Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill & the Politics of Psychological Discourse (review)

Because our understanding of Eugene O’Neill’s plays has been so profoundly shaped by the notion of the psychological self, we have tended to overlook how our sense of the psychological self has been shaped in turn by the plays of Eugene O’Neill. In his new book, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse, Joel Pfister looks at how O’Neill staged a model of psychological “depth” which negotiated the changing shape of identity for middle-class audiences in the early to mid-20th century United States. He argues that this model of the psychological self not only situated O’Neill as a serious literary artist but functioned to transform his audience’s class anxieties into individual neuroses.

Pfister begins his study by contextualizing the biographical tradition of O’Neill scholarship within the intertwining histories of the bourgeois family and the psychological self. Those who know Pfister’s first book, The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction, will recognize a common concern here, namely the way the notion of the psychological self was created for a burgeoning professional-managerial class anxious about its producer-status under capitalism. Following through on his thesis that Hawthorne began the work of producing a psychological identity for an emergent middle class, Pfister shows in his new book how O’Neill helped to secure that identity (and his reputation) by staging the psychological self according to a model of “depth.” Based upon popular interpretations of Freud, O’Neill constructed his version of the psychological self as a web of neuroses and desires which encoded the fractured history of the individual and his/her relationship to the family. Pfister discusses how O’Neill’s plays not only bracket this tortured and agonizing self apart from its cultural and material context, but aestheticize the pathologized self as emotionally-fraught, intellectual, and/or “deep.”

Pfister suggests that this construction of the self performed for the professional-managerial class attending O’Neill’s plays, offered an explanation for the contradictions they experienced under capitalism. The psychological self that O’Neill popularized functioned to internalize social conflicts and class anxieties, making them appear as individual neuroses which could be mystified as both “natural” and “universal.” Pfister cites as evidence reviews and criticism of O’Neill’s contemporaries on the Left who accused him of using psychology to avoid addressing problems of the social real. By doing so, he recovers an important body of criticism which has been all too often omitted from critical overviews of O’Neill’s career. Pfister reminds us, for instance, that Lionel Trilling had noted that the middle class “wanted certain of its taboos broken and O’Neill broke them” (quoted on 96). But, as Pfister points out, the energy used to break these taboos derived from the radical social movements in and around Greenwich Village in the 1910s. He shows how O’Neill’s interest in the feminist-anarchism of Emma Goldman, linking sexual ownership to property relations, developed into an interest in the Individualist anarchism espoused by Benjamin Tucker which rooted lusts and desires within a purely psychological framework. Thus, Pfister gives us a bridge for understanding how O’Neill’s interest in psychological conflict developed out of an initial interest in social conflict.

If the book only provided this important context for understanding how the psychological self became naturalized within O’Neill’s plays, it would be well worth reading. But Staging Depth goes on to show how O’Neill also demonstrates an awareness of the way the self may be consciously shaped and staged for others. Conjecturing that a constructed model of the self might have been made available to O’Neill by fellow Provincetown playwright Susan Glaspell, Pfister proposes a wonderful reconsideration of her plays. Offering brief readings of Trifles, Woman’s Honor, and...