Biblical Perversions In Desire Under The Elms

Abstract

WHILE O'NEILL'S PLAYS ARE NOTED PRIMARILY for the dramatic force with which they express his tragic view of life, many of them—The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Marco Millions, Iceman Cometh, and others—contain a great deal of social criticism. So does his early tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which has been critically examined for its use of the Hippolytus and Medea myths, its Freudian elements, its relation to O'Neill's early plays (e.g., The Rope) and own biography, but there has been little close attention to the way in which religious references inform the play, and the way religion both causes the tragedy and comments upon it.