The Iceman Cometh (Criticism)

Criticism

Clare Cross

Cross is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern drama. In this essay she discusses Hickey’ wife and Parritt’ mother in terms of sexual stereotypes.

In Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, the two most significant female characters never appear onstage. These women, Parritt’s mother, Rosa, and Hickey’s wife, Evelyn, although physically absent throughout the play, are nonetheless powerfully present in the lives of the men who know them. Indeed, Rosa and Evelyn are absolutely essential to the action of the play. Yet O’Neill chose to give these women no voices of their own; the audience sees them exclusively through the eyes of the men who hated and ultimately destroyed them. The result is an incomplete picture of who Rosa and Evelyn really are. An examination of these women and their places in the play must therefore take into consideration the distortion of the lens through which the audience views them.

Edwin A. Engel wrote in his book The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill: “Hickey’s wife and Parritt’ other represent antithetical aspects of love — the former an excess of love and forgiveness, the latter a deficiency. Both generate hate in the men who are closely associated with them.” By framing the love of Evelyn and Rosa in terms of “excess” and “deficiency,” Engel essentially faults them for not adhering to some sort of ideal degree of love. His comment that the women “generate hate” suggests that they are to blame for the hatred the men feel, and by extension, are at least partly responsible for their own downfall. The women are essentially destroyed, however, because they are not what the men want or expect them to be. While this can certainly be framed in terms of how much love Evelyn and Rosa are supposed to have for Hickey and Parritt, perhaps a clearer and more telling way to consider this issue is in terms of sexual stereotypes.

In the time in which O’Neill was writing, the ideal, traditional woman was absolutely selfless and, although willing to accommodate her husband’s sexual needs, was without any sexual desire of her own. If married, she put her husband’s needs before her own. If a mother, she sacrificed everything for her children. Published in The Conscious Reader, Virginia Woolf described such an ideal in her 1942 essay, “The Angel in the House,” named for the heroine of a Victorian poem:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace.

The life of Rosa Parritt is antithetical to that of this “ideal” woman, the angel in the house. Rosa is therefore seen as a selfish and unloving mother, and her son hates her. Evelyn, on the other hand, is an angel in the house in every way. Still, because of her selflessness and love, Hickey grows to hate her as much as Parritt hates his mother. In The Iceman Cometh, these women are, as the saying goes, damned if they do/damned if they don’t. Whether or not they fix themselves to the model of the angel in the house, Rosa Parritt and Evelyn Hickman are condemned, hated, and ultimately destroyed by the primary men in their lives.

Rosa is a political activist, a sexual being, and a parent. In all three roles she rejects traditional femininity and is, in turn, rejected by her son, who finds her mothering skills lacking. The first time the audience hears of Rosa it is in regard to her political actions. Larry reports that she has been arrested for her participation in an anarchist bombing that resulted in several deaths. The action of the play occurs in 1912, eight years before women even had the right to vote. In a time when women have no political voice at all and are expected to accept the system run by men, Rosa is dedicated not simply to a change in government but to the abolition of government itself; where women are supposed to be passive, the “gentle sex,” Rosa takes violent action; when women are supposed to live for their families, Rosa is dedicated to the Movement.

Even in radical political movements, women have often been expected to stand on the sidelines, supporting the men. The American women’s movement of the 1970s, in fact, partly grew out of women’s frustration with the way they were treated within the radical student movements of the late-1960s and early-1970s. Female students felt that they were expected to subordinate themselves to men. But Rosa takes a back seat to no one. In essence, Rosa acts like a man, and her dedication to her lifestyle, which would probably be acceptable, even admirable, in a man, is part of the reason for Parritt’s hatred.

Speaking to Larry of his mother, Parritt says, “To hear her go on sometimes, you’d think she was the Movement.” Larry immediately recognizes the hostility of this comment. He is “puzzled and repelled” and tells Parritt, “That’s a hell of a way for you to talk, after what happened to her!” Parritt quickly backtracks: “Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t sneering Larry, only kidding.” It is clear, however, that even if said in jest, Parritt’s comment is still hostile. Elsewhere Parritt shows that his hostility regarding his mother’s political involvement stems from his own feeling that, largely because of Rosa’s dedication to the Movement, she was not the good mother for which he longed. He tells Larry, “You were the only friend of Mother’s who ever paid attention to me. . . . All the others were too busy with the Movement. Even Mother.”

Parritt recognizes that, for Rosa, the Movement took precedence over all personal relationships and is therefore puzzled that Rosa continued to write Larry after he left the Movement. Parritt says that, in regard to the Movement, his mother is “Like a revivalist preacher about religion. Anyone who loses faith in it is more than dead to her; he’s a Judas who ought to be boiled in oil.” Parritt knows that the bond between mother and child is not as sacred to Rosa as her political beliefs. Just before he commits suicide at the end of the play, Parritt anticipates Rosa’s reaction to his death. “It’ll give her the chance to play the great incorruptible Mother of the Revolution, whose only child is the Proletariat. She’ll be able to say: ‘Justice is done! So may all traitors die!. . . I am glad he’s dead! Long live the Revolution!’” While very few would admire this level of fanaticism in men or women, such sentiment is especially intolerable in a mother, who, by stereotypical definition, is supposed to be selfless and forgiving, to always put her children’s needs before her own.

The angel in the house does not allow herself sexual freedom — or even sexual feeling. Rosa Parritt, however, does. “You’ve always acted the free woman,” Parritt tells her when she complains about his keeping company with prostitutes. The word “free” in this context means sexually free. Rosa does not play the part of the ideal wife, who has sex to please her husband, or the prostitute, who at first glance may seem more free. In fact, the prostitute is not free at all. She too has sex to please men; the sex act is not gratifying to her. When Hickey talks about joking with prostitutes, making them laugh, Cora responds, “Jees, all de lousy jokes I’ve had to listen to and pretend was funny!” Rosa’s sexual relationships are for her own pleasure. She even uses men in the way men have traditionally used women.

Parritt tells Larry that Rosa still respected Larry because he left her before she left him. “She got sick of the others before they did of her. I don’t think she ever cared about them anyway. She just had to keep on having lovers to prove to herself how free she was.” The possibility that Rosa had sexual relations for her own pleasure is unthinkable to Parritt. Rosa’s sexual freedom is offensive to her son. “Living at home,” he says, “was like living in a whorehouse — only worse, because she didn’t have to make her living.” As Parritt recalls, even the tolerant Larry objected to Rosa’s sexual freedom. “I remember her putting on her high-and-mighty free-woman stuff, saying you were still a slave to bourgeois morality and jealousy and you thought a woman you loved was a piece of private property you owned. I remember that you got mad and told her, ‘I don’t like living with a whore, if that’s what you mean!’” Rosa’s sexual freedom would be more acceptable in a man, but because she is a woman who has sex without being a wife or a prostitute she is condemnable. To Parritt and, if Parritt’s story is accurate, to Larry, Rosa is even worse than a whore, fit neither to be a good wife nor a good mother, unwilling to sacrifice her own feelings to the desires of men.

If Rosa Parritt’s life is a repudiation of the “traditional woman” concept, Evelyn Hickman is the angel in the house. She is so selfless, loving, and forgiving that she seems to be more of a fantasy ideal than a real woman. When Hickey drinks or goes to prostitutes, Evelyn forgives him. When he gives her venereal disease, she pretends to believe he got it from sharing drinking cups on trains and again forgives her husband. When Hickey doesn’t come home from a drinking binge for more than a month, she never expresses anger when he returns. When he promises to change, she believes him. And when he inevitably returns to his old ways, Evelyn, as always, forgives him.

In his book The Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Rolf Scheibler called Evelyn “an unattainable ideal,” but she is an ideal only when seen in terms of her adherence to the role of the angel in the house. A man who behaved the same way would be considered a “sucker,” a “pushover,” a “sap.” Scheibler also stated that Evelyn “finds that happiness can be achieved by giving and forgiving.” In reality, however, the audience never knows whether or not Evelyn is happy, whether or not she believes her husband’s empty promises, and whether or not she ever truly forgives his trespasses. She is, after all, seen only through Hickey’s eyes, and it is convenient for him to believe in her happiness. For the angel in the house, however, the question of personal happiness does not even arise; she is required to always place others’ needs and feelings above her own. Acceptance of such a duty, however, should not be construed as happiness.

Evelyn completely embraces the role of the angel in the house, yet Hickey is no more satisfied with her than Parritt is with Rosa. Hickey cannot tolerate the guilt he feels at Evelyn’s love and forgiveness. “That’s what made me feel such a rotten skunk,” Hickey tells the roomers, “her always forgiving me.” According to Hickey, it is not his own actions that make him feel guilty; Evelyn’s forgiveness is to blame. “Sometimes,” he says, “I couldn’t forgive her for forgiving me. I even caught myself hating her for making me hate myself so much.” In contrast to Parritt, Hickey wants Evelyn to act less like a traditional woman and more like a man. He believes it would be better if she committed adultery as he had.

Hickey’s belief is reinforced by Jimmy Tomorrow, whose wife did respond to his drinking by sleeping with other men. “I was glad to be free,” Jimmy says, “even grateful to her, I think, for giving me such a good tragic excuse to drink as much as I damned well pleased.” Evelyn, however, gives Hickey no such excuse. So he turns his disgust with himself into hatred for Evelyn. He finally murders her because, in comparison to himself, she is too perfect, too good.

Hickey kills Evelyn for her attainment of the feminine ideal, while Parritt betrays his mother to a fate he says is worse than death for her rejection of that ideal. Both women are ultimately destroyed because of the way they choose to live. Rosa’s scorn for the role of the traditional female displeases her son; Evelyn’s acceptance of that role — and her perfection of its ideals — confronts her husband with his own inadequacies. Both women pay with their lives.

Source: Clare Cross, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Lower Depths, a 1902 play by Maxim Gorky, is also concerned with the lives of a group of outcasts and their desire to use illusion to shield themselves from the pain of life.
• Waiting for Godot, a play by Samuel Beckett written in 1952, focuses on two tramps who wait vainly for the arrival of the mysterious figure Godot to give meaning and purpose to their lives.
• Living My Life is the 1934 autobiography of famed anarchist Emma Goldman, who may have served as a model for Parritt’s mother Rosa. Goldman’s story provides useful context for Larry and Parritt’s discussions regarding the Movement.
• The Lost Weekend is a 1944 novel by Charles Jackson. It is the story of an alcoholic who attempts to resist drinking but finds he is helpless before his addiction. The film version, which was produced in 1946, the year of the first production of The Iceman Cometh, adds an optimistic ending not warranted by Jackson’s dark novel.
• Long Day’s Journey into Night, an O’Neill play produced in 1956, is an autobiographical domestic tragedy dealing with addiction and dysfunctional relationships. The play is widely considered to offer insight into O’Neill’s personal life.