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Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (review)
- American Literature
- Duke University Press
- Volume 73, Number 3, September 2001
- pp. 646-647
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
American Literature 73.3 (2001) 646-647
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More biographical than psychoanalytic, Stephen Black’s Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy is an extremely well researched and intriguing study accompanied by many stunning photographs. Black draws much of the factual material about O’Neill from the two major biographies by Louis [End Page 646] Sheaffer and the Gelbs. What makes this biography readable and interesting, however, is the new material Black gleans from interviews and papers stored in various libraries, especially the Sheaffer papers housed at Connecticut College in New London. Black’s thesis, that O’Neill used his plays as a medium for his own psychoanalysis and was thus able to move beyond his obsession with the loss of his parents, is loosely threaded through the biographical material. That O’Neill shed his sicknesses in his works is unequivocal, but that he turned a psychological corner and moved on is debatable. Black opines that O’Neill continuously mourned the loss of both parents but that after the composition of Long Day’s Journey, “There appear to be no more characters resembling James or Ella” (447). Ergo he is purged of his grief.
Surely the other tragedies in O’Neill’s life—the death of his son Eugene O’Neill Jr., his grandson’s crib death, and the complete estrangement from his daughter Oona—stayed with him and plagued him to the end. Black eschews the idea that in A Touch of the Poet, composed after Journey, there is any real psychological connection between Oona and O’Neill and the stormy relationship played out onstage between Con Melody and his daughter Sara. The play was written during the O’Neill-Oona feud that began with her Hollywood ties and subsequent marriage to Charlie Chaplin. The guilt over his rejection of Oona must have been devastating and perhaps was, in part, the cause of the terrible battles with his wife Carlotta that Black so vividly describes.
The most stimulating sections of Black’s biography come in the first half of the book where he regales the reader with little-known tidbits about O’Neill’s youth, his romantic interests, school experiences, and second marriage. However, the psychoanalytic thread gets lost within the complex fabric of biographical facts, although it resurfaces later in the chapters “O’Neill’s Analysis” and “Further Analysis.” Throughout, Black reminds us that this is a psychoanalytic study by repeating the phrases “to a psychoanalytic biographer” and “psychoanalytically speaking,” but he fails to present a sustained discussion of particular mental disorders suffered by O’Neill and how they are “self-psychoanalyzed” in the plays. Also, the reader unfamiliar with Freudian terminology needs clear definitions and explanatory notes. Exploring the Freudian implications of The Great God Brown, for example, Black mentions that “the concept of the ego ideal is a precursor to the later idea of the super-ego” (321) without further clarification. In spite of the paucity of psychoanalytic illumination, Black has turned twenty years of research into a compelling and detailed account of Eugene O’Neill and his plays.
Martha G. Bower, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
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