Continued from last week
Eugene O’Neill re-entered university in 1912 and studied Drama, this time at Harvard and with success. His career took off in 1920 when Beyond the Horizon won the Pulitzer Prize. He was to win three more Pulitzer Prizes and the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. He became America’s leading and most influential dramatist. Yet the brooding echoes of his darker life persisted. He stepped out of active public life for years after the Nobel and returned with The Iceman Cometh in 1946. Typically, it is “a long and notable tragedy portraying a haunted man struggling to break free of his illusions” (George McMichael).
His final play, which returned him to high acclaim as the foremost playwright was the very autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night. This is an intense drama of a family in crisis, a depressing dramatic study with a mother who needed a nightly “fix” of drugs, an alcoholic son and a beleaguered father. Yet it is one of O’Neill’s most accomplished plays.
Another outstanding one is the almost Marxist study of American capitalism, The Hairy Ape (1922) in which his venture into realistic modern theatre and his emphasis on the use of symbols in the theatre are excellently demonstrated. It is the tragic clash between Yank, a working class seaman, and the wealthy world of the American capitalist empires. The turning point of the play is a brief traumatic encounter between Yank and Mildred, the daughter of the owner of one of the empires. She has a tendency to reject her father’s filthy richness but was quite unprepared for the hellish and beastly world in which Yank existed when she saw it for the first time in a flash of a few brief minutes.
After having his own taste of it, O’Neill dramatizes the way the working class who fuel the building of wealth, share none of it. They, compared to apes, exist way down at the bottom of the evolutionary chain and are doomed to remain in the depths of a fiery hell. O’Neill seems influenced by the likes of Carl Gustav Jung, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and VI Lenin in a tragic drama that shows the vain struggle of a working-class American to claim his identity, his visibility and his share of the elusive American dream.
