Beyond the Horizon

“Other times my eyes would follow this road, winding off into the distance, toward the hills, as if it, too, was searching for the sea. And I’d promise myself that when I grew up and was strong, I’d follow that road, and it and I would find the sea together”

Rob tells Ruth about he longed to follow the road to the sea as a sicky child. The road itself holds significance as a symbol of life that everyone must walk along. The sea, in contrast to the land, represents change and the unknown. Part of Rob’s unhappiness later in the play is caused by the fact he was never able to fulfil the promise that he made to himself as a little boy. He metaphorically walks a different path or road that is unsuitable.

“Gradually I came to believe that all the wonders of the world happened on the other side of those hills. There was the home of the good fairies who performed beautiful miracles. I believed in fairies then. [With a smile.] Perhaps I still do believe in them. Anyway, in those days they were real enough, and sometimes I could actually hear them calling to me to come out and play with them, dance with them down the road in the dusk in a game of hide-and-seek to find out where the sun was hiding himself”

Rob reminisces to Ruth about the magic that he always imagined waiting behind the hills, further characterizing him as a dreamer. Despite asserting to Andy in Act II that he has given up dreaming, Rob allows his imagination to run away with him even when he is seriously ill and he imagines starting a new life in the city. As Rob is dying, he claims to hear the “old voices” calling to him again and returns to his childhood fantasy of journeying beyond the hills to be with the fairies at last.

“Oh, Rob, how could I help feeling it? You tell things so beautifully!”

Ruth is hypnotized by Rob’s description of beyond the horizon. Ruth is a romantic and quickly falls for Rob’s poetic language, which itself is compared to a type of spell throughout the play. Equally, Ruth later uses Andy’s letters as an escape from her hard life on the farm. The ease with which Ruth is romanticized by language, whether it be Rob’s poetic ramblings or Andy’s matter-of-fact letters, cause her to make two devastating decisions—to marry Rob instead of Andy and then to confess to Rob she truly loved Andy after all.

“Please, Rob! We’ll be so happy here together where it’s natural and we know things. Please tell me you won’t go!”

After Ruth and Rob confess their love for one another, Ruth convinces Rob not to leave. However, Ruth’s appeal to Rob that staying on the farm is “natural” is misguided—although working the land is natural to Andy, Rob never fits in. The theme of being true to your own nature is one that reoccurs throughout the play, and Ruth not recognizing Rob’s true nature soon enough is one of the main catalysts of the tragedy.

“Perhaps after all Andy was right—righter than he knew—when he said I could find all the things I was seeking for here, at home on the farm. I think love must have been the secret—the secret that called to me from over the world’s rim—the secret beyond every horizon; and when I did not come, it came to me.”

Rob convinces himself that staying is the right thing to do and that he can be truly happy on the farm with Ruth—he tries to tell himself that the ineffable “secret” has been in front of him all along. Rob constructs a new narrative that what lay beyond the horizon has come to him instead, but it is plain that he will never make the discovery he desperately wants without leaving the farm. His dishonesty with himself proves to be a fatal mistake.

“You couldn’t tempt him, no ways. Andy’s a Mayo bred in the bone, and he’s a born farmer, and a damn good one, too. He’ll live and die right here on this farm, like I expect to.”

James Mayo reproaches Captain Scott for suggesting Andy would make an excellent sailor and recognizes his son’s true nature as a farmer. Andy has inherited his relationship with the land and love for farming from his father, and his connection to the earth is like a physical part of him. When Andy turns away from the land, he turns away from his true self and against his family heritage.

“What have you been doin’ all this time—countin’ the stars to see if they all come out right and proper?”

After Rob returns from taking Ruth and her mother home, his father, James, asks him what took him so long. The reference to stars is significant in that culturally their alignment is interpreted as a good omen, whilst “misaligned” stars foreshadow bad luck. The turn of phrase “star-crossed lovers” refers to partners whose stars don’t align and who share a doomed fate—much like Ruth and Rob. In addition, sailors at sea use stars to navigate and misreading the stars can throw a ship off course in the same way that Rob has been misguided by his infatuation with Ruth and both brothers’ lives are thrown off course.

“Love! They ain’t old enough to know love when they sight it! Love! I’m ashamed of you, Robert, to go lettin’ a little huggin’ and kissin’ in the dark spile your chances to make a man out o’ yourself”

Captain Scott is scornful of Rob and Ruth’s newfound love and thinks they’re too young to know what love is. Although Scott seems bitter at the time, his judgement proves to be resoundingly accurate later in the play. It is never certain whether Ruth, in particular, is ever in love, or only with the idea of being in love.

“You lie when you say you want to go ’way—and see thin’s! You ain’t got no likin’ in the world to go. I’ve watched you grow up, and I know your ways, and they’re my ways. You’re runnin’ against your own nature, and you’re goin’ to be a mighty sorry for it if you do. ‘S if I didn’t know the real reason for runnin’ away! And runnin’ away’s the only words to fit it. You’re runnin’ away ’cause you’re put out and riled ’cause your own brother’s got Ruth ’stead o’ you.” 

James Mayo rages at Andy when he decides to go to sea, and he delivers an ominous prophecy—that Andy will be sorry for running away and acting in a way that is counterintuitive to his nature. This foreshadows Andy’s ultimate failure when he continues to work against the land that he once valued by engaging in illegitimate wheat speculation.

“Oh, I know deep down in his heart he forgave Andy, though he was too stubborn to ever own up to it. It was that brought on his death—breaking his heart just on account of his stubborn pride”

Kate Mayo believes James’s stubbornness and refusal to forgive Andy for leaving caused his death. Despite his warning to Andy, James also acted against his own nature. Even though he wanted to forgive Andy, he was too proud to admit it. James is another character that suffers from broken dreams in the play, as he originally hopes Andy will take over the running over the family farm. However, by disowning Andy and being too stubborn to forgive him, James removes any possibility of this happening during his lifetime.

“It was a crazy mistake for them two to get married, I argyed against it at the time, but Ruth was so spelled with Robert’s wild poetry notions she wouldn’t listen to sense. Andy was the one would have been the match for her.”

Mrs. Atkins claims that it was a mistake for Ruth and Rob to marry but that Rob cast a ‘spell’ on Ruth with his poetry. O’Neill repeatedly employs motifs of literature, language and poetry as powerful forces that can exert significant influence over people. Rob’s poetic language was persuasive enough to convince Ruth she was in love with him and reject Andy, who would have been a more compatible match.

“They was laughin’ at me for workin’ for you, that’s what! ‘How’re things up at the Mayo place?’ they hollers every mornin’. ‘What’s Robert doin’ now—pasturin’ the cattle in the cornlot? Is he seasonin’ his hay with rain this year, same as last?’ they shouts. ‘Or is he inventin’ some m’lectrical milkin’ engine to fool them dry cows o’ his into givin’ hard cider?’”

Ben the farmhand quits working for the Mayos because he is embarrassed to work for Rob, whom the locals mock for being an incompetent farmer. As the play’s central characters are all members of the Mayo family, Ben’s dialogue is unique because it gives an insight into how the wider community views Rob.

“Oh, those cursed hills out there that I used to think promised me so much! How I’ve grown to hate the sight of them! They’re like the walks of a narrow prison yard shutting me in from all the freedom and wonder of life!”

Rob laments the hills and how he has come to hate them. At the start of the play, the background hills represent the possibility of freedom and adventure, but as the action progresses, the symbolic significance of the hills is reversed, and they become a metaphor of oppression—the hills seem to taunt Rob as much as the mockery of the other local farmers. The outline of the hills can be seen during the course of all the outdoor action, but they remain just as distant as they were in the opening scene.

“Oh, if I’d only known! If I hadn’t been such a fool to listen to your cheap, silly, poetry talk that you learned out of books! If I could have seen how you were in your true self—like you are now—I’d have killed myself before I’d have married you!”

Ruth rages at Rob because she thinks he is making fun of Andy—although he is only complaining at the poor quality of Andy’s letters. O’Neill returns to the idea poetry as a tool to beguile, and Ruth claims that Rob used what he learned in books to deceive her about his true self. However, Rob the poet and dreamer is a truer version of himself than Rob the farmer. Ruth’s drastic assertion, that if she would have truly known Rob, she would have died rather than marry him, is a fatal blow to the couple’s relationship.

“Yes I do mean it! I’d say it if you was to kill me! I do love Andy. I do! I do! I always loved him. [Exultantly.] And he loved me! He loves me! I know he does. He always did! And you know he did, too! So go! Go if you want to!”

Ruth confesses her love for Andy but, just as she misread Rob at the beginning of the play, she now misreads Andy, too. Ruth thinks that Andy feels the same about her as he did three years prior but her shift in tense from “loved” to “love”’ is presumptive. Although Ruth’s life has stagnated in the intervening years since she last saw Andy, his perspective on the world and his feelings for her have changed. Ruth also uses her dramatic confession to goad Rob into leaving, which she believes will leave the way clear to pursue her dream of being with Andy.

“I tell you, I feel ripe for bigger things than settling down here. The trip did that for me, anyway. It showed me the world is a larger proposition than ever I thought it was in the old days. I couldn’t be content any more stuck here like a fly in molasses. It all seems trifling, somehow.”

During his first visit home in three years, Andy dashes Ruth’s hopes that he’s staying and reflects on how small the farm seems now. Andy’s travels have expanded his horizons—he has seen beyond the distant hills that Rob feels taunt and trap him. Andy’s tone is dismissive, and he treats the farm, which once meant the world to him, as something trifling. Andy is unable to settle, as though sea voyage has disrupted his natural rhythms and severed his ties to the land. He no longer feels connected to him home or heritage.

“We’ll go where people live instead of stagnating, and start all over again. [Confidently.] I won’t be the failure there that I’ve been here, Ruth. You won’t need to be ashamed of me there. I’ll prove to you the reading I’ve done can be put to some use. [Vaguely.] I’ll write, or something of that sort, I’ve always wanted to write.”

Rob feverishly tells Ruth about his dreams for them when he is well and imagines them moving to the city to start over. Rob attempts to take his writing and love of reading, which Ruth had grown to loath, and turn it into something positive. However, literature in the play is not endorsed as having a practical use in the world that the Mayos live in—its key function is to beguile, seduce and confuse. Even Rob’s notion of making a living from writing or “something of that sort” is vague and non-specific—it is as much a dream as journeying beyond the hills.

“You—a farmer—to gamble in a wheat pit with scraps of paper. There’s a spiritual significance in that picture, Andy. [He smiles bitterly.] I’m a failure, and Ruth’s another—but we can both justly lay some of the blame for our stumbling on God. But you’re the deepest-dyed failure of the three, Andy. You’ve spent eight years running away from yourself. Do you see what I mean? You used to be a creator when you loved the farm. You and life were in harmonious partnership.” 

Rob wonders what has changed about Andy and concludes that, in a way, Andy has failed, too. Rob attests that at least some of his and Ruth’s tragic situation was beyond their control—such as the death of their daughter—but Andy’s misfortune is all a result of his own choices. Andy’s failure is the most serious because by speculating on wheat, he has attempted to exploit the earth that he once loved and felt a part of. Not only has his voyage put physical distance between himself and his homeland, but the exposure to corrupt business has separated him from his moral sense of self. Andy used to be a creator and nurturer, he cared for the earth, soil, and crops, and understood that making a living from farming was about building a reciprocal relationship with the land. His decision to begin speculating resulted in more than Andy losing his wealth, it also cost him his sense of self and identity.

“I couldn’t help it. No woman could. It had to be because I loved someone else, I’d found out. [she sighs wearily.] It can’t do no harm to tell you now—when it’s all past and gone—and dead. You were the one I really loved—only I didn’t come to the knowledge of it ’til too late.”

Ruth tells Andy that it was him she really loved and how she grew to almost hate Rob, but now she is despondent to any emotion. Ruth’s behavior draws on elements of classical tragedy—the fact that she felt compelled in her actions and that her misfortune is based on poor timing i.e., she only realized she loved Andy when it was too late.

“I wouldn’t know how to feel love, even if I tried, anymore.”

Ruth tells Andy that she is too numb to love or feel anymore—the last of her emotion died with Mary. Although Rob is physically ill, Ruth is both mentally and emotionally damaged—her experiences have drained Ruth of all humanity and left her empty of any hope.

“I couldn’t stand it back there in the room. It seemed as if all my life—I’d been cooped up in a room. So I thought I’d try to end as I might have—if I’d had the courage—alone—in a ditch by the open road—watching the sun rise.”

After Rob has escaped his sick bed, Ruth and Andy find him collapsed on the bank of a ditch waiting to see a final sunrise. As Rob makes an honest assessment of his life, he finally accepts responsibility for not choosing to pursue his dreams and not having the courage to follow the road on which he now lies. The light of the sunrise symbolizes understanding dawning on Rob, and there is a sense of irony about him having to be on the edge of death to see the truth.

“You mustn’t feel sorry for me. Don’t you see I’m happy at last—free—free—freed from the farm—free to wander on and on—eternally!”

As Rob lies dying, he joyfully claims to have been set free by the prospect of his imminent demise. Rob feels that the suffering of his earthly life has been a reasonable price to pay for his ultimate transcendent freedom. Rob imagines death as the beginning of a new adventure, allowing him to fulfil the voyage he never pursued during his lifetime.

“Look! Isn’t it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling me to come—[Exultantly.] And this time I’m going! It isn’t the end. It’s a free beginning—the start of my voyage! I’ve won to my trip—the right of release—beyond the horizon!”

In his final moments, Rob seems to cease the critical self-assessment about his life and return to a more dreamlike state. He claims he can hear voices calling him, similar to the fairies he imagined hearing as a child. It is ambiguous which version of Rob’s death is the true one—the tragic culmination of a failed life, or the beginning of a new adventure that will set him free from his suffering. Another layer of interpretation is that Rob invents a further fictional voyage as a comfort in the face of death and as a compensation for what he considers a wasted life. This latter interpretation is strengthened by the habit of the plays’ characters to turn to fiction and dreams in the face of harsh reality—Rob turns to his books, Ruth is enchanted by Rob’s poetry and then Andy’s letters, and even Andy falls for the tales of easy money made by illegitimate speculation.