Eugene O'Neill Symposium - Beth Wynstra · The Assembled Playwright: Harley Hammerman's Eugene O'Neill Collection

Eugene O'Neill Symposium - Beth Wynstra

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Eugene O’Neill Symposium - Beth Wynstra. 2023, The Assembled Playwright: Harley Hammerman's Eugene O'Neill Collection, accessed February 11, 2026, https://digitalexhibits.library.wustl.edu/s/assembled-playwright/item/57257

Title: Eugene O'Neill Symposium - Beth Wynstra
Description: Symposium Plenary Lecture, Beth Wynstra (Babson College), author of VOWS VEILS AND MASKS: THE PERFORMANCE OF MARRIAGE IN THE PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL (University of Iowa Press 2023) 

"Between the Covers: Roles, Performance, and Eugene O’Neill in Early 20th Century Women’s Magazines"

Illusion making. Conditioned spousal behavior. Double standards. Strategic infidelity. Such are fundamental elements in Eugene O’Neill’s plays focused on marriage. Yet these elements have significance off the stage as well. In prominent and high-circulating publications geared to women such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Vogue, and Ladies Home Journal, 20th century wives and hopeful brides were encouraged, through articles, advice columns, and advertisements, to be dynamic performers who mask honest feelings and abide by set roles. The very women who brought O’Neill’s characters to life felt the pressures of these culturally constructed expectations around marriage. Actors like Alla Nazimova, Louise Closser Hale, and Claudette Colbert navigated in worlds that judged them harshly for deviating from matrimonial rules they did not create. While past scholars have seen and labeled the wife characters in O’Neill’s plays as “shrewish,” “vindictive,” and even as “cannibals,” an analysis of these characters that takes into account crucial cultural context reveals something else altogether. In this presentation, I offer new possibilities for studying marriages and wife characters in literary and dramatic texts. These new possibilities include a recognition, and, hopefully, a rectifying of past patriarchal approaches that can reduce a complex individual to a simple role.
Date: 2023, Nov 16
Subject: O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953 The plays of Eugene O'Neill ..
Place: Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri
Format: Motion Picture
Language: English