Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill

As with most contemporary academic books, Beth Wynstra's new study reveals its topic in the subtitle following the main title's colon. Marriage in Eugene O'Neill's plays is about performance, in both the Austinian sense (a doing that calls something into being, in this case, a usually dystopic legal alliance leavened with resentment) and the vernacular sense (presenting a persona via artifice). Wynstra's project is to read nearly two dozen O'Neill plays "alongside contemporaneous marital literature" (20), with an eye to demonstrating how the last century's advice to any "maid who would marry" (Cole Porter, not E. O.)—recommended beauty regimes, diligence in housework, living uncritically with spousal habits, accepting that "you'll have bad times / and he'll have good times" (Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill, again not E. O.), and a high level of obedience—often led to disappointment and frustration. At the very least.The vows, veils, and masks denote (1) the "I do's" that women supposedly crave(d) as a(n imagined) route to security and bliss; (2) the filmy drapery that hides a presumably demure yet eager bride's face (think of the biblical Laban and Leah to add the element of deception, but note that we today remain in the thrall of this facet of bridalwear); or drapery (sometimes metaphorical) used to screen out other kinds of unwanted items; and, of course, (3) the "face" put on for the world to hide the inner self. (The Great God Brown has obvious pride of place here.) It is the loss or denial of this inner self that leads to the misery, suicide, abandonment, abuse of one spouse or the other, or even murder, in so many of O'Neill's plays.Wynstra challenges too-frequent readings of O'Neill plays that villainize unhappy wives, noting that "Connecting the choices the characters make to the entrapment of marital roles they perform provides a way to move away from reductive condemnation" (63). From the 1920 Beyond the Horizon—where neither Ruth nor Robert really knows the other when they decide in a moment of poetic passion to marry, leading to drudgery and failure to thrive for both—to the 1939–40 Long Day's Journey Into Night (not published until 1956)—where Mary Tyrone is the frequently foregrounded linchpin of misery as a disillusioned drug addict, while her husband goes largely unlamented as a deluded, autocratic alcoholic—marriage (mostly the unhappy ones) in many of O'Neill's plays is about taking a role in a script (the marriage plot, so to speak) that neither half of a couple exactly wrote and that becomes a trap in the absence of what Wynstra repeatedly calls "authenticity" or "frank assessment." She blames "a culture that, when it came to a couple's agreeing to marry, valued superficial interactions over honesty and understanding" (27), adding that "the blame should probably be shared by men and women alike, their chief offense, a lack of transparency" (37) and using as an example the 1917 play Now I Ask You, where the self-absorbed newlywed Lucy feels bored and cramped in the comfortable suburban life provided by her hardworking husband.Wynstra locates the origins of the problems in the marriages depicted by O'Neill in social changes during the first part of the twentieth century, when divorce rates rose precipitously. A marriage that took place in 1880, she notes, had one chance in twelve of ending in divorce; by the end of the 1920s, the odds were one in six (8). Women were claiming rights and autonomy, weren't they? Well, despite the now popular idea that shorter skirts and the right to vote led to (or came with) the rise of companionate marriage in the 1920s, "a profound reliance on a husband seemed baked into the high expectations for marriage and remained intertwined with the romance of courtship" (58). This, among other things, led to O'Neillian wives "unable to experience personal happiness and choice, the bedrock of modern feminism" (96).What these women might choose, however, still looks to me like a lot of wished-for spousal obeisance backed with money, status, and the wifely right to stay out of the workforce and/or out of the marital bed, if either demurral is how she understood happiness or choice. Abby in Desire Under the Elms (1924) is clear about wanting the Cabot farm to be hers and to escape from doing housework for others. Martha in The First Man (1922) does have a career of sorts, as she works alongside her anthropologist husband, Curtis. She would prefer, however, to be a stay-at-home mother (sidebar: they had two daughters who, years before the start of the play, succumbed as children to pneumonia). Martha becomes pregnant; Curtis responds by becoming angry and accusing her of treachery, as a mother-child dyad will interfere with his travel and research plans (96). Martha conveniently dies in childbirth, and Curtis farms the baby out to an aunt. Certainly, each half of this couple fails to grasp what is most important to the other. Significantly, though, Curtis could have sex and could have a lab partner outside of marriage (which is where he certainly finds a surrogate parent); Martha needs a husband. Marriage scripts are written not only by social convention but by law, and until at least the 1970s women needed the signatures and approval of men to do such now-ordinary things as inherit money, own property, or even have a bank account. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act wasn't passed until 1974.To be fair, few of the wives in the plays are upset about being hausfraus, per se. Mostly they just wish their husbands would come home and respect domesticity once in a while (Ile, 1917) or stop leaving cigarette ashes and butts on the floor while having affairs and impregnating another woman, all the while expecting the wife to keep things clean and earn what little money they have (Before Breakfast, 1916). When wives realize in medias (marriage) res that their recalcitrant or stingy or clueless or also-disappointed husbands cannot or will not change (Ile, Gold, Beyond the Horizon, Before Breakfast, among others), they are left to stew in their own juices or seek either revenge or satisfaction elsewhere.Vows, Veils, and Masks is arranged in four chapters that proceed thematically rather than chronologically. In the first chapter, Wynstra focuses on ill-considered proposals and hastily entered marriages where the rose-colored glasses of advice manuals, escapist fiction, and early movies (among other sources) cause couples to rush into partnerships that feel romantic but typically suit neither one. The ur-texts here are Beyond the Horizon and The Great God Brown, but one could make a good case for the less well-known Bread and Butter (1914), where the young bride-to-be is described upon her first entrance as having the qualities of "a spoiled child" (29) and whose ideas of marriage center on material goods and comfort. She hopes her artist-in-training fiancé will become a commercial artist and make a lot of money; he accuses her of failing to understand his finer/higher aspirations. A few years into the marriage, he has become flabby and dull as a successful breadwinner; she is prim and icy. But, while both acknowledge that they didn't really know each other before they married (although they "loved" each other), she will not agree to a divorce. He exits and shoots himself.In the second chapter, the focus is on early and middle-stage marriages. Here, women are willing to play the role of supportive partner with primarily domestic expectations; it is the husbands who are failing in their jobs (the radioman in 1913's Warnings is losing his hearing; the whaling ship captain in Ile is obsessed with pushing through dangerous waters in horrible weather in the face of limited returns on his work investment). Or the husbands have lost sight of anything outside their obsessions with money (Ile again, and 1920's Gold) and fail to listen or even behave rationally. The wife in Ile conveniently goes mad—perhaps the post-Freudian analogue to the nineteenth century's consumption as the dramaturgical deus ex machina when playwrights could not satisfy both unhappy heroines and anticipated audiences.The third chapter features infidelity as a wife's way out of an unfulfilling marriage. Here the obvious suspects are Abby in Desire Under the Elms, Christine in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Nina in Strange Interlude (1928). Wynstra foregrounds the gratification of sexual desire as the missing components in heroines' married lives, paralleling advice magazines' promoting "the validity of a woman's voice in matters of personal desires, sexual and otherwise, in a marriage" (113). But the zeitgeist gave with one hand and took with the other, as women were still expected to acquiesce to husbands' preferences and desires—even to nurture and encourage them. The plays point to tragic consequences for women who fail to play by men's rules, and two of the three plays here add murder to the sin of infidelity. Wynstra notes that the men in these plays also "suffer under societal forces" (144), concluding her chapter with the observation that "it continued to be a man's responsibility to conjure, mediate, and become the final authority and voice for a woman's desire" (145).In chapter 4, "The Past Is the Present, Isn't It?," Wynstra discusses the use of memory as a survival tactic when marriages have gone beyond sour. The wives here are much older and include Nora Melody in A Touch of the Poet (completed in 1942; first performed in 1958) and Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey, both of whom recall the dashing men they married—men who are now disappointed alcoholics with big egos and in denial.Wynstra's hope is that her study will offer "a new lens for reading, performing, and understanding O'Neill's characters" (175), but in her limited examples the new lenses mostly offer nonwhite actors or online platforms, even as she argues for the "lasting, universal truths" in O'Neill's work (178). One of the book's big tip-offs regarding O'Neill's limited purview occurred to me as the result of a major copy-editing gaffe. The summary of Strange Interlude twice refers to Gordon as Nina's "fiancée" (130), which prompted my thinking that lesbian desire is nowhere on any list of what any of these dissatisfied wives might have on their minds. Likewise, present-day casting choices aside, there are no nonwhite couples in these plays. O'Neill's contemporaries among African American women playwrights depict women taking great comfort in domestic life, even while having to do backbreaking, demeaning labor for minimal pay in order to maintain their households. Home as haven takes work and surely many couples then (as now) entered into marriage without fully knowing what to expect either of each other or of the institution. Consider the number of cultures in which arranged marriages are the norm and seem to work out.O'Neill knew his ticket-buying audience; he knew both the progressive women in his circle and his own frustrations. It is unfair to ask retrospectively for him to have seen our world in his time. But maybe we remain more in the thrall of romance novels (or today's rom-coms) than I would like to admit. Wynstra nods to today's "billion-dollar wedding industry" (178), while today's divorce rate for first marriages has soared to 35 to 50 percent in 2023. So, maybe, if O'Neill's truths are not "universal," they are certainly transhistorical. At least for those addressed by and see themselves represented in the mainstream media.