A Study On The Mask Theory And Its Practice In The Dramaturgy Of Eugene O'Neil

Eugene O'Neill is regarded as a most important American playwright,his plays are among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of realism and contributed to the foundation of American style drama. O'Neill devoted all his life to drama exploration, and developed the non-realistic and soul-touching "spiritual drama" through innovative utilization and adaption of various on-stage expression techniques. Among these expression techniques, the employment of mask is the most preferred.From O'Neill's point of view, the expression techniques of realism on stage are unable to reveal the multi-levels of human psychology. To solve this drawback, he innovatively adopted mask-the stage prop derived from ancient Greek dramas-to demonstrate the complex subconscious of human being. Through the skillful application of both physical and mental masks, O'Neill successfully transformed the invisible human inner world such as ambivalence and subconscious into specific visible images, making his dramas brand new and deeply moving to the audience. Furthermore, O'Neill gave mask certain symbolic meanings and made use of it to symbolize those persons short of personality and independence.O'Neill employed mask in more than his ten plays, with the attempt to uncover the split, alienated and distorted souls that prevailed in contemporary American society and to explore a way for people to free their spirits. As mentioned by O'Neill in "The Last Will", he would continue utilize mask as an expression technique and even implement it in his other plays without involvement of mask if he considered to re-write all his dramas.In this thesis, the author described the mask conception of O'Neill and its origin, and studied the persona and multi-symbolic meanings of mask in O'Neill'mask plays based on Carl Jung's theory of the Persona. The author also discussed the inner inheritance relationship of O'Neill's mask concept, the connotation of mask-handling art, and the great influence of mask concept via her decipherment of O'Neill's mask plays such as "The Hairy Ape", "The Emperor Jones", "Mourning Becomes Electra", "The Great God Brown", "Long Day's Journey into Night" and "All God's Chillun Got Wings".