Relocating the Resort: Eugene O’ Neill’s Desire Under the Elms
| Authors |
| Pangeijam Sanjeev |
| Date of Publication: December, 2024 |
| Volume: XXIII, No.- XXVI |
| Abstract |
| In this nightmarish age of broken values, of breaking off man from all the sources of vitality has gradually made him down and broken which finally lead to the loss of faith of finding a peaceful harmony in this world. This has made him disintegrated and distaste from the world around him. Further, the duress of the system and convention of the society have pressure him to live an alienated life resulting in tension which has threaten his identity as an individual human. This fact of the desperation latent in modern life is, in fact, make conscious by certain dramatists. These dramatists have come to realize that man must develop a consolidated ethics of valves that may give solidarity to his free will and help him settle within human personality. They try to analyze the gloomy realm of human psyche and to introduce an affirming faith- a resort in this vex era. Among the modern dramatist who gives a vivid commentary to this feature of the age is Eugene O’ Neill. His play is not an exploration for certainties; rather seems to persistently seeking for truth. Therefore, rather than giving solution, he highlighted options so that the audience may have a momentary glimpse of the truth that exist concealed. Finally, this short glimpse will compel man to find a resort to re-energized and replenish his life. Such a vision of the human situation finds its mature and culminating expression in O’ Neill’s play Desire Under the Elms. This play is of three hours of eloquent agony in which hell is emptied and all devils let loose upon a New England farm. Its distresses span from lusty affair to homicide with all sins like drinking, brawling, vengeance and incest. It is 1850 on a New England farm, old Ephraim Cabot, as stony as his hostile acres, is bringing a bride, his third. Two sons by his first wife, foreseeing their disinheritance,start for the gold fields of California, leaving Eben, their handsome step brother and son of the second wife to face their new mother. Their mother is a young blood with cold heart and wild eyes which cast an enchanting spell on Eben. She schemes for a plan to allure and to captivate Eben so that she may have a settled life with no threat. This is all because she knows that the only resistance between her and her objective to inherit the farm and assets of Cabot will be Eben. Aided by her step son’s hatred for his grim father, she seduces the boy, as a consequence of that misbehaviour has a child by him. Later in the play, when life as Mr. O’ Neill sees it comes to grip with life, she murders the baby, thinking to please the irresolute Eben. That action at first horrifies him, and he gives her up to the law. But at the end Eben returns to the kisses of her thin, red lips and goes to the gallows with her. O’Neill’s hope of finding for the lost faith in human relationships never materialized. He died in the belief that human spirit will perhaps find a resting place. From time to time its clutches at an illusion that provides a temporary stay against confusion, but gradually all illusions turn out to be pipe-dreams. Still it is the illusion that sustains life, it is the resort- a short stay that energized life. This was the final conclusion he arrived at in his elaborately patterned play Desire Under the Elms. |
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