Week #39: October 15 – October 21
What do the following words have in common: disgrace, regret, remorse, shame, sin, stigma, dishonor? Yes, the word ‘guilt’ can substitute all of their meanings, but they have another commonality as well… the three playwrights that would have celebrated a birthday this week all suffered in some form bouts of guilt that greatly influenced their lives and as a consequence their writing too. As we honor Eugene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Miller during their birthday week, we must reflect on how far our society has come and imagine how far it still needs to progress so that others don’t fall victim to the consequences of needless guilt. Although guilt comes in many forms, the three most prevalent forms that affected these playwrights included personal, familial, and/or societal. Since Oscar Wilde celebrated his birthday first on October 16, 1854, let’s begin with him and how guilt influenced his life. As the second of three children of a well-known and successful doctor, Oscar Wilde experienced a comfortable childhood, but during his early adolescence he experienced his first encounter with guilt – survivor’s guilt: his younger sister suddenly passed away from a fever, most likely meningitis. Her death wreaked havoc on young Oscar’s mind. He carried a locket of her hair in an envelope throughout his life and composed the poem “Requiescat” in her memory. In a notebook of his where he drafted this poem, he journaled about feeling guilty that she died because of the love the two shared. Whether this love references a familial love or an incestuous one, remains controversial. Regardless, Wilde found a way to continue on with life and his studies. He eventually attended Magdalen College, and during his time here, at the age of twenty-one, he experienced his second encounter with guilt: that of sibling rivalry. The unexpected death of their father required his older brother to forgo his law ambitions and help care for their mother, while the younger Oscar continued to enjoy the lively campus life. The responsibility his brother faced led him to alcohol, and the more he heard about Oscar’s successes, the more he drank; and the more he drank and screwed up his life, the more Oscar felt a different type of survivor’s guilt – what if he’d helped out more after the death of his father, would his brother have had a successful life too? But Oscar stayed in school and maybe because of the guilt he carried, he became involved in the Aesthetic Movement – wanting to appreciate art (and life) for its beauty rather than for having a deeper meaning. After he graduated from college he dappled in writing children’s stories and while touring internationally to lecture on the Aesthetic Movement, he wrote his first play, “Vera; or The Nihilists” (1880), but it only lasted one unenthusiastic week in the theatre. Fortunately, he still had his excellent reputation as a lecturer and in 1884 he married Constance Lloyd. And within two years, she bore him two sons. Unfortunately, the combination of the stress from trying to maintain that aesthetic lifestyle and the birth of his second son, made Oscar consciously aware of his own unfulfillment. Within a short period of time, he found his fulfillment in the arms of a young man, seventeen-year-old Robert Ross. Once again, Oscar Wilde found himself entrapped in the clutches of guilt – this time not by the survivor’s guilt stemming from familial relationships, but from the guilt of having sinned against society’s expectations – homosexuality was a crime at that time. Brimming with this conflict, Wilde penned the controversial novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) which follows a young handsome man, who after having his portrait painted, unintentionally makes a deal with the devil that allows his picture to grow old, but his physique to remain youthfully handsome. The more he enjoys the pleasures life has to offer him, including innuendos of homosexuality, the older and uglier his portrait becomes, until finally he commits a bizarre form of suicide. Perhaps because society considered his novel scandalous, it quickly rose in popularity. The popularity of his novel introduced Wilde to one of his admirers, Bosie Douglas. The two quietly became lovers, and Wilde’s wife left with his two sons. During this time, Oscar Wilde found a quiet contentment in his personal life and robust success in his writing career. He published three well-renowned plays, “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), “An Ideal Husband” (1895), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). Unfortunately, this period did not last. Although Bosie and Oscar tried to conceal their relationship, Bosie’s father publicized their affair. Upset and fearful of the consequences, Wilde sued him for libel – but lost the suit when investigators brought too much evidence to court. The court then arrested Oscar Wilde for gross indecency and sentenced him to two years of hard labor – the maximum sentence. Upon his release from prison, Wilde spent his few remaining years wandering Europe, trying unsuccessfully to revive his writing talent. He finally succumbed to cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900 – believing that he only left his sins as his legacy for society. It took one hundred and twenty-two years for the courts to see the error of their ways: in 2017, London officials passed the Policing and Crime Act which pardoned some 50,000 men for homosexual acts – Oscar Wilde’s name is on the list. One can only imagine the contributions Oscar Wilde would have continued to make to the literary scene had society learned how to accept people’s differences earlier. Fortunately, the rise of LGBT rights, such as the 2015 Supreme Court decision which recognizes marriages between same-sex couples, reinforce that we are finally headed in the right direction: a direction that leads to acceptance, and acceptance which will lead to the alleviation of unnecessary guilt. After reading about Oscar Wilde’s experiences, we can see that guilt can arise from disappointing both familial and societal expectations. And he was not alone: playwright Eugene O’Neill suffered from the same, and the plays he wrote portray the consequences of living with such guilt. Even before Eugene’s birth on October 16, 1888, guilt’s fingers clutched at the family’s happiness. In 1885, Ella – Eugene’s mom – left her two sons James Jr. (age seven) and Edmund (age two) with her mother to tour with her husband, an actor in a traveling theatrical production of The Count of Monte Cristo. While away, James Jr. contracted measles. He recovered but not before toddler Edmund contracted and succumbed to the disease. Laden with guilt for her absence during this time, Ella verbally accused James Jr. of intentionally infecting his baby brother, and so at the young age of seven, James Jr. – Eugene’s older brother - already had the weight of guilt on his shoulders. Within three years, Eugene came along, and after a difficult childbirth and still suffering from depression over the loss of her second son, doctors prescribed morphine to his mother. She quickly became addicted, causing chaos and instability in the O’Neill household for Eugene’s entire childhood. Full of resentment and at a breaking point for caring for his wife, when Eugene reached adolescence, his father told him that Eugene was responsible for his mother’s addiction. As a way to escape this guilt, Eugene turned to alcohol, and by late adolescence, left home for a drunken and destitute life on the sea, coming to shore to enjoy the ladies. During one of these excursions, he married his first wife and introduced his own son into the world. While staring at the bottom of a bottle and on the verge of divorce, he gave into guilt’s strangulation and attempted suicide. His failed attempt left him believing that his life must have some purpose, and he came ashore and landed a job contributing to a London newspaper. Unfortunately, his previous life caught up with him and he shortly exhibited signs of tuberculosis. At the end of a six-month stint in the hospital, alone but sober for the first time in almost a decade, he tried a different channel for his guilt – he put pen to paper and wrote. Within four years he had written five plays; “Beyond the Horizon” (1918) even winning him a Pulitzer Prize. With this success and the old feelings of guilt at bay, he tried again at love and married Agnes Boulton. They had two children together, but after eleven years, he filed for a divorce when he met Carlotta Monterey, whom he married less than a month later, and even though they suffered a tumultuous marriage, they remained together until his death from complications of Parkinson’s Disease in 1953. By the end of his life, he had written twenty-six more plays, including “Anna Christie” (1920), “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (1941), and “Strange Interlude” (1928), earning him three more Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature. Utilizing his own life’s experiences as his muse, majority of the characters in his plays drift into the despair of a variety of addictions after surrendering their hopes and dreams, leaving the audience exhausted and reflecting upon their own lives. O’Neill not only left us his plays as his legacy, which with the rise of addictions in society, tend to reverberate louder now than they did during their first performances, but he also left the guilt that riddled his life. Both of his sons struggled with addiction – the oldest with alcohol and younger one with heroin – and both eventually committed suicide. And he never spoke again to his youngest child, daughter Oona, after she pursued an acting career and married Charlie Chaplin, thirty-seven years her senior. Although she lived into her sixties, seeking escape from psychological issues, she suffered from alcoholism and eventually passed away from pancreatic cancer. The connection is clear: guilt leads one on a troubled path. But one can escape guilt, or least warn others of its devastating consequences, as we see in Arthur Miller’s life. He endured right along with the rest of his family when they lost everything in the Crash of 1929; he quietly suffered anti-Semitism remarks as a teenager while working for an automotive part warehouse; he defied stereotypes when he attended the University of Michigan to study journalism; and he rose above expectations, when after the success of his first play No Villian, he switched to an English major and graduated in 1938. Then he made the next typical adult move – he married and started a family. With the responsibility of a family, Miller continued to work hard on his writing and found great success with his plays All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). So far nothing to cause Guilt’s sleepy eyelids to open and take notice. But then after over a decade of marriage, in walked temptation: Marilyn Monroe… and Guilt opened her eyes. Miller knew he had responsibilities to his family and fought his attraction to Marilyn, but their relationship continued to strengthen. Maybe the inevitable – his divorce and subsequent marriage to Marilyn - would have happened sooner than the five years it took, but Miller had his eyes on a bigger picture. During the 1950s fear of Communists casted shadows of suspicion on every American and lurked around every corner. As the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogated friend after friend in the entertainment industry, Miller watched each one struggle with their decision to save their own reputation and career by proving their allegiance with America at the destruction of someone else’s reputation by blaming them as Communists. He watched as these friends submitted to pressure. He watched as they lowered their eyes as they passed by the victims they named, the knowledge of their own guilt and betrayal evident in their downcast glance. He could simply watch no more. Miller knew that history tends to repeat itself, and although hundreds of years had passed, he knew we had come full circle. This hunt for Communists based on hearsay - where in order to save your own reputation you had to deliver someone else’s reputation in exchange - strongly reminded him of the infamous Salem Witch Trials - where a ‘witch’ had to prove she believed in the ways of the Lord by surrendering the name of another potential ‘witch.’ Although he knew he needed to tread carefully not provoke the HUAC, he knew just how to portray this so that others would see this mass hysteria for its absurdity. And so, Arthur Miller wrote “The Crucible” (1952). Although no one disputes the historical occurrence of the Salem Witch Trials, Miller certainly added his own speculation about the onset of those events: Miller wrote that when John – the moralistic husband who had an affair - tried to severe his indecent relationship with Abigail – the young girl with whom he had the affair, she accused his wife Elizabeth of witchery, hoping that Elizabeth would hang and John would turn to her in consolation… sounds like Miller’s personal guilt over his growing affections for Marilyn Monroe while still married might have found a creative release! But if no one at the time made that personal connection to Miller, the overall theatrical comparison to the behaviors of the HUAC did not fool the HUAC members, and they subpoenaed him for having Communistic ties. By this time, already knowing what it felt like to have guilt perched upon his shoulders because of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and remembering the guilty look in the eyes of his friends that had succumbed to the HUAC’s pressure, Miller decided to make another stand; he refused to surrender any names and although his sentence included a fine and imprisonment as a consequence, he held his head high. Fortunately, within a year, the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction. Unfortunately, if he thought he had paid his penance to Guilt, he was wrong. As Marilyn Monroe became more of the stereotypical housewife, the more Miller’s attraction toward her waned. By 1961 – just a few years after she staunchly stood beside him during his confrontation with the HUAC – Miller divorced her. The divorce devastated Marilyn; she had sacrificed her career, her fame, and even her religion for him and within a year from that betrayal, she died from an overdose. As Miller felt the tendrils of Guilt root themselves in his mind, he turned to what he knows best – writing plays. He wrote the very personal play “After the Fall” (1964) which follows the main character Quentin’s struggle with the decision to forge ahead in love after the suicide of his last partner. And much like Quentin, Miller forged ahead and married his newest love, Inge Morath. For the next forty years, by outward appearances, Miller lived a contented, humanitarian, and moralistic life. But as the saying goes, looks can deceive. Arthur and Inge had two children: Rebecca and Daniel. Miller doted on Rebecca, but few even knew about Daniel. Why? Daniel had Down Syndrome and Miller made the decision to institutionalize him. Although institutionalizing a child with Down Syndrome was more commonplace during the 1960s than today, Miller’s behavior (or lack thereof) toward his son speaks volumes. He rarely visited, never spoke about him to friends, and didn’t mention him in his memoir. His actions suggest denial of his existence, but exist he did and that guilt must have had a profound affect on Miller. Maybe that guilt hindered his writing, explaining why he wrote less in his final years. Although society remembers Miller as a moralistic humanitarian, stemming from his stand against the HUAC and the Vietnam War, he seemed to continue to juggle one form of guilt or another his entire life. Even in his final days, within two years of his wife’s passing and much to the dismay of his daughter, he became involved with a woman more than five decades younger – a relationship that caused stress on his relationship with his daughter, adding another ball of guilt to juggle. When Arthur Miller died in 2005 from heart failure, maybe his heart just couldn’t fight Guilt’s stranglehold any longer. So here we have three playwrights who all struggled with multiple forms of guilt: Oscar Wilde carried around guilt caused from both personal and societal expectations; Eugene O’Neill carried personal guilt from family relations; and Arthur Miller – although he attempted to at least enlighten society – still met his match with personal guilt. As far as the guilt caused by not meeting some type of societal expectation, I’d like to think that we have learned more about acceptance which lessens the reasons for a person to feel guilty, but evidence suggests that society’s expectations – or at least what we individually think society expects – is too closely interwoven with our own thoughts leaving a tangled mess of what turns into personal guilt. We see advertisements portraying overly thin physiques and see this as society’s expectations for our own physique; we then feel guilty that our own physiques don’t reflect that expectation. We see others following a prescribed path in life that we think society expects, and then feel guilty that our own life hasn’t followed that same path. We see families behaving in a manner in which we think society expects, and then feel guilty about our own family’s dysfunctionality. And sadly, this guilt often leads to addictive or obsession behavior: we feel like we can’t control society’s expectations, but we can control our food intake – so we eat; we can numb those feelings with alcohol or drugs – so we indulge; we can control with whom we interact - so we escape. But truly, it is our own demons – our own insecurities the we project as society’s expectations. Once we accept ourselves, once we love ourselves, we can take responsibility for our own actions which will alleviate the need for Guilt to open her eyes. Let her rest in slumber – she’s been busy for far too long. In addition to the websites I mentioned in my article, I also reference information from researching these authors on the following sites: Churchwell, Sarah. “Eugene O'Neill, master of American theatre.” The Guardian. 30 March 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/mar/30/eugene-o-neill-master-american-theatre Fishman, Howard. “Swept Away By a Dark Current: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill.” The New Yorker. 20 March 2018. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/swept-away-by-a-dark-current-the-plays-of-eugene-oneill Hammerman, Harley. “Eugene Gladstone O’Neill.” eONeill.com: An Electronic Eugene O’Neill Archive. 2016. Web. https://www.eoneill.com/biography.htm Kingston, Angela. “Oscar Wilde and the sister’s death that haunted his life and work.” The Irish Times. 16 February 2017. Web. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/oscar-wilde-and-the-sister-s-death-that-haunted-his-life-and-work-1.2976363 Marino, Steve. “A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller’s Life and Works.” The Arthur Miller Society. 2017. Web. http://arthurmillersociety.net/am-chronology/ Petrusich, Amanda. “A Daughter’s View of Arthur Miller.” The New Yorker. 19 March 2018. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-daughters-view-of-arthur-miller Pluckebaum, Ryan. “Oscar Wilde.” CMG Worldwide. 2018. Web. https://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/biography/ Rintoul, Douglas. “The Crucible: the perfect play for our post-truth times.” The Guardian. 14 February 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/feb/14/the-crucible-the-perfect-play-for-our-post-truth-times Smith, Wendy. “A new biography of Eugene O’Neill looks beyond the playwright’s demons.” The Washington Post. 01 December 2014. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-new-biography-of-eugene-oneill-looks-beyond-the-playwrights-demons/2014/12/01/2e217a88-7016-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html?utm_term=.708992eeafaf Wikipedia contributors. "Oscar Wilde." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 10 October 2018. Web. 15 October 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde Zinoman, Jason. “Arthur Miller’s life had its own lost act: A son placed out of sight.” The New York Times. 30 August 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/arts/30iht-miller.1.7317269.html
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AuthorLet me introduce myself. I am Julie Blasofsel. While teaching high school English for the past dozen years, my appreciation for works of literature increased after visiting several locations associated with the authors and their texts. You can't help but feel the presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson as you stand on the shores of Walden pond, the despair of Henry Longfellow as you stand in his house, the loneliness of Edgar A. Poe as you descend into his walled basement, the candor of Samuel Clemons as you reach his men-only study. My goal is to gather information and relate my experiences about these places of literary significance in this literary hive. Please add your literary travel experiences and recommendations. Together we can bring these authors to life and light the flame of passion for reading in others. Enjoy! Archives
October 2018
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