Masculinity Under Crisis

Eugene O’Neill had crafted more than fifty plays in his whole career,which bring him not only a national apotheosis but also a worldwide fame.With four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and one Nobel Prize in Literature,he is regarded as the father of modern American drama.However,since the late 20^thcentury,literary critics have shifted from an overwhelming admiration to critical reconsideration while commenting on O’Neill’s plays.They pointed out a main defect in O’Neill’s dramatic art,the lack of poetry,which is resulted from the playwright’s employment of the colloquial language.This attitude displays the modern belief in the prominence of language in the art of drama,which,anyway,has other critical and important elements apart from language since its ancient flourish.Action is such an elementary component for drama,especially for tragedies.The tragic actions in Eugene O’Neill’s plays,especially those violent ones,constitute an important origin for O’Neill’s dramatic significance.The tragic actions are carried out as means of defence when the individual honour is threatened by modern social system.In O’Neill’s plays,there is a large group of male characters,who are the main force in this defence.Supported by the honour code and the cowboy spirit,the males are extremely brave and tough.However,modern social system becomes the inescapable fate that dominates their life.They encounter various forms of violence from the social system,which range from interpersonal offence to institutional manipulation and to systemic discipline.The masculine identity is greatly challenged by these invisible forms of violence,which target directly at males’high sense of honour.Far from being cowards and driven by the cowboy toughness,they carry out violent actions to defend their personal honour.The interpersonal violence occurs among family members.The mother casts her maternal control upon her adolescent sons through an attachment system.The wife’s emotional ignorance sets her husband into deep loneliness and depression.The children’s abandonment makes their old father endure his last years in anger and agony.These forms of interpersonal offence greatly challenge the masculine dignity.The institutional violence is displayed through the manipulation of public institutions.The church enforces its divine violence upon male leaders,enforcing classification and stratification among individuals.The factory sucks male labor into the production line and employs various tricks to cover up its strict exploitation.The sanitarium reduces individuals into unified and emotionless puppets by depriving them of the basic emotional desires and comfort.The male autonomy is threatened by these institutions.The systemic violence comes along with the development of modern social system.Language,a necessary communication medium in social life,strictly disciplines males’defining and communicating activities.The spectacle produces a visual catharsis among citizens by displaying arranged and selected visual images.The spacial confinement adds limitations upon individual life through means of reduction and abstraction.These forms of discipline damage males’freedom from every corner of the individual life.These forms of violence are extremely destructive to man’s personal honour.With the high sense of honour and tough personalities,male characters carry out heroic actions to defend their masculinity.The adolescent sons drink prowess to fight back the maternal control.The husbands duel between split selves to escape the marital ignorance.The old fathers wander afar to regain the life power to combat children’s abandonment.The religious leaders are transformed into atheists and their carnival laughter shatters the divine violence.The proletarian workers carry out riots to combat the production violence.The recovered patients intrude into the sanitarium to despise the medical violence.Men keep in silence before linguistic discourses and carry out killings with arms to wipe out the linguistic discipline.The males pretend to be blind and go on self-exile to ignore the spectacle violence.They also break down the walls,which are symbols of spacial confinement,to dissipate the spatial violence.Their actions,fierce and violent,are defensive reactions instead of active attacks,aiming to defend their masculine dignity and also to set up their masculine identities.These actions set them in the opposite position with the social system,which will severely punish these rebellious males under moral and legal principles.These actions are destined to be failed,which is just the modern men’s tragedy depicted by O’Neill.As individual activities,these actions lead to failures.As an component of dramatic art,they are highly romantic and poetic.Their real power resides in the unbeatable hope from the individual heart after the clear recognition of the cruelty of modern life.Always maintaining hope for life is a powerful weapon to defend the masculine dignity for the males.These heroic actions help build the male characters into dramatic heroes and also establish O’Neill’s plays as great modern tragedies.