Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Desire Under The Elms”

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.40.1.2019.0017

2161-4318

Eugene O'Neill,

American Literature and Culture

Hungary. Stephanie, a stolid but gentle and pretty girl of eighteen, is the only child of a peasant father and mother who live in grinding poverty in a wretched hut on a small tenant holding of poor land. They are no better than serfs. Stephanie and her mother have to work in the fields with the father. They are trying to save up enough money for Stephanie's dowry. She is in love with the son of a neighbor, a handsome village catch who is not in love with her but who looks forward to spending her dowry. Stephanie's father has a peasant's passion for land. He loves the soil. He kneels on it and prays and makes his wife and daughter pray with him.New England. Ephriam Cabot and his three sons labor like beasts of burden clearing a new field of their rock-bitten New England farm. They pile the rocks into stone walls. Ephriam is a hard Old Testament Yankee, religious to the point of mania. He kneels in the flinty soil of his fields and prays to his God and makes his sons kneel with him. His two older sons are like great, hulking cattle, yet with shrewd, bargaining eyes. Dull-looking, they are far from fools. The youngest, the stepson Eben, is of a leaner, more high-strung type. All three are afraid of their father, but all three are in stubborn, smoldering revolt against his domination.Hungary. Stephanie's father is taken ill. His resistance has been weakened by the extra labor he has undertaken to save Stephanie's dowry. He contracts pneumonia and dies. The money of the dowry has to be paid out in doctors fees and funeral expenses. There is no money left to pay the rent. Stephanie appeals to her fiance, feeling confident he will find means to help them, but knowing her dowry is gone, he scornfully casts her off. This has a terrible effect on Stephanie. From a gentle, submissive girl she becomes hard and embittered. This change in her is heightened when the landlord's overseer has them evicted from their hut. The village priest, a kind old man, takes them in. He tells them of America and, from his savings, gives them the money to go. Stephanie has inherited from her father his feeling for the soil. She loves the fields of the old place on which she has worked. On the last evening she pays a farewell visit to these fields, passing her old home in which new tenants are already installed. This sight increases her bitterness. In the soil of the fields she kneels and sobs. Then rebellion against her fate arouses her defiance. She takes an oath that, in this new land, America, to which she is going, she will own her own land and her own home, and she will revenge on men the injury her fiance has done to her love and pride.New England. Ephriam and his three sons return home in the evening, silent and exhausted after their days work in the fields. The home is a little farmhouse with big elms on each side, where trailing branches rest oppressively on the roof as if symbolizing the crushing struggle with the forces of nature that bears down the lives of these men. In the house, Eben, the youngest, cooks the supper. He does it in a defiantly sloven fashion. The old man says grace. They fall to eating. Ephriam is angry at Eben for his bad cooking. He says defiantly: “This house needs a woman.” It is a threat to marry again, his sons think, and leave the farm they are waiting to inherit to some strange woman. A quarrel immediately breaks out. They make threats as to what they will do to any woman he brings to the house, but Ephriam is too powerful a character for them. He laughs at their threats. He will do as he pleases. It is his farm. The two elder brothers are subdued, but Eben still rebels. He shouts: “It was my Maw's farm. It's my farm by rights. You stole it.” Then Simeon cuts in mockingly that “it hain't nobody's farm for sartain till they git the mortgage paid offen it. Then we'll see whose farm it be!” This is a threat, but also a proposal for postponing the battle. The father accepts it as such. And he begins to plan out work to them that he believes in a certain number of years will bring in enough money to free the farm from debt.Europe. Stephanie and her mother embark on a sailing ship bound for America. The mother, a dull peasant woman, has sunk into a decline, her heart broken by all that has happened. She dies on the passage going over and is buried at sea. Stephanie lands in Boston alone and bewildered. She is directed to an employment agency by officials on the dock, and gets a job as a chamber maid in a cheap hotel where she has to do work of three. There, as she is a pretty girl, she is annoyed by the attentions of the male guests who try to seduce her, but her great physical strength saves her on all such occasions. The effect, however, is to make her hate all men, to long for the power to be revenged on them, and to realize that in her physical attraction she possesses a power to use. Finally, an old farmer comes to the hotel. Shrewdly, he notes her ability for hard work and he offers her a job as the hired girl on his farm. She agrees. She longs to get into the country again, on a farm. She goes with him. His farm is about fifty miles from the farm of Ephriam and his sons. The farmer's wife, as soon as she sees Stephanie's good looks, is down on her. She is made to work like a horse by this woman, and although the farmer tries feebly to intercede for her, he is too cowed by his wife, and each time he tries to interfere makes the wife more vindictive in her persecution. Stephanie longs to escape, but does not know how. She grows harder and bitterer. Every human feeling is deadened. In any off moment she goes into the fields alone and renews her oath to be revenged, and somehow, someway free herself from the slavery of working for other people in other peoples' homes and fields, and to own her own farm.It is spring at the Cabot farm. Old Man Ephriam feels his loneliness, feels the hostility of his sons, feels they are only waiting for him to die. He wanders in his fields alone, or among the cattle. He is moved by the feeling of spring, he is a bit queer in his head, he prays for guidance and it seems to him he gets a message from the sky to go out looking for something—“to seek and find”. Obeying this impulse on the spur of the moment, he hitches his horse to the buggy and goes off driving down the road with only a word to his sons. They notice the queer look in his eyes, they wonder what's come over him and suddenly the suspicion dawns on them that he has gone out looking for a new wife to whom he will leave the farm when he dies, and this drives all three into a fury.The next day, Ephriam, driving past in his buggy, still in his queer feeling of a quest, stops to get a drink by the gate of the farm where Stephanie works. She is pumping water at the well. She gives him a drink. He stares at her fascinatedly; he is struck by her beauty; he falls in love with her at first sight. She seems to him the answer to his message. He tells her of his loneliness, of his home needing a woman. He asks her to become his housekeeper. At once, she realizes calculatingly the power she can have over this man. She accepts. The farmer and his wife are away. She gets her small bundle of clothes and drives off with Ephriam.The three brothers back at the farm have been plotting grimly how they will make life unbearable for any wife Ephriam should bring back. When they hear the buggy coming they rush in from the fields and wait hostilely by the gate. Ephriam comes up with Stephanie and introduces her as the housekeeper. They are relieved he isn't married. They try to be antagonistic but Stephanie uses her physical charm, her eyes and smile, and they are dumbfounded. She has the two eldest won over in no time. Eben resists her. He resents a woman coming to take his mother's place, (for he sees the old man is in love), on what he regards as his mother's farm—as his farm now, since this has been his mother's farm which Ephriam had made her sign over to him after he had married her. That is, in Eben's mind, his step-father had stolen the farm from his mother.The situation which rapidly develops at the farm is that every one of these lonely men falls in love with this queer foreign woman and that she deliberately, calculatingly encourages each in turn. Eben alone fights against loving her, is rude to her, but she knows the struggle inside him and she takes no offense, knowing she will win him over in the end. She lives in ease at the farm. She does no work. There is always either Ephriam or one of the elder sons to do it for her. And, growing beautiful and sleek in her gratified sense of power she amuses herself by teasing Eben, who pleases her more than the others. But she is determined not to fall in love, not to marry until one of them—she doesn't care which—can give her this farm or some other, made over to her in her own right and name without encumbrance.At first, she thinks she will marry the old man, but Eben tells her about the mortgage. She tells Ephriam inexorably that the mortgage must be paid off or she will not consent to marry him. The infatuated old man begins to work himself, his sons, his animals harder than ever.Stephanie skillfully manages to keep each—except Eben—ignorant of the passion of the others for her. Ephriam, and the two older sons each go about, obliviously, in their own infatuated dream. Peter and Simeon ask her to marry them. To each she replies: “I will marry you if you will give me a farm.”At this time Peter comes across in the village store a poster about California. The gold rush is on. Great tales of miraculous fortunes are flying about. An idea seizes him: he will go to California, find some of the easy gold, and then return and buy a fine farm with which he can bribe Stephanie (called familiarly “Stephie” by them all) to marry him. He leaves the poster on the kitchen table. His brother, Simeon, sees it and immediately he conceives the same idea. Both of these two brothers, unknown to each other, make secret preparation for departure. Before each sneaks off he has a private interview with Stephie, in which each receives a pledge of her hand if he should return with money enough to buy her a farm. To seal this pledge, she kisses them, but when they attempt to embrace her, she immediately holds them away. They leave on the same night, neither knowing of the other's departure, and they do not meet until they are both passengers on the same clipper ship, bound from Boston around the Horn for California. Immediately, as soon as they see each other, each suspects the purpose of the other's journey to be the same as his own. Then they begin to hate each other and each resolves to stick close and keep watch on the other. The result is they agree to a partnership in their quest for gold—a partnership of hate. Neither wishes to chance it that the other will find gold he may not find.In the meantime, Ephriam, discovering the two brothers absence, curses and storms because, with these two strong laborers gone, the paying off the mortgage seems further off than before. He works harder than ever himself and forces Eben to work as hard. Eben enters into the work with a will because with his two brothers gone, he figures he alone is left to inherit the farm if his father should die. He can no longer hide from himself that he too is in love with Stephie. She leads him on, she feels herself somewhat drawn toward him, but she fights this feeling back in her grim determination to play the game. She is convinced the chances of Eben giving her a farm are slim. She must not allow herself to like him too well. He is an instrument to use. The farm needs his labor. She must encourage him enough to keep him from running away. He is alternately full of hope, then of rage and despair in which he curses her and threatens her with his vengeance should she marry his father.The brothers have landed in Frisco. Together, suspiciously eyeing each other, they buy outfits and set out for the mining camps and go prospecting and stake out a claim together. Their claim proves a good one. Their pile of gold grows. Each calculates when it has filled a certain jar in which they store it, it will be enough to go back and buy the farm with. Each dreams of Stephie. Each watches the other more and more suspiciously. Finally, their days output fills the jar to the brim. Then each looks at the other. Each proposes they go to town together. Each tries to get the other drunk while only pretending to get drunk himself. And then, by different routes, each hurries back to the camp to get the gold. As Simeon reaches for the jar, Peter appears in the doorway. They cannot dissimulate further. Each shoots and they are both killed. The jar of gold, the price of the farm, is overturned and the gold lies scattered in heaps between their two bodies.On the farm, a sudden stroke of luck makes possible the paying off of the mortgage. A quarry of valuable granite is discovered in a corner of the place and a man comes to Ephriam and offers him four thousand for this, to Ephriam useless, section of his land. The old man accepts on condition of immediate payment. He receives the money and goes to the village to pay off the mortgage. He has kept the deal secret. He returns to the farm with joy and bursting in on one of the scenes in which Stephie, by encouraging and then withdrawing, has goaded Eben to a frenzy for her own queer gratification in his passion, the old man produces his paper to prove his words and, before Eben, asks that Stephie marry him tomorrow. He has brought with him, too, a deed in which the farm is made over to her. She tries to get this from him, but he cunningly puts it back in his pocket. She can't touch it until she has married him. So she calmly consents.Eben, recovering from the stupor into which this news has plunged him, flies out at them both, but especially at Stephie whom he reviles and insults and tells her he hates her now, until finally, stung beyond endurance, she turns on him and, appealing to the father, has Eben ordered from the place. The father, worked up to a passion, attacks his son and throws him out of the door, slamming it behind him. Then he turns to her. Made bold by his triumph, he makes silly love to Stephie. He tries to put his arms around her and kiss her. Revolted, she pushes him away and goes to her own room. She broods, thinking with disgust what marriage with this old man will mean. Now it has come to the point, she cannot bear the idea. And she is full of hatred for Eben for the insults he has put on her, especially the threat he has made that he does not care what she does now, and that he will find another woman. She feels she would like to be revenged once and for all on them both. Then she suddenly sees a solution. If she can entice Eben back again she will get him to kill the old man, she will get possession of the deed and then give Eben up to justice. In this way she will be free of them all and at last she will own a home of her own she can possess alone without obligation to anyone.Eben has gone off in the fields. His rage gives way to grief. He weeps. All his love for Stephie returns. He must see her again. He sneaks back to the farmhouse and taps at her window just as her plan is completed in her mind. She lets him in. He falls on his knees, asking her forgiveness. She leads him on. He implores her to run off with him. She refuses. They would have no money, no house, no home. She has had enough of that. But she tells him she does love him. He is in heaven at this. And what she does wish is that they could live on here together, without the old man. She hates the old man, she tells him. She pretends to be afraid of him, to dread what he will do to her in the future. She plays upon everything calculated to arouse Eben's hatred to the breaking point until, unable to restrain himself any longer, he rushes from the room, downstairs to the kitchen where his father is. She listens at the stairs. Eben flings open the door of the kitchen, then hesitates. At the sight of him, it is the old man's turn to fly into a rage. Instead of Eben attacking him, it is he who attempts to throw Eben out again. There is a terrible struggle between them. Eben throws the old man from him. He falls, hitting his head against the stove. He lies shuddering for a moment, then is still. Trembling now, Eben bends down beside him. He finds he is dead. He staggers away and falls into a chair and hides his face in his hands, sobbing with horror and grief. Stephie appears in the doorway. She goes to the old man and takes the deed from his pocket. Eben does not notice her coming. She stops to look at him. She weakens, she is full of pity, she moves toward him, she struggles with herself in alarm for she feels a strange desire to take him in her arms and comfort him. Then, bringing all her will to bear, she looks at the deed. She remembers her hatred for men, Eben's insults, her ambition for the farm about to be realized, her sole ownership of her home, and she forces herself to turn and go, to put on her things and walk to the village to the Sheriff's house. The Sheriff opens the door. She enters. By this time she is pale and faltering, but she forces herself to tell her story, to accuse Eben of killing the old man. The Sheriff is in his nightgown. He tells her to wait until he gets dressed. Waiting, she grows conscience-stricken, she sees Eben before her eyes, she sees him in jail, being hung perhaps, and, suddenly realizing that she loves him and has loved him and what she has just done to ruin him, she rushes madly out of the house to go back to warn him.She runs madly. She rushes across fields and through woods, taking a short cut. She finds Eben still in the same position in the kitchen. She flings her arms around him; she kisses him, she tells him on her knees what she has done; she begs him to make his escape while there is time. But he refuses. He has killed. He must pay for his sin and take his punishment. She pleads with him wildly, but he is obstinate. She is still pleading hysterically when the Sheriff comes to take Eben. Then, seeing that hope is gone, she makes her sacrifice. She denounces herself. She tells the Sheriff it was she who put the idea into Eben's mind, forced him do to it. He must take them both. They have both sinned and they will pay together. She does not care what happens to her now as long as it is with Eben. She loves him. The Sheriff takes them outside. Hand in hand, they turn to look at the house and the farm. Then, as a last gesture of self-renunciation, she takes the deed from the bosom of her dress and tears it to pieces and scatters them to the ground. Then, hand in hand, they walk off with the Sheriff behind them and only the farm and the land remain, ownerless now, free and triumphant.