Like Before Breakfast, Ile is the account of a marriage in which one of the partners is destroyed by the other. In Ile, however, the marriage is not viewed as a Strindbergian shackling of hateful opposites but almost with sympathy. Basing his play on a true story of a wife who had sailed with her husband and had lost her mind after enduring a long and hard voyage,²¹ O’Neill’s play presents Annie Keeney as a fragile woman who has gone with her husband to sea despite his protest that a whaling ship is no place for a woman to live. She has dreamed of her husband as a Viking but has learned the truth of her romantic illusion when she is locked in an icebound sea for an interminable winter, surrounded by mutinous sailors and isolated from her kind and her comforts. Captain Keeney’s harshness is bred in him by the qualities of the ship which he must master. He can do no less than what he came for: to fill his ship with oil. Her plea that they return moves him—he is no monster—but his acquiescence is momentary, for at the moment he gives in, the ice to the north breaks, whales appear and he goes forward after the oil. Mrs. Keeney escapes into madness.

Ile is unlike the Glencairn plays in that the sea is not intended to be the center. That the ice opens when it does is a matter of circumstantial convenience at best. What is new in this play is the driving action of Keeney, who superficially resembles a lesser and domesticated Captain Ahab. In Keeney, for the first time, O’Neill draws the character of a man who commits a decisive act of will. Except perhaps for Olson’s abortive effort to leave the sea in The Long Voyage Home, all of O’Neill’s important characters had been bound, will­less, incapable of decision, acquiescent to their fate. Keeney is a change.