Mourning Becomes O'Neill: A Psychoanalytical Study

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was the greatest dramatist America has ever had. His plays won four Pulitzer Prizes and as an artist, O'Neill was the only American playwright awarded Nobel Prize in Literature. His works are regarded as enlightening in nearly every part of the world and many of the playwrights after him acknowledged their profound debt to his art. As it is, the last Pulitzer winning drama of O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night, is considered the greatest tragedy of America.Nevertheless, O'Neill was sad and bitter as an individual. Born the son of a traveling actor, he had learned the hardships of life in early childhood and was haunted by a deep sense of insecurity ever since. The madness in family -the addiction of mother, the overpowering personalities of father, the corruption of brother, and the distrust and betrayal among family members, profoundly influenced his growth and formed traumatic memories in his psyche which brought him to the point of suicide. Although writing gradually taught O'Neill the peace of life, he was never really free from the tragic. When his first Pulitzer winning play, Beyond Horizon, made its debutin 1920, his father fell ill and died, followed by the sudden deaths of his mother and brother. In less than three years O'Neill lost all his parental family.Psychological studies have revealed that bereavement usually leads to emotional loss of the bereaved and resolution lies in mourning for the dead. As for O'Neill, because of childhood traumas, the bereavement was extremely painful and his mourning lasted throughout the next two decades. From 1921 until 1940, every play O'Neill wrote was about death, bereavement, and family madness. In his plays O'Neill carried the profound mourning for his dead and writing gradually taught O'Neill how to accept his loss. In his Tao House play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill revealed the essential story of his family and was at last able to grant them deep understanding and utmost forgiveness. After twenty years' mourning, O'Neill was finally unfettered from old sorrows.In this thesis, the life and plays of Eugene O'Neill are studied to approach the psychic dynamics behind his dramas. The focus is placed on O'Neill's emotional loss and how the never-settled feelings of loss, rooted in childhood, grew into drives that urged O'Neill to resolve his psychic troubles in writing. The first chapter is a brief introduction to thepsychoanalytical theory and its application in literary criticism; the second chapter discusses O'Neill's childhood traumas and analyzes their influence on O'Neill's psychic makeup. In Chapter Three, three representative plays of O'Neill between 1920 to 1940, Desire under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electro, are studied to investigate O'Neill's state of mind in that period; and in Chapter Four, it is explained how O'Neill's most autobiographic play, Long Day's Journey into Night, has finally resolved the playwright's mourning over his loss. Based on above-mentioned analyses, the thesis concludes that after two decades' mourning in his art, O'Neill has at last prevailed beyond mourning and tragedy.