Christ Symbolism in Anna Christie

CHRIST SYMBOLISM IN ANNA CHRISTIE IN IDS SHORT STORY, "The Capital of the World," written in 1937. Ernest Hemingway uses the same pattern of Christ symbolism he was to use with such marked effect fifteen years later, in The Old Man and the Sea. Just as the old man, Santiago, while exhausting his vital force, proves himseH in an unequal struggle against the sea, Paco, the youthful hero of "The Capital of the World," demonstrates his courage, though he receives a mortal hurt, manfully defending himseH in a mock bullfight. In the short story as in the novel a number of details relating to the Passion of Christ furnish a background for the events recounted. Yet Christ symbolism in American literature does not owe its first appearance to Hemingway. In nineteenth century American literature it is found in the works of Cooper, Melville, Crane, and even Harriet Beecher Stowe. It appears first in twentieth century American literature in 1919, in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Early in that work Dr. Parcival (a namesake of Sir Parcival, central hero of the Grail legend and the first knight vouchsafed a vision of the Grail), tells the protagonist, George Willard, "If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this-that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourseH forget." This disclosure he prefaces with the assertion, "In the end I will be crucified, uselessly crucified."l After thus identifying Christ as the archetype of futile human suffering, Anderson undertakes to show, by linking each of his characters in some way to Christ's Passion, how man indeed does suffer to no purpose. As is well known, in the decade following World War I, and thereafter, both Hemingway and Faulkner engaged in tentative experiments with Anderson's technique of Christ symbolism, until, in The Old Man and the Sea and A Fable, respectively, they sought to deal with it in the most explicit manner possible.2 In "The Capital of the World," however, Hemingway's allusions 1. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York, 1958), p. 48. The reader's attention is called also to the use Nelson Algren makes of this passage in his short story "Design for Departure," The Neon Wilderness (New York, 1947), pp. 150-175. 2. See also, Carvel Collins, "The Pairing of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dyingl': The Princeton University Library Chronicle, XVIII (Spring, 1957), 114-123, for a rewaroing discussion of Christ symbolism encountered in these novels. 389 390 MODERN DRAMA February to Eugene O'Neill's play, Anna Christie, invite the reader to consider the possibility that neither Faulkner nor Hemingway, but O'Neill was the first to see in the Christ symbolism of Winesburg, Ohio, a literary device of impressive potential, and that O'Neill was the first writer, scarcely excepting Anderson himself, to confide in Christ symbolism a full embodiment of his theme. 1£ this claim can be upheld Anna Christie becomes a milestone in American symbolic literature and is owed a higher place in the O'Neill canon than customarily given it. While the hero of "The Capital of the World," Paco, enacts his Passion, his sisters uncomprehendingly sit through a movie version of Anna Christie. Significantly they have gone not to see the film but the star, Greta Garbo, and they are disappointed as, indeed, "all Madrid" is disappointed that week. Everyone expects to see the heroine moving in accustomed scenes of "great luxury and brilliance." When they discover her instead, in "miserable low surroundings," they are unable to appreciate her story, and protest by whistling and stamping their feet.s Their romantic desire for worldly happiness blinds them to the reality of human suffering. They fail to recognize Christ in Anna. No more would they discern Him in Paco--or themselves. In citing in his short story these particulars about the reception another writer's work...