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

denies the great Civil War its hallowedness; the Mannon men return from it either scorned or deranged. This is but a selection of O’Neill’s insults to conventional American ideals. The playwright’s rage, however, has been reduced to “gloominess.” He is not the playwright of the raised fist; he is the artist alone, head down in despair. And it is unfortunate that O’Neill has set the mold for the study of other American playwrights through psychological and biographical commentary.

The study of American drama is the worse for this. The critic who was initially O’Neill’s greatest champion, George Jean Nathan (1882–1958), anticipated and precipitated much of the interpretation that continues to underpin the study of American drama. Nathan made O’Neill’s life the object of critical analysis by circulating anecdotes and tall tales about O’Neill’s “colorful” past. Politically, Nathan was an unregenerate reactionary; nonetheless, he was a theatrical radical in the 1920s. Almost from the start, Nathan used O’Neill’s “life and hard times” as the basis for establishing O’Neill as America’s premier playwright and amplified O’Neill’s purported struggles for his own purposes.²⁹ Nathan had no interest in politics, so he told a particular version of O’Neill’s “story” to readers across America. He wanted to paint O’Neill as a dramatist in stark contrast to academic or genteel darlings the likes of Augustus Thomas and Ned Sheldon, so he retailed canards such as O’Neill’s hurling a beer bottle through Woodrow Wilson’s window and getting expelled from Princeton. In doing so, he excised O’Neill’s politics from his plays. Thus, once O’Neill is exposed to a national audience, through Nathan and his epigones, radical politics is a thing of the past because he is presented as a Greenwich Village “bohemian” who happened to have “tramped” around the world after a childhood spent backstage with his famous father. Even O’Neill’s cycle was rumored