Laying Ella’s Ghost: Sublimation of Incestuous Love in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms and A Moon for the Misbegotten

Eugene O’Neill’s treatment of the subject of adult love in the early Desire under the Elms and his concluding work, A Moon for the Misbegotten, finds expression on the dual planes of the maternal and the romantic. The distinction between the two appears in the terms of Oedipal transgression. The former is associated with motherly warmth, security, wholeness of being, and the latter a distracting, erotic passion that only augments desire and self-destruction, leading the concerned protagonists to the threshold of tragedy. For O’Neill, there are semiautobiographical overtones to these depictions. The unsanctioned but conscious alignment of the two dimensions of love raises the specter of incest, which requires a process of exorcism and sublimation for equilibrium to prevail.