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.
Work, family, and gender relationships
In the book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and The Revolution at Home, by Arlie Hochschild gives a lot of detailed information as well as additional tactics through which men and women in two career marriages manage…