“We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it.” (134) It’s hard to believe someone could write such a brutally honest depiction of his own family, but Eugene O’Neil managed to capture his family portrait without any biased shielding. This play is undeniably the epitome of American modernist literature. It’s completely saturated with metaphors, symbolism, and allusions, and at the same time its not dense reading. The family dynamic is so accurately depicted that, as in Tennessee’s Glass Menagerie, the viewer feels intrusive. O’Neil sends so many emotions flying around the stage that you’d assume it would be hard to follow, however the play is extremely easy to relate to. In most families there are problems where love and hate are constantly battled, because you can only truly hate someone you are close enough to love. Despite these conflicts the entire family has a fierce loyalty to each other from outsiders; they are very protective of the secrets they hold.

Their love for each other leads them to try to deceive the others so they don’t hurt them, which ends up causing more pain then they had intended. The fog is a metaphor for this emotional protection between the family members. Travis Bogard said in A Contour in Time that, “Their pain fills their being so completely that their essential natures lie close to the surface” which became impossible to cover. The three men are trying to protect Mary from herself as well as from the truth about Edmund’s sickness. Mary is trying to protect her family from the let down that she failed to stay sober again, and she is trying to escape their judgment and thus her own. Because she knows how upset they will be, it upsets her therefore denying the reality to herself. Both use the fog to hide their true motives.

“I don’t mind it tonight. Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t stand it any more… It hides your from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.” (100)

When Edmund takes a respite from the reality of his mother’s addiction he escapes to the fog,

“The fog was where I wanted to be… I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted-to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself… It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”(133)

Each of them deals with loss of hope in a different way. Mary loses hope that her life will be better and turns to morphine and a deeper, yet flawed, hope in god.

“I’ve never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. But some day, dear, I will find it again-some day when you’re all well, and I see you healthy and happy and successful, I don’t have to feel guilty any more- some day when the Blessed Virgin Mary forgives me and gives me back the faith in Her love and pity I used to have in my convent days, and I can pray to her again- when She sees no one in the world can believe in me even for a moment any more, then She will believe in me, and with Her help it will be so easy. I will hear myself scream with agony, and at the same time I will laugh because I will be so sure of myself.” (96)

Despite her faith in God and in the Virgin Mary, she still doesn’t find strength or purpose with which to live, “I hope, sometime, without meaning it, I will take an overdose. I never could do it deliberately. The Blessed Virgin would never forgive me, then.” (123)

She cannot fully process the loss of her son, Eugene in the play and Edmund in reality. She uses her addiction to sink back into a schoolgirl reality before that happens. When she is not completely gone, but high enough to admit her feelings without restraint because she keeps blabbering on endlessly, she admits to blaming Jamie for his death. She also blames Edmund for her addiction.

 

All of them see life as a separate entity with no positives. While Mary is talking about Jamie she says,

“But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us can help the things life ahs done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”(63)

Life is a force that no hope or action could seemingly change or interfere. That misplaced faith justified their own hopelessness and dependence on drugs and alcohol as well as Edmunds sickness. When Edmund is talking to his father about his life experiences he states that only for a seconds at a time, when he is at sea, is there meaning in the world. At all other times he, “stumble[s] on toward nowhere, for no good reason!” (156)

As we already knew, O’Neil is a master of the stage and of writing. This autobiographical play is amazing because of its brutally honest depictions of the people closest to him during the most trying period of anyones’ lives, childhood and young adulthood. O’Neil is much better reading than our next topic, Kiss Me, Deadly, which I am (to put it nicely) dreading reading.

Eugene O’Neil, the only American playwright to win the noble prize, manages to capture the modernist themes of loss in a different way than most of the other authors we have sampled, in Desire Under the Elms.

Loss of hope is explored through Eben’s mother’s death, the death of the baby, and the loss of love. At the end in a very ironic way, Eben finds his love again but they are still hopeless. Eben deals with the loss of love and hope by fixating on the opposite, which is hatred. When his mother dies, Eben deals with that by hating his stepfather and blaming him for it instead of just accepting her death. Throughout the entire story Eben is fixated on his mother’s presence on the farm is a supernatural form. When Abbie says she feels something is the parlor Eben responds with “Maw…Maw allus loved me.” Also, after Abbie kills the baby, he asks his mother why she didn’t stop her. When Eben loses his love because he thought that Abbie was using him to steal the farm, he deals with it by fixating on the symbol of their love, the baby. While he is fighting with Abbie he says, “I wish he never was born! I wish he’d die this minit! I wish I”d never sot eyes on him! It’s him—yew havin’ him—a-purpose t’steal—that’s changed everythin’!” When Abbie reveals that she had killed the baby he focuses his emotion on her:

“Shut up, or I’ll kill ye! … Don’t ye tech me! Ye’re pizen! How could ye—t’murder a pore little critter—Ye must’ve swapped yer soul t’hell! Ha! I kin see why ye done it! Not the lies ye jest told—but ‘cause ye wanted t’steal agen—steal the last thin’ ye’d left me—my part o’him—no, the hull o’him—ye saw he looked like me—ye knowed he was all mine—an’ ye couldn’t b’ar it—I know ye! Ye killed him fur bein’ mine! But I’ll take vengeance now!”  

          As Travis Bogard states in A Contour in Time, the Dionysian way of life is also used to deal with the loss of love and hope. While Eben in love and happy, Ephraim just assumes he’s drunk as if in life there is no other reason to be genuinely happy except when intoxicated. When Eben feels he has nothing else, he leaves Abbie to be in a dreamlike drunken stupor and frolic with the village girls. In the morning, he doesn’t recollect saying vicious things about the baby and is horrified by the corrective actions Abbie has taken to fix their relationship.

             The play also centers around a comment on the stereotypes of society. America was a mother orientated society during the time that Desire was written. O’Neil challenges the meaning of mother through the incestuous and what would be seen on paper as inappropriate relationship between Eben and the woman referred to as his new Maw. In a symbolic way, Eben and Abbie consummate their love for each other in his mother’s parlor where when he was a child they had bonded and she had sun to him. This makes the reader uncomfortable with the situation; it feels morally wrong for more than the reasons of a typical affair.It also challenges the relationship between father and son in a Freudian manner, reducing it to universal competition. When Eben learns that his father had already had his way with Min he is at first disgusted by it, “I’ll go smash my fist in her face!” He doesn’t hit her though, he makes love to her instead. He is competing with his father in this way. They also compete in everything, like the farm work and of course with Abbie. The two are unaware of this competition, however, because it takes everyone else to point out how identical they are. Their similarity is ironic in itself, because neither of them can stand the other.  In the end, Desire Under the Elms, challenges the comtemporary meaning of family and the common ways of dealing with heart break in a different way than anyother author had brought to the American stage.

            Like Laura’s figurines, many modernist themes are on display in Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie. Chief among them, the reality of experience itself simply in the way the play is written. In his opening monologue Tom states:

“I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion…The play is a memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music.” (p 145)  

          Which leaves the audience questioning the legitimacy of the play. Although the play touches audience with the realistic way Williams portrays the family it’s hard to see a scenario exactly like the one displayed. Its claustrophobic on stage, making the audience feel they are intruding on something personal. The way the real life situation is displayed paired with the clearly unrealistic lighting and music cause the viewer to question their own sense of reality. The irony is, although Tom says the play is not realistic the ending is so bluntly realistic that is gives the readers false hope that such and ending would be impossible. Tom leaving his dependent sister and mother, like his father, is so harsh that it seems entirely fictional. In reality, that’s all too real of a possibility. Also, like in reality the story doesn’t just stop with a fulfilling ending, our memories continue and expand or end abruptly when there is no more left to recount. The brutal reality of the play make embracing it feel far too obvious, and thus one must look to the fiction in order to feel somewhat comfortable with the subject matter.

The hardships from their lives cause the entire family, Laura, Tom, and Amanda to lose hope in a better life and each deal with that in a different way. Laura is so fixated on her disability that she can’t see past it. She stays in her house and tried to isolate herself from reality as much as possibility. She grows practically incapable of conducting normal social interactions. Even her business class makes her so uncomfortable she vomits and can’t bring herself to return. As Tom said to his mother, “She lives in a world of her own-a world of little glass ornaments,” she simply retreats to her glass friends. She knows they can’t judge her; she finds comfort with the unicorn, the original one-of-a-kind figure because she can relate to how it is to feel so different from everyone around her. Strangely enough, I think that maybe in the end her faith was given back to her. Although Mr. O’Connor was engaged to someone else, he was still kind to her. His interest in her was redeeming since she’d had her heart set on him since high school. He broke her unicorn but she was okay with that because she felt he was now normal, and maybe that meant she felt normal. In that way she could be more independent and hopefully learn to support herself somehow in the future, or meet a man to support her.

Tom denied reality to himself as an escape. The monotony of daily life made him feel so trapped he was driven to write, drink, and watch movies to get out of it. He lusted for his own adventure and he didn’t want to wait. He loved his mother and sister, as evident by his remorse at leaving at the end, but was resentful of their dependence on him. Before dinner, Tom confides in Mr. O’Connor by saying:

” People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! … It’s our turn now, to go to the South Sea Island-to make a safari- to be exotic, far-off! But I’m not patient. I don’t want to wait till then. I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move!”

Tom not paying the electrical bill and having the lights turned out is symbolic of the how he plunged his sister and his mother into mystery and uncertainty by leaving. The candle light during the scene with Laura and Mr. O’Connor is like the glimpse she had of the comfort of having a man to love and provide for her. The play also shows how the choices made to help give hope may end up back firing and taking away the only comfort one can hope to find: love from a family.

Amanda is by nature on the stubborn, over dramatic, and good hearted side. She is constantly nervous and scared and deals with that through over preparation. She seems a little bit ocd; she wants everything to be in her control. Thats of course a mental protection device to combat how everything seems to fall apart. She was lost when her husband left so she over compensates to avoid the reoccurence of such termoil. While having a conversation with Tom about Mr.O’Connor’s visit she says:

“You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it!”

The only way that Amanda can somewhat relax is in the preparations for her children. She never really loses hope, because she’d already survived too much anyways. She just continues in an almost psychotic push forward, never really slowing down or smelling the roses. It’s like she’s running a race and allows everything to blur but the finish line because she’s scared if she slows down it will fall apart and never finish. She avoids the fact that in life there isn’t really a finish line because that goal gives her hope.

In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche DuBois is modernist themes wrapped up in the pretty bow of a southern belle. Her flawed interior landscape and interpretation of reality bring out major questions about hope, love, meaning, and responsibility. Also, her perception of how society should be and her role in functional society are two completely different pictures. After her husband commits suicide Blanche is left without hope, as she says her light was never turned on again. She felt personally responsible for not being able to help him, which was why she dealt with it by being increasingly “friendly” to numerous male acquaintances. That behavior is the opposite of how she feels society is supposed to function. She is constantly chastising Stella for how common and bestial Stanley is. She is appalled by the conditions she finds Stella living in, despite that the ones she was living in before were more deplorable. Basically, Blanche’s mental breakdown makes her the perfect message of modernism: hopeless and unable to connect with those around her due to misinterpretations of culture. In her monologue about her prior marriage you see her mentally deteriorate as she blames herself for the death of Allen:

“I didn’t find out anything till after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me-but I wasn’t holding him out, I was slipping in with him! I loved him unendurably but without being able to help him or help myself.”(354)

This scene demonstrates how she could not communicate. She loved this boy but didn’t realize the actual situation until after it was spelled out for her. She knew he needed help, but she discovered he was gay by walking in on him with another man. Even after finding out, she can’t talk to him about until she is drunk and says hysterically, while dancing, “I saw! I know! You disgust me…”(355).  In regards to Stella and Stanley, her communication is more selective. She informs them of how she lost Belle Reve, but she chooses to withhold other personal details of her life. Although that makes her an unreliable character, it also serves to illustrate a more realistic aspect of her character. By nature, humans try to impress other especially those closest to us, so it makes sense that Blanche wouldn’t tell her sister she’s been rather promiscuous. She justifies this behavior, as well as not telling Mitch her true age with:

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! … I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” (385)

Which also goes back to Blanche’s interpretation of how society and people should be versus the reality of the situation.  She’ll do nearly anything to embrace that society and escape reality, which was why when the Psychiatrist behaves like a gentleman she is pleased to go with him. In the end Blanche’s escape from hopelessness is in her own delusions, especially after Stanley rapes her and her own sister doesn’t believe her. The loss of hope seems always ends with a final ending.

My first observation might be stretching, but it appears that the first part of the story, the anecdote about Hortons Bay is a metaphor for the relationship between Marjorie and Nick. At first they were happy together, fishing and knowing each other. Then, abruptly, when there were no more logs to lumber or ideas to share between them it stopped, and left by boat. His relationship with her, I’m assuming becomes the “limestone..foundations” for the new unchartered waters he is plunging into, whereas Marjorie knew everything; their life together was habit.

This ties in to the theme of loss of hope in the relationship and how he dealt with it by dumping her. He fell out of love with her, and was unable to fix it any other way then by ending it. He escaped, like Prufrock, in a less dramatic way.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock encompasses many of the themes common in modernist literature. Namely, a critique of common culture as well as the loss of meaning and hope, and how to deal with that. These themes surface throughout the poem, especially the critique of culture;  the entire poem is about a man who feels he cannot connect to those around him through their culture. He complains about how the women repeatedly say “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all” to each point he tries to make. He can’t personally relate to the frivolous culture of his time and mocks it gently by criticizing the women’s conversation, “In the room the women come and go/ talking of Michelangelo.” The thought of being around these people at a social function clearly makes Prufrock uncomfortable, he refers to it with, “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,” and “Though I have seen my head … brought in upon a platter”. He doesn’t see a purpose in going to the party because he’s “known the eyes already, known them all–” which is comment on the conformity of society. He is also keenly aware of others perceptions of him and the standards they hold to. His own presence around them is seen as a disruption to their carefully balanced universe:

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
[They will say: ``How his hair is growing thin!'']
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
[They will say: ``But how his arms and legs are thin!'']
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

Prufrock has no hope in himself or in life, which leads him to depression and eventually suicide. He doesn’t see himself as a main characater, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;” because he doesn’t believe he is a significant person. He sees his life and wonders vaguely about it, but does not forsee any happiness. He has no hope for himself. His personal way of dealing with that is to escape to the mermaids (which he does not think will sing to him) through suicide.

I’m not really a huge fan of writing about myself, so here it goes. Our English class is doing an experiment/assignment on how we as students and people interact with eachother and our focus is modernism. Kelcey keeps making fun of whatever I type, because she’s sitting right next to me, reading as I type it out. She herself has nothing on her screen so I guess I still win. We’re supposed to write a little bit about ourselves: I’m seventeen years old; I like to cook, clean, and hang out with friends; I have a job banquet waitressing.

I’ll be studying the appearance of various typical themes which include the question of the reality of experience itself; the search for a ground of meaning in a world without God; the critique of the traditional values of the culture; the loss of meaning and hope in the modern world and an exploration of how this loss may be faced, as said on “Some Attributes of Modernist Literature” (which is linked below). This seems like an interesting topic because its an exploration of the literature of the values of the author/time, in a way.