“It Sounds Wonderful, Doesn’t It?”: Promises of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill

In December 1921 an editorial by Eugene O’Neill entitled “Happy Ending (?)” ran in the New York Times. In the article O’Neill attempted to explain and defend the ending of his new play, “Anna Christie.” He argues, “A kiss in the last act, a word about marriage, and the audience grow blind and deaf to what follows.”¹ O’Neill chides his audiences and critics for taking “a word of marriage” as a promise of blissful finality and for falling prey to what he calls “the kiss-marriage-happily-ever-after tradition” prevalent in literature and culture. O’Neill argues that the conclusion of “Anna Christie” is neither happy nor sad but rather uncertain because it is not really an end. He explains that Chris, and especially Anna and Mat, endure and overcome great personal conflicts and revelations and emerge in a more honest and truthful place: “Three characters have been revealed in all their intrinsic verity, under the acid test of a fateful crisis in their lives. They have solved this crisis for the moment as best they may, in accordance with the will that is in each of them. The curtain falls. Behind it their lives go on.”²

With his editorial O’Neill guides his audiences on how they should understand the impending nuptials of Mat and Anna or, rather, how they should engage with the engagement they see on stage. There is certainly no guarantee of happiness for Anna and Mat as they begin their marriage, but there is a kind of genuine understanding between the two. It seems that for O’Neill the truth that is revealed at the end of the play allows Anna and Mat a fighting chance at a future together, whereas love, a word O’Neill never mentions once in his editorial, plays a far less prominent role.

Promises of marriage in early plays like Bread and Butter and Beyond the Horizon and in later plays like All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Great God Brown are handled very differently than in “Anna Christie.” In these plays marriage proposals are impetuous and passionate, and O’Neill goes to great lengths, both in dialogue and stage directions, to demonstrate how very little his couples know about each other before promising a lifetime together. This concept of verity, which according to O’Neill grants Anna and Mat a future together, is conspicuously absent from the engagements in O’Neill’s other plays. Furthermore, the engagements in plays like Bread and Butter, Beyond the Horizon, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and The Great God Brown follow a pattern: promises of marriage are soon followed by a fast-forward of action to several years in the future when a deeply despondent and dysfunctional married couple is found; this pattern seems to indicate that for the couples on stage, any period of understanding each other’s truths has been completely bypassed. Extending the pattern, when these older, now-married couples argue with one other, they invariably use a similar tactic: the characters chastise themselves for not knowing or understanding their respective partners better at the time of marriage or, in other words, the characters take at least partial ownership of the crumbling marriage in which they now find themselves. Through his use of repeated patterns as well as the intense highlighting of his characters’ naiveté at the start of the drama, O’Neill demonstrates that true knowledge and understanding are not only important but also absolutely necessary components at the time of engagement if the marriage is to survive.

When we consider a lack of genuine understanding as the root of marriage problems in O’Neill’s plays, we move away from past and dominant commentary that has situated blame on wives, who, according to Travis Bogard, “fail the test of sensitivity” or seeing wives, according to Richard Compson Sater, as “causing the disillusionment, downfall, or even death of the men who tangle with them.”³ When O’Neill discusses the notion of verity in his editorial, he does so...