Abstract
O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms was produced in 1924, just after he had lost his closest relatives. In 1920, O'Neill's father James died of cancer, and in the following year O'Neill's mother Ella passed away and in 1923 his brother Jamie died, from drinking too much alcohol. Losing his closest relatives at once, O'Neill mourned for them deeply for a long time, and gradually his interest in death grew inside him. He proceeded to writing idealistic plays and, as a first step, he produced DUE.
Preparing to start work on DUE, O'Neill must have gone over the relationship between himself and his family. Especially, O'Neill re flected his feelings toward his brother Jamie, who had hated their fa ther and been attached to their mother since he was a child, and his own feelings toward his mother. O'Neill adopted the elements of Greek tragedy such as Sophocles's Oedipus the King and Euripides's Hippolytus and Media for he knew that therein lay a truth he had deduced from his own experience. O'Neill found his truth in Greek tragedy and proceeded to an analysis of the self through the act of writing.
In DUE, O'Neill entrusted his thoughts to Eben, who is the chief character in the play. He is the youngest son of Ephraim Cabbot who is the owner of Cabbot farmhouse. Eben believes that Ephraim dispossessed his loving mother of the farm and slaved her to death, so he feeds his anger with thoughts of revenge. He never wishes to walk out of this house, because only inside of it does he feel safe and warm. For Eben, it is a sanctuary. One day, Ephraim comes back with his new wife Abbie. At first, Abbie seduces Eben not for love but for bearing a successor for Ephraim's estate, but when she bears their son, her love for Eben has become real. Eben has loved Abbie as a woman and also as a mother by deliberately identifying Abbie with his dead mother. Abbie kills her loving son in order to prove her love for Eben being true when Eben doubted. This leads them to obtain the love beyond desire for possession or lust, the love based on mutual understanding and tenderness. Furthermore, Eben has obtained maternal love, for which Ephraim always craved.
The purpose of this paper is to study O'Neill's interpretation of maternal love and true love by psychoanalyzing DUE. Moreover, it leads us to show why O'Neill had to produce DUE.
