The Worth of Ah, Wilderness!

THE WORTH OF AH, WILDERNESS! THE CRITICAL FATE of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! has been, to say the least of it, peculiar. Nowadays we look with horror at the intentional fallacy; yet we have scrutinized O'Neill's statements about Ah, Wilderness ! and derived attitudes therefrom.1 At present a writer's life is considered almost an irrelevancy; yet Ah, Wilderness! has been attacked because O'Neill's adolescence was obviously never like that.2 Nowadays we are enjoinedto look, at all costs, at the work itself; yet we have turned back to O'Neill's earlier works,3 and, finding Ah, Wilderness! to be very different, we have, according to our biases, either smiled with relief at the mellowness and simplicity4 or winced in pain at what seemed sentimental ,5 superficial, and false.6 To call this unfortunate is a serious understatement. Obviously any play of O'Neill's is worth examining directly and for its own sake. It is the purpose of this paper to offer one such examination. The major indictments against Ah, Wilderness! are to be found, in their extreme form, in the chapter on Ah, Wilderness! ("The Jolly Millers ") in Edwin Engel's The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. These indictments are approximately as follows: 1. The play is written in a uniquely mellow, and hence distorting, mood. While still in that mood, O'Neill praised, as the play praises, its historical period and the American middle classes. O'Neill later realized the falseness of these attitudes and returned to his normal and proper view of the American middle classes and of life itself. 2. The play is a "beatific wish-fulfillment dream,"7 falsifying O'Neill's adolescence, which it is clearly intended to represent. 1. E.g., Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (Cambridge. Mass., 1953), pp. 271-272. 2. Ibid. 3. Joseph Wood Krutch's discussion of Ah, Wilderness! in The American Drama Since 1918 (New York, 1939), pp. 113-116, treats the play almost entirely in terms of how it compares with O'Neill's earlier plays. His principal point is that "it is useless to pretend that O'Neill's peculiar powers are anywhere exlubited" in Ah, Wilderness! (p. 115). O'Neill's other plays "dealt with ultimates" (p. 116); this one does not. See also Engel's treatment (Haunted Heroes, pp. 270277 ), among numerous others. 4. E.g., Harlan Hatcher, Introduction to Ah, Wilderness!, in A Modern Repertory (New York 1953), p. 146: "Following this series of searching and tragic plays, O'Neill surprised and delighted his world audience by writing a gentle comedy, Ah, Wilderness!" (Contrast Krutch's view that the play was popular ''partly because the easy minor works of difficult writers have a special appeal to that large.public which likes to pay its tribute to fame on occasions which make few demands upon its intelligence or imagination" [American Drama, p. 113]./ There are also those critics who generally prefer O'Neill's less experimental or "pretentious' or "ambitious'" plays, among them Ah, Wildernessl See, for example, Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (New York. 1954), p. 231. 5. The word is to be found in Krutch, p. 113 among many other places. 6. Engel, passim. Bonamy Dobree, on the other hand, whose opinion of the play is at least as low as Engel's, finds, unlike Engel, that it unfortunately resembles O'Neill's other plays in dealing with "that stage of adolescent sentimentality in which Mr. O'Neill luxuriates" ("The Plays of Eugene O'Neill," Southern Review, II [Winter, 1937], 444). 7. P. 271. 280 1960 THE WORTH OF AIl, WILDERNESS! 281 3. The play's picture of life is falsely mellow because it displays "no problem of existence; no fighting of life or fear of death; no problem of hidden motives; no unfulfilled longings, neuroses, or obsessions; no father-son hostility, mother fixation, or marital difficulty."8 4. The play lacks depth because the characters have no symbolic significance. Characters parallel to Richard, his father, Sid, Lily, the prostitute, and so on, appear again and again in O'Neill's plays; here, and here almost alone, they...