EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE LANGUAGES OF MODERNISM

It has become a critical commonplace that Eugene O'Neill turned American theater away from its tradition of popular melodrama and toward the mainstream of modern dramatic ideas and style by introducing to it naturalistic plots and settings, Freudian and Jungian themes and expressionistic staging. His late plays, often hailed as triumphs of realism, carry forward into the twentieth century the complexity of Ibsen's realism and Strindberg's expressionism. His tendency to embrace several seemingly contradictory ideas contributes to this complexity, for example, his continued fascination with melodrama's implications of romance even as he experiments with realistic and later expressionistic perspectives. His language, the subject of much critical debate, reflects this complexity of style, but the contribution made by his language to the new modern theater movement he helped establish has been undervalued, even neglected and scorned. Too often judged solely from a realistic perspective and thus found discordant, repetitive and unnatural, O'Neill's language, nonetheless, reflects the experimental nature of his drama no less emphatically than other aspects of his plays so often praised. Rather than challenge the conventions of dramatic language with a language radically different from that of his melodramatic predecessors, O'Neill follows the path taken by Joyce and others of creating something new, not from whole cloth, but from the remnants of other forms, from, in fact, the mixture and juxtaposition of forms. Thus, his language often comes to represent a simultaneous juxtaposition of the language of melodrama, naturalism and expression, a collision of styles which places O'Neill within the shifting confines of modernism.; The introductory chapter locates O'Neill in the modernist tradition, associating his rejection of melodrama with modernism's movement away from romance toward realism. Like other modernists, however, O'Neill constructs new forms out of the fragments of the tradition he seems to overturn. Thus, the melodramatic perspective continues to operate, along with that of realism and, later, expressionism, as is evident in the persistent juxtaposition in his work of the language features which characterize those perspectives. In modernist fashion, O'Neill refuses to replace the old romantic language of melodrama with one authoritative new language, preferring instead to try out a series of dynamic alternatives suggestive of the ongoing struggle for expression in a world where no language is any longer necessarily expressive of total reality. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI...