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The Analysis of Archetypal Characters in Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms:Mythological Approach Mitra Sabet Mehrjardi1 Through a close study of Eugene O’Neill’s later plays, the reader comes across the characters who are guilty of a moral transgression, of a betrayal of their own individual standards, and thus of a truth which the community does not share and if they want to face their own truth, they require great courage which often leads to death. The characters are aware of, as O’Neill observes, the Force behind, including Fate, God, the biographical past forming their present, and of an eternal tragedy of man in his self-destructive struggle. In these contexts, most of O’Neill’s characters become character types who have lost their individuality and personal integrity, all faded away in the mechanical and materialistic society. Equipped with theatrical techniques and the very rich classical-mythological literature especially Greek Drama, O'Neill deploys symbolic elements in his plays to dramatize the disintegration of his characters's lives under psychological and social pressures, characters who in their struggle to improve their lives ironically have to lose their integrity and be crushed in the mechanical and materialistic milieu surrounding them and thus their American dream changes to a nightmare. This study focuses on the symbolic elements employed by O'Neill in his Desier Under the Elms to scrutinize the way he implements symbolic title, setting, names and symbolic mythological figures to express and prsent his meaning.Of coures, in many instances allusins to the symbolic mythological figures and images are ironically utilized to intensify the effect of characterization or thematic aspects of the play. 1 - Islamic Azad University - Maybod Branch Introduction Generally acknowledged as the greatest of all American playwrights, Eugene O’Neill’s works have proved highly influential in developing the great literary legacy of twentieth century American theatre. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Drabble 716), Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was a man tortured physically by tuberculosis, alcoholism, and Parkinson disease, and psychologically by various family traumas including a mother addicted to heroin, an alcoholic brother James Jr., and Edmund, his second brother, who died of measles. The effect of such tragic factors in his personal life is manifested in his works. Despite such sufferings, he created a large body of work that drew on his own life, classical myth, and the theatrical experiments of other modern dramatist like Strindberg, Ibsen, and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and his pessimistic philosophy. He began writing one-act plays and their successes made him go on writing for the theatre. His major works include The Great God Brown, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Desire under the Elms, and Lazarus Laughed, to name just a few of them. O’Neill’s essence of outlook in his plays seems to be the very tragedy of human condition. He views the modern man as the victim of ironies of life and finds the modern man and his situation as the depth of tragedy. O’Neill’s dedication to tragic drama seems to grow out of his recognition of a modern crisis, the loss of spiritual support by the American emphasis on material values which O’Neill considers as the end result of “American Dream”, the dream of material things: “following the same selfish greedy path as every country in the world…. I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen” (Basso 37 – 40). He seems like an anti-modernist, as if challenging all the modern values, all discredited. Furthermore, O’Neill has had literary adoptions from other writers and philosophers, both classic and the modern ones. Eugene O’Neill reintroduces the grandeur of Greek tragedy and transmutes the Greek myths into the modern insights of man and life. O’Neill embodies his modern plays with classical myth patterns, characters and themes and weaves them into the current philosophical and psychological ideas. We can observe traces of such influences in the play under discussion, Desire under the Elms. Desire under the Elms: The Plot The play opens in 1850, on a farm of Ephraim Cabot, the hard- working, God fearing man. His first two wives have died. Ephraim Cabot abandons his farm and his three sons who hate him. The youngest son, Eben, steals the father’s money and buys out his brothers, who are headed toward California. Shortly after this, Ephraim returns with his young new wife, Abbie. The second act describes the increasing hatred of Abbie for her old husband since she has married him only to own the farm. Abbie becomes pregnant by Eben. The third act begins a year later with a party celebrating the birth of the new son. Abbie lets Ephraim believe that the child is his, but she later kills the infant when she sees it as an obstacle between herself and Eben. Eben, enraged, turns Abbie over to the Sheriff, but in the final scene, he is convinced of her love and he accepts his share of blame for the crime. The young lovers are led to their punishment, and old Ephraim is left alone again with his farm. Title, Setting, and Name Symbolism From the very beginning, the symbolism arising from the title, Desire under the Elms, the setting, and specifically the names of the characters, is of the great importance for the later analysis of the characters. The title of the play itself foreshadows the feeling and the mood prevalent through out the play, which is that of strong desire. And this desire comes to be the characters' desire for reaching perfection (Ephraim Cabot), identity (Eben), and position (Peter, Simeon, and Abbie) in a materialistic world where although they are driven to their goals, they are thrown with the force of fate into their tragic end. From the very beginning the sons reveal their passions for the ownership of the farm on which they have toiled for years. Simon and Peter, arguing over the ownership of the farm with Eben, hope their father would never return. PETER. (after a pause) ’T would be hard fur me, too, to give up what we’ve ’arened here by our sweat. (A pause) EBEN sticks his head out of the dining – room window, listening) SIMEON. Ay – eh (A pause) Mebbe – hell die soon. PETER. (doubtfully) Mebbe. SIMEON. Mebbe. Fur all we knows – he’s dead now. EBEN. (with a sardonic chuckle) Honor thy father! …. I prey he’s dead (I. 1. 205). Simeon and Peter, tired of waiting and doubtful that the farm will ever be theirs, dream of a better life in California with its promise of gold and freedom. Desirous of having a better position they sell their share to Eben and head forward to California. “(Together) Ay – eh. They’s gold in the West. In California” (I. 1. 205).Finally Eben owns the farm which he associates with his mother first and later with his step-mother since she also endows Eben with security. “For Eben, the true, the consummate condition of being is to belong to the land as an unborn child belongs to the womb” and “… the land is no longer stony and unyielding, but warmed and filled with life" (Bogard 221). But Eben’s desire is so strong and unbridled that it is not easily satisfied. Eben, at first, views his step- mother as an insult to his mother and thus becomes more determined to possess the farm. He buys his brothers’ shares, commits incest with his stepmother, and is finally forced into asserting responsibility and accepting the destiny predetermined for him. Ephraim Cabot also desires the farm. He has it and he does anything to keep it. Ephraim Cabot presents one of those materialistic characters. He had married two times before he married Abbie, Siemeon and Peter’s mother for 20 years and Eben’s mother for 16 years till she died. Now he wants a son of his to inherit the farm not Siemeon, Peter, and Eben ABBIE. (jerking her hands away – harshly) So ye’re plannin’ t’ leave the farm t’ Eben, air ye' CABOT. (dazedly) Leave…' (Then with resentful obstinacy) I hain’t a – giving’ it t’ no one! ABBIE. (remorselessly) Ye can’t take it with ye. CABOT. (thinks a moment – then reluctantly) No, I calc’ late not….If I could, in my dyin’ hour, I’d set it afire an’ watch it burn…. (II. 1. 232). Ephraim needs warmth and companionship but he is hated by every one in the family, and there is no emotional bond between them. Ephraim Cabot and his sons do not have a meaningful relationship. The sons are resentful because of the way in which their father treats them. Simon expresses his feelings in the following words: “Here – it’s stones atop o’ the ground – stones atop o’stones – makin’ stone walls – year atop o’year – him ‘n’ yew ‘n’ me ‘n’ then Eben – makin’ stone walls fur him to fence us in!”(I.3.209). Ephraim comes to fulfill the desire, which moves in him and drives him to find Abbie. Ephraim marries Abbie, a young woman, but he can never satisfy what he needs except when he is with the cows. He says to Abbie, “it’s cold in the house. It’s oneasy. They’s thin’s pokin’ about in the dark –in the corners” (II.2.238). In the end, he is driven from the house into darkness. Therefore, what Ephraim, like the other characters, come to achieve is that of frustration and dispossession. Ephraim Cabot, with his overweening self – confidence and pride seeks to posses both the farm and the youth of others wholly for himself, “the spokesman of a materialistic society which destroys all the soul of other men” (F.Carpenter 108); and finally depressed and disappointed takes a refuge in his solitude. Even Ephraim’s new wife, Abbie, a possessive young woman, seems to have married him in order to steal and take the possession of his farm. She wants a son to make sure the farm will remain hers. However, his overflow of her desires leads her to her incestuous love for her stepson and her final punishment. Moreover the setting symbolism is also as important as the title and the names in the play. The action of the entire play takes place outside the Cabot farmhouse and two enormous Elms are on each side of the house, which appears to protect and at the same time bring everything under their control. The time and description of the farm creates a sense of gloominess. The house, as described in the play, is in need of paint. The walls are sickly grayish, and the green of the shutters faded. The only beauty is seen in the elms. Though the green elms glow, the house is a shadow, seemingly pale and washed out by contrast. Regarding Jungian psychology, heavily based on myths and archetypes as deep-rooted universal symbols, the existence of elm trees at the outset of the play represents the dominance of the mother over the play. In Jungian psychology, the tree has maternal significance; it is the symbol of the mother figure. It is closely associated with “the origin in the sense of the mother. It represents the source of life, of that magical life force.” (Jung 258) .The maternal significance of the trees in the garden of the Cabot farmhouse is made explicit in their bending over the house like a mother who is embracing her child. They protect and shelter the house with their long branches. As O’Neill describes the scene, the meaning of his setting becomes explicit, “the Elms brood over the house with “a sinister maternity…, a crushing, jealous absorption …they are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears tickle” (I.1.203). The elm trees in the garden of the Cabot farmhouse are also the symbols of youthful energy and rejuvenation. Jung explains the meaning of the tree symbol: “Taken on average, the commonest associations to its meaning are growth, life, unfolding of form, in a physical and spiritual sense, development, growth from below upwards and from above downwards, the maternal aspect (protection, shade, shelter, nourishing fruits, sources of life, solidity, permanence, firm-rootedness, but also being rooted to the spot), old age, personality, and finally death and rebirth"(Jung, 258). The irony of the elms trees brooding over the house is revealed at the end of the play; the murder of the baby by a woman who is a symbol of maternal love and desire under those elms, which was an unholy desire, from which Eben and Abbie could not escape and which settled their fate. The Elm trees, generally “symbolizing life of cosmos, its consistence, growth… inexhaustible life” and “equivalent to a symbol of immortality” (Cirlot 328), in Desire under the Elms symbolizes the materialistic life inhabited by people who are spiritually dead and mortal. Eugene O’Neill shows the materialism of modern man by regarding the conflict between characters to possess the farm: the conflict between Ephraim Cabot and his sons Peter, Simeon, and Eben and their attempt to possess the farm. Ephraim Cabot desires to possess the farm where the power of the hard God is dominating and Eben desires to possess the farm to achieve the life and comfort associated with his own mother. They all become materialistic possessors who are spiritually self- dispossessed. In addition to the symbolism arising from the title and setting, the religious name symbolism reveals to us the character traits of the major personages. One of the first things we notice about Desire under the Elms is that some of the main characters bear Biblical names, some of which are used quite ironically. According to Mick Campbell in his Behind the Names, from the Hebrew name, Ephraim meant fruitful. In the Old Testament he is the son of Joseph and the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel "And Joseph called the name of second son Ephraim: For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction"(Genesis .XLI. 52).But contrary to the Biblical Ephraim, the originator of the tribe of Israel, Ephraim Cabot is the source of his own and his family’s fall. Ephraim boasts of his physical strength and manhood, and his Biblical name Ephraim. But very ironically he is not only barren but the source of his family’s failures. The name becomes even more ironic when at the end of the play it becomes clear that the baby is Eben’s and not his. Eben, according to Mick Campbell, comes from the word Ebenezer, which in Hebrew means stone of help and it was the name of a monument erected by Samuel in the Old Testament. Eben, very ironically, is "neither the stone of help nor the stone of hope but in the constant strife and rivalry with his father” (Racy 58). He even betrays his father by forming an incestuous relationship with Abbie, his step mother. The other two brothers’ names also dictate at least some parts of their actions. Peter, according to Mick Campbell in his etymology of worlds is derived from Greek Petros meaning stone and in O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms, it is Peter who first picks up a rock to cast at his father threatening to rape his new wife. PETER. Ye old skinflint! Goodby SIMEON. Ye old Blood sucker! Good-by! CABOT. Go afore I …! PETER. Whoop! (He picks up a stone from the road. SIMEON does the same) PETER. Ay-eh! One! Two CABOT. (Frightened) what air ye…' PETER. Three! (They both throw, the stones hitting the parlor window with a crash of glass, tearing the shade). (II.4.224). But Simeon and Peter in Desire under the Elms come to be the men after their own will, full of wrath and anger as their instrument of cruelty. Abbie-Eben-Ephraim Cabot: Phaedra-Hippolytus-Thesus Back to the analysis of archetypal characters, the play Desire under the Elms comes to be reminiscent of circumstances of Seneca’s Phaedra and Hippolytus. According to the Greek legend in Seneca’s Phaedra, edited by Betty Radice (99-149), Phaedra is in passionate love with her stepson Hippolytus. When Hippolytus rejects her, Phaedra commits suicide, but before that she writes her husband, Theseus, a letter, that accuses Hippolytus of trying to seduce her. Angry at his son’s betrayal, Theseus appeals to his father, Poseidon, the god of the sea, to destroy Hippolytus and banish him from his kingdom. While Hippolytus is driving along the shore, a sea monster sent by Poseidon frightens the chariot horses and Hippolytus dies. Nevertheless, in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra is virtuous. In Desire under the Elms, O’Neill follows this mythic account. Ephraim Cabot (Theseus) at seventy-six brings his third wife, Abbie (Phaedra), to his farm. Like Phaedra, Abbie longs for an affair with her stepson. Alone with Eben in Eben’s mother’s room, she attempts to seduce him. After Eben rejects her and leaves for a visit to Minnie, the prostitute, Abbie lies to Ephraim that Eben tried to seduce her. Like Phaedra, Abbie blaming herself, conceals her growing passion for Eben. Like Phaedra, she wants the son to be sent away as his punishment, “An’ she says, I wants Eben cut off so’s this farm’ll be mine when ye die!” (III.2.255).Unlike Phaedra, Abbie is successful in her advances. Eben, like Hippolytus, rejects Abbie at first. Then Eben, unlike Hippolytus, enjoys the affair. Theseus’ curse on Hippolytus in Phaedra becomes Eben’s curse on his and Abbie’s son. In Desire under the Elms the curse comes from the father, Eben, on his child. At the end of the play, Ephraim, like Theseus, remains alone. There is also another similarity. Ephraim, Abbie, and Eben fight over Cabot farm, which parallels Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus’ power struggling over the Athenian kingdom. Medea-Abbie Another Greek source is Euripides’ play, Medea edited by Stanley Appelbaum. According to this Greek legend (Euripides 1-47), Medea falls in love with Jason, a Greek hero adventuring with a ship and a group of men in Asia Minor, and she helps him to achieve fame in his travels. When they return to Corinth, Jason leaves Medea and their children to marry Clauce, King Creon’s daughter, to strengthen political position. Angry and humiliated, Medea decides to avenge herself against Jason. She tricks Jason and makes him believe that she has accepted his new marriage by sending their tow children with a golden robe for his new wife. The robe is poisonous and kills Glauce when she puts it on as well as her father Creon when he attempts to save her. Medea also decides to kill her children to end the life with Jason. Her passion for revenge overwhelms her and she succeeds in murdering them. In Euripides’ Medea, Medea succeeds in her revenge. After the murder, she is transported to safety by the god Helios. Euripides’ Medea is tragic because her passions are stronger than her reason and her passion destroys innocent people – her children, Glauce and Creon. Medea kills her children for the man she has loved. In Desire under the Elms, Abbie, in order to secure herself, sees that her only real security lies in providing Cabot a son. She suggests to him “mebbe the lord’ll give us a son. (II.1.234). A new son will disinherit Eben, although Eben is his father. Eben’s child is born to Abbie, and Ephraim thinks it is his child although his neighbors know the reality about the son. Ephraim tells Eben about Abbie’s earlier agreement to have a son and about her desire to turn out Eben: “An’ she says, "I wants Eben cut off so’s this farm’ll be mine when ye die!” (III.2.255).Eben, in a great anger and confusion, rejects Abbie who attempts to express her love for him,“Ye’ve made a fool o’me- a sick dumb fool-a- purpose! Ye’ve been on’y playing yer sneakin’stealin’ game all along”, “they must be a devil livin’in ye! T’ain’t human t’ be as bad as that be”. (III.2.256). “I wish he never was born! I wish he’d die this minit I wish I’d never sot eyes on him! It’s him-yew havin’ him-a purpose t’ steal-That’s changed everythin’!” (III.2.257). In order to prove her love for Eben, like Medea Abbie murders her child. Like Medea, Abbie’s passions are stronger than her reasons. Eben and Abbie become simply the victims of their lust. They doom themselves by their incestuous sin and suffer the terrible consequence. At the end of Desire under the Elms, Eben and Abbie have to take the responsibility of their sinful acts. Abbie accepts her guilt: “I’ got t’ take my punishment – t’pay for my sin.” (III.4. 267). Eben also sees that he is also as guilty as Abbie in their crime: “I want t’ share with ye, Abbie, - prison ‘r death ‘r hell ‘ranythin’!” (O’Neill 402). They are reunited in their love with Eben’s sharing the guilt. Ephraim is driven to seclusion and isolation. Edward L. Shaughnessy remarks that, “O’Neill gives us a portrait of partners in sin who work out their redemption and who, within a modern context, evoke echoes of classical tragedy. . . . O’Neill formed a story in a typical tragic pattern: his characters follow a course of sin and redemption in recognition of error and responsibility” (Shaughnessy 97). Phaedra becomes Abbie who desires for her stepson but Abbie gets a more materialistic stature than a heroic type. From the very beginning it becomes obvious that Abbie, a very young woman married the old Ephraim, for money. She wonders if Cabot will buy more land and does not want Eben to inherit any land. And then, after attempting to seduce Eben and being rejected by him, she even accuses Eben of seducing her enraging Cabot outrageous in a way that he wants to kill him but when she sees this will not be what she wants, she tells Cabot to forget about the whole thing. Desirous to possess Eben, she also tries to get closer to Eben, winning his love, by trying to imitate Eben's mother's interests and character. Thus, the events develop toward catastrophe and Abbie’s tragic end, the incestuous love with Eben, illegitimate childbirth, murder of her infant, and her final apprehension by the sheriff. Oedipus Rex – Freud’s Oedipal Complex-Eben Generally speaking, O’Neill adopts the myth of the son against father and the son loving the mother in Desire under the Elms. “O’Neill attempts to turn his tale of adultery and infanticide into something of a modern Oedipus, where strong passions gain a kind of glory. The son rebels against the father and covets the father’s wife” (Barnet, Berman and Burto 352). In order to understand Eben’s reason for falling in love with Abbie, we need to examine not only the story of Oedipus but also Freud’s oedipal complex. In the story-myth of Oedipus, adopted by Sophocles in his Oedipus Rex, Oedipus unwillingly murders his father and marries his mother. This myth forms Freud’s oedipal complex theory. “Finding in the myth of Oedipus a version of tragedy that he saw as enacted in every family, Freud continuously found this recurring pattern of attraction to and live for the parent of opposite sex, and jealousy and hatred, even a death wish, towards the parent of the same sex that he eventually named the Oedipus complex. There is always the boy’s unconscious rivalry with his father for the love of his mother” (Thurschwell 47). Therefore, Eben resembles Sophocles’ Oedipus and represents Freudian Oedipus complex in many ways. First, he is involved with oedipal conflict of wanting to murder his father and to save his mother. He is resentful because of the way his father has treated his mother and now is treating him. PETER. (after a pause-judicially) she was good even t' him. EBEN. (fiercely) An' fur thanks he killed her! SIMEON (after a pause) No one never kills nobody. It's allus something'. That's the murderer. EBEN. Didn't he slave Maw t' death PETER. He's slaved himself t' death. He's slaved Sim 'n' me 'n' yew t' death-on'y o' us hain't died-yit Ephraim has had nothing but contempt for his son Eben whom he considers as one of the world's weaklings. According to Freud’s theory, Eben finds his father in competition, first for his own mother and then for his stepmother’s love. Hence he begins rivalry and antagonistic feeling towards his father although he is apparently trying to avenge his mother against his father. Eben is also engaged in an oedipal conflict with Ephraim Cabot in his seeking out the prostitute, Min, with whom his father and his brothers have had an affair. According to Freud, Eben acts out a wish that everyone has in early childhood. Like Oedipus, Eben does not intentionally commit his crime, but his anger and betrayal gives Abbie the idea of killing their son to prove her love. And like Oedipus, Eben participates in his punishment by submitting himself to the police. Later, he decides to share the blame with Abbie for the murder of their son. Bogard maintains that “in the reunion of the lovers, O’Neill is announcing strongly what will be a solution for those who cannot ‘belong’ and “when all is lost, the only thing is finding another being equally lonely and alienated, in whose presence comfort can be gained and loneliness forgotten for a time” (Contour 226).Abbie, also comes to signify one of those archetypal women figures, that of the temptress, characterized by sensuous beauty. This woman is “one to whom the protagonist is physically attracted and who ultimately brings about his downfall” (Gordon, 501). In Desire under the Elms, with a more profound analysis of the characters, we come to see that although O’Neill uses the moral and physical involvement similar to Greek sources, the characters are not there to express their heroism in the face of their fate but, on the contrary, to convey the complexity of a family life. Being adopted from the Greek sources, the characters are expected to be heroic types, men and women of high ranks manifesting integrity, dignity, and power in the face of fate but in contrast to the characters in the sources, the main characters, Ephraim Cabot, Eben and Abbie are from the common lot, ordinary people whose desires unravel the values of a materialistic world. And more than being tragic heroes and heroines they come to represent as ineffectual people causing disgrace and passivity in the face of their fate. Apollo vs. Dionysus: Ephraim vs. Eben - Abbie In Desire under the Elms, the legends of Oedipus, Phaedra, and Medea, along with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy are really co-equaled in importance. Nietzsche maintains that Greek tragedies were founded upon some unending conflict between forces of rationality, balance, the life meditative, the impulse to conform and moralize represented by the god Apollo and the wild, creative power, the life strenuous, the impulse to exploit and explore represented by the god Dionysus. The Dionysians are figures of tragedy because they stand for change, they are men of action who incur the wrath of gods and are struck down as rebels. Abbie in Desire under the Elms represents Dionysus. She takes the place of Eben’s mother and his lover simultaneously. She becomes pregnant and as long as Eben and Abbie are in love with each other, the farm, as we see in the play, becomes fertile. Abbie and the farm become one, and she represents another archetypal woman, not at this time a temptress but “the Earth Mother Nature, a symbolic of fruition, abundance, and fertility”(Gordon 501).Therefore, Abbie in Desire Under The Elms offers Spiritual and emotional nourishment to Eben with whom she comes in contact. Eben dramatizes Nietzsche’s Dionysus too. Regarding the beginning parts of the play, we come to see that Eben, like his brothers, try to possess the farm. He steals his father’s money to buy his brothers, share to fulfill his dream of material possession but later on in the play, we encounter Eben complaining to his father’s legal ownership of the land on which his mother was working and made it fertile. Eben is actually identifying the farm with his lost mother and his attempt to possess the land is a kind of strong desire to rediscover and fulfill the security love his mother used to bring him. Abbie and the farm, as mentioned before, become one and Eben, trying to possess the land, is in fact possessed by the land when he finds the force of Abbie’s love and associates it with the farm. Therefore, what Eben does is what Nietzsche referred to as “self- renunciation” (Bogard 221) or the same Dionysian forgetfulness. As it is observed: The land, O’Neill implies, cannot be possessed. It demands surrender. Eben desire to sink into its entity in rapture and Dionysian forgetfulness…. He desire to serve the land as its priest and its son, for O’Neill, making the connection that other dramatists have only implied, sees that the land is also a mother. (The Revels 68). Ephraim Cabot is presented in opposition to Eben. In his monologue in part ΙΙ , scene ii, when he is moved by his desire for Abbie, attempting to reach her by telling her of the hardship of his past, we come to know him always in the service of a hard God. Bogard associates the hard God, as Ephraim says in the play, "with Ephraim’s Puritanism and essentially masculine strength and the easy God with Abbie and the fertility of the farm and considers the conflict between them as the thematic center of the play"(Contour 217). “God”, he says, “hain’t easy”; “God’s” in the stones! Build my church on a rock - out O’stones an’I in them! …I’d made thin’s grow out O’nothin’ – like the will O’God, like to the servant of his hand. It wa’n’t easy” (II.2.237). Ephraim says, “when ye kin make corn sprout out O’stones, God’s livin’ in yew!” (II.2.237). He tells Abbie of a time when he was disappointed at so many stones, and gave up the farm and journeyed west and farmed a broad meadow where there were no stones, where “Ye’ d only to plow an’ sow an’ then set an’ smoke yer pipe an’ watch thin’s grow.” But he says that the easy way had no salvation in it, and he returned to the stony farm and re – entered the service of the hard God. He talks about the loneliness of his life on the farm his going after a woman, when solitude made him “dispairful” (II.2.237), sometimes the whore, Min, or he took a wife, the mother of the Simeon and Peter, and later, when she died, the mother of Eben with both of whom he was always lonesome. His first wife “never knowed what she was helping” (II.2.237) and his second wife “never knowed me or nothin. It was lonesomer’n hell with her” (II.2.237). And for the third time, he hears a call in the spring, “the voice O’God cryin’ in my wilderness, in my lonesomeness t’ go an’ seek an’ find!” (II.2.238). This voice makes him go after Abbie but in her presence as in the presence of other women he feels divided from his God and more lonesome. In opposition to Eben, who dramatizes Nietzsche’s Dionysian forces, Ephraim Cabot dramatizes Nietzsche’s Apollonian power which Nietzsche described it in his Birth of Tragedy hostile to the Dionysian state. In Desire under the Elms, Eugene O’Neill seems to follow Nietzsche’s imagery by putting Ephraim Cabot in conflict with Eben: “With Nietzsche help, O’Neill was able to see this opponent of the Dionysian as being his turn a god – driven man, one, who despite his materialism and his stubborn individualism, also belonged to a power greater than himself (Contour 218). , Therefore, we come to see Ephraim Cabot believing and belonging to a greater power than him and that is what puts him in conflict with Eben. "Ephraim Cabot is actually representing what O’Neill considers in opposition with Eben’s and his lover’s world and that God did not exist for man, but man for the sake of God, and that the purpose alone. Therefore, labor in the service of impersonal social usefulness promoted the glory of God"(Contour 217). In Desire under the Elms, Eugene O’Neill, by presenting a character such as Ephraim Cabot, dedicates to a life a life of self- denial and hardship and as Bogard observes “with the rigorous repression of the flesh and subjugation of impulse to rock- hard will and represents a theological conflict between Ephraim and Eben (Contour 217). Conclusion Finally, we come to see that Eugene O’Neill, equipped wit theatrical techniques and symbolic devices, and inspired by Greek theatre dramatizes the people whose lives under the psychological and social problems are disintegrate. The more they try to make their lives better in the materialistic world surrounding them, the more, they get far away from humanity and drowned in the misery, corruption and poverty of their souls. The fact that the spiritual glories of Americans sold out for materialistic gains is pictured in Desire under the Elms. In a materialistic world, when God is no more the target of people’s belief and just material speaks the first everyone who has still some lights of belief in God in his heart is lonesome. O'Neill tried to track on, in ancient myth, the lost stability of soul, power and sufficiency of human capacity overwhelmed in the materialistic world. And this was exactly what O’Neill aimed to show through his adoption of ancient myth. His characters became the character types of ancient myth and the modern images of Dionysus and Apollo, to show the man’s struggle and aspiration in a world concerned chiefly with material things and entertainment. Contrary to the Greek sources, the main characters have lost their heroic mode, they are not of the dignity any more and they never come to success or completeness of their achievements but very ironically confront the steady unbroken turning of the wheel of fortune, as Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism refers to it which in case of Desire under the Elms is that of torture and hell. O'Neill searches for a basis for a kind of faith and meaning in modern American life and finally makes it clear that the only hope to find meaning for life is very dim, unclear and vague.