Strange Interlude Essay Questions

What is the logical fallacy of Mrs. Evans's argument regarding insanity in the Evans family?

Mrs. Evans confides in Nina that there is a curse in the family, but there's something not quite right about her explanation. Tamsen Wolff says that "what Mrs. Evans presents and Nina accepts as an open-and-shut case of an inescapable hereditary condition is riddled with contradictions. For all her insistence on the terrifying inevitability of insanity, Mrs. Evans argues paradoxically that telling Sam about the problem, or allowing him to witness it, will condemn him to madness. According to Mrs. Evans's recollection, her husband's fear for Sam triggered his madness. In Mrs. Evans's account, hereditary insanity seems not unconnected to will and agency: Mr. Evans 'gave up and went off into it'...; Mrs. Evans's love, or Nina's departure, could alter biological destiny."

Why does Nina think she needs a child to be happy?

Nina feels sexually stunted because she did not sleep with Gordon when she had the chance. She atones for that by sleeping with several men with whom she has no romantic interest. All of those sexual encounters are not meant to produce children; we can assume as a modern woman she was using birth control. Therefore, the deep maternal drive within her is frustrated, held at bay, and contributes to her despair. Only by having a child can she be God-as-mother and fulfill her biological destiny. She needs to subvert the death drive of non-reproductive sex and turn it into something that does indeed produce life and give her a reason for living.

Are any of the characters sympathetic? Why or why not?

This is certainly subjective, and it is possible that some readers/viewers find one or more of the characters sympathetic in a real way. But overall, it's more nuanced than that. Because we have access to their internal thoughts, we realize just how selfish, petty, cruel, dumb, and ignorant they are. It's hard to like or root for any of them. O'Neill is smarter than that, though. What makes his characters somewhat redeemable is that they remind us that we are all this complicated and, perhaps, unsympathetic. We all think things that are terrible but our thoughts aren't broadcast to the whole world. This realization allows for a bit more grace to be given to the characters, and we may, at the end of the play, circle back around to considering them sympathetic because they are human beings just doing their best.

Why does Nina hate Madeline so much?

There are a few reasons. The first is that Madeline is young and beautiful in a way that Nina no longer is; she reminds her of what the decades have stripped away from her. The second is that she is taking Gordon from her—Gordon her actual son and Gordon Shaw, as Gordon Evans is a near-reincarnation of her great love.

Are the characters religious?

There is some old-school Puritan morality that hovers at the edges of this American drama, but it is largely taking place at a time in which more and more people are moving away from religion. Mrs. Evans says she could not have an affair because she was Christian, but Nina says frankly that while at some points in her life she wished she could find faith in something bigger than her, she is ultimately an atheist and has no such qualms. The other characters put their faith in science (Darrell) or the ancients (Leeds) or the human body and spirit (the Gordons) or Mammon (Sam). Joseph Wood Krutch writes, "Strange Interlude is the demitragedy of a group which neither believes in God, like Old Ephraim in Desire Under the Elms, nor even, like Dion Anthony, wants to believe in God. In so far as the individual members believe in anything larger than themselves, that thing is the Freudian subconscious, some awareness of which seems to haunt them, very much as others have been vaguely haunted by an awareness of God. In so far as they ‘belong’ to anything, they belong the ‘complexes’ which force them into actions of which their reason would not approve."