Desire Under The Elms Eugene O’Neill |American Literature
American Literature
Desire Under The Elms
Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill : Life and Work
Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in New York. His parents were devout Catholics, and his father James O'Neill was an actor-manager. The family travelled round the country with James O’Neill, but their home was unsettled in more ways than this. None of them were in good health, the father drank heavily and the mother took drugs. His education at Princeton University was cut short in 1906, when he was suspended before the final examination. In 1909, he married Katherine Jenkins, and was divorced in 1912. He lived a dissolute life, drinking and gambling, until his illness during the same year. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and they had two children. In 1928, after his divorce, he married his third wife, Charlotte Monterary, an actress with whom he lived happily until his death .
It was during his months of convalescence, around 1912, that he wrote the first short plays, eleven of which were published together. His plays, The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God’s Chillun Get Wings (1923), were intellectual and stylistic experiments. In Desire Under the Elms (1924), he used a simple, naturalistic form to achieve the highest imaginative peak of his career. His next play, The Great God Brown (1928), is an allegory between the artist and the materialism of society, which O’Neill expresses through the use of masks that the characters take on and off as the situation requires. Lazarus Laughed and Marco Williams (both 1928), were purely intellectual in concept and demanded extravagant productions. Strange Interlude (1928) is three times the length of a normal play, chiefly because the characters speak their thoughts as well as their words. His next attempt, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), was a trilogy – his version of the Greek story of Orestes. His Days Without End and Ah, Wilderness! (both 1934), are not particularly interesting. Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh appeared in 1946, is naturalistic, projects the fears and weaknesses of man, and the futility of human existence. Among his remaining plays, the only one of any significance is Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1940-41), in which he presents multiple aspects of personality and relationships within the circle of the family. Eugene O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel prize for literature, and the only dramatist to have won four Pulitzer prizes. He introduced psychological and social realism to the American stage; he was among the earliest to use American vernacular, and to focus on characters marginalised by society
Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill : Summary
Desire Under the Elms is a story of greed on a New England farm in the middle of the last century. The farmer, Old Cabot, married his second wife twenty-five years ago purely in order to get the title-deeds of the farm into their own hands. Their son, Eben, knows this and also believes that his father killed his mother by overworking her. Not surprisingly he hates his father and is determined to get possession of the farm himself as soon as possible. Then Old Cabot marries a third wife, Abbie – partly to spite Eben. Abbie is only a few years older than Eben and now her greed is added to the others’. She makes Old Cabot promise that if she bears him a son he will leave the farm to him entirely, cutting Eben out of his will. She then sets about seducing Eben, hoping to have a son by him and to pass it off as Old Cabot’s. At this point the tight mesh of ambition turns to one of passion, because Abbie is also genuinely attracted to Eben. Her scheming ends in a deep and genuine love for him. He feels the same for her and is content to comply in the pretence that his newly born son is really his father’s, until one day his father gloatingly tells him of the promise which Abbie made him give. Abbie, in a mad attempt to prove her love for Eben by removing the object of her original plot, now kills her baby. Eben doubly maddened by this, fetches the sheriff to her and then suddenly, at the last minute, maintains that he killed the child with her. Old Cabot is left alone on his farm as the sheriff takes them off. And the sheriff’s last words, looking around as they leave, are: “It’s a jimdandy farm, no denyin’. Wish I owned it.”
The stark simplicity of this play, both in the writing and in the strict concentration on the theme, raises a plot that could have become melodrama into tragedy. But the play also contains a sense of doom which, without ever seeming extraneous, does help to give it a classical quality. Eben’s mother, for example, haunts the play like a figure of ill-omen because of Eben’s conviction that his father killed her. So his father’s harsh treatment of her looms like a crime in the past, awaiting expiation: she becomes the Thyestes or the King Hamlet of the plot. Fate too is easily suggested by the superstitions of these country people. Old Cabot is convinced for two reasons that it is his destiny to stay on this bleak farm. First, he left it as a young man for richer land out West and yet, when he was already prospering there, something about New England pulled him back to the harder life. And secondly, at the end of the play and after the disaster, when again he plans to leave, he finds that his sons (he also had two by his first wife) have long since taken the horde of money which he had hidden under a floorboard. This is enough to convince him that it is God’s will that he should stay where he is and that God sent him evil grasping sons so that His will should be effected. As with the oracle in Greek tragedy, all that matters is that the characters involved believe it. So O’Neill’s use of superstitions fatalism becomes a much more effective modern version of Fate than any specific Greek echoes or freaks of physiognomy can be.
In Desire Under the Elms, O’Neill made a temporary break with his intellectual and stylistic experiments. Using a simple naturalistic form he achieved in this play the highest imaginative peak of his career. His other plays of a comparable stature were all direct and painful distillations of his own experience, and they are at their best when they come nearest in every detail to that experience. Desire Under the Elms is pure imaginative creation, and the psychological patterns present in the play are an integral part of the dramatic situation.
Analysis of Desire Under The Elms
Desire Under The Elms is a tale of ancient desire and violence structured around many centres of meaning. All the conflicts in the play arise from the self centred, exploitative desires of the characters ambushing each other in a game of outwitting each other. Ephraim Cabot, the synoptic centre of all these desires of greed, lust, authority and acquisitiveness, stalks over his New England farm like a giant under whose power the rest of the characters look very small. His real rival is his dead wife, demanding the restitution of an ancient wrong, unleashing the invisible fury of her vengeful, violated maternity. She is symbolized by the elm trees described at the outset of the play.
If the elms represent growth and fecundity, the rocky soil of the farm and the stone fences built by Ephraim, stand for man-made values, which seem to thwart the free, aspiring spontaneity of the life-force. As Peter complains, the father has slaved everybody to death so that the farm may live and yield. Thus both the living and the dead, in combat of their evenly matched powers, bring remote, explosive forces out of the darker regions of the racial unconscious to converge on their helpless forbears. Ephraim, the patriarch of the primitive kind, is intensely feared and hated by his sons, who struggle against his omnipotent will and desire to steal his farm, his mistresses, his gold, in short, everything that belongs to him. Simeon and Peter, the two elder sons, are somewhat unequal to the task, and lacking logistic subtlety, try to achieve a symbolic slaying of the father by themselves fleeing to California. But Eben, wily like his father, whom he resembles physically, too, and, protected by the guardian spirit of his mother, combines the two primal lusts of possessiveness and revenge into an effective strategy for the usurpation of Ephraim.
The themes of possession and revenge are unfilled in Eben’s quest for a harmonious adult life. He is the victim of an Oedipus complex, because he is caught between the father’s desire to possess and the mother’s desire for revenge. The incest with his step-mother is an outlet for this double fulfilment, as well as a means of normalizing his psychic urges. Abbie’s marriage to Ephraim is in itself the mother’s first act of revenge, because she marries Ephraim for exactly the same reason as he had married Eben’s mother - the possession of the farm. Furthermore, the mother obtains her natural fulfilment of sex through the adultery of Abbie, her symbolic incarnation. For the lovers themselves, their coming together results in a self-knowledge, and a transfiguration of their initial desires. Eben’s desire for revenge, and Abbie’s for the farm, change concomitantly into a desire for each other. By killing her child, Abbie proves that her lust has become love; and, by unconsciously sharing her crime, Eben achieves the murder of the primordial father, whose symbolic surrogate the child really is. Their mutual sacrifice constitutes a consecration of self hood, and a liberation from the dragons of adolescence, so that they can both now grow freely into a meaningful adulthood.
The mother and son ‘belong’ to each other, as well as the lovers, because the experience of growth, once feared, is now accepted through an edification of desire. A mark of their acceptance of adult life is that they are free from guilt feelings. But the world belongs to Ephraim. His identification with the universe is aided, rather than destroyed by his pride. He remains unvanquished, if not victorious, because he is severe, immutable and lonely, the very centre of a perpetual, indestructible power. In Ephraim, O’Neill has modernized the portrait of the Puritan, in that he has traced the ambiguities of Puritan spirituality and Puritan sensuality alike. Ironically enough, the most positive quality of power is essentially negative, and consists in the denial of power, and possibly life, to others. A similar truth says that the Puritan is one who fears that someone somewhere might be happy. Ephraim’s spirituality is in fact reduced purely to the level of passion. He finds himself more at home among his cows and horses and fowls than among men. Ephraim is also a prisoner of the farm and the homestead, over which the sinister serenity of the dead wife’s motherhood broods, torturing him with a tyrannical love that makes him guilty. The father and mother, interlocked in a continual contest for power and authority, have no escape from each other. They prevail as opposites, for they are the archetypes into which all life is divided. Man is torn between the father’s love for power and the mother’s power of love. This duality of primal nature is the moral and psychological conditioning of man’s being, an insight which O’Neill reinforces in Desire Under the Elms by integrating into a single complex, Puritanism, naturalism, primitivism and Freudianism. The realism of the play is in fact an artistic simplicity in depth striving towards a wider universality of vision. The characters in Desire Under The Elms accept with ascetic abandon their ‘heroic knowledge’ of the human condition, the mystic undercurrents of which are controlled by purely naturalistic symbols which the elm sheds its mythic shades.
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