Eugene O'Neill: A Spiritual Wanderer

The Father of American Theatre, winner of Nobel Prize in literature and four Pulitzer Prizes, and one of the greatest dramatists in the world, Eugene O'Neill has created more than 50 plays during his writing career which earn him great acclaim and fame both home and abroad. Though he succeeds in achieving literary fame and material wealth, he is sad and bitter as an individual. Throughout his life he suffered great losses as a son, a husband, and a father. Unable to narrow the distance between ideal and reality, he never escapes from this great feeling of loss, though he tries wholeheartedly to find the real meaning of life through literary creation. With a detailed examination of his plays and biographies, this thesis aims to explore reasons for his inevitable spiritual wandering.This thesis is divided into five parts:The introduction defines the research objectives of the thesis, conducts a literature review and introduces thesis methodology.Through textual and biographical criticism of his plays, the following three chapters make an exploration of O'Neill's spiritual wanderings and analyze its underlying reasons. The first chapter makes a survey of O'Neill's early, middle and late plays and analyzes his spiritual dilemma between Naturalism and romantic Idealism. Chapter two investigates into the direct cause for his spiritual wanderings—his religious certainty and uncertainty during his childhood and adulthood. Chapter three further analyzes the underlying reasons for his spiritual struggling and religious uncertainty, namely, his loss of love in family, his want of love in marriage, and his flawed personality.Born into a Catholic family, O'Neill is taught to believe in God's all-mightiness and benevolence. However, as the son of a traveling actor and a drug-addicted mother, he leads an unhappy childhood starved of love and obsessed by the feeling that he is an unwanted child of the family. This leads to his lacking of sense of security and belonging, which shadows all his adult life. In searching for the meaning of life and the reasons for the tragedy of his family, he accepts naturalism because the blind life...