Desire Under the Elms

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE EUGENE O'NEILL'S SLAVES TO STONE WALLS: DENIAL VERSUS ACCEPTANCE IN DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English by Richard Paul Buller May 1988 The Thesis of Richard Paul Buller is approved: Dr. Lawrence D. Stewart, Honors Advisor California State University, Northridge ii Dedications This thesis is dedicated with love to my parents, Hurley Clyde Buller and Billie Joan McClanahan, for their unwavering support of and encouragement for my education. They are truly special, enlightened people. I also wish to acknowledge Dr. Lesley Johnstone and Dr. Lawrence D. Stewart. Dr. Johnstone has patiently guided me through this paper, and her advice and meticu lous annotations have been greatly appreciated! Dr. Stewart has been my friend and mentor these past five years, and I do not know where I would be without him. Finally, I want to thank my friend Anthony Miles Escalante, for always being there, for always listening. iii " . My special thanks to Teddy Zamora for her invaluable help with the electronic typesetting of this thesis. iv ABSTRACT EUGENE O'NEILL'S SLAVES TO STONE WALLS: DENIAL VERSUS ACCEPTANCE IN DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS by Richard Paul Buller Bachelor of Arts in Honors English 1988 marks the centennial of Eugene O'Neill's birth. Much is being done world- wide to commemorate the event, but at the same time, long-standing questions have resurfaced which challenge his stature as one of the greatest American playwrights. For example, do the bleak, unhappy characters and events in much of his drama actually have redeeming value? Do what have been called the "soap opera" tendencies of his plays allow us to respect them as literature? Was O'Neill really a visionary genius, or was he only a depressed man who penned crude melodrama? It is my opinion that in order to address such questions, it is necessary to approach O'Neill thematically. Consequently, in this thesis I will isolate a major O'Neillian theme and will analyze in detail how it emerges in a representative and major play, Desire Under the Elms. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that behind the desolation so v characteristic of O'Neill's theater are firm, intensively formulated thematic ideas. I will thereby create an argument in support of his stature as an important playwright of the 20th. century. The theme that I have chosen to consider is that of denial versus acceptance. This element, prevalent in much of O'Neill's work, is particularly pronounced in Desire Under the Elms, one of his earliest plays. Desire is built almost entirely upon this important theme; therefore, one should understand this play in order to better appreciate what O'Neill attempts to accomplish in his canon as a whole. In O'Neill's universe, to reject escapism or denial in favor of acceptance entails man's struggle to come to terms with and to accept the purer, better parts of his personality, notably his need for companionship and the longing to give and to receive love. Unfortunately, these latent humane elements are often corrupted by an urge to deny them and to pursue instead false goals based upon, for example, substance abuse, avarice, or misdirected sexuality. This conflict casts O'Neillian characters into terrible struggles, but they usually emerge from them somehow strengthened, progress ing to a state of accepting their better selves, their more enlightened attitudes and more generous feelings. Variants of this process exist in many of O'Neill's plays; but my thesis will pursue it through an analysis of Desire, where the theme is especially concentrated. This play crystallizes the kinds of moral and psychological problems O'Neill would devote the rest of his career to investigating. vi EUGENE O'NEILL'S SLAVES TO STONE WALLS: DENIAL VERSUS ACCEPTANCE IN DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS by Richard Paul Buller "There is beauty to me even in ugliness," Eugene O'Neill once remarked. "I don't love life because it's pretty; prettiness is only clothes-deep. I am a truer lover than that. I love it naked" (quoted in Bowen 152). He made this statement in response to the charge leveled against him by certain critics and play-goers that his dramas were often unnec essarily sordid and gloomy, thereby lacking any redeeming value. O'Neill countered that in the dreariest and most depressing aspects of his plots existed the brightest and most worthwhile attributes:· People talk of the "tragedy" in them [his plays] and call it "sordid," "depress ing," "pessimistic" - the words usually applied to anything of a tragic nature. But tragedy, I think, has the meaning the Greeks gave it. To them it brought exaltation, an urge toward life and ever more life. It roused them to deeper spiritual understandings and released them from the petty greeds of everyday existence. When they saw a tragedy on the stage they felt their own hopeless hope ennobled in art. (quoted in Tornqvist 13) In this explanation, O'Neill touches upon a major theme which pervades many of his plays: the "urge toward life" and the existence of "hope" achieved through "deeper 1 2 spiritual understandings" and through a casting away of "the petty greeds of everyday existence." This concept is important in some of O'Neill's key works, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1940); however, it is particularly well defined in Desire Under the Elms (1924), the subject of this thesis. In Desire Under the Elms, O'Neill conveys the theme by tracing character develop ment in terms of denial versus acceptance. At the play's beginning, all of the members of the Cabot family are denying their own better natures, "the urge toward life," in favor of "petty greeds." They are miserable because they have no sense of love, forgiveness, sharing and generosity, those non-material elements which O'Neill considers vital to making life meaningful. But, as the play progresses, two of these characters come to understand the dictates of their better selves. They mature as they begin to see life in tender and loving terms, as opposed to selfish and intolerant ones. And by doing so, they express O'Neill's view, quoted above, that tragic experience, by illuminating what a fruitful life entails, can release people from narrowness and error. Since O'Neill carefully structures Part One to demonstrate that the Cabot farm, located "in New England in the year 1850" (O'Neill 2), is in an unhealthy state and is by no means a "home" (6) to those who inhabit it, it is useful to analyze each of its four scenes. Scene One opens with a "still" (3).sunset, which reflects onto the "shadow[y] ... pale ... washed out" (3) house. The "sinister" (2) elms are immediately introduced: they are "oppressiv[e], ""crushing," and "jealous," shading "faded" (2) shutters. The house and trees visually establish a sense of constriction, loneliness, physical decay, and through them the audience understands that the natural order has been disrupted. They serve as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting in a sad, haunting way upon the tempest in the play. 3 O'Neill deepens this sense of disintegration and foreboding as he introduces the Cabot brothers. Eben enters, surveys the farm, and speaks the play's opening line: "God! Purty!" (3). His remark is intriguing and doubly significant. Firstly and most obviously, it is upbeat, suggesting that some spiritual sensitivity and love of life are present in him - attributes which the play's later events will at times confirm, at times negate. Secondly, it is ironic, coming from a man who as Part One progresses proves to be very much out of touch with God and who is himself "resentful and defensive," "rough," and "fierce" (3). He has "defiant, dark eyes" which "remind one of a wild animal's in captivity" {3), and each day for him " ... is a cage in which he finds himself trapped but inwardly unsubdued" (3). Like the elms, he has about him a somewhat sinister aura, which contributes to the bleak atmosphere O'Neill is creating. Eben's half-brothers Simeon and Peter are older. "[S]hrewder and more practical" (3), they "smell of earth" (3) and have, like Eben, worked their father Ephraim's farm for most of their lives. They speak often with "sardonic bitterness" (4), and are the first to voice the tremendous animosity which they and Eben feel toward Ephraim and toward the hard life they believe he has tyranically forced them to endure. Peter utters this important denunciation of their lives: "Here-it's stones atop o' the ground-stones atop o' stones-makin' stone walls-year atop o' year-him [Ephraim] 'n' yew [Simeon] 'n' me 'n' then Eben-makin' stone walls fur him to fence us in!" (4) This bitter declaration expresses a theme which O'Neill devotes much of the play to developing: the destructiveness of laboring for goals based upon materialism. The Cabot brothers are indeed fenced in, but in large part by their own designs to make Ephraim's farm more lucrative and eventually to inherit it. They are motivated by greed and by their belief that happiness can be equated only with material possessions. Hence, when Peter states that Ephraim is the cause of their enslavement to "stone 4 walls," he is not being entirely truthful: they are just as much their own captors. These walls, which they have all built, create barriers which cause separation and tension between the family members.

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