Worshiping the Black Sun: Melancholy in Eugene O’Neill and Sarah Ruhl

The prologue to Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia depicts the titular planet colliding into and destroying, and even appearing to consume, the much smaller earth. The director recapitulates this apocalypse at the conclusion of the film, this time as viewed from the ground: two women and a young boy huddle under the frame of a teepee as the blast washes over them. The second part of the movie builds to the catastrophe; the first chronicles the destructive trajectory of a melancholic young bride at her wedding reception. Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, begins the evening happily enough, but soon careens out of control about the estate of her brother-in-law, at which the event is being held. Overwhelmed to the breaking point, she wreaks a path of destruction that leads to the termination of her marriage on her wedding night.

The Danish cinematographer’s depiction of melancholy as an isolated planet, careening out of control, paralleled in the person of the young bride who destructively ricochets about her wedding reception, vividly illustrates Kierkegaard’s conception of the malady as a response to modernity. Unmoored from the certainty of a theistic belief system, the individual is cut loose in the universe. The discord between Justine and her family is consistent with psychoanalytic constructs of melancholy in which the subject psychically consumes love-objects, including parental figures, in order to advance identity formation. Indeed, the planet’s appearing to consume the earth graphically depicts the concept of melancholy cannibalism. Prominent American playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Sarah Ruhl, albeit separated by almost a century, have each created memorable melancholics who conform to this model, although with a significant difference. O’Neill’s generally desire to flee from civilization and family, which they view as corrupt; Ruhl’s mourn life’s impermanence, and yet seek solace in the company of others. Although Ruhl, unlike O’Neill, has yet to pass the test of time, she has emerged as one of the most frequently produced American playwrights thus far of the twenty-first century, to critical acclaim. Given the role that melancholy plays in major works of both, the comparison is a productive one.

Notable melancholics in O’Neill include Ned in Exorcism, Nina in Strange Interlude, Lavinia and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, and Edmund and Jamie in Long Day’s Journey Into Night; those in Ruhl include the title character of Eurydice, Matilde in The Clean House, and Tilly in Melancholy Play.¹ Like the heroine of von Trier’s film, the melancholics of both playwrights are mostly of the superior variety; they are sad because they perceive the true nature of existence, and this sets them apart from their common fellows. Yet, they differ in what they apprehend that truth to be and in what they long for in relation to that truth. O’Neill’s sorrowful characters experience as corrupt the world, or more specifically the civilized world, and in microcosm, the nuclear family. They therefore desire to escape from family, in most cases, for a Rousseauian paradise—that is, an idealized, primitive world free from the corrupting influence of civilization, within which the natural goodness of humanity may flourish. The exception is Nina in Strange Interlude, who is locked into desire for her deceased lover Gordon and unsuccessfully attempts to re-create, with various partners, her imagined family life with him. Ruhl’s doleful characters, on the other hand, are sad because they perceive not corruption but rather impermanence. They long to hold onto life as long as possible and to either reunite with familial figures or construct new family structures.

The playwrights’ explorations in this area stem from their personal experience; both have suffered losses that deeply inform their work. Stephen A. Black lists among his subject’s losses those of five friends between 1913 and 1919, followed by both parents and his brother within a period of just over three years.² Ruhl’s greatest loss is that of her father to cancer when she was twenty; additionally, both of her grandmothers were victims of...