Eugene O'Neill: A Moon for the Misbegotten

Feburary, 2015

Joise Hogan and her father, Phil Hogan, are a disreputable pair – she with the repuation of being a loose women and he as a dunkard and conniving cheater. That said, the two are a vivacious couple, salt of the earth.

The Hogans work a farm in Connecticut, tenants of James Tyrone, Jr., whom we first met in Long Days Journey Into Night, a decade older and all the more haunted for it. After his mother’s death, Tyrone, Jr. has gone about dissolving his life with whores and drink, and though aware of his dissolution he appears unable to help himself. The one evidence of hope for Tyrone that we see is his rapport and relationship with the Hogans.

O’Neill’s stage direction descriptions possess, as always, a rhythmic beauty:

Josie is twenty-eight. She is so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak – five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty. Her sloping shoulders are broad, her chest deep with large, firm breast, her waist wide but slender by contrast with her hips and thighs. She has long smooth arms, immensely strong, although no muscles show. The same is true of her legs.

She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labour of two ordinary men. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman.

The map of Ireland is stamped on her face, with its long upper lip and small nose, thick black eyebrows, black hair as coarse as a horse’s mane, freckled, sunburned fair skin, high cheekbones and heavy jaw. It is not a pretty face, but her large dark-blue eyes give it a note of beauty, and her smile, revealing even white teeth, gives it charm.

She wears a cheap, sleeveless, blue cotton dress. Her feet are bare, the soles earth-stained and tough as leather.

And

Hogan is fifty-five, about five feet six. He has a thick neck, lumpy, sloping shoulders, a barrel-like trunk, stumpy legs, and big feet. His arms are short and muscular, with large hairy hands. His head is round with thinning sandy hair. His face is fat with a snub nose, long upper lip, big mouth, and little blue eyes with bleached lashes and eyebrows that remind one of a white pig’s. He wears heavy brogans, filthy overalls, and a dirty short-sleeved undershirt. Arms and face are sunburnt and freckled. On his head is an old wide-brimmed hat of coarse straw that would look more becoming on a horse. His voice is high-pitched with a pronounced brogue.