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Intertextuality in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Other Playwrights

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.1.0107

2161-4318

Sherry D. Engle,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

Modernists devoted to Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller will especially welcome the range of thought and discussion provided in the essays within this volume. While the works of John Guare, Maureen Watkins, and Sophie Treadwell are also examined, the majority of the essays focus on Glaspell and O'Neill. Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy, the editors of Intertextuality in American Drama, have brought together contributors with backgrounds “as diverse as their critical approaches,” including “the work of researchers at every stage of their career” (3). In the introduction, Eisenhauer traces the meaning of “intertexuality” to Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva, who claimed “that meaning [within a text] is always mediated through the multitude of other texts that lie behind the writer and the reader's use and decoding of meaning” (2). Contributors in this collection discuss not only how the works of other writers and texts have influenced playwrights but also the influence of family, mentors, actors, and the cultural milieu.The editors have divided the essays into two sections: “Literary Intertextuality,” which includes articles that explore plays for their intertextual relationship to poems and plays and performances, and “Cultural Intertextuality,” which looks at sources that are not literary (3). In the first subsection, “Poets,” Herman Daniel Farrell III and Rupendra Guha Majumdar offer contrasting and insightful essays concerning O'Neill's 1924 adaptation of Coleridge's epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Readers might want to reread the poem in order to fully appreciate O'Neill's undertaking, as well as the discussion in the essays. Farrell adopts a “structuralist approach to intertextual criticism” (10), maintaining that O'Neill's adaptation of the poem was a particular moment in his writing career when he willingly diminished his authorial originality in deference to the construction of the dramatic work. On the other hand, Majumdar asserts that many influences contributed to O'Neill's commercially unsuccessful adaptation of Coleridge's poem. He examines a number of O'Neill plays, pointing out the influence of the Ancient Mariner by “virtue of its combined dramatic, visual and symbolic richness” (26). Similarly, in a following essay Aurélie Sanchez posits that in his last extant play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill borrowed not only from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream but from Keats's odes and their “romantic symbolism in the form of references to the moonlight” (37).In the same section, Michael Winetsky and Noelia Hernando-Real explore intertextuality in Susan Glaspell's writings. “German, British, and American Romanticism are all frequently referenced in Glaspell's work,” asserts Winetsky (53). Quoting from Glaspell's novels The Glory of the Conquered and Judd Rankin's Daughter, as well as her play Chains of Dew, he illustrates Glaspell's use of Romantic allusion, noting her references to Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Where Winetsky looks at Glaspell's oeuvre, Hernando-Real focuses her discussion on Alison's House, for which Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. In this three-act drama, the poet Emily Dickinson “serves not only as a model for one character,” but her “words reverberate quite overtly” (63). Hernando-Real draws parallels between the two women, the feminism within their writings and their “experimentation with form” (65–66); she then effectively hones in on dramatic links between the two writers and examines Glaspell's use of Dickinson's imagery.In the second subsection, “Playwrights and Performance Texts,” Kristin Bennett tackles “An Intertextuality Study of Thornton Wilder's Women” (76). Bennett traces Wilder's “attentiveness to woman's potential” through his relationship with his mother and sisters who “defied the nineteenth-century definitions and constraints that were believed to hinder women.” Even so, Wilder presents femininity “as a struggle between an untapped personal potential and a stifling, socially constructed, feminine ideal” (77) as seen in Emily in Our Town and in Gladys Antrobus and Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth, who remain dependent upon male authority. Indeed, rather than “experiencing the world for themselves,” the women in these texts are “hidden beneath decades of tradition” (78). Stephen Marino's essay segues into the topic of Arthur Miller through the playwright's early friendship with Thornton Wilder and posits that the older playwright had a significant influence on Miller's playwriting. Marino argues “both versions of A View from the Bridge show particularly strong evidence of Wilder's impact on Miller's theory of the poetic social drama” (90). Indeed, he maintains that even his late plays “show how Miller continued to tackle the complexity of illustrating family and social elements in the dramatic form” (97) in a manner similar to Wilder's. Jason Shaffer offers the complex “from Page to Stage” history of Washington Irving's play Rip Van Winkle (99). Beginning as a tale in the pages of Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon in 1818, Van Winkle's story evolved over time in the hands of various actors and writers, significantly Dion Boucicault, and American actor Joseph Jefferson III who toured in the play for decades, becoming the definitive performer of the role on stage for that period.Four essays comprise the third subsection on “Cultural Texts,” beginning with Franklin J. Lasik's fascinating discussion of theories of utopianism. He begins with a discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novel Herland, in which the author contrasts “an ideal feminine society to a hegemonically masculinized civilization” (114); he then offers Claire Archer, the central character in Susan Glaspell's 1921 expressionistic play The Verge, as an example of a character embodying the “search for a female utopia” (114). Where Lasik sees a utopian implication in The Verge, Emeline Jouve's essay makes a strong case for the predominance of insanity in the same play, since Claire herself declares “madness … is the only chance for sanity” (quoted 158). Jouve explores various aspects of this theme as it relates to interest in psychoanalysis at the time. Similarly, Sarah Withers delves into “the intersection of performance, loss, and cultural memory” (126) in The Inheritors, Glaspell's other 1921 play. Withers asserts the post–World War I environment shows “a critical response to an era marked by the first Red Scare and by heightened government scrutiny of its citizenry for any hint of ‘un-Americanism’” (127), and she discusses Glaspell's use of the notion of “frontier.” Annalisa Brugnoli looks into intertexuality in Eugene O'Neill's works by ambitiously delving into “the issue of divine hiddenness” or “the deus absconditus leitmotiv” (142); this essay accesses the influences on O'Neill of the Bible, Nietzsche, and Jung, highlighting “the significance of [his] positions on divine hiddenness in the frame of an ongoing historical discourse” (143).In the last subsection, “Cultural Context,” Lisa Hall Hagen intersects crime and gender in Glaspell's Trifles, Maurine Dallas Watkins's Chicago, and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. Showing the similarities of these works—each playwright was a journalist inspired by true events, and all three plays focus on a woman who has killed a man—Hagen argues that the playwrights “created destabilizing and investigative narratives out of a potentially conservative form, the mainstream press” (169). Exploring “history, memory, and nostalgia” in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Jeffrey Eric Jenkins discusses the playwright's anxieties during tryouts as expressed in his letters and shows how the 1938 play became “a ‘psalm’ for its time” (189). Ramón Espejo Romero ponders ways that Arthur Miller's nondramatic writings can “shed surprising and unexpected light on his dramatic oeuvre and his agenda as a writer and intellectual” (205); he cites, for example, the prose poem “Rain in a Strange City,” as well as essays the playwright wrote about his own dramatic work. Graham Wolfe explores John Guare's use of connectedness in his 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation. While he discusses the significance of the title phrase as a measure of separation, Wolfe also delves into ways the play establishes “connections with other texts” and how texts can also connect people to each other (219). The volume concludes with an examination by Sharon Friedman of Susan Glaspell's “challenge to native discourse,” initially “rendered metaphorically” in her Harper's Monthly short stories (232). Responding to society's post–World War I crisis period of “tensions over immigration and exacerbated rival ideologies,” Glaspell expresses a “scathing indictment of native and repressive American nationalism in her full-length play Inheritors” (232). Indeed, Friedman points out how Glaspell's subtle critique of society, in published stories such as “Unveiling Brenda,” becomes an overt parody of cherished beliefs in her “satirical portrait of university culture” in Inheritors (237).Intertextuality in American Drama offers a variety of essays that, while at times uneven in the depth in which subjects are explored, nevertheless offer thought-provoking reading. This volume expands understanding and appreciation of those playwrights discussed and is useful for scholars, teachers, and anyone investigating modern American theater.