O'Neill, Nietzsche, and Cows

O'Neill, Nietzsche, and Cows SAMUEL A. WEISS One ofthe oddest moments in O'Neill, certainly for city dwellers, occurs in Part II, scene 2 of Desire Under the Elms, when the patriarchal Ephraim Cabot poignantly tries to explain himselfto his wife Abbie, whose mind and desire are concentrated on her stepson Eben in the adjacent bedroom. Ephraim, who desperately desires a son worthy of the farm he has built up by his "sweat 'n blood," turns to Abbie in a vain effort to be understood, to explain his "hardness," his following God's will in building a flourishing farm out ofrocky soil by sheer persistence and strength that rejected the "easy" way and built a stone wall of misunderstanding between him, his wives and sons. And all the time he "growd hard" and "kept gittin' lonesomer." To overcome his lonesomeness he took a wife, then another. Both died and neither "knowed" him nor understood his God-driven hardness and what the farm meant. Nor did his covetous, "soft" sons, who hated him. And in his bitterness, he set out that spring to heed the voice of God "cryin' in my wilderness, in my lonesomeness ," to seek and find. The result was his marriage to Abbie to whom he "clove ... in my lonesomeness" and his joyous dream of a son who will grow up to be like him. "Will ye ever know me - 'r will any man 'r woman?" asks Cabot as he begins his long "confession" to Abbie. But she isn't listening. In bitter anger, commanding Abbie to pray "fur understandin'," he pulls on his pants and boots, complaining that "It's cold in this house. It's oneasy. They's thin's pokin' about in the dark - in the corners." He goes "Down whar it's restful - whar it's warm - down t' the barn. (Bitterly) I kin talk t' the cows. They know. They know the farm an' me. They'll give me peace.'" In the previous scene, Ephraim, who had, since Abbie's arrival on the farm, "softened, mellowed," and "taken on a strange, incongruous, dreamy quality," stares at the "purty" sky and, feeling his age, remarks: "It's allus lonesome cold in the house" whereas "It's wa'm down t' the bam - nice smellin' an' wa'm with the cows. (A pause) Cows is queer." And when he fantasizes burning the (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 494 O'Neill, Nietzsche, and Cows 495 fann to the ground rather than surrender it to others at death, he adds "with a queer affection": "'Ceptin' the cows. Them I'd tum free." Later, in Part III, scene I , after dancing wildly at the celebration of his new son's birth, Ephraim leaves the kitchen and reverts to his uneasiness: "Even the music can't drive it out - somethin'. Ye kin feel it ctroppin' off the elums, climbin' up the roof, sneakin' down the chimney, pokin' in the comers! They's no peace in houses, they's no rest livin' with folks. .. . I'll go t' the bam an' rest a spell" (p. 189). And when he learns of the betrayal by Abbie and Eben, he identifies it with his feelings about something poking in the comers. "An' mebbe I suspicioned it all along. I felt they was somethin' onnateral - somewhars - the house got so lonesome - an' cold - drivin' me down t' the bam - I' the beasts 0' the field." And in momentary despair, he sets the cows loose while detemrining to bum down the fann. The Gelbs inform us in O'Neill that Cabot's sense of unease in the house parallels O'Neill's own discomfort in his rural fann home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where O'Neill sensed presences within and outside his house and took to sleeping, like Cabot, in the bam.' Louis Sheaffer, in O'Neill, Son and Playwright, describes the Academy ofSt. Vincent, which O'Neill entered when he was seven, as situated on a large fann that included animals and where the young O'Neill apparently absorbed the quiet, placid strength ofthe cows, which in the adult playwright figured as images of solid, accepting, maternal women. The "cow"-like woman appears in...