Summary
Act Five
The scene is a small seashore house the following April. Nina is pregnant again, this time happy and triumphant and nerveless. She thinks about how much she loves Ned and how she could tell he was happy when he was with her, but she has not heard from him for some time and they have not recently given into their desires. Her child moves within her and she is thrilled.
Evans enters, wearing shabby clothes and exemplifying a state of panic and guilt. He is worried about their relationship. Nina vacillates between cruel thoughts about him and reminders to herself that he is a good man and her husband. She has not yet told him about the baby.
Darrell enters, his face older, wearing an expression of defensive bitterness and resentment until he sees Nina and it turns into one of joy. But the two have to tamp down on their feelings, as Evans is there. Evans leaves to shave and they are left alone with each other and their feelings. Nina is in love with him and desperately wants him to say he is in love with her, but he is mostly filled with desire. She does beg him to say he loves her when they are kissing passionately and he does, but immediately realizes he did not mean it. He tries to say that, but she is triumphant and does not believe him.
Marsden enters, completely beaten down by the depths of his sorrow at the death of his mother. Both know his mother hated Nina, but they pretend she did not. Marsden senses the weirdness in the room between Nina and Darrell, that there is "something human and unnatural in the room…love and hate and passion and possession!...cruelly indifferent to my loss!...mocking my loneliness!” (140).
Finally, he tells Darrell it was cancer and the doctor he sent her to could do nothing. It is almost like he wants to blame Darrell, but he apologizes and says it is his misery talking. He steps out to go see Evans.
Nina only cares about Darrell and his love for her but he chides her for acting foolishly because this is not what their agreement said. There ought to be no feelings between them. He knows he was partly to blame because he always desired her physically but he has let it go too far. Nina querulously says her child wants its father. Darrell calls her crazy and says she is forgetting Sam and what this was all for. He says he does not admire her or her past. She doesn’t care about Sam or anything else; she only cares about him and their unborn child. Darrell begins to be dazed by her and starts to agree that they ought to be together.
But Evans comes in, ruining the moment. Nina tries to hold on and says they all need to have a big talk after lunch. She leaves. Evans confusedly asks Darrell what she meant. He is stricken by the lies and how it seems like she actually still loves Gordon. He resolves to tell Sam about the baby and then go away to Europe for two years.
He does both, and Sam is elated at the news. Darrell encourages him to buckle down and work hard for the sake of his family, and departs.
Nina comes back in and finds a jubilant Sam on his knees. He embraces her and tells her he is thrilled by the news, and relays that Darrell has gone. She is shocked and tries to remain calm while her thoughts tumble about. She almost bursts out with the truth to Sam but something stops her, and she lets Sam tell her how excited he is and how things are going to be different from now on.
When her baby moves inside her again, she thinks of it only as her own—not Sam’s, not Ned’s.
Second Part: Act Six
It is a little over a year later in the same house, which is now much homier and pleasant. Evans is stouter, satisfied, and solid in his appearance and movements. Nina looks a little older but content and calm. Marsden is with them, and has aged greatly, his expression “one of a deep grief that is dying out into a resignation resentful of itself” (149).
Nina is thinking of the baby, whom she has named Gordon, and how Ned hasn’t written but Sam is a wonderful father and has practically become a new man. Marsden is thinking about the difference in atmosphere since the prior time he visited and this, wondering if he was wrong about Darrell and Nina but deciding they must have had something and Nina sent him away. He also chides himself for not having written anything recently, for not thinking about his mother as much as he ought to, and how Sam is so different in his confidence these days.
Marsden explains that his younger sister, whose child just married, may come live with him now. Nina teases him about his bachelorhood and jokes about finding a wife. His comments back to her are subtle digs at her former promiscuity.
He adds more fuel to the flame and brings up Darrell, whom he saw in Munich, smiling that Darrell had a young woman with him. Nina’s sharp response confirms to Marsden that he had been right about them. She is also curious why Marsden is acting like he wants to hurt her; was he jealous? Had he loved her in his own strange way? She decides she must win him over again, and playfully runs her hands in his hair and speaks sweetly to him. He falls for it and embraces her. On her way out of the room, she calls him her only dependable friend and realizes it is actually true. Evans accompanies her to nurse the baby.
Alone, Marsden shudders that he was on the verge of confessing he loved her. But he refuses to have any hope at all, citing his ugliness and wretchedness and fear of life.
Evans returns and brags about his son. He also talks about his new work ethic and eye for business, alerting Marsden to a new opportunity that he may want to partner with him on. Marsden isn’t interested, and Evans leaves. Marsden tells himself that he’s not so superior and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all, so why not be Sam’s partner? This idea does not sit well.
The doorbell rings and Nina calls down to open it. He opens it to Darrell, and when he says who it is, Nina’s voice is tremulous and joyful as she says she will be down in a minute. The two men sit together. Marsden is filled with a sense of enmity, realizing the man and Nina had indeed had something. Darrell looks “pale, thin, nervous, unhealthy looking” (159). He has dreamt of this house and of coming back and being happy.
Darrell explains his father died and he has come back to manage the estate. Marsden worries that Sam will ask him for investment money and Darrell will agree because of his guilty conscience.
Nina comes downstairs, made up and glorious in her triumph that her lover has returned but also filled with fear that her newfound peace and contentment are sure to be threatened. They exchange greetings, trying to guess at the other’s thoughts. Marsden throws out subtly cruel comments like Darrell is Sam’s best friend, he is the proudest parent Marsden has ever seen, and that Marsden himself will furnish the capital when Sam opens his own firm.
Darrell learns the child’s name is Gordon and cannot believe it—is Nina still in love with her dead paramour? Thinking of the child as well, Marsden starts to think it might actually be Darrell’s and becomes filled with disgust and hatred. He leaves to find Sam, and says meaningfully that the two of them probably have a lot to talk about.
Left alone, Nina and Darrell come together and proclaim their love for each other. Darrell begs her to take the baby and come away with him. Nina cannot help but think of Sam and knows she cannot do that. She’s made him happy and she is proud of that. Darrell exclaims that it does not make sense why Sam gets everything and he gets nothing. Nina says frankly that he can still be her lover. He finds this callous and cries out that he’ll “smash your calculating game” (166) by telling Sam the truth.
When Evans returns, though, full of delight in seeing his old friend, Darrell realizes he cannot tell him. Nina feels a sense of rightness in the situation now—the three men and her baby—and invites them all to sit down. Darrell is bitterly thinking about how he has to accept her terms and Sam has won. Evans is marveling about how good a wife and mother Nina is. Marsden does not understand her comment about the child being of all three of the men, and concedes that she “has devious intuitions that tap the hidden currents of life” (168). He decides he will forgive her and no longer meddle. Nina is pleased that all three men are here and feels their desires for her converge; she is pregnant with all three of them, they have dissolved in her, she bears a husband, lover, and father. She is filled with an "extravagantly suppressed exultance” (169) as she says goodnight to the three men individually, and heads out of the room.
Analysis
Nina and Darrell’s calculated choice to dispassionately sleep together and have a child together has, perhaps predictably, not come without complications. She has the child, yes, and he is healthy, but she names him after Gordon, keeping that ghost alive. More importantly, she and Darrell are engaged in a tumultuous, tortured affair in which she loves him and he claims not to love her but is clearly obsessed with her to his own detriment. O’Neill’s inclusion of their inner thoughts heightens the drama of this ill-fated romance and provides the audience no respite from it.
Evans, of course, knows none of this. All of the other characters have decided that his happiness is paramount, and the reader/viewer gets to decide if they think that is the best choice or not. In an article on the concept of happiness in the play, critic Thierry Dubost writes, “Sam does not spend his time defining what being happy means, since for him it corresponds to a precise reality. He will be happy when his demands are met. One could summarize what he asks from life in three wishes: first, he hopes to marry Nina; then he wants to have a son; third, he seeks success in business. His three wishes are granted, and one can learn a great deal about what this fulfillment implies for him, and for the very idea of happiness.” So Sam is happy, yes, but the audience/readers are not supposed to really respect him. Why not?
Dubost breaks it down by explaining that while Sam follows the rules in society, “in the course of the play he ends up being presented as a failure because, like most of his fellow citizens, he misinterpreted the rules, confusing material gain with success. Strange Interlude is no plea for idleness either, but what is praised is selflessness, when the individual manages to rid of egotism and stops acting solely for personal profit.” Sam thinks he is happy, but he has mistaken happiness for “only vulgar and down-to-earth satisfaction.” Ultimately, Dubost claims, “Evans's fulfillment casts a shadow not simply on the pursuit of happiness, but on the very possibility of reaching a genuine state of well being which would not simply be the result of a more or less enduring state of blindness on the part of the person concerned.”
Shifting back to Nina: at the end of Act Six, she exults, “My three men!...I feel their desires converge in me!...to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb…and am whole…they dissolve in me, their life is my life…I am pregnant with the three!...husband!...lover!...father!...and the fourth man!...little man!...little Gordon!...he is mine too!...that makes it perfect!...” (168-69). Though O’Neill intended Nina to be his exemplar of the 1930s “New Woman,” living her life in an untraditional way, she is still inextricably intertwined with the men in her life. She also tries to fashion herself as a sort of God-mother, and eschews any interest in God-the-father, but ultimately she is not liberated from traditional patriarchal strictures. Critic Bette Mandl notes that “While Nina is a focus, it is as a kind of complex resource, or, in Levi Strauss's terms, ‘a currency,’ that the men relate to her. As an examination of their reflections indicates, their thoughts are as much of Gordon, and of one another, as they are of Nina. Their intimate connection with one another is acknowledged by Marsden: ‘I feel with regard to Nina, my life queerly identified with Sam’s and Darrell’s.'” Furthermore, Nina functions in the lives of the men she thinks of as her own primarily as a means by which they position themselves in relation to each other.
Bruce Ingham Granger agrees, saying that while she has this moment where she “stands hysterically triumphant,” it “passes and she succumbs once more to her neurosis.” At the end of the play she gives up her lover (Darrell) and her past lover (Gordon) and her son (Gordon) and embraces only a role as daughter to a father (Marsden). Granger writes, “her long struggle to make" the Force behind "express her was a near-heroic attempt to make God a mother, but in surrendering to it she becomes ‘an infinitesimal incident in its expression.’ She gains stability but only at the terrible expense of obliterating what remains in her of passionate womanhood.”
