Reviewed by:

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

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...

审阅者：

• 誓言、面纱和面具：贝丝·温斯特拉尤金·奥尼尔戏剧中的婚姻表现
• 亚历山大·佩蒂特（简介）

在对尤金·奥尼尔的妻子们进行的自信而迟来的分析中，贝丝·温斯特拉提醒我们，戏剧化的卑鄙行为可以是一种探究的形式，而不是对一个人自身堕落的揭露。然而，把这条不言而喻的真理应用到奥尼尔的妻子身上，结果却很棘手：她们看起来确实是一群脾气暴躁、纵容的人，而奥尼尔本人也是一个糟糕的丈夫。因此，正如温斯特拉所观察到的，传统上将这些角色视为“不可靠”、“危险”、“掠夺性”、“婊子”，以及令人沮丧的中世纪双重性格，“不仅好色，而且不诚实”(13)。这些是 2980 年代女权主义者和早期批评家的判断，这些女权主义者对奥尼尔的舞台妻子的行为感到困扰，他们发现了“大师”（奥尼尔的第三任妻子对他的称呼）的态度，他们认为这些态度本身是无可反驳的。似乎没有人考虑过奥尼尔的舞台妻子可能表现出现代戏剧的因果关系评估的可能性，最尖锐的是自然主义。

Wynstra 纠正了这个错误。在她看来，反应性解雇“会阻止人们对女性所肩负的沉重负担和责​​任的好奇心，更重要的是，停止同情心，无论是在奥尼尔时代还是在我们这个时代”（175）。她的主要论点虽然并不总是一致，但也是互补的。首先，她将妻子们置于后进步时代“女性杂志”中传播的关于伴侣婚姻和征婚身份的不断演变的话语中。其次，她假定奥尼尔习惯于“描绘聪明、复杂的女性”（114）。她断言，奥尼尔戏剧中的厌女症方面“被用来贬低或排斥[妻子]”，实际上“植根于并与当时的文化规范和对女性的期望相关”（175）。假设奥尼尔赞同当下的总体性胡作非为，就忽视了一部全神贯注于社会对个人的亵渎的作品的本质。我们不需要喜欢《超越地平线》中的露丝·梅奥，就像我们不需要喜欢《冰人来了》中的希基一样。奥尼尔要求我们理解他笔下人物的畸形。温斯特拉答应了。

正如她的章节副标题所示，温斯特拉围绕求爱和婚姻的各个阶段来组织她的书，并提及以下主题：“婚姻的承诺”、“早期和中期婚姻”、“不忠与权力平衡”以及“怀旧与婚姻”。婚姻后期的叙事制作。” 这一图式使她能够展现一个在整个职业生涯中思考忠诚、相互性和责任问题的奥尼尔。奥尼尔思想的递归性证实了温斯特拉对时间顺序的回避，并实现了一种有时令人愉快的叙事，[结束第288页]感觉就像一部成长剧，由一系列人物协商婚姻的中途站。在每一章中，不同的妻子在这位剧作家数十年的职业生涯和他所从事的流派中保持一致。温斯特拉对整个语料库的掌控自始至终都是显而易见的。

温斯特拉开篇的“订婚剧”名单显示出对定性判断适当缺乏兴趣（55）：空洞的《现在我问你》和《面包和黄油》与越来越知名的《All God's Chillun Got Wings》和《The Great》并驾齐驱。布朗神和栗子《超越地平线》和《安娜·克里斯蒂》。这些戏剧中提出和接受的“冲动而热情”的求婚强化了关于浪漫作为兼容性基础的流行神话（16）。温斯特拉证明，奥尼尔喜欢快速的说明性部分，以对比一对夫妇的爱的流露和对彼此的无知。她以露丝·阿特金斯为例，她无法理解罗伯特·梅奥突然而华丽的求婚：“没有任何迹象表明她已经听到或处理了他所说的内容；相反，她被他说话的诗意方式所吸引，尽管没有证据表明他说的话实际上具有艺术天赋”（39）。但如果露丝是个傻瓜，她就是社会的……