The Islands of the South Seas

Destination Nowhere

Sometimes it's nice to just pack your bags and get away from it all—everybody needs to take a little vacation now and then. That's where what Brant, Lavinia, and other characters call the "Blessed Isles" come in. Just as O'Neill never pinpoints for us exactly where in New England the Mannons live, we don't know exactly where the islands are. We can guess, based on their popularity with rich folks around the time this play is taking place, that they're islands somewhere in the South Pacific.

 The reason O'Neill doesn't specify is that the exact location is irrelevant. The Blessed Isles are symbolic places, not real spring break destinations. They're meant to be everything that cold, Puritanical New England isn't. They seem to symbolize two things: sex and escape to freedom. Hmmm—maybe it does sound like spring break after all.

Okay, let's take escape first. When the characters mention these islands, they think of them as a place where you can forget about the rest of the world. You can leave your problems behind, problems like an inconveniently alive husband.

BRANT: That's always been my dream—someday to own my own clipper! And Clark and Dawson would be willing to sell the "Flying Trades." You've seen her, Christine. She's as beautiful a ship as you're a woman. Aye, the two of you are like sisters. If she was mine, I'd take you on a honeymoon then! To China—and on the voyage back, we'd stop at the South Pacific islands I've told you about. By God, there's the right place for love and a honeymoon!

CHRISTINE: Yes—but Ezra is alive!

BRANT: I know it's only a dream.

CHRISTINE: You can have your dream—and I can have mine. There is a way. (Homecoming, Act 2)

Sadly, Ezra has the same fantasy. He wants to escape his dead life:

MANNON: We have twenty good years still before us! I've been thinking of what we could do to get back to each other. I've a notion if we'd leave the children and go off on a voyage together—to the other side of the world—find some island where we could be alone awhile. You'll find I've changed, Christine. I'm sick of death! I want life! Maybe you could love me now! I've got to make you love me!

CHRISTINE: For God's sake, stop talking. I don't know what you're saying. Leave me alone. What must be, must be! You make me weak. It's getting late. (Homecoming, Act 3)

Orin's never been to the islands, but just reading Typee (Herman Melville's autobiographical account of life in Polynesia) is enough to send him off into dreamy fantasies about being there all alone with mommy and the warm sand and gentle breezes:

ORIN: Someone loaned me the book. I read it and reread it until finally all those Islands came to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security. I used to dream I was there. And later on all the time I was out of my head I seemed really to be there. There was no one there but you and me. And yet I never saw you, that's the funny part. I only felt you around me. The breaking of the waves was your voice. The sky was the same color as your eyes. The warm sand was your skin. The whole island was you. A strange notion, wasn't it? But you needn't be provoked at being an island because this was the most beautiful island in the world—as beautiful as you, Mother! (The Hunted, Act 2)

For Orin, the islands are the ultimate escape from reality. O'Neill's giving us a great description of what psychoanalysts called the "oceanic feeling," a nursing baby's blissful state of oneness with the mother, no boundaries, just pleasure. One problem, though: Orin's an adult.

The islands also symbolize sex. For some characters, the sexual symbolism of the islands is a kind of thrilling escape from the uptight, repressive attitudes about sex that make everyone feel guilty and dirty. This discussion between Brant and Lavinia makes the islands sound like a sexual paradise, where the islanders don't feel guilty because they don't know they should. Unlike all the other characters in the play.

BRANT: I suppose clippers are too old a story to the daughter of a ship builder. But unless I'm much mistaken, you were interested when I told you of the islands of the South Seas where I was shipwrecked my first voyage at sea.

LAVINIA: I remember your admiration for the naked native women. You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

BRANT: So you remember that, do you? Aye! And they live in as near the Garden of Paradise before sin was discovered as you'll find on this earth! Unless you've seen it, you can't picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea! The clouds like down on the mountain tops, the sun drowsing in your blood, and always the surf on the barrier reef singing a croon in your ears like a lullaby! The Blessed Isles, I called them! You can forget there all men's dirty dreams of greed and power! (Homecoming, Act 1)

Lavinia's sarcastic and skeptical about this at first, and she lets Brant know it. But more than any other character, she's transformed by her experiences once she gets there. We get heavy hints about some foolin' around with one of the natives, but we're never really sure how far things went. Still, she comes back from the islands turned on and tuned in:

LAVINIA: I loved those islands. They finished setting me free. There was something mysterious and beautiful—a good spirit—of love—coming out of the land and sea. It made me forget death. There was no hereafter. There was only this world—the warm earth in the moonlight—the trade winds in the coco palms—the surf on the reef—the fires at night and the drum throbbing in my heart—the natives dancing naked and innocent, without knowledge of sin! (The Haunted, Act 1)

Oh, those throbbing drums—we all know what that rock-n-roll music leads to. Lavinia even looks completely different when she gets back. She's heavier, more voluptuous, acts more like her sensuous mother, and gets rid of the Goth get-up. Everyone's doing double-takes when they see her. She's been sexualized. She practically throws herself at Peter; she's ready to live.

 But Orin, whose own fantasies of the islands were pretty rapturous as long as mommy was involved, is disgusted with Lavinia:

ORIN: Yes. We took advantage of our being on a Mannon ship to make the captain touch there on the way back. We stopped a month. But they turned out to be Vinnie's islands, not mine. They only made me sick--and the naked women disgusted me. I guess I'm too much of a Mannon, after all, to turn into a pagan. But you should have seen Vinnie with the men--!

LAVINIA: How can you--!

ORIN: Handsome and romantic-looking, weren't they, Vinnie?--with colored rags around their middles and flowers stuck over their ears! Oh, she was a bit shocked at first by their dances, but afterwards she fell in love with the Islanders. If we'd stayed another month, I know I'd have found her some moonlight night dancing under the palm trees--as naked as the rest!

LAVINIA: Orin! Don't be disgusting!

ORIN: Picture, if you can, the feelings of the God-fearing Mannon dead at that spectacle!

For these Mannons and their conflicted ideas about sex, the islands have intense meaning, whether it's sexual innocence or sexual perversion. No matter how you feel about it, the Blessed Isles are a place of sexual awakening.