When “Anna Christie” debuted at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921, it won widespread approval from Broadway audiences and Eugene O’Neill’s second Pulitzer Prize the following year. Nevertheless, many critics complained about what the Evening Mail described as the play’s “happy ending,” with the proposed marriage of Mat and Anna apparently resolving the acrimony around Anna’s history of sex work. Although George Jean Nathan, Alexander Woollcott, and O’Neill himself challenged these claims by decrying “the kiss-marriage-happily-ever-after-tradition” that O’Neill maintained was projected onto “Anna Christie,” criticism of the play’s happy ending has persisted for decades from theater critics and drama scholars alike. Did O’Neill capitulate to Broadway sensibilities by ending with the promised nuptials? Did he compromise the proto-feminism of Anna during act 3 when she declares, “Nobody owns me, see?” Did he succumb to the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the deus ex machina?
One hundred and two years later,...
