The Theme of Loneliness in Modern American Drama by Winifred L. Dusenbury (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS THE THEME OF LONELINESS IN MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA, by Winifred L. Dusenbury, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, Florida, 1960, 231 pp. Price $6.50. Loneliness in itself may not be tragedy but loneliness is at least an essential concommitant. Nowhere in her book, The Theme of Loneliness in Modern American Drama, does Viinifred Dusenbury belabor this thesis, but it is implicit in her exegesis of almost every play she has 'chosen to consider. Her book faithfully reflects a widely held attitude, particularly in America, that loneliness is evil, that loneliness is always to be avoided if possible, that loneliness is always a direct cause or result of personal failure, of homelessness, of unhappy family life, of unhappy love affairs, of ovcr-powering socio-eeonomic forces, or of the compulsive urge to be a hero. The first obvious question which comes to mind concerns precisely what Winifred Dusenbury means by loneliness, and the answer appears to be that she considers it a condition of mind and soul which is protean rather than Promethean. In O'Neill's play she shows Anna Christie's loneliness as an exhausted emptiness which results from the physical abuse received from lecherous men; Harriet's, in Craig's Wife, is the inordinate love of material things; Willie Loman's, in Death of a Salesman, is bewildennent in his failure after a lifetime of trying to be "well-liked"; Mio's, in 'Vinterset, is the consuming, vengeful urge to clear his father's name. The cause and the result are the loneliness, and although isolation, separateness, and inability to communicate are common to each of the cases, the loneliness in each is of its own kind. In the twenty-six plays she has chosen for analysis, Miss Dusenbury shows almost as many different facets of this universal condition which sooner or later, in one way or another, affects evcry man who passes this way. Curiously, she has not found a modem American play which deals with what may be the one true loneliness, the one which flows through an aging individual when he arrives at that moment between "riping and riping and rotting and rotting" and grasps, in a sudden consciousness of man's mortality, the terrible intensity of the human dilemma, the moment when he cries with Hamlet "now I am alone." In this country where the life span constantly lengthens and the productivity span shortens, the problem of loneliness in the aging years would seem to be an acutely pertinent one, but one which our major playwrights have largely left alone. The Silver Whistle by Robert McEnroe comes to mind as a wistfully comic treatment of the crises of the aged, and On Borrowed Time is a sentimental presentation of what happens when Grandpa gets Death cornered in the apple tree, but a great play of the tragic stature which another O'Neill could produce is lacking. So the omission of such a play is not Professor Dusenbury's fault but rather, a bearing out of her oblique suggestion tllat a truly great American tragedy remains to be written. And when it is written, it well may be that the loneliness of its protagonist will be of a Promethean nature, a triumphant suffering (suffering in the Aristotlean sense of undergoing, experiencing) which results from a magnificent contribution to the cause of Man. The problem of loneliness is a popular one with our dramatists probably because as artists engaging in the lonely profession of writing they come to 107 108 MODERN DRAMA May understand it. The last act of Anderson's Winterset, one of the pieces analyzed in the book, might possibly be considered as an allegorical one-act play which dramatizes this fact. Mio, symbolizing the artist, must find his way out, out to a world which will receive him, or else die in the attempt. No one can help him, not Miriamne his love, nor Esdras his ideal, nor Carr his fellow man. He must make his own effort to communicate with a world that lies outside, and he dies, not even certain that he has achieved love, that he has found his way into the heart of another, for only after...