On Space-time Aesthetical Features Of Eugene O’neill’s Dramas

Eugene O’Neill, the greatest dramatist of the20th century in America, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times and won the Nobel Prize in1936. He is industrious all his life, leaving over fifty dramas concerning many social problems and human spirit with diversified forms of expression. Every play of O’Neill’s has respective ideological value and social meaning, and each presents unique artistic elegant demeanor. In terms of dramatic space-time, O’Neill intakes artistic forms from other dramatic schools, such as Realism, Symbolism, Expressionism and so on. What’s more, he is brave in innovation, blending many new elements into dramatic space-time, such as music, color, shape, light so as to show his plays’distinct aesthetical features.Dramatic space-time, which constantly changes as dramatic plot evolves, is a complex of dramatic time and dramatic space. As a basic element, it contributes much to the quality of a drama. A great number of western dramatic theoreticians refer this issue in their books, such as Aristotle, Minturno, Castelvetro, Boileau, Lessing, Diderot, Dry den, Goethe, Hugo, Zola, Strindberg and so on, from which we know that the theory of dramatic space-time has kept developing itself in disputes and has kept perfecting in development.O’Neill’s dramatic space-time contains realistic space-time, symbolic space-time and psychological space-time. O’Neill writes lots of realistic dramas resulting from his inherence of realism literature notion. In terms of dramatic space-time, he adopts the same notion-constructing realistic space-time in his early career life, which is the foundation of his symbolic space-time and psychological space-time. By building realistic space-time, O’Neill not only enhances his plays’credibility but also opens a door for people to see how the underclass live and what they suffer, which greatly shows O’Neill’s value orientation in drama. Then, with the shock from western modern drama to American drama, O’Neill catches the tide of dramatic development. He borrows many techniques of expression from Symbolism and Expressionism to build symbolic space-time and psychological space-time, which highly breaks the limitations of realistic space-time on expressing subtle theme.O’Neill also well verses in finding some symbolic elements from nature that are in correspondence to human’s certain emotion, such as some natural phenomena, specific seasons, particular hour or certain objects. By melting them into his dramatic space-time, O’Neill builds a kind of static symbolic space-time that serves to suggest dramas’basic nature and create artistic atmosphere. What’s more, O’Neill’s static symbolic space-time bears a close relation to characters’quality and dramatic theme. Characters’quality, taste, level of knowledge, spiritual outlook and dramatic subject are always demonstrated in static symbolic space-time.O’Neill’s dynamic symbolic space-time is a kind of flowing space-time with the help of acoustics and light. In a great number of his plays, O’Neill adds a lot of lively elements (light, mechanical sound, song, color, shape) into to space-time and utilizes the sound, the change of light, the sharp contrast of object in color and shape as well as the mutual interaction of color and light to make the space-time more vital. These dynamic elements activate the former static symbolic space-time. Therefore, they strongly stimulate the audience’s audition, vision as well as imagination and the charm of dynamic symbolic space-time can be felt truly through listening, seeing and imagination.Psychological space-time is one of O’Neill’s most creative expression ways. The elements of psychological space-time are no longer from the objective environment, but from characters’ mental world. It is a kind of space-time that the characters’inner state is shown directly by representing concrete objects or scenes on the stage. In psychological space-time, characters’distorted mind, illusion and the past events are unfolded vividly to reveal their change in psychology under pressure, fear and anxiety. Psychological space-time broadens the range of performance of space-time and maximizes its function in a drama.