Abstract
Eugene O’Neill started his career as a playwright during a period of bold experimentation and fervent hope for the future greatness of American literature. His reading of Nietzsche, particularly of The Birth of Tragedy, filled him with the ambition of bringing Dionysus back to the theater. He was influenced, too, in his expressionistic sorties, by such European iconoclasts as Strindberg and Wedekind. He began composing plays at a time when new and disturbing ideas were in the air. As we have already noted, psychoanalysis was then attracting public attention. The discovery of the unconscious, the growing interest in the peculiar logic of dream-imagery, the increasing knowledge of the damaging effects caused by sexual repression, the dynamic insight that only a thin partition divided the normal from the abnormal personality, led writers to abandon the practice of personifying the character of evil. A more permissive sex–ethic emerged. What was evil but an upsurge of libidinal energy, an explosion of the primordial, amoral id. Flaming youth, as we remarked in our analysis of Fitzgerald’s work, was now affirming its inalienable right to release its instincts, to obey the “natural” law of desire. The passion of sex was no longer to be fearfully denied or furtively indulged. The theology of original sin was debunked. In matters of sex, the younger generation undertook to free itself from the incubus of guilt. Semantically and psychologically, the opposite of suppression was taken to mean uninhibited sex expression.
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References
See W. David Sievers., Freud on Broadway. New York: Hermitage House, 1955.
H. R. Hays., The Dangerous Sex. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964, p. 289.
Eugene O’ Neill, All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Welded. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924, p. 107.
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956, pp. 153–154.
Eugene O’Neill, Nine Plays. New York: The Modem Library, 1952, p. 523.Eugene O’Neill., All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Welded, p. 151.
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1971). Eugene O’Neill: the Tragedy of Love without God. In: The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3236-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3236-0_7
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