Freedom and Fixity in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Freedom and Fixity in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill LINDA BEN-ZVI The first poem that appears in the collected Poems of Eugene O'Neill begins: Weary am I of the tumult, sick of the staring crowd, Pining for wild sea places where the soul may think aloud. Fled is the glamour of cities, dead as the ghost of a dream, While I pine anew for the tint of blue on the breast of the old Gulf Stream. I It is a poem of a young man, sick of society, desirous of change - a sea change. Though published in 1912, it was written earlier, when O'Neill took his extended sea journey to Buenos Aires aboard the Charles Racine, fleeing not only the "glamour of cities," but a wife and child.2 The title of the poem appropriately is "Free," and it has much of the flavor of O'Neill's reading during the period - works of Jack London and Joseph Conrad - as it does the actual sea life he faced. The short piece concludes with a burst of youthful fervor about the freedom of life on the sea: Then it's ha! for the plunging deck of a bark, the hoarse song of the crew, With never a thought of those we left or what we are going to do; Nor heed the old ship's burning, but break the shackles of care And at last be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind in our hair. One ofthe constant poles in O'Neill's plays is this desire for freedom, a word that has particular significance when related to the O'Neill canon. In fact, the first four definitions of "freedom" in the OED seem specifically written with O'Neill in mind: "exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment; liberation from the bondage of sin (figurative); the quality of being free or noble; and the state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint." O'Neill Freedom and Fixity in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill constantly creates personae who long to escape the imprisonment they feel within the microcosmic world of the family and the macrocosmic world of twentieth-century materialistic society; who feel the weight of sin, and desire surcease from its burden; who seek if not nobility at least a life of purpose; and who yearn to be unhindered and unrestrained. If freedom, then, is a constant theme in O'Neill works, it is set against an antithetical theme also at work in the shaping of an O'Neill play: the tendency toward and the desire for fixity. I choose that word for more than its euphonious pairing with freedom; it too seems peculiarly appropriate for particular tendencies in O'Neill's writing. The word originally comes from physics where it refers to the property ofenduring heat without volitalization or evaporation. It also refers to the condition of not being liable to displacement or change, the desire for stability or permanence in situation. One has only to think of O'Neill's characters, some of whom are literally exposed to the heat of a fiery furnace, others to the hell and furnaces of the mind, to see the connections and the significance of the word in O'Neill's writing. Characters may quest after new experiences, seeking freedom from society and family; but at the same time almost all desire the very thing they are denying: fixity, home, "stability or permanence in situation." The pull between these two seemingly dichotomous poles creates the tensions and provides the imagery in many of O'Neill's plays, both in his early and later periods. O'Neill's earliest successes were his Glencaim cycle plays, works deriving from his time at sea. Like the poem "Free," written, O'Neill said, "on a deep-sea barque in the days of Real Romance,,,3they offer scenes of actual sea life, with characters shaped by the men O'Neill met and settings he knew. The fictional stearner G/eneairn is seen at anchor off an island in the West Indies in The Moon of the Caribees, midwayan a voyage between New York and England in Bound Eastfor...