"Desire Under the Elms"

Characters

STEPHANIE, "Stephie", a Hungarian immigrant girl

EPHRIAM CABOT, a New England farmer

SIMEON            )

                       )

                       ) his sons by his first wife

PETER            )

EBEN, his step-son, his second wife's child.

The period is 1849-50, the time of the California gold rush.

SYNOPSIS

Hungary. Stephanie, a stolid but gentle and pretty girl of eighteen, is the only child of a peasant father and mother who live in grinding poverty in a wretched hut on a small tenant holding of poor land. They are no better than serfs. Stephanie and her mother have to work in the fields with the father. They are trying to save up enough money for Stephanie's dowry. She is in love with the son of a neighbor, a handsome village catch who is not in love with her but who looks forward to spending her dowry. Stephanie's father has a peasant's passion for land. He loves the soil. He kneels on it and prays and makes his wife and daughter pray with him.

New England. Ephriam Cabot and his three sons labor like beasts of burden clearing a new field of their rock-bitten New England farm. They pile the rocks into stone walls. Ephriam is a hard Old Testament Yankee, religious to the point of mania. He kneels in the flinty soil of his fields and prays to his God and makes his sons kneel with him. His two older sons are like great, hulking cattle, yet with shrewd, bargaining eyes. Dull-looking, they are far from fools. The youngest, the stepson Eben, is of a leaner, more high-strung type. All three are afraid of their father, but all three are in stubborn, smoldering revolt against his domination.

Hungary. Stephanie's father is taken ill. His resistance has been weakened by the extra labor he has undertaken to save Stephanie's dowry. He contracts pneumonia and dies. The money of the dowry has to be paid out in doctors fees and funeral expenses. There is no money left to pay the rent. Stephanie appeals to her fiance, feeling confident he will find means to help them, but knowing her dowry is gone, he scornfully casts her off. This has a terrible effect on Stephanie. From a gentle, submissive girl she becomes hard and embittered. This change in her is heightened when the landlord's overseer has them evicted from their hut. The village priest, a kind old man, takes them in. He tells them of America and, from his savings, gives them the money to go. Stephanie has inherited from her father his feeling for the soil. She loves the fields of the old place on which she has worked. On the last evening she pays a farewell visit to these fields, passing her old home in which new tenants are already installed. This sight increases her bitterness. In the soil of the fields she kneels and sobs. Then rebellion against her fate arouses her defiance. She takes an oath that, in this new land, America, to which she is going, she will own her own land and her own home, and she will revenge on men the injury her fiance has done to her love and pride.

New England. Ephriam and his three sons return home in the evening, silent and exhausted after their days work in the fields. The home is a little farmhouse with big elms on each side, where trailing branches rest oppressively on the roof as if symbolizing the crushing struggle with the forces of nature that bears down the lives of these men. In the house, Eben, the youngest, cooks the supper. He does it in a defiantly sloven fashion. The old man says grace. They fall to eating. Ephriam is angry at Eben for his bad cooking. He says defiantly: "This house needs a woman." It is a threat to marry again, his sons think, and leave the farm they are waiting to inherit to some strange woman. A quarrel immediately breaks out. They make threats as to what they will do to any woman he brings to the house, but Ephriam is too...