill revealed ideology’s toxicity by portraying women deadened by their acceptance of stereotypes. Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey and Margaret in The Great God Brown continue to embrace a romanticized image of their school-girl selves, as indeed does Agnes Boulton in Part of a Long Story, her account of life with O’Neill. Their personal stories have been “determined by the roles and masks they have been issued by their culture” (205–7). Despite their differences, both Claire and Mary “angrily tear the discursive web of middle-class feminine ‘normalcy’—even as their webs continue to enmesh them” (215).Throughout Staging Depth Pfister emphasizes that characters’ conceptions of their personal identities must be understood in the context of the specific cultural ideologies to which they respond. From within a culture, he argues, we are tempted to consider authors’ stories as revealing objective, universal truths about the human condition, but, in fact, ideologies are social constructions that provide the foundation on which theater-makers and others build and enact their own personal stories. By demythologizing social ideology, writers give us new ways of envisioning ourselves. As Pfister says, authors are “surveyors of customs” who are themselves shaped by those customs: “We must grasp not only that O’Neill staged ideology, but also that ideology staged ‘O’Neill.’ Culture makes up O’Neill’s ‘depth’” (222).Staging Depth is a brilliant book that more than repays the attentiveness required to follow its detailed argument. It is valuable both as a study of O’Neill and as a perspicacious assessment of the interplay of literature and ideology in a culture. As a cultural study of an author, it is a model of scholarly breadth, depth, and insight. But that excellence is also the source of a limitation—which is perhaps an unfair criticism because it arises from ideas that have gained traction in philosophy of mind, discussions of the self, and literary studies since Pfister’s book appeared in print. Perhaps starting with entomologist E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, published in 1975 to outraged and vicious criticism, scholars have become more willing to consider Darwinism and evolutionary biology as pathways to insights into the human mind and society. Pfister presents O’Neill and indeed all of us as creatures of our cultures. There is little space in his account for universal cross-cultural truths about human experience and human needs in general. Evolutionary biology suggests, contrary to postmodern culturalists like Pfister, that such universal truths do exist and that literature can reveal them. Humans, simply as a result of the evolutionary history of our species, are story-telling animals. We use stories to organize our experience of the world, and we live in these stories, not in the world itself, until some event leads us to question whether our stories might be false. We then “confront reality,” but all that actually means is that we are forced to construct a new story that is more workable for engaging with the world. We never actually get outside some story—our own personal subjectivity—to engage an uninterpreted external world in itself. O’Neill was aware of this. As Pfister himself argues, that may be why he explored pipe dreams in Iceman. But in general, Pfister presents an O’Neill who is overdetermined by the culture that surrounds him; the mind is present as a construct of culture and little else.An interesting extension of Pfister’s work would be to consider humans as story-telling animals and to consider how this universal fact causes us variously to engage with cultures, then to look at O’Neill as an example of this engagement in the context of the American culture of his day. But that, of course, is outside the scope of Pfister’s approach and indeed beyond the purview of the culture of literary criticism in which he was writing—which in the end may be simply another example of Pfister’s central point about the dynamic relationship between literature and culture, a point he makes so persuasively in this excellent book.