On Eugene O'Neill's Religious Exploration

Eugene O'Neill is the American leading playwright in the twentieth century, who won Pulitzer Prize four times and was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1936. As a productive playwright, he completed almost 50 plays in his life, and most of them are tragedies. These works involve religion, society, human nature, which make great contributions to American drama.Many critics are concerned with the religious elements in O'Neill's plays, which resulted in a host of comments. The available materials home and abroad show that most critics tend to believe that O'Neill has given up Catholicism, and the failure of the public performance of Days without End marked the end of his religious exploration. The author of the dissertation argues that O'Neill never gave up his religion, nor had he ever attempted to get away from the western cultural system on which his religious belief was based. Just as O'Neill stated, "I'm interested only in the relationship between man and God" (Normand Berlin, 1982: 125), he spent his life on artistic creation in order to make out the relationship between man and God. And the above statement of O'Neill did get proved in his lifetime creation. The thorough reading and analysis of most of his plays show that O'Neill's productive career consists of four phases: the vacillation of his religious faith, search for spiritual alternatives, depression resulted from the religious exploration, and rethinking of his exploration in religion, which fully proves that his religious exploration is the primary concern of his plays.This dissertation argues the four phases in Chapter Three. The first phase of O'Neill's exploration was the vacillation of his religion, which was proved through the detailed analysis on O'Neill's plays in his early productive period, such as Strange Interlude and Beyond the Horizon. In the two plays the characters shared the same dilemma as O'Neill: they defied God with many profane words; on the other handthey were tormented by the religious doctrines they once received and always felt sinful for their radical behaviors. This dilemma deprived O'Neill of his harmonious relationship with God and promoted him to find spiritual alternatives to console his anxiety for belonging. O'Neill found three substitute-Gods successively: Sea-God, Mammon-God and Subconscious-God, which respectively got expression in his plays: Anna Christine, Hairy Ape and Desire under the Elms, and Mourning Becomes Electra. Unfortunately, the three Gods didn't provide spiritual place for him; on the contrary, they exhausted him physically and spiritually. He suffered from depression resulted from the religious exploration, which got expressed in Days without End and The Iceman Cometh. After a long period of silence, O'Neill reconsidered his religious exploration and realized that what people could do was to accept the reality but man must keep a faith or an illusion to soften the tortured soul and to give meaning to life. This phase was proved through religious confessions of the characters in his two important late plays The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night.