Desire Under The Elms,: A Modern Tragedy

DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, A MODERN TRAGEDY MANY CRITICS OF O'NEILL have commented on Desire Under the Elms as marking a turning point in his development as a dramatist. Some have seen it as O'Neill's expression of extreme violence represented in brutal characters who exemplify "greed, lechery, incest, adultery, revenge, murder." O'Neill "... declared them good, and sanctified them."! This . emphasis on all forms of violence and human degradation is the critical counterpart of popular public revulsion which reached its height in Los Angeles where the whole cast of the play was arrested, tried and convicted of giving a public performance of a play that was "mere smut, and filth ... , morbid, lewd and obscene."::! From this psychological approach the critic and the public indicate that in this play O'Neill had made a new departure into the lower depths of the psyche. They find it false, revolting, and since it sets its approval on bestiality, it deserves the moral condemnation it receives. Another critical attack sees the playas centered on overblown pride that balks at no crime to achieve its own ends. In this view Ephraim "has dedicated his entire life to God, who is, of course, only an image of his own ego."3 From this it follows that all the characters who come in contact with Ephraim are sacrificed to his lust for power. His God is in the rocks, hard, uncompromising and pitiless. This judgment of the play is based on the Aristotelian theory of hamartia, and so marks a turning point in O'Neill's conception of tragedy. According to this idea, there must be a "£law" and the "£law" must account for the hero's "fall." Joseph Wood Krutch also emphasizes Desire Under the Elms as a turning point in O'Neill's development as a dramatist. He regards it as the first play "which clearly revealed the kind of artistic problem with which O'Neill's genius was destined to grapple."4 His conception of the "problem" deals with the manner in which O'Neill succeeded in divorcing the action from the reality of the particular, and thereby concentrating on the interpretation of the abstract, or the idea. By this approach he lifts the play out of the muck of detail to which moralistic criticism is inevitably attached. He considered the playas "interested less in New England as such than in an aspect of the eternal tragedy of man and his 1. Edward A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 126. 2. Nation, CXXII (1926),p. 549. 3. Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswickl .1958), p. 95. 4. Joseph Wood Krutch, "Introduction," Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill (New York, 1954), p. xvi. 326 1960 DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS 327 passions."5 He holds that "the events really occur out of place and out of tim " e. This, however, is only a prelude to the real difference between Desire Under the Elms and the earlier plays. In this play, for the first time, O'Neill begins to see the problem of tragedy in modern drama as opposed to the classical and traditional interpretation. In this play he departs from the traditional interpretations of Aristotle, a departure that made it possible to develop his later and greater tragedies such as Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Ccrmeth, and Long Day's Journey Into Night. O'Neill had, of course, read Aristotle's Poetics, but it does not follow that he studied the Poetics, analyzed twenty centuries of criticism, and then exemplified his own theory in a conscious dramatic structure. He began in a simpler manner, as no doubt Sophocles did, by seeking an answer toman's relation to the invisible forces that control his destiny. "I am interested only in the relation between man and God," states a point of view that O'Neill expressed many times in many different ways, but always emphasizing the essential and the only problem that is inseparable from any theory of tragedy. In his notes to Mourning Becomes Electra O'Neill states the problem, recognizing that a modem version of the Electra story needs a...