Gothic Domesticity in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms

In a 2009 article in the Eugene O'Neill Review, Timothy Dugan refers to Desire Under the Elms as a "gothic play" with "gothic circumstances," but without explanation of precisely how the play is "gothic."¹ Probably few readers would dispute Dugan's claim, but the term gothic is itself ambiguous and problematic, often used as a catch-all phrase to describe a mood or psycho-emotive response to a work of literature. This article will attempt to situate the gothic aspects of Desire Under the Elms as arising from, and this most ironically, the play's domestic elements. Indeed, the very elements that should provide a sense of comfort, familiarity, and security—fences, walls, rooms, and so on—reveal themselves ultimately as thresholds of gothic instances of the Uncanny, signs of captivity, and portents of flight or death. An examination of the play's gothic domesticity reveals underlying issues of labor power relations and gender exploitation as Ephraim Cabot's rapacity transforms domestic spaces into oppressive devices to serve his own ends. In this regard, it is instructive to examine gothic as ideology. The home, as a result of patriarchal malevolence and corruption, becomes a site of oppression and bitterness where Ephraim appears to reign unchallenged. But gothic is, by its very nature, transgressive and subversive, and the egomaniacal Cabot is ultimately thwarted and usurped by machinations both corporeal and supernatural.

In his essay on "The Uncanny," Sigmund Freud observes that heimlich ("native," "familiar" or "belonging to the home") becomes unheimlich ("uncanny") when "that [which] ought to have remained secret and hidden . . . has come to light."² In fact, the two terms heimlich and unheimlich, presumably antithetical, eventually become conflated: that which was domestic and familiar becomes hostile, terrifying, and defamiliarized. In her study of the gothic, Art of Darkness, Anne Williams refers to Freud's uncanny as a kind of "defamiliarized familiar" and "the class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar."³ In Desire Under the Elms, O'Neill transforms the Cabot farm, particularly the farmhouse, into an uncanny haunted space. As David Savran has noted in his article "Haunted Houses of Modernity," ghosts in modern drama are not merely a "product of highly subjective, personalized memories but also an embodiment of social, political, and economic forces."⁴ For many of O'Neill's characters, home becomes a site where these various forces intersect violently. In Desire Under the Elms, the setting is

a farmhouse in New England, in the year 1850. The south end of the house faces front to a stone wall with a wooden gate at center opening on a country road. The house is in good condition but in need of paint. Its walls are a sickly grayish, the green of the shutters faded . . . [with] a parlor, the shades of which are always drawn down.⁵

Some of O'Neill's other plays transform the domestic space into a gothic haunted house where specters of memory and past guilt stalk about as perpetual reminders: Long Day's Journey Into Night and Mourning Becomes Electra are the best-known examples. In Modern Gothic: A Reader, Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith characterize gothic as "the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away."⁶ Domesticity in Desire Under the Elms may be read as a medium through which the past impinges on the present. Rather than existing as a place of refuge and peace, O'Neill's domestic space becomes a site where inexorable guilt and repressed memories prevail. Ephraim Cabot's haunted house, the site of past patriarchal transgressions, where Cabot's iron dominance battered his "soft" wife into an early grave, becomes as well a site of perpetual transgression, where the past encounters the present in effecting a challenge to the status quo. This transgressive element manifests itself through domestic aspects in the play, such as when stone walls, kitchen, porch, and parlor reveal their gothic transformation into something uncanny and threatening. Furthermore, O'Neill's gothic conventions in Desire Under the Elms subvert the notion of home as having "a place for everything and everything in its place"; instead, certain characters are themselves "displaced" in the domestic space by other family members who subvert their roles, as seen in the conflict between Ephraim and Eben Cabot, as well as "Maw's" displacement by the seductive Abbie. The parlor, with its foreboding aura of death, looms as the quintessential haunted space in the Cabot household. These gothic elements invert traditional notions of home and domesticity, and in the end even Ephraim, the frustrated patriarch, attempts to abandon his haunted house, though his attempt to flee is, like his other vindictive schemes, ultimately futile.

In his seminal work Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler observes, "bewilderingly and embarrassingly [American literature is] a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic."⁷ But when this evaluation is applied to twentieth-century American drama, one might well replace Fiedler's phrase "bewilderingly and embarrassingly" with "accurately and pointedly," for gothic devices frequently expose and critique many myths about the American family, especially the notion of home as a "place of peace" and the idea of the father as provider and protector.⁸ These gothic devices are often the machinery used to reveal what Teresa Goddu in Gothic America calls "cultural contradictions that haunt America's self-image," particularly when "gloomy wrongs unexpectedly resurface in the midst of commonplace prosperity."⁹ Frequently, these "gloomy wrongs" in American gothic literature involve economic exploitation or treachery used to wrest away land or money from one party in order to enrich the malefactor. This pattern may be traced to such pioneering gothic novels as Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Gothic literature reveals that this "prosperity" alluded to by Miles was invariably the result of past treachery whereby someone was unwillingly deprived of life, liberty, and land. Inevitably, it is the father (or the patriarchal figure) who is responsible for the wrongdoing, whether through theft, deception, assault, or murder. Thus, one of the "cultural contradictions that haunt America's self-image" is that the father, who should be the provider and protector of the family, is actually a villain whose crimes lead to the family's demise.

There is no compelling backstory to mitigate Ephraim Cabot's ruthlessness; in many ways he is one of the most insular of O'Neill's patriarchal figures. Unlike James Tyrone and Ezra Mannon, whose own fathers' character defects likely molded their sons' recalcitrance, we have no such history with Ephraim Cabot. He appears to have come from nowhere, ruthlessly roughhewn from out of the wilderness some semblance of home, and seeking to establish there a rigid autonomy. In the process Ephraim hounded two wives into an early grave and alienated his three sons. But the reckoning for his crimes, though belated, is imminent. Gothic conventions provide the mechanisms through which the wronged party achieves a measure of revenge, though this revenge is often incomplete or unsatisfactory. This is the literary model illustrated in Desire Under the Elms.

O'Neill has said the idea for Desire Under the Elms came to him in a dream.¹⁰ Indeed, the stage directions are rife with archetypal symbolism perhaps indicative of a dream state. O'Neill's stage directions describe the elm trees as having a "sinister maternity," thereby foreshadowing one of the play's major concerns: namely, that the wife and mother has been robbed of her estate by her grasping husband, and her place in the home has been usurped by a young siren. Ephraim Cabot has outlived two wives; one marriage lasted twenty years, and the second, to Eben's mother, who is referred to as "Maw," lasted sixteen years. We do not know how Maw died, but we may infer that her death was brought on, at least incidentally, by Ephraim Cabot's domineering, ravenous personality. Certainly, Eben believes his father to be responsible for Maw's death, saying Ephraim "murdered" her with "his hardness." The two elm trees may represent the two dead wives of Ephraim Cabot, as the elms are given characteristically feminine attributes: O'Neill describes them as being "like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles" (354, 318). Thus the elms' "crushing, jealous absorption," albeit perhaps more naturalistic than domestic, can be seen as a manifestation of a maternal ghostly presence, which haunts the family home, seeking revenge for Ephraim's myriad betrayals—emotional, spiritual, and economic.

The dead mother has lost not only her life and land, but also her name, stripped of any identity outside of her maternal role. Furthermore, the mother's ghost seems strangely tethered to the Cabot farm, unable to leave the site of her subjugation and enjoy eternal rest until her vengeance has been exacted. Gothic novels have traditionally included scenes of women in captivity, and often the captive women are robbed of land by usurping males. Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), as well as Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1795), are seminal gothic novels that establish a pattern of female captivity. In Desire Under the Elms, we witness this captivity of the female only in its aftermath, its eerie, ethereal residue. Just as heroines in gothic novels are often depicted in situations of confinement, the ghostly "Maw" is also relegated to some sort of otherworldly limbo. Eben, with a sort of extrasensory perception, can sense his dead mother's restless spirit:

She still comes back . . . she can't find it nateral sleepin' and restin' in peace. She can't git used t' bein' free—even in her grave.

(324)

With the mother's vengeful ghost looming over the Cabot farm, awaiting the opportune moment to orchestrate her revenge, readers may observe how O'Neill moves through the play's domestic elements, working from the outside in, taking us into the home's heart of darkness—the parlor—which becomes the site of the play's most gothic moment.

The first visible domestic element on the Cabot farm that is transformed gothically into a threatening apparatus is the stone wall or fence, which serves as the patriarch's self-made boundary. Yet these same walls, which should bring security to the family, instead serve to imprison wife and children. Early in the play, Peter Cabot remarks resentfully how their father has made "stone walls fur him to fence us in!" "We been slaves t' stone walls here," Peter reminds his brother Simeon, and these walls are a testament to Ephraim Cabot's unabashed narcissism as he boasts to his new wife, "Ye kin read the years o' my life in them walls, every day a hefted stone, climbin' over the hills up and down, fencin' in the fields that was mine, whar I'd made thin's grow out o'nothin'—like the will o' God." Ephraim views the stone walls as a personal chronicle of his labor, but the stones also acquire, in Ephraim's mind, a supernatural authority which helps him justify his schemes: "God's in the stones!" (320, 332, 349). This declaration recalls a type of religious fanaticism similar to that of the titular patriarch in Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 gothic novel Wieland. Indeed, Cabot invokes God and religion throughout the play in puritanical flourishes of self-righteous rhetorical maneuvering, and the play is woven throughout with biblical allusions. One may never be sure whether Cabot is suffering from psychotic delusions, like Brown's Wieland; however, by declaring God is "in the stones" that built the wall surrounding the farm, Cabot grants himself a supernatural mandate for oppressing his family. Or perhaps Cabot's claim is, after all, mere posturing for his new wife, a type of braggadocio whereby he asserts his ownership and economic viability.

Ephraim's stone walls have so thoroughly encumbered Simeon and Peter's consciousness that the sons suffer from a sort of Lethean stupor in which manual labor is their only solace. O'Neill's adverbs here are indicative of the sons' impotency and malaise: Simeon says "dully," "I keep fergettin'. (Then resignedly) Waal, let's go help Eben a spell an git waked up" (332). This state of mechanical lethargy, a sort of perpetual unknowing, may be read as a result of an intrusive patriarchal ideology that oppresses by virtue of its stealthy and insidious nature. In "The Sublime Object of Ideology," Slavoj Zizek claims that "the most elementary definition of ideology" may be summarized by Marx's statement in Kapital—"They [the proletariat] do not know it, but they are doing it."¹¹ Ephraim has so conditioned his sons to a life of labor that they continue to work by default even though the father with all of his threats and provocations is not physically present. Foucault's famous illustration fromDiscipline and Punish of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon is an apt metaphor for Cabot's ideological hold on his sons. Bentham's Panopticon has a central tower that maintains effective control over any number of prisoners simply by the threat of possible surveillance at any given moment. But Ephraim Cabot has successfully dispensed with even the Panopticon. The threatening, symbolic citadel is obviated by a thorough inculcation of patriarchal ideology, and consequently Simeon and Peter obey their father's commands.

The turning point comes when Ephraim arrives with his new bride, and the sons, however bovine their mental faculties may appear, realize that they will not, after all, inherit any sort of legacy no matter how loyal they are to paternal mandates or how diligent they are in their domestic duties. They resolve to flee the farm for the promise of riches in California, but not before dismantling one of the more visible signs of domestic authority. Simeon "takes the gate off its hinges and puts it under his arm," in that way inflicting the first visible fracture in the presumably solid domestic façade. This assault on the physical entrance to the farm may be read as a symbolic attack on the father himself, which Simeon apparently hasn't the nerve to attempt more directly. But no doubt the sons are familiar with their father's maxim, "Sometimes ye air the farm an' sometimes the farm be yew," so an attack upon the one will stand for an attack upon the other (334, 348). As we see later in the play, this removal of the gate might also represent—on a supernatural level—an inadvertent inducement to Maw's spectral presence to initiate the endgame with Ephraim.

The second domestic element presented in the play is the Cabot kitchen. O'Neill's stage directions for scene 2 describe a "cookstove" and "four rough wooden chairs" as well as

a big advertizing poster with a ship in full sail and the word "California" in big letters. Kitchen utensils hang from the nails. Everything is neat and in order but the atmosphere is of a men's camp kitchen rather than that of a home.

No family portraits are visible on the walls inside the Cabot house, emphasizing Ephraim's peculiarly sequestered nature, as a man who seems to have sprung forth upon the land ex nihilo. Whereas later plays such as Mourning Becomes Electra use portraits to reveal the patriarch's sociohistorical affinities—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall—as well as to suggest physiognomical nuances (Ezra Mannon's eerie resemblance to Adam Brant, for instance), in Desire Under the Elms family portraits—trademarks of domesticity—are supplanted by a wistful nod to wanderlust. The advertising poster directs our focus outward, foreshadowing Simeon and Peter's flight from the gothic home, as well as Ephraim's abortive attempt to make a similar escape in the play's final scene. The tantalizing prospect of outwardly directed hope, reaching beyond the stifling confines of the gothic farm, both inspires and demands a sense of normalcy and at least a veneer of respectability that even Ephraim seems to understand instinctively. This is most aptly illustrated by Simeon's description of their father's departure in the buggy to obtain a new bride: "He druv off in the buggy, all spick an' span, with the mare all breshed an' shiny, druv off clackin' his tongue and wavin' his whip" (320-21, 324). The buggy, itself a token of the play's domesticity, is laden with contradiction—its pristine exterior belies the antipathies smoldering behind the walls of the Cabot home.

With the Cabot kitchen, O'Neill contrives a sort of reverse gendering. Rather than serving as a traditional site of female captivity or tedium, this kitchen is a "men's camp kitchen," with the word "camp" suggesting a paradoxical perpetual transience where none of the sons can find a true home or place of refuge. Eating utensils hang conspicuously on the kitchen wall, ostensible signs of domesticity and civilized behavior in contrast to the stooped, earthy and ape-like appearance of Peter and Simeon (we cannot escape O'Neill's apparent Simeon/simian pun). Indeed, one may well wonder how often the utensils are put to their appointed purpose. Moreover, the kitchen reveals itself as a gothic haunted space when Eben realizes that it is not womanless after all; rather, it resonates with traumatic memories of oppression and conjures the ghost of his dead mother. By taking on his mother's domestic chores, Eben performs, albeit unwittingly, a type of séance, which summons his mother's ghost:

Me cookin'—doin' her work—that made me know her, suffer her sufferin'—she'd come back t'help—come back t'bile potatoes—come back t'fry bacon—come back t'bake biscuits. . . . She still comes back—stands by the stove thar in the evenin'—she can't find it natural sleepin' an' restin' in peace.

(324)

Eben claims first to have seen or sensed the ghost in the kitchen, by the stove. The site, which should be a place of comfort, sustenance, and familial community, instead serves as a reminder of Ephraim's domination and cruelty. Eben's perception of the ghost may be visual, precipitated by supposed guilt over his own role in his mother's death, much as Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses is tormented by his mother's specter following his refusal to pray at her bedside. More likely, however, Eben's perception of Maw's ghost is extrasensory, but no less real for all that, as the subsequent parlor scene makes clear. Perhaps Eben blames himself for failing to save his mother from Ephraim's malevolent designs, but this repressed guilt does not, in itself, account for the ghost's perceived presence, and the result is a more traditional and authentic gothic milieu rather than merely a manifestation of a filial tortured psyche—a distinction made clearer when examined alongside other works by the playwright.

O'Neill explored to varying degrees the depths of maternally focused filial guilt in later works such as The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. In The Iceman Cometh, Don Parritt is driven to suicide by the knowledge that he betrayed his anarchist mother to the authorities. Stephen A. Black observes that portraying Parritt's torment "allowed him [O'Neill] to see that beneath the primal guilt he felt for causing her [Ella O'Neill's] addiction lay the ordinary and resolvable complications of a normal oedipal neurosis."¹² In Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill created Edmund Tyrone as his surrogate who bears the burden of a morphine-addicted mother and the agonizing belief that his birth inadvertently drove his mother to her fate. "The sense of guilt was absorbed by him and shadowed his whole life. For he was convinced that it was his [O'Neill's] birth that made Ella into a narcotics addict."¹³ Eben Cabot may suffer, albeit to a lesser degree, a similar sense of the guilt that plagues Don Parritt and Edmund Tyrone. While Parritt's guilt regarding his mother is legitimate and warranted, and Edmund's irrational guilt is exacerbated by his brother Jamie's sadistic taunts and accusations, Eben perhaps feels he might somehow have saved his mother from Ephraim's rancor, which ultimately proved fatal for her. But the important distinction between these later plays and the gothic dynamic of Desire Under the Elms is the attested presence of the mother's ghost, which Eben readily acknowledges. Moreover, later in part 3 of the play, Ephraim himself acknowledges this ghostly presence, though his identification of the ghost is somewhat erroneous (as we shall see later). Abbie, too, encounters Maw's ghost in the parlor scene (part 2, scene 3) when she tells Eben, "I kin still feel—somethin' . . . It's kind t' me! It don't b'ar me no grudges fur what I never knowed an' couldn't help!" (353). Maw's ghost is portrayed as more judicious than reckless, more purposeful than frenetic, and both Eben and Abbie realize that there is a preternatural plan in which they both will participate, unwittingly or not, in the subsequent parlor scene.

On the threshold of the haunted house, the porch of the Cabot home becomes another expression of gothic domesticity. In scene 3 Eben arrives home in "pitch darkness" and "feeling his way, chuckling bitterly and cursing half-aloud to himself " (326). The porch should be an inviting, "clean well-lighted place," but it is portrayed instead as an ominous, gloomy space, portending the malice and mean-spiritedness lurking behind the walls. O'Neill would later depict a similar scene in Long Day's Journey Into Night when Jamie Tyrone arrives home and stumbles on the stoop of the darkened porch, thanks to his father's parsimonious ways. Both Jamie Tyrone and Eben Cabot arrive home in darkness, and rather than entering quietly in case their families are asleep, both sons' first instinct is to sound a bellicose alarm and demand to be acknowledged: Eben orders everyone in the house to "Wake up!" while Jamie bellows, "What ho!" The darkened porches suggest that the sons were never truly welcome or expected there, and the sons' vitriol is evidence of their rebellion in the face of such blatant indifference. Furthermore, the ominous threshold implies, like Simeon's removal of the gate, that there is no real demarcation between the home's outside and inside, for the patriarchal transgressions and concomitant guilt pervade all of the environs. In a telling remark in a letter to Theresa Helburn in 1928, O'Neill refers to "the method of simultaneous exterior and interiors I used with such revealing effect" in Desire Under the Elms.¹⁴ The ideological implications of this "revealing effect" may perhaps be more clearly understood in the context of Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses":

What thus seems to take place outside ideology . . . in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition to be outside it.¹⁵

O'Neill's blurring of interior and exterior suggests a similar phenomenon—in this case, the obfuscation may be read as a gothic ideology where the past is never past and where home provides no respite from animus. Upon reaching the house, Eben must "feel his way" in attempting to determine whether or not he has arrived "home." In the Althusserian ideological sense, he may be said never to arrive home nor ever to have left; there is no "outside" to Ephraim's patriarchal malfeasance, and O'Neill's presentation of "simultaneous exterior and interiors" demonstrates this phenomenon both here and in subsequent scenes.

O'Neill subverts and transforms the functionality of the farmhouse's interior walls in part 2, scene 2. This scene plays out within the "interior of the two bedrooms on the top floor," but the wall between the bedrooms, though visible to the audience, is nevertheless inefficacious in ensuring privacy and sequestering these most intimate of spaces. This wall has become, in fact, a partition that fails to separate; the wall stands, literally and symbolically, as a mere vestige of the domestic, and it is powerless against the inexorable repercussions of which the patriarch remains ignorant. Most important, the wall acts as a mirror that at once reflects and reveals Ephraim's desire for conquest over everything and everyone. Yet the same wall simultaneously serves as a type of looking glass in which the imminent lovers, Eben and Abbie, peer into the pending consummation of their mutual lust. O'Neill's stage directions depict the careful choreography by which stepmother and stepson are drawn toward the interdicting wall as though they might step through it at any moment:

In the next room EBEN gets up and paces up and down distractedly. ABBIE hears him. Her eyes fasten on the intervening wall with concentrated attention. EBEN stops and stares. Their hot glances seem to meet through the wall. Unconsciously he stretches out his arms for her and she half rises. Then aware, he mutters a curse at himself and flings himself face downward on the bed, his clenched fists above his head, his face buried in the pillow. ABBIE relaxes with a faint sigh but her eyes remain fixed on the wall; she listens with all her attention for some movement from EBEN.

Since, in O'Neill's words, the "house as character" is paramount to the play's dramatic and thematic dynamics, it follows that this wall undergoes a type of osmosis, becoming a conduit linking the lovers psychically and instinctually. Indeed, Ephraim and Abbie seem to gravitate toward the wall and toward each other almost without volition but rather drawn by the lodestone of the gothic house and its resident ghost. The result is a moment of symbolic psychosexual foreplay, which will culminate in the later parlor scene. The irony is inescapable. Ephraim's words and actions toward Eben—namely bravado, as when he threatens to "put him [Eben] across my knee an' birch him!"—appear to be motivated primarily by spite (348, 366). Ephraim doubtless intends to taunt his son and to flaunt his own sexual prowess by deliberately chambering his new bride in the room adjoining Eben's. But this scheme, like others, inevitably recoils to subvert the patriarchal objectives.

The play's inward trek through these various areas of gothic domesticity culminates in the inner sanctum of the haunted house: the parlor. O'Neill's stage directions describe the parlor as "a grim, repressed room like a tomb in which the family has been interred alive," and in fact the parlor may be read not only as a tomb but also as the womb of the house. The parlor serves as the domestic space that harbors not only Maw's vengeful ghost but also subsequently serves as the backdrop for the passionate lovemaking between Eben and Abbie, a sort of incest-by-proxy. Furthermore, since this tryst results in Abbie's pregnancy, the parlor further becomes a type of conflated womb/tomb. Significantly, the parlor—and to a lesser degree, the kitchen—is the domestic space most pregnant with implications for socially constructed gender roles and the subsequent transgression and subversion of these roles in the gothic haunted house. Traditionally, the parlor should be the space of hospitality where guests are entertained and where the family presents a united front of normalcy and social etiquette. More pointedly, the parlor in mid-nineteenth-century America was, along with the kitchen, the customary feminine domestic space, the site of crocheting, card games, gossip, and tea parties. Shortly after Abbie's arrival, Simeon and Peter surmise that "Maw'll be in the parlor," and they execute their impish vengeance upon their usurping stepmother by throwing stones, shattering the parlor window, and "tearing the shade," rending the veil, as it were, and perhaps awakening the ghost of the real "Maw," Eben's dead mother (352, 337). Although Simeon's remark suggests an inexplicably preternatural intuition, it is indeed prescient, for Maw's ghost will soon select the parlor as the backdrop for her revenge.

In a variety of ways, O'Neill subverts the parlor's traditional role as a domestic space. Eben both fears and reveres the parlor as a forbidden, haunted place, which he dare not enter, yet the room symbolizes his memories of his mother, and he feels obligated to guard and defend this territory. Shortly after Abbie arrives, she declares her intentions to appropriate the parlor for herself: "They's one room hain't mine yet, but it's a-goin' t' be tonight. I'm a-goin' down now and light up!" Eben warns her, "Don't ye dare! It hain't been opened since Maw died an' was laid out thar!" The parlor as mortuary is fitting testament not only to Ephraim's voracious lust for power and control, but its Spartan furnishings attest either to Ephraim's failure to provide adequately for the home or to his apathy in this regard. The parlor has a "horsehair sofa," and Abbie has lit the room with candles, revealing its "preserved ugliness" (352). In true gothic fashion, the site where the body lay becomes the birthplace of the ghost's machinations, the past becoming prologue in the most disconcerting sense.

Once inside the parlor, the ghost communicates supernaturally to both Eben and Abbie, orchestrating their lovemaking as an act of vengeance:

Eben:

Maw, what air ye tellin' me?

Abbie:

She's tellin' ye t' love me. . . .

Eben:

I sees why. It's her vengeance on him—so's she kin rest quiet in her grave!

(354)

Granted, Abbie's claim that Maw's ghost is encouraging their affair may be disingenuous, a mere trope, libidinously motivated, in order to successfully seduce her paramour. But there exists the possibility—a possibility augmented when Ephraim himself later senses the ghost's presence—that Abbie indeed finds herself, wittingly or not, influenced by the ghost's contrivances. Eben describes the ghost's intentions as Maw "tellin'" him something—but it is a voiceless, furtive telling by a ghost who cannot speak for herself and must therefore channel her message through a female Other. This ghost is not allowed the puissance of proclamation granted to Hamlet's father—"I am thy mother's spirit"—but rather merely a reticent agency. Perhaps as a result of this voicelessness, neither Abbie nor Eben questions the authenticity of the maternal influence that encourages their intimacies. Gothic literature often exploits the precarious ambiguity between appearance and reality, and this ambiguity is often rhetorical and audible.

One of the best-known examples of this ambiguity in gothic literature appears in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Wieland. Andrew Smith, following Teresa Goddu, observes,

Wieland stages a debate about the instability of language, which can be explained in historical terms by reference to republican strategies intended to lexically fix meaning, strategies which reflect a wider attempt to secure notions of cultural order and political stability. This also represents a desire to find a "voice," one which can give utterance to new, emerging experiences.¹⁶

In Wieland, this "instability of language" is manipulated by Carwin, the ventriloquist who presumes to be the voice of a vengeful deity, with fatal results. In Desire Under the Elms, the instability of language is twofold. First, Eben is unable to perceive clearly the message from his mother's ghost: "Maw, what air ye tellin' me?" In this instance, inaudibility precludes skepticism, so that feeling—not hearing—is believing. Second, Eben must rely solely on Abbie to interpret the ghost's instructions, so that both the message and its credibility remain unstable. In both Wieland and Desire Under the Elms, language emanates from supernatural sources, whether feigned or authentic, presenting a subversive challenge to patriarchal authority. The dead mother's ghost successfully contrives a scene that serves the dual aims of exacting vengeance on the fallen father and consummating a type of surrogate incest with Abbie in the maternal role. Once the parlor has served its purpose as the site of maternal vindication, it becomes at once a more traditional space of vitality and openness. Abbie lifts the shades, flings open the parlor window, and declares, "I'm goin' t' leave the shutters open and let in the sun 'n' air. This room's been dead long enuf. Now it's goin' t' be my room!" (356). Abbie claims the parlor for herself, effectively re-establishing the matronly domestic space, while the brooding, maternal apparition apparently bestows her own tacit approval after having successfully avenged herself on Ephraim by cuckolding him.

Many scholars, including David Punter and Glynnis Byron, have drawn a distinction between "male" and "female" gothic writing: "Male gothic tends to represent the male protagonist's attempt to penetrate some encompassing interior; female Gothic more typically represents a female protagonist's attempts to escape from a confining interior." Both of these categories are applicable to Desire Under the Elms. In a male gothic reading, Ephraim Cabot may be viewed as the protagonist whose attempts to "penetrate some encompassing interior" involve not only his physical and verbal struggle against his progeny, ultimately ending with his sons' dispossession and exile, but also his psycho-emotive struggle to penetrate the interior of the preternatural mystery manifested in the presence of Maw's ghost. On the other hand, a female gothic reading places Maw's ghost as the protagonist struggling to escape the confines of her death chamber (the parlor) after obtaining some measure of belated justice. O'Neill's status as male playwright is immaterial to the gothic question, since "both male and female writers can produce both male and female Gothic."¹⁷

Since, according to Althusser, "ideology has no outside," the opening scene of part 3 provides a particularly revealing example of how gothic inexorably transmogrifies the extrinsic into the domestic and, ultimately, the hermetic. This scene in part 3 is conspicuous because it is the one instance in the play where the stifling isolation of the farm is temporarily violated by outsiders—in this case, the townsfolk whom Ephraim has summoned to the house as celebrants and witnesses to his virility and paternity. But the ostensibly festive scene is fraught with contradiction from the outset. The stage directions exploit the visual contrast of the gloomy upstairs—where "two bedrooms are dimly lighted by a tallow candle in each" and where Eben sits hunched and scowling—with the kitchen below where a crowd has gathered around Ephraim who is "in a state of extreme hilarious excitement." However, the gothic ghost's maternal presence lingers, as the opening dialogue suggests. Speaking of Eben, Abbie tells one of the guests, "I tuk his Maw's place," and moments later, another guest observes that all babies are "purty" to their mothers (358, 359). With these maternal allusions as a backdrop, the intended domestic function of this scene is subverted—what should be a time of community celebration and patriarchal congratulations becomes instead a scene of ridicule and innuendo as Ephraim is subtly disparaged as a cuckold by his guests.

The Fiddler, whose role of facilitating conviviality makes him integral to the social functioning of this scene, becomes instead a kind of ersatz court jester to Ephraim's implacable monarch, inciting the guests with subtly veiled, jeering poniards directed at their host. Alluding to the infant's paternity, the Fiddler observes sarcastically that Eben "kin do a good night's work," sexually speaking, and that if Ephraim "on'y [had] good eyesight" he might have prevented his betrayal by wife and son (360-61). The Fiddler's derision is doubly insubordinate in the sense that the musician has been, one may assume, bought and paid for this night by Ephraim who, though uncomprehending of the Fiddler's gibes, nevertheless becomes agitated by the delayed festivities and insults the Fiddler as "an ornament," commanding him, "grease yer elbow an' go it!" Ephraim's condescension toward the musician redounds as ridicule upon himself. The laborer's public repudiation of his employer is abetted and condoned by the townsfolk, and with good reason. Ephraim has sown these seeds of recrimination through years of self-imposed isolation and contempt toward any sense of community. He simultaneously insults his guests and declares his own superiority:

Look at me! I'd invite ye t' dance on my hundredth birthday on'y ye'll all be dead by then. Ye're a sickly generation! Yer hearts air pink, not red! Yer veins is full o' mud an' water! I be the on'y man in the county!

(360, 361)

For their part, his guests neither like nor respect Ephraim, though wisely none dares to cross him publicly. Doubtless they all know of Ephraim's abusive ardor, which hounded his last wife into an early grave, and thus their derision toward their host is, in their minds, all the more justified. As in many works of gothic literature, the villainous patriarch ends by reaping the harvest of his own maledictions.

Gothic literature, it has been observed, is in many ways a "literature of alienation."¹⁸ Ephraim simultaneously revels in and suffers from a self-inflicted alienation born from pride in his own vigor and tenacity; he views the farm not as a providential portion of the larger community but rather as a self-congratulatory monument, "what I'd made out o' nothin' with my own sweat 'n' blood!" (345). The guests realize the impropriety and futility of Cabot, the self-exile who has worked obsessively to isolate himself from others, reluctantly forcing upon himself the role of gregarious host. In the eyes of the locals, Ephraim's efforts to wrest from the cold earth his reclusive kingdom may seem a fool's errand. Ephraim doubtless believes that good fences make good neighbors; consequently, the guests who are allowed momentarily to cross his boundary this night are more indignant than affable.

It would be difficult to overstate O'Neill's explicit intentions regarding the role of gothic domesticity in this play as a conduit to a past that is ever present. In a letter to Barrett H. Clark in 1929 O'Neill writes, "The house there [in Desire Under the Elms] definitely takes part in the play and the revealing of the rooms enhances the drama." In a letter to Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill complains that Desire Under the Elms had "never" been produced as he wrote it, with one of its deficiencies in production being "the house as character."¹⁹ O'Neill seems to have envisioned the house as almost sentient, able to exert influence upon the family members. One of the best-known literary examples of this phenomenon appears in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," a work that may have served as an ideal at which O'Neill was aiming. As early as age five, O'Neill was introduced to Poe's works by his English nurse, Sarah Jane Bucknell Sandy.²⁰ In a letter to Marion Welch in 1905, O'Neill admires lines from "Annabel Lee" by writing, "Some of the lines express my feelings exactly."²¹ Even later in his career, in Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill includes Poe as one of those writers beloved by Edmund Tyrone—and disparaged by James Tyrone—alongside Nietzsche, Swinburne, and Baudelaire, among others. Harold Bloom has observed how Mourning Becomes Electra contains "gothic features [which] point toward Poe," specifically Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher."²²

Consequently, it is helpful to revisit a passage from "The Fall of the House of Usher" in order to better understand the overall effect that O'Neill may have aspired to conjure in Desire Under the Elms. Poe's narrator relates how Roderick Usher, obsessed with the idea that the ancestral estate is a sentient, self-conscious presence that shapes his destiny, is tormented by a pervading sense of dread and fatalism:

The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long-undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had molded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was.²³

Although O'Neill in Desire Under the Elms apparently sought to emulate the eerie, gothic tone of Poe's story, it is important to acknowledge that Ephraim Cabot stands, in many ways, in sharp contrast to Roderick Usher. Ephraim shares neither Usher's acute nervous disposition nor his fatalism; rather, Ephraim emanates a myopic and ultimately erroneous sense of confidence resulting from his sinewy strength and brute force of will, which, he believes, ensures his dominance over family and farm. He believes himself to be, as he boasts to his guests, "Hard as iron yet! Beatin' the young 'uns like I allus done!" Curiously, Ephraim, like Usher, can intuit a supernatural, gothic presence within his house. Yet he misinterprets the origin and import of this presence:

It's cold in this house. It's oneasy. They's thin's pokin' about in the dark—in the corners. . . . Even the music can't drive it out—somethin'. Ye kin feel it droppin' off the elums, climbin' up the roof, sneakin' down the chimney, pokin' in the corners! They's no peace in houses, they's no rest livin' with folks. Somethin's always livin' with ye.

(363)

Ephraim is simultaneously and paradoxically astute and obtuse, for though he acutely senses "it," he later concludes that "it" was the sensation of the double betrayal of Abbie's tryst with Eben and the resulting pregnancy that made him a fool in the eyes of the community. He is oblivious to the fact that "it" is the ghostly amalgam of guilt, manifested through Maw's spirit, for which he himself is responsible. Ephraim's attempt to articulate an elusive psycho-emotive response and to posit the origin of this response results in a frustrated verbal fumbling, trying to determine if what he senses is an "it," or "thins'," or finally "somethin'." Significantly, Ephraim identifies this presence as "droppin' off the elums," for O'Neill makes clear in the opening stage directions that the elms are characteristically feminine. Thus the elms with their "crushing, jealous absorption" become inextricably identified with Maw and her imminent retribution.

The presence that Ephraim senses is, in his flawed perception, both ab extra and intrusive, as evinced by the verbs "pokin'," "climbin'," and "sneakin'." Ephraim interprets the haunting presence as a kind of interloper invading the home. Consequently, the same sinewy robustness that has served Ephraim well his entire life and become the source of his hubris now dupes him into believing he can triumph over this recently perceived threat. Ephraim fails to recognize what Freud has referred to as "the secret nature of the uncanny": "This uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old."²⁴ The eerie presence Ephraim senses is thus at once uncanny and gothic, in that it emanates from this house, this farm, and from the oppressive regime of its patriarchal dictator. Ephraim fails to acknowledge what Mary Tyrone observes in Long Day's Journey Into Night: "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too." Ephraim's past oppression of his wife and children created the haunted present he now experiences. Those same past patriarchal transgressions will result in a future in which Ephraim is bereft of both Abbie and his sons. Past, present, and future are inseparable.

Ephraim's floundering attempts to articulate the insidious source of his discomfiture may be read as a harbinger of poststructuralist theory. According to Mark Hennelly, gothic literary conventions "anticipate" deconstructive criticism because gothic reveals a

concern both with pursuing absolute knowledge of the original "Thing itself"—whether termed Das Ding or the Freudian "Id"—and with demonstrating that such a quest for what philosophers call "the enigmatic X" is doomed to failure. To repeat an old adage, it's like turning on the lights to see what darkness looks like; or as Derrida often demonstrates, the double-bind of language puts one in the impossible situation of using rational discourse to comprehend the irrational, to speak of the unspeakable, or to represent the unrepresentable.²⁵

Ephraim appears to be receptive to the possibility that a supernatural presence resides in his house, but his efforts to articulate this presence are doomed from the start, for he is unable to comprehend the true origin and import of this presence, and he is forced to use inadequate media (language) to express the inexpressible.

Maw's ghost is silent throughout the play; her communication (such as it is) to other characters is done subliminally or otherwise preternaturally, as subtly efficacious as the elm limbs that droop over and threaten the house itself. Maw's outrage and indignation are beyond words; even the specific details of her ordeal as Ephraim's wife are left unspoken. Her only recourse now is through phantasmic repercussion.

Ironically, the gothic dynamics at work in the play serve as a sort of perpetual self-undermining. By bringing home a new wife, Ephraim Cabot intended to further establish his authority and supplant his sons' hopes of one day inheriting the farm. But Abbie's arrival is merely prelude to cuckoldry, thereby negating Ephraim's ambitions and exposing him to ridicule in the eyes of the community. Likewise, by carrying Eben's baby, Abbie intended to undermine Ephraim but instead ends up alienating herself from Eben (albeit temporarily) who doubts the child's paternity. Thus, as is characteristic of gothic literature, the scheming patriarch is ultimately undone by his own cunning, and Marx's observation about ideology may be said to have come full circle: Ephraim did not know it, but he was doing it. With all of his progeny either dead, deserted, or condemned, Ephraim determines to flee the haunted house to try to make a new life for himself, reasoning that his past failures might be immolated into oblivion: "I'm quittin' here today! I'll set fire t' house an' barn an' watch 'em burn, an' I'll leave yer Maw t' haunt the ashes, an' I'll will the fields back t' God" (376). But Ephraim abandons this plan once he realizes that Eben has robbed him of his cash hoard, and he now has no practical means of escape. Destroying the site of his transgressions would have solved nothing, and perhaps Ephraim finally comes to understand this.

Probably Ephraim's ultimate realization is that, like the stone and the elms, he is rooted fatefully to the site of his iniquities, a purgatory of his own making with little chance for redemption. So, though Eben and Abbie face prison or even hanging for infanticide, they nevertheless are granted a moment of transcendence in the closing moments of the play, "looking up raptly in attitudes strangely aloof and devout." Ever intractable in the face of defeat, and always ready with an angry allusion to deific wrath, Ephraim braces himself with one last "stiffening" and consoles himself with a desperate epithet—"God's hard an' lonesome!"—a rhetorical shrugging that reveals its own vacuity (378, 377). Ephraim cannot escape the consequences of his myriad failures for, as Leslie Fiedler observes, "the final horrors . . . are neither gods nor demons but intimate aspects of our own minds."²⁶

As early as 1816, the term gothic began to refer to other facets of culture beyond merely architectural style.²⁷ Ironically, in Desire Under the Elms, O'Neill not only incorporates literary gothic conventions such as vengeful ghosts, but also brings the reader full circle to Freud's heimlich ("belonging to the home"), the haunted house flanked by sinister elms where the patriarch remains at last, isolated and unrepentant. By exploiting gothic literary conventions in Desire Under the Elms, O'Neill follows in the tradition of American gothic writers Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne by portraying a patriarch whose treachery leads to the family's ruin. An important distinction, however, is that O'Neill's guilty patriarch does not ultimately suffer a deserved, painful death but rather endures to face justice, perhaps, only in the hereafter. Whether it is Ephraim Cabot turning to enter his haunted house alone, or James Tyrone at the dinner table staring sullenly before him, the O'Neillian patriarch is doomed to live, surrounded not by the promise of his progeny but by the residue of his wrongdoing. Gothic provided O'Neill with both the medium and the message of the many ironies inherent in the American Dream and the American family—endless opportunity, coupled with inevitable disappointment, the tantalizing prospect of change crippled by an awful failure of will.