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1、Eugene ONeills Writing Trajectory and EvolutionI. A general introduction of his life and his main worksEugene Gladstone ONeill was born on Oct.16, 1888, in New York City. His father was a well-known actor. As a child ONeill travelled with his fathers company until he was 7, in which time he was care
2、d for by nanny, hired to help his mother who was not recovering from her addition to morphine. The nanny took young Eugene to see the sights wherever they travelled. At seven he had a wider acquaintance with the natural wonders and oddities of America than most Americans ever acquire. All the while
3、Eugene absorbed the grammar of theatrical artifice, a native language. At seven he went to a private school, a Catholic school, he remained in that kind of school until he was thirteen. In 1906 he entered Princeton but left at the end of his freshman year. ONeill drifted for several years. He went t
4、o Honduras and then worked as a seaman travelling to Africa and to South America. He finally took a job as a reporter for the New London Telegraph in Connecticut. The years of irregular living, combined with heavy drinking, had undermined his health, and in 1912 he entered a tuberculosis sanatorium.
5、During his illness ONeill read the works of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and decided to try writing plays. In 1914-15 he studied dramatic writing with George Pierce Baker at Harvard. He wrote the one-act plays that were presented by the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts. The company moved
6、to Greenwich Village in New York City, where it formed the Playwrights Theater. It opened in 1916, and the first bill included ONeills Bound East for Cardiff, his New York debut. This play and three others In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, based on ONeills experiences
7、 at sea were produced together in 1924 as S.S.Glencairn. The immediate success of these short plays established ONeills reputation.In 1920 ONeills first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon was produced on Broadway. It won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1922 Anna Christie won another, and in 1928 Strange In
8、terlude won a third. ONeill journeyed to Paris, where he began Mourning Becomes Electra, produced in 1931. In 1936 he was the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1946 his successful The Iceman Cometh was produced. Other works are The Emperor Jones (1920), Desire Under
9、the Elms (1924), and The Great God Brown (1926), Marco Millions (1927) included some humor, but Ah, Wilderness! (1933), a nostalgic view of small-town life, was ONeills only comedy.The last ten years of ONeills life were filled with frustration. After suffering from multiple health problems (includi
10、ng alcoholism) over many years, ONeill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write (he had tried using dictation but found himself unable to compose in that way) during the last 10 years of his life. While at Tao House, ONeill had intended
11、to write a cycle of 11 plays chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were ever completed. As his health worsened, ONeill lost in inspiration for the project and wrote the three large autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, L
12、ong Days Journey into Night, which won a fourth Pulitzer Prize and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He managed to complete Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, just before leaving Tao House ad losing his ability to write. Drafts of many other uncompleted plays were destroyed by Carlotta at Eugenes request.O
13、Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. (The building is now the Shelton Hall dormitory at Boston University). There is an urban legend perpetuated by students that ONeills spirit haunts the room and dormitory. A revised analy
14、sis of his autopsy report shows that, contrary to the previous diagnosis, he did not have Parkinsons disease, but a late-onset cerebella cortical atrophy. He was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. ONeills final words were reportedly “Born in a hotel room, and Godd
15、ammit, died in one!”Although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death, in 1956 Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Days Journey into Night to be published, and produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won th
16、e Pulitzer Prize in 1957. This last play is widely considered to be his finest. ONeills home in New London, Monte Cristo Cottage, was made a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His home in Northern California was preserved as the Eugene ONeill National Historic Site in 1976.ONeill was the first Amer
17、ican dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction,
18、painting, and music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920, Broadway theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce. ONeill saw the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas.
19、Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragediesa drama that could rise to the emotional heights of Shakespeare. For more than 20 years, both with such masterpieces as Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes El
20、ectra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other serious dramatists, ONeill set the pace for the blossoming of the Broadway theatre.II. The three periods of ONeills writing and the main achievement of each phaseONeills career as a playwright consists of three periods. His early realistic
21、 plays utilize his own experiences, especially as a seaman. In the 1920s he rejected realism in an effort to capture on the stage the force behind human life. His expressionistic plays during this period were influenced by the ideas of philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, psychologists Sigmund Freud and
22、 Carl Jung, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. During his final period ONeill returned to realism. These later works depend on his life experiences for their story lines and themes.A. From trial to triumph(1913-1924): the early playsIn 1912-1913, while a tuberculosis patient in the Gaylord Sa
23、nitarium, Eugene ONeill decided to become a dramatist after had worked as a gold prospector in Honduras, as a seaman, and had become a regular at New York Citys flophouses and cheap saloons. Eugene ONeill made profitable use of his three-month hospital stay by reading philosophy, drama, and absorbin
24、g the influence of new theatrical movements in Ireland, Franc, Sweden, and Germany.On his release from Gaylord he started to write, using his own life experiences as creative matrix. His devotion to his own personal “drama of souls” never ceased, and hence writing exacted a tremendous physical and p
25、sychological toll.Like his father, ONeill was an autodidact. His Princeton year (1906-07) was essentially one of self-directed study, because he despised his course assignments, being suspended for “poor scholarship.” He learned from wide, undisciplined reading, rather than academic instruction, cla
26、iming that the only result of his year in George Pierce Bakers English 47 Workshop (1914-15) at Harvard was his practice of first writing a scenario and then the dialogue, which he did throughout his productive life.1His early experimental plays (1913-24) demonstrate the structural influence of his
27、fathers theatre of melodrama, in his instinctive ability to build a scene or action toward a sometimes explosive conclusion, skillfully varying the pace of a play.The influence of the vaudeville skit is also obvious in his very fast play, A Wife for a Life (1913) written during his post-sanitarium r
28、esidence in New London, based on ONeills miserable mining experiences in Honduras.“Thirst” and Other One-Act Plays (1914), the first published collection of ONeills plays, are important as indicating his future development. These five plays are important for what they are and what they prefigure. Th
29、irst (1913), portrays a raft as a microcosm, with its three unnamed shipwreck survivors of Dancer, Gentleman, and West Indian Mulatto Sailor. While introducing the theme of woman as whore, along with interracial and class conflict, it also portrays the behavior of individuals pushed to their emotion
30、al and physical limits. In Fog (1914) a lifeboat serves as a microcosm, this time with a Poet, a Man of Business, a Polish Peasant Woman and her dead child. Fog is used to evoke mood, and also a sense of supernatural mystery, when a passing steamer turns aside from its course after the sailors hear
31、the cry of the dead child over the noise of their engines. This is ONeills first foray into the eerie world of supernatural fantasy. The three other plays of this group were written in 1917-18. In the Zone is a conventional submarine-warfare potboiler, spiced with some violence, with Smitty as the a
32、lcoholic lover, a failure driven to sea by a womans rejection, while The Long Voyage Home is a predictable Shanghai-ing drama, including the reappearance of the dream-forever-deferred theme in Olsons wish to retire to a farm. The greatest advance, however, comes with Moon of the Caribbees (1918) whe
33、re ONeill, in addition to developing mood, also experiments with the impact of black culture upon whites, and his first truly multicultural play, foreshadows also his interest in “total theatre”.As within several events in the authors life, there was heavy irony in the occasion. Within a month, Jame
34、s ONeill suffered a stroke and while he was recovering, intestinal cancer was diagnosed. Until adolescence, Eugene had worshipped his father as a hero such are his words in a private autobiographical document. Then for many years Eugene seemed nearly as often to hate his father as to love him, altho
35、ugh his father supported him in and out of trouble, and tolerated the youths contempt.In ordinary circumstances, ONeills mourning for his father would surely have been intense, but it would have run a normal course, and would have resolved itself in three or four years. But ONeills life had never be
36、en ordinary, and his grief was to be greatly compounded. A year and a half after James died, Ella ONeill, thirteen years younger than her husband and seemingly in good health, died suddenly from a brain tumor. Twenty months later, his first son, James Jr., ten years older than Eugene and idolized by
37、 him since childhood, succeeded in an oft-declared intent to drink himself to death. Within thirty-nine months, ONeill lost all the members of his parental family.In 1921 ONeill finished his significant African-American play, The Emperor Jones, the first full-length play in which ONeill successfully
38、 evoked the starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own life. Drawing on Greek themes of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context of his own familys conflicts. This story of a lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous wife who murd
39、ers her infant son was told with sparseness of its style, the play was acclaimed immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th century. In The Hairy Ape (1921), another foray into expressionism, ONeill combines a number of themes from his earl
40、ier sea plays, and also the symbiotic relationship of the second engineer with his engines in The Personal Equation. He develops further his interest in labor politics, and even more importantly, his commitment to expressionistic total theatre.Desire Under the Elms (1924) established him as a dramat
41、ist of true genius and is the culmination of his first period of composition. The modern world is often thought hostile to tragedy, but in this play ONeill discomfits the naysayers. He manipulates into an astonishingly successful tragic whole such different elements as the conflict between duty and
42、joy, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the dysfunctional family, and a combination of Greek myth. These disparate ideas are melded together in a thoroughly American New England setting with the mythico-religious tradition of Puritanism, along with the dream of monetary success, the pioneering spirit
43、 of breaking new land, and the world of gold in the far West.With this play, initially banned in Boston on moral grounds and refused a public performance in England until 1940, ONeill reached true international status. This was not merely because of the steamy plot, but the extraordinary transmutati
44、on of mythology into modern garb. It also demonstrated one of ONeills greatest strengths as myth user rather than myth maker. Here and in Mourning Becomes Electra he combined ancient myths with modern psychology to examine American emotional and cultural equivalents.B. Experimental Expressionism in
45、writing style(1925-1934): The middle playsBy the time Desire Under the Elms closed in the fall of 1925, Eugene ONeill was firmly established as the leading artistic playwright of the American theatre. This combining of ancient and modern, foreign and native, pervades this play foreshadows the works
46、of ONeill middle decade. ONeill indulged his imagination, composing the historical extravaganzas Marco Millions (1928) and Lazarus Laughed (1928) and the allegorical The Great God Brown (1926), and sketching out two studies of modern bourgeois America, Strange Interlude (1928), which won him the thi
47、rd Pulitzer Prize, and Dynamo (1929) as well. This phase also includes ONeills Civil War trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and the autobiographical dramas Ah, Wilderness! (a domestic comedy)(1933) and Days Without End (1934) (a dogmatic miracle play) (1934).While at Princeton ONeill was great
48、ly affected by Nietzsche, and over the years an impulse toward what might be called scientific mysticism had become increasingly prominent. As he stopped drinking and tried to accept his fathers death, his plays show him turning increasingly toward a view of the world influenced by Nietzsche, psycho
49、analysis and the ancient Greeks. Plays like Strange Interlude, Lazarus Laughed, and Dynamo reflected these interests. In The Great God Brown, ONeill dealt with a major theme that he expressed more effectively in later plays the conflict between idealism and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically intricate to be staged successfully in 1926, it was significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with expres
