EUGENE O'neill and the RHETORIC of ETHNICITY By

PIPE DREAMS AND PRIMITIVISM: EUGENE O’NEILL AND THE RHETORIC OF ETHNICITY by DONALD P. GAGNON A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Jack Moore, Ph.D. Anthony Kubiak, Ph.D. William Ross, Ph.D. Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Date of Approval April 8, 2003 Keywords: Modern drama, race, expressionism, capitalism © Copyright 2003, Donald P. Gagnon Dedication This work is dedicated to all of the valued teachers who have encouraged and challenged me to become the person and student I am. Special thanks to Dr. Jack Moore, teacher, collaborator, and great soul, for his personal and professional contributions to my work; to my partner Lance Smith for everything that may not be seen within these pages but remains an invaluable part of my studies and my life; and to my parents, Robert and Yvette Gagnon, whose patience, confidence, pride and love are as essential to my life as they have been to my education. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciation to the following people who have contributed their energies, experience and knowledge to me and my work during this rewarding process: My committee members Dr. Rosalie Murphy Baum, Dr. William Ross, and Dr. Anthony Kubiak for their direction, suggestions, and interest both professional and personal; Dr. Richard Dietrich, for invaluable input; Dr. Jack Moore for marshalling these extraordinary forces and mitigating the stress that can easily accompany a project of such scope; Dr. Susan Greenbaum for valuable contributions when they counted most and for making the defense as enjoyable as it was rewarding; Marianne Bell for a sympathetic ear and her professional skill in assisting me with this document; the faculty and staff of the English Department at the University of South Florida for their contributions in time, energy and congeniality; Gary and Sandy Redmond, whose generosity contributed in uncounted measure to the completion of my degree; to my friends in and out of academia for their support and encouragement; and to all my family, especially my mother and father, who knew enough to take me to the theatre in the first place. Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter One 7 Discussion of Goals 11 O’Neill’s Experience 18 Focus of Study in the Plays 20 Research Basis of Discussion 26 Clarification of Terms 31 Chapter Two 37 O’Neill and the Rhetorical Challenge 38 Beginnings: “Thirst” 41 Bringing it Home: “The Dreamy Kid” 52 Language and the Life-Lie 68 Chapter Three 72 African and Irish Americans 75 O’Neill and the Culture of Capitalism 82 The Emperor Jones in Context 88 Unmasking the Origins of Brutus Jones 103 Exploring The Emperor Jones 108 The Failure of Reconciliation 127 Chapter Four 135 Early Challenges 137 Family Ties 139 Exploring the Play 143 When Worlds Collide 148 Going Behind the Masks 159 Chapter Five 164 Art Imitates Life 165 Joe Mott at Stage Center 170 i Victim as Victor 180 The Rhetoric of Eugene O’Neill’s Art 182 Works Cited 184 About the Author end page ii Pipe Dreams and Primitivism: Eugene O’Neill and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity Donald P. Gagnon Abstract Eugene O’Neill included within his vision of humanity a series of complex, emotionally and psychologically developed black characters. Despite critical controversy over his methods or effectiveness, from his eerily silent mulatto in “Thirst” through the grandiose incarnation of The Emperor Jones and the everyman of Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill created characters of African descent that thrilled and infuriated critics and audiences alike. A closer exploration of the issues involved in his portrayal of ethnically identified characters seems necessary, an exploration that does not limit itself to an interrogation of ethnicity per se in O’Neill’s plays, but one that addresses the portrayal of black characters and whether O’Neill privileges one “race,” or socially and culturally identifiable population. O’Neill’s infusion of “psychology” into his black characters may have delineated them as fate-driven primitives at the mercy of their atavistic histories, but he did the same with his Irish and other ethnic characters. In fact, many critics argue that his Irish characters are particularly subject to caricature, yet O’Neill is not generally understood to iii be anti-Irish. Are we then to understand O’Neill’s portrayal of ethnicity in the superstition and fear of The Dreamy Kid and Brutus Jones, or in the context of the playwright’s bold and dismissive retort to the Ku Klux Klan’s condemnation of interracial casting in All God’s Chillun Got Wings? It would be a spurious examination that intentionally disregards perceived racist phenomena in O’Neill’s plays. However, his depiction of racialized behaviors (and his own possible racism) must be seen to function as an extra-discursive element that ultimately does not disrupt the development of a unified body of work. His major black characters, tragic or otherwise, are not limited by their deceptively stylized portrayals but rather reflect O’Neill’s quest to understand and examine the nature of a common human experience, a view that is ultimately consistent within the entirety of his canon. iv Introduction In Lorraine Hansberry’s play Les Blancs, a character named Tshembe says, “I am simply saying that a device is a device, but that it also has consequences; once invented it takes on a life, a reality of its own” (92). I suggest that Hansberry’s words must be kept foremost in mind as one reads through the following study of Eugene O’Neill’s use of race and ethnicity. For O’Neill, unlike many of his white contemporaries, black characters often played significant, if not central, roles in many of his plays. Indeed, the playwright’s inclusion of these characters was a device, but one that would continue to have critical and political consequences throughout and beyond the playwright’s lifetime. One challenge, as I have discovered in writing about O’Neill and characters of African descent (American or otherwise), is that the device itself complicates any critical interrogation of the plays. Terms often (and entirely too casually) used in grouping and labeling such characters are problematic in ways that O’Neill himself may not have grasped but that our post-postmodern critics (and others) are eager to seize upon in order to question the nature of the language and its function. Whereas O’Neill lived at a time when Americans of African descent were known (at least in polite white society) as “Negroes” or “colored people,” our twenty-first century world dictates that these words are not only politically incorrect, but also that such typographic signifiers be routinely scrutinized, almost ad infinitum. 1 Trying to maintain my balance on the shifting grounds of theory and criticism, I first had to find ways to validate/employ/define terms such as “race” and “ethnicity” before attempting to create a workable—even useful--critical approach to studying O’Neill. Unfortunately, the hard-copy and ether-bound worlds of published research provided little that seemed to be stable enough to support unconditionally my application of the terms under scrutiny—a reassuring finding to a post-postmodernist, perhaps, but one that contributed more to graduate student angst than to doctoral candidate satisfaction. Like contemporary African American author Randall Kenan, I, too, felt like a hypocrite in using the most obvious ethnographic term of “race,” since I don’t subscribe to it as a biological absolute—whatever that might be—to determine the characterization of one’s physical being. In biological terms, there is only a single human species, and no one has succeeded scientifically in defining significant differences between peoples who sometimes simply look different from others, according to Kenan’s argument (5). In scientific terms, then, “race” is a myth, often put forth by those, at least in the United States, whose interest in developing a caste system to support the economic development they required to support such institutions as legal slavery also demanded “scientific” proof of distinction. As Martin J. Favor states, “Race becomes a way of insisting on the merits of difference rather than acquiescing to all dominant aesthetic and topical concerns,” a suggestion that in trying to overcome notions of some inherent physical inferiority, many have reconstructed the concept of race to hinder the ease with which distinct cultural practices can be assimilated into (or phased out of) mainstream U.S. culture (18). Or, as Tommy L. Lott says, “All races are political inventions” (1). Either 2 way, the term “race” is fraught with rhetorical challenge. It may be considered authentic (at least in non-scientific terms) or inauthentic, and perhaps much of the word’s impact derives from this play between conflicting constructions. However, “race” is not an incontestable fact but rather a social construction. If we are then to see “race” as a less politically correct signifier for qualifying (or quantifying) culture than some other term might be, we must also be careful not to essentialize social patterns that a word such as “race” might have signified in earlier times, though “race” may refer chiefly to cultural, rather than biological characteristics. There is, despite its ineffability, an important distinction between race and culture. And while, according to Lott, the strength of a group lies in its cultural integrity (66), an essentialist view of blackness (for our purposes) goes hand in glove with the idea of race as fact, where the defining culture becomes inextricably bound up with the idea of a “race” (Kenan 9).

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