Summary
Act Three
It is seven months later at the Evanses' homestead in upstate New York. The room is ugly and bland, but Nina, seated at the table, looks happy and calm. She is pretty and her figure fuller. She is working on a letter to Ned and we are privy to her thoughts. She explains how the house is odd and seems to have lost its soul but that she herself has never felt more normal. Sam’s mother is “a strange woman from the bit I saw of her last night” (99), she writes, and guesses that the woman is lonely alone in this house. Nina’s thoughts tell us that she is pregnant with Sam’s baby and very content with that fact.
Marsden enters, saying he is going to mail a letter to his Mother. They talk for a few moments and Nina is playful with him. He guesses that she is pregnant and is happy for himself because now he can let go of her in his head. He wonders why he chose to come here with the couple, but it is getting into a new environment for his new novel and he resigns himself to the awkwardness of it. His thoughts return to Nina and he is unsure why she has not told Sam of the pregnancy; perhaps it is that “ancient shame…guilty of continuing life, of bringing fresh pain into the world…” (102).
Marsden leaves and Sam and his mother enter. Sam is “timorously happy, as if he could not quite believe his good fortune” (102). His mother is 45 but looks 60. She is pale with large dark eyes, which are filled with deep sorrow, but some “ghost of an old faith and trust in life’s goddess, hovers girlishly, fleetingly, about the corners of her mouth” (102). Sam is talking about his excitement with his new job and taking care of his mother. She wonders if Nina is pregnant and seems distressed by it. Sam is hoping that Nina is pregnant because he knows she wants a baby and also it will make her truly love him.
Mrs. Evans suggests Sam take a ride into town with Marsden so she can get to know her daughter-in-law better. He agrees. She is privately agitated, thinking of how much she wants him to be happy and worried about Nina’s child.
Nina enters, explaining she is down lately because she could not get to sleep. Mrs. Evans asks if there was something strange about the house and Nina says no. She has an odd feeling about Mrs. Evans’s question.
Mrs. Evans asks Nina if she loves her son, and, startled, Nina lies and says yes. When Mrs. Evans asks if she is going to have a baby, Nina replies yes. Mrs. Evans asks her if it might not be better to wait but Nina says no, that she has so desired a child. Mrs. Evans’s manner becomes more intense and harried and she insinuates Nina ought to get rid of the child. Nina is horrified at the woman’s suggestion and cannot understand this evil.
Finally, Mrs. Evans explains herself: it seems that there is a curse of insanity in their family. She herself did not know when she married Sam’s father but once she found out she thought she could be his salvation. She was fine until Sam was born, and her husband went mad and left them. Sam did not know this. She sent him to boarding school and never let him return and his father eventually died. She concludes that “I’m certain my husband might have kept his mind with the help of my love if I hadn’t had Sammy. And if I’d never had Sammy I’d never have loved Sammy—or missed him, would I?—and I’d have kept my husband” (108).
Nina is astonished. She thought Sam was from a healthy and normal family and she sobs that she hates him now. She announces she will run away but Mrs. Evans says sharply that she cannot do that because it will destroy Sam. Nina bursts out that she only married him because she wanted a child. Now it is unfathomable that Mrs. Evans is telling her she has to kill her unborn child because of this curse and stay with him. Mrs. Evans responds that she will come to love Sam the way she loves herself. Nina is confused, thinking of Gordon and wondering if she ought to stay with Sam to honor Gordon.
Crying, she asks Mrs. Evans how she is supposed to go on. Mrs. Evans knows Nina desperately wants a baby and tentatively but clearly ventures an idea she had for herself—to deliberately pick a good man to secretly give her a healthy child, a man whom she did not love and who did not love her. She could not do it herself, as she was religious, but Nina responds that she does not believe in God and does not care about “sin.” Nina tells herself she has a right to be happy.
Mrs. Evans is gentle with her now, saying she knows they will not see each other again. Nina sobs and Mrs. Evans embraces her, calling her the “daughter of my sorrow” and claiming she is closer to her than Sam ever was or could be” (112).
Act Four
It is seven months later, the scene set in Leeds’ former study. This is now Sam and Nina’s house. Most of the professor’s things are untouched but the table “has become neurotic” (113) and the wastebasket is overflowing. Sam is there, thinner and dispirited. He is trying to write an advertisement but is failing miserably. He thinks of how troubled his marriage is, how odd it was that they left his mother’s house so quickly, how frustrating it is that they have not been intimate for five months so there is no child for them.
Nina enters, thin and nervous. Her thoughts flick from cold, cruel condescension of her husband to stricken guilt over such thoughts. She tries to comfort him about his work and remind herself he is a poor, innocent, tragic child and she must be kind to him. Occasionally she thinks of her unborn child, which she aborted, and how sick and unhappy she was afterward.
It is hard for her to forget what Mrs. Evans suggested, but she wonders if it is cowardly and vile to give herself without love or desire to another man. But her response to herself is that she did that with the soldiers, so perhaps it is not different.
Nina reminds Sam that Charlie is coming to bring his notes on the biography she wrote of Gordon, and Sam replies that Ned is also coming to say hello. Nina lights up and excitedly hurries away to get things ready. Marsden comes in, seeming “prey to some inner fear he is trying to hide even from himself” (119). He has the manuscript with him, but his thoughts are mostly on his mother, who seems to be ill. He bristles when Sam says she is older and it is normal to have afflictions.
Marsden looks around the room, critical of what they’ve done to the study. It is as if Leeds’ tomb is desecrated, especially since Sam is trying to “write” in here. Snobbishly, Marsden sneers at how people think just anyone can be a writer. He also thinks of how he is certain Nina has had an abortion, that he knows because of "psychic affinities…her body confessed…and since then, I’ve felt an aversion…as if she were a criminal…she is!...how could she?...why?...I thought she wanted a child…” (120). He wanted her to be a mother for his own peace of mind, but alas, that did not happen. He chides himself for these harsh thoughts.
When Sam says that Ned is coming by, Marsden is surprised, wondering if he was the one that performed the abortion. He decides it is just a mess here and he should go home.
Darrell enters, his manner “more convincingly authoritative, more mature” (121). He and Marsden exchange pleasantries. Marsden asks about his mother’s ill health but when Darrell starts to ask questions, Marsden becomes defensive. Darrell merely says he is trying to emphasize that delay is dangerous and that his mother’s pain might be harmless but she ought to talk to someone. They say goodbye, and Darrell marvels inwardly that he is still a mother's boy.
Alone now, Darrell looks at the chaotic office and wonders if he was wrong about Sam. It seems like their marriage is not going well. He admits to himself he envied Sam for a bit because Nina has a strong physical attraction for him, but he’d honestly forgotten her.
When Nina enters, it is clear she has put on makeup and dressed herself differently since before; she looks younger, prettier. They exchange warm pleasantries. At one point Nina tells him he ought to settle down and have a baby and then adds sadly that she is not fated to. He is surprised, and she tells him the whole story of what Mrs. Evans said, how she got rid of the baby she loved, and how unhappy she is now. He is utterly shocked and thinks to himself how she will lose her mind and it’ll be his fault because he encouraged her to marry Sam.
Nina asks him to be a doctor for her, to have a cool and dispassionate approach to what she is about to ask. He agrees. She ventures that she has thought of picking out a man whom she cared nothing about to have a child with her that Sam would think is his. Darrell decides internally that he can be scientific about this, that he can understand he might feel desire for her as a result of biology but still remain unbiased. They talk through it, both agreeing that Sam’s happiness and ignorance are paramount. When she wonders about adultery he says it is not as bad as her husband ending up in an asylum and her having to manage that. Guilt is unimportant. She comes closer to him and says she cannot give herself to a man she does not desire or respect. He agrees and says it should be a man she is attracted to and a man with a scientific mind “superior to the moral scruples that cause so much human blundering and unhappiness” (131). He says it should be a man that does not love her, and she agrees. They are on the same page now, and she thanks him meekly and sincerely. He drops to his knees in emotion and kisses her hands and is internally thinking about how he will finally be happy for a brief period of time, and Nina thinks of how she will be happy and her husband happy as well.
Analysis
The main dramatic elements of the plot are laid out in these two acts: Nina learns Sam’s lineage is “cursed” and she cannot bear his child; she aborts the child and realizes she will never be able to love her husband; she tells Darrell of this predicament and he, also concerned with Sam’s happiness and Nina’s health, decides he will sleep with her and give her a child. Everything in the subsequent acts of the play is what happens as a result of Nina and Darrell’s choice, and given what we’ve seen of the play so far, we can guess at this point that it is not going to go well for most of the characters.
Mrs. Evans’s confession that her husband’s family line is cursed with insanity comes rather out of the blue, especially as Darrell had told Marsden that what he knew of the young man’s family was that it was healthy and inoffensive. But of course Darrell doesn’t actually know anything, and he could not be more wrong. From the moment we read Nina’s letter and hear her thoughts about the house, we know something is amiss. The house is ugly, dispiriting, strange; Mrs. Evans does not seem surprised to hear that Nina has not slept well. Her questioning about whether or not Nina is pregnant also has an odd cast to it. This foreshadowing is answered rather quickly when Mrs. Evans tells Nina the truth, which is that she believes that if Sam continues the family line, he will eventually go insane and his and Nina’s future child may suffer from the same affliction. Nina is horrified to hear this because she desperately wants to be a mother. She had been happy in her youth, but she, as critic Donald Heiney writes, “spends the middle years of her life as a tormented instrument of the reproductive instinct that lives within her.”
Unfortunately for Nina, she has to think very carefully about who she wants to be the father of the baby that she knows she needs to endure living. This is nothing less than eugenics, which was a popular movement in American society in the first few decades of the 20th century, its “eruption…[responding] to the resulting instability of national, class, gender, and racial boundaries," scholar Tamsen Wolff notes. O’Neill had always been interested in the relationship between past and present, so “the visibility and force of the past in the embodied present offered a ready resource." In eugenic theory “there is a vital tension between hidden truth (for eugenicists, usually ominous, recessive genetic secrets) and visible truth, or dominant genetic history displayed on the body. For eugenicists, this tension creates an unsettling vacillation between an assurance about what is clearly visible on the body and dread about what lurks unseen in the body.” This was all fascinating to a dramatist like O’Neill, whose job it was to explore truth, desire, time, visibility, and more.
Nina was constantly described as “sick” by the men in her life, and the cure was to marry Sam and have a child. However, Wolff explains that “although the remedy for Nina—marriage and maternity—is generally agreed upon, her problem is not. The exact nature of Nina's sickness is never clear, primarily because sickness is used ambiguously to refer to an unspecified combination of physical and mental conditions” and that “lumping together very different kinds of problems is a defining characteristic of eugenic rhetoric.” The men, especially Darrell, conflate her psychological and physical symptoms and try to diagnose her, and Nina even scoffs at how he is trying to do so without really seeing her.
There are other references to common eugenics tropes and theories. The main solutions for insane or feeble-minded people were institutionalization and sterilization, the former which happens to Sam’s father and his aunt Bessie, who is stuck silently upstairs. Another nod is the reference to Nina “breeding,” as if she were an animal. She and Darrell both decide to be “guinea pigs” to have their baby, a troubling clinical term. The voicing of inner thoughts, partly derived from O’Neill’s interest in psychoanalysis, is also reliant on eugenic reasoning. Wolff thinks that O’Neill actually prioritized eugenics thinking over psychoanalytic thinking, writing that “according to the play's logic, articulating a hereditary problem (congenital insanity) threatens to accomplish the exact opposite of the goal of the psychoanalytic talking cure: that is, speaking can cause the problem to materialize rather than to disappear. No sign of insanity ever surfaces in Sam, yet since he never learns of the possibility, the basic premise about the danger of articulating hidden problems is neither confirmed nor denied. The terrifying power of this utterance, however, remains one of the strongest forces in the play.”
A final comment about eugenics here is in regards to the character of Gordon Shaw. Described by Sam and Nina, he is a golden boy, an athletic, handsome, strong Adonis. However, Marsden, Leeds, and Darrell are less impressed and cast aspersions on his heredity. Wolff says that O'Neill complicates the myth of Gordon Shaw by having Gordon Evans become the embodiment of his namesake, something almost all the characters acknowledge. But Evans, Darrell, and Marsden all see the boy as their own son at some point. This means, Wolff writes “that they imagine the second Gordon as collectively produced and strongly reminiscent of the original Gordon indicates that the powers of desire and imagination can outweigh biological heredity. Nina's son is a counterpart to the forces of motive that Mrs. Evans claims affect bad blood; in Gordon's case, the sheer will of his piecemeal family has brought about a biological impossibility. Finally, neither the good nor the bad bloodline is verifiable.”
