Desire Under the Elms

Eugene O’Neil, the only American playwright to win the noble prize, manages to capture the modernist themes of loss in a different way than most of the other authors we have sampled, in Desire Under the Elms.

Loss of hope is explored through Eben’s mother’s death, the death of the baby, and the loss of love. At the end in a very ironic way, Eben finds his love again but they are still hopeless. Eben deals with the loss of love and hope by fixating on the opposite, which is hatred. When his mother dies, Eben deals with that by hating his stepfather and blaming him for it instead of just accepting her death. Throughout the entire story Eben is fixated on his mother’s presence on the farm is a supernatural form. When Abbie says she feels something is the parlor Eben responds with “Maw…Maw allus loved me.” Also, after Abbie kills the baby, he asks his mother why she didn’t stop her. When Eben loses his love because he thought that Abbie was using him to steal the farm, he deals with it by fixating on the symbol of their love, the baby. While he is fighting with Abbie he says, “I wish he never was born! I wish he’d die this minit! I wish I”d never sot eyes on him! It’s him—yew havin’ him—a-purpose t’steal—that’s changed everythin’!” When Abbie reveals that she had killed the baby he focuses his emotion on her:

“Shut up, or I’ll kill ye! … Don’t ye tech me! Ye’re pizen! How could ye—t’murder a pore little critter—Ye must’ve swapped yer soul t’hell! Ha! I kin see why ye done it! Not the lies ye jest told—but ‘cause ye wanted t’steal agen—steal the last thin’ ye’d left me—my part o’him—no, the hull o’him—ye saw he looked like me—ye knowed he was all mine—an’ ye couldn’t b’ar it—I know ye! Ye killed him fur bein’ mine! But I’ll take vengeance now!”  

          As Travis Bogard states in A Contour in Time, the Dionysian way of life is also used to deal with the loss of love and hope. While Eben in love and happy, Ephraim just assumes he’s drunk as if in life there is no other reason to be genuinely happy except when intoxicated. When Eben feels he has nothing else, he leaves Abbie to be in a dreamlike drunken stupor and frolic with the village girls. In the morning, he doesn’t recollect saying vicious things about the baby and is horrified by the corrective actions Abbie has taken to fix their relationship.

             The play also centers around a comment on the stereotypes of society. America was a mother orientated society during the time that Desire was written. O’Neil challenges the meaning of mother through the incestuous and what would be seen on paper as inappropriate relationship between Eben and the woman referred to as his new Maw. In a symbolic way, Eben and Abbie consummate their love for each other in his mother’s parlor where when he was a child they had bonded and she had sun to him. This makes the reader uncomfortable with the situation; it feels morally wrong for more than the reasons of a typical affair.It also challenges the relationship between father and son in a Freudian manner, reducing it to universal competition. When Eben learns that his father had already had his way with Min he is at first disgusted by it, “I’ll go smash my fist in her face!” He doesn’t hit her though, he makes love to her instead. He is competing with his father in this way. They also compete in everything, like the farm work and of course with Abbie. The two are unaware of this competition, however, because it takes everyone else to point out how identical they are. Their similarity is ironic in itself, because neither of them can stand the other.  In the end, Desire Under the Elms, challenges the comtemporary meaning of family and the common ways of dealing with heart break in a different way than anyother author had brought to the American stage.