Lehigh University Lehigh Preserve Theses and Dissertations 1-1-1975 Form in selected plays of Eugene O'Neill. Tarcisio S. Campo Follow this and additional works at: http://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Campo, Tarcisio S., "Form in selected plays of Eugene O'Neill." (1975). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1768. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FORM IN SELECTED PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL by Tarcisio S. Campo A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English ProQuest Number: EP76040 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 This thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / (date) Profe;is^or in Char»rge Cha i rmari of Department •n 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENT / The author wishes to express his special indebtedness to Professor Rosemary Mundhenk for the encouragement and critical supervision without which this work could not have been completed. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ■ 1 INTRODUCTION 3 THE EARLY YEARS . 7 The Emperor Jones 8 The Hairy Ape. %. 15 THE MIDDLE YEARS , 25 Desire under thle Elms 25 Strange Interlude \ 32 Mourning Becomes Electra.... 38 THE LATER YEARS... .'... 46 The Iceman Cometh .\ 47 Long Day's Journey into.Night 54 CONCLUSION. .".". 61 NOTES 65 BIBLIOGRAPHY ". 69 VITA 72 IV ABSTRACT This thesis will attempt to deal with Eugene O'Neill as a craftsman, a builder t>f plays. The form of his works, not the content, will be the focus. However, in this examination of form and structure, some intrusion of content will be necessary since the two aspects are interdependent. If interpretations are implied, they will be included only in so far as they dominate some structural factor. This thesis looks at some representative plays of O'Neill to discover what stylistic and structural traits have been dominant and what trends, if..any, have appeared in his structural techniques. The plays chosen include works from the second decade of fche century through the years preceding his death in 1953. They have varied. As an experimental playwright, O'Neill tried many different structural patterns i and devices in his attempts to find effective new means for conveying the drama of modern America- But despite O'Neill's freedom and willingnesSfflto experiment, certain characteristics emerge repeatedly in his works. O'Neill did strive to discover the substance and the form for modern tragedy. In rejecting nineteenth century methods, he adopted the realistic approach to character representation and wrote with frankness and sympathetic concern. Although his convictions were constantly changing he was searching diligently for some ultimate meaning for man's suffering and for some method by which he could convey that significance effectively in the drama. O'Neill was not . - l _ striving for novelty of theatrical effect but for deeper understanding and communication., Thus his experimentation in form arises out of his thematic concerns. O'Neill's works seem to fall into three groups: the short plays of the early period, notably The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, the highly experimental and varied plays of the prolific middle period exemplified by Desire 'Under the Elms, Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, and the more conventionally structured plays of the \ yeara preceding his death, notably The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's , - . % Journey into Night. The second period seems to develop naturally out of the first, but the major break in output occurred between the second and third periods. From increasingly radical experimentation O'Neill turned back to surface adherence to popular current dramatic form and structure. - 2 - C^ INTRODUCTION While critical research on O'Neill is still a relatively fresh field, scholars have produced various studies of his work. However, they have dealt mainly with the psychological and philosophical implications of the plays, with meaning rather than form. Histories of American dramaturgy, such as Krutch's The American Drama Since 1918, 2 Dickinson's Playwrights of the New American Theatre, and Quinn's A 3 History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day, contain chapters about O'Neill's development, his contributions, and, his place in American drama. Books and articles, such as Barrett H. Clark's Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays, revealed the facts of his life and the corresponding dates of composition and production. Attempts have been made to show O'Neill as a philosopher seeking to understand the relationship between man and the world about him. Various writers have pointed out the influence of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and the ancient Greek playwrights. The spirit of the times, the mass confusion and searching of the 1920's and 1930's of O'Neill's own life, beliefs, and interpretations, and his constantly varying philosophical attitudes have all been documented. His works have been analyzed according to subject, philosophy, character and general 5 development in Richard Dana Skinner's Eugene O'Neill: A Poet's Quest, Sophus K. Winther's Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study,6 and Edwin A. 7 Engel's The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. He has been compared with the ancients and the moderns. He has been praised and condemned. His language has been criticized as pedestrian, unpoetic, inadequate , - 3 - and often as detrimental to his tragic vision. He has been called a writer of melodrama rather than of tragedy. Studies have emphasized the fact that his tragedy deals with the psychological analysis of man in relation to himself, his heredity, and his environment. Analyses reveal his works as studies of dream versus reality, man versus society* and man versus himself. The mass of studies generally shows his development as a thinker and a revealer of his thoughts through some systemized series of plays. In a recent interpretative study of O'Neill's plays Doris V. Fa Ik points out very carefully the underlying tensions within man which, in the light of psychoanalytical studies, cause him to bring about his own destruction. Basically Falk analyzes the opposing self- estimates of the O'Neill characters which create for them unsolvable Q frustrations. Because O'Neill never used the same combination of subjects nor exactly the same characters, each play has been treated in a manner somewhat different from the others. Nevertheless, one can note certain trends in thinking among these many efforts toward creating drama. 9 / Always, one senses—even in the one comedy, Ah, Wilderness —the playwright's search for an understanding of human nature. Generally there appears a sympathetic concern for the failures of men and women. Frequently one can infer that O'Neill is complaining about certain factors that create suffering for some kinds of human beings. The plays included in this particular study were chosen as examples which would indicate several elements within O'Neill's development as a dramatist. An analysis of these dramas—The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape,11 Desire under the Elms, Strange Interlude,13 - 4 - Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey into Night16—reveals the techniques O'Neill used to produce such emotionally intense drama. » t. This study will investigate O'Neill's works primarily from the point of view of discovering what tragedy really meant to him and analyzing how he depicted dramatically his tragic visions of life. Dramatic criticism is generally held to involve three processes: a discovery of what the playwright is trying to say, a discovery of the method used—in this case the form and structure—and, finally, an evaluation of his efforts. What O'Neill has endeavored to express has frequently been discussed. Explication of the respective forms and structures with which he dramatized his ideas has not yet been fully clarified and is the subject of this study. For the purposes of this study form can be interpreted to mean the particular way of being that gives the play its nature or character and the combination of qualities making the play what it is;—its style. Structure is defined as the arrangement or interrelation of all the parts of a whole—its construction. These explanations and the Aristotelian qualitative components of tragedy—plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle—serve as the bases for analyzing the stylistic and structural composition of the O'Neill plays chosen here. _ / Although the seven plays will be discussed in the chronological order of their writing and consequently will be examined somewhat according to the ideas of the playwright which varied from year to year, the major emphasis will be directed toward analyzing how the ideas are presented in certain forms and structures, rather than toward - 5 - any particular development of the playwright that might be specifically related to periods of time. - 6 - THE EARLY YEARS O'Neill's first plays were one act dramas in which the characters usually talked about themselves and their pasts, revealing more and more of their motivations and hidden desires, and finally uncovering some irony in their present situation.