Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Beth Wynstra (review)

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• Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Beth Wynstra
• Alexander Pettit (bio)

Beth Wynstra. Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023. Pp x + 214. $92.50.

In this confident and overdue analysis of Eugene O'Neill's staged wives, Beth Wynstra reminds us that dramatizing shabby behaviors can be a form of inquiry rather than a revelation of one's own depravity. The application of this truism to wives in O'Neill, however, turns out to be tricky: they do seem a sour and conniving lot, and O'Neill himself was a lousy husband, serially. Thus, as Wynstra observes, the tradition of dismissing these characters as "undependable," "dangerous," "predatory," "bitches," and, in a depressingly Medieval twofer, "not only lustful but dishonest" (13). These were the judgments both of 1980s feminists troubled by behaviors of O'Neill's stage-wives and of earlier critics who had discerned attitudes in "the Master" (as O'Neill's third wife called him) that they found unobjectionable, per se. No one seems to have considered the possibility that O'Neill's stage-wives might manifest the assessments of causality broadly characteristic of modern drama, naturalism most pointedly.

Wynstra corrects this error. In her reckoning, reactive dismissals "halt curiosity about—and more important, empathy for—the heavy burdens and responsibilities that women shoulder, both in O'Neill's time and in our own" (175). Her main lines of argument are complementary if not always confluent. First, she positions the wives in the evolving discourse about companionate marriage and uxorial identity promulgated in the "women's magazines" of the post-Progressive Era. Second, she posits an O'Neill who habitually "depicted smart, complex women" (114). Misogynistic aspects of O'Neill's plays that have been "used to diminish or dismiss the [wives]," she asserts, are actually "rooted in and connected to the cultural norms and expectations for women of the time" (175). To assume that O'Neill endorsed the totalizing jackasseries du jour is to ignore the nature of an oeuvre preoccupied with society's desecration of the individual. We needn't like Ruth Mayo in Beyond the Horizon any more than we like Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill asks us to understand his characters' deformities. Wynstra complies.

As her chapter subtitles indicate, Wynstra organizes her book around stages of courtship and marriage, with nods to theme: "Promises of Marriage," "Early- and Middle-Stage Marriages," "Infidelity and Balance of Power," and "Nostalgia and Narrative-Making in Late Stages of Marriage." The schema enables her to present an O'Neill who pondered questions of fidelity, mutuality, and responsibility throughout his career. The recursiveness of O'Neill's thought validates Wynstra's eschewal of chronology and enables a narrative that sometimes, delightfully, [End Page 288] feels like a bildungs-play peopled by a succession of characters negotiating the way-stations of marriage. Within each chapter, diverse wives align across the decades of the playwright's career and the genres in which he worked. Wynstra's command of the full corpus is evident throughout.

The roster of "engagement plays" in Wynstra's opening chapter telegraphs an appropriate lack of interest in qualitative judgments (55): the jejune Now I Ask You and Bread and Butter serve alongside the better and better-known All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Great God Brown and the chestnuts Beyond the Horizon and "Anna Christie." The "impetuous and passionate" proposals tendered and accepted in these plays bolster popular myths about romance as the basis of compatibility (16). O'Neill, Wynstra demonstrates, favors quick expository sections that counterpoint a couple's effusions of love and their ignorance of each other. She instances Ruth Atkins's failure to comprehend Robert Mayo's sudden, florid proposal: "Nothing indicates that she has heard or processed the content of what he says; instead, she is lured by the poetic way he says things, despite the lack of evidence that he actually possesses artistic talent" (39). But if Ruth is a fool, she's society's...