Though they never met in person, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller—two of the most significant U.S. playwrights in the twentieth century—corresponded in writing. In 1947, O’Neill sent a telegram to Miller, congratulating him on winning the New York Critics Circle Award for All My Sons. Two years later, Miller, in turn, wrote to O’Neill, inviting him to see his new play Death of a Salesman (1949) and to convey his respect for the elder playwright’s work: “I have held your work,” Miller wrote, “in such high esteem since my first consciousness of the theatre” (Isaac, Appendix).
Miller, in fact, had more of a slow-growing admiration for O’Neill’s work. As Miller admitted in his autobiography, Timebends, in the spiraling economic climate of the mid 1930s, when the young Miller was acutely awakened to leftist politics and socially conscious theater, O’Neill’s work , to him, seemed “archaic,” as opposed to the overtly topical and politically agitating plays by Group Theatre prodigy Clifford Odets, the self-proclaimed “stormbird of the working class.” For the politically engaged Miller, O’Neill—who, in the 1930s, wrote Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness! and Days without End—seemed “the playwright of the mystical rich, of high society and the Theatre Guild and escapist ‘culture’” (Miller 1987, 228).
It was not until the premiere of The Iceman Cometh that Miller reassessed his opinion of O’Neill’s work. He wrote of how “struck” he was by O’Neill’s “radical hostility to bourgeois civilization,” a hostility, in comparison, that was “far greater than anything Odets had expressed.” Miller also observed how “Odets’s characters were alienated because – when you came down to it – they couldn’t get into the system, O’Neill’s because they so desperately needed to get out of it, to junk it with all its boastful self-congratulation, its pious pretension to spiritual values when in fact it produced emptied and visionless men choking with unnameable despair” (Miller 1987, 228).
It was perhaps for this reason that Miller reached out to O’Neill in his letter—at last seeing him more as a kindred artistic spirit. According to theater scholar Christopher Bigsby, Miller better understood that “O’Neill had worked against the American grain. Like Miller himself, he had been concerned to dramatize a tragic sense of life, at odds in some respects with American melioristic philosophy and now with mid-century boosterism” (491).
In Miller’s letter to O’Neill, he, in addition to inviting him to attend Salesman, asked if they could meet: “I have long wished to speak with you and take this occasion to ask whether we might get together for an afternoon or an evening. Will you let me know if and when you could see the play and whether a meeting is possible at this time?” (Isaac, Appendix). The meeting, unfortunately, never occurred. O’Neill was already suffering from a neurological disease that left him with a severe case of tremors, impairing his ability to write and travel.
It is tempting to imagine this situation differently with these two great playwrights getting together to discuss the situation of theater and their work. This, of course, can no longer happen after O’Neill’s death in 1953 and Miller’s in 2005. Instead, the types of extant communications are these correspondences and, quite possibly, their plays as a means for them to speak to each other. Miller’s expressionist play A Memory of Two Mondays—produced in 1955, only two years after O’Neill’s death—speaks to O’Neill’s work like none other, specifically to The Hairy Ape, which premiered thirty-three years earlier as one of the founding expressionist plays in the United States. It is fitting to see A Memory of Two Mondays as homage to O’Neill and his great body of work, in particular, The Hairy Ape.1
There indeed are considerable similarities between these two plays, especially in their dramatic styles and themes. This study, though, positions the two plays together primarily to focus on how O’Neill and Miller comparably used Irish immigrant characters in industrial settings as powerful vehicles of reflection and rebellion and how these similarities relate to their own immigrant family histories. As theater scholarship moves further into the twenty-first century, it is important to better understand the commonalities between these two playwrights, as well as the significant influence O’Neill had on the younger writer’s work.
An immediate distinction between the playwrights, of course, is that O’Neill descended from Irish Catholics while Miller came from Polish Jews.2 Despite this difference, it is important to note that O’Neill and Miller, both second-generation Americans, had immigrant fathers; their mothers were born in the United States. O’Neill’s father, James, was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and emigrated in 1850 at the age of four as part of the great famine diaspora. Miller’s father, Isidore, left Poland in 1891 at the age of six as part of the massive exodus of Jews fleeing destitution, discrimination, and the immense violence of pogroms.
Many of the Irish and Jews who emigrated from the harsh conditions of their homelands were disappointed to find new racial and economic discriminations awaiting them on U.S. shores. Both playwrights’ fathers came to the United States during a period of fierce anti-immigrant sentiment and discrimination. Xenophobia was rampant in both law and industry. This was seen clearly in the numerous immigration acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that gave the government greater authority to restrict immigration and naturalization, as well as in the ruthless labor practices of the day. Poor work conditions and exploitation of immigrant workers in the United States were widespread throughout the early industrial years of the twentieth century. These were the times before child labor laws, minimum wage, and worker’s compensation. Men along with women and children worked seventy to eighty hours per week in dangerous work environments that entrapped and exploited destitute Americans, in particular, immigrants.
There was no damned romance in our poverty […] I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows … And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! (147–48)
Arthur Miller’s father, Isidore, also plainly understood indigence and great hardship. To help support his impoverished family, Isidore started work at the young age of twelve in a sewing machine company, working seven days a week from sunrise to sunset. In Miller’s later years, the image of his father bent over a sewing machine in the gloom of the sweatshop continuously haunted him, “stirring a retrospective anger at the treatment of those, like his own family, forced to spend years struggling to escape a kind of servitude” (Bigsby, 12–13).
Each playwright’s father managed to rise from poverty to success and wealth in his career: Isidore as an owner of a prosperous women’s clothing manufacturing business and James as a popular and well-paid actor. The years of destitution they and their families endured, though, were never forgotten, even when they were financially secure, and resulted in a severe drive and desire for money, as well as a constant fear of being without. Isidore, like many ill-fated U.S. citizens in the 1920s, overinvested in the stock market, in constant pursuit of the American Dream, and lost his fortune during the Great Depression, which forever destabilized and damaged the Miller family. Isidore was driven, it seemed to his son Arthur, by “a desire to make his mark, to claim his place in a world that once he could have felt he had no right to access” (Bigsby, 28). In other words, wealth, for Isidore, became an unstated requirement for U.S. citizenship: proof that you had the right to belong.
My father was really a remarkable actor, but the enormous success of Monte Cristo kept him from doing other things. He could go out year after year and clear fifty thousand in a season. He thought that he simply couldn’t afford to do anything else. But in his later years, he was full of bitter regrets. He felt Monte Cristo had ruined his career as an artist. (Workers, 110)
It was at home I first learned the value of a dollar and the fear of the poorhouse. I’ve never been able to believe in my luck since. I’ve always feared it would change and everything I had would be taken away […] It was in those days I learned to be a miser … And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it. (148)
In a recent speech to the Eugene O’Neill International Society, Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland and an admirer of the playwright, spoke of the great expectations placed on immigrant fathers and how these expectations impacted family dynamics, in particular, the father–son relationships: “In the Irish migratory experience, it has a particular meaning in terms of a response to dispossession. The devalued father of the dispossessed is the father who has not been able to redress a great wrong or achieve excellence in the new conditions, the new destinations, to which the family of the dispossessed has fled or migrated” (Higgins 2017).
Enormous tensions were placed on such new immigrants struggling with how to continuously survive the hazardous economic and social climate and belong in their adopted country. To best succeed, many immigrants chose strategies either of cultural isolation or assimilation. Miller’s father, for instance, opted for the path of cultural isolation. In an act of protective insularity, the majority of immigrant Jews who settled in New York, Isidore included, lived and worked in the Lower East Side to form their own ethnic community. James O’Neill took more of the approach of assimilation. In addition to abandoning his artistic ambitions and embracing the American Dream, he rid himself of all vestiges of brogue as he performed throughout the nation to succeed in his career and, in extension, in the United States. The ways Isidore and James dealt with their fears of poverty, belonging, and succeeding did not just greatly impact their careers but also their spouses.
Both Ella O’Neill and Augusta Miller—again, first-generation Americans—were brought up in a different world with greater wealth, and thus they understood less about the transient and transitionary struggles of their husbands. Ella grew up in a comfortable home in Cleveland, Ohio, where her entrepreneurial father—who had prevailed over the Irish famine, the fearful journey to the new world, and discrimination toward Irish immigrants—prospered as a local businessman and real estate investor. He was able to provide Ella with a strong education at Catholic schools, where she also studied piano and voice. This put her on the path, she believed, toward a life of devotion and music. Her life, though, went in a different direction when her father died, and shortly after, she married James.
It never should have gotten a hold on her! I know damned well she’s not to blame! And I know who is! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you’d spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was born, she’d never have known morphine existed! Instead you put her in the hands of a hotel quack who wouldn’t admit his ignorance and took the easiest way out, not giving a damn what happened to her afterwards! All because his fee was cheap! Another one of your bargains! (140)
Augusta Miller also had a more prosperous childhood than her immigrant parents. She grew up in New York, where her father overcame the initial hardships of settling into the new world to succeed as a clothing manufacturer. Like Ella O’Neill, she grew up with culture and education. Her marriage to Isidore was more of convenience than love, an arranged union by the couple’s fathers to help consolidate the clothing manufacturing businesses. In Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall, the character called Mother laments, “I’ll never forget it, valedictorian of the class with a scholarship to Hunter [College] in my hand…. A blackness flows into her soul. And I came home, and Grandpa says, “You’re getting married!” (Miller 1981, 489).
Augusta’s sense of dismay was certainly real enough, the feeling on her part that she had surrendered her own future to a man whose charm and business acumen left her entertained and apparently secure but in some fundamental sense frustrated and eventually contemptuous of his incapacities. (19)
That sense of security, though, quickly dissipated in October 1929 when she learned that her husband had borrowed great sums of money to invest in the stock market and find his fortune. The family lost most of what they owned after the Great Crash, including their eleven-room Harlem apartment that overlooked Central Park. The Millers were forced to move to Brooklyn where they lived in a small utilitarian apartment with Arthur’s grandfather and a lodger. Like Ella, Augusta never forgave her husband. The remainder of their marriage was filled with bitterness and regret.
Both playwrights had uneasy relationships with their fathers as well, and part of this unease was directly attributed to the choices their fathers made as they struggled with poverty, immigration, and resettlement into an industrial society ripe with economic and racial discriminations.3 These tensions can be traced not just in the family dynamics of O’Neill and Miller but also in their dramatic work. As previously mentioned, O’Neill directly addressed that experience in his late masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it impacted many of his previous plays as well. As noted by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, much of O’Neill’s work was on narratives of the outsider. President Higgins also observed in “play after play […]the voices of the excluded are heard.”4 Edward Shaughnessy’s critical study on O’Neill emphasized, as well, the significance of O’Neill’s family history with immigration and poverty: “To think that this history did not touch O’Neill would be naïve. The playwright’s roots are to be found in the poverty, sorrow, and wrenching extirpations caused by the Great Famine of the late 1840s.” James O’Neill, Shaughnessy asserted, was a “product” of that history (3).
Both O’Neill and Miller used their artistic work to better understand their fathers, their fathers’ choices, and the immigrant and industrial worlds that helped to shape them. The first half of The Hairy Ape and the entirety of Two Mondays are set in an industrial locale depleted of spirituality and significance to make way for capital and commerce. The settings of these plays are similar, as well, to the confining and unsanitary settings of the sweatshops where the playwrights’ fathers worked in their youth. In The Hairy Ape, it is in the fireman’s forecastle of an ocean liner that recently departed from New York. The forecastle is described as a “crowded” and “cramped space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel,” with all of the grime associated with shoveling coal (1). In Two Mondays, it is in the shipping room of a large auto parts distribution warehouse in an industrial section of Manhattan. The business is described as “dirty,” “unmanageably chaotic,” and claustrophobic. Instead of windows that look out to the world, for instance, the glass is “encrusted with the hard dirt of years” (3).
Both of these dark and dingy worlds—like the sweatshops where the playwrights’ fathers once worked—are inhabited by a menagerie of marginalized workers who are a mix of immigrants and multi-generational Americans—similar to the playwrights’ families. In the stage directions of The Hairy Ape, for instance, O’Neill describes the workers in the forecastle as being comprised of “all the civilized white races” (2). The specific accents (Irish brogue) and word uses (“Gesundheit”) of the firemen, as well as their derogatory terms for each other (“Dutchman,” “Froggy,” and “Wop”) identify them as a mix of immigrant Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians, along with multi-generational Americans, like the leading stoker Yank, who ran away from his New York home when he was a child (2–3). The same can be seen in Two Mondays. For instance, the packing boss Gus, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Eastern Europe, speaks with a “gruff” Slavic accent; coworker Kenneth, a recent immigrant from Ireland, talks with a thick brogue; and the new hire Bert is a second or third generation U.S. citizen, as are several other workers in the warehouse.
The Brooklyn based, machine-idolatrizing protagonists in each play are both presented as ruthlessly uncivilized and comparable to apes. In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Yank, who zealously compares himself to steel, is likened to a “hairy ape” (41). In Miller’s Two Mondays, Gus, who literally embraces auto parts more than his deathly ill wife, is compared to “King Kong” (1981, 7). Despite the primitive references, these two characters who acquiesce to their occupations are both severely removed from nature and their natural selves by the repetitive toil of industrial labor. This leads Yank and Gus to existential crises and to catastrophic acts of suicide, which in the end leave their bodies physically entrapped in the metallic industry to which they devoted and sacrificed their lives—Yank in a steel cage and Gus in an automobile. In both plays, the protagonist is a clear symbol of the laborer’s inner and external disharmony within an industrial society that creates demeaning, debilitating, servile jobs for people such as Yank and Gus. It also serves as a stark warning to those, like the playwrights’ fathers, who devotedly serve and crave to belong to the ruinous system of American capitalism.
To better illuminate this separation between self and nature, in each play, in addition to an “ape,” there is an Irishman who functions as a foil to the protagonist: Paddy in Hairy Ape and Kenneth in Two Mondays. These Irish characters resist the protagonists’ narratives that initially accept an industrial existence and instead counter with poetic nostalgia for a more human existence, one more in harmony with nature prior to the onslaught of industrialization.
For O’Neill, the Irish, especially those more connected to their homeland, represented a prideful and rebellious spirit : “There is,” he said, “among Irish still close to, or born in Ireland, a strange mixture of fight and hate and forgive, a clannish pride before the world, that is particularly our own” (Dowling 2016, 476). In The Hairy Ape, the other firemen are described as “bewildered, furious” and having a “baffled defiance.” Paddy, though, who is “wizened” and has eyes that contain sadness and “patient pathos,” is not baffled. Despite his similar “monkey-like” appearance from years of industrial labor, Paddy clearly understands what dehumanizes and cages him, and has pity for those who live among him confused and confined (1, 4).
The overworked characters—in particular, the immigrants—are presented as debased species in such an industrial context. They are, as O’Neill put it, like “beasts in a cage” (1922, 1). Gina Rossetti observed in her scholarship how the workers in The Hairy Ape are pejoratively marked immigrants who are encoded with an “evolutionary retrogression.” As she put it, there is a “clear link between the immigrant characters and their primitivism” (91). To be clear, O’Neill, a son of an immigrant and sweatshop laborer, is not presenting a racist or xenophobic lens of immigrants but attempting to show how the industrial and capitalist system entraps, exploits, and diminishes the humanity of immigrant workers. The Hairy Ape—as well as Two Mondays—explicitly shows the menace and toll of industrial labor. The setting and characters symbolically portray the monotony of cyclical work, a violent detesting attitude toward industrial labor, and the deadly physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual toll of the work itself on a person, such as the playwrights’ fathers.
In The Hairy Ape, Paddy’s fellow stokers unknowingly yearn for a different lot, and it is this desire that most likely makes them reach out to the Irishman and request a chanty, a song from his youthful days as a sailor aboard a clipper ship, when workers were more meaningfully connected to nature and more natural labor. Yank, though, refuses to listen to such songs and sees them as dead lyrics from a dead world. Paddy, who partly functions as the historicizing character archetype, provides the crucial link between the old and new world—a reminder of what has been lost and, perhaps, what still can be recovered. Yank, though, foolishly wishes to belong only to his present workplace. Paddy warns Yank of such belonging: “We belong to this, you’re saying? […] Almighty God have pity on us!” Paddy may serve the transatlantic liner in body but definitely not in spirit. He resists Yank’s ruthless diatribes and attempts to silence him by rebelliously crying out “in a voice full of old sorrow” memories of the “fine beautiful ships” and “fine strong men in them” who were “free men.” Unlike Yank, Paddy refuses to belong to his workplace, and, with great passion and defiance, reminds the other firemen of another way of being: “You worked under the sky … ‘Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ‘Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one” (9–11).
Paddy attempts to rally the workers—bent from the cramped spaces, blackened by the coal, and cowered by the monotonous Tayloristic work—with stories of the “brave” “bold” men of his youth who were “free” with “clean skins,” “clear eyes,” and “straight backs” from their “work wid skill and daring to it.” He then scornfully turns on Yank: “Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank […] feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along wid the coal, I’m thinking—caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!” (9–11).
Yank, who listens with a “contemptuous sneer,” loses patience with Paddy. He calls him a “crazy Mick” and then “springs to his feet and advances on Paddy threateningly.” Yank manages to physically restrain himself, but then verbally barrages his opponent. Like the numerous xenophobic Yankees that condemned the arrival of Irish immigrants and attempted to define who and what was American, this Yank derides the “Old Harp” and his old world. The leading stoker repeatedly “barks out” his violent mantra, “Yuh don’t belong!” (11–12). With this, Yank dramatizes the ethnic pecking order and clearly portrays Paddy—in addition to his unwelcomed ideas—as an unwelcomed outsider.
Paddy almost cowers before the Yankee and retreats into an indifferent alcoholic stupor, but then the Irishman “throws his head back with a mocking burst of laughter” (14). Paddy, who never physically could overpower the “broader, fiercer, more truculent” fireman, instead dissents with mocking laughter and verbal assault. With “jovial defiance,” he cries out: “I’m no slave the like of you. I’ll be sittin’ here at me ease, and drinking, and thinking, and dreaming dreams” (14–15).5 And with that, Paddy does not return to work but rebelliously returns to his thoughts of better days, quietly humming to himself.6
In A Memory of Two Mondays, the rebellious Irishman is Kenneth. Oddly, there is no apparent Jewish or Polish person in Two Mondays. Miller, in his early plays, had the tendency to remove the Jewishness of his characters, largely in response to the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. In Two Mondays, the Irish become the stand-in for the oppressed ethnic outsider, who is described by other members of the warehouse as sub-human.7 This is seen most clearly in several coworkers who repeatedly mock Kenneth’s ethnicity, as did the coworkers of Paddy, calling him a long-faced “donkey’’ and ridiculing his accent.
Kenneth’s characteristics and situation are similar to Paddy’s. Like Paddy, Kenneth is Irish and will become a worn-out cog in the industrial machine, ethnically marked and assaulted, continuously berated by a leading and acquiescent coworker. Kenneth also is defiant in nature and sympathetic toward his fellow workers. He frequently confronts Gus about his ruthless treatment of coworkers and mocks Gus about his thinking, similar to the way Paddy chides Yank about his thinking in The Hairy Ape. Moreover, Kenneth, in the same way as Paddy, attempts to escape the harshness of the industrial workplace by fixing his mind on nature and resisting those who oppose him.
At the beginning of the play, Kenneth, who likes to sing and recite poetry, has just arrived in the United States and has brought with him the hope of a better life. Kenneth, though, is the most hard-pressed of the workers. He suffers at home as well as at work; his shoes are full of holes, and he lives in a run-down boarding house with a landlady who neglects to provide proper heating or food. Despite his poverty, Kenneth has confidence and is the one figure capable of standing up to the belligerent Gus and to the intolerable labor conditions that the older worker does not challenge. Kenneth, for example, confronts Gus about “the dust constantly fallin’ through the air” of the workplace, and solicits Bert to help him clean up the workplace (11). Kenneth refuses to let the harshness of the industrial environment get to him by frequently remembering nature and imagining how “spectacular it must be out in the country […with its] green countryside” (Miller 2010, 13). Remembering nature, as in The Hairy Ape, is an important act of resistance in the industrial world.
Two Mondays, though, traces Kenneth’s deterioration. He initially seeks to change the decrepit conditions of the warehouse, but ultimately the warehouse changes him, robbing him of his spirit and his poetry. Towards the end of the play, he is a despairing alcoholic, forgetful of his poetry and acquiescent to his monotonous life in the warehouse. Like many immigrants who expected prosperity in their new country, Kenneth has tailored the American Dream of success to fit his reality. He compromises his ambitions and starts to accept an impoverished lot in life. Like Paddy, who almost succumbs to drink, the incessant racial slurs of coworkers, and hard industrial labor, Kenneth almost capitulates but then resists.
Later in the play, for instance, Kenneth stands up to a coworker who racially insults him. Instead of joking it off, as he has done previously, Kenneth grabs him roughly with a clenched fist, refusing to be demeaned. Most importantly, Kenneth tells Bert that, while at a tavern, he became disgusted with his constant inebriation and decrepit life, and knocked over a bar, breaking all the glasses and piping, which caused the beer to pour out all over the floor. For this outburst, Kenneth lost six weeks of pay, but he gained the knowledge that he was near his end and to survive he had to break free of his wretched manner of existence. As a result, Kenneth tells Bert he is bound for the Civil Service, working as a guard in a mental institution, where he can straighten himself out and, most importantly, get away from the ruinous atmosphere of the warehouse. He refuses to accept his situation and remain stagnant. The play ends with Kenneth returning to song, as did Paddy. He triumphantly remembers his poetry and sings the lyrics to “Minstrel Boy,” about a “warrior bard” who is off to battle, armed with his “father’s sword” and “wild harp” (xlii–xliii). The minstrel boy, most likely Kenneth, is now ready to fight against the economic and racial discriminations that attempt to break him.
There are, indeed, many notable commonalities between the playwrights’ fathers and immigrant histories, and how these similarities and ways of attempting to understand their fathers manifest in these two plays. Of course, clear distinctions also exist in the dramas of Miller and O’Neill. Both playwrights saw—particularly in industrial and capitalistic contexts—the economic and sociopolitical forces that rupture humanity, as well as the life-lies we tell ourselves—such as the American Dream—in order to avoid the truth about ourselves and society. In Miller’s work, however, there is more optimism that we can break destructive cycles, discover new paths forward, and cultivate our humanity. In Two Mondays, for instance, Gus does die, but the new hire Bert manages to escape the destitution of the warehouse for the promise of a better life in college. He later gains a better understanding of and sympathy toward the shared plight of his coworkers. Kenneth no longer accepts a life of drinking or demeaning work and is bound for Civil Service employment where he will “get back to regular” (58). Hope is present in the play, perhaps, due to the promise of Miller’s father, who, though never again wealthy and always miserly, managed to recover some of his money after the Great Crash in a new hat-manufacturing business.
In O’Neill’s work, though, the modern human is inescapably alone, forever searching but never able to fully belong in the material world, like the character Yank who is banished from several sectors of society and ultimately dies miserable and alone. Paddy does resist but will ultimately return to his work in the forecastle, ending his days shoveling coal with his confused and confined firemen. In The Hairy Ape, no one truly escapes or belongs, perhaps only in death (as the ending stage directions postulate). This play, like many of O’Neill’s works, philosophically succumbs to a more Nietzschean coldness. Perhaps this is due to how James O’Neill ended—a bitter man, incessantly penny-pinching and deeply regretful of the true ruinous cost of fame and fortune on his self, art, and family.
- 1.
O’Neill was on Miller’s mind at the time of Memory. In the article “Concerning the Boom” for International Theatre Annual, Miller considered the most significant dramatic event for the 1955–1956 season not his own play but the publication of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
- 2.
Miller, however, did have some connections to Irish ancestry. His second wife, Marilyn Monroe, was Irish through her maternal grandmother, Della Mae Hogan Monroe (1876–1927), who could trace her lineage back to Dublin.
- 3.
The tensions between first- and second-generation Americans also can be traced in the difficult relationships O’Neill and Miller had with their mothers. This study, though, focuses more on how the immigrant histories of the fathers impacted the playwrights.
- 4.
O’Neill, in fact, never visited the native land of his father, though he understood himself as being “all Irish” (Merrill). In his youth, O’Neill called himself “The Irish Luck Kid,” and later in life reaffirmed his heritage to his son: “The one thing that explains more than anything else about me is the fact that I’m Irish. And, strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked” (Gelb, 118). This has been largely corrected since then with important scholarship, such as Edward Shaughnessy’s Eugene O’Neill in Ireland, but omissions still occur. For instance, the 2006 American Experience documentary on the playwright, written by esteemed O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb, gave little attention to O’Neill’s Irish background and its impact on his work. Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins, though, understood the importance of O’Neill’s Irishness: “O’Neill’s themes are reflective of the great themes of both Irish and American theatre: migration and the use and abuse of memory. O’Neill belongs to both the literary canons of America and Ireland.” O’Neill biographer Robert Dowling also recognized the impact of Ireland on the playwright: “O’Neill’s dogged testimonials about his Irish heritage—in his diaries and letters, public proclamations and idle chatter—together lay bare the weight his Irishness had on his dramas, and thus on American theatre” (Dowling “The Fact”). Indeed, this can be seen readily in what has been considered his more Irish plays, like A Touch of the Poet (1942), but it is also apparent in The Hairy Ape.
- 5.
Later in the play, Paddy gets his revenge on Yank by being one of the main catalysts of the events that lead to Yank’s death. Paddy turns him into a laughingstock in front of his coworkers when he taunts Yank with how Mildred, the daughter of a steel tycoon, was repulsed by Yank’s appearance when she came down to visit the forecastle. She looked at Yank, as Paddy put it, like a “hairy ape.” Despite Paddy’s warning that it is foolish to give any attention to “the skinny sow,” Paddy does say he wished Yank “brained” her and ultimately provokes Yank into seeking revenge, thus sending him spiraling toward his eventual demise (41–42, 45).
- 6.
Several O’Neill scholars have noted how the playwright surrendered to stereotype when he created the character of Paddy. Edward Shaughnessy, for instance, wrote: “In his early depictions of Irish-Americans, [he] worked too often from a paint-by-the-numbers kit. As he gained confidence, however, he created more convincing characters; eventually, his men and women became fully three-dimensional.” It is true that O’Neill’s Irish creation in The Hairy Ape—seen also in his early plays The Moon of the Caribbees and Bound East for Cardiff—is a hard-drinking Irish-type sailor who speaks with a pronounced brogue and has little regard for his work. Some critics found O’Neill’s depiction of the Irishman a demonstration of his disdain for the Irish, but in truth, O’Neill simply refused to sentimentalize the Irish and instead chose to present them more accurately with all the darkness and light he saw in them as well as in himself. “O’Neill,” further explained Shaughnessy, “knew first-hand the dark and brooding melancholy and the Irishman’s debilitating habit of self-medication via alcohol and he responded to the mysteries of fatalism and mysticism that stalk the Irish soul.” William V. Shannon agreed: “Those who thought him anti-Irish did not comprehend that for an artist telling the truth is the highest act of love” (see Shaughnessy, 154). In A Memory of Two Mondays, Kenneth is a much more fully developed character but does harbor several ethnic stereotypes, such as succumbing to drink.
- 7.
Arthur Miller showed a keen interest in Ireland and its theater. In his autobiography Timebends, he discussed at length how much the artistic power, politics, and beauty of the 1930s Group Theatre inspired his dramaturgy. Only one other company, Miller recalled, was comparable: “When I recall [the Group Theatre], time is stopped. They seem never to have been tempted to make an insignificant gesture. The closest to these productions that I ever saw was [at] the Abbey Theatre” (230). Miller, in fact, had a consistent appreciation for Irish theater and its practitioners. After visiting the Galway-based Druid Theatre in 1997, he solicited its director Garry Hynes to direct the off-Broadway debut of his play Mr. Peters’ Connections. In 2000, the playwright claimed that “the best work being done for the stage today is being produced by the young Irish playwrights.” Matthew Martin has observed how much “the Irish dramatic tradition influenc[ed] [Miller’s] dramatic practice.” The influence of both O’Neill and the Irish dramatic tradition are seen clearly in A Memory of Two Mondays.