The Archetypal Unity of Eugene O’Neill’s Drama

The Archetypal Unity of Eugene O’Neill’s Drama Emil Roy Seen from the inside the typical play by Eugene O ’Neill recapi­ tulates the ritual conflict of winter and summer, death and rebirth which both the early Greek and Christian drama inherited and ex­ tended. Found out in his lust for a forbidden love object, a son figure is expelled from his primal social group. In order to return and grasp his never fading Edenic vision of purity, he embarks on a quest pur­ sued by inner and outer erinyes. As O ’Neill has commented in his “Memoranda on Masks,” “ One’s outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one’s inner life passes in a solitude bounded by the masks of oneself.” His dark voyage may take him inward through the spiraling entrails of the racial unconscious or outward through the labyrinthine windings of a Necropolis, figured scenically as an urban slum, ship, brothel or home. In his role as marked down prey, he vicariously enjoys the law-giver’s power and endures the criminal’s aggrieved sufferings. Finally exhausted but clear eyed, he achieves a blissful Liebestod with the long sought mother breast. Most critics have recognized that O ’Neill’s career began with an early period of seascape realism, evolved through a most uneven middle stage of sometimes labored symbolism, and returned finally to the conventions of his beginnings. Yet the pervasive thrust of his drama is non-realistic and negative, sadistic and melodramatic, as Leslie Fiedler has characterized American fiction. Even when his plays deal with man’s subjection to both his society and environment, O ’Neill places archetypal motifs in contexts which amplify their ironic implications in unexpected ways. Like most poets O ’Neill spreads the visualizable world out in mental space. He appears to conceive of his fictional universe as an emanation of his own rich and dynamic psyche. Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation regarding symbolic map making in Thus Spoke Zarathustra could just as validly have come from O ’Neill, whom he pro­ foundly influenced: “For each soul, every other soul is a hinterland. . . . For me— how could there be an outside of me? There is no outside. . . . The center is everywhere.” J. H. Raleigh has denoted sea and land, city and farm as O ’Neill’s basic pairs of antithetical settings. However, 263 264 Comparative Drama his scheme overlooks the dialectic of repugnance and desire which provides the essential dramatic conflict. As in the seasonal ritual play, O ’Neill’s action begins in a bright, sun-lit and rationally organized world, moves into a dark, nighttime world of dreams and passionate disorder, and may return to the normal world. At his most obvious he exhibits his paternal-maternal, sterile-fertile antitheses through his protagonists’ pendulations back and forth, in and out. He moves between Greco-Roman, mask-like Mannon house and anchored ship South Winds, battlefield and marriage bed in Mourning Becomes Electra, house and bam, “hard” New England and “soft” California in Desire Under the Elms, the palace of the present and the night­ marish Great Forest in The Emperor Jones, ship’s boiler room and urban labyrinth in The Hairy Ape, and men’s saloon and women’s home in The Iceman Cometh, Touch of a Poet and Hughie, among others. On one side is a man’s world, dominated by a series of selfish, magnetically attractive, and powerful old patriarchs who rule over the minds if not always the wills of their families. Even in their absence or after death, such men as Ephraim Cabot in Desire, Abra­ ham Mannon in Mourning, James Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night maintain a dramatic presentness. Like the folkloric dragon guarding a hoard of buried treasure, each of these father figures identifies his potency and well-being with property, often epitomized by something hidden in it. Thus Cabot claims that he resides God-like in his farm’s stones, Orin Mannon jibes that his father the General “was no good on an offensive, but would hold a position until hell froze over,” and James Tyrone comments, “ The more property you own, the safer you...