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Memory and Guilt

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.2.0183

2161-4318

Elizabeth Fifer,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

How does a copy relate to its original? First it draws attention back. Questions about inspiration and originality blur the links between the two. Tracy Letts's August: Osage County (2008) does not try to replicate Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1940–41; produced 1956), but his borrowings create the shiver of recognition: a family reunited, the exposing of hidden secrets and truths about characters, contrasts between the aspirations of one generation and the failure to realize them in the next, a doomed matriarch, a tragic patriarch. All this combines to create something not quite unexpected.In many ways the Westons in Letts's play echo and parallel the Tyrones in O'Neill's, written more than half a century earlier, as has been observed since the first production of the play. E. Teresa Choate writes that it is "blatantly derivative" of O'Neill's play, as well as "of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart."1 Edward Sobel, Steppenwolf Theater's director of play development, says Letts is "in dialogue" with "the pantheon of American playwrights."2 Comparisons veer wildly. Benedict Nightingale, writing in the London Times on November 27, 2008, hears echoes of King Lear, while on the same date in the Evening Standard Nicholas de Jongh finds the voice of Sam Shepard.3 It is true that Long Day's Journey casts its shadow over many playwrights who seek to portray family disintegration for their own times. And Letts's vision mirrors the struggles of the families of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, placing the source of the children's individual failures on the parents who are themselves victims—of poverty, idealism sacrificed for survival, art abandoned for the drudgery of daily living. But Letts owes his greatest debt to Long Day's Journey for its emphasis on the persistence of the past into the present and the legacy of parents, both living and dead.As the action unfolds around Beverly and Violet, and Mary and Tyrone, their images and reflections form the substance of the two plays. The parents' backward gaze reveals a past neither fully accepted nor resolved. The isolated figures of Beverly and Violet recapitulate the insular nature of the lives of Mary and Tyrone, cut off from the next generation and from other families who might give comfort. Mary asks for "someplace I could go, to get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to."4 Inside both families, conflict puts up insurmountable barriers to intimacy. While it is not necessary to know the text of O'Neill's play to understand August: Osage County, reading them together enriches an appreciation of the dilemma of parents whose efforts to raise successful and independent children seem to have failed.Absent figures, each causing regret and recrimination, loom over both plays. Dysfunctional families use each other as targets for private grief. Artistic characters face the fact that their best work is behind them. A common theme of addiction pervades, whether prescription drugs or alcohol. Death haunts each family, by suicide, illness, or age, yet they hold hope for regeneration, at least for a while. And both families—both plays—rely on memory to fill the emptiness of present time.In both plays the family matriarch becomes the focus of discussion and self-reflection. They are angry at being left by their husbands. Mary tells Edmund that Tyrone would "never spend the money" to make their summer house inviting to guests, ensuring her loneliness while he went out to "hobnob with men at the Club" (45). Violet complains to Ivy, "Goddamn your father for putting me through this. For leaving me to handle this."5 They married successful men for love, but when the plays open, each marriage has collapsed. In one case, the wife drifts away into a haze of addiction. In the other, the husband kills himself. Mary was "so happy for a time" (179). Violet refuses to look at "what used to be" (65). As Mary sinks further into a stupor, Tyrone tries desperately to rekindle her love. Beverly calls Violet in vain before his suicide. Mary remembers a Tyrone who "was handsomer than my wildest dream" (107). Violet admits she fell in love with Beverly's "mystery" (36). Alcohol has damaged each marriage irreparably. Mary tells Tyrone she never would have married him if she had known about his drinking (119). Violet scoffs that Beverly was a "world class alcoholic, more'n fifty years" (88). They fear the loss of what remains of their union—Mary must reclaim her wedding dress, Violet her safety deposit box. The nature of their preoccupations is telling. Mary relies on a symbolic object to evoke her past, while Violet is fiercely practical about finding her security in the present.The addictions of Mary and Violet are similar. Mary takes morphine, first prescribed for her pain after the birth of her third child, Edmund. Violet, who has mouth cancer, takes the modern equivalent, "little blue babies," prescribed for her by a number of physicians (16). They fiercely oppose anyone who tries to take their drugs away. Mary calls the morphine "a special kind of medicine" she has to take "because there is no other that can stop the pain—all the pain" (106). Violet warns, "Try to get 'em away from me and I'll eat you alive" (96). They use a variety of doctors to get their supply of medication. They appear onstage in a drugged haze, Mary distant and withdrawn, Violet combative, slurring her words. Their families stare, horrified, at these self-destructive women. Mary has relapsed again, crushing their hopes for a cure. Violet's daughter Barbara scours the house to confiscate hidden pills, saying, "we've got a sick woman here" (101). The blame falls on the doctors. Mary denounces Dr. Hardy's incompetence (120) while Barbara threatens to sue Dr. Burke, who claimed not to know how much medicine Violet was taking (100). The matriarchs have justifications for numbing their pain.Violet is unrepentant. When disagreements go out of control during the dinner scene and her children turn against her, a major shift occurs that will resonate throughout the rest of play. Violet does not accept her loss of power or any guilt, either for the suicide of her husband—whose last telephone call she did not take—or for her attempts to escape reality through drugs. She has to be forced to rehabilitate by her daughters, especially Barbara. Violet: "I don't need help." Barbara: "I want to help" (109). By the play's end Violet is "tolerably" clean (128), yet the audience has not seen her struggle, so her change does not move them. O'Neill creates empathy for the matriarch by the slow accumulation of detail, which Letts's play does not because of its multiple characters and plot lines.Early in act 1, Mary coaxes her family to be calm, even as she grows increasingly irritable and strange: MARY:Quickly. I'm not upset. There's nothing to be upset about. What makes you think I'm upset?TYRONE:Why nothing, except you've seemed a bit high-strung the past few days.MARY:Forcing a smile. I have? Nonsense, dear. It's your imagination. With sudden tenseness. You really must not watch me all the time, James. I mean, it makes me self-conscious. (16–17) A few minutes later she accuses her son of the same behavior: MARY:Turns smilingly to them, in a merry tone that is a bit forced. I've been teasing your father about his snoring…. She stops abruptly, catching Jamie's eyes regarding her with an uneasy probing look. Her smile vanishes and her manner becomes self-conscious. Why are you staring, Jamie? Her hands flutter up to her hair. (20) In act 2, scene 2, Jamie accuses his mother of relapsing: MARY:Tensely. Why do you stare like that?JAMIE:You know. He turns back to the window.MARY:I don't know.JAMIE:Oh, for God's sake, do you think you can fool me, Mama? I'm not blind. (65) Later Tyrone tells her "I've been a God-damned fool to believe in you" (71). She pleads, "I tried so hard! Please believe—!" He cries out, "For the love of God, why couldn't you have the strength to keep on!" (72). Here O'Neill shows the cost to Tyrone of daring to believe. And his sons blame him for her condition—for settling for a cheap quack who prescribed morphine without warning about its danger. There will be no recovery for Mary, but her failed attempt gives her the status of a tragic figure, someone whose suffering deserves sympathy. She bitterly recalls how she had to beg Dr. Hardy for medication. "When you're in agony and half insane, he sits and holds your hand and delivers sermons on will power" (76). Jamie speaks tenderly of his mother's struggles: "I understand what a hard game to beat she's up against "(78). O'Neill raises the experience of addiction to a heroic level. From seeing Mary as blooming—"fat and beautiful," "your dear old self again" (17), Tyrone unwillingly recognizes her illness as incurable. The audience feels the finality of this last loss of hope. Mary is irrecoverable. She can no longer be a wife and mother, and her fall signals the end of the family. Without her it will not cohere.Mary provides a running critical commentary on the family. She adopts the role of narrator as if she could be objective and dispassionate, but at other moments we see how deeply implicated she is in the tragedy, and her point of view contains as much distortion as any other member of the family. When Tyrone tells her that McGuire "put me onto" a bargain on cigars, her acid reply comes back quickly: "I hope he didn't put you onto any new piece of property at the same time. His real estate bargains didn't work out so well" (15). She manages their conversations, warning her husband, "Now James, don't lose your temper," and telling him not to scold Jamie or Edmund, who "isn't well" (16). Her diatribes against Dr. Hardy begin early and continue during the play. Her description of her beautiful hair strikes a familiar chord about the "golden age" of the past when Tyrone was a noble hero, the man who came to sweep her away in her youth—almost a prince, an aristocrat in his count's costume; all her friends were in love with him. His connection to other great dramatic tragic figures is ironically echoed by his failed career as a Shakespearean actor. Although Mary dwells on Tyrone's inability to attend to his family's needs, she also helps the audience recognize a larger point. In act 2, scene 1, she tells Edmund with a "strange detachment" that none of them are guilty: "It's wrong to blame your brother. He can't help being what the past has made him. Any more than your father can. Or you. Or I" (66). Both husband and wife are shown as they might have been, juxtaposed against what they became.In comparison, Violet screams where Mary grieves, and her anger is always directed outward, making her more selfish, bitter, insensitive, and openly hostile to her family. She has suffered like Mary, and like her has become critical and unforgiving. But she does not trace her daughters' problems to Beverly's parenting except to emphasize his weakness for alcohol. While Beverly does not openly criticize Violet, his unanswered call speaks to her lack of empathy and makes her a less appealing victim. Did she know his call was a cry for help? Violet suffers out loud, with curses and insults, hurting others because her mouth hurts: (Violet takes another pill.)IVY:Is your mouth burning?VIOLET:Like a son-of-a-bitch. (27) Her unmarried daughter Ivy looks "like a lesbian"; Ivy's former boyfriend Barry is "an asshole" (26). Soon the dialogue descends to Violet's level. She answers her daughter Barbara's "What a load of absolute horseshit" with "Oh, horseshit, horseshit, let's all say horseshit. Say horseshit, Bill." Barbara's husband complies (39).O'Neill's tragedy requires a different sort of intensity. Mary either appears or is discussed continually. The nuclear family and house servants provide the entire context. While Violet dominates August: Osage County, Letts's focus is spread over a number of characters, including her sister Mattie Fae and husband Charles, her daughters Ivy, Karen, and Barbara, and their husbands or lovers, her nephew little Charles, her grandchild Jean, a housekeeper, and the Sheriff. Violet is onstage for most of the play but so is her large extended family, who interrupt her when they get excited. While O'Neill's play is more about the family's relationship to Mary, Letts's play tries to work out the interrelationships among family members and untangle their separate histories. Violet, while important, provides only one strand of many. The passion in Long Day's Journey all leads in one direction. The recognition of the impossibility of Mary's rehabilitation provides the structure and the climax, and the despair that follows. Because of the speedier tempo of August: Osage County, the family discovers Violet's condition, rallies to address it, and solves the problem of her addiction, at least temporarily. Smaller dramas spin within the greater structure. When Karen's boyfriend Steve tries to seduce Barbara's daughter Jean, and little Charles turns out to be Ivy's half-brother by Mattie Fae and Beverly, farce mixes with melodrama, effectively complicating the surrounding tragedy.In both plays, the patriarchs fail themselves and their families, while thinking that their families fail them. They are absent, whether through work or drink. Their hope fades and disappears with their talent. Tyrone could have been a fine Shakespearean actor if not for "that God-damned play" that brought him "thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season" (153). He tells Edmund, "That mistake ruined my career as a fine actor" (152). Once he became identified with that part audiences "didn't want [him] in anything else" (153). Early in his career Beverly wrote one important book of poetry, Meadowlark. No one knows why he stopped writing, but Bill thinks the pressure of success silenced Beverly. "I can't imagine the kind of pressure he must've felt after this came out. Probably every word he wrote after this, he had to be thinking, 'what are they going to say about this? Are they going to compare it to Meadowlark?'" Barbara insists that he scorned the public reaction. "My father didn't write anymore for many reasons, but critical opinion was not one of them" (46).Is alcohol paramount in the decline of the patriarchs? In one play, drinking sets the mood for the "long day" of the title. It is not yet a wake—Mary is alive, although out of reach. Characters do not need an occasion for their thirst. As in The Iceman Cometh, drinking is life, early and late, first sad, then angry, one generation after the next. Retrospection and revelation, the family's increasing awareness of Mary's relapse and fears for Edmund's pending diagnosis, remain. The maid Cathleen drinks, at Mary's urging. Edmund has some before lunch—"I grabbed one while the going was good"—as does his brother Jamie (56). He waters the whiskey to fool Tyrone and pours another shot when he sees his mother's state. Tyrone claims that "good whiskey, taken in moderation as an appetizer, is the best of tonics" (68). All agree that Edmund should refrain because he might have tuberculosis, but no one stops him.Tyrone actively supports the culture of alcohol in his home. He is the author of his family's despair. His sons are caught in the web of his disease, ensuring their decline. Without his direction everything is out of kilter. He stubbornly refuses to recognize how he has tainted them with his corruption. Darkness gathers as Edmund, Jamie, and Tyrone go on a spree. They roundly condemn each other's drinking, but by midnight Tyrone has consumed three-fourths of a new bottle. When Edmund comes home drunk from a walk on the beach that began and ended in a bar his father offers him more, saying, "I'm wrong to treat you. You've had enough already…. It's too much in your condition" (132). Drinking incites them. Edmund baits Tyrone by attacking his father's literary idol, Shakespeare: "They say he was a souse, too," which makes Tyrone defensive: "I don't doubt he liked his glass—it's a good man's failing" (138). Edmund blames Tyrone for his mother's condition. Jamie stumbles in reeling from an evening spent in a brothel and tells his brother, "I'm as drunk as a fiddler's bitch" (158). While Tyrone is out he pours himself another drink. Edmund warns him, "You're stinking now. That will knock you stiff." Soon Edmund asks him to "shove over that bottle" (159).It is true Tyrone's children have not realized their promise, but the father needs to take responsibility for this. Jamie acts only because Tyrone's connections are in the theater; his eldest is not drawn to the career. "You forced me on the stage." Instead of admitting his son has no aptitude or desire for this career, his father accuses him of aimlessness, calling him a sponge and a "lazy lunk." "You made no effort to find anything else to do." He tells Jamie "your reputation stinks" (32). His younger son, Edmund, is a dreamy poet who wastes his gifts with what Tyrone calls "the mad life" he has led since college, a "bundle of nerves," "playing the Broadway sport" to imitate his brother (34). Edmund is thus an imitation of an imitation, as Mary points out to her husband: "You brought [Jamie] up to be a boozer. Since he's first opened his eyes he's seen you drinking" (113). Drink increases Jamie's cynical view of reality and Edmund's hopelessness: "Be so drunk you can forget." He adds, quoting from Baudelaire, "Be always drunken. Nothing else matters" (135). Oblivion provides the only relief. But the poison of the cure eats at the core of the family, trickling down from Tyrone's disappointment in himself to Jamie's aversion to reality, ending with Edmund's dazed acceptance of the possibility of an early death.In contrast to Tyrone's commanding presence, the Weston patriarch is a puzzling and shadowy figure. The fact that the audience never sees Beverly interacting with anyone in the family except Violet gives his alcoholism legendary status. Did alcohol cause his creative decline and the demise of his marriage, as Violet asserts, even his death? Letts has sidelined Beverly into an opening prologue before his suicide, where he drinks while he interviews Johnna for a housekeeping position. She is a good device for retrospection. Instead of excusing his addiction, as Tyrone does, Beverly explains it in the context of the "cruel covenant" of his marriage. "She takes pills and I drink. I don't drink because she takes pills. As to whether she takes pills because I drink … I learned long ago not to speak for my wife" (11). Just as the inability to practice abstinence is a central concern for the Tyrones, so it is for Beverly. He has tried it before—assumed "the mantle of guilt" with "queasy hope" in vain (11). He found he hated sobriety. He parallels his own story with Violet's. "She has been down that road once before, and came out of it clean as a whistle … then chose for herself this reality instead" (16). The audience briefly hears him narrate his past before he is found dead. The couple's short interaction in the prologue would be sad if it were not so funny, Violet slurring her words, Beverly trying hard to communicate. In her inebriated state she doesn't understand the interview and suddenly wanders out.The prologue establishes Beverly as a self-pitying but clear-sighted and sympathetic character who understands his own condition. He knows he faces his crisis alone, although he calls Violet just in case. He has an affinity "with the damaged"—admirable, burdened poets who suffered as he does (11). He burned his past the night before in a ritual bonfire, a cleaning up before his final exit. He now circles the ruins of his life, ending with a child's nursery rhyme, "Here we go round the prickly pear" (16). It is "prickly" for the family as well because he has not finalized all his plans—it turns out that Violet has decided to keep Barbara's, Ivy's, and Karen's portions of the estate for herself. And so despite his good intentions, he, too, is a thoughtless and ultimately destructive father, not getting out of the way as much as making himself an unseen but bitterly felt presence.Once Beverly's suicide is established the wake begins. The family shields their vulnerability through alcohol that fuels the ritual and brings forth memory—and not only of the dead father. Everyone's faults will be under a microscope. Escapism takes on a comic urgency. We see the family begin drinking as soon as they arrive—scotch for Violet's sister Mattie Fae and beer for her husband Charlie. They quarrel over whose drink is more appropriate at this "fraught" time; Mattie Fae wants Charlie to "show a little class." "I don't believe you. Watchin' the baseball game and drinkin' beers. Don't you have any sense of what's going on around you?" (23). Violet's stage directions read, "Takes a pill … takes another pill" (37). She tells Barbara that they are "muscle relaxers" (40). Barbara's fourteen-year-old daughter, Jean, hides in the attic to smoke marijuana.Letts's characters also act violently—in addition to insults, the daughters even come to blows over Violet's pills—but the action builds to a farcical frenzy. The stage directions read: "Pandemonium. Screaming. Barbara strangles Violet" (97). This scene is preceded by Violet's call for truth-telling, what Barbara calls vicious attacks on "each and every member of this family" (93). The service describing his talent as a poet and teacher reveals Beverly's best days were behind him, as Violet observes, "today's the send-off Bev should've got if he died around 1974. Well, he hadn't written any poetry to speak of since '65 and he never liked teaching worth a damn" (88). Under the influence, Violet can be brutally honest and self-involved. She tells Barbara, Ivy, and Karen that "we had things covered for you girls" until she and Beverly changed their minds, if not their wills. "We never got around to taking care of it legally, but you should know he meant to leave everything to me. Leave the money to me" (92). Barbara can act with equal cruelty. After Violet offers her daughters a discount on the family silver before she takes it to auction, Barbara coolly replies, "you might never get around to the auction and then we can have it for free after you die" (92). Painful honesty destroys the unity among family members this death might otherwise have forged.Each play heralds the passing of the last generation, seen with rueful affection and a distinct lack of respect by the present one. The patriarchs and matriarchs have let their homes deteriorate along with their lives. Tyrone does not spend money refurbishing their dilapidated summer house. He trims the hedge to talk to neighbors. Mary feels ashamed to ask anyone over because of the appearance of her home. "It was wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest way" (45). In the Westons' home, "all structural care ceased" around 1972 (9). The chandelier is described as "tatty," the front lawn "strewn with dead grass," the windows covered with "cheap plastic shades" that are taped shut to blot out light (9–10). Violet refers to her furniture as "this old shit" (92). They show little pride in surroundings or possessions. At the center of both families lies an absence of home. The children have nowhere to return. They will not be visiting for a long time, if ever: Ivy: "You will never see me again" (135). Letts's play ends with Violet counting the losses, "And then you're gone, and Beverly, and then you're gone, and Barbara, and then you're gone, and then you're gone, and then you're gone—" (138).Human exteriors decay along with homes. Mary obsesses on the effect of time. The stage directions describe her as once "extremely pretty … still striking" (12). She tries to recapture an idealized past. She tells Cathleen she "was really very pretty" when she first met Tyrone (107). When Violet shows her daughter Ivy an old photo she exclaims, "You're beautiful, Mom." Violet responds, "I was beautiful. Not anymore … women are beautiful when they're young. And not after" (65). The inevitable loss of their looks causes them pain. Mary declares that "only the past when you were happy is real" (107), but Tyrone cautions his sons to "take her memories with a grain of salt" (139). At Beverly's funeral they speak solely of the young man. Recorded time stopped more than thirty years ago. The families cannot move forward.The past's hold on the present dictates the parents' fierce grasping for money and security, which erodes their emotional ties to their children. Tyrone and Violet share memories of brutal childhoods to let their children know they have had it easy. Tyrone recounts the familiar litany to silence any complaints. "It was at home I first learned … the fear of the poorhouse"; "I was the man of the family" (149–50). Violet tells her daughters that this present generation, made of weaker stuff, could never have withstood the pain. Between the ages of four and ten Beverly "lived in a Pontiac sedan" with his mother and father. "Now what else do you want to say about your rotten childhood?" Mattie Fae saved her "when one of my dear mother's many gentlemen friends was attacking me, with a claw hammer" (94).The fears of the last generation keep them from valuing the accomplishments of the new one. This should be a proud time for Violet. Her children are grown and she has a grandchild, something Mary lacks. But Violet voices her disappointment with her children loudly and frequently. Underneath her need for them to be stable and successful sounds clearly. Like Tyrone she bemoans the good education she provided: "You girls, given a college education, taken for granted no doubt, and where'd you wind up?" (95). Tyrone shouts at Jamie about "all the money I wasted on your education." Jamie was "fired in disgrace from every college" he attended (32). Their chagrin is particularly sharp because Tyrone and Beverly were self-made men, rising out of poverty to a kind of fame. Violet's pride in the hard work of her generation causes her disgust at its outcome: "Jesus, you worked as hard as us, you'd all be president" (95). The children's concerns seem to her paltry, a luxury, invented out of boredom with their good life.At the same time, both sets of parents refuse to give up on these children they love. There is always a chance, however slim, that they will improve. Tyrone probes Jamie gently—perhaps he will try harder to be a good actor, to re-launch his career, or do something constructive to increase his chances to earn his keep and be a good family member and citizen: "If you'd get ambition in your head instead of folly! You're young yet. You could still make your mark. You had the talent to become a fine actor. You have it still." Their own egotism makes them believe—"You're my son," Tyrone reminds him (33). Violet expects her daughters to take her advice, however harshly expressed. Ivy presents an easy target for criticism: "You're a pretty girl. You're the prettiest of my three girls, but you always look like such a schlub … you could get a decent man if you spruced up. A bit, that's all I'm saying" (25–26).The previous generation wonders what they will bequeath to the next. Tyrone's miserly ways merge with his desire to pass on a wealth that can't be counted either in cash or land. Violet's zeal to alter her daughters' appearances and relationships comes alive with Beverly's death. She attempts to cancel out the effects of his suicide and to take control, to remake the future if she cannot affect the past: "I don't plan to spend the rest of my days walking around and looking at what used to be" (65). Mary and Beverly may have taken themselves out, but life is not over for the people who remain, if only temporarily, in charge. Violet reveals Beverly's disappointment at Barbara's marriage—that she "settled" when she could have done so much better. Now that marriage is broken. "Your father thought you had talent, as a writer" (39).Being singled out for their parents' special attention and hopes does not affect the children's lives for the better. Barbara was Beverly's favorite, as Jamie was at one time Tyrone's, despite Barbara's absence and Jamie's dissipation. Neither child has a stable relationship. Jamie prefers the anonymity of brothels and he did not become a great actor, while Barbara's husband had an affair with a student nearly the same age as their own daughter, and she did not become a writer. The other children fare even less well. Edmund's tuberculosis may be terminal. Ivy's relationship with Little Charles must end because Beverly is his father from an affair with Mattie Fae. Motherhood does not suffice, fatherhood is missing, marriage erodes, siblings are at odds, and all family links prove fragile.The already loose fabric of relationships unravels. Respect due to an earlier generation has disappeared, replaced by a gloomy forecast. Mary's addiction will be thought about, whispered about, argued about, until Edmund finally attacks: "It's pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother." Although he quickly apologizes, Mary ignores him, turns away to look out the window, and responds "Just listen to that awful foghorn." Soon she will leave, saying "I must go upstairs. I haven't taken enough" (123). Violet's behavior grows increasingly bizarre, until Barbara tells her to shut up—"You've already said enough." Still, her mother will not be shamed (93). Both women fight for what gives them a measure of peace. The difference is that in the O'Neill play tragedy prevails; Mary will go on taking her drug. The family is helpless to contain her. Letts's family, however, is not; they throw out the drugs and force Violet into an unwelcome