The Pen and The Brush: Eugene O'Neill, Visual Artists, and Women Muses

This article reconfigures the lines of the author's pen and the artist's brush in Eugene O'Neill's formative career as a playwright. Visual artists in Provincetown and New York, returning to America from Paris, sought to recreate a collaborative community. In this interarts matrix, three women, sources of inspiration, include Agnes Boulton, Christine Ell, and Dorothy Day. Commonly considered as models for composite characters in Eugene O'Neill's plays, they are also associated with significant visual artists' works. O'Neill is viewed in a broader context of his relationships with visual artists and their common women muses. To explore this relation between the playwright's and the visual artist's imagination, especially regarding women as subject and object of the male gaze, I explore the impact of figures of the Ashcan School in O'Neill's milieu. The intertextual discussion is extended through allusions to cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I draw analogies between the playwright's imaginative working process and that of a major artist, Marsden Hartley, as both seek peace of mind. Both a painting and a play require a viewing audience to be complete, different spectators seeing differently. O'Neill develops a visual style of playwriting in his stage directions and character descriptions. I reinterpret the work of those artists active in stagecraft at the Wharf Theater and the Provincetown Theater in New York in association with O'Neill who implemented the detailed stage directions in O'Neill's scripts and interacted with him, acted in the plays, and, together with O'Neill, formed a creative gestalt that enhanced each other's creative consciousness and process.