Ideal And Reality:the Misery Of Females In Eugene O’Neil’s Plays

Eugene O’Neil, who has been internationally acknowledged as the father of American drama, creates more than sixty dramatic works in his lifetime. He has won4Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as the only American playwright. The contemporary greatest American dramatist Arthur Miller once gave him high evaluation for his contribution to American drama. The reason why he gains much popularity among the world stage of drama is due to his remarkable achievement in tragedy creation, particularly, the creation of three female tragic characters Anna, Abbie and Nina, whose images are vividly portrayed, in his best-known plays:Anna Christie, Desire under the Elms and Strange Interlude. Of two plays, Anna Christie and Strange Interlude are awarded Pulitzer Prize successively.This paper starts from the social reality, coupled with three heroines’miserable experiences, and analyzes the influence of men on women under the patriarchal society. These women are bounded by their social status, lose their rights of speech, and end up with tragic results eventually.The paper is made up of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction and made up of four parts. Part one briefly makes introduction of the author Eugene O’Neil. The second part mainly introduces the content of three plays:Anna Christie, Desire under the Elms and Strange Interlude, as well as the theories about feminism and Power of discourse. The third part roughly presents the researches about three plays conducted by scholars both at home and abroad. Part four is the framework of the whole paper.Chapter Two probes into the ideals of three female characters Anna, Abbie and Nina. The first part discusses their ideals for romantic love based on their experiences. The ideals of their self-fulfillment are discussed in the second part.Chapter Three mainly analyses the realistic lives of females in the patriarchal society. This chapter is composed of four parts. Part one starts from three heroines’ miserable experiences of love, and then states the reality that females can not control their love and marriage. Part two probes into their embarrassing situations in terms of their physical and material need. Part three presents an actuality that females lack rights to speak when meeting some essential choices. Part four reveals the gap between the ideal and reality of three heroines according to the analysis above.Chapter Four explains the accounts from three parts that cause the sad reality for females. Part one accounts for the differences between men and women during the20th century. Part two states the male influence on the female. Part three presents the undeniable reasons from females themselves for their tragedies.Chapter Five comes to the conclusion. It is concluded that the female’s misery is inevitable in the patriarchal society in the early20th century, because of the huge gap between the female’s ideal and reality.