PIERRE'S PROGENY: O'NEILL AND THE MELVILLE REVIVAL * JOYCE DEVEAU KENNEDY Mount Saint Vincent University W h e n in 1851-52 Melville was composing his bitter autobiographical novel Pierre, he could hardly have guessed, given the public's cool reception of Moby Dick, that his extravagant new novel might one day serve as inspiration for America's greatest dramatist. Yet Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is a belated tribute not only to "the man who lived among cannibals," in its use of Typee, but more so to the legacy of Pierre. The roots of Melville's influence on O'Neill may lie in the New England Puritan heritage they shared,1 but their affinities go much deeper than that. Those who like to read meaning into coincidence may think it eventful that O'Neill was born 16 October 1888 in New York City just a few blocks from where on 16 November Melville was to begin his last novel, Billy Budd. Three years later Melville was dead. Not for almost three decades, until the scholars celebrating Melville's centenary discovered the contemporary appeal of psychological and rebellious novels such as Moby Dick, Pierre, and Mardi, would Melville receive the attention he deserved. Certainly, it was not coinci dence that at the same time O'Neill was producing his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, on Broadway. One might say the two matured (in the tastes of the literary public) at precisely the same time and for the same reason: both were searching out the darkest corners of the human spirit - especially as manifested in the sexual repressiveness of a Puritan and capitalist American society. O'Neill often talked about the European influences on his work - Nietzsche, Freud, Strindberg, and Conrad among others - but for some reason (perhaps he did not consider Americans properly avant garde), he was silent about influences closer to home. When he wrote in his Electra "Work Diary" that the "New England background" was the "best possible dramatically for Greek plot of crime and retribution, chain of fate - Puritan conviction of man born to sin and punishment-Orestes' furies within him, his conscience-etc." (p 531),2 he was not stating an absolute truth. Faulkner, for instance, has used Mississippi to the same end, and just as successfully. No. What O'Neill's statement proves is that he found in New England, and in her writers, though he is not quick to acknowledge the latter fact, material for his finest plays. This essay will try to English Studies in Can ad a, h i, 1 , Spring 1977 104 show the influence of only one New England writer,3 Herman Melville, on the most ambitious of those plays - Mourning Becomes Electra.4 One critic has said, "it is Melville ... to whom O'Neill has the most affinities,"5 and although the evidence is only circumstantial (i.e., O'Neill did not own a copy of Pierre and no record has been found of his mentioning it),6 I think it was from Melville's Pierre that O'Neill borrowed ideas when he got bogged down in trying to find the right vehicle for his "Greek" drama. Most earlier critics could not have seen that, for they were prepared to meet O'Neill on the terms he had defined for them and thus to see the play as a modern Oresteia. J.W. Krutch's Introduction to Nine Plays compared O'Neill to Aeschylus and Shakespeare in his tragic conceptions, if not in his language. A.H. Nethercot surveys the reviews of the play that dealt with O'Neill's Freudian manhandling of the House of Atreus.7 Typical was John Corbin, "O'Neill and Aeschylus": "The normal human horror at incest becomes an interestingly Freudian libido. The upstanding manhood of Orestes, his hard fought battle for spiritual release, becomes a weak-kneed and neurotic pes simism ending in suicide ... Far from murdering his mother [Orin] is warmly Freudian toward her" (s r l , 30 April 1932). Doris Alexander believes that the relationships between O'Neill's characters are very much like those described in a book written by two of O'Neill's...