IN
O’NEILL’S “STRANGE INTERLUDE”
One
way of approaching the literature of the 1920’s is through its “newness.” It
was the emergence of the “new age” which expressed its “new” ideas in the New
Masses, The New Freewoman and the
American
drama attained a certain measure of maturity in the ’Twenties, especially with
the plays of O’Neill. Hitherto, the major attitude in the depiction of women
characters on the stage was rather flat and conventional. On the spectrum of
the images of women, at one extreme was the idealized virgin and, at the other,
the victim. In any case it was a sentimentalized rather than a sensitive
approach to woman that rendered her an unreal, lifeless non-entity. The “new
woman” came as a refreshing gush of fresh air replacing the cliched
notions of woman. Now, what is the “new woman”? The “new woman” is primarily a
rebel. She is an individual. She stands on her own, thinks for herself, finds
solutions to her problems and decides her own fate. No longer complacent, her
inherited timidity of spirit is overcome. She asserts her individuality
reiterating the fact that she is different from the rest. The dominant trait of
the “new woman” is then her search for self. Nina Leeds in O’Neill’s Strange
Interlude has all these qualities. She is a “new woman” but
there slowly emerges out of her personality, characteristics which one cannot
brand as exclusively “new.” These qualities in her are almost archetypal. Nina emerges
out of the “new woman” stereotype to become a vital, living character. Perhaps,
Mary in Philip Barry’s Paris Bound, Christina in Sidney Howard’s The
Silver Chord are sounder embodiments of the “new
woman” as such.
What
strikes one most on reading the Strange Interlude is the emergence of a
vital woman-consciousness such as had never taken place before. The entire
vision of the writer is filtered through the female protagonist’s point of
view. In so doing, O’Neill adds a new dimension to what, according to him,
constitutes the sickness of today. At the time when he was writing O’Neill
referred to it as “my woman play.” It appears that O’Neill sought to create a
character who would personify all women and not just the “new woman.” It is
worthwhile, however, to remember that O’Neill’s protagonists cannot be ruled
off into any rigid categories so that their futures are ascertainable. O’Neill
has a unique way of considering men and women that is rare among other
dramatists of the ’Twenties. His judgment of them is continuously suspended.
The introduction of the novelistic technique in Strange Interlude heightens
our awareness of the character to such a great extent that we get a glimpse of
the poignant ambivalence of the character protrayed.
The character of Nina Leeds develops until her “realistic actions acquire the
dimensions of an archetypal myth.” The very ambiguity of her position – her
typical and a-typical, individual and archetypal stances–suggests that this
play is written from the middle-ground of the human and actual. The play is a
saga of strange frustrated desires, guilt feelings, promiscuity, talent,
homosexuality, insanity, adultery, illegitimacy, neurotic motherhood with an
undercurrent of incestuous desire and emotional exhaustion. At the centre of this shifting vision of raw life is the
kaleidoscopic figure of Nina Leeds, “the author’s most fascinating and least
credible woman”.1 The characters are realized in dramatic depth by
the new technical innovation of the play which allows the characters to express
their inner state of mind, their conflicts of hidden human motives. This
frankness in the analysis of Nina Leeds helps O’Neill in presenting a woman not
cut in alabaster, but very much living and real.
The
play begins with World War I as a kind of a backdrop for the inner wars of the
characters. Nina’s aviator fiance, the omnipresent
Gordon Shaw, has been shot down just before the Armistice. Nina feels she has
been cheated; her world of illusions crashing with the death of Gordon. There awakens
in her a new awareness that the world of experience does not correspond to the
moral idealism which she had fostered. Nina, we must note, is the daughter of a
puritan, New-England professor. To the embattled self then
the father embodies the structured evil of the rigid puritanical force which forbid her, in the past, to give expression to her natural
self. While Nina represents the life-force, Prof. Leeds becomes the symbol of
the “denial and prevention of creation.” He is, according to Nina, “the professor
of Dead languages,” “a dead man” droning “dead” words with
“spiritless messages from the dead”2
(Italics mine). The recurrence of the word “dead” speaks forcefully of Nina’s
“will to live,” which ultimately turns out to be a kind of a blind force
mastering her life. Edwin Sapir summarized in the American
Mercury the “anti-Puritan revolt” of the 1920’s as a “generalized revolt
against everything that is hard, narrow and intolerant in the old American life
and which sees in sex repression its most potent symbol of attack”.3
Nina’s guilt and frustration lead to rebellion which is wild, explosive and
blind. Nina inhabits an absurd universe, and has an uncanny awareness of her
own responsibility for fostering and clinging to such illusions. Her “sickness”
is what Kierkegaard would call the “despair at
willing to be oneself.” For the first time in American drama we listen to a
woman telling us that despair, too, can be a way of life, but one must be bold
enough to embrace it and walk on, to assume responsibility of the falsehood in
one’s self, to carry destiny in one’s own hands. “It’s too late
For
lies!” Nina tells her father in a moment of awareness.
Even
from Nina’s frustration O’Neill extracts tragedy by exploiting the complexity
of the human dilemma. Nina’s growth is not a growth by plot nor by an obedience to any theatrical expectation, but a natural
movement which is inevitable. Nina throws overboard all authority. The collapse
of Nina’s traditional structure of beliefs makes her transvaluate
all values. After having made up her mind, when she proclaims her intention of
nursing soldiers who have been crippled by the war of sacrificing herself to
them, Prof. Leeds says, “You’re not yourself.” Nina’s reply is significant,
“No, I’m not myself yet. That’s just it. Not all myself. But I’ve been becoming
myself. And I must finish.” (Act I, Plays, p. 500) Nina’s declaration of
her sexual freedom is really a revolt against quite other than sex
restrictions. Her clamour against convention can be
explained in part as an expression of her need to acknowledge an individual
sense of guilt, and to experience evil. “At the root of all disease and sin is
a sense of guilt”, said Auden, and the cure is a
personal one; it consists in taking away the guilt feeling in the forgiveness
of sins, by confession, the re-living of the experience, and absolution, the
understanding of its significance.” 4
O’Neill’s
description of Nina in this scene reveals the image of a defiant woman: a woman
who is not only in revolt against the structured evil in society, but who is
also in search of some meaning in life. “Since Gordon’s death”, we are told,
“her defiant eyes” have a quality of continually shuddering
before some terrible enigma, of being wounded to their depths and made defiant
and resentful by their pain. Yet she is “strained, nerve-racked, hectic, a
terrible tension of will alone maintaining her self-possession” (Act I, Plays,
p. 495). Nina is shown in one of the two states of being. The first, and the dominant one that she reveals in the first
acts of the play is the “neurotic, tense-frustrated and vindictive.” The second
is contented, almost at peace, “filled with a current
of vitality flowing in her like the power of nature itself”.5 Nina’s
physical features are also indices of her personality traits. She has “broad,
square shoulders” capable of responsibility, “strong hips” suggesting her
innate sexuality, and “a firm jaw” reflecting individuality. There sounds a
cord of dissonance in her entire personality. There is something bewildering
about her which is so attractive and makes her so humanly interesting. She is
not just a representative of the “new woman”; Nina Leeds has gone beyond the
concept of the “new woman.”
The
central theme of Strange Interlude is Nina’s search for self, her
pursuit of happiness and her attempt at the avoidance of pain. Gordon’s death
threatens Nina with the problem of non-being. It spurs on the realization that
human life has no intrinsic meaning or order except the meaning that man
projects upon it. Nina puts a stay against the crumbling chaos in her life by
willing to live, by a self-flagellating puritanic
revolt against the puritanic faith:
Nina:
What use is my life to me or anyone? But I must make it of
use–by giving it! (Fiercely) I must learn to give myself ... give and give
until I can make that gift of myself for a man’s happiness without scruple,
without fear, without joy, when I’ve accomplished this I’ll have found myself,
I’ll know how to start in living my own life again.” (Act I, Plays, p.
500)
Nina
might sound very Indian with her fierce arguments of self-sacrifice. Actually,
she is not out to renounce herself; on the contrary, she craves to “live on.”
There is violence and self-mockery in her realization that she is “still Gordon’s
silly virgin”. There is a keen desire to live life intensely. Perhaps, Nina’s
tragic awareness of her sense of loss, her need to belong is the key to her
humanity. Her process of adaptation to the crisis–her promiscuity only results
in total disillusionment:
Nina:
(With a sad little laugh) ...
“No,
I was the blindest! I would not see! I knew it was a stupid morbid business,
that I was more maimed than they were, really, that the war had blown my heart
and insides out! (Act II, Plays, p. 527)
The symbolic motif of
her return to home heightens the irony of Nina’s desire to belong.
The
death of her father confirms the absurdity of the human situation. She realizes
the futility of all man’s efforts to belong. “How we poor monkeys hide from
ourselves behind the sounds called words!” The word has been emptied of its
meaning. Life is just a long drawn out “Lie” and even prayers are ineffectual.
In fact, Nina tries hard to pray to the modern God science, but finds it
difficult to believe how that God could care about the “trifling mystery of
death-born-of-birth.” Nina seeks to find a new meaning for life beyond despair:
Nina:
(Suddenly jumping to her feet and going to him with a
horrible moaning desolation) Oh, God ... I want to believe in something! I want
to believe so I can feel! I want to feel that he is dead – my father! ... ... I
can’t feel anything at all! (Act II, Plays, p. 525)
Nina’s
quarrel with God springs from a poignant sense of incongruity between life’s
reality and her own romantic conception of it. She is in search of a new
concept of morality which will give meaning to life. She creates a new concept
of God, the Mother:
Nina:
The mistake began when God was created in a male image. Of
course, women would see Him that way, but men should have been gentlemen
enough, remembering their mothers, to make God a woman! But the God of Gods –
the Boss – has always been a man. That makes life so perverted, and death so
unnatural. We should have imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God, the
Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children,
have inherited pain, for we would know that our life’s rhythm beats from Her
great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth. And we would feel that
death meant reunion with Her, a passing back into Her
substance, blood of Her blood again, peace of Her peace! (Act II, Plays, p.
524)
Nina’s
myth-making though poignant, does not lack irony, humour
and pathos. Nina sounds a note of despair that is ever so human that we forget
her naivette. This myth is both created and
identified with Nina Leeds. In Desire Under the
Elms we recall the myth of the Old Testament God which gave meaning to
Ephraim Cabot. Nina hopes to become “herself through motherhood. Ironically
enough, it is the Mother (Sam’s mother) that foils creativity. The complication
of insanity which leads to the abortion subtly inverts the created myth. It is
at this stage that Nina realizes that nobody is responsible for what is
happening to them. When Darrell tells her that he, somehow, feels responsible
for her unhappiness, she says: “No one is.” Nina’s words reflect that of Mary
Tyrone’s in Long Day’s Journey Into Night:
Mary:
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re
done before you realize it, and once they’ve done they make you do other
things, until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be,
and you’ve lost yourself forever.
There
is something in Nina which drives her on to “belong.” Nina’s attempt “to
discover and to belong to the force from which she takes her life, and the
attempt of her men to belong to the God in her, is at heart O’Neill’s primary
theme”. 6
O’Neill
is portraying a modern woman driven by the strange life-force in her
bloodstream to unconventional relationships and seeking multiple possession of men’s lives. The specific nature of Nina’s
problem is that she stands in an unsteady position between all her men. In the
fear of losing power over them she is nervous, fretful and discontented. In
creating a new image of women, O’Neill creates a new concept of power. Gordon
was for Nina the symbol of a redeeming figure representing the ideal husband,
lover and father. This trinity is no longer attainable in one man. Nina seeks
it through her three men. She marries Sam not for love, but with the reasoning
that “when children come, love comes.” After her abortion she decides to sleep
with Darrell in a bold experiment to produce a healthy child, ostensibly for
Sam’s happiness. Her child is conceived in “scientific” planning: Nina and Ned
becoming guinea pigs in the experiment. In this scene, one also notices that
Nina’s decision to have a baby is only apparently an act of will. It is as if
she is moved by something outside her (the words of Sam’s mother ring in our
ears) in such a way that she is somehow stripped of her responsibility, of her
will. Nina’s voice takes on a “monotonous insistence” and Darrell assumes “a
cold emotionless professional voice, his face like the mask of a doctor” (Act
IV, Plays, p.567). A sharp dichotomy of their personalities occurs, and they
enact roles of “Sam’s wife” and “Doctor.” A kind of scientific detachment
occurs when they come to a decision. This hypnotic trance is,
however, broken by Ned: “I must confess the Ned you are speaking of is I, and I
am Ned.” To which she replies, “and I am Nina, who
wants her baby.” Here, “the role and the reality of both join as the decision
is made.” Nina, who has freed herself from all outward authority, is trapped by
the authority within herself, Strange Interlude is
certainly concerned with the need of the female to have multiple male
relationships for no one relationship is presented as creative or satisfying.
She continues as Sam’s wife and Darrell’s mistress and in addition forms a
daughter-father relationship with Charles Marsden.
Nina
says in the quintessential scene:
Nina
(more and more strangely triumphant): My three men! … I feel their desires
converge in me! ... to form one complete beautiful
male desire which I absorb ... and am whole ... they dissolve in me, their life
is my life ... I am pregnant with the three! ... husband!
... lover! ... father! ... and the fourth man! ... little man!
... little Gordon! … he is
mine too! … that makes it perfect! ... (Act VI, Plays,
p. 616)
The complexity of
relationships presented here makes the play the opposite of Welded, where
an absolute one-to-one union is the ideal. It is only Marsden
who, the most feminine of them, senses what has happened, that Nina has
“strange devious intuitions that tap the hidden currents of life” which have
entrapped each and which makes her child “the child of our three loves for
her.” It is also significant that the woman now is the God-force, and in
finding her, the man can achieve a sense of belonging he can obtain
where else in life. Nina’s general attitude to marriage is far from
conventional; she has freed herself from her traditional status by refusing to
cater to the traditional notion of womanhood created by men, in which their
true feelings and personalities were disregarded and denied. In this scene Nina
embodies the quintessential woman or “the eternal feminine”, what Goethe called
“das ewige Weibliche.” What
distinguishes this play is its groping, smoldering passionate sincerity which
is so intense, relentless and mysterious. Nina has been acting out successively
various roles that exhibit major aspects of woman. The play “rationalizes her
development from idealistic virgin to self-sacrificing wanton to dutiful wife
to a devouring kind of Earth Mother”.7 The
above scene seems incredible, realistically speaking. The language even seems
puerile. However, “the quality of subconscious realism triumphs over conscious
reality and the interweaving of these twin realities produce a dramatic
myth...”8 She is a kind of a goddess who encompasses the functions
of daughter, wife, mother, mistress and superwoman whom all men find attractive
and whose needs no single man is capable of fulfilling. Nina’s extreme will to
power is manifested in her need of all her men. Sam represents status and
material security for her; creative power is represented by Darrell:
while Charles fulfils her; emotional and psychological need of a father figure.
In the quintessential scene Nina feels triumphant because she has supreme power
over all her men.
One
of the themes of the play is the instability of human relationships and the errosive workings of time. Nina’s felicity cannot last
long. The lover breaks off and exists as an old friend; the husband dies
(though not out of insanity); the son must grow up, marry and lead his own
life. Nina is left only with “the good, old Charlie” to “rot away in peace.”
The triumph of Act VI is replaced by “these men make me sick!...I
hate all three of them!” (Act VII) In Nina Leeds O’Neill presents the ultimate
in self and social alienation, she is the “masochistic product of modern
rationalistic probing”, she attempts to possess people’s lives, as if she were
“god and had created them.” (Act VIII, Plays, p. 650) Her exercise in
personal divinity had made her boast once “I am a Mother...God is a Mother.”
The tragic self-recognition puts an end to Nina’s godhead. The tragic tension
between her need to give and her need to receive is over, because of her
growing awareness of the limitations of the self:
Nina:
My having a son was failure, wasn’t it? He couldn’t give me happiness...The
sons of the Father have all been failures: Failing they died for us, they flew
away to other lives, they could not stay with us, they
could not give us happiness! (Act. IX, Plays, p.
681)
Nina’s
recognition of this fact enables her to give her son freedom in a supreme act
of stoical self-sacrifice. Self-assertion had only given her pain. Here is
charity in her act of freeing her son. She has passed through all the stages of
eros, psyche to agape and caritas. She realizes her
fault, the “unpardonable sin”.
Nina:
And I forgive you Father. It was all your fault in the
beginning, wasn’t it? You mustn’t ever meddle with human lives again. (Act
VIII, Plays, p. 662)
At
the end of the play, all passions spent, Nina discovers a mutual equation of
love and rest and peace with Charles Marsden. Like
Shaw’s Methusalites, both have “passed beyond desire
to become pure vortices of memory.” A subverbal
communion has been built over the years, underneath the tides of passion and
the cataclysms of unhappiness that each has wallowed in. Marsden
feels that some kind of a timeless, indefinable yet genuine relationship has
been achieved between them, while all the other relationships in the play are
completely fluid and unstable. Peace descends at the end because the struggle
against time has been abandoned. The human heart is no longer in conflict with
itself. A kind of stasis overtakes us at the end of the play. Nina has passed
beyond desire, and Marsden is a neuter gender. The pace
that comes at the end is not merely physical. There is something more to it.
Nina has passed beyond the will to power. It is a significant observation of
Lawson that “while Ibsen presents emotions as a means
of salvation, O’Neill can find no salvation outside of religion. The Strange
Interlude is not a theologically oriented drama of souls. What one must
understand, however, is that emotion is here depicted as negative, working in
man’s own heart to accomplish his destruction. Nina clings to the will to
belief, but there is no room for “will.” Nina is faced with a tragic universe
and is unable to support it with her whole strength of the intellect or
the emotion. Her pride gives way to powerlessness. Having passed beyond power
and desire Nina is now capable of humility. Extreme powerlessness is virtue.
Nina:
(with a strange smile) Strange Interlude! Yes, our lives are merely strange
dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father! ...
You’re so restful, Charlie, I feel as if I were a girl again and you were my
father... I wonder is our old garden the same? ... It will be a comfort to get
home, to be old and to be home again at last – to be in love with peace
together – to love each other’s peace – to sleep with peace together! .. to die in peace! I’am so
contentedly weary with life! (Act IX, Plays, pp. 681-82)
If
Nina Leed’s attainment of peace is a kind of a stale
finale, it is because the struggle is over, because Nina’s “fighting,
willing-living “is also over. That may explain the phrase “to rot away in
peace.” It is not the dramatists to give clear-cut solutions All O’Neill’s
plays have this kind of a tentative conclusion – a momentary stay against
confusion. The Hairy Ape, we are told, “perhaps, belongs.” And if we find
difficulty with his plays’ endings it is because we search for an answer, when
there is none. The peace that Nina attains can, perhaps, be explained by
reference to O’Neill’s mysticism. O’Neill had always been drawn by the idea of
mysterious forces beyond the individual life of man. When O’Neill and Terry
Carlin first came to
1
Louis Sheaffer.
O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973) P.240.
2
Eugene O’Neil.
Strange Interlude in Nine Plays (New York, Random House, Inc., 1952) P.
497. Later references have been incorporated in the text of the paper.
3
4 Hoffman,
’Twenties, P. 235.
5
Travis Bogard.
Contour in Time: The Plays of
6
Bogard.
Contours m Time. P.314.
7
Sheaffer.
Son and Artist. P. 241.
8 Carpenter. Eugene O’Neill.
P.127
9
Doris Alexander; Tempering.
p. 216