“The dead are dancing with the dead”: Ghosting in the Haunted Drama of Eugene O’Neill

BY JOEL IWASKIEWICZ

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1954) are conspicuously ghost-free plays. Yet these two career-defining works by “our most important

American dramatist,” Eugene O’Neill, have garnered distinctly haunted reputations.1 In an essay on Journey, Marxist critic Raymond Williams observes, “the play has a haunting effect . . . like a ghost walking.”2 Similarly, Suzanne Burr claims, “invisible ghosts are made visible [in

O’Neill’s plays] either through haunting images voiced by the living or through the transformation of memories into ghostly characters.”3 Regarding Electra as “O’Neill’s death play”4 and Journey as one of the dramatist’s “ghost plays,” Normand Berlin argues, “O’Neill’s ghosts haunt his mind” and inspire for the playwright a drama “obsessed with death and with

O’Neill’s memories of his past life.”5 The playwright himself might actually be said to engender the ghostly discourse surrounding his body of work by titling the Electra trilogy’s final installment The Haunted, and later, dedicating Journey, his autobiographical penultimate play, to

“the four haunted Tyrones.” The fact remains, however, that not a single ghost appears in what critics herald two of the most haunted works by our great American tragedian.

1 Normand Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past: O’Neill and Hamlet,” The Massachusetts Review 20.2 (1979): 313. 2 Raymond Williams, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: Eugene O’Neill,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 35. 3 Suzanne Burr, “Ghosts in modern drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill and their legacy,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1987). 4 Normand Berlin, O’Neill’s Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 108. 5 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 315–16. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 1

While Electra and Journey dwell on the pains of memory, grief, and guilt, neither play exhibits haunting in the traditional style of Hamlet, for example, which theatre scholar Marvin

Carlson flags as “the most haunted of all Western dramas.”6 As Carlson’s The Haunted Stage implies, however, the elements responsible for the central ghostliness in Hamlet may ultimately result from more than the slain Dane’s apparitional visitations. Recalling the words of Herbert

Blau, Carlson writes, “one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return.”7 “All theatre,” he asserts, “is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition,” thus shifting our focus from literal ghosts to things historical, cultural, and, as this paper highlights, structural in nature.8 In t ur n , my exploration of dramatic haunting emphasizes the “cyclical repetition [that] serves as a major structuring device in all of O’Neill’s best plays,” among which Electra and Journey are notably haunted inclusions.9 By investigating s tr uc t ur e s —particularly textual layers of meaning—upon which O’Neill erects his themes, I advocate an intrinsic relationship between the playwright’s ghostly motifs and the repetitions through which he articulates, complicates, and, ultimately, enriches his haunted central themes.

Looking to O’Neill’s “techniques” and “pervasive tendencies” (such as his textual repetitions and the complex ambiguities they produce), I hope to highlight the “tensions [and] conflict between the very elements that make up [O’Neill’s] drama.”10 Rather than arbitrarily engaging the playwright’s broad theme of haunting (one which Erich Auerbach might consider

“an unsurveyable mass of various material that defies order”), I have selected a pair of O’Neill’s

6 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 4. 7 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 1. 8 Ibid., 11. 9 Zander Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structures in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), 130. 10 Ibid., 25–6. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 2

most prominent keywords as my own “point of departure . . . by which the subject [of haunting] can be seized” and in which to ground my thematic analysis.11 Humanist scholar

Edward Said, a critic heavily influenced by Auerbach, offers a promising preface for what he might term a “true philological reading” of O’Neill’s ghostly themes—one that:

[i]nvolves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself.12

Ultimately, I believe the individual linguistic units of O’Neill’s themes provide the key to unlocking the mystery behind the true haunting within Electra and Journey.

A thorough survey of the plays at hand reveals the following among O’Neill’s recurring words: “shade,” “disappear,” “resemble,” “remember,” “forget,” “rotten,” and “damned”— terms that evoke, not coincidentally, concepts of memory, repetition, ghostliness, and death.

The two keywords central to my project—“haunt” and “dead”—illuminate the unsettling congruency between O’Neill’s dramatic themes and his diction, so much so that I consider these words “an organic inner part of [O’Neill’s] theme itself.”13 To quote Williams from the introduction to his seminal Keywords, “haunt” and “dead” posit themselves at the core of an

“active vocabulary” functioning within Electra and Journey.14 By charting the different usages of these words over the course of two plays, I hope to explore in my analysis what Williams considers “the vitality of language”: the “extension[s], variation[s] and transfer[s]” in meaning

11 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 13–15. 12 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 59. 13 Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur, 16. 14 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 15. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 3

that emerge, in our case, with each repetition of O’Neill’s keywords.15 Within Electra and

Journey, I believe the vitality of the playwright’s language manifests itself as a “complex web of reception” composed of overlapping meanings and richly ambiguous thematic resonances.16 Yet the haunting O’Neill enacts by repeating his ghostly keywords produces more than an exhilarating parallel between form and theme; what the playwright ultimately illuminates within his own ghost stories is a universal tale of haunting inherent in drama itself.

When O’Neill’s readers first encounter the title of the Electra trilogy’s concluding play— presumably in the table of contents—the playwright’s reference to The Haunted lacks context entirely. Similarly, O’Neill introduces “the four haunted Tyrones” before the action of Journey can inform his choice of the adjective “haunted.” For a member of either play’s theatrical audience, neither Electra’s individual titles nor Journey’s epigraph would stand out so prominently as they might to a reader directly encountering O’Neill’s text;17 thus, in a way, these written facets of O’Neill’s work that do not necessarily manifest themselves onstage produce additional appeal for O’Neill’s readers and draw particular attention to the purposefulness of his language.18 In A Playwright’s Theatre, scholar Egil Törnqvist emphasizes

“the fact that O’Neill’s frequent and comprehensive stage directions far surpass practical production demands,” and furthermore, Törnqvist even contemplates “whether [the dramatist] wrote his plays primarily for the reader or for the spectator.”19 Although O’Neill composed much work directly for stage interpretation, I also believe he crafted his dramas (particularly those like Journey, which were intended for posthumous publication) for the linguistically-

15 Ibid., 21. 16 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 144. 17 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 33. 18 Ibid., 52. 19 Egil Törnqvist, A Playwright’s Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 26. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 4

minded reader to extrapolate meaning from written elements such as the stage notes no director could faithfully transfer to the stage. If indeed “O’Neill considered the written drama as he wrote it superior to the theatrical production,” then we are wise to maintain a particularly close watch on his linguistic motifs.20

Despite a reader’s inclinations as to what O’Neill intended in distinguishing the protagonists of Electra and Journey as “haunted,” this term remains ambiguous as a result of its initial, uncontextualized usages in one play’s table of contents and the other’s epigraph; indeed, the playwright “gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” in both instances.21 As a result of the “multiple, concurrent senses” of haunting O’Neill draws upon

(whether intentionally or not) with each employment of the words “haunt” and “dead,”22 a complex and fascinating tension springs up, “not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.”23 While exploring “the variations of use” of O’Neill’s keywords, I, like Williams, have found the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be an invaluable resource and consult it regularly for explication in regard to the possible connotations of

“haunt” and “dead.”24 Even a brief first glance at the OED’s citations for “haunted” reveals the word’s potential for varied readings and implications, a feature Alan Durant defines as

“polysemy.”25

The most commonly cited definition for “haunted” during the first half of the twentieth ce n t ur y —the period during which O’Neill composed Electra and Journey—describes a person,

20 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 28. 21 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 1. 22 Alan Durant, “Raymond Williams’s Keywords: Investigating Meanings ‘offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed,” Critical Quarterly 48:1 (2006): 11. 23 Williams, Keywords, 92. 24 Ibid., 18. 25 Durant, “Raymond Williams’s Keywords,” 11. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 5

place, or thing “frequented or much visited by spirits, imaginary beings, apparitions, [or] specters.”26 Yet as I initially acknowledged, the trouble with this definition lies in the fact that

O’Neill’s “haunted” subjects never encounter literal ghosts within either play. And so Alan

Durant’s concept of polysemy reigns in our examination of the different functions of the single word “haunt” across O’Neill’s texts.27 Consequently, we must immerse ourselves further in the layered connotations that result from the numerous potential “right” meanings behind any of the playwright’s “historically and semantically related” haunted references.28 As our OED survey of “haunted” goes on to reveal spatial and social connotations in addition to the word’s popular ghostly meaning, we acquire new justifications for classifying both the Mannon and

Tyrone families as simultaneously haunted and haunting clans.29 In concordance with these spatial and social definitions, both sets of “haunted” dramatic kinspeople “resort . . . freque n t l y and habitually” to their respective homes (even the same locales within those homes) and rarely associate with persons beyond their own blood relations.30 A fourth OED citation, one defining haunting as an act carried out indirectly by “diseases . . . memories, cares, feelings, [and] thoughts,” also applies readily to O’Neill’s protagonists.31 From Christine’s obsession with death and Lavinia’s excessive references to her family’s dead ancestors in Electra to Edmund’s tubercular affliction, Mary’s morphine addiction, and general alcoholism in Journey, O’Neill’s tales are full of the abstract haunters invoked in this last dictionary citation. My goal is not, however, to pinpoint a single, correct denotation for each of O’Neill’s haunted references, but

26 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Haunted.” 27 Durant, “Raymond Williams’s Keywords,” 11. 28 Ibid., 11. 29 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Haunt.” 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 6

rather to entertain the rich complications that spawn from the keywords’ varied, interconnected meanings within both O’Neill texts.

In Act One of The Hunted, Electra’s second play, Christine Mannon declares, “I hate moonlight. It makes everything so haunted.”32 The prominent visual imagery of this reference in conjunction with a later stage note illuminates haunted aspects of both Electra’s matriarch and the physical Mannon household. Thr ough o ut the trilogy, O’Neill describes the Mannon estate as an edifice bathed in moonlight, a feature that, of course, Christine flags as haunted. In turn, O’Neill’s directions for lighting the stage function as extra-textual cues for haunting. The establishment of this visual-textual relationship (with haunting garnering verbal and optical connotations) lingers throughout our reading of The Hunted when, in Act Five, Christine laments that she is “old and ugly and haunted by death.”33 The accompanying stage direction notes the actress should be seen “passing from moonlight into the shadow of the pines and back again.”34 Having already acknowledged moonlight as a direct indicator of haunting, we are encouraged by the text to contemplate who or what is actually being haunted in this scene; after all, according to Christine, she herself and her home are made “haunted” by the night light that bathes them. Does Christine believe herself to be haunted by some external being or force, or is she, wandering in the moon’s glow, the agent of her own home’s haunting? Both the OED and

O’Neill affirm the polysemy at hand, allowing us to assign Christine a dual status as haunted woman and haunter. After Christine’s death, we learn “it’s her ghost folks is sayin’ haunts the place,” which further likens her to a specter in the play despite her pre-established status as one

32 Eugene O’Neill. Mourning Becomes Electra, in Three Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Vintage, 1931), 286. 33 Ibid., 323. 34 Ibid. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 7

of The Haunted.35 As our reading has implied, however, Christine haunts the Mannon estate long before her suicide; consequently she embodies a ghost both as a haunted living being and later as an imagined returning spirit.

Journey’s aging matriarch Mary Tyrone also assumes the dual roles of victim and agent of haunting, paralleling Christine as a woman characterized by death-in-life. Beyond the playwright’s initial “haunted” reference in his epigraph, the keyword “haunt” only surfaces twice more within the text of Journey. In both instances, Edmund Tyrone describes his mother as a “ghost haunting the past,” escaping deeper into a morphine-induced stupor every time she shoots up during the play.36 Indeed, the peak of Mary’s haunting arrives in Journey’s final scene, one which Raleigh enthusiastically deems “the soul-chilling climax of the greatest tragedy in the history of American theater.”37 Here Mary’s return to childhood (a former, lost life) emerges as

“an image presented so hauntingly that we cannot escape the feeling that it came from deep within the hidden chambers of O’Neill’s mind.”38 The fact that Mary (the only Tyrone O’Neill calls “haunted” beyond his epigraph) enacts Journey’s most visibly haunted moment in this final scene highlights the deep irony surrounding her ghostly character and the play at large: those who are haunted inevitably become haunters themselves even as they continue to be haunted.

Like Christine in Electra, Mary can be described using any of the previously surveyed definitions of “haunted.” As the “noxious creature” of dope regains its hold on her life, Mary sneaks off to a spare room on her home’s second floor to shoot up more and more frequently.39

This behavior, of course, reestablishes her as a woman of habit and a frequent visitor, both of

35 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 334. 36 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 137, 152. 37 John Henry Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 238. 38 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 312. 39 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Haunted.” Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 8

which amplify her haunted status via variations on the adjective’s meaning.40 With each visit upstairs (to the site of her spatial and habitual haunting), Mary’s husband James predicts she’ll

“be like a mad ghost before the night’s over!”41 In the play’s final scene, d ur i n g which “the young girl alive within the pain-wracked woman comes forth to haunt them all,” Mary fulfills her husband’s prophecy and becomes her own ghost.42 By examining the language O’Neill associates with Mary, however, we can recognize that her ghost has been present all along.

The gradual exposition of Mary’s dually haunted identities is marked by a certain subtlety as a result of O’Neill’s repeated use of a single, descriptive keyword. In presenting and re-presenting “the identical thing [his readers/audience] have encountered before” (in the form of the thrice-employed word “haunt”), O’Neill demonstrates a process Carlson coins

“ghosting.”43 Carlson uses his term to denote any dramatic task (writing, performing, staging, etc.) that calls forth and revises one’s perceptions of something previously known.44 In Electra and Journey, O’Neill employs textual ghosting as a means of complicating the “haunted” characters at the center of his texts. The richness of this action increases from the fact that his ghosting concerns, and is enacted by, ghostly characters—characters whose ghostliness stems reciprocally from the ghosting they enact.

By discussing O’Neill’s repetitions as revisionary echoes, Törnqvist localizes Carlson’s concept of ghosting in direct relation to O’Neill. In A Drama of Souls, the scholar claims that the fullest resonances of O’Neill’s repeated words

40 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Haunt.” 41 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 123. 42 Travis Bogard. “The Door and the Mirror,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Eugene O’Neill “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 62. 43 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7. 44 Ibid. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 9

[f]requently . . . emerge only when seen against a larger canvas. A word or passage, which in its immediate context appears flat may, when related to other passages in the play, suddenly seem meaningful. With regard to the unobtrusive, repetitive key words we normally find their superficial meaning suspended by the far more significant one, which may well, however, have been implied from the first.45

As a result of this self-reflexive looping, a first appearance by “haunt” (and, as we will soon discuss, “dead”) ultimately garners the full significance of every subsequent repetition.

Likewise, the playwright’s final usage of a word is informed and enriched by all references preceding it. In establishing O’Neill’s repetitive action as a distinct looping, Törnqvist promotes a circular rather than linear vision of textual ghosting. Scholar Timo Tiusanen also discusses

O’Neill’s “inescapable repetitions” as “circles” inherent in the playwright’s work.46 Raleigh evokes a loop most clearly when he states, in reference to Journey, that O’Neill is “repetitious in an encircling way and you can see the repetitions coming like the figures that keep passing on a merry-go-r o un d .”47 Furthermore, I believe that with each turn of Raleigh’s figurative carousel, the passengers assume more completely the identities they have possessed (though perhaps unnoticeably) from the start, just as O’Neill’s words acquire more comprehensive, challenging implications with each new appearance in both plays. Brietzke identifies the power of the echoing O’Neill harnesses within his dramas as “the most crucial aspect of language.”48 Like

Törnqvist, Brietzke claims that “all language responds to previous utterances and to pre- existent patterns of meaning and evaluation, but also promotes and seeks to promote further

45 Egil Törnqvist, A Drama of Souls (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 193. 46 Timo Tiusanen. “Through the Fog into the Monologue,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Eugene O’Neill “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 49. 47 Raleigh, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, viii. 48 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 19. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 10

responses,” and thus the playwright, like any author, naturally engages the ghosts of those writers who precede him, just as he is certain to haunt those who will write after him.49

As we turn our focus to the second of O’Neill’s ghostly keywords—“dead”— considering all the while that “all texts are in fact haunted by other texts and can best be understood as weavings together of preexisting textual material,” we might view O’Neill’s linguistic looping as both an intertextual strategy (echoing across Electra and Journey) and an intratextual method of sorts (in which the “intertextual dynamic” emerges from the confines of a single playwright’s echoes of himself).50 In approaching our reading of “dead,” I agree with

Williams that “no word ever finally stands on its own”; consequently , the echoes of “dead” resonating across the two plays at hand must revive and reshape our previous readings of

“haunt.”51 Raleigh notes the fluidity with which “the ghost metaphor blends into and turns into the dead metaphor” for O’Neill, and I believe the linguistic shift from “haunt” to “dead” is marked by a similar blending.52 As he discusses the theme of death in Electra, however, Raleigh bypasses too hastily much of the rich blurring O’Neill demonstrates in developing his dead characters. In particular, Raleigh notes that, at the end of The Haunted, Lavinia “bears a striking

‘resemblance’ to her dead mother” and, in turn, succumbs to her family’s “tragic fate” of

“turning into their father and mother, as their father and mother had turned into their father and mother, and so on, in an endless chain of biological doom.”53 I, however, would argue that

Lavinia’s resemblance to her father and mother—who are themselves doomed to join ranks with the Mannon dead—begins well before Electra’s finale.

49 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 19. 50 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 17. 51 Williams, Keywords, 22. 52 Raleigh, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 151. 53 Ibid., 147–8. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 11

According to Normand Berlin, the Civil War veteran Ezra Mannon, like Shakespeare’s

King Hamlet, is a father “returning from the dead.”54 Although Ezra returns to his family’s home as a survivor of the war, Berlin likens him to a famous theatrical ghost literally returning from the afterlife, a realm of departed spirits. As Ezra evokes the images of dead soldiers in his memories of the war, Berlin’s Shakespearean association gains pertinence, and O’Neill challenges his readers and audience to contemplate the ambiguity of Ezra’s return.55 This ambiguity emerges primarily as a result of O’Neill’s repeated use of “dead” as a plural noun within Electra.56 “All these people are coming to stare at the dead—and at me,” Christine later moans while feigning grief over her husband’s death.57 When her children confront her as the prime suspect in Ezra Mannon’s murder, Christine confesses she does not wish to spark a criminal investigation “any more than you do, or your father, or any of the Mannon dead”;58 she later elaborates, “Father’s memory and that of all the honorable Mannon dead would be dragged through the horror of a murder trial!”59 As these references increase, it becomes clear that Ezra’s return “from among those that are dead” leads directly to his initiation into the ranks of the Mannon dead.60 Ambiguous and ironic, the Mannon patriarch simultaneously escapes and returns unto the dead, both literally (Christine poisons him in their home) and figuratively (the spirits of the Mannon dead gradually consume the minds of their living kin).

As Lavinia’s sanity, memory, and conscience become increasingly less stable in Electra’s final play, she (the last surviving Mannon by this point) addresses the ghosts of her house with

54 Berlin, O’Neill’s Shakespeare, 104. 55 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 269. 56 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” 57 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 285. 58 Ibid., 301. 59 Ibid., 306. 60 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 12

a startling frequency. Within the final four pages of The Haunted, the tortured heroine references the “dead” a total of twelve times, finally raising the desperate and paradoxical question, “why can’t the dead die!”61 The longer she contemplates the undying power of her departed relatives

(who now include Ezra, Christine, and her brother Orin), Lavinia asserts more confidently that there are “always the dead between” people and, in turn, concludes “the dead are too strong” for her to go on living in the outside world.62 Ultimately, Lavinia administers self-punishment with the declaration that “living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison” and resolves, “I’ll live alone with the dead.”63 Following this last speech, Lavinia seals herself inside the haunted Mannon house indefinitely. Though she views her return to the dead as a climactic shift in a tragic family drama, the playwright’s language implies that Lavinia and her kin have always been as good as ghosts. T h us , the fiber of O’Neill’s disturbingly clever linguistic web serves as the backdrop for Lavinia’s macabre life sentence and casts an ironic light on seemingly innocuous prior hints at the heroine’s ill fate.

These hints emerge as early as the trilogy’s first play, in which Adam Brant explains to

Lavinia that “your face is the dead image of hers,” referring to Christine, who is still alive at this point in the drama.64 Though at first we might have discounted Brant’s acknowledgement of the

“absolute” resemblance between Lavinia and her mother as a straightforward comment, our retrospective reading (informed by Ezra’s, Christine’s, and Orin’s deaths and Lavinia’s morbid final resolution) validates the reference more completely.65 Likewise, when Lavinia states early

61 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 372-76. 62 Ibid., 374. 63 Ibid., 376. 64 Ibid., 241. 65 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 13

in The Haunted, “I was dead then,”66 we might think she refers only to her former wont for dressing exclusively in black.67 Once again, however, the multiple connotations “dead” garners by the end of the trilogy cast long shadows across all of the word’s previous appearances in the text. A character states in The Haunted that, “a Mannon has come to mean sudden death,” and indeed, the Mannons become a paradox unto themselves; the living members seem prematurely plagued by death while the departed grow startlingly vivacious.68 Raleigh reiterates this paradox in his discussion of the trilogy’s conclusion, arguing that, “ironically, the last Mannon,

Lavinia, is not given the blessed relief of death but is doomed instead to a continued existence of death-in-life.”69 All three Electra plays ultimately comprise a grand tale of death-in-life; the tragedy of the conclusion results from the devastating irony of Lavinia’s recognition that she has always lived among and will never elude the Mannon dead, neither in her own life nor her death.

The concept of death-in-life also emerges as one of Journey’s central paradoxes. Once again the playwright introduces his keyword in the epigraph to his penultimate work, where he highlights the “faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play.” Here

“dead” indicates a collective body of those departed; that is clear. Yet the question remains, as it did in Electra: who are O’Neill’s dead? O ur reading is complicated once again when we attempt to resolve the ambiguity of the keyword. As Brietzke notes, “O’Neill is an autobiographical writer, perhaps more than any other,” and the members of O’Neill’s family are paralleled on

66 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 345. 67 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” 68 O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 368. 69 Raleigh, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 59. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 14

stage by each of the Tyrones in Journey, the playwright’s most autobiographical work.70

Although they could comprise exclusively the original O’Neill clan or, contrarily, their dramatic counterparts, I believe that Journey’s dead ultimately exist both onstage and in the playwright’s past. According to Brietzke, O’Neill’s “practice blurs the distinction between life and art” much as he blurs the lines between living soul and ghost.71

In establishing the Tyrones as mirrors of his own personal dead, many of O’Neill’s dead references occur within his stage directions rather than the dialogue. The playwright thrice calls for either “dead silence” or “dead quiet” throughout the play. 72 In performance, an actor’s faithful attention to this note might produce what an audience member would accurately consider a “profound” silence or a “deep” quiet, but it is only O’Neill and his readers who will recognize the uniquely and distinctly “dead” nature of these moments.73 Though perhaps we might initially read these adjectives through the same lens as we previously read the “dead image” in Electra (as meaning “absolute” or “complete”), the word gradually seems to bind itself to O’Neill’s leading players.74 With time, we realize something essentially dead about life in the Tyrone household. Throughout Journey, Jamie, the eldest Tyrone son and “the most dead corpse in the house,” produces the majority of the play’s remaining dead references, each of which realizes our vision of the Tyrones as O’Neill’s scripted and personal ghosts.75

In a conversation with his younger brother near the end of the play, an inebriated Jamie describes himself repeatedly as “dead.” Much like his mother, who takes on the paradoxical dual identities of haunter and haunted, Jamie’s role within the drama is complicated

70 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 9. 71 Ibid., 8. 72 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 72–3, 107. 73 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” 74 Ibid. 75 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 319. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 15

indefinitely by the paradoxical language O’Neill assigns him. While confessing to Edmund how deeply Jamie envies his brother, the elder Tyrone admits, “[T]hat [envious] part’s been dead so long.”76 This usage of “dead” seems to indicate an “extinct” or “obsolete” emotion, implying that Jamie’s bitter jealousy has vanished absolutely.77 Yet as Jamie carries on, it becomes clear that his dead emotions remain very much alive. “The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well,” Jamie continues to inform Edmund; “He doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house.”78 With these statements the older brother refers to himself in the third person not only as dead, but also as a corpse. In a final drunken plea, Jamie even urges Edmund to “think of me as dead . . . tell people, ‘I had a brother, but he’s dead,’” although neither brother has reason to believe Jamie will literally perish soon.79 By this point, Jamie’s “obsessive, binding reiteration”80 of his own death-in-life exposes the previously veiled desire he shares with his parents and brother to join the ranks of the play’s dead.81

The playwright’s repetition (and simultaneous complication) of “dead” in this scene allows us to return, as we did in Electra, with greater perspective to a previous appearance of the adjective. Several pages before Jamie’s encounter with Edmund takes its morbid turn, the older sibling quotes Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Harlot House” while recalling a visit to a brothel.82 “The dead are dancing with the dead,” Jamie states nonchalantly, producing an image that transcends O’Neill’s allusion while forming a commentary on the playwright’s

76 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 165. 77 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Dead.” 78 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 166. 79 Ibid. 80 Raleigh, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 175. 81 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 320. 82 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 159. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 16

representation of his own dead within Journey’s text.83 According to Wilde’s poem, the dead do not dance alone, but rather in pairs. As we continue to question which “dead” O’ Ne i ll faced in writing Journey, this verse from Wilde suggests, not surprisingly, an ambiguous answer.

Ultimately, O’Neill’s characters become “so haunted that they seem to have split into a reality and a shade that haunts the reality,” two disparate elements—the illusory and the real—that

O’Neill unites in this poetic allusion.84 As the ghosts of O’Neill’s past take the stage and couple with their dramatic counterparts, reality and fiction haunt one another with the fluid give and take of waltzing partners. Contrary to Doris V. Falk, who invokes the dead as a distant company of ghosts while arguing that the Tyrones are “doomed . . . to be victimized not only by each other but by the dead,” I believe the playwright unites the Tyrones and their haunters in an ambiguous clan of living and dead ghosts—a collection of mirrored, synchronized dancing pairs.85 Just as “motifs and phrases repeat themselves in various combinations and resolve into a complex whole over the time of the piece,”86 so too do O’Neill’s ghosted characters merge into a multifaceted whole or, as Marvin Carlson writes, a “ghostly tapestry.”87

The ambiguity of O’Neill’s language, which fosters the ambiguity of his ghosted dramatic personae, ultimately develops into a paradox that defines both O’Neill’s writing as well as drama at large. Mary Tyrone theorizes in Journey’s second act that “the past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too,”88 a question Tiusanen echoes with his own assertion that

83 Ibid. 84 Raleigh, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 151. 85 Doris V. Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958), 182. 86 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 148. 87 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 165. 88 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey, 87. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 17

“O’Neill does not only move backwards in time, he also makes the past present.”89 This temporal ambiguity envelops the other paradox of death-in-life that O’Neill engages throughout Electra and Journey. With this musing from Mary, the playwright sheds light on a truth that both defines and transcends the language of his plays. As Brietzke articulates,

“repetition is the force of the past claiming its victims in the present.”90 Thus, in the act of reviving indefinitely that which has come and gone before, O’Neill achieves the kind of haunting Carlson envisions in The Haunted Stage. Furthermore, it is the playwright’s preoccupation with language—an elusive element of drama that frustrated and haunted O’Neill relentlessly during his lifetime91—that guides us to the most provocative examples of haunting at the heart of his best plays.92

Through the textual interplay of the keywords “haunt” and “dead,” O’Neill enacts the very haunting these words aim to illuminate as active, central themes within his drama.

Throughout the texts of Electra and Journey, the past implications of each keyword become the present implications of those very terms and remain part of the words as they reappear in the future. And so O’Neill enacts not only the task accredited to him by Törnqvist, but he also constructs a model of drama as a genre that constantly revisits its own creative history, revises its current function, and anticipates its own inevitable, though yet unscripted, future.93 By immersing himself in the thick, complicated, and often unsettling web of echoes between his keywords, O’Neill replaces the literal stage figure of the ghost with a poetic motif that is distinctly dramatic and yet uniquely his own. As Raymond Williams writes about Journey,

89 Tiusanen, “Through the Fog,” 49. 90 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 25. 91 Michael Hinden, “Long Day’s Journey into Night”: Native Eloquence (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 68. 92 Eugene O’Neill to Arthur Hobson Quinn, in Anthony Caputti, ed., Eight Modern Plays (New York: Norton, 1991), 543. 93 Törnqvist, Drama of Souls, 193. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 18

“what the play relives, in its substance, is not only the history of a family, but of a literature.”94

Indeed, while engaging the ghosts in his mind, O’Neill captures the most haunted essence of an entire genre; and, in capturing this genre’s past, the playwright envisions the present and future of drama as a circling waltz choreographed by playwrights past and danced perpetually by ghosts.95

94 Williams, “Long Day’s Journey,” 38. 95 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 315. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 19