| Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is generally considered America's greatest playwright and father of American drama. Because of "the vital energy, sincerity, and intensity of feeling, stamped with an original conception of tragedy"(from Internet), he won Nobel Prize for literature in 1936. He is acclaimed as a theatrical innovator and experimenter, a writer whose impact upon American theater has been profound, extensive and permanent. Researchers on him have been plentiful since the revival of interest in his works, which began with the 1956 production of The Iceman Cometh. In China it was not until the 1980s that the scholarship has become really vast and varied.Desire Under the Elms (1924) is considered by many to be among O'Neill's greatest dramatic achievements. It has been thought as one of O'Neill's masterpieces. With the crown of Nobel Prize for literature, O'Neill is becoming more and more famous, and a lot of critics applaud him for all his plays. Take O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, which has won great popularity since it was introduced to China in the 1980s, all the critics share the opinion that Desire belongs to O'Neill's best works and it digs out the roots of the sickness of the 1920s-the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new faith for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning of life in, or to comfort fears of death with. Nevertheless, there are still some calm and objective critics in the critical field abroad. One was Maxwell, who says that [in Desire] O'Neill is abdicating to a more "aesthetic", refined, and redundant creator, who does not seem to care for his former oaths, and gasping cries from the darker bottoms of life. Another one, Conrad suggests that one still feels a kind of hollow and melodramatic unreality in Mr. O'Neill's realism: an operatic largeness, which is not quite life itself. A third critic, Barbara, argues thatthere is theatricality in Desire such as portrayal of the characters, and design of the ending; that rather than ameliorating his attempts at closure, the poetic language usually only emphasizes its failure. Still another, Robert, thinks that O'Neill's ideas [in Desire] are borrowed rather than experienced. Those ideas are grafted onto plots which are largely unconvincing irrelevant, or inconsequential.This thesis attempts to discuss the merits and defects of O'Neill's play Desire Under the Elms from different angles. The thesis is in five chapters. The opening chapter is an introduction to different voices of critical ideas about Desire both in America and in China. Chapter Two deals with the question-what is the essence of true tragedy. Here the author will introduce the definition of tragedy by Aristotle, Hegel, and Palmer, and then cites several different opinions about the essence of true tragedy by Richard Sewall, Michael Manhelm, and Ren Shengming. Finally the paper deduces its own idea of the essence of true tragedy- true tragedy should reflect the trend of history and illustrate the dilemma of modern man existing in his surroundings and in his self.Chapter Three, the core of this paper, is in five parts. The first part introduces the plot of Desire, its social and historical background, and something of O'Neill's family. The conclusion of this part is that the play's theme- attack on the lust of property and lust of possessiveness in human nature, contradicts its social background, with an analysis of the main characters in Desire. The second part deals with the defects of Desire in its portrayal of the main characters, with an effort to find the archetype of each main character and to analyze O'Neill's motive in his writing-to make money and to express his strong feelings. It is not difficult to see that the main characters are not portrayed impartially, and that the image of each is very simple and flat. Hence there is a long distance between Desire and the basic standard of true tragedy. The thirdpart of this section analyzes the defects in the whole structure and the...
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