On The Mother Images In Eugene O'Neill's Plays

As "the founder of American stage", O'Neill is one of the most outstanding American playwrights. O'Neill's tragic sense is closely related to his tragic family life which is full of distrust and betrayal. His dominated father, corrupted brother and addicted mother all exert profound influence on his growth and drama-creation.By adopting psychoanalysis, the thesis attempts to explore the mother images exemplified in five typical plays by O'Neill. Based on the close reading of the texts, the thesis aims to analyze the formation, representations and evolution of mother images in O'Neill's plays.By tracking the influence of his mother and his marriages, Chapter 1 analyzes the formation of mother images in O'Neill's plays. Lack of maternal love in his childhood craves in O'Neill a complex feeling toward his mother: he desires mother's love, but also hates her because of her addiction and aloofness. O'Neill has been searching for the lost motherly love all his life. His complex feelings toward his mother and his three wives exert a great impact on the creation of his mother images.Chapter 2 typifies the evolutionary representations of mother images in his five plays: early mother images—Ruth, Abbie and Nina—as vaporizer, controller and victimizer, and later mother images—Nora and Mary—as sufferer and victim. Mother images in O'Neill's plays present an evolutional trend, revealing that O'Neill's feelings toward his mother and other women evolve from hatred and abomination to sympathy and forgiveness.Chapter 3 evaluates O'Neill's mother images. His earlier mother images reflect that O'Neill develops misogyny, while those in his later plays reveal his feminist ideas and modern view of womanhood. The evolution of these mother images coincides with the developing process of O'Neill's female consciousness.