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Five dramatic treatments of illusion

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Five dramatic treatments of illusion

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Content FIVE DRAMATIC TREATMENTS OF ILLUSION
by
Gerd Wernblom-ftvergaard
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(Comparative Literature)
August 1958
UMI Number: EP43079
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
L O S A N G E L E S 7
do W¥This thesis, written by
Qsrd..IfemblD0h-.Qv:ergaard............
under the guidance of b & £.....F acuity Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Faculty of the
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of the
requirements for the degree of
. ......................
JOHN p. COOKI
A cting D eg a Dean
D a te . ...AUG-4-4.J358.
Faculty Committee
---------, ------------------------------------------------------ I
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION .................................. 1
■II. THE ILLUSIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL............. . 4
Henrik Ibsen's The Wild D u c k ................ 4
Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths................ 24
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman............ 44
III. THE ILLUSIONS OF MANKIND........................ 63
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh .......... 63
Luigi Pirandello's It Xs. Sol (If You Think So) 83
IV. CONCLUSION...................................... 98
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................. 104
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In a famous dialogue in The Republic, Plato states
that the primary attribute of a philosopher and a good
statesman is the ability to perceive reality. Most people,
however, mistake appearances for reality. They are like
prisoners, chained from their childhood in a cave, where
they see only the shadows of people and objects on the wall
that they face. The task or even the duty of the philoso
pher is to release his fellow beings from their bonds, to
rid them of their illusions.
A true idealist, Plato assumes that every human
being is capable of achieving understanding: "The soul of
every man does possess the power of learning the truth and
the organ to see it with."*- At the same time he emphasizes
the danger of too sudden a transition from darkness to
light.. A mind has to be trained before it "can bear to
contemplate reality.
The thesis of Plato's allegory that man often fails
to grasp reality and is a victim of illusions has become
* - The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald
Cornford (New York and London: Oxford University Press,
Eighth printing, 1952), p. 232.
^Ibid.
2
almost axiomatic. The words reality and illusion have,
however, different meanings in modem thinking. To Plato
our world is a world of appearances, illusions. The true
and real world is the world of ideas. To us, on the con
trary, reality is made up of this world, its objects and
the life that is lived in it.
According to modem psychology, however, most men
are conditioned by their own limited experience and are,
therefore, unable to see clearly what reality is. As long
as the discrepancy between the concept of reality of one
person and that of others is fairly small, we hardly notice
it. But at times the misconceptions become dominant, and
then the person is likely to be unable to adjust to real
ity. Anybody who fails to accept things as they are and
who creates for himself an imaginary world is living a life
based on illusions, or, as the Norwegian author Henrik
Ibsen put it, his life is based on a life-lie. Sometimes
the person himself is not completely convinced that the
hopes and dreams that he nourishes can be realized, and
therefore he does not put them to test. Then the collo
quial term for his illusions is pipe-dreams.
Of all man's inner conflicts and failures none is
as pitiful or as far-reaching as those caused by an inabil
ity to see reality. The problem has naturally evoked the
interest of authors as well as psychologists, and has been
the theme of several dramas.
3
The purpose of this thesis is to show how five out
standing dramatists of the last century have treated the
problem. Due to their differing attitudes to life, their
opinions have varied as to the extent and quality of human
illusions and man's need for them. Consequently they have
also arrived at different conclusions as to man's ability
to perceive and accept reality.
The plays chosen are as follows: The Wild Duck
(1884) by Henrik Ibsen, The Lower Depths (1902) by Maxim
Gorky,3 It Is. S o ' . (If You Think So) (1916) by Luigi Piran
dello, The Iceman Cometh (1946; written in 1939) by Eugene
O'Neill, and Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller.
The dramas have not been dealt with in chronological order,
but are grouped according to the outlook of the author.
Thus Ibsen, Gorky and Miller seem to confine the illusions
to the individual, the little man, whereas O'Neill and
Pirandello in their plays treat the illusions of mankind.
•^Pseudonym for Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov.
CHAPTER II
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck
The first modern dramatist to deal with the con
flict between reality and man's illusions was the Norwegian
Henrik Ibsen. Although it is perhaps most poignantly
treated in The Wild Duck, the problem was not new to him.
As the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, pointed out as
early as 1867, Ibsen did not have very many themes or
ideas. Instead he scrutinized a limited number of problems
from different points of view. Time after time he dealt
with uncompromising idealism (e.g., in Brand and An Enemy
of the People), with escapism (Peer Gynt) and marriage
problems (A Doll's House and Ghosts). In The Wild Duck
these problems are merged together: the high-strung ideal
ist Gregers Werle tells the escapist Hjalmar Ekdal the
truth about the foundation of his marriage, and thus
deprives Hjalmar of one of his life-lies.
To be able to give an intensified effect to the
clash between the two extremes Ibsen used a new technique.
^Georg Brandes, "F^rste Indtryk" (1867), Henrik
Ibsen (Ki^benhavn: Gyldendalske Bokhandels Forlag, 1898),
p. io.
5
That he considered this as an achievement is evident. In
the letter that he sent to Hegel, his publisher, along with
the manuscript, he wrote: "I also think that The Wild Duck
may very probably entice some of our young dramatists into
new paths; and this I consider a result to be desired.M2
The new device adopted in The Wild Duck is the use
of a symbol as a unifying thread all through the play. The
title thus refers not only to the bird that is actually
present on the stage, but also to some of the characters
that are wild ducks, i.e., Old Ekdal, Hjalmar Ekdal, Hedvig,
Molvik and— Gregers Werle.
In Act I there is a reference to the wild duck sym
bol,3 but it is not until Act II that we find the key scene:
EKDAL:
It's Hakon Werle we have to thank for her [the wild
duck], all the same, Gina. (To GREGERS.) He was
shooting from a boat, you see, and he brought her down.
But your father's sight is not very good now. H'm; she
was only wounded.
GREGERS:
Ah! She got a couple of slugs in her body, I suppose.
HIALMAR:
Yes, two or three.
HEDVIG:
She was hit under the wing, so that she couldn't fly.
^Letters of Henrik Ibsen, trans. John Nielsen
Laurvik and Mary Morison (New York: Fox, Duffield and Co.,
1905), p. 384; 2nd September 1884. Hereinafter referred to
as Letters. op. cit.
3The Works of Henrik Ibsen, trans. William Archer
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), VIII, 263.
Hereinafter referred to as Works. op. cit.
GREGERS:
And I suppose she dived to the bottom, eh?
EKDAL:
(Sleepily, in a thick voice.) Of course. Always do
that, wild ducks do. They shoot to the bottom as deep
as they can get, sir— and bite themselves fast in the
tangle and sea-weed--and all the devil's own mess that
grows down there. And they never come up again.
GREGERS:
But your wild duck came up again, Lieutenant Ekdal.
EKDAL:
He had such an amazingly clever dog, your father had.
And that dog--he dived in after the duck and fetched
her up again.
GREGERS:
(Who has turned to HIALMAR.) And then she was sent to
you here?
HIALMAR:
Not at once; at first your father took her home. But
she wouldn't thrive there; so Pettersen was told to put
an end to her--
EKDAL:
(Half asleep.) H'm— yes— Pettersen— that ass—
HIALMAR:
(Sneaking more softlvTl TKat was how we got her, you
see; for father knows Pettersen a little; and when he
heard about the wild duck he got him to hand her over
to us.
GREGERS:
And now she thrives as well as possible in the garret
there?
HIALMAR:
Yes, wonderfully welTI She has got fat. You see, she
has lived in there so long now that she has forgotten
her natural wild life; and it all depends on t h a t.
GREGERS:
You are right there, Hjalmar. Be sure you never let
her get a glimpse of the sky and the sea— . But I
mustn't stay any longer; I think your father is asleep.4
ihWorks.. . op ._cit. .. pp. 313-315.
On this theme of the wounded wild duck with its
three variations (diving to the bottom of the sea, adapta
tion to a life in captivity, temporary revolt of the captive
bird, when it catches a glimpse of true reality), Ibsen
built his drama. ^ Counterpointed^ to it were then the
stories of the human wild ducks. Like Hedvig*s duck the
two Ekdals, Old Ekdal directly and Hjalmar Ekdal indirectly,
were wounded by Old Werle. Neither of them bit "themselves
fast in the tangle and sea-weed";^ that is, neither pulled
the trigger of the pistol that he had pointed to his own
breast. They were both saved by their cowardice and there-
-*As has been frequently noticed (see for instance
Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen, trans. Ruth Lima McMahon
and Hanna Astrup Larsen, The American Scandinavian Founda
tion [London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1931], II, 199;
and Martin Lamm, Modern Drama, trans. Karin Elliott [Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1952], p. 122), Ibsen radically changed
the personality of the characters while working on the play.
Since this is a unique case in his career, we have reason
to believe that the change took place, after he had struck
upon the idea of using the wild duck as a symbol.
^The relationship between Ibsen's technique and
that of a composer has been noted earlier. See Jeanette
Lee, The Ibsen Secret. A Key to the Prose Dramas of Henrik
Ibsen (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1908),
p. 105; and Theodore Jorgensen, Henrik Ibsen. A Study in
Art and Personality (Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College
Press, 1945), p. 377. Miss Lee sees Ibsen's symbol as
"Leading Motives" and Mr. Jorgensen calls the wild duck
symbol a "repetitional cadence." I find the term counter
point more adequate, however. That the "symbolism is
detachable," as is said in Brian W. Downs, A Study of Six
Plays by Ibsen (Cambridge, England: The University Press,
1950), pp. 185-167, is an opinion that I cannot share.
Mr. Downs' theory is evidently based on a misunderstanding
of Hedvig's relation to the symbol. See Downs, op. cit..
pp. 161-162.
?Works. op. cit., p. 314.
8
after adapted themselves to a life in captivity, i.e., to
changed conditions of life.® To be able to stand this,
however, they had to create a make-believe reality. Old
Ekdal "hit upon his own cure,"^ as Relling says. Out of
old Christmas trees he made a forest in the garret, fur
nished it with tame animals and went hunting there. Hial-
mar had to be helped to his illusion, his dream of the
great invention, by Relling, who also created Molvik's
life-lie.10
In both Old Ekdalfs and Hialmar's cases the money
for "keeping" them comes from Old Werle. Old Ekdal is
over-paid for his copying papers for Old Werle and Hialmar
was helped to both an occupation and a wife. Like the wild
duck that they keep in their fake forest they thrive quite
well. Hialmar is "thoroughly happy"^*- and has also "put on
flesh."12 Unfortunately Gregers Werle misjudges the situa
tion. He does not realize that the Ekdals are saved. They
do not dwell at the bottom of the sea--which would mean
death to any mammalian creature— but in a snug garret where
®Downs is probably right when he assumes that
Ibsen got the idea of the changed character of a wild duck,
kept in captivity, from Darwin's Variations of Animals and
Plants Under Domestication; see Downs, op. cit., p. 140.
Kofit, however, means that the similarity is a coincidence;
see Koht, op. cit.. p. 207.
^Works, op. cit.. p. 432.
^ Ibid.. p. 432.
^ Ibid., p. 246. ^ Ibid., p. 242.
they get fresh water ever so often. And instead of being
the "clever dog" Gregers wants to be, he is the fool who
shows one captive bird a little bit of blue sky. In the
reaction that follows, another being, Hedvig, is hurt. And
to her the garret becomes the depths of the sea: she kills
herself there.
Although The Wild Duck is based on a symbol, it is
essentially a realistic work. In a letter to a Norwegian
author, Theodore Caspari, Ibsen wrote in June 1884:
". . . I have just completed a play in five acts--that is
to say, the rough draft of it; now comes the elaboration,
the more energetic individualization of the persons and
their mode of expression."13 The characters may seem a
little exaggerated, as if caricatured, but still they are
plausible. Ibsen has used the same technique as Moliere.
The exaggeration has a comic effect, but it is a thoughtful
laughter it evokes, for the characters and their weaknesses
are universal.
Due to the construction of the play there is no
main character; instead we have a group of characters show
ing the different variations of the wild duck theme. The
main interest is focused on Hialmar Ekdal, Gregers Werle
and Hedvig.
Hialmar Ekdal is the very opposite of the hero in a
13Letters, op. cit., p. 383; 27th June 1884.
10
classic drama. He is a conceited, lazy and rather insipid
daydrearner with a great amount of self pity. While his
wife works for the support of the family, he lies on a sofa,
dreaming of the great invention he will make to restore "the:
name of Ekdal to honour and dignity."1^ Typical of this
kind of person is also his penchant for rhetoric and meta
phors, a characteristic he has in common with Gregers Werle.
Thus he says that he has ufelt the crushing hand of
Fate,"15 that he is "a man beset by a host of cares,who
17
has to "bear the whole burden,” and that he has "eonse-
18
crated” his "powers to this handicraft" to "rescue the
shipwrecked man."^
Not even in critical situations does he lose this
eloquence. According to Hedvig he once told her, when he
20
was ill, that "death was staring him in the face.” And
when he gets to know of his wife*s premarital affair with
Old Werle he accuses her of the "spider*s-web of deceit"
that she has "spun a r o u n d " ^ ! him. Relling is, therefore,
probably right when he tells Gregers after Hedvig*s death
that "before a year is over, little Hedvig will be nothing
22
to him but a pretty theme for declamation." In the last
^•^Works, op. cit.. p. 351.
15Ibid., p. 258. 16Ibid.. p. 296.
17Ibid.. p. 332. 18Ibid., p. 350.
19Ibid.. p. 351. 20Ibid.. p. 420.
21Ibid., p. 386. 22Ibid., p. 464.
11
act he is revealed in his utter weakness. He is happy to
accept his wife's suggestion to stay for a couple of days—
i.e., forever— to arrange his things, but because of his
wish to be a hero, he rejects the offer again, when Gregers
arrives. His shallow eloquence increases with the richly
buttered bread he eats, and while he is giving a last ora
torical fling at Hedvig*s "pretended1 1 love for him, without
actually believing in what he says himself, the poor child
shoots herself in the garret for his sake.
Hialmar Ekdal's tragedy is not that he is deprived
of one of his illusions. His tragedy--if there be one— is
his complete lack of perception. He can never grasp real
ity. If his illusions are destroyed he will inmediately
replace them with new ones. He beautifies everything and
"rationalizes" reality to suit himself. Thus, for in
stance, he tells Gregers that he pities his father for
being too cowardly to shoot himself, whereas he considers
it a great victory that he himself refrained from committing
suicide.
And yet one does not despise Hialmar Ekdal, but
smiles with pity at him. He is, after all, not a cynical
egoist. He is just a poor fool who needs people that ad
mire and love him. It should also be noticed that Ibsen
himself did not want the role to be played "with any trace
of parody in expression, or any sign that the actor sees
12
anything comic in his lines."25
Gregers Werle at first sight seems to be the very
opposite of Hialmar Ekdal. But as a matter of fact he is
just as unrealistic as Hialmar. In his high-strung ideal
ism he imagines that it is his life-mission to tell Hialmar
the truth about the foundation of his marriage. What he
does not realize is that all people are not strong enough
to face reality as it is, or, as Relling puts it, "Rob the
average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his
happiness at the same stroke."^ Relling goes even further,
however. He accuses Gregers of coming with lies. "While I
think of it, Mr. Werle, junior— don't use that foreign word:
ideals. We have an excellent native word: lies."25 un
doubtedly this is an echo of Buckle's theory of the rela
tivity of truth. August Strindberg, Ibsen's contemporary
Swedish playwright, had used this theory as a theme in one
of his plays, Master Olof. as early as 1872. A great
endorser of modern ideas, Ibsen must have been acquainted
not only with Strindberg's drama, but also with Buckle's
works which were the topic of discussion of the day among
the artists in Scandinavia.26 Even though Hialmar may not
25Quoted by Lamm, op. cit.. p. 124.
2^Works. op. cit.. p. 433.
25Ibid.. p. 433.
9 f \
See Carl Albert Helmecke, Buckle's Influence on
Strindberg (Philadelphia: University Press, 1^24), p. 18.
be Hedvig*s biological father, he has become her true
father. He loves Hedvig and she him. Old Werle could
never take over Hialmar*s place. What was a lie has become
truth. This is also the case with Hialmar and Gina*s mar
riage. Gina may certainly have had reasons for wanting to
get married to any suitable young man so as to remain
respectable in the eyes of the people, but apart from that
she really loved and still loves Hialmar.
Gregers Werle*s claim of the ideal is therefore
unrealistic and false. The righteousness of his cause is
27
only an illusion— now. The "time to have spoken,** as Old
Werle also affirms, was when Old Ekdal alone was convicted
of cutting government wood. To break into a reasonably
happy family sixteen years later and tell one of the pair
that their marriage is based upon a lie is bound to cause a
catastrophe. Gregers' "integrity fever,"2* * as Relling
calls it, has deeper reasons than an honest belief in the
value of ideals. The only truth he seems to be interested
in telling Hialmar is related to his own father's affair
with Gina. Hialmar's worst illusions, his pipe-drearns
about the invention, he never attacks. Gregers* integrity
fever is rooted in his hatred for his father which is so
deep that he even detests his surname.2^ Ibsen's play
2?Works. op. cit.. p. 369.
2**Ibid., p. 430.
________2^Ibid.« p. 318.__________________ ______________
14
Ghosts is generally considered to show what happens, if
Nora of his drama A Doll’s House does not leave her husband.
Here we have another variation of the theme. Gregers is a
bodily healthy Oswald, who was not sent away from home, but
was dragged into the struggle between the parents. The
late Mrs. Werle was evidently a spiritual sister of the
puritanical Mrs. Alving. Like Mrs. Alving she ruined her
husband’s "joy of life."3® Mrs. Sorby, Old Werle's future
wife, says:
Fancy a man like him, full of health and vigour,
passing his whole youth and the best years of his life
in listening to nothing but penitential sermons I And
very often the sermons had for their text the most
imaginary offences— at least so I understand.31
Influenced32 by his mother's viewpoints, Gregers has sub
consciously ceased to hope for revenge. Now he gets an
opportunity and takes it. He leaves his father and goes to
tell Hialmar "the truth." To his great amazement the re
sult is not what he expected. Instead of rescuing Hialmar
"from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him
3QIbid.. Vol. VII, p. 315.
3*Works. op. cit.. p. 401.
32The Darwinistic theories about heredity and en
vironment influenced Ibsen a good deal. In The Wild Puck
Hialmar*s, Gregers' and Hedvig's diseases, mental as well
as physical, are due to these factors. Hialmar was brought
up by aunts who admired and spoilt him (Works. op. cit..
p. 429). Mrs. Werle not only was always preaching but also
has "crazy fits" (Works. op. cit.. p. 374) and Hedvig's
biological father, Old Werle, has, like Hedvig, poor eye
sight.
15
to ruin,"33 he brings "dullness, oppression, gloom."34 The
final blow to his illusion about his life-mission is
Hedvig's death that he has involuntarily caused. To the
last he tries to believe that it has not been in vain. But
Relling is unmerciful to him, and makes him realize that
Hialmar is not the man Gregers has thought him to be.
Melodramatic as Gregers is, however, he cannot accept the
fact of his utter failure without trying to attach to it a
tragic grandeur. His mission is then "to be the thirteenth
at table."33 "The devil it is,"3^ is Relling's mocking
answer.
Like so many others of Ibsen's characters, Hialmar
and Gregers are mediocre individuals who endeavor to raise
themselves above their potentials. Since Hialmar confines
his attempts to his dream-world, he can actually do very
little harm. This is of course also true of the
"demoniac"37 Molvik and Old Ekdal, the hunting sportsman
and officer. Gregers Werle is more dangerous. "... Life
would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be
33Ibid., p. 369.
34Ibid.. p. 391.
33Ibid., p. 465.
3^Ibid. The Norwegian text has, "Fan tro'et'." The
Scandinavian expression has a sardonic and mocking ring
that seems to be lost in Mr. Archer's translation.
37Ibid.. p. 359.
16
rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in
our poverty, with the claim of the ideal,"38 Says Relling.
The flaw of "the confounded duns” is their hubris. Sickly
as Gregers Werle is, he is by no means bom to set things
right.
Many critics have objected to Gregers* smallness
and his evident mental aberration. Thus, for instance, one
critic declares that ”this lessens the importance of the
play as an anti-idealistic tract."39 Evidently they miss
the point at issue. Ibsen wanted to attack just "fixed
dogma and bodiless idea."^® Gregers* claim of the ideal,
i.e., telling the truth sixteen years too late, is just as
absurd as Mrs. Alving*s (in Ghosts) keeping up appearances
at any cost.
Gregers totally lacks insight in human nature. Not
only does he think that Hialmar*s life is ruined by the lie
that his marriage is built on, but he actually believes
that Hialmar will become a new man, when the truth about
his wife is revealed. Viewed in this light, Gregers and
his mission is an excellent example of Buckle’s thesis that
a well-meaning but ignorant person with a great moral zeal
is a danger to his fellowmen.
38Ibid.. p. 465.
3^John Gassner, Masters of the Drama (3d ed.; New
York: Dover Publications^ Inc., 1954), p. 374.
^Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New
York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 36. _______
17
We see the superiority of the intellectual acquisi
tions over moral feeling. There is no instance on
record of an ignorant man who, having good intentions
and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far
more evil than good. And whenever the intentions have
been very eager, and the power very extensive, the evil
has been enormous. . . . Such men as these [who seek to
enforce opinions which they believe to be good] are not
bad, they are only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of
truth, ignorant of the consequences of their own acts.
But in moral point of view, their motives are unim
peachable. 4 i
Thus Gregers Werle is by no means another Brand.
He is too small, too ignorant for that. There was grandeur
and nobility in Brand's inhuman demands, and yet he, too,
failed. He went too far; he forgot that God is "the God of
Love.
In Hialmar's case Gregers' truth-telling does not
cause a catastrophe. He will build up a new illusion—
maybe with the help of Relling. But his life is deprived
of a great happiness and will of course grow duller— not to
mention what a bore he will become to his environment. His
nature is by no means changed, so he will most likely spend
the rest of his life complaining about his great loss. And
^-1-Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in
England (from the London edition; New York: D. Appleton and
Co. ~~T8'74), I, 132-133.
^That the problem in Brand refers not only to
religion but is universal, Ibsen pointed out to Brandes in
a letter of June 26, 1869: "I could have constructed the
same syllogism just as easily on the subject of a sculptor
or a politician as of a priest. . . . On the whole, there
is a great deal more of masked objectivity in Brand than
anyone has so far perceived; and of this, qua poet, I feel
quite proud." (Letters, op. cit.. p. 173.)
________^^Works. op. cit.. Vol. Ill, p. 305._____ __
18
certainly it is more endurable to listen to pipe-dreams
about the future than to eternal laments.
The only real tragedy in the play is therefore
Hedvig*s. Relling quickly realizes that the only person
that Gregers can hurt seriously with his claim of the ideal
is Hedvig.
. . . You must be good enough to keep Hedvig outside of
this. You two are grown-up people; you are free, in
God*s name, to make what mess and muddle you please of
your life. But you must deal cautiously with Hedvig, I
tell you; or else you may do her a great injury . . .
or she may do herself an injury— and perhaps others
too. . . . Hedvig is at a critical age. She may be
getting all sorts of mischief into her head.
The self-centered Gregers and Hialmar take no heed of
Relling*s warning, however. On his return home after hav
ing spent the night drinking— the only cure that he can
think of to get over a great crisis--the declamatory
Hialmar bursts out, **In these the last moments I spend in
my former home I wish to be spared from interlopers .**45 ^o
Hedvig who loves her father this is a terrible blow. Al
though she probably does not grasp the full meaning of the
words, she resolves to follow Gregers* suggestion to kill
her wild duck in order to show her father that she loves
him. It is not the duck that she finally kills, however,
but herself. Whether she overhears the conversation be
tween Gregers and Hialmar, we do not know, but it is rather
44^orks. op. cit.. pp. 394-395.
^Ibid., p. 442.
19
probable that she does. They are talking right outside the
garret door. In any case she has understood that her
father does not wish to have anything to do with her, and
so harsh a reality she cannot stand.
Gina Ekdal is, apart from Hedvig, as one critic has
pointed out, "the most sympathetic character in the
drama.It is she that keeps the house running by her
industrious work; it is she that has created the warm at
mosphere in the home with her love for them all and her
broadminded tolerance. And still she is actually responsi
ble for what happens. Had she told Hialmar of her pre
marital affair with Old Werle, Gregers would probably not
have come "pestering” them with his claim of the ideal,
since his truth-telling mission is based on his hatred for
his father. Her reasons for not telling the truth were
human enough, though: she realized that Hialmar would prob
ably not have married her then. "For I'd come to care for
you so much, you see; and I couldn't go and make myself
utterly miserable,she confesses to Hialmar.
To emphasize Gina's mistake Ibsen uses contrast.
The marriage of Old Werle and Mrs. Sorby will be based on
truth. They can both face things as they are and make the
best of them. In their case nobody can turn up later and
destroy their happiness— for there is no reason to believe
^Jorgensen, op. cit.. p. 388.
________^Works. op, cit.. p. 386.________________ __
20
that they will not be fairly happy together. They like one
another, and besides they have— realists as they are--con-
sidered both the drawbacks and the benefits of a marriage,
and found that they will gain more than they will lose.
Typically enough, Gregers cannot see that the foundation of
their marriage is honest confession, which even Hialmar can
perceive. Relling has, like Gregers, only ironic words for
Old Werle and Mrs. Sorby's marriage. But they are only an
example of sour-grapes mentality. Relling has presumably
been in love with Mrs. Sorby, but been rejected because of
his drinking. Although Relling is the mouthpiece of the
play, Ibsen has not made him all white, which would have
ruined the realistic tone of the play.
The Wild Duck was first performed in Ki^benhavn.
Although it was received with "some hissing,"4® it aroused
interest and was soon staged in Berlin (1888), Paris (1891)
and London (1894) as well as in the other Scandinavian
countries. Ibsen himself had predicted that the critics
would find "several things to squabble about and several
49
things to interpret." He was certainly right. The gen
eral tendency was to see the play as a tragedy, showing a
complete renunciation of ideas, expressed or implied, in
his earlier plays, as a proof of his pessimistic outlook on
mankind. "The mood in which Ibsen wrote 'The Wild Duck'
^ Letters. op. cit.. p. 388.
________49Ibid.. p. 384.______________ _________ _______
21
was one of deep dejection— if not despair,"^ wrote one
critic in 1894, and he was followed by many others.^ On
the other hand the play was also considered a comedy by
some people. As is mentioned above, Ibsen had to protest
against the interpretation of Hialmarrs part as played in
Copenhagen, and an American critic wrote about the "hilari
ous p e rfor m a n c e " - ^ £n New York. Ibsen himself called his
play a tragi-comedy, and the best description of The Wild
Duck is without doubt George Bernard Shaw's. After a per
formance in London in 1897, he wrote:
Where shall I find an epithet magnificent enough
for "The Wild Duck"! To sit there and getting deeper
and deeper into that Ekdal home and getting deeper and
deeper into your own life all the time until you forget
that you are in the theatre at all: to look on with
horror and pity at a profound tragedy shaking with
laughter all the time at an irresistible comedy.53
Although Ibsen attacked Gregers Werle's claim of
the ideal, he was not opposed to the advancement of ideals
and truth itself. He merely wanted to show what a terrible
instrument a truthful fact, that no longer has any
’^ H j a l m a r Hjert Boyesen, A Commentary on the Writ
ings of Henrik Ibsen (New York and London: The Macmillan
CoV, 1894), p. 259.
^See for instance Koht, op. cit., p. 208. "In
disappointment and hopelessness over humanity, The Wild
Duck was then created."
DZLouis Sherwin in New York Globe. March 12, 1918
guoted by Joseph T. Shipley in Guide to Great Plays
(Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1956), p. 341.
5^G. b . Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an
Apology (New York: Brentano1s, 1906),p. 269.
22
relevance, can become in the hands of a mediocre individual
who has no insight into human nature. As little as Gregers
Werle's failure is a declaration of the bankruptcy of
idealism, so little is the two Ekdals1 and Mblvik's escap
ism an expression of Ibsen’s belief in the incapacity of
mankind to stand truth. Ibsen merely showed that there are
people who are not strong enough to face an uncomfortable
truth or a stark reality but have to be inoculated by a
life-lie to be happy. But--and this is important--he no
longer despised such people. With increasing age Ibsen
became more tolerant. In September 1884, he wrote to
Hegel: "Long, daily association with the persons in this
play has endeared them to me, in spite of their manifold
failings."^ Tolerance is not the same as despair, how
ever. As has been shown already, there are also realists
in the play. A statement in a letter to Brandes, in which
Ibsen mentioned that he had just started on "a new dramatic
w o r k ,"55 i.e., The Wild Duck, proves that he still believed
in progress, although it was slower than he wanted it to be:
You are, of course, right when you say that we must
all work for the spread of our opinions. But I main
tain that a fighter in the intellectual vanguard can
never collect a majority round him. In ten years the
majority will, possibly, occupy the standpoint which
Dr. Stockmann held at the public meeting. But during
these ten years the Doctor will not have been standing
still; he will still be at least ten years ahead of the
5^Letters. op. cit.. pp. 383-384.
55ibid.. p. 369.
23
majority. He can never have the majority with him. As
regards myself, at least, I am conscious of incessant
progression. At the point where I stood when I wrote
each of ray books, there now stands a tolerably compact
crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere;
farther ahead, I hope.56
This is completely in line with Buckle’s ideas:
. . . Although the origin of a new opinion may be . . .
due to a single man, the result which the new opinion
produces will depend on the condition of the people
among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a
philosophy is too much in advance of a nation, it can
do no present service, but must bide its time, until
the minds of men are ripe for its reception. . . . Ac
cording to the ordinary course of affairs, a few gener
ations pass away, and then there comes a period when
these very truths are looked upon as commonplace
facts.57
The issue of The Wild Duck is then: show considera
tion for weak people that need a life-lie. Truth is after
all relative, and nothing is gained by depriving such per
sons of their illusions. They are not the ones that can
further the progress of mankind anyhow. They are too
small— and so are those that cannot realize that. The play
is, therefore, no recantation of earlier standpoints of the
author’s, but a moderation. It shows a new toleration for
human frailties, with one important exception: stupidity
ruled by hard-heartedness. It is a work of an author who
feels compassion but who by no means has lost his belief in
truth and the progress of mankind.
^Ibid., p. 369.
-^Buckle, op. cit.. p. 186.
24
Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths
One of the most famous dramas in the world about
the illusions of the little man is Maxim Gorky's The Lower
Depths,58 "the quintessential epitome of his experience as
a vagabond."59
Actually, it was almost by accident that Gorky be
came a dramatist. Anton Chekhov, who was eager to interest
some native authors in the Russian stage, invited the prom
ising young short-story writer to his home in the Crimea in
the spring of 1900. There Gorky met Vladimir Nemirovitch-
Dantchenko, Constantin Stanislavsky and the famous actors
from the Moscow Art Theatre who were touring the country,
partly to be able to give some performances for Chekhov,
who could not go to Moscow because of his tuberculosis.
Both Chekhov and the actors strongly exhorted Gorky to
write a play, and they soon succeeded in interesting him in
the theatre.
'ftnce of an evening, sitting on the terrace and
listening to the sound of the Crimean waters, he [Gorky]
told me in the darkness of his dreams about a new play
5^The original title of the play was At the Bottom
of Life. On Nemirovitch-Dantchenko's suggestion Gorky
shortened it to At the Bottom (NaDne). There are seven
translations of the play into English under different
titles. The best known English title is The Lower Depths.
■^Alexander Kaun, Maxim Gorky and His Russia (New
York: Cape and Smith, 1931), p. 379.
25
which he later called The Lower Depths."60 Stanislavsky
wrote later. The task was not an easy one, however; Gorky
told the director:
You see the trouble is that all these people of
mine have surrounded me, and are crowding me and them
selves, and I can't get them to take their proper
places or make peace between them. The devil take
them'. They talk, talk and talk, and they talk so well
that it,is a pity to stop them, by God. My word of
honor'.®1
Before he could finish the play, he wrote another drama,
The Snug Citizen.
By the fall of 1902 Gorky was ready to hand over
the play to the Moscow Art Theatre. The actors were struck
by the novelty of the piece. Never before had life in the
slums been represented on the stage, and what was more: the
characters who resembled the persons in Gorky's short-
story Creatures that Once Were Men were shown as thinking
human beings with souls. It was a realistic slice-of-life
treatment of the most abject social misery, the existence
of which was known but which few seemed to care about.
In the preface to the American edition of The Judge
Gorky gives his opinion on the ideal play:
The characters of a drama should all act independ
ently of the volition of the dramatist, in accordance
with the law of their individual natures and social
environment; they must follow the inspiration of their
own destiny, and not that of any other destiny
^^Constantin Stanislavsky, My Life in-Art. trans.
J. J. Robbins (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1924), p. 367.1
61Ibid.. p. 391.
26“
arbitrarily imposed upon them by the writer. They
must, driven by their own inner impulses, create the
incidents and episodes--tragic or comic--and direct the
course,of the play, being permitted to act in harmony
with their own contradictory natures, interests, and
passions.62
Although Gorky himself did not think much of his own plays,
he more or less achieved this ideal in The Lower Depths.
The scene of the play is laid in a flop house in
the slums of a Russian city. There live drunkards, a pimp
who was born a baron, a pickpocket, a prostitute and other
dissolute creatures of the gutter. The only persons that
work are two longshoremen and a locksmith, called Kletsch.
The others take the day as it comes. The tone of much of
the work is cynical, harsh and raw. Thus Bubnov, a former
capmaker, has only one comment to make about Anna,
Kletsch*s consumptive wife, when he learns that she is
dying: "Well, then she*11 stop coughing. Her coughing*s
been disturbing everybody.'*
Although a few interrelated incidents take place in
the course of the play, they cannot be said to form a plot
in the ordinary sense of the word. There is nothing theat
rical or contrived about the action. The events grow
logicallyoout of the actual situation of the people con
cerned and the influence exerted on them by the two main
^^Kaun, op. cit.. p. 373.
63Seven Plays of Maxim Gorky, trans. Alexander
Bakshy in collaboration with Paul S. Nathan (New Haven:
Yale University Press, Third printing, 1947), p. 36. Here
inafter called Plays.
27
characters of the play, Luka, the pilgrim who comes and
stays for a couple of days, and Satin, the drunkard.
In the first three acts the interest is focused on
Luka. Like the others he is well acquainted with the drab
side of society, but he is different. The former j a i l b i r d & 4
tells the inhabitants of the flop house that they must re
spect one another, for every human being has its worth,
that they must pity their fellow beings and not use deri
sive words and violence. "Jail doesn't teach anyone to do
good, nor Siberia, but a man--yes*. A man can teach another
man to do good— believe me'."65 Luka shows a great interest
in each individual in the flop house, and through his con
versation he tries to help them raise their self-respect,
and give them confidence in themselves and ease their tor
mented mindsv He consoles the dying Anna, telling her that
she will have rest and peace at last:
You'll have nothing to fear— nothing at all.
There'll be peace and quiet— and you'll have nothing to
do but lie. Death quiets everything. It's kind to us
humans. When you die you'll have rest, folks say.
It's true, my dear. For where can a human being find
rest in this world?66
When the others mock Nastya, the prostitute, for her
stories about her great love that are obviously taken from
6^That Luka is a former convict is only hinted at
in the play. In his introduction to The Lower Depths,
Bakshy says, however, that this is evident in Gorky's film
scenario based on the play. (Ibid.. p. 13.)
65Ibid.. p. 49.
66Ibid.. p. 35.
28
a novel, Fatal Love. Luka comes to her help.
Now wait, folks! You mustn't interrupt the girl.
. . . It doesn't matter what's said, but why it's said.
. . . (taking NASTYA by the arm) Come along, dear.
Don't mind tnem— calm yourself. I know— I believe you.
Yours is the truth, not theirs. If you believe you had
a real love, then you did have it--you certainly did.67
The ones that are most influenced by Luka, however, are
Peppel, the thief, and the Actor whose name no one can re
member any longer. Peppel is a dashing (mutatis mutandis' . ) ,
arrogant and seemingly self-confident young man. Within
himself, however, he feels dissatisfied with his life, and
he breaks with his mistress Vassilissa, the flop house
owner's young wife, when he realizes that she is no better
than the others. "There's no soul in you, Vassilissa. A
woman must have a soul. We men are brutes. We should be--
we have to be tamed and trained. And what kind of training
have you been giving m e ? " 6 8 Luka who has overheard the
conversation between Peppel and Vassilissa tries to induce
Peppel to leave the lodgings and go to Siberia to start a
new life. Peppel listens to Luka eagerly. Maybe, after
all, he became a thief only because he was always called,
"Vasska the thief. Vasska the thief's son."69 He therefore
decides to follow Luka's advice. With him he wants to take
Natasha, Vassilissa*s ill-treated sister, with whom he has
67Ibid.. p. 46.
68Ibid.. p. 39.
69Ibid.. p. 51.
29
fallen deeply in love.
Into the Actor who no longer can remember a single
line Luka also instills hope for the future:
You get yourself treated. They treat for drunken
ness today, so I hear. Free of charge, too. . . .
They've decided, you see, that a drunkard is a human
being like everybody else, and they're even glad when
he wants to be treated. There's a chance for you— go
there right away.70
Although Luka has forgotten the name of the town where this
miraculous hospital for drunkards is situated, his talk
gives the Actor back his self-confidence. Having refrained
from drinking for a couple of days, he triumphantly tells
Satin that he is going away some day.
Thus Luka, the "consolateur et menteur."?! tries
the same method to cure wounded souls as Rolling in The
Wild Duck. By inventing life-lies for them, he will make
their existence more endurable, perhaps even happy. His
treatment fails, however. In a fit of anger Peppel slays
Kostylyov, the keeper of the lodgings, when his wife has
scalded her sister Natasha's legs and feet out of jealousy.
He is taken away to prison, and that is probably how he
will reach Siberia. Neither is the illusion about a hospi
tal for drunkards a success. When Satin tells the Actor
that there is no such thing, and that people can only live
^OjDbdd., p. 34.
Ivan Thorgevsky, De Gorki a nos jours. La nou-
velle litt&rature russe (Paris: Editions La Renaissance,
1945), p. 22.
30
in the hope of something better to come, the Actor quickly
tosses down some vodka, rushes out and hangs himself. When
that happens Luka has already left the flop house, partly
because he does not want to be entangled with the events
that take place there--at a police inspection it will be
found that he does not have a passport— but mainly because
he wants to go to the Ukraine, where people supposedly have
discovered a new faith. He is no confirmed believer, for
he tells Peppel that God exists only if one thinks so. But
he wants to believe. The new religion might be the salva
tion for the tormented men in this grim world.
As Ashley Dukes has pointed out, Luka has accepted
’ ’ the Tolstoyan gospel of love and rejection of violence as
72
a working hypothesis. Luka has also other Tolstoyan
traits, i.e., traits of the man Gorky considered Tolstoy to
be. Talking about Vassilissa Luka says to Peppel: "Don't
listen to that witch. Look at my head. Bald, isn't it?
And why? Because of these same women."^3 And he immedi
ately suspects a woman to be the cause of Satin's murder of
a man. In his "Reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy," Gorky writes
that Tolstoy once said: "And I will tell you the truth
about women, when I have one foot in the grave. I shall
tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and
^Ashley Dukes, Modern Dramatists (Chicago: Charles
H. Sergei, 1911), p. 187.
73piays, op. cit., p. 41.
31
say, 'Do what you like now.'"7^ And Gorky goes on: "The
look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying, that we all
fell silent for awhile.Likewise one is probably justi
fied in connecting Luka's disregard for truth with the
following quotation from Gorky's Reminiscences:
He [Tolstoy] read Leo Shestov's book "Good and Evil
in the Teaching of Nietzsche and Tolstoy," and, when
Anton Tchekhov remarked that he did not like the book,
Tolstoy said: "I thought it amusing. It's written
swaggeringly, but it's all right and interesting. I'm
sure I like cynics when they are sincere." Then he
said: "Truth is not wanted; quite true, what should he
want truth for? For he will die all the same. . . .
If a man has learnt to think, no matter what he may
think about, he is always thinking of his own death.
. . . And what truths can there be, if there is
death?"76
Although Gorky considered Tolstoy "a madly and tor-
mentingly beautiful m a n ,"77 he did not approve of Tolstoy's
philosophy and religion, and "Tolstoyism as a mode of life
was abhorrent to him. "78 The two men respected one another,
but neither of them could understand the other. This is
•\
also true about Luka and Satin in The Lower Depths. Both
Luka and Satin believe in man and demand respect for every
individual, but their fundamental attitudes are different.
7^Maxim Gorky, "Reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy,"
trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Wolf, Reminiscences
(New York: Dover Publications, 1946), p. 45.
75ibid.
76Ibid.. p. 32.
77Ibid., p. 36.
7®Filia Holzman, The Young Maxim Gorky 1868-1902
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 189.
32
Luka admits that "even a pimple doesn't spring up, without
a reason,but he has no positive plan for changing the
conditions of his downtrodden fellow beings. He accepts
society as it is, and only pleads for kindness and accept
ance of people's illusions. He even goes so far as to
create illusions for those that need them, although he
ought to know better. At the same time as he invents the
hospital for drunkards, he tells the story about the man
who hanged himself, when he realized that the true and just
land that he hoped to attain was not to be found on any
map. That the Actor sooner or later will find out the
bitter truth about the social conditions in Tsarist Russia,
i.e., the complete disregard and neglect for the situation
of the lower classes, must be evident also to Luka. Of
course he can always hope that the Actor will be able to
cure himself while looking for the hospital, but that only
proves how unrealistic he is.
Satin is not conciliatory like Luka but defiant.
He considers society responsible for the conditions in the
slums. The amoral inhabitants of the flop house are vic
tims of the rotten structure of the society. Like Bubnov
and Peppel he thinks that conscience and honor are only for
rich and powerful people. Society must, therefore, be
changed. The only way he can conceive of, however, is
79plays, op. cit.. p. 29.
33
resistance and strikes.
SATIN:
Hey, widower1 Why so down in the dumps? What's on your
mind?
KLETSCH:
I'm trying to think what to do. I've no tools. The
funeral swallowed up everything.
SATIN:
I'll give you a word of advice— don't do anything.
Just let yourself be a burden on the world at large!
KLETSCH:
You with your talk. I have some shame before other
people.
SATIN:
Forget it. People aren't ashamed at your living worse
than a dog. Think this over— you stop working— I stop—
hundreds and thousands of others— everybody— under
stand? --everybody stops working. Nobody wants to do
any work— what'll happen then?
KLETSCH:
Everybody will drop dead from hunger.
LUKA (to SATIN):
You ought to join the Wanderers with your ideas. There
are such people, called Wanderers.
SATIN:
I know— they're no ‘ fools, grandpa.80
The censors of course suspected a reference to labor strikes
in these lines, and they, as well as many others, were cut
out of the play for the performance in Moscow and all later
80
Plays. op.*cit.. pp. 56-57. In a footnote on
page 57 the translator explains that the Wanderers are "a
Russian religious sect dating from the time of Peter the
Great and called Wanderers (or sometimes Runners) because
they preached running away from places where the government
instituted religious reforms were being enforced.
34~
stage productions in Tsarist Russia.8^
In line with Satin's demand for better social con
ditions is his contempt for illusions and pipe-dreams or
lies, as he calls them. The very first time he hears about
the Actor's dreams of the hospital where he can get cured,
Satin breaks out: "Fata-morgana'. The old man lied to you.
There's nothing! No town, no people— nothing!"82 When
Luka has left, and the dissolute Baron calls him a humbug,
Satin retorts:
Shut up, you brutes, numskulls! . . . The old man
is not a faker. What's a truth? Man— that's the
truth! He understood this--you don't. . . . Certainly
he lied--but it was out of pity for you, the devil take
you! There are lots of people who lie out of pity for
others. . . . They lie beautifully, excitingly, with a
kind of inspiration. There are lies that soothe, that
reconcile one to his lot. There are lies that justify
the load that crushed a worker* s arm— and hold a man to
blame for dying of starvation--I know lies!S3
Although Satin takes Luka's part against the others and
honors him for his respect for man, he is by no means will
ing to accept Luka's life-lie treatment. He knows that
comforting lies only lead to apathy, that no change for the
better will grow out of them. Since pity does not help man
to improvement or progress, it only degrades him. There
fore, illusions must be destroyed.
81(3orky was kept under close surveillance of the
police and was imprisoned several times because of his
radical, political standpoint. The censors therefore care
fully studied his works and often deleted long passages.
82Plavs. op. cit.. p. 44.
83Ibid.. p. 62
35
People weak in spirit--and those who live on the
sweat of others— these need lies--the weak find support
in them, the exploiters use them as a screen. . . ♦
Lies are the religion of slaves and bosses. Truth is
the god of the free man.8^
This quest for truth and aversion for pity runs
through all of Gorky's works. As late as 1935 he wrote
that genuine humanism must not
. . . advocate the despicable idea of the inevitability
of suffering, nor the passive feeling of sympathy, but
. . . stimulate an active hostility to all suffering,
especially the suffering engendered by social economic
conditions.85
In a democratic society there would be no slums, no injus
tice and therefore no need for illusions to brighten up a
drab existence. It should be noticed, however, that Gorky
had no illusions about the possibilities of transforming
the people depicted in The Lower Depths into constructive
citizens. The well-known German critic Georg Lukacs
writes:
Die Hauptanklage Gorkis richtet sich niemals gegen
das Individuum, und sei es mit noch so negativen
Zugen dargestellt, sondera gegen den Kapitalismus . . .
in seiner altrussischen, barbarischen und asiatischen
Form.86
But although it is true that Gorky did not attack these
outcasts, he certainly did not glorify them as the heroes
in his earlier short stories Chelkash, On the Steppe and
8^Ibid.. p. 63.
85
Maxim Gorky, Culture and the People (New York:
International Publishers, 1939), p. 214.
88Georg Lukacs, Per russische Realismus in der
Weltlitteratur (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. 1952), p. 232.
36
Konovalov. As time went by, Gorky came to realize that
such beings had sunk too deeply to be able to raise them
selves, were too downtrodden to be saved. As has already
been mentioned, the Actor hangs himself, when he realizes
that his hope of being cured of his drinking is based on a
lie. The Baron and Nastya keep their dreams of a noble,
respectively romantic past, and go on fighting for them.
Kletsch adjusts himself to his surroundings. Bubnov finds
his salvation in being a cynic as he has earlier. Not even
Satin has strength enough to start out for a better life in
spite of his glorification, not to say deification, of man
and his possibilities. He knows that there is no way out
for him. He still enjoys Bubnov1s favorite song, the
famous prisoner's song, that runs through the whole play:
The sun comes up, the sun goes down again.
But in my cell it's never light.
0 chains, you heavy chains that bind me
You are my iron guards in truth.
1 know I cannot break you ever.
Thus Satin is no real hero. He himself points out
that "a man is born for something better to come,"®? or, to
use another translation, "Han is born to conceive a better
man."®® Satin, like the other lodgers in the flop house,
87
Plays. op. cit., p. 66.
®®Maxim Gorki, The Lower Depths, trans. Jenny
Covan, in John Gassner (ed.). A Treasury of the Theatre
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950), p. 252.
37
og
has been too "hurt” to be able ever to forgive, to start
anew and make something out of his life. But although
there is no hope for these ex-men^® themselves, they can
forward the cause of humanity by respecting the children.
". . .We have to be considerate of youngsters. Kids need
plenty of elbowroom. Don't interfere with their life. Be
kind to them. "9 Satin is avowedly drunk when he makes his
speech on Man, but not to take it seriously is a m i s t a k e .92
Just as confusing as this fact are, of course, the last
words of the play, "Ah, spoiled the song— the fooli"93
They do not mean that Satin does not care about the Actor's
suicide. They are only an example of the inability to use
anything but cynical and harsh words, a trait that is
typical of such an environment. Thus the owner of the
lodgings in Creatures That Once Were Men reacts in the same
way, when his friend, the teacher, is reported dead.
The Lower Depths was first staged in Moscow in
89piavs. op. cit.. p. 65.
90xitle of one of Gorky's short stories.
9Splays, op. cit.. p. 63.
9^James Huneker is without doubt wrong, when he de
scribes Gorky as a "lycanthrope, pessimist, despiser of his
fellow-men" in his book Iconoclasts. A Book of Dramatists
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), p. 272.
93piays. op. cit.. p. 70.
3 8 ~
December 1902.9^ Earlier the same year Gorky's election to
the Imperial Academy of Sciences had been canceled on
orders of Tsar Nicholas II to the dismay of the students
and of authors like Chekhov who resolutely left the
Academy. Because of this and the startling and explosive
ideas implied in the play, the police expected tumult, and
the theatre was surrounded by policemen. Gorky's dangerous
situation was known, however, and nothing happened. All
the reviews in the Moscow papers were good, and "Gorky be
came the hero of the day."9- * The Petersburg critics were
negative, however, and in February the play was forbidden
by the Administration.
Tolstoy did not like the play, and, as one of
Gorky's biographers, Kaun, has pointed out, this was proba
bly because he "vaguely felt the kinship with Luka."9^
Chekhov who took great interest in his young prot^g^ found
the play "highly original and unmistakably fine."97 But he
considered the fourth act "dull and unnecessary, especially
when, with the exit of the strongest and most interesting
^According to Stanislavsky, op. cit., p. 577, the
premiere was on Dec. 18, whereas it is said to have been on
"the last day of 1902" in Barrett H. Clark and George
Friedly (eds.), A History of Modern Drama (New York:
D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc., 1938), p. 423. Likewise
Kaun, op. cit., p. 341, gives Dec. 31 for first night.
9^Stanislavsky, op. cit., p. 399.
96Kaun, op. cit.. p. 306.
97Holzman, op. cit.. p. 189. Letter to Gorky
written on July 29. _________________________ _____ ____
39
actors, only the mediocre ones remain.”^® Chekhov's
opinion has been shared by others. Thus one critic talks
of "a useless fourth act, the unnecessary person of a
woman, introduced in the first scene and then disappearing
[Anna]."99 others have gone even further: "The Lower
Depths is not a drama, although the author has put a bar to
the inconvenient pretensions of criticism by naming it
'scenes.'"^® The play has also been called a "master
piece,"^! a description that seems more proper.
Gorky paid no attention to Chekhov's criticism, and
the reason is obvious: the fourth act is the most important
in the whole playI For it is not Luka that is Gorki's
interlocutor, but Satin. The fourth act shows the failure
of Luka's escapist philosophy; it makes clear that human
beings that are too badly wounded cannot be healed, and,
above all, it holds the wonderful speech on Man in which
Gorky's confirmed belief in the necessity of truth and his
98Ibid.
99Ibid. Evidently Chekhov considered Luka and
Peppel the most important characters in the play. (That he
did not refer to the actors themselves is evident, since
this statement was based on a perusal of the play five
months before the production.) Chekhov also criticized the
suicide of the Actor and considered it unexpected. This
objection is not justifiable, as the story of the man who
searched for the true and just land prepares the audience
for the Actor's death.
^ • 88Leo Wiener, The Contemporary Drama of Russia
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1924), p. 129.
•^^Oliver M. Sayler, The Russian Theatre (New York:
Brentano's, 1922), p. 66._________________________________
40
ardent optimism for the future are forever manifested.
This optimism was evidently rooted in his strong, social
istic belief. "I do not believe that any man is bad by --
nature. . . . It is the class structure of society that has
made man bad," he wrote to E. I. K h l e b n i t s e v i c h . * ^
That Gorky's mouthpiece is "a jailbird, a murderer,
a cheat" *-^3 is undoubtedly one of the reasons why The Lower
Depths makes such an intense and stirring impression on
most of its audiences and readers. One feels convinced
that the divine spirit in man can never be extinguished,
however lowly human beings may seem at times. They may
live almost like animals, seemingly caring only for food--
and liquor--but as we are shown in this play they have not
lost man's ability to think. Some critics have objected to
this "philosophizing,"*-^ this "Geistreichelei der
Analphabeten,"*^-* considering it unrealistic. Such criti
cism can definitely be regarded as unfounded prejudices,
however. Gorky knew his people. He himself grew up in a
very poor milieu, and spent part of his youth on the road,
lO^Holzman, op. cit.. p. 83. The discussion among
Soviet critics whether Gorky was a communist or not falls
outside the range of this work.
*^Plays, pp. cit.. p. 66.
104yiener, op. cit.. p. 129.
^■^^Alfred Kerr. Das Neue Drama (Berlin: Fischer
Verlag, 1905), p. 255.
41
taking odd jobs here and there. Before the production of
The Lower Depths some of the Moscow Art Theatre actors also
visited the slums of Moscow, and they felt that they in
this play represented real people.
Gorky's glorification of man has sometimes been
connected with Nietzsche's teachings. Gorky himself, how
ever, disliked Nietzsche, and, unlike Nietzsche, Gorky
had compassion (not to be confused with passive pity'.) for
unsuccessful, downtrodden human beings. Kachalov later
wrote that when he read the scene in which Luka consoles
the dying Anna for the Moscow Art Theatre actors,
Gorky's voice trembled and broke. He stopped, re
mained silent for a moment, wiped a tear with his
finger and tried to resume his reading, but after the
first few words he stopped again and wept almost loud,
wiping his tears with a handkerchief. Ugh, devil," he
mumbled, smiling in embarrassment through his tears,
"well written by god, well doneI"107
In spite of the horrible drabness depicted in The
Lower Depths, the main impression of the play on a reader
or an audience is not one of gloom and pessimism. Neither
is there the slightest trace of Chekhovian ennui-*-®® or
lObMaxim Gorky, Articles and Pamphlets (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951), p. 328. (The
Old and the New Man. 1932.)
-*-®^Kaun, op. cit.. p. 378.
108The difference between Chekhov and Gorky becomes
evident when one compares The Cherry Orchard with The Lower
Depths. Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard attacks theorizing
without action, and yet he cannot pull himself together to
pass his degree at the university although nothing prevents
him from doing so. Much less does he do anything to change
42
Dostoyevskian despair.*nie mood created in the play is
one of fiery defiance and opposition to the social condi
tions in Tsarist Russia and to advocates of the kindly but
dangerous life-lie-treatment, dangerous since it gives re
lief only for the moment but does not produce an active and
lasting cure or improvement. In the majestic but unfortun-
110
ately not very well-known poem The March of Man. Gorky
talks of the dead ashes of superstition and the heavy
clouds of the past that are trailing behind him. These are
the very things that Gorky wants to get rid of but that
Luka stands for by his complacent acceptance of the exist
ing society and his creation and fostering of illusions.
The message of The Lower Depths, and one should
really call it a message, therefore differs considerably
from that of Ibsen's The Wild Duck. While Ibsen demands
the existing order of society. He completely lacks initia
tive and is satisfied to know that there will be a change
some day.
109corky did not like Dostoyevsky's works. In an
open letter in the press after a stage performance of The
Brothers Karamazov, Gorky said: "I know the frailty of
Russian character; I know the compassionate wavering of the
Russian soul and its tendency, in its torment, weariness
and despair, toward all contagious. . . . Not Stavrogins
should be shown it now, but something quite different. It
should be exhorted to boldness, spiritual health, activity,
and not introspection; it should be exhorted to return to
the source of energy— to democracy, to the people, to
sociableness and to science." Vladimir Nemirovitch-
Dantchenko, My Life in the Russian Theatre, trans. John
Cournos (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1536), p. 273.
Hogans. A. Kayden, The Sewanee Review. April
1937, p. 11.
43
that we let the little man alone, that we tolerate the il
lusions that he needs for his happiness, Gorky demands
truth at any cost. Man is only degraded by lies, and,
although truth might be hard to stand, it is necessary for
the progress of mankind: "Lies are the religion of slaves
and bosses. Truth is the religion of the free man."m
^■^Plays, op. cit., p. 63.
44
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
The subtitle of Arthur Miller's play Death of a
Salesman, "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem," is very illuminating. Like Ibsen, Miller felt
the need for a new method to be able to convey to the audi
ence the full significance of the fate of the main charac
ter in his drama about the common man and his illusions.
Between The Wild Duck and Death of a Salesman lies the
almost seventy-year-long development of modern drama, how
ever, and it is, therefore, no wonder that the two plays
differ vastly in approach and technique. Most striking is
undoubtedly the dissimilarity of the nonrealistic trends:
where Ibsen employs a contrapuntal symbol, Miller uses
flashbacks into the past. This device of Miller's is in a
way a development of what is generally considered to be one
of Ibsen's most important contributions to dramatic tech
nique: the integration of the exposition into the play.
Thus the last vital facts of the salesman's past are re
vealed' at the same time as the action reaches its climax.
The way in which this information is given, however, is
totally different: "What Ibsen was content to leave as a
narrative, information conveyed by the dialogue, Miller
dramatizes.
H^Alan S. Downer, Fifty Years of American Drama
1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1951), p. 74.
45
Scenes out of the salesman's earlier life are re
enacted on the stage and juxtaposed with the events of the
present. The effect is also completely different. Because
of the obviousness of the symbol in The Wild Duck. Ibsen's
play seems rather contrived and ponderous. To modern audi
ences that are used to the stream-of-consciousness tech
nique of twentieth century novels, Miller's drama converse
ly appears to be more realistic, truer to life, in spite of
the almost expressionistic fusion of the past and the
present in a succession of scenes, connected only through
the associations of the disintegrating mind of the salesmanj
The structure of Death of a Salesman is partly due
to the fact that the idea of the play first occurred to
Miller in the form of an image, "an enormous face the
height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then
open up, and we would see the inside of a man's head."-H3
Although this intention had to be abandoned, the play
actually imposes upon one a feeling that one is looking
into the normally hidden, contradictory complexity of a
man's mind. The dramatized memories of the salesman are,
of course, not chosen at random. All works of art have to
be selective, and Miller has, therefore, only included
thoughts and memories that are related to the main subject.
What Miller primarily wants to achieve with his new form is
1 "^Arthur Miller, Collected Plays With an Introduc
tion (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), p. 53.
46
"a new and heightened consciousness . . . of causation."H-4
In an interview before the premiere of the play, Miller
said:
I've always been impatient with naturalism on the
stage. But I knew I had to master it before I tried
anything else. "All My Sons" was in that category.
The pattern I used for "Death of a Salesman" gives me
more leeway for honest investigation and makes the peo
ple seem more lifelike. Of course I think this play
has more roundness of truth and handles a great many
more aspects of people.115
Miller's tremendous interest in the dramatic form is also
shown in a statement that he made when he was asked in a
questionnaire for a dissertation, whether he had sought for
a technique to dramatize the inner life of a person: "The
externalization of conscious but repressed, and unconscious
thoughts and motives is the basic problem of dramatic
structure.*1-*-^ jn Death of a Salesman the problem is
solved most successfully. The audiences never get confused
as to what is happening in the present and what belongs to
the past. This is undoubtedly due to the more or less new
stage technique. Added to "the interior-and-exterior-
combined s t a g i n g " ^ - * - ? that has also been employed by
114Ibid.. p. 23.
USMurray Schumach, "Arthur Miller Grew in Brook-
lyn," New York Times. February 6, 1949, II, 1:7-3:4.
David Sievers, Freud oh Broadway (New York:
Hermitage House, 1955), p. 395.
117Eric Bentley, The Dramatic Event (New York:
Horizon Press, 1954), p. 250.
47
Tennessee Williams, for instance, is the use of a prosce
nium on which all the flashbacks take place. When the play
was made into a film, the memory scenes were acted in the
proper locales, and this actually lessened the tension that
is created on the stage. Miller has given an excellent
explanation for this: "Drama becomes narrative.
The delineation of the main character, the sixty-
year-old traveling salesman Willy Loman, is excellent.
That he is completely worn out is evident from the very
opening of the play, when he arrives at home and tells his
wife that he cannot concentrate enough to drive his car.
He is left alone in the kitchen and starts talking to him
self in a way that shows that his fatigue is mental rather
than physical. In the following scene, in which his kind
neighbor Charlie is playing cards with him, we also begin
to realize what has caused Willy's utter disintegration:
his failure to live up to his ideal of the successful,
self-assured businessman, personified in his memory of his
elder brother Ben. Time after time Willy recalls Ben's two
visits to New York and his description of his life: "Why,
boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and
when I was twenty-one I walked out. He laughs. And by God
I was rich."H9 pr0m Willy's conversations with an
118^iiier> op. cit., p. 26.
119Ibid.. p. 157.
48
imagined Ben we learn that when Willy was a small boy their
father left for Alaska never to return. To Willy the
father, too, is a somewhat romantic figure, who used to
sell flutes that he made himself. Ben, who set out to find
him and did not return until he was rich, has evidently
taken over the father's role for Willy; for every time the
idea of success occurs to Willy, a flute is heard playing
in the background.
All his life Willy has worked according to the
hypothesis that he will achieve success, if he can be well-
liked— he makes a definite distinction between the two
words liked and well-liked. The times have changed, how
ever; most of his old customers have died and the new ones
are unwilling to spend time listening to Willy's jokes.
Besides, his formula for success has never worked satis
factorily. In one of the memory scenes a tired, middle-
aged Willy has to admit to his loving wife, Linda, that he
has not earned quite the amount of money that he first
claims to have done. But he immediately offers an explana
tion: "The trouble was that three of the stores were half
closed for inventory in Boston. Otherwise I woulda broke
records."120
Willy's feeling of insecurity, of inability to be
come another Ben, is not confined only to his old age,
12C)Ibid.9 p. 148.
49
however. His recollections show this clearly. He may tell
his sons that he never has "to wait in line to see a
buyer,"*-2^ - but he confesses to Linda all the same that he
is afraid that people do not really like him and that maybe
he talks too much. The same doubt as to the effectiveness
of his "riding-on-a-smile-and-shoeshine"-*-22 method becomes
evident in the scene where he tells his son Biff how to act
before his former employer, Oliver, to get a new position
there: "A business suit, and talk as little as possible,
123
and don't crack any jokes," he says. But while talk
ing- -or rather through talking— he regains the self-confi
dence of the successful salesman, and he tells Biff:
Don't be so modest. You always started too low.
Walk in with a big laugh. Don't look worried. Start
off with a couple of your good stories to lighten
things up. It's not what you say, it's how you say
it— because personality always wins the day.12^
Obsessed by his dreams of success and big money,
Willy Loman cannot accept the fact that he and his sons are
not suited for the calculating and highly competitive busi
ness world. Although very skillful at mending household
utensils and eager to improve his house, he never realizes
that he would make a better craftsman than a salesman, and
that, working with his hands, creating things, he would
^ • 2^Ibid.. p. 146.
122Ibid.. p. 222.
123Ibid.. p. 168.
________124Ibid.. p. 169.______________: ___________________
50
probably be relaxed and happy. Instead he keeps asking
himself why his dreams and aspirations never came true.
Scenes out of a promising past become vivid for him again
and are contrasted to the disappointments of the present in
which there seems to be no place for him. But as Willy is
unable to face reality, his thoughts and recollections only
confuse him, make him more and more frustrated and ill-
tempered. When Charlie, his successful friend, offers him
a job, he gets furious, in spite of the fact that he can no
longer provide for his family; he has to work on commission
like a beginner now, and later on is actually fired. For
how can he accept a job from somebody that has been a
success, thus acknowledging his own failure?
That the final breakdown occurs, when Biff has just
returned from one of his many unsuccessful jobs, this time
as a farmhand, is no surprise. Like most fathers, Willy
has hoped that his sons would have everything that he has
not been able to obtain for himself. But Biff has turned
away from his father, and, moreover, has utterly failed to
make anything out of his life. Vaguely Willy feels that he
is responsible for Biff's failure, but he prefers to say
that Biff is lazy and that he refuses to settle down only
to spite his father. At the same time he is ready to ex
cuse Biff, as soon as he promises to go to one of his
former employers and ask for a new job, and he happily
tells Linda: "He's heading for a change. There's no ques-
51
tion, there simply are certain men that take longer to
get— solidified."125 h: L S conversation with Charlie's son,
Bernard, who is now a prominent lawyer, seems to affirm,
however, what Willy has secretly feared all these years:
that it was the discovery of his father's affair with a
woman in Boston that made Biff stubbornly refuse to retake
the mathematics course that he had failed, which prevented
him from graduating from high school and accepting one of
the scholarships that three universities offered the young
football hero. Of course Willy cannot acknowledge this,
but answers Bernard in fury: "What are you trying to do,
blame it on me? If a boy lays down is that my fault?"!2^
And as soon as he grasps that Biff's interview with Oliver
may not have turned out well, he says without the slightest
reference to the conversation: "No, noI You had to go and
flunk math!"*-2"7
How completely remote Willy is from any perception
of who he is and what reality is like becomes evident in
the last scene before the Requiem. In a desperate need to
get away from the horrible experiences of the day Willy is
planting seeds in his garden, although he should be per
fectly aware that nothing can grow there any longer, since
125Ibid.. p. 173.
126Ibid-> P- 190.
127Ibid.. p. 200.
52
the new high buildings that surround his house prevent the
sunshine from reaching the ground. He is discussing with a
phantom Ben the pros and cons of suicide; his brother has
now more or less become his alter ego. He has not come to
any definite conclusion, however, when Biff disturbs him
and makes him go into the house. In the heated discussion
that follows, Biff tells Willy that he is nothing but "a
hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like the
rest of them."*28 willy still does not want to listen to
what Biff tries to explain to him; i.e., he refuses to
accept Biff's statement that they are insignificant little
129
men, living for a "phony dream." At this Biff starts
crying, however, and that is enough to restore Willy to
happiness, for it means that Biff loves him and needs him.
He is, therefore, ready to take the drastic step that he
has been considering for a long time. This does not mean,
however, that Willy acquires a tragic insight. His resolu
tion to commit suicide is, on the contrary, based on a new
illusion: with the money from the insurance company Biff
will "be ahead of Bernard again,**130 j j e tells Ben. Further
more, he believes that the "funeral will be massive,"*8*
and that will establish him in the eyes of his sons as
128Ibid.. p. 217.
129Ibid.
130Ibid.. p. 219.
_______ 131Ibid., p. 213.__________________________________
53
having been a well-known and well-liked man. Whether the
family ever gets the money we do not know, but nobody turns
up at the funeral except his family and Charlie and Bernard,
In a way, Biff is Miller's counterpart to Satin in
Gorky's The Lower Depths. Like him, he is the only person
in the play that is brought to perception, and he is also
the mouthpiece of the author. This has not always been
clear to the critics,' however, who have tended to concen
trate the interest solely on the salesman and his fate.
Particularly misleading have been the interpretations of
reasons for his conduct. In an article in the Partisan
Review in June 1949, Eleanor Clark condescendingly says:
". . . Nothing excuses the triteness and pseudo-psycho
analytic nature of the Boston scene, dragged in to explain
Biff's failures."132 others have not been so disapproving
but have still wanted to explain in Freudian terms Biff's
maladjustment and also the relationship between father and
son. Thus, for instance, the dinner scene is said to be a
modern equivalent of "the eons-old Freudian totem-feast in
which the sons make peace with their father over sexual
rivalry."133 tke stolen fountain pen is referred to as
•^^Eleanor Clark, "Old Glamour, New Gloom,"
Partisan Review. June 1949, p. 634.
■^•^Sievers, pp. cit.. pp. 394-395. The quotation
is a summary of parts of Dr. Daniel Schneider's interpreta
tion of Death of a Salesman in his book The Psychoanalyst
and the Artist.
_ 54
"a psycho-analytic symbol for castration."1-^ The validity
of this interpretation is probably rather dubious, since
Miller himself says in the preface to his Collected Plays:
"I will admit, I was little better than ignorant of Freud's
teachings when I wrote it."1^
Of course Biff's refusal to return to school is
closely related to what took place in Boston, but his in
ability to adapt himself to the demands of society and his
kleptomania are due to other causes. Biff realizes this
himself. When Willy starts talking about his failure in
mathematics, Biff asks: "What math? What're you talking
about?"1-^ The real cause is, instead, the belief that he
is different and better than other people, instilled in him
since his early childhood by his father, that has made it
impossible for him to take orders from others and to work
industriously towards a goal. The former football hero has
always expected things to be there ready for him, and when
reality has not come up to expectations, the discrepancy
has been covered by big talk. Biff's confrontation first
by his disintegrating father and later by his former em
ployer brings him to self-realization, however. He bursts
out to Willy:
1^^Ibid.. p. 395.
135^iner, pp. cit.. p. 29.
136Ibid.. p. 200.
How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a sales
man there? I even believed myself that I'd been a
salesman for him! And then he gave me one look and— I
realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been!
We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was
a shipping clerk.137
He perceives that he has been hunting for something that he
actually does not want:
I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand
today. . . . I stopped in the middle of that building
and I saw--the sky. I saw the things that I love in
this world. The work and the food and time to sit and
smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself,
what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying
to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in
an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of my
self, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the
minute I say I know who I am! 138
He knows he is "a dime a dozen,"139 but does not mind
any longer.
Biff's perception is not confined only to himself.
At the cemetery he tells the others that Willy "had the
wrong dreams"!^ an(j that "he never knew who he was."^^-
Hap, however, refuses to accept Biff's statement as valid.
Although he has said earlier in the play that he is actual
ly bored with his life and does not know what he lives for,
he does not want to give up his dream of a glamorous future
137Ibid., p. 197.
138Ibid.. p. 217.
• * ~ 3^Ibid.
140lbid., p. 219.
141Ibid.. p. 220.
56
as a successful business man. Responding to the uncomfort
able truth about his father in fury--just as Willy always
did--he tells Biff:
I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy
Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's
the only dream you can have— to come out number-one
man. He fought it out here, and this is where I'm
gonna win it for him.142
This means that Hap will be another Willy, always frus
trated because reality will not correspond to his dreams.
Whether or not Biff will become completely adjusted and
happy is difficult to say, but everything seems to indicate
that he will be able to face reality.
The characters of Linda and Charlie are not so fully
rounded as those of Willy and his sons. This is only
natural, since the author's interest is focused on the
characters that live on a life-lie. Yet they are delineat
ed well enough to be effective counterbalances to the
others.
Apart from the somewhat high-strung quality of
Linda's speech, which mars the role to some extent, Linda
is the ordinary wife just as Willy is the common man. Her
outlook on life differs considerably, however, from that of
Willy. She is happy with her lot. She loves her husband,
and although she knows that he is a little, insecure man,
she even admires him. She tells her sons:
142Ibid.. p. 220.
57
I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never
made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper.
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But
he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening
to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be al
lowed to fall into the grave like an old dog. Atten
tion, attention must finally be paid to such a
person.143
She refuses to accept their obvious disregard for and in
gratitude to their father. When she realizes that they
left Willy behind in the restaurant after having invited
him for dinner, she turns them out. Because of her own
adjustment to reality she cannot understand why Willy is
driven to such a desperate act as suicide. In the Requiem
that takes place at the graveyard we hear her talking to
her dead husband: "Why did you ever do that? . . . I
search and I search and I search, and I can't understand
it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today.
. . . We're free and clear.**144
Although striving more or less for the same goal as
Willy Loman, Charlie is actually his very opposite. He
does not live in a world of illusions but keeps his feet on
the ground and works methodically. Consequently he also
succeeds. He soon perceives that Willy does not give his
sons the right upbringing, and therefore tries to stop him
but in vain. As a true friend he is always ready to help
Willy. He does not realize, however, that this hurts
143Ibid.. p. 162.
144Ibid.. p. 222.
58
Willy's self-respect. To a certain extent Charlie reminds
one of Luka in The Lower Depths. Not that he creates illu
sions for his friend, but in his great compassion for the
defeated salesman, he does not pose any judgment on his
misdirected ambitions--mainly because they are rather like
his own— nor on his suicide, but even finds an excuse for
his actions:
Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is
no rock bottom to life. . . . He's a man way out there
in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And
when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake.
And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your
hat, and you are finished. Nobody dast blame this man.
A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the
territory.145
Charlie's forgiving attitude, like Luka's, implies not only
pity for the protagonist, but also acceptance of the exist
ing order of society, a society in which material success
seems to be the only measure of happiness, in which men of
Willy's caliber have to live in a dream-world not to fal-
ter, a laissez-faire society in which only the fittest can
survive.
It is probably the misconception that Charlie
should be Miller's spokesman that has led certain social
istic critics to regard the play "as a Right-Wing manifes
tation of decadence."146 On the other hand, some rightist
critics have regarded the play as an attack on the
145Ibid., pp. 221-222.
14^Ibid.> p. 37.
59
capitalist system and referred to it as an example of "the
party line literature of the thirties.”1^7 ^ third group
of critics, however, have been misled by the relatively
dispassionate tone of the play. Thus Brooks Atkinson says:
"But Mr. Miller does not blame Willy, his sons, his boss or
the system, and he draws no moral conclusions."^® There
is no doubt, however, that Miller draws conclusions. In a
great many respects Willy is the same type of character as
Hialmar Ekdal in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. Neither of them
has a clear intellect, but they are both sensitive, charm
ing dreamers who are unable to face the harsh truth about
their abilities to become something great in the terms of
the world. Both of them are victims of timely yet timeless
ideals that are imposed upon them from the outside:
Hialmar Ekdal the demand of truth and cold facts, how
ever devastating, that the eighties stood for, and Willy
Loman of the dance round the golden calf that has, it may
be, never been as pronounced as in our days. Ibsen consid
ers the little man unable ever to grasp his own situation
and, therefore, offers no solution but only demands compas
sion. Miller as well as Gorky, however, is opposed to this
/
viewpoint. The false conception of happiness prevailing in
our society must and can be fought. Honest as Miller is,
Clark, op. cit.. p. 634.
148Brooks Atkinson, "Death of a Salesman: Arthur
Miller's Tragedy of an Ordinary Man," New York Times.
February 20. 1949._______________________________________
60
he does not pot the entire blame for Willy1s failure on
society, however. In an interview before the premiere of
Death of a Salesman, Miller said:
Every man has an image of himself which fails in
one way or other to correspond with reality. It's the
size of the discrepancy between illusion and reality
that matters. The closer a man gets to knowing him
self, the less likely he is to trip upon his own illu
sions . 149
Willy refuses to face reality. It is not that he cannot.
He chooses his ideals on his own responsibility. Thus he
is not only a victim of the prevailing code, "but he is
also a consenting victim,"150 clearly contrasted to his son
Biff.
As the well-known critic George Jean Nathan has
pointed out, Death of a Salesman "turned out to be box-
office in spite of itself."151 Qn the whole, serious plays
do not attract too much attention. Death of a Salesman.
however, ran for 742 performances in New York.152 xhe
reason for the tremendous success of the play in Europe as
well as in the United States is easily accounted for: it
deals with a universal problem. It is true that certain
l^Schumach, op. cit.. II, 1:7.
150joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since
1918 (New York: George Braziller^ Inc., 1957), p. 328.
151ceorge Jean Nathan, The Theatre in the Fifties
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 105.
152joseph x. Shipley, Guide to Great Plays (Wash
ington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1956), p. 4^1.
61
English reviewers wrote when the play was staged in London
that the essential features of Death of a Salesman are too
American to be of concern to English audiences.This
seems to be refuted, however, by the fact that there were
"fifteen curtain calls at first night"1^ and that the play
ran there for 204 nights.*^5
Any discussion of Death of a Salesman which does
not consider whether or not the play is a tragedy must seem
incomplete since this has been one of the major concerns of
the critics. Certainly it cannot be called a tragedy in
the classical sense. Thus, for example, the main character
is not an exceptional hero; on the contrary he is a modem
Everyman. His failure is not only due to a flaw in his
character but is also socially conditioned. Furthermore,
he does not reach a tragic insight. Miller himself, how
ever, has strongly stressed that he did not intend the play
1 S f i
to be a classical tragedy, a He wrote a play about the
fate of the common man. Viewed in this light Death of a
Salesman is a tragedy: To be frustrated because one has
built one's life on wrong and unattainable dreams, and
153ivor Brown, "As London Sees Willy Loman, New
York Times, August 28, 1949, VI:11.
154
"Death of a Salesman Moves Londoners," New York
Times, July 29, 1946, p. 12.
Shipley, op. cit., p. 431.
^"^Miller, op. cit., p. 23.
62
never to perceive this, is undoubtedly the typical tragedy
of an age when life seems to have become too complicated
for the ordinary man to achieve the Greek ideal expressed
in the inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi:
Gnothi seauton.
CHAPTER III
THE ILLUSIONS OF MANKIND
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh
Three years before the production of Death of a
Salesman appeared another great play about the illusions of
man, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Except for the
\
theme, the two plays have nothing in common, however. Not
only is the issue of The Iceman Cometh, as will be shown,
a complete reversal of that of Death of a Salesman, due to
the different outlook on life of the authors, but even the
approach and technique of the plays differ greatly.
After various experiments with the dramatic form
Eugene O'Neill returned to stark naturalism in his famous
four-act tragedy, The Iceman Cometh. At an interview in
March 1946, i.e., a few months before the first performance
of the play, O'Neill gave a very apt description of it:
Mere physical violence--mere bigness, is not im
portant. You'll see that The Iceman is a very simple
play: one set; I've certainly observed the unities all
right, characterization, but no plot in the ordinary
sense; I didn't need plot: the people are enough.I
It is evident that the characters and the environ
ment depicted in the play are based on O'Neill's personal
^Barret H. Clark, Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His
Plays (New York: Dover Publications^ Inc., 1947), p. 151.
„ g - 4-
experiences during his vagabond years. In a review of the
first performance, a New York critic mentions that O'Neill j
said in a press interview in 1924:
I lived at Jimmy-the-Priest's, a waterfront dive,
with a back room where you could sleep with your head
on the table if you bought a schooner of beer. . . .
You can get an idea of the kind of room I had when I
tell you that the rent was three dollars a month. One
roommate of mine jumped out of the window.2
Of greater importance, however, is the fact that
the theme is not a new one with O’Neill. In 1917 he pub
lished a short story called Tomorrow, of which The Iceman
Cometh can be said to be an extended, dramatized version.
Thus Jimmy Tomorrow, the main character of the short story,
reappears in the play, under the same name and with the
same personality, as one of the many characters whose lives
are variations on the main theme. The suicide that Jimmy
Tomorrow of the short story commits is transferred to
another character in the play, however. But in both in
stances the suicide is the token of a clear perception of
an unbearable reality.
The saloon in which the action takes place is well
described by one of the characters: "It's the No Chance
Saloon. It's Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe, The
Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller
^John Mason Brown, "All O'Neilling," The Saturday
Review of Literature, New York, October 19, 1946, p. 26.
^Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh (New York:
Random House, 1946), p. 23T Hereinafter referred to as
Iceman, op. cit.________ __________________________________
65
Whether or not there is a reference to Ibsen's
wild-duck-theme in the name "The Bottom of the Sea Raths
keller" is difficult to say. But to the proprietor, Harry
Hope, as well as to the boarders of his rooming house, the
dive is a last resort or more or less a refuge from the
world of cold realities.
It is a very heterogeneous group of people that
dwell in this New York waterfront saloon. Apart from the
two bartenders, and the three street walkers nobody works.
To use a phrase coined by Gorky: They are all "ex-men."
Of different races and nationalities, from different social
levels, they can be said to form a cross-section of our
civilization; or, rather, they would have formed one, had
they kept their social positions. Yet, the misery they
live under has made them much alike. Apart from the drink
ing, which goes with the environment so to speak, they have
one thing in common: unwilling to accept the truth about
their lives, they all try to maintain their self-respect by
means of their various pipe-dreams.
Although all the characters are related to the main
theme, they are not all equally well rounded. The interest
is clearly focused on Theodore Hickman— or Hickey as his
friends call him— a hardware drummer; Don Parritt, the son
of a prominent woman leader within the Syndicalist-
Anarchist movement; and Larry Slade1 , the philosopher of the
saloon, formerly a member of the movement.
66
The action— and there is action although chiefly on
a mental plane--starts when Hickey arrives at the bar. A
periodic drinker, he usually turns up at the saloon twice a
year, one of the times being Harry Hope's birthday, as the j
!
case is this time. Hickey always gives the inmates a good
time. He buys their drinks and, above all, he cheers them
up with his many funny jokes.
To the dismay of his friends it is a transformed
Hickey that comes this time. He has stopped drinking,and
he does not crack any jokes. The reason he gives for this
transfiguration puzzles them:
The only reason I've quit is--well, I finally had
the guts to face myself and throw overboard the damned
lying pipe-dream that'd been making me miserable, and
do what I had to do for the happiness of all con
cerned— and then all at once I found I was at peace
with myself and I didn't need booze any more.4
He also insists on making the others give up their
pipe-dreams. Unwilling to do so, but infuriated by Hickey's
insinuations, they set out to prove that he is wrong, only
to find out that he is not. That is, they do not even dare
to try to put their pipe-dreams to test. They have to
admit to themselves that reality does not correspond to
their talk about their abilities and their chances for a
new start, a better tomorrow. Harry Hope does not make the
walk round the ward that he has postponed for twenty years;
Cora and Chuck do not marry; Jimmy Tomorrow, the Captain,
^Iceman, op. cit., p. 79.
67
the General, Ed Mosher, Pat McGloin, Willie Oban and Joe
Mott never apply for the jobs that they have kept referring
to as almost theirs.
One by one the lodgers slink into the back room of
the bar, completely beaten. They have been forced to ac-
knowledge that they are worthless, that they have sunk too
deep ever to be able to rise again. Worse even is the fact
that the truth about their past is revealed. Their whole
lives have been nothing but lies and fraud.
Also, other life-lies are exposed and destroyed.
The street walkers have to accept the term ''whores,” al
though they prefer to be called "tarts"; Rocky, the night
bartender, may have a job, but he is a pimp all the same;
Joe Mott's features are not pronouncedly negroid, but he is
not white. The General's retreat in the Boer war was not a
strategic one but was due to his own cowardice. The Cap
tain would still have been an officer in the army but for
his embezzlement of military funds.
The effect of all these revelations is disastrous.
The glib and amiable tone that used to dominate the conver
sation in the saloon is gone. Hickey promised peace, but
instead they are filled with despair. The naked truth is
insufferable, and they have nowhere to turn for help. Not
even whiskey brings solace any longer: "What did you do to
this booze? That’s what we'd like to hear. Bejees, you
68
done something. There's no life or kick in it n o w . " ^
The unhappiness that Hickey's conversion of the
others brings about makes it evident that he is the antago
nist of the play. Like his counterpart in Ibsen's The Wild
Duck. Gregers Werle, he is a victim of illusion himself,
and his mission is based on a misconception of the ability
I
to accept the real truth of those on whom he forces his |
i
ideas.
Most obvious is his illusion about his reasons for
murdering his wife. When he realizes that his efforts to
give the others peace have failed, he feels that he has to
explain how he attained his own peace. To his horror, he
hears himself say that he hated her. Looking down at her
dead body, he had exclaimed, "Well, you know what you can
do with your pipe-dream now, you damned bitchi"^
He has told himself all the time that he killed her
because he loved her and wanted to save her from the suffer
ing that he caused by always breaking his promises to be
faithful and to stop drinking. Subconsciously, however, he
hated her. One critic assumes that he killed her "for her
intolerable, overwhelming love,"^ which caused a terrible
5Ibid.. p. 229.
^Ibid.. p. 241.
7Rosamond Gilder, "Each in His Own Way: Broadway in
Review," Theatre Arts, December 1946, p. 687.
69
feeling of guilt in him. The point becomes even clearer,
if we add that the hope of his reform was not only her pipe-
dream. It was also his. As a matter of fact, he did not
want her purity and love.
The damned hotel rooms. I'd get seeing things in
the wall paper. I'd get bored as hell. Lonely and
homesick. But at the same time sick of home. I'd feel
free and I'd want to celebrate a little. I never drank
on the job, so it had to be dames. Any tart. What I'd
want was some tramp I could be myself with without be
ing ashamed— someone I could tell a dirty joke to and
she'd laugh.8
"Lika barn leka bSst,"^ as the Swedish saying goes.
As Hickey realizes that his words indicate that his
act was a form of revenge for the feeling of inferiority
and guilt that she gave him, and that his peace consequent
ly is based on an illusion, he desperately breaks out:
No I That's a lie'. I never said--I Good God, I
couldn't have said that*. If I did, I'd gone insane!
Why, I loved Evelyn better than anything in life!
(He appeals brokenly to the crowd) Boys, you're all my
old pals! You*ve known Hickey for years! You know I'd
never— (His eves fix on Hope) You've known me longer
than anyone, Harry. You know I must have been insane,
don't you, Governor?10
The significance of Hickey's last words has some
times been misunderstood. Thus, one reviewer writes: "At
the last moment, stricken with remorse at the terrible
effect of his compassionately meant interference with their
&Iceman, op. cit.. p. 236.
^"Children that are alike play the best together."
IQIceman, op. cit., p. 242.
70
lives, he allows them to think that he has been insane.
The point is that he not only allows them to think so out
of pity for them, but actually wants to believe himself
that he was crazy when he uttered his abominable words.
The truthteller can bear the truth no better than the
others.
Likewise, it is wrong to believe that Hickey has
achieved real peace. Brooks Atkinson writes: "He [Hickey]
has already stepped into the edge of the shadow of death.
In these circumstances, conversion to peace is nothing more
than renunciation of life and acceptance of death."12
Apart from the fact that the kind of peace to which Atkin
son is referring is probably the only peace 0*Neill finds
real, it is evident that Hickey has not found that peace.
Hickey returns to the saloon, not to drink--having de
stroyed the reason for reforming, he does reform, illogic-
ally enough--but to preach and also make his friends face
the truth about themselves. As he is the son of a minis
ter, and a salesman by profession, this persuasiveness of
his could perhaps be accounted for, had it not been for a
very obvious parallel in the play
Faced with the epithet "pimp," Rocky, the night
^Wolcott Gibbs, "The Boys in the Back Room," The
New Yorker. October 19, 1946, p. 53.
■ ^ B r o o k s Atkinson, Broadway Scrapbook (New York:
Theatre Arts, 1947), p. 243.
71
bartender, tries to talk Larry and Parritt into his own
situation:
ROCKY:
(He looks from one to the other of their oblivious
faces with a sly, calculating look-“ingratiatingly.)
I was thinking now you was hot' regular guys.I tinks,
ain't two guys like dem saps to be hangin' round like a
coupla stew bums and wastin1 demselves. Not dat I
blame yuh for not woikin'. On'y suckers woik. But
dere's no percentage in being broke when yuh grab good
jack for yourself and make someone else woik for yuh,
is dere? I mean, like I do. So I tinks, Dey're my
pals and I ought to wise up two guys like dem to play
my system, and not be lousy barflies, no good to dem
selves or nobody else. (He addresses PARRITT now--
persuasively) What yuh tink, Parritt? Ain't I right?
Sure, I am. So don’t be a sucker, see? Yuh ain't a
bad-lookin' guy. Yuh could easy make some gal who's a
good hustler, an' start a stable. I'd help yuh and
wise yuh up to de inside dope on de game. (He pauses
inquiringly. PARRITT gives no sign of haying heard him.
ROCKY asks him impatiently ) Well, what about it? What
if dey do call yuh a pimp? What de hell do you care—
any more'n I do.
PARRITT:
(Without looking at him— vindictively) I'm through
with whores. I wish they were all in jail— or dead!
ROCKY:
(Ignores this— disappointedly) So yuh won't touch it,
huh? Aw right stay a humI (He turns to LARRY) Jees,
Larry, he's sure one dumb boob, ain't he? Dead from de
neck upI He don't know a good thing when he sees it.
(Oily, even persuasive again) But how about you,
Larry? You ain't dumb. So why not, huh? . . . (Hope
fully) Well, don't it look good to yuh?
LARRY:
(Glances at him— for a moment he is stirred to sardonic
pity) No, it doesn't look good, Rocky. I mean the
peace Hickey's brought you. It isn't contented enough,
if you have to make everyone else a pimp, too.1J
^ Iceman, op. cit.. pp. 220-222,
i 72
Larry's answer is undoubtedly applicable also to
Hickey's case. Even though Hickey probably repressed the
memory of what he said immediately after the deed, he must
have been aware, at least subconsciously, of the hollowness
f
of his peace. Like Rocky, the first way he could find to
attain self-assurance was to convert the others. The peace
of the others would prove that he was right, only they did
not attain it, after all. His last long monologue was
nothing but an attempt to justify himself and make the
others acknowledge the righteousness of his cause. Trapped
by his own words, he sought and found escape in a new pipe-
dream, since truth was unbearable.
Hickey's willingness to go with the police is due
to a wish to atone, even though he still will not admit the
real cause of his act: "I've got to explain to Evelyn. But
I know she's forgiven me. She knows I was insane. You've
got me all wrong, Officer. I want to go to the Chair.
This need for redemption is also evident in Don
Parritt. Although the primary cause of his conflict is the
very opposite of Hickey's, he is in somewhat the same posi
tion as Hickey, when the play opens. Unable to admit that
he sold information about the actions of the syndicalist
i
movement as a revenge on his mother for showing greater j
interest in the movement and her lovers than in him, he
14Ibid.. p. 245.
73
tells himself as well as Larry that he did it to get money
and that he never suspected that she might be caught and
imprisoned. Hickey realizes at once that they have some
thing in common, but, afraid of probing more deeply into
the case, he leaves Parritt alone.
Unlike Hickey, Parritt is capable of facing the
truth. After Hickey’s pitiful departure, he says:
You know I'm really much guiltier than he is. You
know what I did is a much worse murder. Because she is
dead and yet she has to live. For a while. But she
can’t live long in jail. She loves freedom too much.
And I can’t kid myself like Hickey, that she’s at peace.
As long as she lives, she’ll never be able to forget
what I've done to her even in her sleep. She'll never
have a second's peace. (He pauses--then bursts out)
Jesus, Larry, can’t you say something? (LARRY is at the
breaking point. PARRITT goes on) And I’m not putting
up any bluff,either, that I was crazy afterwards when
I laughed to myself and thought, "You know what you can
do with your freedom pipe-dream now, don't you, you
damned old bitch'.’ *15
But although he wants to atone, he cannot take the necessary
step. Like Miss Julie in Strindberg's play with the same
name, he is ready to die because of his feeling of self
contempt and guilt, but still he hesitates, until he is
told that there is no other way open for him than suicide.
The only other person in The Iceman Cometh who is
brought to self-realization and acceptance of reality is
Larry Slade. Since there is no crime involved with his
pipe-dream and since he, consequently, has no need for j
atonement as Parritt does, the philosophical implications
I5Ibid., p. 248
74
of the play are best discerned in his part. Furthermore,
Larry's perception of reality differs from that of Parritt.
Whereas the latter is too concerned with his own conflict
to be able to see beyond himself, Larry not only realizes
the truth about himself, but is also aware of the needs of
his fellow men.
We are, however, prepared for Larry's exceptional
perception. Right from the beginning of the play, he is
clearly distinguished from the other characters. It is
true that he could be asked with as much justice as the
others, "And why beholde^t thou the mote that is in thy
brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in
1 £
thine own eye?' But even though he has a pipe-dream, too,
it is of completely different nature than those of the
others. His does not beautify a sordid past; nor does it
give luster to an otherwise hopeless future. His illusion
is that he is in "the grandstand,watching other people
live, while he himself is longing for death.
All I know is I'm sick of life'. I'm through! I've
forgotten myself! I'm drowned and contented on the
bottom of a bottle. Honor or dishonor, faith or
treachery are nothing to me but the opposites of the
same stupidity which is ruler and king of life, and in
the end they rot into dust in the same grave. All
things are the same meaningless joke to me, for they
grin at me from the one skull of death.18
16Matt. 7:3.
^ Iceman, op. cit., p. 115
18Ibid., p. 128.
j
75
The superficiality of Larry's creed is quite obvi
ous, however. He still cares about a great many things.
Thus, when he finds out that it is Parritt who sold infor
mation about the movement, he gets terribly upset. Not
only did he once belong to the same movement, but he also
loved Parritt's mother. As Parritt will not leave him
alone, he even breaks out:
Look out how you try to taunt me back into life,
I warn you! I might remember the thing they call jus
tice there, and the punishment for--(He checks himself
with an effort--then with a real indifference that
comes from exhaustion! I'm old and tired. To hell with
you' . 19
Neither does he view the fate of his friends with indiffer
ence. Time after time he tries to stop Hickey from making
them fully aware of the truth about their miserable exist
ence.
While trying to convert Larry, Hickey gives a very
apt explanation of the underlying cause of Larry's pipe-
dream. He is "just an old man who is scared of life, but
even more scared of dying."20 Watching the effect of
Hickey's truth-telling mission and the reversal at his de
parture, Larry comes to loathe life more than he fears
death. He realizes that man's lot is insufferable without
petty pipe-dreams. Those of Hickey's friends who can be
lieve that he is crazy, i.e., those who can accept a new
19Ibid.. p. 129.
20Ibid., p. 116.
76
pipe-dream, can go on living. For Parritt and Larry only
death remains.
LARRY:
(Torturedly arguing to himself in a shaken whisper)
It* s the only way out for him! For the peace of all
concerned, as Hickey said! (Snapping) God damn his
yellow soul, if he doesnft soon, I*11 go up and throw
him off*.— like a dog with its guts ripped out you'd put
out of miseryI (He half rises from his chair just as
from outside the window comes the sound of something
hurtling down, followed by a muffled, crunching thu
LARRYgasps and drops back on his chair, shuddering l a r k y gasps and drops back on nxs chair, shuddering,
hiding his face in his hands. The group at right near
it but are too preoccupied with drinks to pay much
attention.)
HOPE:
(Wonderingly) What the hell was that?
ROCKY:
Aw, nuttin'. Someting fell off de fire escape. A
mattress, 1*11 bet. Some of dese bums been sleepin' on
de fire escapes.
HOPE:
(His interest diverted by this excuse to beef--testily)
They*ve got to cut it out! Bejees, this ain't fresh-
air cure. Mattresses cost money.
MOSHER:
Now don't start crabbing at the party, Harry. Let's
drink up. (HOPE forgets it and grabs his glass, and
they all drink.) --- ---------- --------- --------
LARRY:
(In a whisper of horrified pity) Poor devilI (A long-
forgotten faith returas to him for a moment and he
mumblesl God rest his soul in peace. (He opens his
eyes--with bitter self-derision) Ah, the damned pity--
the wrong kind, as Hickey said'. Be God, there's no
hope! Irll never be a success in the grandstand--or
anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I'll be a
weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of every
thing till the day I die! (With an intense bitter
sincerity) May that day come soon! (He pauses started-
ly. surprised at himself--then with a sardonic grin)
Be God, I'm the only real convert to death Hickey made
77
here. From the bottom of my coward's heart I mean that
now *.21
This means that although Larry stands above the
others as far as ability to perceive reality is concerned,
he is yet not strong enough to want to go on living, once
he is made aware of stark reality. Thus, if it is wrong, to
say, as a reviewer once did, "Man is ready for truth, when
he is ready to die,"22 since this is refuted by Hickey's
|case, one is probably justified in assuming that O'Neill
meant that man is ready to die when he has perceived truth.
The reception of The Iceman Cometh varied a good
deal. One theatre critic wrote, "Seldom in these theatre
23
going times has so much been written about so little."
Most New York reviewers were impressed by the play, how
ever, as were later critics abroad. George Jean Nathan
showed perhaps the greatest enthusiasm of all:
With the appearance of this long awaited work, our
theatre has become dramatically alive again. It makes
most of the plays of other American playwrights pro
duced during the more than twelve-year period of
O'Neill's absence look comparatively like so much damp
tissue paper. In it there is an understanding of the
deeper elements of human nature, a comprehension of the
confused instincts that make up the life of mortals,
and an evocation of pity for the tortured existence of
^ Ibid.. pp. 257-258.
^William Hawkins, "O'Neill's 'Iceman' Here at
Last," New York World Telegram. October 10, 1946; reprinted
in The New York Theatre Critics'Reviews 1946 (New York:
Critics' Theatre Reviews, October 14, 1946), p. 316.
^^Robert Garland, "Iceman Cometh,” New York Journal
American, October 10, 1946; reprinted in The New York
Theatre""Critics' Reviews, op. cit.. p. 313TI
78
dazed mankind that not merely most but all of those
plays in combination have not faintly suggested.24
Yet he agreed with practically all other critics that the
play is far too long: the acting time is four and a half
hours.
It is clear, however, that O'Neill considered the
length of the play and the great number of characters
necessary to emphasize the universality of the theme. Then
there is another question whether the theatre goer and the
reader accept "the battered men and blowzy women"25 Qf the
play as typical and worthy representatives of mankind.
Undoubtedly the effect of the drama would have been greater
had the characters been ordinary everyday people.
Taken as a comment on confused and tormented man-
kind, The Iceman Cometh shows none of Plato's confidence in
man's ability to grasp reality. On the contrary O'Neill
was convinced that most human beings cannot perceive it,
much less accept it. To be able to endure life they seek
refuge in illusions and pipe-dreams, sometimes also adding
other tranquilizers such as liquor.
It is important to realize that O'Neill does more
than point out that all men have pipe-dreams, varying from
case to case. Interwoven with this theme is another which
^George Jean Nathan, The Theatre Book of the Year
1946-1947 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 93.
25
Brooks Atkinson, op. cit., p. 242.
79 ;
is of greater consequence: all men have certain illusions
in common.
This aspect of the play is emphasized in a book on
O’Neill by a Harvard scholar, Edwin A. Engel, who says that
"the unmasking of love is the main intention of the pla y ."26
It is evident, however, that Engel’s statement is true only
if we take the word love in its broadest sense. Engel’s
discussion is based on the concept of love between the
sexes, but a close examination of the drama shows that it
should include also .unselfishness and friendship.
Hugo has spent ten years in jail for his socialistic
belief, one of the main tenets of which is that all men
should be free and live under equal conditions. Yet, deep
within himself he is no true socialist. Drunk on the cham
pagne served at Hickey's birthday party for Harry, he breaks
out:
I vill trink champagne beneath the villow-- (With a
change to aristocratic fastidiousness) But the slaves
must ice it properly! (With guttural rage) GottamneH
Hickey'. Peddler pimp for nouveau-rich capitalism! Vhen
I lead the jackass mob to the sack of Babylon, I vill
make them hang him to a lamppost the first o n e .27
Also, what appears to be friendship is really but an
illusion. Bereft of their sustaining life-lies, the so-
called friends start snarling at one another. When the
^Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of O’Neill
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 294.
2^Iceman, op. cit.» p. 200. (Italics mine.)
80
streetwalkers are called whores instead of tarts, they
|assail the night bartender and call him a pimp. No longer
heroes, each of the two veterans really wishes that he had
killed the other during the Boer War.
Likewise it is implied that happy, reciprocal love ^
does not exist except in man's dreams.^® Harry Hope hated
his wife Bessie for making him lead a life that he did not
want; Jimmy Tomorrow preferred drinking to staying at home
with his wife; Hickey could not stand his wife's virtue and
all-forgiving love; Parritt hated his mother for her many j
affairs and lack of interest in him. The only person of thej
whole group who really seems to have loved is Larry Slade,
but he could not accept his mistress* independence and her
"free" morality, so he left her and pretended that he was
through with her.
Only one conclusion can be drawn from this. Al- — -
though homo sapiens is gregarious, each individual is
basically alone. Innate selfishness and fear of being hurt
prevent man from seeing beyond himself, from really liking
other human beings.
To the very few who, like Larry Slade, O'Neill's
alter ego,29 are brought to full realization of the human
^®It should be noticed, however, that O'Neill has
given this theme a strictly one-sided treatment. Except for
Cora, one of the streetwalkers, none of the women involved
in these relationships appears in the play.
2^Engel, pp. cit.. p. 282.
lot, life seems too complicated to be endurable. This is
expressed already in the very beginning of the play, when
Larry quotes Heine's poem to morphine:
Lo, sleep is good; better is death; in sooth
The best of all were never to be b o r n .30
Nevertheless, it is certainly an exaggeration to
assume that the pessimism which is so apparent in The Iceman
Cometh is "nihilistic."31 O'Neill may not say with the
Swedish author Par Lagerkvist, "Jag vordar manniskan men
i
foraktar livet."32 The characters in O'Neill's drama do
nothing to deserve respect. But they are definitely not
depicted with contempt. O'Neill shows great compassion for
them. How to interpret the information given to the reader
in Larry's final speech, "A long-forgotten faith returns to
him for a m o m e n t ."33 is doubtful, but it is significant that!
i
it appears at the same time as Larry realizes that man can- j
not have rest and peace on earth after he has faced the j
truth about himself. The best analysis is, perhaps, Edmund
A. Gagey's. He writes:
The play does not lack O'Neill's innate religious
feeling, implicit in his works from the early days . . .
30Iceman, op. cit.. p. 32.
31
Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918
(New York: George Braziller, 1951), p. 332.
OO
"I respect man but feel contempt for life." Par
Lagerkvist, "Du finns ej sjalv," Dikter (Stockholm: Albert
Bonniers Forlag, 1941), p. 147.
33
Iceman, op. cit.. p. 258.
82;
but at the same time the piece shows no evidence of
church doctrine or of the conversion suggested by
Days Without End.34
With 0*Neill*s outlook on life, it is only natural
that he should find the truth-teller just as offensive as
Ibsen did, particularly since the truth-teller proves to be
another victim of illusions, the greatest of which is that
man can face truth and gain peace from it. The true
philosopher who has a conception of what reality is like
knows that truth does not bring happiness, and he leaves
man and his illusions alone.
The similarity of the settings has made many
critics connect The Iceman Cometh with Gorky*s The Lower
35
Depths. The likeness is only superficial, however.
Gorky pleaded for truth— at any cost. Larry*s attitude is,
in The Lower Depths, held only by Luka, and, as has been
shown previously, he is the antagonist of the play. The
happiness of Biff in Death of a Salesman, when he realizes
who he is, has no equivalent whatsoever in 0*Neill's play.
Self-perception, according to 0*Neill, only opens up horri
fying perspectives, and with it goes an intense longing for
death, the Iceman.
34
Edmund A. Gagey, Revolution in American Drama
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 68.
35gee for instance Brown, op. cit.. p. 27; and
Martin Lamm, Modem Drama, trans. Karin Elliott (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 325.
' 83
Luigi Pirandello's It la. Sol
(If You Think BoT
I
Few authors have treated the theme of illusions
versus reality with such persistency as Pirandello has. In
work after work, short stories and novels as well as dramas,
he returns to the same question. Thus there is some justi
fication for the statement that his plays form "a single
1
jdrama in a hundred acts.
It Is So! (If You Think So)^ £g not Pirandello's
best known play, but it is perhaps the one in which his
philosophical attitude is most easily perceived.
Pirandello's plays deviate considerably from what
is generally regarded as good drama in that they are hardly
anything but dramatized ideas. One might say that they are
his philosophy expressed in dramatic form. The result is,
of course, a highly intellectual and often very contrived
drama, in which the action does not grow out of the charac
ters. Instead, both the action and the characters are
subordinate to the philosophic idea. At an interview in
Barcelona in 1924, Pirandello explained that the basis of
drama should be the workings of the intellect:
■^Massimo Bontempelli, "Luigi Pirandello," La Nuova
Antologia, February 1, 1937, Milan. Cited in "Introduc
tion" by Eric Bentley, in Luigi Pirandello, Naked Masks.
Five Plays. trans. Arthur Livingston (New York: E. P.
Dutton and Co., Inc., 1952), p. xxiii.
3^The play has also appeared in an English trans
lation under the title of "Right You Are (If You Think So)."
84
People say that my drama is obscure and they call
! it cerebral drama. The new drama possesses a distinct
character from the old: whereas the latter had as its
basis passion, the former is the expression of the
intellect. One of the novelties that I have given to
modern drama consists in converting the intellect into
passion. The public formerly were carried away only by
plays of passion, whereas now they rush to see intel
lectual works.38
The setting of It Is Sol (If You Think So) is
extremely well chosen. It is an upper middle class home in
a small, provincial Italian town, where gossip forms the
main part of the conversation and, in fact, provides most
of the entertainment.
With this background and with half a dozen con
ceited and narrow-minded members of the dlite discussing
the strange circumstances of the private life of a Signor
Ponza, the new secretary to the prefect, the play at first
strikes the audience as a comedy of manners. But by the
time Signor Ponza and his mother-in-law, Signora Frola, |
have each indicated that the other is mad and that his own
insanity is only pretense, the audience is no longer merely
amused. It is as anxious as the other characters in the
play to know the truth. Is Ponza's wife his second wife,
as he says? Or is she Signora Frola's daughter and conse
quently Ponza's first wife? Which of them is telling the
truth and which is mad? When the suspense becomes almost
unbearable, Signora Ponza herself appears and gives her
3®Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello (London: J. M.
Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1926), p. 42.
startling answer: "Tell you what? The truth? Simply
this: I am the daughter of Signora Frola . . . and the sec
ond wife of Signor Ponza . . . and, for myself, I am
nobody. . . . I am she whom you believe me to be."39
To a great many onlookers who have become as im
mersed in the play as in an intriguing detective story, the
end of the drama is actually as exasperating as it is to
the characters on the stage. They cannot accept a statement
according to which both Signor Ponza and Signora Frola are
right. And an outstanding theatre critic even wrote in his
review after the New York performance that he wagered "one
pistareen on the husband's insanity."^
Yet, intriguing as it is, the plot can hardly be
said to be plausible. It is built on too many unusual
factors: an earthquake killing all relatives, friends and
officials and also destroying all documents; a person com
pletely secluded from the world, et cetera. Critics have,
I
therefore, described the play as "a philosophical extrava
ganza, "a purely symbolic fable.The best term is
^Luigi Pirandello, It Is Sol (If You Think So),
trans. Arthur Livingston, Naxea Masxs. op. cit.. p. 1j8.
^Brooks Atkinson, "Right You Are (If You Think You
Are," New York Times, February 24, 1927, p. 27.
^John Gassner, Masters of the Drama (3rd ed.; New
York: Dover Publications^ Inc., 1^54), p. 440.
^Joseph T. Shipley, Guide to Great Plays (Washing
ton, D.C.: Public Affairs Press'] 1956), p. 505.
86 i
undoubtedly Pirandello's own, A Parable in Three Acts.
A close examination of the groundwork of It Is Sol (If You
Think So) reveals a striking similarity to a philosophic
system, built on thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Thus
there are two central characters in the play. Each of them
makes a statement which runs counter to that of the other.
And at the close of the play appears a third person, who
gives the Pirandellian synthesis of the matter.
Along with the schematic and unrealistic plot goes
a superficial characterization. Yet, at first the charac
ters appear to be rather realistically portrayed. This is
undoubtedly partly due to the fact that the tone of their
conversation is so well caught. Some of the flavor of
their idiom is lost in the translation, but the Italian
critic Thilger's comments on the language in Pirandello's
dramas are to some extent still valid about the English
version of the play:
Always extremely simple (the most naked and eco
nomic, the furthest removed from literary "equilibrium,"
the most truly "spoken" ever heard on our stage), the
language of these plays is agile, astute, mobile, full
of sap, bursting with inner vitality; the dialogue,
restrained, exact, with no ornamental appendages, the
images immediate and germane, bends itself wonderfully
to follow the sinuosities of psychological processes.^3
But if we try to see beyond the dialogue, what
remains of the seemingly vividly drawn characters but
^ Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, p. 244; cited in
"Introduction” by Bentley in Pirandello, Naked Masks, Five
Plays, op. cit.. p. xxiv.
87
types? A comparison with the characters of G. B. Shaw,
another champion of the drama of ideas, is very illuminat
ing. Joan of Arc in the play of the same name, Ann in Man j
i
and Superman, Marchbanks in Candida are all vibrant indi- J
viduals apart from the fact that the author has expressed
ideas through them. Pirandello*s characters, on the con
trary, are not sufficiently rounded; they never emerge from
the pattern. This is, of course, particularly true about
the subsidiary characters. They can almost be said to be
caricatures. Take, for instance, the Sirellis. What do we
know about them except what they look like (which informa
tion is given in the stage directions) and that they are an
insipid and quarreling couple of gossips?
But neither do we learn much more about the central
characters, Signor Ponza and Signora Frola. As they are
presented to us in the first act, they remain all through
the play, never developing and even seeming somewhat alike.
Thus^ the outstanding feature of their characters is the
strong tension they exhibit when they are faced with the
doubting attitude of the others. Furthermore, they both
show a great need to vindicate themselves and explain the
situation. It is only in one respect that they differ:
when trying to establish the validity of their own state
ments they treat each other differently. Signor Ponza
behaves aggressively toward the old lady, while she becomes
very submissive. In each case, however, the stupefied on-
88
lookers are told that the actions are due to consideration
for the other person. "We all have our weaknesses in this
world, haven't we! And we get along best by having a
little indulgence for one another,"^ says Signora Ponza.
By pretending that he is mad, as Ponza says, he makes
Signora Frola believe that she is right. By not gainsaying
I
her son-in-law, as Signora Ponza says, she makes him be
lieve that he is right.
The character Laudisi is generally said to serve
the same purpose as the chorus in a classical drama. Actu
ally, however, this is an understatement of the importance
of his part in the play. Laudisi is much more explicit
than a chorus. Not only does he comment on what is happen
ing and foresee the outcome of the conflict, but he even
forwards the action. His conversation with the Sirellis
reveals a parallel between relationship of the main charac
ters and that of these minor characters, and it is his
suggestion that Signora Ponza herself be questioned. Fur
thermore, the discrepancy between the major characters'
concepts of reality develops only one of the themes in the
play, or rather, since they are all interrelated, is only
one facet of the main idea. The others are all evolved by
Laudisi.
With some justification, therefore, one can say
^Pirandello, op. cit.. p. 83.
89
that Laudisi has the same function in It Is Sol (If You
i Think So) as the ego has in Plato's cave allegory. He is
Pirandello himself, the mundane philosopher, clearly set
apart from the other characters. As one of Pirandello's
biographers has pointed out, even the description of
Laudisi's physical appearance indicates that he is a self-
portrait
In the plays discussed earlier, the illusions,
whether held by the little man or by all mankind, have al
ways been clearly distinguished from reality. That is,
even though the persons who live on life-lies or pipe-
dreams seem to prove the validity of Pirandello's idea that,
anything is real as long as you believe in it, there have
been no doubts on the part of the authors as to the exist
ence of one objective reality. This is the case in Piran
dello's drama, however. He is convinced that what we call
reality is something subjective, is based on individual
interpretations of mere appearances.
The result is, of course, that each individual is
alone in his own world, absolutely unable to enter or
penetrate the separate worlds of his fellow men. The theme
is developed for the first time in an excellent little
scene in Act I as an ironic contrast to the characters'
/
Domenico Vittorini, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935),
pp. 10, 120.
90
eager attempts to learn the truth about Signor Ponza and
Signora Frola.
SIGNORA SIRELLI:
. . . The real truth, Amalia, is this: for all my hus
band says he knows, I never manage to keep posted on
anything!
SIRELLI:
And no wonder! The trouble is— that woman never trusts
me! The moment I tell her something she is convinced
it is not quite as I say. Then, sooner or later, she
claims that it can* t be as I say. And at last she is
certain it is the exact opposite of what I say!
SIGNORA SIRELLI:
Well, you ought to hear all he tells me!
LAUDISI:
(laughing aloud) May I speak, madam? Let me answer
your husband. My dear Sirelli, how do you expect your
wife to be satisfied with things as you explain them
to her, if you, as is natural, represent them as they
seem to you?
SIGNORA SIRELLI:
And that means--as they cannot possibly be!
LAUDISI:
Why no, Signora, now you are wrong. From your hus
band's point of view things are, I assure you, exactly
as he represents them.
SIRELLI:
As they are in reality!
SIGNORA SIRELLI:
Not at all! You are always wrong!
SIRELLI:
No, not a bit of it! It is you who are always wrong.
I am always r i g h t . 46
The mistake these people make is that they take
what they perceive for das Ding an sich. to use a term
t x ( \
Pirandello, op. cit., p. 69.
91
created by the German philosopher Kant. Consequently they
are all completely at a loss when two persons offer abso
lutely divergent explanations, both of which seem equally
reliable and logical, for.the conditions under which they
live.
Strictly speaking, it is impossible that both
Signor Ponza and Signora Frola can be right. But whichever
is wrong, he or she has had to face an unbearable situa
tion, as their stories clearly show. Either Signora Frola
has suffered the loss of a dear daughter, or else Signor
Ponza has once been separated from his wife by force. The
"remedy"47 has, in either case, been the creation of a
"beneficial"48 illusion. And the illusion has been so
powerful, so extensive that it has not only hidden an unen
durable reality, but it has actually taken the place of
reality. It has become reality— at least temporarily.
She has created for him, or he for her, a world of
fancy which has all the earmarks of reality itself
. . . and this world of fancy, this reality of theirs,
no documents can possibly destroy because the air they
breathe is of that world. For them it is something
they can see with their eves, hear with their ears, and
touch with their fingers.^9
The most interesting aspect of the theme of the
relativity of r e a l i t y ^ 8 is the fact that the townspeople
47Ibid.. p. 137. 48Ibid., p. 87.
49Ibid.. p. 98.
^8The more common term, relativity of truth, has
purposely been avoided, since it applies to a concept of an
entirely different character. Buckle's theory of the______
92
cannot decide which of the two stories is true. The illu
sion has the same appearance as reality.
Oh, I grant you--if you could get a death certifi
cate or a marriage certificate or something of the
kind, you might be able to satisfy that stupid curios
ity of yours. Unfortunately, you can't get it. And
the result is that you are in the extraordinary fix of
having before you, on the one hand, a world of fancy,
and on the other, a world of reality, and you, for the
life of you, are not able to distinguish one from the
other.51
The idea is not new, however. The Spanish dramatist, Pedro
Calderon de la Barca, expressed it in his play La vida es
sueno (Life Is a Dream), and in Ett Dromspel (The Dream
Play) and Till Damaskus (To Damascus) the Swedish author,
August Strindberg, developed the same theme in an expres-
sionistic technique. Another facet of the theme that is
evolved in It Is Sol (If You Think So) is the problem of
multiple personality. Talking to the Sirellis, Laudisi
explains that every person appears in a different way to
different people.
relativity of truth is based on the concept of evolution.
What is right today may be wrong tomorrow, as the circum
stances may change. In It Is Sol (If You Think So) the
question concerns the various perceptions of reality that
different people have in one, fixed situation. In a way
Pirandello s concept of reality is akin to that of Plato,
since he considers this world a world of appearances. Yet
it is probably more related to Kant's philosophy. Like
Kant, Pirandello means that all human perception of reality
is based on experience and is derived through certain in
tellectual predicates or categories. But Pirandello goes
one step farther than Kant. He indicates^that all things
appear in different ways to different individuals.
^Pirandello, op. cit., p. 98.
93
Never mind your husband, madam! Now, you have
touched me, have you not? And you see me? And you are
absolutely sure about me, are you not? Well now,
madam, I beg of you: do not tell your husband, nor my
sister, nor my niece, nor Signora Cini here, what you
think of me; because, if you were to do that, they
would all tell you that you are completely wrong. But,
you see, you are really right; because I am really what
you take me to be; though, my dear madam, that does not
prevent me from also being really what your husband, my
sister, my niece, and Signora Cini take me to be--be-
cause they also are absolutely r i g h t . 52
j But not even to himself is man one person. Facing
his own image as reflected in a mirror, Laudisi says:
So there you are! (He bows to himself and salutes,
touching his forehead with his fingers.) I say, old
man, who is mad, you or I? (He levels a finger menac
ingly at his image in the glass: and.of course, the
Image in turn levels a finger at him. As he smiles.
his image smiles.) Of course, I understand! I say it's
you, ana you say it's me. You--you are mad! No. It's
me? Very well! It's me! Have it your way. Between
you and me, we get along very well, don*t we! But the
trouble is, others don't think of you just as I do: and
that being the case, old man, what a fix you're in! As
for me, I say here, right in front of you, I can see
myself with my eyes and touch myself with my fingers.
But what are you for other people? What are you in
their eyes? An image, my dear sir, just an image in
the glass'. They're all carrying just such a phantom
around inside themselves, and here they are racking
their brains about the phantoms in other people; and
they think all that is quite another thing.53
The only thing that all these personalities have in common
is the name Lamberto Laudisi.
It is significant that Pirandello published all his
dramatic works under one common title: Maschere Nude (Naked j
!
Masks)♦ We are all like actors in a play wearing masks, i
52Ibid.. p. 70.
53Ibid.. pp. 101-102
94
according to him. Underneath the mask is a different face.
Yet we persist in our belief that we can apprehend another
human being. We draw conclusions from what we happen to
see. Our concepts of a person are, therefore, only ration
alizations. Clarifying parallels can be found in a great
many of Pirandello's dramas. The Father in Six Characters
in Search of an Author protests that his personality should
not be judged from one shameful act. The author in Quando
si e qualcuno^ has more sides than his public will accept.
Laudisi*s main reason for trying to make the others
stop their " i n v e s t i g a t i o n " ^ is not the futility of all at
tempts to find out what truth and reality are. He knows
that the chasm between individuals derives from the sub
jectivity of their perception of reality and results in
inevitable misunderstandings and quarrels. Furthermore, if
they succeed, the "fictitious reality," the mask of one
person will be destroyed, and that will lead to unhappi
ness. They must, therefore, show consideration and leave
Signor Ponza and Signora Frola alone. In various words
this is repeated all through the play, not only by Laudisi
but also by Signor Ponza and Signora Frola. And at the
close of the play Signora Ponza herself says: "There is a
misfortune here, as you see, which must stay hidden; other-
^"When One Is Somebody." The play has not been
translated into English.
-*-*Pirandello, op. cit.. p. 131.
wise the remedy which our compassion has found cannot
avail."56
The characters in It Is Sol (If You Think So) who
are "athirst for the truth"57 are, therefore, more or less
counterparts to the truth-tellers in The Wild Duck and The
Iceman Cometh, even though they do not tell "truths" but ask
questions. Like Gregers Werle and Hickey, they do not per
ceive their own illusions. Likewise, their quest for truth
is primarily egotistic. Gregers Werle wanted revenge on
his father; Hickey needed assistance to prove to himself
that he was right; the drawing room characters in Piran
dello^ drama want to be diverted. The pettiness of the
underlying reason for the Pirandellian characters* interest
in the truth makes the result of their actions all the more
revolting.
Although they do not find out what the actual facts
are, their curiosity has still caused irreparable damage.
Signora Frola and Ponza leave the room in tears. One of
them perhaps cries out of pity for the other person. The
other is made aware of the fictitious quality of his (or
her) own attitude. As Domenico Vittorini has pointed out,
"this prevents the obliteration of the original ego. . . .
The two personalities remain, tragically merged into one,
writhing in a grief in which the truth of art defies the
56Ibid., p. 137.
57Ibid«. p. 67.
96
truth of life."“ ^
Tt! Is So* (If You Think So) logically ends with
Laudisi saying, "And there, my friends, you have the truth!
(With a look of derisive defiance at them all.) Are you
satisfied? (He bursts out laughing.)"^ Behind this laugh
ing remark is as pessimistic an outlook on life as that of
Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh. Trapped in his own mind,
man can never see anything from another point of view than
his own. But instead of accepting the position that any
thing is reality as long as one believes in it, man nour
ishes the illusion that he can objectively determine what
reality is in every single case. And in the conflict that
ensues when different opinions or "planes of reality"^
meet, unhappiness is the result.
Yet, Pirandello's response to this grim aspect of
life is not the same as O'Neill's on the surface. Larry
admits that he wants to die. Laudisi laughs, but it is a
hollow laugh. In an essay on Pirandello, H. Daniel-Rops, a
French critic, writes:
Pirandello ne s'appelle jamais lui-m&me autrement
qu'humoriste. Mais il en a une conception fortdif-
f6rente de 1'humour de nos auteurs gais. L'antithdse
pour lui n'est pas seulement un jeu spirituel qui, par
"*®Vittorini, op. cit., p. 38.
“ ^Pirandello, op. cit.. p. 138.
^Barrett H. Clark and George Friedley (eds.),
History of Modern Drama (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co.,
Inc., 1938), p. 369.
971
balancement successif des apparences, provoque la
gaiete. L'antithese pirandellienne, dont le symbole
pour lui est cet Erma bifroute. dont une face rit et
1'autre pleure, a quelque chose de dramatique, presque
de monstrueux.ol
Monstrous is hardly a fitting word, however. In one of his
short stories, Pirandello says:
The characters of my fiction are spreading all over
the world the rumor that I am a most cruel and heart
less writer. I need a sympathetic critic who will show
how much understanding there is beneath my laughter.62
But greater than his pity for mankind is his bitterness at
the incongruities and cruelties of life. He has described
his own life work in the following words: "A man, I have
tried to tell something to other men, without ambition,
except perhaps that of avenging myself for having been
born."63
61H. Daniel-Rops, "Pirandello," Carte d1Europe
(Paris: Perrin et Cie, Libraires-fiditeurs, 1928), p. 175.
^ Novelle per un anno, TV, 238. Cited in
Vittorino, op. cit., p. 34l.
^Pirandello, "Foreword" to Vittorini, op. cit.,
p. vii.
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
The literary techniques employed in the five dramas
discussed in the previous chapters of this thesis vary con
siderably.
Although reminiscent of the well-made plots of the
mid-century, Ibsen's The Wild Duck is basically a realistic
play. Particularly good are the psychological delineation
of the characters and the exceptionally well individualized
tone of the dialogue. The use of an elaborate symbol is,
however, a striking feature of the play. The Wild Duck, in
fact, belongs to a transitional period of the author’s
career and is a forerunner of his symbolistic plays which
form part of the symbolistic movement at the end of the
century.
Good dialogue and well rounded personalities are
also characteristics of Gorky's The Lower Depths. The play
culminates the realistic trend toward the minimizing of
plot. Like The Wild Duck, however, The Lower Depths devi
ates from what is generally considered to be realistic
drama. Because of the concentration on the sordid and
unsavory sides of society, Gorky's play may be classified
as a naturalistic piece. It is, however, strongly colored
by Russian emotionalism. The best way to describe The
Lower Depths seems, therefore, to be to create a new term,
Russian naturalism.
Miller's Death of a Salesman is an example of a
more recent departure from the realistic technique. The
expressionistic flash-back device, however, actually leads
to exceedingly realistic projections of what takes place in
a man's mind. Thus, Death of a Salesman can be said to be
primarily realistic.
As O'Neill is one of the most important American
exponents of the expressionistic technique, one would ex
pect in The Iceman Cometh a device similar to that employed
in Miller's play. This is not the case, however. Instead,
O'Neill's drama bears close resemblance to Gorky's The
Lower Depths from a technical point of view. The many,
well-drawn characters, the realistic, colloquial dialogue
and the drab setting of The Iceman Cometh are all earmarks
of naturalistic drama. Since the tone of the play is less
passionate than that of Gorky's, the term "slice-of-life"
is highly appropriate of The Iceman Cometh.
The least realistic development of the theme is
undoubtedly Pirandello's It Is Sol (If You Think So). In
spite of the extremely contrived nature of the situations
and the scant characterization of the play, It Is Sol
(If You Think So) is theatrically effective. It is, there
fore an example of purely intellectual drama at its best.
100
The apparent technical differences in the treatment
of the theme of illusions are, however, less remarkable
than the distinctly divergent opinions implied or expressed
in the five plays. Two major groups are easily discerned.
The plays which show that the little, maladjusted individ
ual creates for himself or accepts an illusory reality
constitute one group. The other group consists of the
dramas which show that all men are victims of illusions.
In these two divergent points of view there lies the dif
ference between a more or less positive and a negative
attitude to life.
The authors of the plays in the first group (Ibsen,
Gorky, Miller) do not have a deterministic concept of life
as a whole. The tragedies in their plays are only individ
ual, and, furthermore, under different circumstances they
would not have occurred. Thus, The Lower Depths is based
on Gorky's belief that all men, since they are born equal,
should, and one day will, be socially equal. Positive
belief in the values of the non-materialistic things in
life underlies Miller's Death of a Salesman. That The Wild
Duck also belongs to this group is evident. Not only does
Ibsen indicate that the little man's illusions are of no
consequence to the rest of mankind, but he also stresses
the fact that the life of his protagonist is good and
happy.
The plays of the second group, The Iceman Cometh
101
and It Is Sol (If You Think So), demonstrate that their
authors have a tragic concept of life. Although Piran
dello's treatment of the theme is comic, he, as well as
O'Neill, finds nothing but unhappiness and loneliness at
the bottom of all human experience. Pirandello's laugh is
only a mask.
Within both groups the causations for the illusions
vary, however. And in the dramas about the illusions of
the individual, the authors even express different opinions
as to the treatment of the illusions.
Apart from the fictitious fatherhood of Hjalmar
Ekdal, which is a development of the theme of the relativity
of truth, all life-lies in The Wild Duck are primarily
caused by the environment. Hjalmar Ekdal has been spoilt
by his aunts and given a false idea of his own signifi
cance. Gregers Werle has been brought up by a sick mother
who has imbued him with a high-strung idealism and false
notions about his father. Yet, since the damage is already
done, Ibsen means that consideration must be shown. "Rob
the average man of his illusions and you rob him of his
happiness," says Relling.
In marked contrast to this viewpoint stands Gorky's
The Lower Depths. Society is made responsible for the need
of illusions on the part of his characters. The complacent
attitude of Luka leads to no changes in the structure of
the society, and his pity is, therefore, misdirected. "To
. . . 162
lie--it's the creed of slaves and masters of slaves! Truth
is the religion of the free man!”
In Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman the motiva
tion for the illusions is of a more complex nature. The
social responsibility is perhaps most apparent, but, like
Ibsen, Miller also stresses the fact that children can be
brought up with misconceptions. Furthermore, there exists
a personal choice in Death of a Salesman that is absent in
Ibsen's and Gorky's plays. "Why am I trying to become what
I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a
contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is
out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I
am!" says Biff.
Although both O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and
Pirandello's It Is So! (If You Think So) imply that all men
live in an illusory world, there is a fundamental differ
ence between O'Neill's and Pirandello's concepts of
reality.
O'Neill indicates that all individuals are basical
ly insignificant and insecure. They hide the harsh reality
behind illusions, general as well as individual. To the
person who perceives this, life becomes unbearable. He
wants to die.
Pirandello also shows that men create illusions
when they are faced with intolerable situations. But the
main reason for Pirandello's pessimism originates from the
103
fact that it is impossible to distinguish reality from
illusion. Anything is reality--as long as one believes in
it, and consequently anything is illusion.
The dramatists arrive at the same conclusion, how
ever. Man's lot is pitiful. Therefore he should not be
deprived of his illusions. "He's earned his dream! Have
you no decency or pity?" Larry asks Hickey in The Iceman
Cometh. "There is a misfortune here, as you see, which
must stay hidden: otherwise the remedy which our compassion
has found cannot avail," says Signora Ponza in It Is So!
(If You Think So).
Thus, it is evident that the problem of illusions
has been of concern to dramatists of completely different
views on life. In fact, the awareness of the existence of
illusions has, perhaps, formed the general trend of their
life philosophy. Consequently, it is only natural that
they have approached and treated the problem from different
aspects and arrived at different conclusions. Furthermore,
as the classical saying goes, "Quot homines, tot senten-
tiae."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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1555:------- ----------------
flnivBTBitv nr oa'tif'ornf*

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Creator Wernblom-Overgaard, Gerd (author)

Core Title Five dramatic treatments of illusion

Degree Master of Arts

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Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Hadley, Paul E. (committee chair), Crittenden, Walter M. (committee member), McElderry, Bruce R., Jr. (committee member)

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