62. Oleanna by David Mamet

There is no character called Oleanna in Oleanna, nor is the name ever mentioned. There are only two people in Mamet’s play: John, an American college professor, and Carol, his student. The action deals with an accusation of rape — which may or may not be justified — brought by Carol against John, and the threat to John’s career that results.

The title is in fact a remarkably obscure allusion to a nineteenth-century Utopian community in Pennsylvania called Oleana (one ‘n’), after its Norwegian founder, Ole Bull (1810-80), a famous violinist, and his mother Anna (Ole + Anna = Oleana).

Ole Bull was ranked second only to Paganini in the nineteenth century’s pantheon of violin virtuosi. After a triumphant concert tour of the USA in 1852 Bull decided to leave a permanent mark on the Continent by purchasing 11,000 acres of land in Potter County, Pennsylvania, as a settlement for Norwegian immigrants.

Bull’s fiefdom had four main settlements: Oleana, New Bergen, New Norway and New Valhalla. Pioneers flooded in, attracted by the prospect of free land, but it soon became clear that most of the 11,000 acres, located in a narrow valley between thickly forested hills, were completely unsuitable for farming. The community failed. By the mid-1850s the colonists had either returned to their old homes or sought new homes elsewhere in the USA.

The debacle inspired a satirical folk-song called ‘Oleanna’, originally composed in Norwegian and later recorded in a translation by Pete Seeger, as follows:

Oh to be in Oleanna,
That's where I'd like to be
Than to be in Norway
And bear the chains of slavery.

Little roasted piggies
Rush around the city streets
Inquiring so politely
If a slice of ham you'd like to eat.

Beer as sweet as Muncheners
Springs from the ground and flows away
The cows all like to milk themselves
And the hens lay eggs ten times a day.

Mamet included the first verse of this song as the epigraph to the printed version of his play.

The most immediate connection is to do with land. In Oleanna John spends much of the time on the phone to his wife or his lawyer talking about the purchase of a new house, while Carol, mute and waiting, listens. Both John and Ole Bull’s plans are eventually blighted by legal restrictions on the purchase of land. But John’s failure to negotiate the sale of land, and Ole Bull’s failure to pioneer a new Utopia, are paralleled, in the play, by another failure: the failure of the Utopian project of university education. John admits to Carol in a careless moment that he regards the whole university system as flawed and worthless, and that he is willing to break the rules and give her an ‘A’ grade, even though her work has been poor. He has the power to do it, and so why not? ‘We won’t tell anybody,’ he says. Carol is shocked, puzzled, and finally outraged at the failure of the university system to supply what she has a right to expect: legitimate instruction, value for money. She berates John rather as a Norwegian colonist might have addressed Ole Bull — she has no ‘security’; as in the song, she is a ‘slave’:

CAROL...But to the aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave to come here — you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school — you mock us.
[...]
CAROL...But we worked to get to this school [...] To gain admittance here. To pursue that same degree of security you pursue. We, who, who are, at any moment, in danger of being deprived of it.

One might bear in mind that Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s play of 1984, is about real estate agents who swindle members of the public by selling worthless parcels of land, and Mamet himself worked briefly for a real estate company in the 1960s. Oleanna, it seems, picks up where Glengarry Glen Ross left off, exploring the inability of capitalism to ensure ethical social behaviour and the ever-present danger of getting royally ripped off. In both Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross there are dangerous people willing to bend the rules for their own ends. This is the meaning of Oleanna as a title: in the USA of David Mamet, the dream of security and social mobility through education and hard work is just another fantasy exploited by the unscrupulous to trap the gullible.

Consulted:
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/olebull/page1.asp?secid=31
Bigsby, Christopher: The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

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