The Inner Strength of Opposites: O'Neill's Novelislic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination by Kurt Eisen (review)

724 Book Reviews major criticism, that the works are linked with Brook's life and not much with Life, is made briefly (265). In the epilogue Brook is, on the one hand, "daring and original" (273); on the other hand, though, "Brook's freedom has given him the opportunity for indulging some of his private spiritual fantasies" (275). While the book is informed and successfully catches what some performances were like, Hunt and Reeves fail the reader in not more fully placing the achievements of these last twenty-five years. MALCOLM PAGE, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY KURT EISEN. The Inner Strength of Opposites: O'Neill's Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 241. $40.00. Kurt Eisen has produced a polished study Of O' Neill's development using an interpretative framework based on Bakhtin that affords thoughtful insights to selected plays. Eisen contends that O'Neill's triumph consists in lhe modem reinvention of dramatic character through the intentional fusion of novelistic teChniques and the melodramatic imagination. Each of these key tenus is carefully defined. By "novelistic" Eisen, following Bakhtin, refers to the development of "dialogical" relations between characters that open multivalent points of view leading to a clash of discourses, not merely conventional conflicts or conversations. In some cases (for example, Strange Interlude, through its use of thought-asides), O'Neill's characters engage in dialogical relationships with self. In such work - The Hairy Ape, The Great God Brown, Days Without Elld, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie - the characters "see themselves most fully in dialogue with their own internal otherness" (108). By such advances in psychological disclosure O'Neill "epitomizes the modern playwright in search of a form adequate to contemporary representations of truth in a literary epoch dominated by the novel" (5). By "melodramatic" Eisen refers not only to stage techniques contrived to arouse the most basic human emotions through spectacle, plot surprises, stereotypical characters, clashes of virtue and vice, and appeals to sentimentality - but also to a vision of the world in which moral absolutism reigns, the family is supreme, and characters are whole (wholly good or bad or wholly one thing or another). Eisen traces the rise of this vision to post-Napoleonic France, where idealism, egalitarian aspirations, and new middle class interests shaped an aesthetic celebrating merit rather than heredity, innocence rather than sophistication, and domestic piety. This excellent historical discussion of melodrama's ideology will be of interest to all readers of modern drama. Eisen then argues that just as the novel tends to dissolve melodramatic stereotypes by allowing space for (he development of characters' inner lives, so O'Neill's experimentation with novelistic techniques leads him toward greater depth of characterization and a wider view of modern life. It is not that O'Neill "transcends" or "escapes" melodrama, as previous critics such as Robert B. Heilman or Michael Manheim have Book Reviews contended. His project is more ambitious: O'Neill hisloricizes and critiques melodrama by subverting its generic conventions and scrutinizing its assumptions using novelistic techniques. In Strange Interlude. which seems to be a touchstone play for Eisen, O'Neill undennines melodrama's reverence for such middle class values as marriage, family, and motherhood by interrogating them dialogically; the characters interrogate both others and themselves on these topics and grow over the course of time through a clash of referential frames. Eisen suggests that in Strange Interlude O'Neill celebrates his successful wedding of the novellc dramatic fonn by symbolically marrying Nina, who embodies the life force, to Marsden, her most mature suitor. In the end, it is the novelist ~ho gets the girl. It is certainly interesting that so many of O'Neill's plays deal with the problem of marriage, and marriage as a metaphor (wedding playwriting to novelistic techniques) provides an opening for Eisen to revisit work that other critics have passed over. The discussions of Welded, Servitude, The Straw, and A Wife/or a Life are lively and original . The author connects these readings to excellent discussions of Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh, which he finds to be O'Neill's...