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Letting the Dead be Dead: A Reinterpretation of A Moonfor the Misbegotten STEPHEN A. BLACK O'Neill organizes AMoonfor the Misbegotten not around Jim Tyrone, as most interpreters believe, but around Josie Hogan. The play's central dramatic action occurs in the growth we witness in Josie's understanding of Jim, herself, and the world. The action of the play is the process of mourning: not, primarily, the unending mourning of Jim for his mother, but the mourning of Josie for Jim, who dies to her during the course of the play, and whose deadness Josie eventually accepts. I Jim gains little peace or "insight" from his third act confession. The "salvation," or "forgiveness" Josie gives him is mainly significant in its meaning to Josie. We must take Jim seriously when he insists that he is "dead": he cannot grow, feel, love, ordo anything except, by drinking himself to death, send his body to join his soul and his mother. The play's drama, like that of Oedipus the King, lies in the process by which a character, Josie, resists awareness of something wen known. but unconsciously known. Until almost the end ofAct Three she still holds her hopes and dreams, and only gradually lets herself understand what Jim tells and shows her. With the greatest difficulty she brings herself to renounce the belief that with Jim she might fulfill herneed to love and beloved. The renunciation, when it comes, signals a great bittersweet change. To gain something new, Josie must renounce something old. Hers is the work of mourning. By it she looses a ghost that haunts her, and gains a new sense ofher self. Insight makes the world anew for Josie, new and sadder. The world ceases to seem a place where all things may be possible. It becomes one governed by laws of finitude, exclusion, time, place, and mortality. Josie's discovery leads to an outcome that is not disastrous, but is deeply tragic in a way the Greeks would have understood. When Oedipus finally learns who he is, he punishes himselffor having believed himself more powerful than the gods and fates. For her lesser folly, Josie accepts the humiliation of being an ordinary person, an humiliation that, paradoxically, accompanies growth toward autonomy. In Act Four we witness A Moonfor the Misbegotten 545 evidence ofJosie's growth. She now perceives her father from the viewpoint of another adult, rather than that of a dutiful and partly dependent daughter. Independence replaces old dependencies. From the beginning, Josie sees more ofJim than she lets herself understand. At her first sight of him in Act One she says that he looks like a "dead man walking slow behind his own coffin" (p. 322). In the next breath she denies the ยท knowledge, attributing his low spirits to a hangover. She uses her selfconsciousness about her size to confuse the issue. It's because she's so big and ugly that Jim can't love her. Half a lifetime of practice has made her expert at surviving the problem of her size. Something within herself she can probably manage. Someone else's thoughts or feelings are another matter. Later in Act One, she literally seizes the problem: "(Shepulls TYRONE'S head back and laughingly kisses him on the lips . .. She looks startled and confused, stirred and at the same time frightened. She forces a scornful laugh) Och, there's no spirit in you! It's like kissing a corpse" (p. 331). The game with Harder distracts her thoughts, but when it is finished, and she hears Jim laughing offstage, she partly remembers: "It's good to hear him laugh as if he meant it" (p. 340). And at the end of the act she urges him to eat, telling him "You're killing yourself' (p. 342). Nothing suggests she consciously intends more than a figure of speech, just as when, earlier, she has told her father, "It's true, if I was his wife, I'd cure him of drinking himself to death, if! had to kill him" (p. 318). To this point it seems clear that Josie and the audience probably see Jim the same way: an attractive, charming drunk, reformable...

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