The inner strength of opposites

the long version

In an age dominated by the novel, Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) emerged as America's first great modern playwright. His work has long been characterized as novelistic and melodramatic, but until now neither of these attributes has been adequately explored, much less linked together. In The Inner Strength of Opposites, Kurt Eisen departs from the primarily biographical and psychoanalytical scholarship on O'Neill to offer new theoretical insights on his transformation of the modern stage. Drawing on studies of the novel by Georg Lukacs, Rene Girard, M. M. Bakhtin, and on such theorists of melodrama as Eric Bentley, Robert B. Heilman, and Peter Brooks, Eisen shows how O'Neill evokes and then subverts the simple unified self of nineteenth-century melodrama. By dismantling the moralistic and psychologically crude oppositions on which melodrama depends, O'Neill achieved novelistic yet vitally theatrical characters and relationships whose dramatic tension is inherent - a natural development of the "inner strength of opposites.". Tracing the course of melodrama from its origins in the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of the Napoleonic hero in the novel, Eisen also renders a persistent historical subtext within O'Neill's dramatic experiments. He then suggests that using marriage as a guiding theme, the dramatist united novelization and melodrama in an artistic and spiritual consummation, a wedding of word to life. In thorough and imaginative analyses of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh, Eisen illustrates how techniques of the novel enabled O'Neill to explore the ideology of melodrama within his conception of family as destiny, his personal ambitions as an artist, and, finally, his critique of modern history. Playwrights from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to Marsha Norman, Sam Shepard, and August Wilson would later use similar techniques to examine for themselves major historical and theatrical dilemmas. O'Neill's groundbreaking meditations on these same problems, Eisen points out, led him to affirm an essential dramatic paradigm: two voices, compelled into dialogue, working against time and trusting in the enabling rituals of theater to sustain life.