“Oh, come now, Nina! You’ve been reading books. Those don’t sound like your thoughts.”
Lest anyone think that since this is the 1920s there might be more modern views in the air about women, Marsden's comment here answers that in a remarkably succinct misogynist comment. There's the classic assumption that books aren't good for women because they corrupt them, as well as the assumption that if a woman does proffer an intelligent or interesting idea it is most certainly not her own.
“The devil!...what beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing!...”
The asides are very useful psychoanalytic tools to allow the audience to see what comes to the surface of the characters' minds and thus reveals the truth of their feelings, motivations, etc. Most of the time they don't acknowledge their own thought patterns, but occasionally they are able to look circumspectly upon their own cogitations. Here Marsden rues the fact that it's usually the most troubling and painful memories that bubble to the surface.
“There’s no use trying to think of others. One human being can’t think of another. It’s impossible.”
Nina offers an egoist perspective on the condition of being human—even though we are embedded in a society and have close ties to others, our base nature always privileges ourself before others. This isn't something Nina is necessarily proud of, but her utterance of this belief out loud gives us insight into her character as well as asks us to consider if we also, perhaps grudgingly, agree with her.
“My three men!...I feel their desires converge in me!...to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb…and am whole…they dissolve in me, their life is my life…I am pregnant with the three!...husband!...lover!...father!...”
This is a histrionic utterance if there ever was one, and is unsurprisingly one of the most famous in the play. Bette Mandl says it is representative of her "libidinous greed of a divine maternity" and also a reminder that she "functions in the lives of the men she thinks of as her own primarily as a means by which they position themselves in relation to each other." Freudian psychology says women are motivated by the lifelong search for the penis, which they lack, so this might be another interpretation. She can also be viewed as a mother goddess figure who devours men.
“the only living life is in the past and the future…the present is an interlude…strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living!...”
This is another famous line from the play, not just because it contains the title of the play but because it articulates one of its main themes—time's passage. Nina's present has always been one of turmoil and torture, stuck in a loveless marriage while yearning for another man and seeing her son slip away from her. Her sex drive overpowers her, O'Neill suggests, and her young adulthood is a misery. She yearns for the vanished past (Gordon) and for a future in which she is happy. Finally, after Sam's death she is able to attain this contentment because she is no longer striving, desiring, dreaming. She can go gently into the good night with the neutered Marsden and let go of her son.
"Gordon is dead, Father. I've just had a cable. What I mean is, he flew away to another life—my son Gordon."
There is a moment in which Nina's confusion filters into our own confusion. Is Gordon Evans dead? Did she have a premonition? Is he fated to die like his namesake, leaving Nina bereft once more? Even when we realize that no, she is just referring to the fact that he literally flew away in his plane and did not die, we can still see that to some extent he did die. He is grown now, no longer a son the way a mother might want him to be. He has his own woman now, and this is something for Nina to mourn.
"That...is...true!...he's full of poison!...I've never married the word to life!...I've been a timid bachelor of arts, not an artist!...my poor pleasant books!"
Marsden realizes Darrell's sneering comment about his books not being about life is actually true. He has lived a rather intellectual bachelor life, living with his mother and sister and shying away from the pleasures of the flesh. He is cerebral, not corporeal. He is an academic to the core, and his books do not evince reality or vitality.
"Be sensible, for God's sake! We're absolutely unsuited to each other! I don't admire your character! I don't respect you! I know too much about your past!"
This is another misogynistic comment from a man in the play directed at Nina, this time from the man who agrees to use her body for his own pleasure and for the nebulous goal of making another man happy. It would be less troubling if he'd only mentioned the first parts of the two not being suited to each other and his not liking her character—after all, one may object to innumerable people's character, or lack thereof—but Darrell asserts that it is because she behaved whorishly in the past by taking on the soldier lovers.
Evans: —(dejectedly) Oh—I thought perhaps—(then changing the subject) I suppose I ought to go up and say hello to Aunt Bessie.
Mrs. Evans: —(her face becoming defensive—in blunted tones, a trifle pleadingly) I wouldn't, Sammy. She hasn't seen you since you were eight. She wouldn't know you. And you're on your honeymoon, and old age is always sad to young folks.
Aunt Bessie is the classic "madwoman in the attic," the woman whose problems and character traits and complications make her unfit for proper society. Her actual insanity and its degree is not known, but regardless she is tragically kept away. She's described as "happy" by Mrs. Evans but it's a bit odd: "she's out of her mind. She lives on the top floor of this house, hasn't been out of her room in years, I've taken care of her. She just sits, doesn't say a word, but she's happy, she laughs to herself a lot, she hasn't a care in the world. But I remember when she was all right, she was always unhappy, she never got married, most people around here were afraid of the Evanses in spite of their being rich for hereabouts" (107). There's a lot to unpack here, but it seems that this woman was a spinster and perhaps that made her a problem. We never see Bessie so there's very little else to analyze, but it's still worth probing what it is about her that was considered socially unacceptable.
"It is also true I was jealous of Gordon. I was alone and wanted to keep your love."
Among the many crosscurrents of sexual desire and frustration are those of two parents who seem to have problematic feelings for their children—Leeds for Nina, and Nina in turn for her own son Gordon. Incestuous inclinations are, as most psychoanalysis reveals, submerged deep in the unconscious, but O'Neill's asides allow us to see how dangerously close they might be to rising to the top.
