When Incest is Not a Taboo: Desire and the Land in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill

Abstract

The American playwright Eugene O'Neill, who had an Irish-born father, can be studied with profit alongside Marina Carr, a contemporary Irish woman dramatist, in that both of them present not only relevant Irish heritage in their works but also a shared interest in the incestuous relationships in Greek tragedies. Although their plays are not on the grand scale of Phaedra or Oedipus, O'Neill, having been an editor for a collection of Greek dramas, and Carr, who has written over thirty adaptations of Greek tragedies, both dramatize the incestuous lust of their countrymen in Desire under the Elms (1924) and On Raftery's Hill (2000), respectively. Incestuous passion, however, is not simply, as Sigmund Freud suggests, an expression of inherent but repressed sexual love between family members, but is mixed with desire for the legitimate inheritance of land and self-recognition. Although O'Neill and Carr both apply social ethics to these tragic family affairs, they introduce an unconventional, and not necessarily celebrated, presentation of incest, so as to challenge this taboo and the patriarchal violence to which the father figures in both plays resort and impose on their families. O'Neill's and Carr's reinterpretations of incest in rural settings across the Atlantic Ocean and almost seven decades both question the stereotypical, often male-privileged depiction of resentful female victims in Greek tragedies. This paper will therefore examine how the two playwrights-with Irish connections abroad and at home-dramatize the Oedipus and Electra complexes of the characters, and the playwrights' interrogation of the social mechanisms to which their characters are subject.