But it is perhaps so that had the man followed his dream, he would have died content rather than in abject misery and with a sense of imprisonment in the confines of farm and family. In this regard, Beyond the Horizon suggests that man's tragic fate is to be pulled at once by his dreams and by the realistic imperatives of life such as love, family, work and obligation. In the resolution, this internal paradox renders man an empty and discontent shell of what he dreams to become.
If this perception of man's tragic fate is altered in any regard during the intervening four years between the two plays in question, it is perhaps in the yet less redeeming nature of the dreamers in Desire Under the Elms. Where the parties in Beyond the Horizon bypassed their dreams in spite of themselves, the greedy brothers and the inconstant wife of Desire pursue their dreams in spite of one another. Eben, Ephraim and Abbie are, similarly, locked into a love triangle. However, unlike the figures in his first play, O'Neill casts these as characters with no regard for one another. In this sense, man's tragic fate seems less to center on the inevitable disappointment of dream, materialized or lost, and instead to center on the power of a dream to corrupt, to transform into greed and ultimately to manifest as malice toward others.
In Eben, we can see the greed and selfishness instilled in him by their recently deceased father. Buying out his brothers for the family farm on gains stolen from their father and subsequently impregnating Ephraim's betrothed Abbie, Eben is a picture of ruthlessness....
His ambitions -- his dreams we might suggest -- are more precious to him than family or integrity. And just as Robert pays an ultimate price for his failure to pursue his own dreams, so too will Eben pay a dear price when Abbie murders their bastard infant. Here, O'Neill's conception of man's tragic fate has taken yet a darker turn, as Ephraim soliloquies toward the resolution. Here, he speaks bitterly to both Eben and Abbie, making a case that their ambitions as represented by ownership of the family farm are types of careless dreams that make men do evil. In Act III, Scene IV, he charges, "Ye make a slick pair o' murderin' turtle doves! Ye'd ought t' be both hung on the same limb an' left thar t' swing in the breeze an' rot -- a warnin' t' old fools like me t' b'ar their lonesomeness alone -- an' fur young fools like ye t' hobble their lust. (a pause. The excitement returns to his face, his eyes snap, he looks a bit crazy.) I couldn't work today. I couldn't take no interest. T' hell with the farm. I'm leavin' it! I've turned the cows an' other stock loose. I've druv 'em into the woods whar they kin be free! By freein' 'em, I'm freein' myself! I'm quittin' here today!"
For Ephraim, O'Neill's sense of the human condition has become all too clear. Just as for Robert, the pursuit of dreams and the dependency upon these dreams manifesting as expected or desired is the ultimate path to personal destruction.
Works Cited:
O'Neill, E. (1920). Beyond the Horizon. Bartleby.com.
O'Neill, E. (1924). Desire Under the Elms. Gutenberg.net.
