Self-Dispossessing Possessors. Businessmen and Salesmen in Eugene O’Neill’s Fictional America

• Main Author: Annalisa Brugnoli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2010-07-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: American drama; salesman; salesmanship; businessman; business; Faust
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1358

Taking my cue from Edmund’s remark in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night that “[s]tammering is the native eloquence of us fog people”, in the pages that follow I will be questioning Wittgenstein’s seventh proposition. “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence” by concerning myself with O’Neill’s insightful, if dim, intuition as to the connection that that exists between what Scott Sandage calls America’s “ideology of achieved identity”, whose outcome is either tangible success or existential failure, and the self-dispossession that comes as a consequence of self-deception. I will do this by outlining the development of two key figures that haunt both O’Neill’s work and his country’s identity quest, namely, the businessman—who restlessly tries to buy his soul—and the salesman—who is equally eager to sell his—from their initial rendering in early one-act melodramas, through the failure of O’Neill’s ambitious cycle of plays “Tales of Possessors Self-Dispossessed”, all the way to The Iceman Cometh, in which the playwright could finally master what Matthew Roudané calls the “talismanic power of the theatre to trigger public awareness and private insight.”