Part 10: Critical perception of the changing society and life in American Drama        2课时

1.教学内容：文学史导读，文学选读赏析，文学术语介绍，文学练习阐释，文学创作实践。

       (1) Eugene O’Neil:Long Day’s Journey into Night （思政融入点：人的物化）      

       (2) Arthur Asher Miller: Death of aSalesman （思政融入点：美国梦的破灭）

2. 基本要求：进入20世纪现实主义成为美国戏剧的主要模式，EugeneO’Neil是美国戏剧中第

一位重要的代表人。要让学生了解在他之前美国戏剧通常是温和的、感性的、极少去质疑之

前戏剧中所描绘的生活，并且几乎从未挑战过传统。 

3. 教学重点：介绍美国戏剧的代表人物和他们的创作主题、形式和风格。

4.教学难点：了解EugeneO’Neil采纳Ibsen,Strindberg 和Chekhov作品中的现实主义技法将现

实主义引入美国戏剧。他笔下的人物通常生活在社会的边缘，挣扎着实现自己的希望和抱

负，但最终都落入幻灭、绝望的深渊。

 Eugene O'Neil:Long Day’s Journey into Night 

（思政融入点：人的物化）

  

 “Most modern plays,” Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) once declared, “are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am interested only in the relationship between man and God.” That is not strictly true, for two reasons. The first is that, in many of his plays, like Lazarus Laughed (1927) and The Hairy Ape (1922), he does move towards the condition of social drama to the extent that he explores the contemporary emphasis on acquisition and material standards or the plight of those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. And, in all of them, he is drawn into intensely poetic, often erotic accounts of the tentacular relationships to be found, say, in families (Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956)), among confined groups at sea or in a bar (Bound East for Cardiff (1916), The Iceman Cometh (1946)), or in local communities and neighborhoods (All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924)). The second is that it was not so much God, as the absence of God that preoccupied O’Neill. O’Neill was born into a generation that included Joyce, Eliot, and Stevens, profoundly concerned with the death of the old grounds for belief. He was affected by European expressionism, with modern 208 Making It New: 1900–1945 psychology seen as an instrument to analyze human nature, and by a Nietzschean philosophy which reinforced a characteristically American tendency to explore heroic individuals and their search for self-realization. The fundamental problem O’Neill dramatizes in all his work is the problem of the relation of the human being to something outside himself, to which he can belong and in which he can ground his life and discover a purpose: something that saves him from feeling lonely, lost, an existential exile – or, as one of his characters puts it, “a stranger in a strange land.” The younger son of a popular actor, O’Neill began writing drama when he was confined in a sanatorium. During this period of enforced rest and reflection, he produced a series of one-act plays based on his life at sea and among the outcasts in many places: he had been, at various times, a prospector for gold, a merchant seaman, and a beachcomber. His first play, The Web (1913–1914), was followed by nine others. Gaining further dramatic experience with George Peirce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard in 1914–1915, he then spent a winter in Greenwich Village, New York. Then, in 1916, his involvement with the Provincetown Players brought him, and the company, to the attention of the New York public, initially with a series of plays about the S.S. Glencairn and its crew, among them Bound East for Cardiff and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). With the production of his Beyond the Horizon in 1920, O’Neill was acknowledged as the leading American playwright of his day. For a while, from 1923 to 1927, he helped manage the Greenwich Village Theatre; he was also a director of the Provincetown Players and a founder of the Theatre Guild, which produced his later plays. But he devoted more and more of his time to writing, in a variety of styles, to express and explore his view of life. Plays that gravitated toward naturalism included Chris Christopherson (1920), rewritten as Anna Christie (1921), All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms(1924). As such plays revealed, O’Neill was not afraid to explore difficult and, for their time, even controversial subjects. Anna Christie is a prostitute, All God’s Chillun is concerned with interracial marriage, in Desire Under the Elms a woman bears a child by her stepson only to kill the child when her husband, learning that it is not his son, repudiates and disinherits him. A similar daring, a willingness to test and extend the boundaries, is also a feature of O’Neill’s more experimental and expressionist work. Only now the boundaries that are tested are as much a matter of dramatic form as social norm. InThe Hairy Ape, for example, the fall of the central character into consciousness, exile, and death is charted in eight scenes that, as O’Neill explains at the beginning, “should by no means be naturalistic.” O’Neill’s interest in experiment drew him towards the use of symbolic masks for the actors in The Great God Brown (1926), a play that fuses symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idealism in an ironic critique of the materialism of the modern world. It also led him to experiment with a dramatic form of stream-of-consciousness in Strange Interlude (1928), where conventional dialogue is juxtaposed with stylized internal monologue to reveal the inner lives of the characters. The more romantic impulse in O’Neill, that straining towards affirmation, some source of hope, that is typical of so many of O’Neill’s characters is given freer play in The Fountain (1925), which is dominated by a celebration of what is called here “the Eternal Becoming which is Beauty.” The comic impulse, in turn, is more evident in Ah, Wilderness (1933), a gently humorous, nostalgic portrait of New England life that draws on O’Neill’s memories of his own family. More generally typical, though, of his use of drama as a Making It New: 1900–1945 209 means of exploring human abandonment are Dynamo (1929), Days Without End (1934), and the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In Mourning Becomes Electra, the Oresteia of Aeschylus is retold as a story of the Civil War, with the classical sense of fate replaced by an emphasis on character conceived of in Freudian terms. The essential elements of the ancient Greek story of the curse on the house of Atreus are retained here in this story of a New England family called the Mannons: a woman in love with her father, a man in love with his mother, the wife who kills her husband as an act of vengeance, the son who kills similarly in vengeance and is consumed by the “furies.” These elements, however, are redrawn in modern terms, theatrical and conceptual: the chorus, for example, is replaced by choric characters and the “furies” that pursue the son, leading him in this case to commit suicide, come from within, his own devouring sense of guilt. More to the point, there is no final tragic recognition, no sense of an ultimate resolution. At the end of Mourning Becomes Electra, the surviving member of the Mannon family, the daughter Lavinia Mannon, simply shuts herself up in the house, to live with the ghosts of her father, mother, and brother. After the failure of Days Without End, O’Neill maintained a long theatrical silence, during which he suffered mental and physical ill health. The silence was broken by The Iceman Cometh, his first new play to be produced after a gap of twelve years. Set in a rundown New York bar, it is a tragi-comic exploration of O’Neill’s obsessive theme, the need for meaning expressed here as the human need for a saving illusion: as one of the bar-room regulars puts it, “the lie of the pipe dream is what gives life.” Many other plays written following this were only produced after O’Neill’s death. Most notable of these is Long Day’s Journey into Night, probably O’Neill’s finest work, which appeared in the theatre in 1956. Set over the course of one long day in August, 1912, Long Day’s Journey into Night tells the story of the Tyrone family: James Tyrone, a former matinee idol, his wife Mary, a nervous, sickly woman addicted to morphine, their older son Jamie, a hard-drinking cynic, and their younger son Edmund, who has literary aspirations and suffers from tuberculosis. O’Neill was drawing on his own life, and the life of his family, when he wrote this play. Edmund, for example, is an exercise in selfportraiture. But he was drawing on this for a deeper purpose. What is on offer here is a study of lives in disintegration, people without something to give shape and significance to their lives. They have lost that something, anything that might have convinced them once that life made sense; that is, even if they ever had it. As a result, they are left astray and anxious. “It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or a fish,” Edmund observes, and, in doing so, speaks for all the Tyrone family. “As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home,” he explains, “who must always be a little in love with death!’ “Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people,” Edmund says, shortly after this. The Tyrones are divided, disintegrated people. Lacking belief, grounding, they lack a sense of community, stability. They are at odds with themselves and each other; and this is expressed in the words they use, their reflections and conversations, which are characterized by a continual oscillation, an ebb-and-flow movement in which one statement will cancel out another. There is no continuity here because there are no grounds for it, no foundations in faith or conviction. The characters are aimless, without anchor in anything except their dreams of what they might have been (a nun, a concert pianist, a great Shakespearean actor) or what they might be (a great writer, a 210 Making It New: 1900–1945 success), and no forms of emotional rescue other than those offered by various narcotics – drugs, alcohol, poetry, the blanketing numbness of the fog. What they all long for is described when Edmund recalls his life as a seaman. At sea once, he remembers, he felt that he had “dissolved in the sea.” “For a second you see –,” he explains, “– and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!” “I belonged,” he insists, “within something greater than my own life ...to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.” But such moments of union are rare here. “The hand lets the veil fall,” Edmund concludes bitterly, “and you are alone, lost in the fog again.” That is the condition of the Tyrones, and the human condition in O’Neill’s plays. The secret of joy, losing oneself in “a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams,” is professed, if at all, only for a moment. Before and after, there is only waste and exile. O’Neill is essentially a religious writer without a religion. The power and pain of his best work is a measure of that paradox. Long Day’s Journey into Night achieves a tragic pathos precisely because it requires the audience both to see and share in the disintegration of the Tyrones: to recognize that they are “fog people,” stammering for something they can never possess, but also to share their need, feel compelled by their “native eloquence.” What is especially remarkable about this portrait of a family being borne towards extinction is how intricately O’Neill weaves the familial web. Like Faulkner, he believed that, as he has one of the characters say here, “the past is the present”; like Faulkner, too, he uses that belief to present the family as an elaborate network of blame and dependence, in which the family members both resist and rely on each other – feel isolated and betrayed, yet also feel an intense need to be with one another. The Tyrones are constantly accusing one another, blaming one another for the damage done to their own lives. They are also, constantly, relying on one another: not just for advice or assistance, nor even just for conversation or comfort, but to bolster their image of themselves through the rehearsal of shared memories and illusions – by seeing themselves, as they would like to be, in the mirror of the past or the gaze of a husband or wife, father or mother, son or a brother. Long Day’s Journey into Night represents a seminal moment in American theatre. An American family of ordinary means inspires the awe, the fear and pity, that used to be reserved for the special few, in traditional drama. It is also a key moment in American literary modernism. The insignificant life becomes here the significance of literature, the common the uncommon and even tragic.

Preview questions:

1. Why is Eugene O'Neill regarded as the father of modern American Drama?

2. Write a summary of O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey Into Night.