ANOTHER BIBLICAL PARALLEL IN DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS

It is well-known that Eugene O'Neill relied throughout his career upon biblical and classical parallels in an effort to transcend what he believed to be the naive naturalism of American theatre and to lend structural and thematic coherence to his plays. As early as 1915 O'Neill had written with Harvard classmate Colin Ford a play called Belshazzar, based on an episode from the Old Testament, while in Rope (1918)--the manuscript of which he destroyed soon after completion--he used the Genesis story of Jacob, Isaac, and Esau, and again, in Lazarus Laughed (1927), retold a famous story from the New Testament. In The Great God Brown (1926), the strange Nietzschean hybrid Dion Anthony brought together in his very name the primitive pagan and Christian elements that are in conflict in much of O'Neill's work, while in The Iceman Cometh (1946), Christian mythology was inverted into a nihilistic fable about the necessity of illusion in a godless universe. And O'Neill's great trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), based upon the Oresteia of Aeschylus, is perhaps the most ambitious adaptation of a classical subject in American drama. Occasionally, O'Neill even used multiple parallels within a single play; a good example of this is Desire Under the Elms (1924), in which at least four such substructures are at work.

Of these four parallels, three have been previously pointed out by critics.¹ Perhaps the most salient of these is O'Neill's use of the Phaedra myth, with the ill-fated triangle of Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus clearly serving in Desire as a structural prototype for the relationships of O'Neill's Ephraim, Abbie and Eben Cabot, respectively. A second, though somewhat less rigid, parallel derives from the Oedipus legend, with Eben Cabot as a modern Oedipus; the brooding spirit of his dead mother, which lives symbolically through his stepmother, as Jocasta; and, again loosely, Ephraim as a frustrated Laius. And a third parallel has been shown to exist in the loose but suggestive equation of Cabot with the Old Testament prophet Hosea. In addition to these three parallels, I wish to suggest a fourth, also from the Old Testament.

One of the first things we notice about Desire Under the Elms is that each of the four major male characters bears a biblical name. Peter, for example, may be associated--if only, like Rocky in The Iceman Cometh, for negative reasons--with the biblical rock (petrus) upon whom the church was founded; it is he who throws a rock through the window at Abbie, his new stepmother. Against both Peter and his brother Simeon, who may be associated with the Simeon of Genesis 49:5, stands Eben, whose final integrity tragically but fully warrants his name (Hebrew, stone of hope). And, finally, there is Ephraim, whose name suggests the progenitor of the tribes of Israel. These four names are not only appropriate to the rural New England setting of 1850, but resonate well with the legalistic, Old Testament ethos of the play as a whole. The significance of these names has also been pointed out before by critics, yet no one, to my knowledge, has offered either a source or a significance for the name of Abbie Putnam. While the name Abbie is of course a diminutive of Abigail (source of joy), there is a good possibility that O'Neill derived the name from a minor heroine of the Old Testament, who appears in the following passage from the first Book of Kings: