Theatricality of Absence: Male Identity and O'Neill's Self-reflection in Before Breakfast

부재의 연극성-『조식 전』에서 남성 정체성과 오닐의 자기반영

Eugene O'Neill's one-act play Before Breakfast (1916) depicts a morning scene of a married couple who live in a slovenly flat at Greenwich Village. There is no apparent dramatic action occurring in the play. Instead, the play is full of Mrs. Rowland's incessant complaints about her husband Alfred's loafing around bars with artists friends, neglecting his role as breadwinner. An irony is that every morning she prepares breakfast for the good-for-nothing husband even in the moment of complaining. It is worth noting that Alfred is an 'unseen character' who is never directly observed by the audience but is only described by her wife. Deprived of all chances to speak and present himself on stage, he is kept in the room throughout the play. In contrast, Mrs. Rowland dominates the stage, monopolizing language and action. The audience has to listen to her, judge from her statements, and take her one-sided complaints. The accused husband, with zero chance of showing up and defending himself, has no choice but to be the sinner as the wife intends. Another irony is that the audience's feeling about the situation is quite different from what is expected. The wife's complaints are regarded to be unfair and groundless in the reason that the situation is monopolized by her. In case of the husband, in contrast, the loss of voice and presence stresses the injustice of his dead-lock situation. In other words, the 'absent' quality of Alfred works to evoke the audience's sympathy for himself and subsequently makes his presence recognized, not visually but emotionally, by the audience throughout the play. Discovered in this paradoxical moment where the spectators understand or 'see' the status of the unseen and the devoiced message is successfully conveyed to the listeners, is the theatricality of absence. Adding to the function as theatrical device, the 'unseen character' Alfred works as a device of self-reflection to mirror the author's own life. Alfred, the alter-ego of O'Neill, effectively exorcises the author's life-long feeling of guilty as the unfaithful husband and father in the unhappy first marriage, successfully evoking the audience's sympathy for himself.