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Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy

Name: Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy
Author: Stephen A. Black
ISBN: 9780300093995

by Stephen A. Black

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Overview

Within little more than three years of the opening of his first successful play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill endured the deaths of his father, mother, and brother. These devastating losses plunged the young playwright into a period of guilt and profound mourning that consumed two decades of his life. In this enlightening critical biography, deeply informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, Stephen Black presents a new understanding of Eugene O'Neill's life (1888-1953), from his troubled childhood and adolescence through a glacially slow period of mourning for his family to his ultimate emergence from the preoccupation with grief and loss that had pervaded his life and his writings. Black argues that O'Neill consciously and deliberately used playwriting as a medium of self-psychoanalysis-an endeavor that led to the creation of some of the finest American plays ever written and, eventually, to a successful therapeutic outcome.
Through close analysis of O'Neill's plays and literary writings, some five thousand surviving letters, other personal documents, and accounts of people who knew him, Black reaches new conclusions about important aspects of the playwright's life and work. He follows the slow course of O'Neill's mourning by studying the many grieving characters in O'Neill's plays, and when at last the playwright accepts his losses and moves on, his characters do likewise. The changed tone and form of O'Neill's final plays, including Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten, reflect the playwright's psychological and artistic growth and his hard-won victory over mourning and tragedy.

Synopsis

Within little more than three years of the opening of his first successful play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill endured the deaths of his father, mother, and brother. These devastating losses plunged the young playwright into a period of guilt and profound mourning that consumed two decades of his life. In this enlightening critical biography, deeply informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, Stephen Black presents a new understanding of Eugene O'Neill's life (1888-1953), from his troubled childhood and adolescence through a glacially slow period of mourning for his family to his ultimate emergence from the preoccupation with grief and loss that had pervaded his life and his writings. Black argues that O'Neill consciously and deliberately used playwriting as a medium of self-psychoanalysis—an endeavor that led to the creation of some of the finest American plays ever written and, eventually, to a successful therapeutic outcome.
Through close analysis of O'Neill's plays and literary writings, some five thousand surviving letters, other personal documents, and accounts of people who knew him, Black reaches new conclusions about important aspects of the playwright's life and work. He follows the slow course of O'Neill's mourning by studying the many grieving characters in O'Neill's plays, and when at last the playwright accepts his losses and moves on, his characters do likewise. The changed tone and form of O'Neill's final plays, including Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten, reflect the playwright's psychological and artistic growth and his hard-won victory over mourning and tragedy.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association - Eric J. Nuetzel

The major strength of Black's portrait is his description of O'Neill's maturation as an artist... . This fascinating biography will be of interest to anyone concerned with the life of Eugene O'Neill, tragic drama, theater history, or the problems of applied psychoanalysis.

About the Author, Stephen A. Black

Stephen A. Black is professor of English at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, and a trained psychoanalytic therapist.

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Editorials

Eric J. Nuetzel

Wendy Smith

[This book contains] a wealth of fresh insights... . The entire thrust of this sensitive book is that O'Neill's art gave him the means to transcend his pain. Because Black has delineated the healing powers of that magical process so fully, readers will feel O'Neill's agony over its loss all the more keenly.
— Washington Post Book World

Wendy Smith

Black's persuasive argument that in these masterful works "the playwright had passed beyond mourning and tragedy" makes the grim chronicle of O'Neill's last years, consumed by a mysterious nervous disorder that prevented him from writing, almost bearable. But not quite. The entire thrust of this sensitive book is that O'Neill's art gave him the means to transcend his pain. Because Black has delineated the healing powers of that magical process so fully, readers will feel O'Neill's agony over its loss all the more keenly.
— Washington Post Book World

Publishers Weekly

Black, a professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and a psychoanalytic therapist, clearly states his central thesis in a prefatory chapter. "O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning," Black argues; his plays were the vehicles through which the playwright explored his tortured relationships with his father, mother and brother, and came to terms with their deaths, which all occurred in a devastating three-year period at the beginning of O'Neill's career. While this premise may sound simplistic, Black's examination of its manifestations in O'Neill's art is rich and complex. With his guidance, plays like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude reveal the dramatist's intense interest in (and use of) Freudian theories, making Black's psychoanalytically oriented approach appropriate. Yet the author does not insist on that approach as the only one; indeed, he makes a cogent case for the tragic worldview O'Neill (1888-1953) imbibed from Greek drama as a means by which the playwright developed a more objective view of his family and shed some of his guilt over the pain he inflicted on them. In his stimulating consideration of the late plays (Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten), which he believes contain strong comic elements usually ignored, Black paints a moving portrait of an artist who "had passed beyond mourning and tragedy." His thoughtful and provocative analysis does not supersede Louis Sheaffer's magnificent two-volume biography (O'Neill: Son and Playwright, 1968; O'Neill: Son and Artist, 1973), nor does it tell the whole story. Nonetheless, Black offers many fresh insights into the great American dramatist's life and work. 40 illus. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

One could ask, Do we need yet another biographical study of O'Neill? What can be left to say, especially given the exhaustive studies by Louis Sheaffer (O'Neill: Son and Artist and O'Neill: Son and Playwright, both AMS Press, 1988. reprints), among others? Black, a trained psychoanalytic therapist and English professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, demonstrates convincingly that there is indeed more to say. Using material from the Sheaffer-O'Neill Collection at the Shain Library at Connecticut Coll. as his springboard, Black offers a psychoanalytic framework to explore his thesis that much of O'Neill's work is the "work of mourning." He points to O'Neill's having had encounters with psychoanalysts in the 1920s and having considered his work a form of self-psychoanalysis. Closely analyzing some 5000 letters, the plays, other personal documents, and accounts by people who knew him, Black follows O'Neill's course of mourning. That O'Neill had a successful therapeutic outcome is shown in such plays as Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and larger public libraries.--Susan L. Peters, Emory Univ. Lib., Atlanta Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.