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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Denisa Šantová Eugene O’Neill: Autobiographical Features in Chosen Plays Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Tomáš Kačer, Ph.D. 2015 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature 2 Acknowledgment I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Tomáš Kačer, Ph.D. for his patience, support and help he provided me while writing this thesis, my family for always supporting me and last, but not least, Artic Monkeys, The Weeknd and Adele for their albums and never-ending supply of music when most needed. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction………………………………………………………...…5-7 2. Eugene as a playwright……………………………………………......8-13 3. Eugene as a lover……………………………………………………14-27 4. Eugene as a son and a brother………………………………………28-36 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………..37-38 6. Works Cited…………………………………………………………39-40 7. Résumé…………………………………………………………………41 8. Résumé………………………………………………………………....42 4 1. Introduction “Less than a year ago,” O’Neill wrote the Harvard professor, “I seriously determined to become a dramatist. With my present training I might hope to become a mediocre journey-man playwright. It is just because I do not wish to become one, because I want to be an artist or nothing that I am writing you.” -Eugene O’Neill to George Baker1 To write about Eugene O´Neill is to write about the birth of American drama. Undoubtedly, there were many playwrights, more or less successful, but as Gore Vidal remarked: “Before Eugene O’Neill . there was a wasteland. Two centuries of junk.” (Dowling 27). An American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Lewis Sinclair in 1930, 29 years before Vidal, was more specific: [O’Neill] has done nothing much in the American drama save to transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness ... [he has] seen life as something not to be neatly arranged in a study, but as terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible, a thing akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a devastating fire.2 O’Neill’s brilliance was not only based on his primacy, but also originality and sense for literature; he was not only a playwright, he was a storyteller and in play after play, characters seize an opportunity to tell each other their stories as well (Chotia 195). It is not possible and neither a goal of this thesis to cover O’Neill’s whole life – for such an attempt much larger space is needed. 1 O’Neill Selected Letters 26 2 Sinclair Lewis - Nobel Lecture: The American Fear of Literature 5 The purpose of this thesis is to show that O’Neill’s life, and fruitful life it was, affected or rather inspired his work and that the two are mutually intertwined. As a method of proving this stance, I am going to compare life events and people surrounding him to his plays, searching for any similarities. As I mentioned, I will not attempt to mention everything that had ever happened to O’Neill, or describe everybody in his life; I have chosen specific aspects of his life, which I found the most suitable for establishing the comparison of his life and work. These particular aspects will be introduced in three chapters of my thesis. The first chapter will deal with the three features of O’Neill’s life that, in my opinion, had their impact on it and, therefore, his playwriting work – alcoholism, seafaring and sickness of a body and mind. All these issues can be seen in O’Neill’s various plays, specifically in his sea plays and his autobiographical plays A Moon for the Misbegotten and Exorcism. Second chapter is focused on a very broad topic – O’Neill’s women. Women in general inspired a lot of his plays; I will concentrate on his mother and lovers and how these women were transformed into the characters of his plays. Not every one of O’Neill’s lovers and wives has served as a vision for a particular character, but I am convinced that each and every one affected him and shaped his character, which I will try to prove in this part of the thesis. The plays used for comparison in this chapter are Ah, Wilderness! and Exorcism. The last chapter deals with the most essential and complicated matter of O’Neill’s life – his family. Member by member, I will describe them and show the way they are depicted in his plays, by analysing the characters of chosen plays: Desire under the Elms, Beyond the Horizon, Before Breakfast, but mainly Long Day´s Journey into the Night, as this play clearly shows the story of O’Neill’s family and is his most autobiographical play. 6 This thesis uses O’Neill’s plays as primary sources and also numerous secondary sources, but the one I mainly refer to is recently published Robert M. Dowling’s Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts. I find this biography significant for my thesis, as it offers unpublished letters, photographs and not well-known events from O’Neill’s life, together with a reference to Exorcism, O’Neill’s suicidal play only discovered in 2011. 7 2. Eugene as a playwright “Writing is my vacation from living” -Eugene O’Neill This chapter will offer a brief O’Neill’s biography, or rather few facts from his life, which I consider important as the way to get to know O’Neill or at least to get some idea what kind of a man he was. I will later focus on three aspects of his life: alcoholism, seafaring and sickness of body and mind, all of which accompanied O’Neill throughout his life and affected his writing. It seems like Eugene O’Neill’s fate was decided long before his birth. He was not the first one in his family to be successful, in fact, his father James O’Neill was popular much longer before Eugene was even born. A matinee idol James was a well-known actor and, hence, O’Neill was exposed to the theatre from the very beginning of his life. He was literary born on the Broadway, in the Barret House on October 16, 1888, as a third child of James and Mary Ellen “Ella” O’Neill. Two days after his birth, Eugene was swept away with his family on the first of many national tours with his father and his theatre company (Dowling 27). His childhood was not a typical childhood of a normal, ordinary boy. He was travelling with his family for the first seven years of his life. “Usually a child has a regular, fixed home,” he said, “but you might say I started in as a trouper. I knew only actors and the stage. My mother nursed me in the wings and in dressing rooms.”3 But then he was sent to Catholic boarding school, which he loathed. After that he was transferred to the secular Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut. At Betts he made a good academic records and acquired a solid education, which he amplified by constant wide reading, by writing poems, daily letters to his parents, brother, nanny, and others (Black 7). 3 Sheaffer Son and Playwright 24 8 From these facts we can see that O’Neill’s was interested in a literature and writing since childhood and it was an inseparable part of his life. Alcoholism was, unfortunately, the inseparable part of O’Neill’s life, too. It began when he was fourteen, with him finding out about his mother’s morphine addiction, caused by severe pain after giving birth to him. By the age of fifteen, he was a full blown alcoholic (Black 7) and his drinking continued his whole life, with short off-wagon periods. And it was exactly during these off-wagon periods, when he had written his plays. There was one rule he tried to keep during his whole playwriting career- not to write when drunk. The theme of alcohol did not just occur in O’Neill’s life, but also in his plays. In this part I will focus on O’Neill’s play A Moon for the Misbegotten, where alcohol appears as an important mean to the story. In A Moon for the Misbegotten there is, of course, an inn – drinking place where everybody gather and where business is done. The three main characters of the play, Josie Hogan, her father Phil Hogan and their friend James Tyrone, Jr., they all come into contact with alcohol. James Tyrone Jr., alter ego of O’Neill’s brother James O’Neill, Jr., is a middle-aged alcoholic, who is basically drinking his way to death. Phil and Josie are not non-drinkers, but they treat alcohol with some kind of respect, and serve it only occasionally. For both Josie and James, alcohol is a way to honesty; for Josie even more, it helps her to uncover her romantic side, especially in the scene, where she and James are drinking and later confessing love for each other. (“Let’s sit down where the moon will be in our eyes and we'll see romance. She takes his arm and leads him to her bedroom steps. She sits on the top step, pulling him down beside her but on the one below. She raises her glass. Here's hoping before the night's out you'll have more courage and kiss me at least.”)4 4 O’Neill A Moon for the Misbegotten 54 9 James realizes how bad alcohol is, or the consequences it has, and he proves it by saying “I said a drink was a grand idea--for me.

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