Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms": themes and analysis

Eugene O'Neill & Desire Under the Elms

Personal feelings about O'Neill from the Video

Listening to the video replay (I recorded it digitally for playback) it is at first quite sad to learn that O'Neill's father and mother for the most part were such incomplete and really incompetent parents during his formative years. It would be hard to imagine one's mother was addicted to morphine rather than being the loving, nurturing leader and role model as she is supposed to be. On second thought, it is also amazing that O'Neill turned out to be such a literary giant, showing sheer genius in his plays.

The video notes that O'Neill is credited with being among the first playwrights to introduce "realism into American drama." Realism indeed, his early life was about as real as it can get, as his mom struggled with addition and his father was a wealthy and well-known theater star who, according to O'Neil's biography apparently "reformed the rather loose life he had lived" (American Decades, 1998, p. 1) -- but doesn't seem to have provided the leadership a young boy needs. Indeed, sending one's bright young son off to a boarding school at the age of 8, doesn't sound like hands-on parenting. It sounds more like getting the kid out from under foot.

The video left out several important facts of O'Neil's life: for example, his mother became addicted to morphine "…perhaps as a result of Eugene's birth, a thought that tormented the playwright for the rest of his life" (American Decades, p. 1). This apparent torment perhaps explains some of period of his life when he was given to wild drinking bouts in New York City, given to chasing women, and being reckless. And while living in Buenos Aires as a "beach bum" he slept on park benches and consumed massive quantities of alcohol (American Decades, p. 1-2).

After taking that information to heart, and feeling a bit sorry for the man, and wondering at how far down into the gutter he actually plunged, the biography in American Decades, and the video, shows an alert reader / listener that those so-called "low life" escapades gave him the real-life experience to write the play the Emperor Jones. It is not recommended that young writers wishing to become proficient and successful in a career as a playwright. But that said, the biography pointed out that all the bars and saloons O'Neill visited helped him write plays like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Christie and the Iceman Cometh; I haven't read either of those plays, but now, with the video and the biography, they interest me a great deal.

The video very briefly mentioned his career at sea but certainly that experience gave him the ideas and characters to write the Hairy Ape -- which I have studied -- a play about a "stoker" (one who keeps the boilers going by stoking the fire) on an ocean liner who "…goes mad when he is insulted by an aristocratic passenger" (American Decades, p. 3).

O'Neil's time spend in Greenwich Village (the video narrator called it "GREEN-witch") was when he met some left wing activists and political radicals; it was mentioned in the video that O'Neill also met the founder of the U.S. Communist party. What the narrator didn't mention was that while O'Neill was meeting and mixing in with literary folks and intellectuals there in Greenwich Village, he learned about Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke, who had founded an amateur theatre group called "Provincetown Players," and this was a huge break for him. O'Neill took advantage of this tip, moved to Massachusetts, joined the troupe, and began submitting one-act plays, including Bound East for Cardiff. The video mentions his success with the Provincetown Players but didn't get the link with Greenwich Village scene.

Soon he was to become nationally known for his brilliant plays, and his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was a Broadway hit and earned him his first Pulitzer Prize.

In reviewing the video and the biography, it is simply amazing that a man who fell so far from respectability, drank so heavily and embarrassed himself so often, could rise to the top of the literary world and take home two Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize to boot. it's amazing, and I am inspired to read more of his plays now.

Is Desire Under the Elms Life-Affirming?

Why do I not believe that the crime committed by Abbie in this play helps Eben find the meaning of real love? It is true that after the baby is killed Eben first rages and runs away but returns begging forgiveness, but that's not real love nor is it life-affirming; it's more like death-affirming. Real love in the first place is seemingly not possible in a house that is so full of hatred, of jealousy, of incest and betrayal. Eben truly hates his father because Eben believes his father worked his late mother to death and because he believes the father (Cabot) has authorized someone else to take over the farm.

Cabot hates Eben, his son, because Cabot is jealous that Eben is young and virile and handsome and has his whole life ahead of him. Critic Safi Mahfouz notes how skillfully Abbie plays Eben against Eben's father. Eben tells Abbie that his dad "…couldn't 'preciate" (O'Neill, 354) Eben's mother. And quickly Abbie "plays on words," (Mahfouz, 2010) by saying, "He can't 'preciate me!" (O'Neill, 354). But as Mahfouz points out, Abbie is in reality saying she's not getting any sex from the old man and a younger man like Eben could / should satisfy her.

A person would have a hard time coming to the opinion that this play was life-affirming by reading through Desire Under the Elms . By coming across passage after passage that was sexually and morally twisted, it could occur to a reader (who hasn't seen the play) that O'Neill was testing the limits of good taste in literature. His own past certainly crossed over the line of morality and social mores on many occasions, so reading the wildly unethical passages, and the steamy sexual passages in this play leads a reader to wonder if all those years when O'Neill was in a drunken stupor ruined his moral capacity and he was just sharing what his tormented mind was spewing out on paper.

How, for example, could anyone believe that because his lover -- who also happens to be his step mother and his father's wife -- killed his new baby boy, she is proving her absolute loyalty to him? How could it be understood that by strangling a baby in a crib, Eben's baby, that Eben would then believe Abbie truly was not trying to cheat him out of the farm he believes he will inherit? It makes an alert read queasy and disturbed.

"Ye must've swapped yer soul t'hell," Eben yells at Abbie, after finding out his child is dead (O'Neill, 371). On the one hand, in this crazed household anything, no matter how foolish or ignorant or morally nauseous, is possible and likely to happen. On the other hand, love can bring about passions that are clearly beyond normal behavior, so the sexual tension between Abbie and Eben can be taken into account no matter how absurd the actions of the characters are.