Eugene O’Neill
Points of Departure
Critical Assessment
• Literary critics and theatre historians
generally place O’Neill at the forefront of
American dramatists.
Experimental Drama
• O’Neill experimented with realism,
naturalism, expressionism, comedy,
tragedy, and myth
• Brings psychological realism to the stage,
highly influenced by Freud and Jung
• O’Neill sought to deal with man’s inner strengths
and his subconscious and quickly found, like the
naturalists, that realism failed to probe deeply
enough.
• Thus, Expressionism became a major technique,
complementing his earlier naturalistic bent.
• O’Neills experimented with monologue, trilogies,
symbolism, divided characters, and masks.
Expressionism
• Definition: This is an early 20th century art movement
which held sway from about 1905-1940. It is a style
which intends not to reproduce a subject accurately,
that is objectively, but instead seeks to portray the
subject in such a way as to express the inner state of
the artist. Practictioners of Expressionism sought to
convey the artist's subjective expression of inner
feelings above objective observations.
• The movement is especially associated with
Germany, and was influenced by such emotionallycharged styles as Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism.
Expressionism in Literature
• Expressionism, in a literary sense, is often seen
as a revolt against the realism and naturalism of
the previous generation. Expressionist writers
sought to achieve a psychological or spiritual
reality rather than an objective reality recorded
objectively in logical sequence
• Expressionism in literature arose as a reaction
against materialism, complacent bourgeois
prosperity, rapid mechanization and
urbanization,
• “In forging a drama of social protest, Expressionist
writers aimed to convey their ideas through a new style.
Their concern was with general truths rather than with
particular situations, hence they explored in their plays
the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather
than of fully developed individualized characters.
Emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which is
merely sketched in and barely defined in place or time,
but on the internal, on an individual's mental state; hence
the imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by
the ecstatic evocation of states of mind”.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Characteristics of Expressionism
• In painting the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes,
and disjointed space
•
inner feelings expressed through a distorted rendition of reality
•
distortion and exaggeration used for emotional effect
•
reflect the artists‘ or characters’ state of mind rather than the reality of
the external world.
•
tends to dwell on the darker, more sinister aspects of the human
psyche
Some Points of Departure
• In what ways, is Elmer Rice’s play, “The
Adding Machine”, expressionistic?
The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice is a funny and terrifying look at the
dehumanization of society in the technocratic age.
Points of Departure
• Written in 1922, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine
represents one of the earliest works of American
expressionistic drama. What is the life of Rice’s
protagonist like? As the name suggests, Mr. Zero is a
nothing. He is at once every man and no man, caught up
as a cog in the great social machine of conformity and
adherence. Are we merely cogs- sorts of automatons
with no hope of liberation from the roles society has
given us? Or is there more to humanity? How can we
escape the machine and become true individuals?
These are just a few of the questions explored in Elmer
Rice’s The Adding Machine.
(http://waynesweb.ualr.edu/Expressionism/ExpressionisticTheatre.htm
The Trial Scene from The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice
Points of Departure
What’s the significance of names in the play? Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones
What is the significance of the setting?
How is the play structured and why?
What is the significance of the costuming and the disintegration and ultimate
disrobing of Brutus Jones?
In what ways does O’Neill use expressionism in his early plays? Where and
how do you see it functioning in “The Emperor Jones”?
In what ways does “Emperor Jones” present the conflict between good and
evil?
In what ways does the play present “the illusion of reality”? How does O’Neill
present illusion in the drama?
Consider the ways in which O’Neill uses day/night, sunlight/moonlight,
reality/illusion
How does memory function in “Emperor Jones”?
How does O’Neill move beyond Brutus Jones’ illusions to discussion of ideas of
the “collective unconsciouss”?
More Points of Departure
• Jones runs in a circle. Smithers sees in this only a simple fact, but
can one say that the symmetry is meaningful? Do you think it is
appropriate, for instance, to see in it a return to our inarticulate and
mysterious origin? Explain.
• If you don’t recall the time scheme of the play, look again to see at
what time of day the play begins and at what time it ends. What do
you make out of this structure?
• The Emperor Jones has eight scenes, a large number for a short
play. What is the effect of so large a number? After all, the six
central, expressionistic scenes between the realistic opening and
closing scenes could, with a little rewriting, have been one long
scene, but O’Neill chose to put the material into six scenes. Why?
Hint: expressionistic drama often uses lots of scenes—but why?
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_drama/o'neill.html
• "Sometimes these (O'Neill's major works) involve what appears to
be a criticism of society. Sometimes they make use of a Freudian
pattern. But at their most successful, they are tragic, rather than
either sociological or psychological, because at the bottom the
problem is, always, not what O'Neill himself has called the problem
of man's relation with man, but the problem of man's relation to
something outside himself, to that something to which he must
"belong" if he is to feel himself more than the cleverest of the apes."
Discuss with specific references to the plays.
• "The essence of O'Neill's dramatic output is the grim futility of
human existence, cursed by alienation from self, society, and the
Source-of-all-life, and made bearable only by illusion." - William R.
Thurman. Do you agree? Discuss with reference to his plays.
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/oneill.html
Emperor Jones’ descent into madness, from an azure-tinted hallucination sequence.