Cross is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern drama. In this essay she discusses Hickey's wife and Parritt's mother in terms of sexual stereotypes.

In Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh, the two most significant female characters never appear onstage. These women, Parritt's mother, Rosa, and Hickey's wife, Evelyn, although physically absent throughout the play, are nonetheless powerfully present in the lives of the men who know them. Indeed, Rosa and Evelyn are absolutely essential to the action of the play. Yet O'Neill chose to give these women no voices of their own; the audience sees them exclusively through the eyes of the men who hated and ultimately destroyed them. The result is an incomplete picture of who Rosa and Evelyn really are. An examination of these women and their places in the play must therefore take into consideration the distortion of the lens through which...