"Vital contact": Eugene O'Neill and the working class

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Patrick J. Chura

For male seekers of "vital contact," class descent ideally resulted in a restored masculine identity through the exchange of the softening conditions of privileged life for the rugged hardships of a labor environment. (6) Intertwining masculine self-renewal with themes of pastoral escape, downclassing mirrored aspects of Theodore Roosevelt's ideal of the "strenuous life" as a method of physically rebuilding overly domesticated male selfhood in the late Victorian age. William James made explicit the link between Roosevelt's masculine ideal and the downclassing of the Progressive era in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Searching for a vibrant, creative middle ground between what he termed "military" and "saintly" asceticism, James concluded that socioeconomic self-denial was the logical answer: "May not voluntarily accepted poverty be 'the strenuous life,' without the need of crushing weaker peoples?" (367). Alluding directly to Roosevelt's behavioral standard and terminology, James argued that "poverty indeed is the strenuous life" while implicitly admonishing snobbery, cautioning against material measures of social worth, and condemning the obscene acquisition of wealth that characterized turn-of-the-century finance capitalism.

Not surprisingly, female "vital contact" differed from the male model, producing for its devotees a different kind of sociological authority. When Jane Addams founded Hull House in 1889 in one of Chicago's most impoverished wards, her example inspired educated upper-class young women in Chicago and several other northern cities to relinquish material comforts to live and work among the poor. The female paradigm of the proletarian journey in the Progressive era involved ameliorative social work, not simply passing through and embodying the lower class but reforming it--actively inculcating bourgeois moral, spiritual, and aesthetic standards among working-class subjects. Through their desire to nurture and make over the lower classes in their own image, the "old maids at Hull House" embodied a surrogate maternal function that attenuated their declarations of sexual independence and bespoke only a partial liberation from the conventions of gender.

In addition to these models of class interaction, the Paterson silk workers' strike of 1913 produced an influential theatrical display of cross-class interaction during the formative period of O'Neill's dramatic career. The Paterson strike brought Bohemian intellectuals and the working class together before 20,000 spectators on the stage of Madison Square Garden to create the spectacular Paterson Strike Pageant, an unprecedented display of possibilities for cross-class unity that is now understood by art historians as "an important incident in the history of radical self-consciousness and in the history of public art" (Nochlin 64). The Paterson Pageant--which reenacted events from the Paterson strike as a way of publicizing the violent reality of the class war and raising money for the strike fund--forged an innovative coalition between striking workers and leisure-class intellectuals, exemplified a fascinating ideal of societal revitalization, and produced an expressive, revolutionary dramatic text that is still actively being interpreted. (7) As the principal force behind the pageant, Harvard graduate and Greenwich Village radical John Reed exerted enormous influence on public perceptions of the strike in particular and the class war in general. (8)