TESIS DOCTORAL FAMILY AS FATE IN EUGENE O'NEILL AND SAM SHEPARD

243 Pages·2013·1.51 MB·English

UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA

Departamento de Filología Inglesa II

TESIS DOCTORAL

La familia como destino Eugene O'Neill y Sam Shepard

MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR

PRESENTADA POR

James William Flath

Directores

Félix Martín Gutiérrez
Gustavo Sánchez Canales

Madrid, 2014

© James William Flath, 2013
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
Departamento de Filología Inglesa II

TESIS DOCTORAL

LA FAMILIA COMO DESTINO
EN EUGENE O’NEILL Y SAM SHEPARD

James William Flath

Madrid, 2013

Directores:

Dr. Félix Martín Gutiérrez
Dr. Gustavo Sánchez Canales

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Preface and acknowledgments
This dissertation represents a culmination of work, reading and learning that has taken
place over the past few years. I first became interested in the plays of Eugene O’Neill
when I was an undergraduate in the United States. I came upon playwright Sam Shepard
much later but from the beginning the similarities between the two struck me as uncanny.
What moved me particularly was the way each playwright portrayed the time-honored
American institution of the Family and how both focused on the idea that I’ve come to
refer to as “family as fate.” I began to ask myself, why did these playwrights write such
gut-wrenchingly harrowing portrayals of the family? To exorcise their own ghosts? To
come to terms with themselves? But even more compelling is the question why are we so
attracted to these plays? What do we see in these plays? Ourselves, our nation?
I began my research to see if anyone had devoted a full-scale study to this
phenomenon and discovered that others had also noticed the similarities but none had done
as in-depth a study as I wished to do. To carry my research out, I decided to take the
approach of a comparative analysis with a diachronic focus. I soon realized that this type of
approach is not without its difficulties and pitfalls yet felt that the rewards far outweighed
the adversities. When attempting to compare two writers it is easy to get trapped by just
one of them or to become so enthusiastic about your approach that you see parallels
everywhere even where they might not actually be. However, when the study is narrowed
down and focused, the gains are immense.
I feel that this type of analysis and that the work put forward in this dissertation will
be of great help to those interested in a number of different fields of interest that include
not only American drama but the American family, Modernism, Postmodernism, tragedy
and tragicomedy as well. In addition, this type of analysis can help to fill in some of the
gaps in literary studies in the sense that it provides more complete ideas about the plays
studied as literary works and can also shed light on the work and trajectories of both
playwrights and lead to a richer and deeper understanding of their dramatic works. Finally,
I hope it will inspire others to carry out more analytically comparative studies of other
writers.
In writing this dissertation I have had indispensable collaboration from a number of
people. In am greatly indebted to Dr. Ana Antón-Pacheco Bravo, who was the first to
support my efforts and encourage me, and without whom I may never have discovered the
works of Sam Shepard or have found the right footing. I am equally grateful to Dr. Félix
Martín Guitiérrez for taking me on and for his wise and valuable suggestions. I feel a
special gratitude to Dr. Gustavo Sánchez Canales for his unstinting faith and inestimable
help.
Among others to whom I feel a special gratitude is the staff at the libraries at the
University of South Florida in Sarasota and Tampa along with friends and colleagues in
America for their friendship, input, comments and suggestions throughout the years. For
other valuable help I am indebted to several colleagues at the CES Felipe II in Aranjuez as
well as at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Finally, I take the opportunity to express my gratitude to my wife, Emma and my
family for their love, unfailing encouragement and support. I would like to dedicate this
dissertation to my parents, who unfortunately are no longer with us.
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INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 4 
1   FAMILY IN THE AMERICAN VEIN ............................................................ 10 
1.1  Eugene O’Neill: Family as Burden .................................................................................................. 13 
1.2   Sam Shepard: Family as Trap ......................................................................................................... 25 
Notes: ............................................................................................................................................................... 54 
2   DANGLING BETWEEN MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM .............. 59 
2.1   Eugene O’Neill and Modernism ...................................................................................................... 63 
2.2  Sam Shepard and the Urgency of Theatricality .............................................................................7 1 
Notes: ............................................................................................................................................................... 75 
3   TRAGEDY AND TRAGICOMEDY: BREAKING GENERIC BOUNDARIES 77 
3.1   Eugene O’Neill: The Classical Tradition Revisited........................................................................ 83 
3.2   Sam Shepard: The Classical Tradition Challenged ..................................................................... 123 
Notes: ............................................................................................................................................................. 145 
4  THE POSTMODERN MOMENT ................................................................. 149 
4.1  Sam Shepard: (Post?)Modernism .................................................................................................. 156 
Notes: ............................................................................................................................................................. 186 
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 190 
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 205 

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INTRODUCTION

Writing or talking about the family rarely produces indifference and many have provided
their thoughts on the matter throughout history. Since the Ancient Greeks until the present
century much of the greatest literature and art is based on family. Another common topic is
that of how family shapes and breeds a person’s character. It was Heraclitus (c. 535-c. 475
BCE) who said the “a man’s character is his fate” and it was Sophocles (c. 496-c.406 BCE)
who showed the ineluctability of trying to avoid one’s fate. More recently Mary Renault
(1905-1983) wrote that “[g]o with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.”
Hence the title of this dissertation, “Family as Fate.” For better or worse family is fate and
family breeds character because normally a person cannot choose his/her family. Though
usually attributed to French Abbot Jacques De Lille (1738-1813), many use the expression
“fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends” to describe this very difference between
family and friends. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) put it into comical nutshell when
she wrote that “[w]ith him for a sire and her for a dam,/What should I be but just what I
am?”
As explained in the previous paragraph, family has been a constant throughout the
history of mankind in general and the history of drama in particular. The plays of Eugene
O’Neill (1888-1953) and Sam Shepard (1943) are not an exception in this respect and we
can safely say that a large amount of their best work is precisely devoted to family. Both
playwrights wrote early experimental plays about the family and then later on in their
careers turned to a more intimate look through the prism of dramatic realism.
Much has been written about O’Neill and Shepard, the two dramatists under study
in this dissertation. Sheila Rabillard (1993), Jim McGhee (1993) and William Demastes
(1996, 2002) have devoted attention to realist and fantastic elements, whereas critics like
John Orr (1989, 1991) Vanden Heuvel (1991), Stephen Watt (1998), Joel Pfister (1995),
Christopher Bigsby (2000, 2002) and Carol Rosen (2004) have studied their work from a
modernist and/or postmodernist point of view. In addition, the use of language has been
extensively studied by critics like Jean Chothia (1979, 1998), Bonnie Marranca (1981),
Michael Manheim (1982), Deborah Geis (1993) and Thomas Adler (2002). Moreover, the
use of time has also been explored by Laurin Porter (1988, 1993), Jeannete Malkin (1992,
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1999) and John Raleigh (1988). Psychoanalytic studies have also been made by critics like
Patrick Nolan (in Di Mauro 1993 [1981]), Luther Luedtke (1989) and William Kleb
(1998), as well as studies devoted to the influence of European—e.g. Shakesperean,
Chekhovian, Strindbergian, Racinian—drama on (contemporary) American drama like
Travis Bogard (1972), Murray Hartman (in Di Mauro 1993 [1961]), Jay Ronald Meyers (in
Di Mauro 1993 [1967]), John Patrick Diggins (2007), Doris Alexander (1992, 2005) and
the influence of classical Greek drama on American dramatists like Peter Hays (1990),
Richard Sewall (1991), Bennet Simon (1993) and Sophus Keith Winther (in Di Mauro
1993 [1960]).
The basic aim of this dissertation is to show how two American playwrights,
Eugene O’Neill and Sam Shepard, wrote about this idea of the family as fate, both
artistically and personally. Although as explained below both O’Neill and Shepard
approach the issue of family relationships differently, both dramatists eventually reach a
similar conclusion: tradition as well as family are inescapable and must be dealt with.
On the one hand, I will approach O’Neill’s drama from an autobiographical
viewpoint and will attempt to show how he resorts to classical Greek drama like Euripides,
among others. In this sense, he was endeavoring to infuse the American family with tragic
overtones in order to show that in America the past also shapes what happens in the
present. Not only is this present in Desire under the Elms and Long Day’s Journey to Night
but is also present in his earlier works as well. On the other hand, I will analyze Shepard’s
plays with a similar focus in order to demonstrate that his intention is to break with that
tradition so beloved by O’Neill and other American playwrights. Rather than use classical
references to tradition, Shepard worked more with a countercultural focus and when
resorting to tradition he did so in a more postmodern way using tradition to subvert the
portrayal of a more postmodern family in which the past has been reduced to fragments
that are impossible to string together in a coherent fashion. Although the settings, themes,
and characters of the family plays vary in Shepard and O’Neill, one dramatic element that
remains constant in each is the presence of a young man haunted by unresolved ties to
family and personal heritage. Though attempts to evade this past are doomed to failure in
both playwrights, their approach will be different.
Such a comparative study is not without its pitfalls and inevitably is prone to a
certain degree of overlap and several passages and ideas may be repeated in another
chapter. For example, how both playwrights deal with memory and the past, or the
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relationship between fathers and sons have to do not only with their approach and
interpretations of the notions of tragedy/tragicomedy, but point as well as to the nature of
just what defines Modernism and Postmodernism, which are treated separately but are also
subject to the same overlap.
In the first part of this dissertation, I will attempt to demonstrate that O’Neill’s
drama is mixed with the more classic traditions of myth, concentrating on the strong
influence/presence of classical themes and archetypes as found in the plays of Greek
dramatists like Aeschylus and Euripides, among others. This comparative study, which will
allow me to show the interconnectedness between past and present, aims at exploring the
tension and decay at work beneath the surface of American families and to a certain extent
of America itself. Probably, the clearest example of O’Neill’s sense of connectedness to
something—religion, history, family, tradition—is found in Desire under the Elms. There
seems to be some sort of presence haunting the Cabot farm in this work and making the
family members behave in a certain way. Whether it be Eben’s dead mother or something
else, what becomes clear by the play’s end is that there is a fate compelling the characters
forward. On the other hand, his strongest and perhaps best play, Long Day’s Journey into
Night, can be read as a lament for a past that has influenced the present yet can no longer
be grasped. Each of the characters is driven to confront a past that no longer has any clear
referents.
Conversely, Shepard, who also addresses the theme of (the) family, places more
emphasis on its purely biological aspect. The key difference between both dramatists is
that Shepard, unlike O’Neill, attempts to break away from the family at the beginning of
his career. His early plays underscore the wish or the need to show a break with the family
and by extension with tradition (e.g. The Rock Garden and The Holy Ghostly). Probably
for this reason, his earlier plays use many countercultural elements of popular culture and
show a much more secular approach than those of O’Neill. A clear example of this is the
early play The Rock Garden, a one-act play with three scenes written when he was 21
years old. A young man is depicted in a number of minimalistic, disjunctive actions
involving a sister, mother, and father. Communication between them is all but impossible
as they lean more on clichés than normal conversation. The atmosphere borders on the
claustrophobic. In the first scene, a boy and girl and their father sit wordlessly at a table
until the girl spills a glass of milk. In the second, the boy brings his mother glasses of water
while she talks aimlessly about the weather. In the third, the boy and his father sit around
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in their underwear. The father begins to talk about rock gardens and the young man falls
out of his chair three times and finally responds with a graphic description of his sexual
experiences. After five minutes, the play ends with the father falling out of his chair.1
Although the issue of family disintegration is a common theme to both dramatists,
it is more acute in Shepard than in O’Neill. If one assumes that one of the givens of the
postmodern age includes the phenomenon of fragmentation or disintegration and a loss or
absence of significant and unifying rules, then one is entitled to claim that Shepard, just as
much or even more than O’Neill, uses the family as a symbol of the fragmentation and
disintegration of America. Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child
(1979) are plays that go beyond a mere criticism of the moral and physical disintegration
of the American family towards a more earnest investigation of just what it means to be a
member of a family and how the crushing force of heredity can motivate personal
behavior.
The idea of family as a symbol of fragmentation and disintegration in O’Neill is
probably best exemplified in Chapter One, “Family in the American Vein.” It is commonly
known that, for years, Eugene O’Neill had thought of writing a drama based on one of the
Greek tragedies but set in America and embodying present-day concepts and insights. The
play was Mourning Becomes Electra. Based on the play on The Oresteian Trilogy by
Aeschylus, he indeed chose to “update” a play which depicts, once again, the struggle at
the core of family life. However, this dissertation focuses more on O’Neill’s Desire under
the Elms, his first foray into the use of classical myth due to its similarities with Shepard’s
work.
One last aspect to be looked at in depth is a concern with the past and memory,
another cornerstone for both playwrights. In his late plays like The Iceman Cometh and
Long Day’s Journey into Night, among others, O’Neill finally managed to embed the
principles of Greek tragedy within otherwise naturalistic plays. In this way, he could
realize his lifelong goal of dramatizing man and his struggle with the past. One of the
changes in his plays is that the action in the late plays, unlike in his early plays, is
retrospective and there is a move in them toward an unmasking.
Unlike O’Neill, whose characters seem to follow a more classical structure in terms
of time and space, Shepard’s characters have a totally different concept or notion of time.
As we shall see in Long Day’s Journey into Night, the Tyrone family past has effected the
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present of every member of the family. The past for them existed at one time and although
their memories of it might differ, it can be conjured up albeit under the effects of alcohol
and morphine. Shepard’s characters, on the other hand, often seem to be attempting to
deny time and to live without it. There is a desire for the past to remain in the present and
in the memory as a physical, concrete and lasting entity. As will be shown, in Shepard’s
Buried Child, Dodge attempts to convince Shelley that photographs she has seen of him in
his house when he was younger are not the real thing and the past “never happened.” The
real thing is him, right now sitting in front of her. In the case of Buried Child, this
inevitably leads to instances of a lack of a common memory in characters like Vince and
Shelly. This leads to what some have referred to as “disrecocogniton” and “todayism” in
Shepard’s character. (Respectively, Orr 1991 and DeRose 1992)
This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Each chapter begins with a general
Introduction or overview of the issue addressed and followed by an analysis of two O’Neill
plays and two Shepard plays. For reasons of space, I will only analyze O’Neill’s Long
Day’s into Night and Desire under the Elms and Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class and
Buried Child.
Chapter One, “Family in the American Vein,” gives a brief overview of how the
family has been treated in American drama and how the notion of family as fate is a
continuum in American drama. The reasons for including O’Neill and Shepard are looked
into particularly through the four plays mentioned above.
Chapter Two, “Dangling Between Modernism and Postmodernism,” explores the
very nature of the Modernism/Postmodernism debate and shows that O’Neill can be said to
have been working in a modernist idiom and Shepard in a postmodern idiom and
overlapping of the two modes occurs, which makes for some of the richest and most
exciting plays in the American canon. This chapter also looks at realism and its role in
modern drama, particularly American drama and just how it was used by O’Neill and how
it is parodied and undercut by the use of pastiche in Shepard’s work. This chapter also
illustrates the use of language in both playwrights, how O’Neill uses a uniquely American
dialogue in Desire under the Elms and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and how Shepard
uses a realistic language as well but where communication between family members has
almost totally broken down.
Chapter Three, “Tragedy and Tragicomedy: Breaking Generic Boundaries,”
explores tragedy and tragicomedy and explains that O’Neill attempted to work within a
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more classical mode and write tragedy in an idiom that his contemporaries would
understand in America. Shepard, on the other hand, eschews tragedy and adopts a more
postmodernist approach to tragedy and works more with the genre of tragicomedy. His
plays underwrite notions of tragedy, at times with a more mocking and nihilistic tone than
O’Neill. The effects of fate, time and memory are studied in detail in this chapter as they
embody notions of tragedy and are major causes of the tragic downfall of the families
portrayed in both O’Neill’s and Shepard’s plays.
Chapter Four, “The Postmodern Moment,” explains that O’Neill wrote his plays
heavily influenced by the tenets of what is known as Modernism and that Shepard wrote
basically the same plays but influenced by what is referred to as Postmodernism. In this
sense, O’Neill is much more of a traditionalist and, in spite of profound pessimism and
atheism, left room in his plays for what he himself referred to as a “hopeless hope.” Like
other modernists, O’Neill was more heavily steeped in tradition whether it be classical,
mythical or Elizabethan. Shepard, on the other hand, does not seem to adhere to any such
tradition and his plays echo more secular notions, many of which come from pop
mythology and, like Beckett, his plays leave little room for hope. Perhaps this has to do
with the waning of religious effect between the two periods. Shepard is commonly referred
to as being more nihilistic yet, like O’Neill, in his family plays, in spite of the gloom that
hovers over them, there is room for what that same notion of “hopeless hope” even if it is
shrouded by an all pervasive ambiguity.
For this reason, and in order not to try to break the structure of this dissertation, in
the “Postmodern moment” part, I will only analyze Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class
and Buried Child.

Notes:
1Henry I. Schvey suggests that there is a remarkable coincidence between this play and Buried
Child. “[T]his little play has a disturbing vitality born out of its conjunction of realistic setting
(dining room, apparently realistic dialogue) and symbolic subtext. It also foreshadows in a
remarkable way the mature Shepard with its disconnected monologues and contrasting image
patterns of dryness and fertility which are especially reminiscent of Buried Child.” (1993: 16)

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