Eugene O'Neill's Century: Centennial Views on America's Foremost Dramatist ed. by Richard F. Moorton, Jr. (review)

Book Reviews 173 RICHARD F. MOORTON, JR., ed. Eugene O'NeUl's Century: Cenrelll1;al Views Oil America's Foremost Dramatist. New York: Greenwood Press 1991. Pp. xxiv, 235. $39.95· This collection presents the fruils of an O'Neill centennial festival sponsored by Connecticut College and The O'Neill Theater Center in New London, Connecticut in 1988. It offers a variety of essays by a dozen accomplished writers. most of whom have not published widely or previously on O'Neill. The contributors include an arts administrator as well as professors of English, theater arts, psychology. classics, German, and philosophy. The result is a mixture of agreeable essays but not the comprehensive overview of major trends in O'Neill criticism as suggested by the title. Rather, the interest in this volume lies in its transposition of familiar melodies to unusual and occasionally eccentric keys. The essays are sorted into three baskets: "O'Neill's Tragic Art," "Art and Life The Wellsprings of Genius," and "O'Neill on Stage." These baskets have broad bottoms, no doubt to accommodate the variety of papers presented at the conference; for example, under the category of ''Tragic Art" can be found essays on adapting O'Neill to film (Burton L. Cooper) and on O'Neill in translation. In the latter essay, Rita Teaas expands on the interesting point that "more people know O'Neill in translation than in the original English" (89). In the same section, Richard B. Sewall, a critic whose work is always worth reading, explains why the playwright's tragic sense is closer to Conrad's than to Aristotle's. Still under the heading "Tragic Art," Spencer Golub illustrates O'Neill's use of "defamiliarizing" techniques in Long Day's Journey into Night; while Roger Brown ("Causality in O'Neill's Late Masterpieces") offers the provocative view that O'Neill's characters suffer from a "depressive attribution style," which is a way of "construing one's own life so as to blame oneself for unhappy outcomes" (5 I). For Brown (who is a professor of psychology), this condition is clinical - but it should be remarked that the tragic heroes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare also appear to suffer this attribution style, which seems a prerequisite for the acceptance of moral complicity in the tally of one's actions. "The problem," writes Brown, "is that we tend to think of personalities or characters as autonomous agents, free to choose their actions, primary causes of their actions" (43). Yet that, after all, is the view assumed by classical tragedy. Think: of the noble troupe of stage heroes who might populate the ward of Dr. Brown's Depressive Attribution Clinic: Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and many more. Still, Brown's discussion of character motivation in the late plays of O'Neill is quite insightful. The collection as a whole is weighted toward psychological criticism. Rounding out the first section is S. Georgia Nugent's argument in "Masking Becomes Electra: O'Neill, Freud, and the Feminine" that O'Neill displaces female eroticism in Mourning Becomes Electra from the play's narrative to the writing process itself. O'Neill does so, claims Nugent, because he fears female sexuality. but that which is repressed returns in O'Neill's prose style, which fetishizes the act of writing and employs "a 174 Book Reviews metaphorics of male -perfonnance and adequacy" (66). The argument is fascinating, for Nugent's aim is to move discussion of the play away from the Oedipus Complex to new ground where critics can confront the issue of female desire. However, her illustrations are mainly unconvincing. To support her thesis she quotes O'Neill's discussion of his manuscript as "limp" and then of "real size ... quite apart from its length" (65). Sections of this potentially brilliant essay suggest overzealous Freudian detection. In Part Two, " Art and Life," editor Moorton reprints two of his previously published essays on Mourning Becomes Electra, the first of which traces just how closely O'Neill followed Aeschylus' Eumenides in the third play of his American trilogy. His distinction between Greek shame and Puritan guilt is an important one. In bis second essay ("The Author as Oedipus"), Moorton speculates on...