Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of ...

have somewhat scanted O’Neill’s obsession with displacement and his bleak assessment of twentieth-century America.

I would argue that the problem is even larger than the gargantuan presence of O’Neill himself, the study of O’Neill and his plays has virtually consumed the study of other American plays and playwrights. (O’Neill is the tipping point for American drama even more than Shakespeare is for British drama.) In spite of this––to use a crucial O’Neillian phrase––the playwright “does not belong.” He is a cultural anomaly who has been misunderstood, if not misrepresented, as the greatest American playwright.

Central to Eugene O’Neill’s index of indictments against his native land is the frequently cited statement about his great cycle of plays about the development of the United States, to which he gave the title: “A tale of possessors self-dispossessed.” During a press conference prior to the 1946 opening of The Iceman Cometh, he declared: “We are the greatest failure in history––no other country was given so much––and look at what we have done with ourselves. I can’t help but think of the words ‘what profit it a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?’ We’ve lost our soul.”²⁷ O’Neill refers, of course, to the drive for material possessions that had become the “American dream.” Moreover, throughout his career, O’Neill arraigned the United States for its imperialist depredations at home and abroad: occupying territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, crushing labor unrest, and harassing dissenters.

O’Neill’s political radicalism coupled with his contempt for “joining” is at the center of his un-American discourse. His earliest one-acts The Web and Recklessness rely on melodramatic conventions, but, nonetheless, assault contemporary morality by sympathizing with a barely repentant prostitute in the former, and depicting a murderous capitalist in the latter. One of his first