Singing in the Wilderness: The Dark Vision of Eugene O'Neill's Only Mature Comedy

Singing in the Wilderness: The Dark Vision of Eugene O'Neill's Only Mature Comedy THOMAS F. VAN LAAN THE CONSENSUS ABOUT Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! characterizes the playas nostalgic, light-hearted, sunny, wholly approving of the life and people it depicts, and- in the words of Joseph Wood Krutch - "quite unlike anything else O'Neill ever wrote.'" O'Neill himself described the play, shortly after he wrote it, as "out of my previous line";' and he probably encouraged the usual view by calling it "a comedy of recollection" and "a dream walking,'" by offering a remarkably non-committal note for the Wilderness Edition of his plays in which he seems to praise "the spirit of the American large smalltown at the turn of the century,'" and by claiming that the play was not autobiographical but "a sort of wishing out loud. That's the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.'" Since the appearance of Long Day's Journey Inlo Nighl, the consensus has included a realization that Ah, Wilderness! dramatizes some of the same material from which O'Neill would eventually create profound tragedy; this realization has generally altered not the response to Ah, Wilderness! but merely the terminology in which this response is phrased, for it is now customary to describe the playas the other side of the coin,' the "bright counterpart to the dramatist's final self-assessment.'" There have, of course, been some departures from this consensus. A few readers- Sheaffer in part, Raleigh in part, Shawcross, and most notably Adler and Carpenter- attribute dark undertones to the play, including a genuine awareness of evil and a suggestion of spiritual 9 10 THOMAS F. VAN LAAN despair. However, none of these readers has discussed these undertones in much detail or sufficiently indicated their sources within the play.' Two critics, finally, recoil from Ah, Wilderness! with something approaching, and in one case definitely crossing into, loathing. Engel dismisses the playas a falsification of experience, which, among other distortions, bestows upon its heroes, father and son, a set of rewards that "exist only in the sentimental pipe dream.'" For Ruby Cohn, "Ah, Wilderness! conceals smug acceptance of a double standard, hypocrisy of American family life, and unfocused boredom of July 4th, America's national hOliday." "Were O'Neill not the author of Ah, Wilderness!," Cohn concludes, "it would have faded into the oblivion it deserves."10 In one sense, the play has virtually faded into oblivion. Many have written about it, but almost no one has attempted to discuss it in detail, to discern exactly what is happening in it and what O'Neill is doing with his supposedly sunny and sentimental material. It is not oblivion that Ah, Wilderness! deserves but serious consideration which views it as worthy of the kind of careful, detailed analysis to which O'Neill's other major plays have been subjected and on which all good drama thrives. Analysis of this sort reveals that Ah, Wilderness! is far more complex than has yet been realized, that the consensus about the play contains much more sentimentality than the play itself, that the critics who discern dark undertones have apparently merely scratched the surface, and that the sentimentality and smugness of which Engel and Cohn complain stem less from the dramatist than from his characters . 11 The title of the play, as is well known, constitutes O'Neill's slight modification (changing "Oh" to "Ah") of the first two words in the last line of the most famous quatrain from FitzGerald's translation of The Rubiliyill of Omar Khayyam. This quatrain posits a distinction between an existing reality, the wilderness, which is barren, desolate, and lifeless, and the hypothetical transformation of it, "paradise enow," which could take place given certain desiderata- the loaf of bread, the jug of wine, and the "thou" singing "beside me." Although most commentators on O'Neill's play treat it as if it dramatized- or sought to- the implicit "paradise enow" evoked by its title, this title in fact emphasizes the wilderness. Perhaps these commentators are in part misled by the "Ah," but as Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary explains, "Ah" is an...