Trauma In The Plays Of Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill is the founder of American theater. His plays have an indispensible relationship with his family life and the times that he lives through. Traumatic experience has become the origins of his creative writings, those collective traumas from the society and personal traumas from his own family. In The Haiiy Ape, O’Neill dramatizes Yank’s mechanization in the industrial society and his inevitable failure to dynamite the whole of industrial civilization; in Marco Millions, O’Neill explores an obsessive materialism of Marco Polo at a time of capitalist triumph and commercial imperialism and his disintegration of ideals; Beyond the Horizon, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten mainly focus on the disparity of O’Neill’s parents, mother’s addiction, and bother’s Oedipus Complex respectively, which are from O’Neill’s own life and are the roots for his tragic sense. From the perspective of trauma, this paper probes the origins of O’Neill’s trauma and analyzes the collective trauma in his experimental plays and the personal trauma in his family plays in order to better understand his invariably tragic and hopeless characters, their inescapable struggling in contemporary life, and O’Neill’s self-therapy through constant writing, from which he gains spiritual tranquility.