Desire and Forgiveness: O’Neill’s Diptych

Desire and Forgiveness: O’Neill’s Diptych Michael Hinden In addition to the striking parallels between Desire Under the Elms and A Moon for the Misbegotten regarding setting, plot, and characterization, the plays are intimately and pro­ foundly related in terms of psychology and structure. O’Neill reported that the conception of Desire Under the Elms appeared to him all of a piece, vivid and complete in a dream, suggesting the deep, immediate importance to him of the play’s autobio­ graphical content.1 That he felt a need—consciously or un­ consciously—to rework this material twenty years later in the testament of his last completed play indicates that he was indeed wrestling with issues of considerable personal concern. By this comparison I hope to demonstrate that together the plays com­ prise a fascinating diptych, two panels of a single portrait or one unified action.2 In A Moon for the Misbegotten, it can be argued, certain unconscious fantasies dramatized in Desire Under the Elms are exorcized and self-forgiven. Moreover, as Travis Bogard notes, the conscious Dionysian framework of O’Neill’s earlier plays (nowhere more powerfully visible than in Desire) is replaced in Moon by a Catholic vision of absolu­ tion and confession.3 It is possible, then, that A Moon for the Misbegotten is not only O’Neill’s elegy for his brother Jamie, an extention of the autobiographical impulse generally present throughout the later plays, but an attempt on the part of the playwright to come to terms with his own artistic vision. Before proceeding further, it may be necessary in this con­ nection to dispel the notion that we must approach all of O’Neill’s late plays primarily as examples of compulsive repeti­ tion suitable only for Freudian analysis. Sheaffer promotes this view and Bogard develops it, speculating that the real-life Jamie clearly “was possessed of an overt oedipal drive” and that in Long Day’s Journey Into Night Eugene O’Neill may have depicted his brother as a double of himself (in Act IV 240 MichaelHindert 241 Jamie says to Edmund, “You’re my Frankenstein!”). In other words, by dramatizing Jamie’s oedipal dilemma, O’Neill may have been trying to come to terms with his own.4 I am indebted to Bogard for many of his insights, yet my position is more tentative. I do not know whether Jamie or O’Neill himself actually suffered from the oedipal complex as described by Freud, or even whether such a complex is rare or universal. I do recognize that Eben Cabot and Jim Tyrone, two of O’Neill’s imaginative creations, may be described in terms of the oedipal model. However, the question is, to what dramatic purpose are these psychological perceptions put? After all, O’Neill is valued as a dramatic psychologist, not a clinical one. If the plays exhibit striking similarities, it is difficult to determine the extent to which these are largely unintentional or planned. Perhaps, then, a comparison of the two panels of the diptych can reveal salient details concerning O’Neill’s dramatic method as well as hidden aspects of his personal quest. Consider first some of the most noticeable parallels linking Desire Under the Elms and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Both are set on stark, rock-strewn New England farms where the living is hard and where solitude, compounded by sexual repression, looms as an emotional threat. The farms are popu­ lated by a cast of familial doubles of which there are four types: first, a scheming father (Cabot, Hogan) who manipulates the younger lovers but who is himself alone and sleeps among the cows; second, a buxom earth mother (Abbie, Josie) who attracts the male protagonist but who combines seduction with the threat of incest (Josie reminds Tyrone of his dead mother; Abbie similarly reminds Eben of his and is in fact his step­ mother) ; third, an anguished male protagonist (Tyrone, Eben) haunted by his mother’s ghost, confused by sexual impulses, and worried about ownership of the farm; and last, as minor characters, the feckless siblings (Simeon and Peter, Mike Hogan) who are enticed by bribery to quit the stage before the end...