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thesis entitled
VIOLENCE IN THREE PLAYS BY EUGENE O'NEILL:
THE EMPEROR JONES, DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS

and
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

presented by

 

 

Lamia Ben Youssef

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VIOLENCE IN THREE PLAYS BY EUGENE O'NEILL:
W. W AND W5.
W

BY

Lamia Ben Youssef

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

College of Arts and Letters

1992

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ABSTRACT

VIOLENCE IN THREE PLAYS BY EUGENE O NEILL:

WW. ANDW
W

BY

Lamia Ben Youssef

Relying on Rene Girard's WM this thesis
examines violence in Eugene O'Neill's W, 11:31:;
mum. and W Each play is
viewed in the light of Girard's concepts of "collective murder,"
"ambivalence,“ "mimetic rivalry," "sacrificial victimage." and
"generative violence." For O'Neill. Violence is generative only if it
leads to a spiritual communion between people. This explains why it
is generative only in W. Violence
triggered by selfisheness and materialism cannot be generative. for it
leads to the destruction of society. The factor that drew O'Neill's
attention to the cyclical nature of violence could be the pattern of
failed relationships in his family. The three plays could be seen as
attempts to break that vicious circle. Only in the autobiographical

play, is his attempt successful.

To my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When Dr Arthur Athanason asked me why I chose to write on
Eugene O'Neill, I anwered vaguely: "he attracts me." After working on
this thesis for six months. I have realized that O'Neill speaks aloud
what I never dared to confront: my own failed relationships with my
mother.

Despite her love for us. the only thing my mother can
express is disapproval and criticism. Whenever I am hurt, I seek the
solace of morbid poetry and music. My mother hates Laforgue, Al-
Moutanabbi, and Jacques Brel as much as James Tyrone hates
Edmund's “damned library." In W,
Edmund tells his mother: "I've been away a lot. and I've never
noticed it broke your heart I" (l 19). I have always pretended to be ill
to get my mother's attention. I even enjoyed seeing the tears in her
eyes at the Carthage airport. on my way to the United States. Thanks
to O'Neill, I have learned to understand and accept my mother as she
is, for she was born in a culture where emotions are seen as
weakness.

I would like to thank especially Dr. Arthur Athanason, the
director of my thesis. His love of teaching made me love modern
drama, and his encouragement boosted my self-confidence. The

course he offered on Tennessee Williams invited me to look to my

iv

own relationships with my parents. and conclude that it is the love of
those around us that makes life meaningful.

Among the graduate faculty, I particularly thank Dr.
Johnsen. my academic advisor, who helped me to understand Rene
Girard's theory. I am also grateful to Dr. Lopez, Dr. Uphaus, and Dr.
Matheson for their support during my early graduate work. I express
similar gratitude to my professors in Tunisia. especially to Mrs
Tarchouna and Mr Belgaroui.

I owe thanks as well to Hichem Ben Youssef, my father,
who kindled my love of literature and history. and who, despite my
mother's opposition, insisted that I pursue my studies in the United
States. I also wish to express a special gratitude to Aisha Ben Youssef,
my mother and teacher, who introduced me to French novels and

poetry.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ease

Introduction

Chapter
I W
11W....
111W

Conclusion

Bibliography

28
50

79
88

INTRODUCTION

Aggression on a large scale is obviously enough the human
problem with which we ought chiefly to be concerned. This issue has
always preoccupied the human mind. Greek tragedy was essentially
about violence: Euripides's Ajax, Sophocles's W, and
Aeschylus's Ma bear witness to the bloody nature of Greek
tragedy. The plays of Seneca also indicate the interest of the Romans
in the problem of human aggression. In Elizabethan times, the
blinding of Gloucester and the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare's
King—Lem; point to the irrational nature of human violence. Le
Theatre du Grand-Guignol de Paris (which lasted from 1897 till late
1962) was devoted to horror plays and designed to terrorize and
amuse its audience. Nowadays, people strive to understand and to
obviate the horrors of W.W.I and W.W.II, but there is still
disagreement between scientists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts
regarding the nature of human aggressiveness.

The first group give biological bases to violence. Whereas some
scientists relate it to human genes, others present evidence that

aggressive behavior has its origin in brain mechanisms.1 The second

 

1 For further information on the theories of aggression see David N. Daniels; Marshall. F.

Gilula; and Frank Ochberg, Wm (Boston: Little, Brown &
and company, 1970).

2

group which is composed of psychologists emphasizes the importance
of learning upon aggression. In his book AM Scott makes it
clear that fighting is a learned behavior based on the principle of
recompense. Although it can be stimulated by the pain of an attack,
aggression in the strict sense of an unprovoked attack can only be
produced by training. He concludes that a "happy child and peaceful
environment should automatically produce a child with strong habits
of being peaceful."2

As for the psychoanalysts, they have relied on instincts as
explanatory constructs in human aggressive behavior. In W
W (1922), Freud viewed such behavior as a function
of frustration. At that time Freud thought that aggression was a
primordial reaction against the thwarting of either pleasure seeking
or pain avoiding responses. Later, Freud altered this early conception
of aggression. In Totem and 123th (1950), he formulated the
problem in terms of two instincts: the Eros, or life instinct and
Thanatos, or death instinct. For Freud, "man is impelled not only by
attempts to maintain life but also by the search for quiescence."3 The
primary function of the death instinct is to bring man to an
inanimate state. Aggression is the manifestation of the Thanatos, or
destructive forces. Freud made suggestions regarding the reduction
of violent conflicts. Since aggression is a result of energy which must
be expressed, it is useless to try to eliminate man's aggressive
tendencies directly. Rather, he proposed to bring Eros into play

against the antagonistic forces (Thanatos) by encouraging emotional

 

2 P. 1. Scott, AW (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),p. 22.
3 Knud S. larsen, WM (Chicago: Nelson Hall), p. 41.

3

ties with people. Freud's ideal society would be some form of
"benevolent dictatorship, where people have subordinated their
instinctual impulses to the dictatorship of reason."4 Freud's critics
argue that the elimination of conflict must begin with the
restructuring of societies and the elimination of social rank as the
root cause of most conflict between and within nations. They fear
that Freud's "benevolent dictatorship" could turn out to be another
Nazi or Fascist regime.

Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, has proposed that
anxiety is the basis of all motivated behavior. For Horney, the genesis
of aggression lies in the rejection of the child. "Basic anxiety,"5 she
argues, "is the feeling a child has of being abandoned, isolated, and
helpless to cope with a potentially hostile world." The child's
response may take three forms: "the child may learn to move toward
people, that is, to be open and acceptant of communication; to move
against pe0ple and show hostile behavior; or to move away from
them by avoiding potential conflict altogether." For Storr, another
neo-psychoanalyst, aggressive drives serve a biological function in
terms of preserving the individual and the species. Aggression is
necessary under conditions of competition. Only those with strong
aggressive drives will survive. Thus, Storr's theory appears to be in
direct contradiction to the death instinct which is fundamental to
Freud's aggression theory.6 Whereas for Freud the purpose of the
death instinct is to return the organism to an inanimate stage.

Aggression as strivings for survival reflects the Bros and would

 

4 Iarsen, p. 42.,
5 K. Homey , Mum (New York: Norton, 1945), mentioned by Larsen, p. 213.
6 Storr, Wen (New York: Atheneum, 1968), mentioned by Larsen, p. 213.

4

appear to contradict the death instinct, which is the basis of
psychoanalytic theory.

In his book WM] Rene Girard refutes
Freud's instinct theory as an explanation for human behavior, and
replaces it with the notion of culture. In his quest of cultural origins,
Girard uses a peculiar method of research: it is a marriage of
anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism. According to this
French thinker, violence has a purgative function which helps to
maintain a social order based on the differentiation of classes.

In "The Origins of Myth and Ritual," Girard states that a
collective murder is at the origin of all cultural forms. The unanimous
violence directed at this victim is generative because "by putting an
end to the vicious and destructive cycle of violence, it simultaneously
initiates another constructive cycle, that of the sacrificial rite that
protects the community from the same violence and allows culture to
flourish” (93). In Girard's theory, the pro-cultural state is
characterized by an utter lack of distinctions. Human beings are
identical to one another, and this identity draws the human mass
into a "mimetic strife." In his essay "Mimesis and Violence:
Perspectives in Cultural Criticism," Girard explains what he means by

"mimetic rivalry:"3

If the appropriative gesture of an individual
named A is rooted in the imitation of an
individual named B, it means that A and B
must reach together for one and the same

 

7 Rene Girard, Vigienge and me gged. Trans. Patrick Gregory, (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1977).

8 Rene Girard, ”Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism," W
14-16 (1979-81): 9-19.

5

object. They become rivals for that object. If
the tendency to imitate appropriation is
present on both sides, imitative rivalry must
tend to become reciprocal; it must be subject
to the back and forth reinforcement that
communication theorists call a positive
feedback. In other words, the individual who
first acts' as a model will experience an
increase in his own appropriative urge when
he finds himself thwarted by his own
imitator. And reciprocally. Each becomes the
imitator of his own imitator and the model of
his own model. Each tries to put aside the
obstacle that the other places in his path.
Violence is generated by this process; or
rather violence is the process itself when two
or more partners try to prevent one another
from appropriating the object they all desire
through physical and other means (9).

Mimesis thus engenders a situation of "reciprocal violence." In
this process which links violence to the loss of differentiation, incest
is viewed as its ultimate goal. Although he agrees with Freud that the
son seeks to take the father's place everywhere, even in his conjugal
bed, Girard maintains that the "sexual cathexis" toward the mother
comes after identification with the father, not before, as Freud
suggested.

Violence calms down only through what Girard calls "the
scapegoat effect." Through this process, the community unites and
transforms its "reciprocal violence" into a "collective violence"
directed against this "surrogate victim" or scapegoat. As Thomas L.
Jeffers writes, the "community must say that the victim alone was
the carrier of violence, and that they were merely expelling it. This

community can remember the collective murder which founded their

6

society only in a religiously 'interpreted' form, whereby the victim is
metamorphosed into a god. Since his death restored the community,
his advent must be providential. Who but a god would have come to
take the guilt of all onto himself, giving himself as a sacrifice so that
others might thrive again."9 For Girard, there is no difference
between violence and the sacred. The sacred is nothing but human
violence transfigured and hidden from human awareness. The god
(the sacred) is the violence which was originally expelled and which
sacrificial ritual keeps safely transcendent. The god "digests" the
sacrifice, taking the offered violence into himself and thus purifying
the celebrants. If men neglect the sacrificial ritual, the god,
maddened by hunger, ...will descend among men and lay claim to his
nourishment with unexampled cruelty and ferocity. Which is to say,
"the exteriorized violence will reveal its true home in men
themselves, and once more the community will enter the vicious
cycle of reprisals that threatens its very existence."10

In his review of W, Jeffers notes that the
power of this theory "lies in its ability to explain many religious
forms and to identify a multiplicity of these forms as the scattered
fragments of a single system" (422). Girard's fragments include such
diverse ideas and practices as royal incest, animal sacrifice, regicide,
myths of dying gods, attitudes towards twins, and rituals. The
primary function of the latter, according to Girard, is to maintain
social solidarity by diffusing violence and preserving it from running

wild as it threatened to do in the past. Girard remarks that myths

 

9 Mentioned by Thomas L. Jeffers, in "Violence Is Our Property: the New Work of Rene

Girard,” Michigan Quarterly Review 19- 20 (1980-1): 422.
10 Ieffers, p. 422.

7

and rituals distort the reality that generated them to protect society
from guilt by perpetuating the delusion that violence resides beyond
its boundaries.

The possibility of this theory for literary criticism first emerges
in Girard's view of language. Unlike the post-structuralists (Lacan
and Derrida), a literary text has a reference to a reality outside itself.
In fact, Girard assumes that ”our knowledge in the humanities is
neither purely objective, nor purely subjective, but somewhere in
between. He agrees with Frederic Jamestown that if "we turn
language into a prison house...we ignore its true mystery just as
much as when we take it for granted, when we assume it is always
perfectly adequate to its task."11

The second possibility of this theory for literary criticism
emerges in Girard's reading of Greek tragedies especially W
King. According to Girard, Sophocles understands this myth better
than Freud. If the plague which infests Thebes is reciprocal violence
itself, then Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias are in fact struggling to see
who can lay the blame on whom. Oedipus loses, and the crimes he is
charged with, patricide and incest, represent the extreme confusion
of identities which marks a city where everybody imitates the
violence of everybody else, where the father is no longer distinct
from the son, and both have become ”enemy brothers" fighting to the
death over the same prize. Girard observes that Sophocles couldn't
show any of this directly, first "because the conventions of his
theater presuppose distinctions which are lost in the first sacrificial

crisis," and second, "because he fears that too strong an intimation of

 

11 Ieffers, p. 424.

8

that crisis would unleash violence which his audience believes
resides in Oedipus, not in themselves."12 Girard concludes that
tragedy, like religion displaces and regulates original violence. But it
doesn't function as well as religion, for, in spite of the playwright's
caution, it reveals too much of the chaos and turbulence which must
have accompanied the first crisis. And "it is this Dionysian aspect in
Sophocles's tragedies which alarmed Plato and led him, for the sake
of civil order, to put this tragedian on the road with Oedipus and thus
to perpetuate the cycle of retribution."l3

In his book, Girard focuses primarily on the portrayal of
violence in Greek drama and devotes little attention to violence in
modern drama. The latter issue has become the concern of many
contemporary dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill and Samuel Beckett.
This thesis is a reading of Eugene O'Neill's plays We
(1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and Wm
Night (1941) in the light of Girard's theory of violence. In each of

these three plays, O'Neill drew upon the model of Greek tragedy, yet
he used different modes: the first is expressionistic, the second
mainly naturalistic, and the third both realistic and naturalistic.
Accordingly, there will be three chapters, one for each play. The first
part of each chapter is a textual analysis of the play based upon
Girard's theory of violence. The second part will focus on each play as
a theatrical experience, and will also examine how the play's form
and mode relate to the ideas discussed in the first part of the

chapter.

 

12 Jeffers, p. 425.
13 Jeffers, p. 426.

CHAPTER I

W

In W (1921), Eugene O'Neill tells us the story

of a Negro who fled to the West Indies after committing two murders
in the United States. On a West Indian island, he makes himself
Emperor. Exploiting the superstitions of the natives, he tells them
that only a silver bullet can kill him. After a while, the natives
realize he is milking them and decide to kill him. Although he flees to
the forest, hoping to escape onboard a ship to Europe, jones finds out
that he is running in a circle. He is finally killed by a silver bullet the
natives have made for that purpose. In this expressionistic play,
O'Neill takes us not only to the West Indies, but also to the African
jungle. The world that O'Neill depicts is full of fear, violence, and
guilt. This chapter will examine We in view of
Girard’s theory of violence. In the first part, jones's breakup with the
Baptist Church will be viewed as a deicide. The insuing guilt
represents man's guilt toward the killing of the Old God. The second
part will show that violence is due to the state of confusion and chaos
on the Island. The third part will identify two sacrificial rites in the
play. The first occurs when jones offers himself to the crocodile God
to absolve himself of sin, and the second, when the natives

unanimously decide to kill jones. This part will also explain why this

10

act of unanimous violence fails to restore harmony to the community.
The final part will show how the expressionistic mode of the play
contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of violence.

On the literal level, Jones is fleeing from the natives who are
preparing his death. On a deeper level, this journey through the
forest is a psychological one. In the midst of his flight, some "Little
Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest”1
(30). In Scene 3 and 4, he sees the ghosts of two people he has killed
in the United States: his fellow convict Jeff, and the prison Guard who
had viciously slashed him on the shoulders with his whip. The forest
is thus a metaphor for man's struggle with his guilty conscience. In

Scene 5, in a voice of agonized pleading, Jones confesses:

Lawd Jesus. heah my prayer! I'se po' sinner, a
po' sinnerl I knows I done wrong, I knows it!
When I cotches Jeff cheatin' wid loaded dice
my anger overcomes me and I kills him dead.
Lawd, I done wrong! And down heah whar
dese fool bush niggers raises me up to the
seat 0' de mighty, 1 steals all I could grab.
Lawd, I done wrong! I knows it! I'se sorry!
Forgive me, Lawd! Forgive dis po' sinnerl
(42-43).

From an onomastic point of View, Brutus is originally the name
of a white man. Marcus Junius Brutus (85-42 BC) is one of the
conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar. In killing the King (here,

the white guard), Jones symbolically commits a deicide.2 This

 

1 Eugene O'Neill, The Emmr leg, Anna Chg'stie, The Hairy Am (New York: The Modern
Library, 1937).

2 Till the late nineteeenth century, Blacks were portrayed as the children of the white father.
Thus, in killing the white guard, Jones is symbolically killing the Great Father. O'Neill seems to
be using the Medieval view that kings are God's substitutes on earth.

11

suggests that the nineteenth century secularism could be viewed as
an act of deicide. In breaking away from the church, modern man
has killed the Old God. Instead, he is venerating the gods of greed,
selfishness, and materialism. In W, Jones "has
foisted himself off as a god incarnate on a band of superstitious
savages, relying only on his wits and bravado"3 (21-22). He has even
created the myth of his own invincibility. As Smithers recalls: "You
was so strong only a silver bullet could kill yer, you told 'em" (14). In
Scene 1, the blazing sunlight, the "dazzling eye-smiting scarlet" (5)
with which Jones's throne is painted, and even his red pants lending
"something not altogether ridiculous about his grandeur" (9)
"implicitly link him with suffering heroes like Prometheus and
disguised gods like Apollo, the sun-deity".4 This suggests that in
breaking away from the church, man has condemned himself to
eternal suffering and guilt. He is partly responsible for his plight.
Jones seems to have forgotten his Baptist Church since he has been
on the island: "If I finds out dem niggers believes dat black is white,
den I yells it out louder 'n deir loudest...It don't git me nothin' to do
missionary work for de Baptist Church. I'se after de coin, an' I lays
my Jesus on de shelf for de time bein'" (24).

In W Girard points that it is the loss of
distinctions that leads to violence. An overview of the play shows
many similarities between O'Neill's characters. These similarities
exist not only between people of the same race but also between

members of different ethnic groups. First, there is basically no big

 

3 Emil Roy, ”Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape As Mirror Plays,”

W 2 (1968): 21-31.
4 Emil Roy, p. 22.

12

difference between Lem and Jones: besides being black, they both
have been Emperors of the West Indies. The antagonistic relation
between them exemplifies Girard's concept of "mimetic rivalry." Lem
seems to function as a model for Jones. When the latter arrives on
the Island, he usurps Lem's throne. By the end of the play, the
disciple (Jones) becomes the model of his own model (Lem). Jones
has told the bush niggers that he has a strong charm: only a silver
bullet can kill him, creating thus the myth of the invincible King. In
Scene 8, Lem is trying to regain his throne by using the same charm

as Jones's:

Smithers: [WI They got silver
bullets?

Lem: Lead bullet no kill him. He got um strong
charm. I cook um money, make um silver
bullet, make um strong charm, too (57).

Second, except for their differing in skin color, Smithers and
Jones are the same. And even this difference is minimalized. The
stage directions inform us that "the tropics have tanned" Smithers's
"naturally pasty face" (6). Both characters have been in prison, and
as their names indicate, both are capable of violence. Brutus Jones
"brutally" killed Jeff, a Negro fellow-convict because he was cheating
at dice. With the same "brutality," he bashed in the skull of the
prison Guard who had whipped him. On the Island, he is a source of
terror. As he constructs the myth of his own invincibility. the "bush
niggers" look up to him. as if he were a deity. His revolver, his charm
(the silver bullet), and his whip serve as instruments to keep

everything under control. Similarly, Smithers's name suggests

13

violence. "To smither“—-which means to smash or blow out into tiny
fragments--applies to what this character has been trying to do to
the natives, and to Jones in the play. His ill-treatment of the old
black woman5 exemplifies his violent and fearsome nature. The old
woman is scared to death when he catches her sneaking out of the
palace. "He taps her bundle with his riding whip“ (7). He is capable of
psychological violence too. It is with ecstatic pleasure that he tells
Jones that the Negroes are planning to kill him. In the same scene,
and with the same pleasure, he revives Jones's fear of the Whites in

the United States:

Smithers: No, Gawd strike me! I was only
thinkin' o' the bloody lies you told the blacks
“ere about killin' white men in the States.

Jones [Angered]: How come dey're lies?

Smithers: You'd 'ave been in jail if you 'ad,
wouldn't yer then? [WI And from
what I've 'eard, It ain't 'ealthy for a black to
kill a white man in the States. They burns 'em
in oil, don't they? (17).

Throughout Scene 1, Jones and Smithers vacillate between
defensiveness and release of restraint. Being afraid of each other,
they each try to protect themselves by destroying the mask the
other is wearing. As Smithers tries to shatter the mask of security
Jones is wearing by reminding him of what awaits him if ever he is
extradited to the United States, Jones's tone begins to change slightly.
His uneasiness and tension escalate, progressing from suspicion,

anger, “cool deadliness,” to murderous violence. He tells Smithers:

 

5 In Scene 1, Smithers catches an old black woman running away from the Palace. She tells him
that the other Negoes have left for the mountain to join Lem who is preparing Jones's murder.

14

You mean lynchin' ‘d scare me? Well, I tells
you, Smithers, maybe I does kill one white
man back dere. Maybe I does. And maybe I
kills another right heah ‘fore long if he don’t
look out (17).

Smithers's forced laughter comes in time to relieve the

atmosphere of its deadly tension:

I was on'y spoofin’ yer. Can't yer take a joke ?

And you was just sayin’ you'd never been in
jail (17).

Just as Smithers’s laughter is a defensive strategy against the

Emperor's anger, Jones's laughter at the end of the scene protects

him from his own fears of being killed by the “bush niggers”:

Jones: Does you think I'd slink out de back
door like a common nigger? I’se Emperor yit,
ain't I? And de Emperor Jones leaves de way
he comes, and dat black trash don’t dare stop
him--not yit, leastways. [W

. | I |° . | E _
WWI Listen
to dat roll-call, will you? Must be mighty big
drum carry dat far. [W1 Well,
if dey ain’t no whole brass band to see me off,
I sho' got de drum part of it. So long, white
man WWII!
W
W
left] (26).

Much of the verbal violence and threats in Scene 1 stem from
external attempts to break the facade. According to Emil Roy, "Jones's
visions, like Lear's storm, project psychic tempests onto the cosmos.
At the same time, the progressive stripping away of Jones's uniform,

like Lear's symbolic disrobing reveals the “the poor forked animal‘

15

beneath the egotistical, self-gratifying clothing" (28). In Scene 4,
Jones "tears off his coat and flings it away from him, revealing
himself stripped to the waist" (37). In stripping off the mask of the
civilized Negro, he confronts his nakedness: he is as superstitious and

scared as the "bush niggers" he laughs at:

WI Lawd God don't let me

see no more 0' dem ha' ntsl Dey gits my goat!

[WM]
You fool nigger, dey ain 't no such things! Don t
de Baptist parson tell you dat many times? Is
you civilized, or is you like dese ign'rent black
niggers heah? (38).

Besides vacillating between defensiveness and relief of tension,
the two characters work hand in hand like skinflints to dispossess
the natives of their wealth. In Scene 1, Jones draws Smithers's

attention to the fact that they are both thieves:

Dere's little stealin' like you does, and
dere's big stealin' dey gits you in jail
soon or late. For de big stealin' dey
makes you Emperor and puts you in de
Hall 0' fame when you croaks (13).

Although black himself, Jones nevertheless treats the natives
with the same contempt and scorn as Smithers does. He whips them,
milks them, and calls them "niggers." In Scene 1, just after his speech

about the big and the little stealing, Jones says:

If dey's one thing I learns in ten years
on de Pullman ca's listenin' to de white
quality talk, it‘s dat same fact. And
when I gits a chance to use it I winds
Emperor in two years" (13).

16

In trying to mimick the model of the white father, he ends up
by having no identity at all. He is a white racist inside a black skin.
He is prejudiced against his own race: he calls the blacks on the
island "bush niggers" (12) and “black trash” (26). In the forest, in an
attempt to reassure the self, he refers to himself as "nigger": "Cheah
up, nigger, de worst is yet to come" (28). This way of looking at the
self is obviously symptomatic of a fragmented self.

Besides the aforesaid similarities, all differences between man
and God, and man and animals are lost. In Scene 1, the old black
woman kneels down and “embraces” Smithers's knees in
supplication. Later, we are told that Jones is venerated by the “bush
niggers.” Jones himself tells us: “And dere all dem fool, hush niggers
was kneelin’ down and bumpin' deir heads on de ground like I was a
miracle out of de Bible. Oh Lawd, from dat time on I has dem all
eatin’ out of my hand. I cracks de whip and dey jumps through” (14).
In Scene 7, Jones becomes a reptile. “His voice joins in the
incantation, in the cries, he beats time with his hands sways his body
to and and from the waist” (54).

In this play, it is Jones who is responsible for the state of chaos
and disorder on the Island. At the end of Scene 1, Jones confesses
that he has used the natives' superstition to exploit them: "If I finds
out dem niggers believes dat black is white, den I yells it out louder
'n deir loudest" (24). Paradoxically, the disorder he has created to
take advantage of the natives' ignorance turns against him. In the
first forest scene, the white stone under which Jones has hidden his
food suddenly multiplies. All the white stones become the same for

him. Everything seems chaotic because in the dark everything looks

17

the same. It is at this moment that his fears begin to become
apparent. After scratching a match on his trousers to find the white
stone, he is aware that he is in fact revealing his position to the
Negroes. But he cannot prevent himself from firing bullets at the
ghosts of Jeff, the Guard, the auctioneer, the planter, and the
threatening crocodile. This calls to mind Girard's view that violence
once triggered becomes irrational. It won't be appeased till it is
deflected on somebody.

In this play, Jones offers himself up for sacrifice to find peace.
To absolve himself from sin, he subconsciously offers himself to the
crocodile God. This animal grotesquery indicates Jones's ambivalent6
attitude toward the sacrificial scene he is witnessing. It is true that
he is afraid of the Congo witch-doctor and the crocodile, but at the
same time he is attracted to them and joins in the incantation. In
Scene 7, he approaches the altar with ambivalent feelings of fear and
fascination. Death to Jones is both scary and attractive. When he sees
and listens to the witch-doctor's chants, he ”looks up, starts to spring
to his feet, reaches a half-kneeling, half-squatting position and
remains rigidly fixed there, paralyzed with awed fascination by this
new apparition" (52). When the witch-doctor designates him as a
sacrifice for the crocodile god, at first he moves back, then he starts
moaning and squirming on his belly toward the monster. He ends up
by firing the silver bullet at the crocodile. Symbolically, the crocodile
represents the evil that is inside Jones himself. In killing the

monster, he is in fact killing himself. He is dead a long time before

 

6 Girard defines ambivalence as a circular line of reasoning: ”Because the victim is sacred, it is
criminal to kill him-but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed" (1).

18

the Negroes catch him. Just as Jones has predicted, it is the silver
bullet that seals his fate.

Jones's murder is the second sacrificial rite in the play. The
ministers, the guards and the entire Island have joined Lem on the
hills and initiated the game. Jones like an animal is finally killed by a
silver bullet. In this modern play, this former Pullman porter may
represent the first victim of the "sarlficial crisis" in Girard's theory.
Girard observes that there is an ambiguous attitude toward a victim
of unanimous violence: on the one hand, he is held responsible for
the ills of the community, and on the other hand, he is venerated
because only a god can put an end to violence and save the
community by offering his life. This ambiguity characterizes the
relationship between Jones and Lem's tribe. On the one hand, he is
held responsible for the loss of order on the Island: he has ousted the
former Emperor and murdered the “nigger old Lem hired to kill” (14)
him. On the other hand. he is venerated. In Scene 8, Lem tells
Smithers that they made silver bullets in order to counterbalance
Jones's "magic power."

In “Sacrificial Sub stitution,” Girard writes that ritual victims are
“neither outside nor inside the community, but in the marginal:
slaves, children, livestock” (271). In this play too, the victim is
neither outside nor inside the community. It is true that he belongs
to the same race, but he is not born on the Island. He is a civilized
Negro from New York. This leads us to consider first why the
community chooses Brutus Jones for sacrifice. In “Sacrifice,” Girard
observes that sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of

vengeance:

19

All our sacrificial victims, whether chosen
from one of the human categories...or, a
[QLLIQLL from the animal realm, are invariably
distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable
beings by one essential characteristic:
between these victims and the community a
crucial social link is missing, so they can be
exposed to violence without fear of reprisal.
Their death does not automatically entail an
act of vengeance (13).

In this play, Jones is alien to the Island community. He has fled
from the United States after committing two murders and sought
refuge in the West Indies. So, his death does not entail any kind of
reprisal. The whites in America are more likely to lynch him than
avenge his death. In Weed, Girard explains that
“the purpose of sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to
reinforce the social fabric” (8). But does Jones’s death restore the
community to order? in other words, is this unanimous act of
violence generative?

An examination of Scene 8 reveals that the new order is no
different from the old one and that history is eternally repeating
itself. The play's movement is circular. Jones ousts Lem who finally
murders him to regain his throne. Lem’s return to power suggests
that the new order is worse. Even the noble blacks of the West Indies
have been corrupted by the lure of money. In the last scene, Lem has
learned to make silver bullets. What he has learned is , in fact, the
love of money. He is going to protect his throne at any cost. He won’t

have one silver bullet (like Jones), but as many as necessary to

20

protect his throne. Far from being generative, violence leads to the
creation of an order that combines primitive aggression with
twentieth century materialism. The Island is thus a metaphor for
our modern jungle-like world, Le., a Darwinian world where survival
is only for the fittest. No hope is left to redeem man from self-
destruction. The suggestion is that human beings sentence
themselves to a dead-end alley. In this dungeon, the jailer is the
greedy and selfish self. No less relevant is Jones's first name in this
respect. In W, James Tyrone quotes from
Shakespeare's W: ”the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our
stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." This quotation
suggests that man often causes his own tragedy. Emil Roy rightly
observes that “at the end of W, which is ironic
comedy, we recognize the absurdity of society’s attempt to define the
enemy as a person outside that society” (21). The play can be seen as
a parody of the cathartic function of sacrificial violence in primitive
societies. Both IhLHfliDLADs. and W, Roy writes,
"demonically parody the tragic ritual pattern which has been defined
as a 'transition by which--through the processes of separation,
regeneration, and the return to a higher level-~both the individual
and the community are assured their victory over the forces of chaos
which are thereby kept under control"7 (21). As this play was
designed primarily for performance, it would be interesting to see
how O'Neill expressionistically presents this chaotic world to his

audience.

 

7 Roy is quoting Herbert Weinsinger, "The Myth and Ritual Approach to Shakespearean
Tragedy, " W (Neb: Lincoln, 1966), p. 151.

21

In her book. Wage—and
1W8 Susan Letzler Cole writes that the

originary impulse of tragedy was that of funerary ritual. "In tragic
drama, the text makes present for the reader/ viewer the full
enactment of the universal paradox of mourning" (6). Funeral rituals,
"in various guises,“ enact "the desire to reanlmate the dead" (9). Thus
they extend "the life of the deceased beyond the moment of death by
invoking belief in a liminal period during which the mourners'
behavior is directed toward controlling the "danger" of transitional
states. This dangerous liminality has been transferred onto the Greek
stage. She observes that the world of tragedy is the world of
liminality in space, time, and feeling. In Wee, O'Neill
has captured the tragic ambivalence of Greek tragedy, and expressed
it through expressionistic techniques

Defining expressionism, Theodore Hatlen9 writes: ”the
expressionist is a surrealist. He insists that actuality is within. The
true character is marked by conventional behavior. Beneath the
social facade, there is a vast jungle of primitive feeling and desires to
be explored" (167). In W, O'Neill flings open the
windows of a Negro's mind and allows his audience to have a look at
the private world of his character. O'Neill's interest in the dynamics
of the psyche explains the fragmentary and episodic structure of the
play. Six out of the eight scenes in the play take place in the jungle.
Jones's flight from the Negroes is symbolically an internal journey.

The forest is a metaphor for Jones's struggle against the past. The

 

8 Susan Letzler Cole, The A t One M urnin Ritual Tra and the P rf rman e of
Ambivelege (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985)

9 Theodore w. Hatlen, We: (New York: Appleton-Century—Crofts, 1962).

22

haunting past is dramatized in the appearance of the ghosts of Jeff
and the Guard: the two people Jones murdered in the United States.
This theatrical technique is similar to the stream of consciousness
technique of fiction: for the temporal and spatial boundaries are
transcended. 0n the stage, past and present overlap for O'Neill's
audience is taken back not only to the United States but also to the
African jungle. The dangers of this temporal liminality are expressed
both on the acoustic and kinetic levels.

From the second to the seventh scene, there is a constant
contrast between the sound of the tom-tom and the revolver. When
he hears the tom-tom, Jones becomes paralyzed by terror. The beat
of the drum seems to plunge him in the world of irrationality and
chaos. In contrast, the revolver shots are attempts to regain self -
control. "These attempts are not just feeble, but self-defeating for
each shot alerts the natives to Jones's exact location."10 The sound
patterns of the play dramatize man's inability to escape from his
primitive past. When he joins the "monotonous" crooning of the
witch-doctor in Scene 7, the present surrenders to the powers of the
past. Rather than escaping onboard the ship to Europe, he ends up
joining the ghosts of his ancestors.

As early as Scene 2, there is an ambivalence between life and
death or motion and stillness. In the forest, the "somber monotone of
wind lost in the leaves" sounds like moaning. Yet this sound "serves
but to intensify the impression of the forest's relentless immobility

to form a backgound throwing into relief its brooding, implacable

 

10 James A Robinson mentions that "the tom-tom indicates the increasing alienation of Jones
from the normal civilized world of the ego. The revolver shots, by contrast, represent an attempt
to regain the stability of the conscious world by reliance on a product of human technology" (37).

23

silence" (27). James A. Robinson,11 observes that the "monotonous
moaning establishes its own strange atmosphere by animating
lifeless objects, giving the leaves human quality.” This sound also
foreshadows the appearance of the Little For mless Fears which at the
end of the scene emit "a tiny gale of low mocking laughter like a
rustling of leaves" (31).

On the kinetic level too, the mechanical motions of the
characters expressionistically project the paralyzed reactions of the
protagonist onto his environment.12 In Scene 3, for example, Jeff
(representing the past), appears "throwing a pair of dice on the
ground before him, picking them up, shaking them, casting them out
with the regular, rigid, mechanical movements of an automaton" (34).
In Scene'4, f urthermore, Jones joins his visions in their mechanical
movements. The movements of the convicts "like those of Jeff in the
preceding scene, are those of automatons-—rigid, slow, and
mechanical." Jones takes part in the motion of the dream—characters.

"John winces in pain" when the Guard whips him on the shoulder:

MW (40).

In Scene 5, "there is something still, rigid, unreal, marionettish

about the Southerners at the slave auction" (44). In the next scene,

 

11 James A. Robinson, " O'Neill's Symbolic Sounds,” Mggem Language studies 6 (1978-9): 346-45.
12 Robinson, p. 346.

24

Jones sees Negroes swaying "slowly forward toward each other and
back again in unison, as if they were laxly letting themselves follow
the long roll of a ship at sea. At the same time a low, melancholy
murmur rises among them, increasing gradually, by rhythmic
degrees which seem to be directed and controlled by the throb of the
tom-tom in the distance" (48). Later, he "rises to a sitting posture
similar to the others, swaying back and forth." His voice reaches the
hightest pitch of sorrow, of desolation" (49).

The emotional effect of this scene is reminiscent of the
antiphonal lament in Greek tragedy. According to Susan Letzler Cole,
there is some evidence of an originally antiphonal tradition in the
stichomythic dialogue of Greek tragedy. Greek tragedians, she argues,
"used stychomythia as the mode of communication between the
living and the dead." (22). In this play, Jones communicates with the
dead not only through his mechanical movements and moaning, but
also through dance. In Scene 7, there is a ritual dance performed by
grotesque characters. The Congo witch-doctor "is wizened and old,
naked except for the fur of some small amimal tied about his waist,
its busty tail hanging down in from. His body is stained all over a
bright red." Then, he “begins to dance and to chant. Jones has
become completely hypnotized. His voice joins in the incantation, in
the cries, he beats time with his hands and sways his body to and fro
from the waist" (51). We are informed that "he has entered the
whole spirit and meaning of the dance.” In that world of dangerous
liminality, he cannot find his way out to the world of the living. In a

desperate attempt to find a way out. he shoots the silver bullet at the

25

crocodile god. This act turns out to be fatal for it has indicated his
location to the natives.

Unlike Derrida, Girard argues that literature is referential. An
examination of the personal and historical context where this play
was written might explain O‘Neill's dark vision. On the personal level,
this play was written nine years after O'Neill had divorced Kathleen
Jenkins, and eight years after he had attempted suicide at Jimmie the
Priest's by taking an overdose of veronal. His behavior lends
credence to Mary Tyrone's view in W that
"we all are victims of our family inheritance." From his Irish
ancestors, the dramatist inherited not only his love of alcohol, but
also his death wish. Indeed, after leaving his family and returning to
Ireland, O'Neill's paternal grandfather killed himself. This perhaps
explains why O'Neill himself views human history as repeating itself.

W also echoes the failure of the black
movements at the beginning of the century. In 1914, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People was created to
defend Negro rights. As it was governed by the middle-class, the
NAACP failed to attract the majority of Negroes. Randolph Owen and
the Messenger group were other middle-class intellectuals who failed
to defend Negro rights. Although they tried to organize the Pullman
porters into a union, their program went unheard among
slumdwellers. In 1916, Marcus Garvey, a black West Indian came to
the United States and created the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). He assured American Negroes that their glorious
past is in Africa and gave them a promise of a brilliant future there.

Francis L. Broderick writes: "To the urban Negroes, most of whom

26

were wartime migrants from the South, the dream had potent
appeal, for reality was bad housing, scarce jobs, lynching, and race
riots. He made black the standard of goodness, and satisfied the
yearnings of identity and racial pride"13 (82). On a more practical
level, Garvey espoused economic nationalism. He urged Negroes to
support Negro businesses. The UNIA itself undertook commercial
enterprises and tried to establish trade between Negroes in America
and those in the West Indies and Africa. In W
W Robert E. Jenkins14 writes that Garvey "drained off
potential f unds, sharpened race distinctions and caused confusion in
Negro ranks" (225). Thus, W is a symbolic account of
these historical movements. In this expressionistic play, Jones is a
racial archetype. As his visions suggest, his ancestors were taken
from the African jungle on board of a slave—ship to the American
South where they were sold to the white planters. After the civil
war. poverty and fear of the Ku Klux Klan prompted many Negroes to
migrate to the North. There, too, they were exploited by the nascent
industry. Many of them, like Jones, became Pullman porters. The
latter represents all the Negroes who fled from the United States to
Africa and to the West Indies for a better future. Ironically, instead
of heaven, they created a hell. They started exploiting the native
populations. They became as racist as the American whites. For
O'Neill, whether white or black, it is greed that governs human

action; this explains the predominance of violence in human history.

 

13 Francis L. Broderick, Negre Pretest Thought in the Twentieth Qentury (Indianapolis: The
Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc, 1965).

14 Robert E. Jenkins, W (San Francisco: United School District,
1967).

27

Thus, Jones represents man in general, not just his race. He is as
greedy as Smithers and as brutal as Brutus the Roman who
assassinated Julius Caesar.

The date when the play was written also corresponds to the
end of W.W.I. More than ten million people were killed by the
products of our new technology: guns, bombs, gases, etc... No less
significant is the function of the revolver shots in the play. As they
indicate Jones's location to his pursuers, they also suggest that
modern civilization is destroying itself.

Eventually, we can say that violence has no purgative function
in this play. Rather than reinforcing the social fabric and bringing
society to a new order. violence is a license for exploiting the other.
The outcome of WWI shows this: the more powerful a nation
becomes, the more likely it is going to use its military power to its
advantage. Thus, it is greed that often leads to world conflicts. As
greed cannot be extricated from human beings, this means more and
more world catastrophies will befall mankind. Unfortunately, WWII,
the Vietnam War, and the recent war in the Persian Gulf give further

credence to O'Neill's dark vision of humanity.

CH APTBR 11

W

In W (1924), O'Neill takes his audience to
New England in 1850. Suffering from the tyranny of their father Old

Ephraim Cabot, Simeon and Peter decide to quit the farm hoping to
find gold in California. Their youngest brother Eben decides to stay
and fight for the farm his "Paw" took from his "Maw." This puts him
in conflict not only with his father but also with his stepmother
Abbie. The mutual attraction between Eben and Abbie results in
incest and the birth of a baby boy. Fighting with his son, Ephraim
unintentionally makes Eben believe that Abbie has used him to
produce a heir. Thinking he has been fooled, Eben decides to leave
the farm. In a desperate act to retain her lover, Abbie kills the baby
to prove her love. The two lovers are taken into custody by the
Sheriff, and only Ephraim remains on the farm. In this tragedy,
Ephraim's Calvinism and the inf anticide are instances of religious and
physical violence. The first part of this chapter will demonstrate that
violence is due to the similarities between the members of this
family. The second part will look at the antagonistic relationship
between father and son in view of Girard's concept of "mimetic
rivalry." The third part will consider the baby's murder as an act of
"unanimous violence": everybody is guilty but not entirely
responsible. It will also examine whether the infanticide is

generative for the community. The fourth part will focus on the

29

symbolic pattern of the play. It will suggest that O'Neill's Biblical
allusions serve to underscore the cyclical nature of both family and
religious violence. The last part will examine the form and mode of
the play in view of Girard's theory.

A close reading of the play shows that it is sameness that
causes those violent conflicts between the characters. First, all of
them are vacillating between love and hate. In Part II, Scene 2,
Abbie undergoes a multiplicity of love-hate reactions to Eben,
ranging from attachment to jealousy, from revenge to calculated
scheming in the course of which she raises Ephraim's hopes to have a
son by her. To get revenge on Eben who has ranked her below
Minnie the prostitute, she tells Ephraim that his son has tried to
seduce her. The same thing could be said of Eben. He feels both
attraction and hatred toward the intruder who has taken his
mother's place. In their first encounter, he is "obscurely moved,
physically attracted to her--in forced stilted tones." Yet, he says to
her: "Yew kin go t' the devil!" (68). And fighting "against his growing
sympathy," he harshly lets fall that his father has bought her "like a
harlot." Likewise, Peter and Simeon have an ambivalent attitude
toward Ephraim. In Part I, Scene 2, Peter and Simeon admonish Eben
for wishing their father dead:

Simeon:
Ye'd oughtn't t' said that, Eben.

Peter:
'Twa' n't righteous

Eben:
What?

30

Simeon:
Ye prayed he'd, died (20-1).

In the next scene, they enact a grotesque Indian dance. In a
half -serious tone, they threaten not only to scalp their father, but

also to rape his wife:

Simeon:
We're free as Injuns! Lucky we don't skulp ye!

Peter:
An' burn yer barn an' kill the stock!

Simeon:
An' rape yer new woman! Whoop! (63).

Even Ephraim vacillates between softness and hardness. In
Part I, Scene 1, he confesses to his new wife that he is growing old

and that one day he could warm up to his son Eben:

I'm gittin' t' feel resigned t' Eben--jest as I got t' feel
'bout his Maw like her'n. I calc'late I c'd a'most take t'
him--if he wa'n't sech a dumb fool! [W.] I s'pose it's
old age a creepin' in my bones (83).

Madness is another similarity between the Cabots. Ephraim
accuses all of his sons of being mad, especially Eben. When he
informs Abbie who has become his son's mistress that "Eben is
queer," she responds "He‘s the dead spit 'n' image of yew!" (81).
During the Indian dance, Simeon and Peter seem mad: Cabot says to
them: "Lust for gold-~fur the sinful, easy gold 0' California! It's made
ye mad!" (63). By the end of the play, Abbie's goes mad because of

31

Eben's decision to leave the farm. She kills the baby to keep her

lover:

[WW
mm!

If that's what his comin's done t'me-—killin'
yewr love--takin' yew away--my on'y joy--
the on'y joy I ever knowed--like heaven t'
me--purtier' n heaven--then I hate him, too,
even if I be his Maw! (141).

The second common feature among the Cabots is greed. Peter L.
Hays writes that "Desire Under the Elms (1924) is a play about greed
and possessiveness, greed for land, wealth, and security"1 (434).
Ephraim, Simeon, Peter, Eben, and Abbie all want to possess the farm
they live on. Ephraim wants a son so that he might pass the farm on

as an extension of himself, and so still possess it:

A son is me--my blood--mine. Mine ought t'
git mine. An' then it's still mine--even though
I be six foot under. D'ye see? (89).

Because she covets the farm, Abbie arouses in Ephraim the
desire to have a male heir. She tells her husband: "Would ye will the
farm t'me then--t'me on' it?" (91).

Apparently she sacrifices the baby to keep Eben. Thus, it is
possessiveness not love that prompts her to commit inf anticide.2

Similarly, Simeon and Peter are waiting for the old man's
death to inherit "two thirds" (24) of the farm. Like his two brothers,
Eben wants to get back his "Maw's farm.” This explains the

dominance of the singular possessive pronouns and adjectives in the

 

1 Peter L Hays, ”Child Murder and Incest in American Drama,” Twentieth seem; Literatug 36
(1990): 341-48.
2 According to Hays, the infanticide is one of O'Neill's ways to undercut possessiveness.

32

play; ”my farm." "mine," ”my crops." "my son," "my room." The last
words by the Sheriff underscore this covetousness: "It is a jim-dandy
farm, no denyin'. Wished I owned it!" (166).

The only sharing in the play, Hays-3 remarks, is grudgingly
between Ephraim and Abbie. As they enter the house, the old man
says:

Har we be t' hum, Abbie.

Abbie:

[WI

Hum! [WWW
e ' w ' ' a
gale.) It's purty--purty! I can't b'lieve it's
r'ally mine.

Cabot

[5113:2li

Yewr‘n? Mine! [WEE
WWW.) Our'n--
mebbe! It was lonesome too long. I was
growin' old in the spring. A hum's got t' her a
woman (58).

The search for a home is another common link between the
characters. When she first sees the house, Abbie exclaims: "Hum!"
Ephraim later reminds her that is his ”hum." Then, Eben shows up to
remind his stepmother that she has usurped his "Maw's" place. At
thirty-nine and thirty-seven, Simeon and Peter have never left their
father's farm. They decide to go to California only when Eben has
given them money. This suggests that a home for them means

material security rather than family warmth or love. Carl E. Jr

 

3 Hays, p. 344.

33

Rollyson4 writes that W. "embodies [O'Neill's]

sense of futility over identifying home with a piece of ground with a
single set of family relationships, with what the characters
obsessively call mine throughout the play."

As they are trapped by their environment, all the characters
behave like animals. Simeon and Peter remind Abbie of "strayed
hogs" (59). Eben and Ephraim are two dogs ready to eat each other.
The neighbors are "hens" and ”hogs" (121). In their first sexual
encounter, Abbie and Eben stand panting after a lustful embrace
"like two animals" (79). This grotesque imagery indicates the
absurdity of our materialistic values and the downfall of modern
civilization.

Because they are longing for the same thing, 1.1.. money, the
characters come into conflict with one another. The most antagonistic
relationship in the play is that between Ephraim and Eben. This
inimical f ather-son relation perfectly illustrates Girard's concept of
"mimetic rivalry." Although soft like his "Maw." Eben has inherited
his father's hardness and greed. When he discovers that his father
also goes to Minnie the prostitute, he cannot contain his anger any

longer. In a violent outburst, he tells his two brothers:

Eben:

That's more to it. That grows on it! It '11 burst
soon! [W.l I'll go smash my fist in
her face! [WW
xiolentlxl

 

4 Carl E. Jr Rollyson, "Eugene O'Neill: the Drama of Transcendance,” W
QNeilLJames J. Martine (Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall 8: G, 1984.), p. 125.

34

His violence reminds his two brothers of their father:

Simeon:

[LookinufteLhimJ
Like his Paw.

Peter:
Dead spit an' image!

Simeon:
Dog'll eat dog! (31-2).

Commenting on the Oedipus complex, Girard observes that it is
the desire to mimic the father that motivates the son to usurp his
father's bed. Eben wants not only to have the farm but also to take
his f ather's wife. Throughout the play, Eben repeats that he hates his
father because he slaved his "Maw" to death. Underneath this surface
level, he hates Ephraim because the latter had exclusively the
mother's attention. For Eben, "Maw" and the farm are one. In trying
to possess the farm--which belonged to her-~he is trying to possess

his mother, the thing he couldn't do when she was alive:

It's Maw's farm agen! It's my farm! Them's
my cows! I'll milk my durn fingers off for
cows 0' mine! (46).

This explains his fury when he discovers that his father also
goes to Minnie. It is as if Ephraim were for the second time
preventing Eben from getting closer to his “Maw." But this time, Eben
decides to go to Minnie and to take her as his father did. After

returning from the village, he tells his brothers:

35

She's like t'night, she's soft 'n' wa'm, her
arms're wa'm, she smells like a wa‘m plowed
field, she's purty (32-3).

Simeon ironically says that he might try to make his new
stepmother his mistress too: "Mebbe ye'll try t'make her your'n, too?"
(40). Simeon's irony turns out to be prophetic. Abbie becomes Eben's
mistress. Their first sexual encounter is a "mixture of lust and
mother love" (108). Abbie identifies with Eben's mother:

Tell me about yer Maw, Eben.

Eben:
They hain't nothin' much. She was kind. She
was good.

I'll be kind an' good t' ye!

Eben:
Sometimes she used t' sing fur me.

Abbie:
I'll sing fur ye! (107).

Later, the disciple (Eben) becomes the model of his own model

(his father). Ephraim doesn't accept the fact that he is getting old:

I'm gettin' old--ripe on the bough. [Ween
W.) Not but what I hain't a hard nut t'

crack even yet an' fur many a year t' come! By the
eternal. I kin break most 0' the young fellers's backs at
any kind 0' work any day 0' the year (83).

36

In Part III, Scene 1, he invites the neighbors to show them his
virility and strength. At seventy-six he has not only fathered a child,

but is also still capable of dancing like a youth:

Whoop! Here's dancin' fur ye! Whoop! See that!
Seventy-six, if I'm a day! Hard as iron yet!
Beatin' the young 'uns like I allus done! Look
at me! I'd invite ye t' dance on my hundreth
birthday, on'y ye'll be dead by then (125-6).

This obsession makes him envious of his youngest son. His
jealousy leads him to a hand to hand confrontation with Eben. After

beating his rival, Ephraim says to Abbie:

Ye needn't t've fret, Abbie, I wa' n't aimin' t'
kill him. He hain' t wuth hangin' fur-~not by a

hell of sight! [WWI

Seventy- six an him not thirty yit--an' look
whar he be fur thinkin' his Paw was easy! No
by God, I hain't easy! An' him upstairs, I'll
raise him t' be like me! (136).

Peter L. Hays observes that "the symbolic use of child murder
occurs in places where there is also the suggestion of incest, another
symbol of perverted, unnatural development" (435). In Desireflnge;
Mme, out of her incestuous relationship with Eben, Abbie gives
birth to a baby boy that she kills to keep her lover. In W
W, Girard writes that if children and slaves are very often
the target of unanimous violence, it is because no one will avenge
their death. In O'Neill's play, the victim is an infant. The whole
family, not just Abbie, is responsible for the infanticide. Ephraim
makes Eben believe that Abbie used him to produce a heir that

would give her the farm:

37

Waal, it'll be her'n. too--Abbie'sye won't git
'round her--she knows yer tricks-~she'll be
too much fur ye--she wants the farm her'n--
she was afeerd o' ye—-she told me ye was
sneakin' “round tryin' t' make love t‘ her t' git
her on yer side... ye... ye mad fool, ye! (134).

Believing he has been fooled, Eben decides to leave Abbie:

Ye' made a fool o' me--a sick, dumb fool-—a
purpose! Ye've been on'y playin' yer sneakin’,
stealin' game all along--gittin' me t' lie with
ye so's ye'd hev a son he'd think was his'n, an'
makin' him promise he'd give ye the farm and
let me eat dust, if ye did git him a son!

[WW
1191.] They be a devil livin in ye! T ain't
human t' be as bad as that be! (138).

Girard writes that "the more critical the situation is, the more
precious the sacrificial victim must be" (18). In a desperate attempt

to keep her lover, Abbie kills her own baby:

Abbie:

Imam!

I done it, Eben! I told ye I'd do it! I've proved I love ye-—
better' n everythin'--so's ye can't never doubt me no
more! (145-6).

These three characters, however, are not entirely responsible
for the infanticide. They are both guilty and innocent.5 Ephraim
unintentionally makes Eben believe Abbie has betrayed him. At the
time, Ephraim doesn't know that the baby is Eben's. He cannot
predict the consequences of what he is saying to Eben. Somehow, it is

misfortune that has caused the killing of the baby.

 

5 This ambivalence characterizes the community's attitude toward the victim of the first sacrificial
crisis in Girard's theory. Because the murder is collective, the individual doesn't feel entirely
responsible for the performance of that violent act.

38

The community's guilt toward the victim of the collective
murder is seen in Eben's reaction to Abbie when she tells him that it
is love for him that has prompted her to kill the baby. The need to

protect the self from guilt explains Eben's violent outburst against

Abbie: he"s.p.tin2§_ontLhis_f_e_e1_in_a_Lum_thLea1en1ng_heL_ms
MW" and shoutsz

"Ye lie! I never said--I never dreamed ye'--I'd cut off my head afore
I'd hurt his finger" (150).

Girard writes that when violence breaks out it wears out all
differences among the antagonists. By the end of the play, both Eben
and Abbie seem mad. Abbie kills the baby and Eben, torn by guilt,
acts in an irrational way. He decides to deliver Abbie to the Sheriff:

I'm a-goin' fur the Sheriff t' come an' git ye! I
want ye tuk away, locked up from me! I can't
stand t' luk at ye! Murderer an' thief 'r not, ye

still tempt me! I'll give ye up t' the Sheriff
(151).

Later, when his violence has subsided, he recognizes his

responsibility for the child's murder:

I put it in yer head. I wisht he was dead! I
was much as urged ye t' do it! (160).

According to Girard, there is a physical resemblance between
the vicarious victim and the real object of violence. Hence, it should
come as no surprise that Abbie deflects her anger against Eben onto
the baby, for Eben's having decided to leave her. Scene 4 of Part III
points to the strong resemblance between the father and his son.

Addressing Abbie, Eben says:

39

Ye saw he looked like me—-ye knowed he was
all mine--an' ye couldn't b'ar it--I knowed ye!
Ye killed him for bein' mine! (150-1).

In this play, the death of the baby doesn't entail any form of
reprisal. The father is as responsible as the mother for its murder.
Ephraim asks the Sheriff to apprehend the two lovers not to avenge
the baby's death but because he has painfully discovered his sexual
impotence: the baby is not his but Eben's.

Ephraim in this case resorts to what Girard calls "public
vengeance."6 Under the public system, "an act of vengeance is no
longer avenged; the process is terminated, the danger of escalation
averted" (16). This leads us to consider whether this sacrificial act is
generative.

Far from being cathartic, violence in this play signals the
breakup of society. Abbie, Eben, and Ephraim out of selfishness have
sacrificed the future generation to secure the enjoyment of the
present. Abbie wants Eben, the latter wants the farm, and his father
wants the baby as an extension of the self. The law-enforcement
authority to whom Ephraim delivers Eben and Abbie lusts for his
farm as much as his son and wife. The Sheriff and the neighbors are
vultures waiting for the old man's death to get hold of his farm. The
child—sacrifice symbolically means that our modern values are
leading us to self-destruction: there is no future, for we ourselves

have killed it. No less significant is the play's ironical tone. Doris V.

 

5 Girard distinguishes two kinds of vengeance: the private vengeance and the public vengeance.
"By definition, primitive societies have only private vengeance. Public vengeance is the exclusive
property of well-policed societies, and our society calls it the judicial system. This system does
not suppress vengeance; rather it effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a
sovereign authority specializing in this particular function" (15).

40

Falk states that "the affirmative ending of the tragedy is
unconvincing... . Even when this sin has been compounded with
adultery, incest, and murder, romantic love 'purties up' everything."
The final words of the Sheriff reinforce the ironical tone of the play:
"It's a jim dandy farm no denyin'. Wished I owned it" (269).

A close reading of the play shows that religious and family
violence are inextricable. This has the special effect of suggesting the
circularity of human experience. In Part 1, Scene 4, Abbie tells Eben
that she has lost a baby before. This intensifies our horror as we
suspect her of having killed her first baby too. Abbie's murder calls
to mind Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. According to the Koran and the
Bible, "God delivered to Abraham the ram previously sacrificed by
Abel. This ram was to take the place of Abraham's son Isaac; having
already saved one human life, the same animal would now save
another."7 In W, this sacrifice is pointless for it
saves nobody's life. Rather, it is an absurd act revealing only selfish
values.

According to Girard, religion is "another term for that obscurity
that surrounds man's efforts to defend himself by curative or
preventive means against his own violence." This obscurity coincides
with "the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy,
legal, and legitimate, successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust,
illegal, and illegitimate" (23). In W, O'Neill
denounces this legal form of violence. Ephraim's hardness represents

those atrocities committed in the name of religion: wars, bigotry, and

 

7 Girard, p. 4.

41

lack of understanding. One could say that Abbie's suffocation of the
baby calls to mind "the way in which Ephraim's hard Calvinism has
strangled the humanity in his sons."8 He has enslaved his two
previous wives to death and trapped his sons within the strangling
stone-walls of his farm. Peter remarks that his father has "slaved
himself t' death. He's slaved Sim 'n' yew t' death--o'ny none 0' us
hain't died--yet" (23).

Whereas the rock on which Jesus Christ built his church is
symbolic of regeneration and love, the stones of Ephraim's farm are
symbolic of his spiritual aridity. Instead of a heaven, he has built a

family tomb. With bitterness, Peter says:

Here--it's stones atop o' the ground--stones
atop o' stones--makin' stone walls —-year atop
o' year-~him 'n' yew 'n'then Eben--makin'
stone walls fur him to fence us in! (16).

As in the Calvinist dogma, Ephraim's God is hard and lonely.
Rather than reinforcing the social or familial fabric, Calvinism has
made people more lonesome and harder toward one another. After
discovering that Simeon and Peter have taken his money, Cabot

decides to stay on his farm:

Ha! [W
W.) I calc'late God give it to 'em-
-not yew! God's hard, not easy! Mebbe they's

easy gold in the West, but it hain't God's gold.
It hain't fur me. I kin hear His voice warnin'
me agen t' be hard an' stay on my farm. I kin
see his hand usin' Eben t' steal t' keep me

from weakness...lA_p.a11§:;tnen_he_my_tter_s

535111.] It's goin' t' be lonesomer now than

 

8 Hays, p. 436.

42

ever it war afore——an' I'm gittin' old Lord-ripe

on the bough...[Ih£n_§.IiH£nin2.] I waal-—what

d'ye want? God's lonesome, hain't He? God's
hard an' lonesome! (164).

In Hebrew, Ephraim means fruitful land. Ephraim is the second
son of Joseph (Gen 41. 52), who with Manasseh, his brother,
compromised the "house of Joseph." Later, the strife over land made
them the two brothers enemies. The tribe of Ephraim was as
aggressive as the old man in O'Neill's play. Just as the Israelites fell
short of creating their "promised land," Ephraim fails to make of the
American wilderness a home. The last scene where Abbie and Eben
embrace near the gate of the farm calls to mind the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from Eden9. Whereas the forefathers wanted to make
the new continent a heaven, the grotesque animal imagery10
throughout the play ironically points to the failure of the American
dream. It suggests man's fallen state rather than his salvation. For
Simeon and Peter, the West means money, not a spiritual heaven. So,
if O'Neill sees human history, especially violence, as cyclical, it is
because human motifs such as greed and selfishness are forever

recurring.

Besides these Biblical allusions, O'Neill has used some elements

of Greek drama. Although about New England, Wm

is built on the model of Greek tragedy. For aesthetic purposes, the

 

9 Mentioned by John Gatta Jr., "The American Subject: Moral History As Tragedy in the Plays of
Eugene O'Neill,” mm 5-6 (1978-9): 227- 39.

10 Catta writes that "the cumulative effect of this animal imagery, combined with the palpably
bestial conduct of those so delienated, is to belie that familiar national myth of the newborn
"Amerian dream” (231).

43

Greeks didn't show violence on the stage. In this play too, the
audience doesn't witness the infanticide. The latter occurs in
Ephraim's and Abbie's room. This has the special effect of
intensifying the audience's horror as they imagine what is going on

behind the curtains.

The plot of Wm derives from three Greek
plays. From Sophocles's Medea, O'Neill borrows the principle of

human substitution of one victim for another. "Frightened by the
intensity of Medea's rage against her faithless husband Jason, the
nurse begs the children's tutor to keep his charges out of their

mother's way"l 1:

I am sure her anger will not subside
until it has found a victim. Let us pray
that the victim is at least one of our
enemies.

The incestuous love affair between Abbie and Eben reminds
one of Sophocles's W. In this Greek tragedy, the son
kills his father and marries his mother. When he discovers his sin, he
blinds himself and leaves Thebe. The plot of this play might also
derive from Euripides's Phaedra. The two playwrights show that
passion and vengeance are inextricable. Like Abbie, Phaedra falls
madly in love with her stepson Hippolytos. Both women seek
revenge when they have been rejected. Just as Phaedra tells Theseus
that his son has tried to outrage his father's home, Abbie tells

Ephraim that Eben has tried to make love to her.

 

11 Girard, p. 9.

44

Besides plot, O'Neill has introduced some ancient Greek rituals
such as the Dionysian dances. Whereas for the ancients the latter
were symbolic of life and regeneration, in W, the
grotesque dances in Part III, Scene 1 symbolize death as they occur
just before the murder of the baby. The time scheme of the play is
most significant in this respect. The play starts in summer and ends
in spring. Whereas for Chaucer spring is a symbol of rebirth, for
O'Neill it means death. This violent act means that modern
civilization is sentencing itself to death by its selfish and materialistic

values.

Although he built his play on the model of Greek tragedy,
O'Neill uses both the naturalistic and the expressionistic mode.
According to Hatlen, the naturalist "has to show the debilitating
effects of unfavorable environment and heredity by bringing on
stage characters who were twisted, wayward, and grotesque" (160).
In this play, all the characters speak and behave like animals. The
play, as Hays observes, is full of meaningless cliches such as "there's
gold in the West," "like his Paw," "dog'll eat dog," and "the cows
knows us." The repetition of these simplistic observations denotes a
special meaning: man is the offspring of his environment. On the
kinetic level too, the characters move like animals. While dancing,
Ephraim looks "like a monkey on a string" (125). When Eben calls
them to supper, the stage directions tell us that they are running to
their food like animals:

[W
| I. | . l I ! . | I

45

I I . . III I'
W
W109)

O'Neill uses also the expressionistic technique of short bursts of
staccato speech to show the alienating effect of this rural
environment. The rhythm of the dialogue between Simeon and Peter

indicates their alienation:

Simeon:

1W.)
I air hungry!

Peter:

[Sniffing]

I smells bacon!

Simeon:

1W.)

Bacon's good!

Peter:

[W1

Bacon's bacon! (19).

In "Desire Under the Elms/ a Phase of O'Neill's Philosophy,"

Roger Asselineau writes: "Reduced to essentials in this very primitive

46

strong setting, man appears primarily as an animal. Eben and
especially Simeon and Peter, look like oxen, and feel tied up to the

other animals of the farm by bonds of brotherhood."12

In Part 1, Scene 4, Simeon and Peter do an absurd Indian war
dance around their father. "The dance's frenzied nature and the wild
laughter accompanying it illustrate the depths of the mindlessness of

characters ruled by primitive emotions, not their intellects"l 3 (343).

Hatlen writes that in a naturalistic play, "the protagonist does
not move in a straight line toward his goal from conscious intent but
is bedeviled by doubts and frustrations, torn by inner conflicts,
ridden by passions"14 (162). In W, O'Neill uses a
complex method of characterization. In the scene when Eben is
tempted by his stepmother, his hardness disappears, and he seems
guilty, and "confused" (103). He starts speaking like a toddler. As he

and Abbie enter the parlor, the following dialogue occurs:
Abbie:

When I fust come in—-in the dark--they
seeemed somethin' here.

Eben:
15111121161

 

12 Roger Asselineau, "Desire Under the Elms / A Phase of O'Neill's Philosophy,” in Ernest C.
Griffin, Bum Qfleill (New York: MC Graw: Hill Book Company, 1976), p. 60.

13 James A Robinson: "O'Neill's Grotesque Dancers, " Modern DEE 19 (1976): 341-49.

14 Hatlen writes that this technique of complex characterization was clear to Strindberg who
wrote in his foreword to M15: |ulie: "People are character. They are conglomerates made up of
past and present stages of civilizations, scraps of humanity, torn- off pieces of sundry clothing
turned into rags—all patched together as is the human 30111" (160).

47

Maw.

Abbie:

I kin still feel--somethin'.

Eben:

It's Maw.

Abbie:

At fust I was afeerd o' it. I wanted t' yell an'
run. Now--since yew come--seems like it's

growin' soft an' kind t' me. [We
aim.) Thank YeW-

Eben:

Maw allus loved me (105).

The same complexity characterizes the setting. The elms might
reflect the two sides of Eben's personality: softness and hardness.
The stage directions tell us that there are two enormous elms on each
side of the house. "They appear to protect and at the same time to
subdue" (11). The same ambiguity characterizes the wooden gate

Simeon and Peter take away when they leave the farm:

[I I I [E . I . I . I I .
31:111.] We harby 'bolishes shet gates, an' open gates,

an' all gates, by thunder! (57).

48

It is true that they have escaped their father's tyranny, but
they are taking the symbol of Ephraim's hardness with them. This is
ambiguous because it suggests that they too might become further

Ephraims in California.

No less relevant is the presentation of the parlor as a tomb.
Since the death of Eben's mother, the parlor hasn't been opened.
According to the stage directions, the interior of the parlor is a "grim,
repressed room like a tomb in which the family has been interred
alive" (104). The stage appears as a liminal space between life and
death. The danger of this liminality is expressed in the violent
conflicts between the characters. In this tomb-like place, each of
them is fighting to be the last survivor. Such struggle seems
meaningless since they are all doomed to death. It is as if O'Neill
were saying to his audience: since the worms are what awaits us, our
lust for material security is worthless. O'Neill's dark vision of life
boils down to this: we are born to suffer, and the only way to make
life meaningful is to accept it. Rather than fighting against one
another, we can reduce the pain of living by understanding and

loving one another.

To sum up, we can say that this play is about both familial and
religious violence. Ephraim's hard Calvinism has emotionally starved
everything around him including his sons, his wives, and himself.
Ephraim's short-sightedness might stand for man's spiritual

darkness. As in Wes. violence in Wane.

film, is not generative. The infanticide means that as long as we

49

behave like dogs eating one another, there is no future for modern
humanity. In mm, which is also a family
drama, O'Neill reaches another conclusion: the more disparate the
parts, the tighter the whole and the hold they have over each other.
In this autobiographical play, his characters use aggression as a self -
defensive strategy. Because they cannot find peace. the Tyrones are
at each other's throat. Only when they recognize their shortcomings
and show some understanding toward one another, does violence

become generative.

 

CHAPTER I I I

111.] I Ii'l

In Went, O'Neill couldn't find a better

inspiration for domestic violence than his own family. The play,
completed in 1941, and posthumously published in 1953, was
dedicated to his third wife Carlotta, on the twelfth anniversary of

their marriage. In the dedication, O'neill wrote:

I mean it as a tribute to your love and
tenderness which gave me the faith in love
that enabled me to face my dead at last and
write this play—-write it with deep pity and
understanding and forgiveness for all the

haunted Tyrones.l

According to O'Neill's biographers, O'Neill's family was stricken
by many calamities. His mother became addicted to morphine after
the death of her second child Edmund. His father was a miserly
alcoholic, and his elder brother wasted his life between the bottle
and "whore-houses." Given this background, no wonder that O'Neill
tried once to kill himself. After that, he started taking sea voyages to
escape what looked like a family curse: alcoholism and self-

destruction. After quitting alcohol, he dedicated himself to his

theatrical career. This chapter will examine WM

 

1 Eugene O'Neill, W (New Haven 6: London: Yale University Press,
1955), p. 7.

50

51

Night in view of Girard's theory of violence. The first part will view
the death of the baby Eugene Tyrone (O'Neill's dead brother) as an
example of what Girard calls "collective murder." Special attention
will be given to the similarities between the members of this family.
And the rivalry between Jamie and his father will be seen as an
embodiment of Girard's concept of "mimetic rivalry." The second part
will examine not only the contaminating and irrational power of
violence, but also its relation with the "sacred." The third part will
demonstrate that Jamie is the familial scapegoat. This scapegoat,
however, is only temporary, for the demon of violence demands
another sacrifice which is the social self of every character in the
play. The last part of this chapter, will examine the form and mode of
the play in the light of Girard's conception of violence.

In "The Origins of Myth and Ritual," Girard states that a
collective murder can often be found at the origin of all cultural
forms. The unanimous violence directed at this victim is generative
because it gives birth to a new social or cultural order. An overview
of Wm suggests that the death of baby
Eugene could represent this collective murder. Apart from Edmund
who was born after Eugene, all the other members of the family are
responsible for the latter's death. The community's guilt toward the
innocent victim of unanimous violence is seen in the Tyrones'
projection of guilt onto one another. Mary states that she has always
believed "that Jamie did it on purpose because he was jealous of the
baby. He hated him." (87). Yet, deep inside, she knows that if she
"hadn't left him with [her] mother to join [Tyrone] on the road...Jamie

would never have been allowed, when he still has measles, to go in

52

the baby's room." Similarly, Tyrone knows that if he hadn‘t written
to his wife telling her that he missed her, Mary wouldn't have joined
him, and the baby might not have died. To escape the remorse of his
conscience, Tyrone also lays all the blame on Jamie. "Oh, I know
Jamie was only seven, but he was never stupid. He'd been warned it
might kill the baby. I've never been able to forgive him for that"
(87). As for Jamie, although he never mentions it, the death of
Eugene weighs on his conscience too. Mary contends that it was not
she, but Tyrone who insisted on having another baby to take
Eugene's place. Jamie reasons this way: had Eugene lived, Edmund
might not have been conceived and Mary would not have been
introduced to morphine. Because they have to protect themselves
against their guilty consciences, they all avoid the subject of
Eugene's death. Only when Mary relapses into her morphine
addiction, does she mention that taboo subject. In Act 11, Scene 2,
when Mary begins her reminiscences, Tyrone begs her to forget the
past. "Dear Mary! For the love of God, for my sake and the boys' sake
and your own, won't you stop now? " (85). What he is in fact afraid
of, is the recalling of a painful past that would bring him to
acknowledge his responsibility in the death of Eugene. Such
acknowledgment might lead to the shattering of his apparent
security. This illustrates not only the concepts of "collective murder"
and the community's subsequent "guilt," but also Girard's concept of
"generative violence." In this play, the death of Eugene has led to the
present situation: Edmund's poor health, Mary's addiction, Tyrone's

love of the bottle, and Jamie's whoring and alcoholism.

53

In "The Sacrificial Crisis,"2 Girard writes that "the cultural
order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in
which the differences among individuals are used to establish their
'identity' and their mutual relationships," and he adds that "it is not
these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce
rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one
another's throats" (49). An overview of WW1];
reveals many similarities between the Tyrones. According to Karen
Horney, the genesis of aggression often lies in the rejection of the
child. The four Tyrones seem to have undergone the same
experience: Tyrone's father abandoned his family and returned to
Ireland where he committed suicide. Mary's frequent references to
her father draw attention to the absence of her mother. The only
female figures she mentions are Mother Elizabeth and the Virgin
Mary. This suggests that she was possibly rejected by her real
mother. Mary's lack of attention toward Jamie is behind his jealousy
of his two brothers and father. Because he was conceived to replace
the dead baby, Edmund has always felt that his mother didn't want
him. This feeling has been further aggravated by his apprehension
that his birth may have significantly contributed to his mother's

addiction. In Act 111, he tells his mother:

And why are you so crazy against my going
away now? I've been away a lot, and I've
never noticed it broke your heart! (1 19).

The second similarity between the Tyrones is their vacillation

between love and hate. Commenting on his mother's detachment,

 

2 Rene Girard, "The Sacrificial Crisis,” W (Baltimore and London: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1977, pp. 39-67.

54

Edmund tells his father that it seems to him that Mary deliberately

withdraws from them as if, despite her love, she hated them.

The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she
builds around her. Or it's more like a bank of fog in
which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately,
that's the hell of it! You know something in her does
it deliberately to get beyond our reach, to be rid of
us, to forget we're alive ! It's as if, in spite of loving
us, she hated us ! ( 139).

Yet, we know that Mary's relapse is due to Edmund's disease.
In Act II, Scene 2, she confesses her guilt: "I never should have born
Edmund." She was sick when pregnant, as a consequence, Edmund
was born nervous and too sensitive, and that she believes was her

fault:

And now, ever since he's been so sick I've kept
remembering Eugene and my father and I've been
so frightened and guilty-~(88).

Because she loves him, she is afraid to lose him as she previously lost
her father and the young Eugene. This explains her violent outburst

when she discoveres that Tyrone has sent Edmund to Doctor Hardy.

No! I won't have it! How dare Doctor Hardy
advise such a thing without consulting me!
How dare your father allow him! What right
has he? You are my baby! Let him attend to
Jamie!

(Whiter)

I know why he wants you sent to a
sanatorium. To take you from me! He's always
tried to do that. He's been jealous of every
one of my babies! He kept finding ways to
make me leave them. That's what caused
Eugene's death. He's been jealous of you most

55

of all. He knew I loved you most because-—
(119).

In Act IV, Jamie confesses that he has delibrerately been a
rotten influence on his brother. Warning Edmund against himself , he

says:

Nix, kid! You listen! Did it on purpose to make
a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part.
That part that's been dead so long. That hates
life. My putting you wise so you'd learn from
my mistakes. Believed that myself that for
times, but it's a fake. Make my mistakes look
good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made
whores fascinating vampires instead of poor,
stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made
fun of work as sucker's game. Never wanted
you succeed and make me look even worse by
comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always
jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet!"
(16S).

Yet, he confesses later: "But don't get wrong idea, Kid. I love you
more than I hate you. My saying what I'm telling you now proves it"
(166).

As for Edmund, he both loves and hates his father. He hates
him when he remembers that Tyrone's miserliness may very well
have caused his mother's morphine addiction. Had Tyrone sent her to
a good physician, she might never have known morphine. In Act IV,

Edmund exclaims:

Because you've never given her anything that
would help her want to stay off it! No home except
this summer dump in a place she hates and you've
refused even to spend money to make this look

56

decent, while you keep buying more property, and
playing sucker for every con man with a gold mine,
or a silver mine, or any kind of get-rich-quick
swindle! You've dragged her around on the road.
season after season, on one-night stands, with no
one she could talk to, waiting night after night in
dirty hotel rooms for you to come back with a bun
on after the bars closed! Christ, is it any wonder she
didn't want to be cured. Jesus, when I think of it I
hate your guts (141).

But after listening to his father's family story and to his
confession of how he ruined his own artistic career for material
success, Edmund is moved. Looking at his father with understanding,
he tells him: 'I'm glad you've told me this, Papa. I know you a lot
better now" (151).

The same ambivalent feelings characterize Tyrone's attitude
toward his elder son. Though he accuses Jamie of being a failure, a
drunkard who is incapable of supporting himself, Tyrone is in fact
deeply affected by his son's failure. It is frustration that prompts his
outburst of verbal violence in Act 1. Later, with indignant appeal,

Tyrone tells Jamie:

If you'd get ambition in your head instead of
folly! You're young yet. You could still make
your mark. You had the talent to become a
fine actor! You have it still. You're my son--!

(33).

At the end of Act IV, he bitterly comments on the drunken Jamie:

A sweet spectacle for me! My first-born, who
I hoped would bear my name in honor and
dignity, who showed such brilliant promise!
(167).

57

In addition to their vacillation between love and hatred, their
use of masks is another common feature between these characters.

In "The Origins of Myths and Rituals," Girard writes:

In primitive societies the mask displays
combinations of forms and colors incompatible
with a differentiated order that is not
primarily that of nature but of the culture
itself. The mask mixes man and beast, god and
inanimate object. They are beyond diff erences;
they do not merely defy differences or eff ace
them, but they incorporate, and rearrange
them in original fashion. In short, they are

another aspect of the monstrous double.3

In reference to modern plays, Susan Valeria Harris observes,
masks have a double function: they both protect and reveal the
character. The mask is usually the public or false face, the unmasked
face the private or true one. This critic notes that "the Jungian idea
about frozen persona ( a protective and false social self) forms the
basis for many of Eugene O'Neill's plays."4 In a culture where people
are afraid of falling short of what they think society expects from
them, they often hide their shortcomings from the public eye. In
W, every character is wearing a mask.
Whenever anyone tries to see beneath their facades, and discover
their naked selves, the characters invariably resort to aggressiveness
to defend themselves. This explains the tense atmosphere in the first

three acts of the play. For example, Tyrone is a successful actor.

 

3 In his chapter ”From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double," Girard defines what he means
by the double. "When all differences have been eliminated and the similarity between two figures
has been achieved, we say that the antagonists are doubles. It is their interchangeability that
makes possible the act of sacrificial subsitution" (159).

4 Susan Valeria Harris Smith, WW (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), p. 108.

58

Although, he has amassed a lot of money, he believes he has failed as
an actor by permanently restricting himself to the role of the Count
of Mount Cristo. He has also sacrificed his wife and children to his
need for secure wealth of which he was deprived in childhood. He is
responsible not only for his wife's addiction to drugs but also for
Jamie's alcoholism and Edmund's sickness. "The tragedy of Tyrone,"
as Doris V. Folk remarks. "is that he sold his soul for the illusion of
success"5 (13). In Act IV, he bitterly realizes that he is nothing
behind the mask of success he has created and in which he has
trapped himself.

On the surface level, Edmund is accusing his father of trying to
cause his death by sending him to a cheap public sanatarium.
Underneath this accusation, however, he is in fact hiding a death
wish. Although he knows his health is precarious, he keeps on
drinking. To use Poe's words, his "imp of the perverse" is pushing
him toward self ~destruction. He has even attempted once to commit
suicide in a bar called Jimmie the Priest's.

Jamie is also wearing a mask. Out of childhood jealousy and
envy of the promise shown in Edmund, Jamie has deliberately taught
his brother cynicism and self -destructive dissipation, in the guise of
romantic adventure. Tyrone constantly warns Edmund to beware of
Jamie's sneering tongue. But under his constant sneering, Jamie is
hiding self-contempt and loathing, for he has always had Eugene's

death on his conscience. As Dennis J. Rich6 points out, Jamie "assumes

 

5 Doris v. Falk, “Long Day's Journey," M rn ri ' Int

Night, Harold Bloom ed (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 9-20.

6 Dennis J. Rich, “Exile Without Remedy/ the Late Plays of Eugene O'Neill,” W
Wee; Virginia Floyd, ed (New York: Frederick Ungar Co, 1979), p. 259.

59

the mask of the cynic. But underneath this Jamie is a spiritual
suicide. Confronted with meaninglessness in his relations with others
and with himself, he has given up on life. He is, as he describes
himself , a 'God-damned shell."

The same thing could be said about Mary. She is hiding her fear
and contempt for sexuality from the others as well as herself. In his
essay " Pitching the Mansion and Pumping the Morphine/ Eugene
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night,”7 Kevin P. Reilly contends
that "her drug-taking does seem to be an attempt to escape from the
excrementalized self of the present into the vision of the spiritualized
self of the past, the self of girlish romance who was in communion
with the comforting Virgin Mary" (26). Reilly contends, furthermore
that Mary does exhibit a contempt for sexuality right from Act I.
When James follows his compliment on the beauty of her eyes with a
kiss in full view of Jamie, she is embarrassed. Later, what at first
seems modesty, turns out to be a device to cut herself off from her
husband and sons: "You must not try to touch me. It isn't right, when
I am hoping to be a nun" (174). Reilly further suggests that her failed
suicide by drowning could well have been an attempt to clean her
body from the dirt of sexuality by immersion in purifying waters.

Not least important is the characters' frequent use of
quotations throughout the play's action. Like masks, they serve both
to reveal and hide the private self. Some of Jamie's quotations are
clues to his character. A notable instance being his distortion of Oscar

Wilde's " The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Wilde's original lines are "the

 

7 Kevin P. Reilly, "Pitching the Mansion and Pumping the Morphine/ Eugene O'Neill's Long
Day's Journey into Night," W 5-6 0978-9): pp. 22-33.

 

60

man had killed the thing he loved/ And so he had to die." According
to Jamie, Wilde got the meaning twisted: "the man was dead and so
he had to kill the thing he loved. That's what it ought to be" (166).
Because Jamie is spiritually dead inside, he seems to be saying that
he has tried to destroy Edmund, his rival who took all of Mary's love.
The reference takes on an additional meaning when we realize that
later in that ballad, Wilde alludes to Cain's murder of Abel.8

The use of masks and quotations reveals another common
denominator between the Tyrones: self -defense. Denial is the most
important defensive strategy in the play. The latter, according to
Stroupe, is "a total repudiation of an internal or external threat in
spite of clear evidence of its existence."9 It is clear that Mary semi-
consciously thinks that Edmund has consumption, the disease that
killed her father, but she rigorously denies it, thus her insistence that
he has a summer cold. In Act I, everyone except Jamie denies Mary's
relapse back into morphine dependency. Whenever Jamie hints at his
mother's addiction, the other family members jump at his throat. For
example, when Jamie tells his father that he woke up at night
because he heard his mother walking in the spare room (Eugene's
room), Tyrone retorts: "By God, how you can live with a mind that
sees nothing but the worst motives behind everything is beyond me"
(38). And Edmund reacts similarly when his brother tells him that he

suspects his mother's return to morphine: "She didn't! You're crazy"

(57).

 

8 John H. Stroupe, MAW (New York: AMS, 1988). Stroupe mentions that
there is a reference in Wilde's ballad to Cain's murder of Abel "And how men their brothers
maim." p. 176.

9 Stroupe, p. 172.

61

The second thing the Tyrones deny is Edmund's sickness. When
Tyrone demands that Jamie pretend to his mother that Edmund is
not sick, Jamie says: "All right: have it your own way. I think it's
wrong to let Mama go on kidding herself. It will only make the shock
worse when she has got to face it. Anyway, you can see she's
deliberately fooling herself with that summer cold talk. She knows
better" (29). Jamie's characteristic behavior, as noticed in the above
examples, is that of revealer or exposer of truth. Whereas Tyrone,
Edmund, and Mary deny reality, Jamie reveals the lies they have
been fabricating to protect themselves. His defensive behavior
clashes with the characteristic defenses of the other family members
and directly produces some of the upheaval. He is considered the
black sheep of the family and Mary even warns everyone against his
poisonous tongue. Thus, it is the clash between those strategies of
evasion and confrontation that leads to verbal and physical
aggression in the play. When Jamie begins his cynical speech about
the madness of his mother in Act IV, and asks "where is the
hophead? Gone to sleep?" (161), in a blank non-acceptance of
reality, Edmund slaps him on the face.10 When strategies of denial
and undoing are used as defenses in a family, they betray the
presence of psychological tension. Stroupe rightly remarks that "the
intensity of defensiveness at any point in the play indirectly reflects
the degree of psychological tension among the characters" (177).
These defensive strategies betray the vulnerability of the inner self.

Whenever someone puts his finger on another's Achilles' heel, the old

 

10 Stroupe identifies three other important defensive strategies: regression, introjectr'on, and
displacement

 

62

wounds and guilt are revived, which in turn cause the outbreak of
violence.

Besides self-defense, the family has a shared sense of loss. To
start with Mary, her loss is theological. As her husband observes,
"she hasn't denied her faith, but she's forgotten it, until now there's
not strength of spirit left in her to fight against-her curse" (78). She
longs for a return to the stability of her youth, and for a state of
grace she believes she once had attained. But her life has been
marked by suffering. The final humiliation is her addiction to
morphine. Mary discovers that she is no longer able to face life. "One
day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my soul" (93). If
Mary's loss is ”theological," Tyrone's loss is "aesthetic," he has
prostituted his talent as a classical actor for the illusion of material
success. In his life, the absurd appears in the comparison between
the actor he might have been and the material success he is: "That
God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success
in--a great money success—-it ruined me with its promise of an easy
fortune...what the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was
worth well, no matter. It's a late day for regrets" (149—50).

According to Dennis J. Rich, Jamie's loss is "psychological."1 1 He
believes the worst because he wants to believe the best. "His being is
defined by "the divorce of an existence envisioned and existence as it
actually is." Quoting from Rossetti, Jamie gives us a definition of

himself:

Look into my face. My name is Might-have-been;

 

11 Rich identifies four types of loss in the play: theological, aesthetic, psychological, and
metaphysical, pp. 259-60.

63

I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell (168).

Edmund's loss, as Rich states, is on a "metaphysical plane." "He
is the character who experiences most the crisis of the absurd. He
realizes that life is 'damned crazy' (151), and at one point in his life
he 'stopped to think too long'” (147). It is at this time that he to tried
to kill himself. Now he rebels against death and the absurd. And
decides to go for that sanatorium for cure." All that he seeks in life
are some moments of insight and understanding. In these short
glimpses of hope, he feels that "for a second there is meaning! Then
the hand lets the veil fall an you are alone, lost in the fog again, and
you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!" (153).

In "Freud and the Oedipus Complex," Girard argues that
"mimesis is at the source of continual conflict. By making one man's
desire into a replica of another man's desire, it invariably .leads to
rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence" (169).
The antagonists become doubles: anybody can be the double of the
other, and anybody can be a victim. This process which links violence
to the lack of distinctions will naturally perceive incest as its
ultimate goal. While mimicking the father, the child identifies with
him by means of appropriation, Le., by "taking the things that belong
to the father" (170). This sheds light on the tense relationship
between Jamie and Tyrone and Jamie and his brothers. In his book
W12 Michael Hinden
suggests a "possible rivalry between father and son over the love of

Mary." In this play, Jamie is thinking of his father not merely as the

 

12 Michael Hinden. WW (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1990).

64

head of the family, but as Mary's sexual partner. There are many
signs that he is bitterly jealous of his father. For example, in Act IV,
when he awakens temporarily from his drunkenness, he greets his
father with lines from W that suggest he secretly thinks of

his father as a hated rival:

Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That Stabbed me in a field by Tewksbury.
° Seize on him, Furies, take him into torment (168).

Jamie later repeats the same image to his brother. In his warning to

Edmund against his own self, he says:

And when you come back, look out for me. I'll be
waiting to welcome you with that 'my old pal' stuff,
and give you the glad hand, and at the first good
chance I get stab you in the back (168).

Hinden maintains that "all his life Jamie has been competing
unsuccessfully with his father for his mother's love, and has
transferred his feelings of rivalry to his brothers." (56-9). He has
destroyed one brother Eugene. And now, he is trying "to protect his
brother Edmund from a similar fate at his hands." He confesses to

Edmund:

Never wanted you to succeed and make me look
even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail.
Always jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet!
(16S).

Girard writes that "because disciple and model are converging on the
same object, a clash between them is inevitable" (174). In his
identification with the father (the model), Jamie (the disciple) not

only desires the mother (the very object which the father desires),

65

but tries to appropriate his father's estate. This leads him to wish the

death of Tyrone. Unmasking his deep motives, he tells Edmund:

You suspect right now I'm thinking to
myself that Papa is old and can't last much
longer, and if you were to die, Mama and I
would get all he's got, and so I'm probably
hOping--( 163 ).

Edmund is shocked by the fact that his brother is harboring such
thoughts. He is coveting not only Tyrone's money, "but most
important of all, the prospect of having Mama for himself."13 The
identification with the father leads to a loss of differentiation
between son and father. And it is this elimination of differences
which leads to chaos and thus to the unleashing of violence. A close
view of the play shows some similarities between father and son.
First, Jamie is an actor like his father. Throughout the play, he is
compared with his father. In Act 1, Scene 1, the stage directions tell
us that "Jamie the elder, is thirty-three. He has his father's broad-
shouldered, deep-chested physique, is a an inch taller and weighs
less, but appears shorter and stouter because he lacks Tyrone's
bearing and graceful carriage" (19). Besides his physical appearance,
Jamie has inherited from his father his love of the bottle. Both father
and son drown their sorrows and guilt in the whiskey padlocked in
the cellar. After all, it is Tyrone (the model) who introduced his son
(the disciple) to alcohol. Whenever, young Jamie had a nightmare, his
father would give him a teaspoon of whiskey to quiet his fears.
Furthermore, the ob session with the mother seems to be continually

present in the family. Both Tyrone and Jamie are deeply attached to

 

13 Hinden, p. 57.

66

their mothers. At sixty-five, Tyrone still cannot hold back his
emotions whenever he remembers his mother. He is in tears when
he tells Edmund all the pain his mother suffered when his father

abandoned them:

Twice we were evicted from the miserable
hovel we called home, with my mother's few
sticks of furniture thrown out in the street,
and my mother and sisters crying. I cried, too,
though I tried hard not to, because I was the
man of the family. At ten years old! There
was no more school for me. I worked twelve
hours a day in a machine shop, learning to
make files (148- 49).

He concludes his reminiscences by stating that "there was never a
braver or finer" woman than his mother. Even now, Tyrone wishes
that his father were "roasting in hell" (147).

Commenting on the nature of violence, Girard writes that
"violence is self -propagating. Everyone wants to strike the last blow,
and reprisal can thus follow reprisal without any true conclusion
ever being reached" (26). The same pattern of reprisal is operating in
this play. In tragic dialogue,l4 Girard observes, "hot words are
substituted for cold steel" (44). This kind of "stichomythic" dialogue
is expressed in the men's use of quotations. Hiding behind the words
of Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Dowson, Rossetti, and
Symons, the characters direct arrows at one another and return them

when possible to the person who sends them. In Act IV, underneath

 

14 According to Girard, there is a symmetry in tragic dialogue. This symmetry "is perfectly
mirrored by the stichomythia, in which the two protagonists address one another in alternating
lines." Another characteristic of this kind of dialogue is that it "is a debate without a resolution.
Each side resolutely continues to deploy the same arguments, emphases, goals, Gleichgewicht is
Holderlin's word for it" (44-5).

67

this apparent argument over Shakespeare and the Decadent poets,
there is a real battle going on between Tyrone and Edmund. For
example, when Tyrone condemns his son's favorite writers as
"whoremongers and degenerates" (135), this reminds one of Jamie.
Edmund in defense of his brother counters that Shakespeare was a
"souse too." Well aware that Shakespeare is his father's idol,
Edmund's insult is undoubtedly directed at Tyrone. In retaliation,

Tyrone says:

Don't compare him with the pack you've got
in there.

[ He indicates the small bookcase again]

Your dirty Zola! And your Dante Gabriel
Rossetti who was a dope fiendl.

Because violence often operates without reason, it destroys both the
other and the self. Attacking Edmund (the other), Tyrone calls
Dowson a dope fiend, but he soon realizes that he is only hurting
himself. Indeed, this derogatory term could well be applied to Mary
his beloved wife. This explains why he feels guilty afterwards and
why Edmund puts an end to the argument: "Perhaps it would be wise
to change the subject" (135). Thus, WW
could be seen as a modern revenge play, where only violence is the
winner, as both parties end up hurting each other and themselves.
The irrational nature of violence can also be seen in the shifting
of alliances in the Tyrone family. As Hinden observes, "When two
members are alone, they tend to quarrel. A third person usually

intervenes to restore order but he is as likely as the original

68

participants to renew the argument."15 Often Mary is the peacemaker.
In Act 1, she intervenes on Jamie's behalf with Tyrone ("Now don't
start in on poor Jamie, dear" (18)), and in Act II, on Tyrone's behalf
with Jamie ("Remember your father is getting old, Jamie. You really
ought to show more consideration" (60)), but neither gesture
prevents her from attacking both men later on. To the puzzlement of

Edmund, she turns on Jamie:

[Win
comm.)

It's you who should have more respect! Stop
sneering 'at your father! I won't have it! You
ought to be proud you're his son! He may
have his faults. Who hasn't? But he's worked
hard all his life. He made his way up from
ignorance and poverty to the top of his
profession! Everyone else admires him and
you should be the last one to sneer--you, who,
thanks to him, have never had to work hard
in your life (60).

And later in Act 111, she spews her anger at Tyrone. After stating
that Jamie won't return home so long as he has the price of a drink
left, she suddenly changes her tone. The stage directions indicate that
"her face hardens and she stares at her husband with accusing
hostility":

No, it isn't at all. You brought him up to be a

boozer. Since he first opened his eyes, he's

seen you drinking. Always a bottle on the

bureau in the cheap hotel rooms! And if he

had a nightmare when he was little, or a

stomach-ache, your remedy was to give him a
teaspoonful of whiskey to quiet him (1 10).

 

15 Hinden, pp. 33-34.

69

Similarly. Edmund defends his mother against Jamie in Act I,
but later throws Jamie's accusations in her face. Suspecting his
mother's relapse back into morphine addiction, Jamie keeps staring
at her before he finally tells her: "Take a look at your eyes in the
mirror" (63). Edmund who has just come into the room, turns on
Jamie and attempts to calm his mother by telling her that her eldest
son is a liar.In Act III, however, when Mary tells him that she hates
him when he becomes gloomy and morbid, Edmund "gets up from his
chair and stares condemningly at her--bitterly, and says to her
bitterly: It is pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a
mother" (120). This indicates that violence is not only irrational, but
also cyclic.

Girard explains that violence is never really removed from the
community. Whenever violence threatens to emerge again, people
resort to rituals and sacrifices. The latter are "extraordinary
precautions to prevent the community from falling once again to
reciprocal violence" (121 ). This explains why Girard identifies them
as "letting-off-steam" techniques. In W,
rituals, alcohol, morphine, as well as morbid poetry have an
anesthetic and protective function. These means of escapism are
attempts to protect one's integrity from being shattered by guilt.

For Girard, violence is the heart and the secret soul of the
sacred. The operations of the sacred and violence are ultimately the
same process. "The sacred involves order as well as disorder, peace
as well as war, creation as well as destruction" (258). In W
W Mary moves like a sacred figure. She embodies

both life and destruction for the other characters. On the one hand,

70

she is the bond of common feeling between the other members of the
family. Quarrels are often resumed for her sake. When she is around,
the characters get closer to each other. In Act I, for example, Jamie
and Tyrone accuse each other of having caused Edmund's illness, but

the quarrel calms down when Tyrone mentions Mary:

It is damnable luck Edmund should be sick
right now. It couldn't have come at a worse
time for him.

[Wilts
uneasiness.)

Or for your mother. It is damnable she should
have this to upset her just when she needs
peace and freedom from worry. She's been so
well in the last two months since she came
home .

lH' . | I I II I. I.)

It's been a home again to me. This home has
been a home again. But I needn't tell you,
Jamie.

!' . . . .
WWW-gm. .
WWI . I'I I. . III
forgotten]

Jamie: [AlmeaLxsumk-l
I've felt the same way, Papa (36-37).

On the other hand, Mary is the cause of the altercations
between the father and his sons. Both Edmund and Jamie think that

their father's miserliness has led to their mother's morphine

71

addiction. She is even the provocation of the only instance of verbal
violence in the play. When Jamie asks whether "the hophead" has
gone to bed, Edmund's response is to slap his brother's face. Her
pivotal position in the play suggests the picture of a deity
surrounded by worshippers seeking salvation. Indeed, Tyrone, Jamie,
and Edmund all believe they could save themselves from alcoholism
and self-destruction if Mary succeeds in her struggle against
morphine. Her relapse explains not only their violence against her,
but also their dead silence at the end of the play. Explaining his

insolence toward his mother, Jamie admits:

I suppose it's because I feel so damned sunk.
Because this time Mama had me fooled. I
really believed she had it licked. She thinks I
always believe the worst, but this time I
believe the best.

[Was]

I suppose I can't forgive her--yet. It meant so
much. I'd begun hope, if she'd beaten the
game, I could, too (162).

Despite his deep love for Mary, Tyrone is also capable of angry
outbursts against her. He cannot help wounding her for the pain she
causes. They could have had a home, he argues, had it not been for
Mary's instability. At such moments, he catches himself and relents,
deciding that Mary is not responsible for her addiction. In the final
scene, Mary is completely isolated from her family, dreaming of the
Virgin Mary and Mother Elizabeth. The three men have poured
themselves drinks for consolation. But even alcohol doesn't alleviate

their distress, for Mary's withdrawal means spiritual death for them.

72

At the play's end, "Mary stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone
stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless" (176).

In "Sacrifice," Girard observes that "when unappeased, violence
seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited
its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only for it is
vulnerable and close at hand" (2). He further explains that the
purpose of sacrifice is "to restore harmony to the community and to
reinforce the social fabric" (8). In the first three acts of Lengm
JeunneLimLNjgnL Jamie functions as the familial scapegoat.
Everybody argues that he bears the chief burden of responsibility for
their collective unhappiness. According to Hinden, Jamie "is regarded
by everyone including himself as morally unclean and to his despair
he is viewed as a source of pollution spreading contagion throughout
the family" (58). As a boy he contaminated his brother with measles
and now he is poisoning everybody with his cynicism. Tyrone openly
associates him with poison. "Beware of that brother of yours," he tell
Edmund, "or he'll poison life for you with his damned sneering
serpent's tongue !" (109). Mary uses similar imagery complaining of
Jamie's "vile, poisonous tongue" (83). To use Hinden's words, "both
parents are intent on isolating Edmund from Jamie," the cause of his
disease. But is the elder brother the only poisoner in the family?

As Hinden points out, on the symbolic level, the pattern of
poison imagery in the play identifies Jamie once again with his
mother. "Mary is a poisoner too, in the sense that her addiction
threatens to distabilize the f amily" (59). By identifying Jamie and
Mary as the family poisoners, O'Neill has Jamie function as a familial

scapegoat, scourging his own conscience but also symbolically

73

bearing away the various contagions that plague the Tyrones" (59).
Tyrone is also responsible for his f amily's suffering, If he hadn't been
miserly and economizing on Mary's and Edmund's medical treatment,
perhaps Mary would never have known morphine, and his son
wouldn't have contracted consumption, the immediate cause for his
wife's relapse. Because the parents can't direct their violence against
themselves, they deflect it onto the first and closest person to them,
their son, a surrogate for the guilty self. Girard notes that "sacrificial
substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an
institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon
which the rite is based" (5). This explains the failure of the first
sacrificial mechanism in W. The parents
are aware that they bear the same amount of responsibility as Jamie:
their responsibility is too obvious to be totally ignored by their
conscience. Their aggressiveness as well as the pattern of defense
they develop indicate their inability to rid themselves of guilt.
Whereas at the beginning, the movement of the characters is flight
from guilt and from the problems posed by existence, at the end they
move towards an acceptance of life's hardships. This movement is
accompanied by a decrease in the emotional intensity of the play.
Each of the three men comes to a recognition of his aims and motives.
For two of them, Jamie and Tyrone, this amounts to a humiliating
confession. In an effort to redeem himself , Jamie confesses his hatred
and jealousy towards his brother. Similarly, Tyrone admits that he
allowed himself to be corrupted by early success, and that he
prostituted his talent for financial gain and security. For the first

time, his real character is revealed to the audience and to his son

74

Edmund as well. We realize that his longing for his youth is no less
poignant than his wife's. The letter in which Booth commends him for
his playing of Othello, may be hidden, as Edmund suggests,
somewhere perhaps in the attic, in the same place as Mary's wedding
dress. His confession puts an end to the quarrel. By offering their
social masks, both Jamie and his father find peace. Likewise, once
Edmund admits that he is a little in love with death, and that he
expects nothing in life but some moments of illumination when "the
veil of things as they seem [is] drawn back by an unseen hand," is he
then able to find serenity. As Girard demonstrates, "sacrif ice serves
to protect the community from its own violence...the purpose of
sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community to reinforce the
social f abric" (4). In this play too, sacrifice helps to promote family
unity. The final unmasking of the characters makes the characters
more understanding toward one another.

Girard has pointed out that Greek tragedy effaces all
differences between antagonists. "Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides all utilized the same procedures and almost identical
phraseology to convey symmetry, identity, and reciprocity" (46). In
W, for example, Sophocles puts in Oedipus's mouth
words that emphasize his resemblance to his father: resemblance in
desires, suspicions, and course of action. As a result, an audience can
not take sides, and hopefully remains impartial. This leads us to
consider the form and mode of W in the
light of Girard's view of violence and tragedy.

In her book.Ihe_Ab_sem_.Qne_Melth1na._thual_ILa2edx_ane
WW Susan Letzler Cole writes that the

 

75

originary impulse of tragedy was that of funerary ritual. "In tragic
drama, the text makes present for the reader/ viewer the full
enactment of the universal paradox of mourning" (6). Funeral rituals,
"in various guises, enact the desire to reanlmate the dead" (9). Thus
they extend "the life of the deceased beyond the moment of death by
invoking belief in a liminal period during which the mourners'
behavior is directed toward controlling the 'danger' of transitional
states. This danger of liminality is paradoxically controlled by
entering the liminal realm itself." (10). This dangerous liminality has
been incorporated into the Greek stage. She ob serves that the world
of tragedy is the world of liminality in space, time, and feeling.
Regarding O'Neill, itis the model of Greek tragedy that underlies the
structure of this modern play. O'Neill has reverted to the classical
unities of time, place, and action. Paralleling the lack of distinctions
between characters, the boundaries of place and time have been
eliminated. And as a result, O'Neill's stage has become the center of
liminality. In Act I, we know that there are two libraries in the same
room. In the left wall, there is Tyrone's library, containing classical
works by Shakespeare, Dumas, Victor Hugo, etc,... On the right side,
there is Edmund's "damned library" (135). It contains "philosophical
and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels,
plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti,
Wilde, Dowson, Kipling, and Shakespeare. This informs us of the
antagonistic philosophies of father and son, and prepares the context
for their battle of the books. The existence of Shakespearean works
in the young men's library breaks the neat distinction between the

two libraries. And it is Shakespeare that Edmund later quotes to

76

antagonize his father. Once Edmund won a wager from Tyrone by
memorizing the role of Macbeth in a week. When, in Act IV, Tyrone
quotes Shakespeare: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
our little life is rounded with a sleep," Edmund ironically responds
using Shakespeare's words: "Fine! That's beautiful. But I wasn't
trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's
drink up and forget it. That's more my idea" (131). The setting here
suggests the lack of real differences between father and sons as well
as Girard's concept of "mimetic rivalry." After all, it is the father who
has introduced his sons to Shakespeare.

On the second floor, there are four small bedrooms: one for
James and Mary, one for each of the brothers, and a spare room
where Mary gives herself her morphine injections. This extra room
would have belonged to baby Eugene had he lived. From afternoon
till evening, Mary sporadically stalks the second floor. And
everybody else is worried. They suspect that she has returned to her

morphine addiction. Edmund tells his father:

Yes, she moves above and beyond us, a ghost
haunting the past and here we sit pretending
to forget, but straining our ears listening for
the slightest sound, hearing the fog drip from
the eaves like the uneven tick of a rundown,
crazy clock--or like the dreary tears of a
trollop spattering in a puddle of stale beer on
a honkey-tonk table top! (152).

On the symbolic level, this could mean that there is no present as
long as the Tyrones are haunted by the memory of the dead. As

Mary puts it: "the past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too"

77

(87). The overlapping of past and present in the play indicates the
elimination of the time boundary. Besides baby Eugene's room, time
liminality is expressed through O'Neill's use of sounds. The
melancholy foghorn and the warning bells on yachts anchored in the
harbor and Mary's piano playing in Act IV, indicate the overlapping
of past and present. The power of the past over the present is also
expressed in the gestures and movements of the characters. In the
last act, at the end of his confession, Tyrone starts turning off the

light bulbs in the chandelier, one after another:

No, I don't know what the hell it was that I
wanted to buy.
[Heeliekmnebulhl
On my solemn oath Edmund I'd gladly face
not having an acre of land to call my own, nor
a penny in the bank--
[We]
I'd be willing to have no home but the
poorhouse in my old age if I could look back
now on having been the fine artist I might
have been.
[WWW
. . . w .
WWI .I E I I I I I I I I I I
puns; g: strained. ironical laughtecJ (151)

In Act IV, the four confessions can help arouse a liminal feeling
in the audience. In Act IV, Mary appears with her wedding dress,
plays the piano, and recalls her dream of becoming a nun. Though
physically present, she is mentally absent. This ambivalence between
presence and absence or life and death pertains to the liminal realm
of tragedy. This kind of feeling can elicit empathy and understanding

in those members of the audience who have become involved in the

78

play. In a letter to a friend, O'Neill interpreted the ending of the play

as follows:

At the final curtain, there they still are,
trapped within each other by the past, each
guilty and at the same time innocent,
scorning, loving, pitying each other,
understanding, and yet never to be able to

forget.16

We can say then that the mode of the play relates to Girard's
view that a literary text is both objective and subjective. It is true
that W is an autobiographical play, but at
the same time, it is deeply rooted in the American tradition. Tyrone's
Irish background and his aspiration for material success ought to be
viewed as a realist dramatization of the American dream. Far from
being an optimistic realist, O'Neill has adopted the view of the
pessimistic naturalist, who sees man as the offspring of his
environment and impotent to do anything to change his fate. The
most poignant scene in the play is perhaps in Act IV, when James
Tyrone tells his son that he doesn't understand what made him
sacrifice his career for money. But while saying that, he cannot help
himself from clicking out one bulb after another to save money. Like
Zola, O'Neill seems to imply that human behavior is rooted in the
pressures of the environment. Eventually, O'Neill's tragic hero is
simultaneously innocent and responsible for his suffering. And to

survive, he must accept the inconsistencies of his human condition.

 

16 As quoted by Hinden, p. 36.

CONCLUSION

This concluding chapter will examine three important
questions: what made O'Neill view violence in the same way as
Girard? what is his conception of tragedy? and why is violence
generative only in W? In the first part of
this final chapter, we will focus on Girard's and O'Neill's common
interest in myths, rituals, and Greek drama. It will focus in particular
on O'Neill's interest in restoring theater to its ritual function. The
third part will examine O'Neill's view of tragedy. Finally, relying on

the dramatist's biography, we will look at the common themes

Present in W. W and Longitude

Jenmey 1th Night. This part will pay particular attention to the
development of O'Neill's thought and how this may have affected his

view of violence.

Girard's theory of violence can be summed up in a few words:
all cultural forms originate in a ”collective murder." And he then
proceeds to examine the function of these cultural forms such as
religion, myths, and rituals. Whereas sacrificial rituals act as
"letting-off-steam" techniques to protect the community from its
own violence, religion and myths all distort the reality of the first
act of unanimous violence- This helps to keep the community safe

from the knowledge of its own violence and thus from replunging it

79

80

into chaos. Girard observes that the Greek tragedians understood
that it is the loss of order that leads to the unleashing of violence.
For example, in We, there is no difference between
Oedipus, Theseus, and Laius. They are all responsible for the
outbreak of violence and unrest. Girard's theory is a mixture of
everything: anthropology, religion, literature, mythology, and
history. Similarly, O'Neill's drama shows a diversity of sources
ranging from the times of the Ancients, to Post W.W.II. This common
interest in Greek drama and rituals explains why Girard and O'Neill
have reached the same conclusions concerning the nature of
violence. O'Neill's interest in Greek drama cannot be separated from
his interest in restoring theater to its ritual function. Leonard

Chabrowe observes:

For O'Neill, art is for life's sake. He tried to
convert the theater back into the church
because he had a deep psychological need to
do so. Only this could turn doubt into will and
despair into acceptance. O'Neill's purpose is to
achieve an effect in the modern theater like
that in the ancient Athenian. And such an
effect meant not only finding equivalents for
the Theater of Dionysus and Greek fatalism
but reuniting them.1

In W, O'Neill takes us back to those sacrificial
rituals in primitive societies. The confrontation between Jones and
the witch-doctor and his crocodile god is symbolic of the struggle

between the forces of life (Dionysus) and those of death (the

 

1 Mentioned by Chabrowe in the introduction of ' l h f ill
(London: Associated University Presses, 1976), p. xxi.

81

gorgon)2. As in Greek tragedy, O'Neill's tragic hero is both victim and
self-victimizer. The death of Jones stands for the triumph of those
evil forces in the cosmos. However, his plight cannot be attributed
solely to external forces: there is a tragic flaw in his character as
well. It is his greed that turns the natives against him.

In new the folk dances can be seen as
attempts on the part of the playwright to create the Dionysian spirit.
In leaving the farm, Peter and Simeon are leaving the tomb-like
home for freedom outside. The ceremony following the baby's
birthday turns out to be a funeral ritual rather than a ritual for the
celebration of life. No less important is the title of the play in this
respect. It prepares us for the battle between the powers of life and
death (Bros and Thanatos). Indeed, it is Abbie who introduces
"desire" or life in the tomb where the Cabots are interred alive.
Sexuality in this play is not associated with sin. Rather, it is an
expression of the life instinct3. Abbie arouses this instinct not only in
Eben who is metaphorically dead by his father's Calvinism, but also
in the old man: she awakens in him the desire to have a child at
seventy-six. Like Jones's fate, the baby's death could be attributed
both to misfortune and to the characters' greed and selfishness.

In Web; too, O'Neill combines Greek
fatalism with the theater of Dionysus. Whereas in the two previous
plays O'Neill's characters are unaware of the forces motivating them,

in this play, the Tyrones come to an awareness of their tragic flaws

 

2 In Greek mythology, the Gorgon is any of the three frightful maidens with wings and claws,
and with snakes instead of hair. The three Gorgons—Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa —were
daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Medusa was mortal and was beheaded by Perseus; generally she
alone could petrify by her glance.

3 Asselineau, p. 64

82

and to the fact that they are not entirely responsible for what has
befallen them. Only in this play do O'Neill's characters communicate
and show empathy for one another. It is this spiritual communion
that explains why violence is generative only in this play. For O'Neill,
the stage seems a place of spiritual communion not only between the
characters, but also between the characters and the audience. This
leads us to consider the function of the dramatist according to O'Neill.

"Most modern plays," O'Neill writes, "are concerned with the
relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I
am interested only in the relation between man and God." In a much

quoted letter to George Jean Nathan, O'Neill shows the same attitude:

The playwright today must dig at the roots of
the sickness of today as he feels it... the death
of the old God and the failure of science and
materialism to give any satisfying new one
for the surviving primitive religious instinct
to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its
fears of death with. It seems to me that
anyone trying to do big work nowadays must
have this big subject behind all the little
subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply
scribbling around the surface of things and
has no more real status than a parlor

entertainer.4
The Dionysian spirit of the play lies in man's struggle to make
his life meaningful. For O'Neill man must not surrender to pessimism.
Rather, he must accept his suffering, for it is through his struggle

against the absurd that man asserts himself. W19

High; can be seen as a celebration of life because the characters have

 

4 Eugene O'Neill as quoted in Joseph Wood Krutch, "Introduction to Eugene O'Neill,” N111:
W11 (New York: Liverright, Inc, 1932), p. xvii.

83

thrown away their masks and accepted their suffering. O'Neill's view
of tragedy corresponds to what Doris Alexanders calls aesthetic
tragedy. According to this critic, life is ”one eternal tragedy, of Man
in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to be the force that express
him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its
expression."

Personal factors could also have drawn O'Neill's attention to the
cyclical nature of violence. Richard Armour writes that: "After
reading a biography of O'Neill, one not only understands his tragedies
better, but finds them a relief."6 O'Neill's biography reveals that
violence and self-destructiveness are passed on from father to son in
his family. His grandfather abandoned his wife and children to
return to Ireland where he killed himself with rat poison. His father
James O'Neill denied paternity to Nettie Walsh's son. Hinden notes
that O'Neill's portrait of himself is "disingenuous" in M
W. "Edmund's inexperience and passivity" serve not
only to bring "the family's aggression into focus," but also to protect
himself. Indeed, when the play was written, O'Neill had already
abandoned two wives and three children. He didn't meet the son he
had by Kathleen Jenkins till Eugene O'Neill, Jr. was twelve. In 1918,
he married Agnes Boulton, and lived with her till he met his third
wife Carlotta Monterey. He shunned his second wife and his two
children by her, Shane and Oona. "While writing this family tragedy,
he might be reflecting on his own failed relations with his children.

Like Mary Tyrone, O'Neill had an ambivalent attitude toward his

 

5 Mentioned by Chabrowe, p. xxr.
‘Hinden.Long_12aiLstunexmteNthLLN1ber!eqeeneep 107

84

children." At first, he admitted that when he thought of his children
he suffered "like hell from a sense of guilt toward them."7 But soon
he was speaking of Shane as just another "parasitic slob of a Boulton,"
stating that "son or not, he simply does not interest me as a human
being." Ironically, O'Neill once copied this passage from W
W3: "Unto my children shall I make amends for being the
child of my fathers." Unfortunately, he failed to achieve that goal.
And the only thing he gave them was self-destructiveness: for two of
his children killed themselves. Eugene O'Neill, Jr., slit his wrists in his
bath three years before his father died. "Shane, who never
understood his father's rejection, became an alcoholic like his uncle
Jamie and a drug-addict like his grandmother. He jumped to his
death from an apartment window in New York in 1977."9 It seems
that O'Neill was aware of this vicious pattern entrapping his family in
violence and self-destruction. The problem that puzzled him may
originally have been this: how can can we break that circle of family
violence? can one give what he has been deprived of? It is quite
possible that it is this personal problem that prompted O'Neill to
write these three plays. The latter might be viewed as three
attempts to break that vicious circle. In W Jones
both exploits and despises the natives because he was treated in a
similar manner by. the whites in the United States. In W
Mme, Eben is hard, greedy, and suspicious: he is the "Dead spat
image of his 'Paw'." In W, however, O'Neill

succeeds in breaking the circle. Whereas James Tyrone never forgave

 

7 As quoted by Hinden, p. 106.
3 Hinden, p. 107.
9 Hinden, p. 107.

85

his father the suffering his mother endured when he abandoned
them, Edmund does understand and forgive his father. In showing
sympathy and compassion toward his own father, O'Neill may might
be cherishing the hope that one day his children may also
understand and forgive him. In W; Mary
Tyrone expresses animosity toward her sons as a defensive
aggressive response to her own guilty feelings for abandoning them.
Admitting her helplessness toward what seems a family curse, she
confesses to her husband: "the present is the present, isn't it? It's the
future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us" (87).

An overview of these three plays shows a common theme: the
constant search for home. In W, Jones flees to the
West Indies. Escaping lynching in the United States, he thinks this
island will be a heaven. Ironically, he is killed there by members of
his own race. In Wine, we find the same yearning
for a home. Abbie, Ephraim, and his three sons all covet the farm.
This quest is also unsuccessful because home for them means land,
stones, and material possessions, rather than compassion or family
warmth. In Webb Mary tries to prevent her
son from going to the sanatorium. In an admonishing tone, Edmund
tells her: "And why are you so against my going away now? I've
been away a lot, and I've never noticed it broke your heart!" (119).
This search springs from Edmund's sense of displacement in his
family. It is true that O'Neill (Edmund in the play) wanted to discover
the world but at the same time he was looking for a place where he
could belong. A home for O'Neill is a place of spiritual communion,

not only with his fellow beings but also with the universe. Edmund

86

tells his father that he experienced this feeling of oneness at sea. The
first time when he was "on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for
Buenos Aires," and the second time on the American line, "when [he]

was looking on the crow's nest in the dawn watch":

A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground
swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The
passengers asleep and none of the crew in
sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring
from the funnels behind and beneath me.
Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone,
and above, and apart, watching the dawn
creep like a painted dream over the sky and
sea which slept together. Then the moment of
ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of
the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging
to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful,
greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And
several times in my life, when I was
swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I
have had the same swimming experience.
Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed
anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a
saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of
things as they seem drawn back by an unseen
hand. For a second there is meaning! Then the
hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost
in the fog again, and you stumble on toward
nowhere, for no good reason! (153).

In short, both personal and external factors--like the failure of
the American dream and W.W.I--affected Eugene O'Neill's view of
violence. Commenting on international conflicts, Girard states that we
have a "perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable

choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of

87

violence."10 However, he doesn't mention how to renounce violence.
Jeffers writes that Girard "scorns humanism too much to suggest we
shall do it ourselves, yet he never quite says we shall be given the
grace to do it either" (425). In contrast with Girard, and despite the
dark vision in his drama, O'Neill does not scorn humanism, nor does
he advocate a return to the old faith like T. S. Eliot. Rather, his faith is
in man's ability to forgive and understand. In W
M, O'Neill admits that it is human to fight back, but it is more
human to understand and forgive those who hurt us. In a world torn
by mass destruction, greed, and selfishness, O'Neill doesn't surrender
to pessimism. He has faith not only in man's ability to kill the beast
within, but also in his ability to give and to reach out to his fellow
beings. Jamie tells his brother that he expects the worst because he
hopes for the best. This explains perhaps why O'Neill described this
tragedy as a "Long Day's Journey into Light--into Love."ll

 

1° Jeffers, p. 404.
11 It is mentioned in the letter accompanying the autobiographical play he dedicated to his
wife Carlotta See WM

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