Yet still they side with Oedipus—“No, not till I see / these charges proved will I side with his accusers" (567-68)—because Oedipus represents the best of humanity, a man whose talents are beyond their own.  When Oedipus finally sees that the truth of human misery is beyond even his comprehension, he blinds himself—an act that suggests surrender to the unknowable and the limits of human knowledge.

Eugene O'Neill's Attic Spirit: Desire Under The Elms

 Many studies of Eugene O'Neill's plays, when not searching out flaws and speaking of fate, advance thematic formulas about his drama that pose blanket truths and offer universalities that transcend style and conceptualization.  With a writer who experimented as much in form as did O'Neill, this seems a lamentable practice.  Desire Under The Elms in particular has suffered from generalizations and misunderstandings.  The play essays pure Attic tragedy—not inaccurately perceived, as O'Neill believed Greek plays often were—within a setting that is modern and seemingly inconducive to such a venture.  It is a noble attempt, one not always successful, that warrants a fresh look at this misunderstood work.

The model for O'Neill's tragedy are the Hippolytus and Medea of Euripides.  The Hippolytus is the more apparent source, as the plot of Desire follows the same triangular conflict and revolves around an incestuous crisis between mother and son—not a blood relationship, but one provoked, in both instances, by the father's remarriage.  Little credit, however, has been given to the Medea as an influence upon O'Neill's play; yet both are works of passionate hatred as well as love, and both center upon tragic victims rather than tragic heroes.

Like the Hippolytus, Desire is a well-plotted play whose simple story depicts a change in character development commensurate with that in plot.  That is, as the story alters in linear development the characters may be said to alter horizontally in equal proportion.  O'Neill's plot, which examines the interrelationship of three lives, structurally recognizes a moral order and deistic allegiance beyond any one character.  In its plot, Desire is far more akin to the Hippolytus than the Medea, for the latter play relinquishes narrative structure, yielding all to the towering character of its heroine.

Nonetheless, O'Neill takes from the Medea a passion associated with both the maddening fury of hate and the convoluted ecstasy of love.  Establishing his play upon extant works, much as Euripides based his upon myths, O'Neill replicates the passion and conflicts between the gods as in the Hippolytus, while recreating the emotional rhythm of hatred and passion found in the Medea.  Although the outward form is modern realism, the spirit is purely Attic.  And like the Hippolytus and Medea, Desire Under The Elms is, first and foremost, a story of possession.

In the two plays of Euripides, Aphrodite maddens Phaedra and Medea, possessing them as a daimon and overpowering their reason.  O'Neill has the son possessed by a mother who, in a modern pantheon, wields the power of love goddess.  The elms, her outward form, are an ever-present maternal set piece.  O'Neill describes their function in the scenic design with words that suggest the visual presence of a significant entity, not mere set decoration, as he notes their "sinister maternity" and "crushing jealous absorption" (136).

The elms assume the role of mute stage actor, growing in importance as the play progresses.  When Cabot and Abbie make their entrance in the second scene, the shapes of "sinister maternity" recall the previous wives of Cabot, who were worked to death to serve his passion for the farm.  Nor can one ignore the evil vitality they suggest when Abbie suffocates her child, much as the elms smother the house and those within.  Ernest G. Griffin has referred to the elms as an "arboreal oversoul" (16), a term too poetically pale for such a dynamic symbol.  They represent the possessing deity as mystic grotesque, the daimon who instills desire.  Their presence is like the static figure of the god announcing vengeance; and, as in the Medea and Hippolytus, all in proximity to the vengeful god's wrath will suffer.  It is Eben's great mistake to suppose the spirit of the house friendly toward him—it is not, though he calls to his mother from the depths of his fear, his needs, and his loneliness. 

Loneliness is the common thread spun by the fates of each character, and when turned into self-sufficiency it serves as a modern parallel for the cause of Aphrodite's anger with Hippolytus.  She is, like Cabot's God, a jealous deity and not one to be ignored.  Because Cabot serves the "God o' the lonesome," everyone is made to feel the pain of his isolation.  The longing within Eben for kinship drives him to Abbie, who offers comfort in the guise of passion; but, rather than ennobling her, he merely debases himself. 

The daimon who inflames the desires of Phaedra and Medea is an external entity, a god.  So, too, as the elms which watch over the house, O'Neill's absent character, Eben's mother, has a spiritual quality beyond the ken of simple rustics.  But the set of Desire Under The Elms has a second symbolic, functioning scenic piece: a stone wall that runs across the front of the stage.  Like the elms, the wall grows in significance as the play progresses.  Like a mute chorus, these two static, imagistic observers make their quiet truth heard amid, beyond and beneath the dialogue of the characters. 

Cabot is stamped in the mold of the insular puritan—an Ahab come ashore on the American coast, driven by an Old Testament God, who is jealous, exacting, and ever-present.  In contrast, his wives are unsuited to his purposes and cannot survive his hard, demanding life.  The God of Cabot is not the god of the women on the farm, and a contrast of spirit, much like a Dionysian/ Apollonian dichotomy, is represented by these silent observers—stone wall and elms.  Cabot may serve a hard God found in the stones, but the women too have a place on the farm.  Representing chthonian deities of the earth, their spirits take form in the dark recesses of shuttered rooms and rise from the land like phantasmic trees.

The conflict of deities offers a further similarity to the Hippolytus and its conflict between Aphrodite and Artemis.  As Aphrodite plans the destruction of Hippolytus, so too does the maternal vengeance of the farm seek to destroy Cabot, who serves a different god.  Both Cabot and Eben call upon their gods for assistance, even as Hippolytus cries out before his death: "O Zeus, if I am sinful, let me cease to live."  But gods do not always interfere.  Cabot calls to his God on the evening that Abbie and Eben lie together: "God A'mighty, call from the dark!" (174).  Although his prayer is not answered, Eben's "Maw? Whar air yew?" (176) finds response momentarily in the darkened parlor.

The pervasive influence of externalized gods upon characters' actions adds greatly to the "Greekness" of O'Neill's play.  Both deities are summoned in moments of need, and neither god is interchangeable with the other: Cabot clearly fears the unknown entity which seems inimical and threatening to him, while Eben interrupts his father's call to heaven with "T' hell with yewr God!" (161).  Cabot's god is clearly under siege by the chthonian spirit of Eben's mother, and the conflict is internalized in the character's behavior, prayers, and fears. 

While O'Neill's God-to-man relationship in Desire is not as internal as he would later make it, where God becomes part of a modern subconscious, neither is that relationship secure and fast in some remote past.  The gods, while externalized, are still placed in the vague, uneasy modern world of spiritual desolation.  Even though the play takes place in 1850, the tenor of the work has a modern, even timeless feel to it. 

To present his troubled relationship in an arena of immediacy between God and man, and yet capture that tortured soullessness that filled his own era, O'Neill found a suitable descriptive ambiguity.  The most often used word of any consequence in Desire is the indefinite and intangible "somethin'," which serves to explain as well as possible the unanswerable, indescribable feelings of fear and uneasiness that the characters experience.  For these simple, inarticulate people the word is sufficiently expressive and easily understood, and throughout the play it takes on increasing importance and grows in momentousness and meaning to a phrase, a concept, and finally a truth.  Could the word be defined, one feels, the unanswerable would at last find expression.  Abbie uses the word in the shuttered parlor the night she seduces Eben, and he affirms that "somethin'" to be his mother.  Her presence is more than just a third party to their lust, for on this night Eben acts in a way that suggests he is being manipulated—being directed by some force other than his own.  As Abbie beckons him to meet her in that place which will stir his passion the most—the id of the farm's consciousness and the center of Eben's world—the stage directions reveal the other force at work in his confused, driven mind.  Eben is directed to dress "mechanically" in his finest clothes before muttering "in bewilderment, wonderingly," helplessly, "Maw! Whar air yew?" (176).

The answer to Eben's question soon becomes apparent; his behavior in this scene suggests that his mother exists in more than just the darkened, airless room where she lay in death.  Yet Cabot truly validates her presence, for he is no motherless child or impressionable young man in arrested psycho-development.  The patriarch attributes to the "somethin'" a pervasive influence on the lives of everyone on the farm, describing it as a thing that drops off trees, sneaks down chimneys, and lives in corners (189).

The dead mother, in memory at least, possesses everyone beneath the elms: she represents  the "somethin'" that all are aware of but cannot see or articulate.  The enigmatic "somethin'" that defines the unseen force in these people's lives transforms itself into an ambiguity of desires and needs.  And a confusion between wanting and needing sets in motion the tragic events of the play as Abbie is brought to the farm.  Her desire for Eben appeals to his elemental, instinctual longings: "Nature'll beat ye, Eben.  Ye might's well own upt' it fust 's last" (164).  Her words synthesize the tragic essence of the play, the confusion of passionate desire with a nobility in love.  Abbie's coarse nature and suggestive speech anticipate the changed relationship between Eben and herself, but the tenor of her words does not adumbrate a change for the better.  Lust fills her spirit and grows within her like the "elums" to which she likens Eben.  This dichotomy of meaning and appropriateness is important to the play as it establishes a tension of expectation and acts as the contradictory emotion so prevalent in tragic characters, especially in the Hippolytus, where Phaedra suffers the conflicts of honor and passion. 

The allegiance one owes to the moral and the natural self remains confused in Desire Under The Elms,  which presents the central conflict of the Hippolytus as well, as Aphrodite comes into conflict with the goddess Artemis.  The desire that Eben has for Abbie distorts his reason and arises from his possession by his mother's daimon.  Arguably, he comes to know more than lust with Abbie, but his moral amelioration does not occur until the end of the play, when he realizes that he has been used for the vengeance of his mother and then acknowledges his love for Abbie and shares in her guilt.  Not until that moment is there truly a transformation of his character or is he ennobled as a tragic victim.

Is Eben, then, fated to his end?  Is Abbie not ultimately responsible for deceiving her husband and killing her child?  In a play that combines a Greek concept of deity with a Christian God, fate is problematical—not because it is essential to Greek tragedy, but because it is a questionable "given" in the conceptualization of tragic form.  The answer remains familial.

O'Neill identified the family as a "destructive entity" (Williams 117); and though he does not alter his concept of the destructive family in Desire, the idea takes on a different and greater meaning by its context—its Greekness.  Blood assumes the role of fate, as surely as in the houses of Cadmus or Atreus.  Eben suffers because he is his mother's son as well as his father's; his mannerisms cause those around him to see his likeness to one or the other parent.  Thus Eben becomes caught in a crisis of identity which, rather than pulling him apart, leads him inextricably to a fated predicament.  When understanding Desire as an attempt at Greek tragedy, one views even the baby's death as the consequence of blood relation.  The baby dies because he is Eben's, and Eben suffers because he is Cabot's son.

Most curious about Desire, however, remains the play's flaw.  The most prevalent imagistic leitmotif running through the work is a continuous and unrelieved animalism, which debases the play's nobility: the brothers move together like two oxen, Cabot finds comfort with his cows, and Abbie sees Eben as a "prize bull" (164).  Such prevalent use of this imagery prevents the sudden passion that takes place between the two from appearing as grand and noble as O'Neill doubtless intended.  The animalism may be an attempt by O'Neill to suggest the essential animalistic passions from which those elemental gods sprung; but the attempt still constitutes a weakness in the play.  The complete lack of inhibitions and raw sexual desires that finally erupt between Abbie and Eben, which should remove all reason from their humanity, is less than explosive.  While the stage direction has them "panting like two animals" (174), one is inclined to accept this as de rigueur on a farm where everyone does likewise.

The weakness of the play, the ignobility of the characters, ultimately taught O'Neill lessons for other tragic works; but none that followed had the purity of the Greek form found in Desire Under The Elms.  Many have lauded it as a turning point in O'Neill's craft, a tragedy that made the later, greater works possible; but its true Greek quality has often been overlooked, except by those who note the plot similarity to the Hippolytus.  Yet for its simplicity of narrative, depth of characterization, and tragic inevitability it remains a powerful work that shares the tragic Attic beauty of the dramas that inspire it. 

Works Cited

  Griffin, Ernest G.  "Eugene O'Neill: An Introduction to His Life and Career."  In Eugene O'Neill: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Ernest G. Griffin.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976: 1-20.

O'Neill, Eugene.  Desire Under the Elms.  In Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill.  New York: Modern Library, 1941: 135-206.

Williams, Raymond.  Modern Tragedy.  Stanford University Press, 1967.