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Tragedy In Eugene O Neill's Desire Under The Elms

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The play Desire Under the Elms is based on incest and struggle for inheritance. It takes place in New England farm in 1850. The main characters of this play are Ephraim Cabot, the father who has survived two wives and has recently married a third one, Abbie Putnam. She is disliked by Ephraim’s three sons. Two of his sons leave for California in search of gold. However the youngest son Eben, stays on the farm to struggle for his legacy. Abbie uses her sexual charms and seduces Eben in order to give an heir to her husband. Her intial intention is to inherit the farm by herself. A son is born but in this period of time she falls in love with Eben who later finds out about Abbie’s earlier motives. Incapable of persuading Eben of her love, she kills …show more content…

He has recreated the starkness of the Greek tragedy in this play. Desire Under the Elms is a realistic portrait of primitive desires in rural New England. This play has more passion and is also known for catastrophic darkness and irony. The play has a very mature conception and is more creative. Brenda Murphy in American Realism and American Drama states that, “Desire Under the Elms is a carefully structured tragedy. It can be seen from the efforts that are made so clearly by all the elements of this play from the first until the last scenic image.”(129) Women of the mid- nineteenth century are seen to be unfit for holding property, employment and even their own mind. They are not believed to have more ability other than raising a child. The ideal woman of this time is an obedient wife and is expected to follow her husband’s every order. Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Essential Feminist Reader believes that this society has “a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral deliquescence’s which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed a little account in man.”

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