The longing for death is a theme which appears in many of the plays of Eugene O'Neill.¹Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, which represent the middle period of O'Neill's career wherein the playwright was preoccupied with ideas, are two lengthy plays that repeatedly give expression to this theme. Generally speaking, the literary critics have regarded these two plays as heavily influenced by the psychology of Sigmund Freud. However, their analyses primarily have focused upon the subject of the Oedipus complex rather than the Freudian concept of the death instinct.² Therefore, part of my study will refer to Freud's theories on death, which I find parallel to this theme, to support my own argument and to illustrate that the two plays are accessible to a Freudian interpretation from another angle. But in addition to observing the similarity of the ideas of the psychoanalyst and the playwright, I will attempt to demonstrate some of the distinctions between their visions of life and death and between psychoanalysis and playwriting.

Arthur H. Nethercot's detailed articles on "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill" reveal that the extent of Freud's influence on O'Neill is a debatable issue. O'Neill himself objected to the critics' charges that his plays were patterned too closely along Freudian lines. In 1929, in response to a request by Martha Carolyn Sparrow, a graduate student, for personal information concerning this influence, the playwright put forth his defense:

There is no conscious use of psychoanalytical material in any of my plays. All of them could easily be written by a dramatist who had never heard of the Freudian theory and was simply guided by an intuitive psychological insight into human beings and their life-impulsions that is as old as Greek drama. It is true that I am enough of a student of modern psychology to be fairly familiar with the Freudian implications inherent in the actions of some of my characters while I was portraying them; but this was always an afterthought and never consciously was I for a moment influenced to shape my material along the lines of any psychological theory. It was my dramatic instinct and my personal experience with human life that alone guided me.

I most certainly did not get my ideas of Nina's compulsion [in Strange Interlude] from a dream mentioned by Freud in "A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis." I have only read two books of Freud's, "Totem and Taboo" and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." . . . But the "unconscious" influence stuff strikes me as always extremely suspicious! It is so darned easy to prove! I would say that what has influenced my plays the most is my knowledge of the drama of all time—particularly Greek tragedy—and not any books on psychology.³

We can appreciate O'Neill's fervent reply, for the phenomenon of the death wish already was present in his plays preceding the appearance of the English translation of Freud's book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the psychoanalyst introduced his concept of the death instinct. The death wish can be detected in characters like Smitty of The Moon of the Caribbees and Robert Mayo of Beyond the Horizon (two of the playwright's early achievements). But it is necessary to note that O'Neill admitted he read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for it is in this work that Freud defines his theory of the death instinct. Essentially, this is the innate tendency on the part of the organism to return to its original inorganic state. Freud postulated that the death instinct arose when inorganic matter came to life as a result of a disturbance by external forces. However, in opposition to the death instinct is the life instinct, whose aim is to preserve organic substance. Since both instincts are said to be conservative by nature, life is pictured as a perpetual battle-ground of conflicting forces. This dualistic view of nature is analogous to the backdrop of Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electro. Gregory Zilboorg, a Freudian analyst, "praised the insight of Strange Interlude and its effective dramatization of the stratification which makes us all ' . . . in our "normal" daily life go on unsuspecting that we are but a sort of endless dynamic battlefield rather than a compact whole.'"⁴

If we were to obtain no evidence of O'Neill's reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle other than the letter he wrote to Miss Sparrow, which was dated 1929, it would be conceivable that O'Neill read the book before or during his writing of Strange Interlude (1926-1927) since Beyond the Pleasure Principle was first translated into English in 1922; and certain that he read it during, if not before his work on Mourning Becomes Electra (1929-1931). However, the critic Egil Törnqvist has pointed out that "By 1925 O'Neill possessed not only Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle but also Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego."⁵ Törnqvist notes that "Both copies, which are now in Yale University Library, are signed 'Eugene O'Neill, Bermuda '25.'"⁶ Thus it is probable that O'Neill read Freud's book before he wrote these two plays.

Another factor which could have contributed to the strong Freudian overtones in these two plays is O'Neill's own brief encounter with psychoanalysis in 1926. According to Arthur Nethercot and W. David Sievers, the playwright consulted with Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton, a Freudian psychiatrist, who cured him of his drinking problems.⁷ Dr. Hamilton had been given a grant to investigate through psychoanalysis the marital problems of a number of individuals and published his findings in A Research in Marriage, which later became the popular version What Is Wrong with Marriage? by Hamilton and Kenneth Macgowan. Nethercot claims that while working with O'Neill, "Hamilton, however, in his abbreviated six weeks' treatment, went considerably beyond his [O'Neill's] primary problem, and afterward O'Neill told Macgowan, who was also questioned about his marital habits, that now 'he had no trouble understanding that he hated and loved his father, and that he was suffering from an Oedipus complex.' Hamilton also told Macgowan later, 'There's a death wish in O'Neill"' [italics mine].⁸

In Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electro, the longing for death, or the death wish, is a recurring phenomenon. In both plays, much of the dramatic action stems from war—a metaphor for the conflicts of life.⁹ Early in the first act of Strange Interlude, it is established that Nina Leeds, the heroine, lost her lover, Gordon Shaw, when his plane crashed during World War I. From that traumatic moment on, Nina longs to recapture the past and to lose herself through love relationships with the following male figures: Sam Evans (her husband), Doctor Edmund Darrell (her new lover), Charles Marsden (a father substitute), and Gordon Evans (her son, a substitute for her original lover or object choice). At the end of the final act of the play, we have come full circle as Nina watches her son fly away with his lover and comments: "Gone. My eyes are growing dim. Where is Ned [Darrell]? Gone, too. And Sam is gone. They're all dead. Where are Father and Charlie? (With a shiver of fear she hurries over and sits on the bench beside Marsden, huddling against him) Gordon is dead, Father. I've just had a cable. What I mean is, he flew away to another life—my son, Gordon, Charlie. So we're alone again—just as we used to be."¹⁰

Nina literally and predictably decides to settle down with Charles Marsden, for each finds shelter from the problems of living in the other's embrace which represents a marriage of death. In a mournful mood, Nina reflects upon her situation now that her husband is dead: "I am sad but there's comfort in the thought that now I am free at last to rot away in peace .. . I'll go and live in Father's old home . . . Sam bought that back .. . I suppose he left it to me . . . Charlie will come in every day to visit . . . he'll comfort and amuse me .. . we can talk together of the old days . . . when I was a girl . . . when I was happy . . . before I fell in love with Gordon Shaw and all this tangled mess of love and hate and pain and birth began!" (p. 214).

And herein lies an important distinction between Freud's conception of the death instinct and O'Neill's view of the longing for death as expressed through Nina and Charlie: these characters strive to return to the state of nonexistence not because of a built-in instinct, but because they cannot bear the pain of being alive; and therefore, they choose psychological death as a means of escape from the tortures of living. Charlie reckons that "Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life [italics mine], have still to be concluded" (p. 212). The boundaries of the play—between which lies the strange interlude of life—are marked by death. Life, then, is the strange interlude, or more accurately, the terrifying interlude beyond which the characters yearn to pass. Near the closing lines of the play, Charlie turns to Nina and says: "So let's you and me forget the whole distressing episode, regard it as an interlude, of trial and preparation, say, in which our souls have been scraped clean of impure flesh and made worthy to bleach in peace" (p. 221), to which Nina replies: "It will be a comfort to get home—to be old and to be home again at last—to be in love with peace together—to love each other's peace—to sleep with peace together!—(She kisses him—then shuts her eyes with a deep sigh of requited weariness)—to die in peace! I'm so contentedly weary with life!" (P. 222).

Thus Freud's world-view, which is represented in the biological battle between life and death instincts, can be differentiated from what we may call the O'Neillian spiritual struggle which manifests itself in the reaction of the individual will to choose to live or die when it is confronted by a world of continuous conflict.¹¹ I think that this partly explains O'Neill's resistance to the critics' strict Freudian comparisons between his plays and the psychoanalyst's studies. After analyzing his complete works, one can infer that the playwright is not content with a mechanistic-rationalistic view of life.¹² He may share with Freud an antipathy toward conventional religious attitudes, but he is not willing to dismiss or reduce the question of religion to an illusion, much less renounce it in favor of modern science which, as his plays indicate, cannot alone solve the mysteries and complexities of the human dilemma. Moreover, O'Neill convincingly demonstrates that even illusions (see the plays Gold and The Iceman Cometh) are necessary for man's survival.

Recalling O'Neill's remark in the 1929 letter that "the 'unconscious' influence stuff strikes me as always extremely suspicious! It is so darned easy to prove!", we can believe that the playwright had no intention of subordinating art to science. This skeptical attitude toward the science of psychoanalysis is expressed in Strange Interlude through the private thoughts of Charlie in reference to Doctor Darrell: "Giving me the fishy diagnosing eye they practice at medical school . . . like freshmen from Ioway cultivating broad A's at Harvard! . . . what is his specialty? . . . neurologist, I think . . . I hope not psychoanalyst .. . a lot to account for, Herr Freud! . . . punishment to fit his crimes, be forced to listen eternally during breakfast while innumerable plain ones tell him dreams about snakes .. . pah, what an easy cure-all! [italics mine] .. . sex the philosopher's stone . . . 'Oh Oedipus, O my king! The world is adopting you!'" (p. 86)."¹³

However, the language of Strange Interlude appears to be a curious contradiction to these sentiments of Charlie Marsden, who may be O'Neill's mouthpiece in this instance. On the one hand, the playwright brought before the public an innovative dramatic technique to express the subconscious thoughts and hidden motives of his characters. Kenneth Macgowan observes that "This device was more than soliloquy and it did more than expose the thoughts of people. It was a living and exciting dialog of a new kind. To the dramatic contrasts and conflicts of ordinary spoken dialogue O'Neill added the contrasts and conflicts of thought. There was the speech of Nina against the speech of Charlie, the thought of Nina against the speech of Nina; the thought of Nina against the thought of Charlie and sometimes the speech of one against the thought of the other."¹⁴

But O'Neill's utilization of this technique to penetrate through the exterior of his characters in order to reveal their inner complexities is extremely mechanical. Oedipal wishes and death wishes are too neatly mapped out and occupy the attention of the characters to such an exclusive degree that the complexes become living abstractions.

In addition to this, there seems to be some confusion between subconscious and self-conscious thoughts. For example, concerning death wishes, Professor Leeds, Nina's father, in an aside in Act One is gratified to learn of the death of Gordon Shaw because Leeds desires to possess his daughter: "(thinking angrily) Her eyes .. . I know that look . . . tender, loving . . . not for me . . . damn Gordon! . . . I'm glad he's dead!" (p. 72). Even at best, sometimes, people have only a dim perception of their neurotic conflicts. But, as in many passages in the play like this one, O'Neill's characters give us the impression that they are aware of their psychological conflicts and simply are withholding their thoughts from others. A few minutes later, Leeds himself divulges his death wish to his daughter in ordinary dialogue:

PROFESSOR LEEDS: .. . You are young. You think one can live with the truth. Very well. It is also true I was jealous of Gordon. I was alone and I wanted to keep your love. I hated him as one hates a thief one may not accuse nor punish. I did my best to prevent your marriage. I was glad when he died. There. Is that what you wish me to say?

NINA: Yes. Now I begin to forget I've hated you. You were braver than I, at least . (p. 75.)

It was a great achievement of Freud to have discovered in human beings the existence of unconscious mental processes. The task of the psychoanalyst is to bring to the awareness of the patient the repressed or unconscious conflicts of his or her experience for the purpose of restoring the patient to a state of mental health. But the task of the playwright is to dramatize conflicts without resorting to explanation; that is, the characters should be acting out, not speaking about, their problems. The playwright must carefully avoid having his characters explain their own conflicts independent of the process of the struggle for self-knowledge, for if he fails to do so the reaction of the reader or the audience will be one of disbelief.

Nevertheless, one has to admire O'Neill for his energy and ability to transport his characters through the nine acts of Strange Interlude to a destination echoing the one at which Freud arrived in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of life is death' and, looking backwards, that 'inanimate things existed before living ones'.¹⁵

O'Neill continued to pursue the theme of longing for death in Mourning Becomes Electra, a play of epic proportions. In his notes for the play, O'Neill raised this question: "Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?"¹⁶ Eventually he found the answer to his question: yes. For all its faults, Mourning Becomes Electra is O'Neill's contribution to our need for new myths in its fresh, even though limited, interpretation of the world as we know it today.

The external forces of classical fate have been transformed into internalized forces—namely, Oedipus complexes and death wishes that torment the Mannon family throughout the history of their existence. O'Neill "urged himself to 'try for prose with simple forceful repeating accent and rhythm which will express driving insistent compulsion of passions engendered in family past, which constitute family fate.'"¹⁷ He achieved his goal but not by avoiding the kind of self-conscious language that proved to be detrimental to Strange Interlude. The youngest generation of Mannons, Orin (Orestes) and Lavinia (Electra), has inherited the sins of its ancestors, as Orin points out to his sister: "(with a quiet mad insistence): Can't you see I'm now in Father's place and you're Mother? That's the evil destiny out of the past I haven't dared predict! I'm the Mannon you're chained to!" (p. 356). Indeed the problem is that the characters literally resemble their predecessors in appearance and behavior to the point of absurdity. It seems to me that O'Neill has exaggerated the idea, which reappears in many of his other plays and in the works of Freud, that the past determines the present and the future.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud relates the death instinct to part of this idea which he terms "the repetition compulsion: " . . . we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces."¹⁸ He adds that "the most impressive proofs of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology."¹⁹

O'Neill, on the other hand, signifies that when the individual is under the pressure of external disturbing forces of life, he or she reacts by harboring death wishes in the form of longing to return to the past or dreaming of a nonexistent paradise free of conflict. In Mourning Becomes Electra, as in Strange Interlude, war (in this case the Civil War) is symbolic of the constant battle of life. "Haunted by death" (p. 323), Christine Mannon (Clytemnestra), who used to "believe in heaven," but "now knows there is only hell" (p. 323) bemoans her lost youth: "(Then with bitter longing) If I could only have stayed as I was then! Why can't all of us remain innocent and loving and trusting? But God won't leave us alone. He twists and wrings and tortures our lives with others' lives until—we poison each other to death!" (p. 286). Unable to endure life after her lover, Adam Brant (Aegisthus), is killed by her son when the latter discovers their secret affair, Christine "turns and rushes into the house" (p. 328) to commit suicide.

Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon), the husband of Christine and victim or her malice, before being murdered by her, confesses to his wife that her hatred of him was the reason why he entered the Mexican War: "I was hoping I might get killed" (p. 270). Now after his return from the Civil War and desiring to mend their marriage, Ezra, to no avail, utters his longing to escape from the perils of the present: "I've been thinking of what we could do to get back to each other. I've a notion if we'd leave the children and go off on a voyage together—to the other side of the world—find some island where we could be alone a while. You'll find I have changed, Christine. I'm sick of death! I want life!" (p. 270). The irony is that Ezra is longing for some otherworldly existence because life itself is a form of death: "That's always been the Mannons' way of thinking. They went to the white meeting-house on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die. Death was being born" (p. 269).

In the exact same vein, Christine's son, Orin, describes how, during the Civil War, he "wanted to desert and run home—or else get killed" (p. 300) because he longed for his mother's love. And after he was wounded in action, he, too, dreamed of going to the Islands on the other side of the world—the South Sea Islands which "came to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security" (p. 300). These "Blessed Isles" represent the womb to which the Mannon men, including Adam Brant, long to regress, for it is only within the womb that all one's needs are satisfied and no conflicts can emerge. In his notes for the play, O'Neill "wrote that the islands should represent among other things the 'mother symbol—yearning for prenatal non-competitive freedom from fear.'"²⁰ He also "talked about ' "Island" death fear and death wish' . . . and after the play was completed, he spoke about 'the life and death impulses that drive the characters on to their fates."'²¹ And in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud similarly states that "The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the 'Nirvana principle', to borrow a term from Barbara Low)—a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts."²²

When Orin actually goes to the Islands, it is no surprise that "They only [make] [him] sick" (p. 346), for what he really longs for is to reenter his mother's womb; consequently, "the Blessed Isles" (p. 243) exist only inside his imagination, not in external reality. Having lost his mother and continually hounded by guilt (the furies), Orin can find no peace in life and seizes on his sister's taunting remark that "[He'd] kill [himself] if [he] weren't a coward" (p. 365) as an avenue of escape:

ORIN: . . . (He stops abruptly and stares before him, as if this idea were suddenly taking hold of his tortured imagination and speaks fascinatedly to himself) Yes! That would be justice—now you are Mother! She is speaking now through you! (More and more hypnotized by this train of thought) Yes! It's the way to peace—to find her again—my lost island—Death is an island of peace, too—Mother will be waiting for me there—(With excited eagerness now, speaking to the dead) Mother? .. . You're here in the house now! You're calling me! You're waiting to take me home! . . . (pp. 365-366.)

Orin then "turns and strides toward the door" (p. 366) and commits suicide.

After a Freudian slip, Lavinia, the last Mannon, realizes that she, like other Mannon figures, was goaded to revenge not out of a sense of justice but because of selfish desire. Finally, she decides to take upon herself all of the Mannons' sins:

LAVINIA: . . ."I'm the last Mannon. I've got to punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I'll never go out or see anyone! I'll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I'll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! (With a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self-torture) I know they will see to it I live for a long time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born! (p. 376.)

Following her speech to Seth Beckwith, the Mannons' gardener, Lavinia "ascends to the portico—and then turns and stands for a while, stiff and square-shouldered, staring into the sunlight with frozen eyes. Seth leans out of the window at the right of the door and pulls the shutters closed with a decisive bang. As if this were a word of command, Lavinia pivots sharply on her heel and marches woodenly into the house, closing the door behind her" (p. 376).

One is struck by the way in which Nina and Charlie of Strange Interlude and the members of the Mannon family come home to rest. In both plays, the house is a symbol of death. According to Freud, "the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother's womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease."²³ For all her talk of living, Lavinia has returned to the Mannon house only to die. To be more precise, she, like Nina and Charlie of Strange Interlude, has become a living-death figure. Her Christ-like decision to suffer for the sins of "everymannon" by remaining "bound here [italics mine]—to the Mannon dead" (p. 375) is merely a mask to conceal her terror of living in the world of reality. Sealing herself off from society by literally shutting her self in the house. Lavinia does not experience the joy of courageously confronting her conflicts in a constructive manner, but only indulges herself in masochistic delight in having found a neurotic pseudosolution to the problem of guilt.

The image of being bound plays an important part in the theme of the longing for death in these two plays. It represents the characters* self-imposed confinement which reflects their inability to exist between the limits of life or spiritually to transcend them; that is to say, within the dualistic framework depicting the battle between the forces of life and death, the characters cling to the pole of death in order to escape the tragic tension of life.²⁴ The image is paradoxical because the characters long to go "beyond the horizon"²⁵—beyond the boundaries of their existence in search of peace and security, but they discover that this can only be accomplished through regression. Hence, the characters bind themselves to death—to the womb-tomb shelter of the past.

The theme of the longing for death in Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra bears a striking resemblance to Freud's concept of the death instinct as it is described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is understandable, for O'Neill most likely read Beyond the Pleasure Principle prior to writing the two plays whose language suggests a knowledge of this book. But I contend that O'Neill's reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle reinforced his own concept of the death wish, which is expressed through his characters as a longing to be delivered from the pain of living. We must credit the playwright for his unique, personal vision and distinguish it from that of the psychoanalyst since in O'Neill's writings the death wish is not instinctual but a choice on the part of the individual to eliminate life's tragic tension through self-destruction.

¹ Critics who similarly have dealt with the subject of death in these two plays, but not specifically from this point of view, or only tangentially to it, are: Inger Aarseth, "A Drama of Life and Death Impulses: A Thematic Analysis of 'Mourning Becomes Electra,'" Americana Norwegica, 4 (1973), 291-304; Leonard Chabrowe, Ritual and Pathos: The Theater of O'Neill (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1961): Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); Bryllion Fagin, "Eugene O'Neill Contemplates Mortality," in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1961), pp. 424-430; Doris V. Falk, Eugene O 'Neill and the Tragic Tension (1958; rpt. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1969); and John Henry Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).

² Tom F. Driver, in his article "On the Late Plays of Eugene O'Neill," The Tulane Drama Review, 3, No. 2 (Dec. 1958), 8-20, notes that not much critical attention has been paid to Freud's notion of the death wish and then briefly discusses this idea in relation to O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

³ Arthur H. Nethercot, "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill," Modern Drama, 3, No. 3 (Dec. 1960), 248.

⁴ W. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama (New York: Hermitage House, 1955), p. 116.

⁵ Egil Törnqvist, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Supernaturalistic Technique. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 36.

⁶ Törnqvist, p. 36n.

⁷ See Arthur H. Nethercot, "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill," Modern Drama, 8, No. 2 (Sept. 1965), 154; and Sievers, p. 116.

⁸ In 1912, O'Neill tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of the drug Veronal. Croswell Bowen, in his book The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O'Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959), p. 26, remarks that "In this suicide attempt O'Neill was giving positive expression to an inner drive that was to be noted by others at many stages in his life—a drive which Freudian analysts have called the 'death instinct' and which Brooks Atkinson, a few years after O'Neill's death, so nicely described as an 'infatuation with oblivion.'"

⁹ Cf. Raleigh, p. 57.

¹⁰ Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude (1928), rpt. in Three Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 221. All further references to Strange Interlude, and all references to Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), will be included in the text.

¹¹ Cf. Chabrowe's comment, p. 106.

¹² Cf. Chabrowe, p. 106.

¹³ Edwin A. Engel, p. 214, notes that "Insofar as psychoanalysis may be considered a science (its method, at least, is claimed to be empirical) it shares with biology O'Neill's contempt."

¹⁴ Kenneth Macgowan, "The O'Neill Soliloquy," in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1961), p. 451.

¹⁵ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, XVIII (1955; rpt. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), 38.

¹⁶ Doris M. Alexander, "Psychological Fate in Mourning Becomes Electra," PMLA, 68, No. 5 (Dec. 1953), 923.

¹⁷ Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 338.

¹⁸ Freud, p. 36.

¹⁹ Freud, p. 37.

²⁰ John Stafford, "Mourning Becomes America," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3, No. 4 (Winter 1962), 551n.

²¹ Törnqvist, p. 38.

²² Freud, pp. 55-56.

²³ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1930; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962), p. 38.

²⁴ See Doris Falk's book for an excellent Neo-Freudian interpretation of O'Neill's plays.

²⁵ With reference to the theme of longing for death, O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon can be considered a prototypical play in which its protagonist, Robert Mayo, finds freedom from pain in actual death, while his wife, Ruth, grows content with figurative or living death.