Autobiographical Elements in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REALISM
O’Neill’s dramas are not only realistic and psychological, but also autobiographical.
O’Neill considers art and autobiography as one. He is known as the most
autobiographical among modern playwrights. O’Neill’s own life has the raw material for
his final plays. It is only towards the end of his life that he resorted to direct
autobiographical statement. His later plays are based on his own personal experiences or
reminiscences. Intensely autobiographical, O’Neill poured all his longings and despairs,
his agonies and ecstasies, into his plays.
SELF-DRAMATIZATION
Many of his characters are near projections of his own-self John Gassner rightly
observes: “It is impossible to forget that O’Neill is speaking through them”. From the
beginning to the end of dramatic career, O’Neill has attempted to transmute his
autobiographical experiences into art. Many of his characters reveal his own thoughts
and experiences and give expression to his views and ideas. The Poet in Fog, Robert
Mayo in Beyond the Horizon, Stephen Murray in The Straw, Michael Cape in Welded,
Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, Richard Miller in Ah! Wilderness, John in Days
Without End, Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, etc., represent the writer as a
hero. Stephen Murray, in The Straw, is the surrogate of O’Neill. The character description
of Stephen is as valid as a self-portrait of O’Neill as a young artist. In Days Without End,
John Loving is a persona for the playwright. In Ah! Wilderness, O’Neill deals with the
memories of his high school days and happy love. In Marco Millions, he reveals a part of
his own nature. Dynamo is too much of his own private thinking aloud. In Welded, the
marital problems of Michael and Eleanor Cape resemble those of O’Neill and his wife.
They represent separation and final reunion. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill is
able to utilize successfully the subjective experiences of his early years.

HIS SPIRITUAL PAST

O’Neill has made an extensive use of his life and delves directly into his own mental
and spiritual past. He plays the role of the tormented agonist in the tragic drama of his
own life. He has succeeded in expressing the secrets he had been carefully hiding for
many years. As he grows older, he turns back even more firmly into the past and lays bare
his personal experiences. Increasingly he has used his own past for dramatic material.
O’Neill’s early plays dramatized his own longings for adventure that took him to remote
places. He was a member of the Norwegian sailing vessel “Charles Racine” in Boston. He
had himself sailed from San Francisco to Honduras. He found sea-faring very exciting.
His sea-voyages deepened his knowledge of the world of derelicts, loafers and exiles and
he frequently mixed with down-to-outs. He lived in a saloon on the New York waterfront
known as Jimmy the Priest’s. This refuge for unemployed seamen, prostitutes and other
outcasts of society appears in many of his plays. His early life was devoted to drinking,
girls and anarchists. A Wife for a Life narrates O’Neill’s experiences in “Honduras”. In
Moon of the Caribbees, he drew on his memory of a moon-lit night off Trinidad on the
same British tramp steamer bound for New York. Abortion points to many references to
his year at Princeton. It is a typical Princetonian celebration of a sport’s victory. It is a
celebration of Yale’s defeat in a baseball game. The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s
Journey Into Night belonged to the year 1912, when he had almost lost himself in the
aimless and dissolute ways into which he had slipped. He was disgusted by his father’s
easy and enervating career in the commercial theatre. The refuge were unemployed
seamen, prostitutes, and other outcastes of society. The Straw deals with O’Neill’s
experiences in the sanatorium and vivid recollections of his own life. Hughie re-enacts
the story of the writer’s creative life and Erie re-enacts his author’s frustration. Here
O’Neill identifies himself with Erie Smith.

FAMILY REFERENCES
O’Neill’s family is fundamental to the understanding of all his plays. “I fact”,
remarked Coolidge, “he wrote of his family all his life”. His dramas are full of strange
echoes of his own past familial experiences. In Desire Under the Elms, Ephraim Cabot is
Eugene’s image of his father. They have many things in common. Like Ephraim Cabot,
Eugene’s father, James O’Neill, is also a godlike patriarch. Both the fathers are very
harsh, intolerant and critical of their sons. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, James
Tyrone’s nature is like that of O’Neill s father, James O’Neill. Both the families are
highly self-centered and have little time for their families and there is emptiness in their
lives. They are godlike patriarchs. Both are irrationally anxious about money or the
possession of land. Like O’Neill s father, James Tyrone is also a popular actor of
romantic melodrama. O’Neill has given full representation to his mother in his plays. She
was dreamy, self-dispossessed, convent-bred angel. She was a victim of her proud,
romantic temperament and fixations. Love and peace are associated with mother’s love.
She is commonly presented as Earth-Mother. The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude,
Mourning Becomes Electra show how her death-hungry ‘sons’ seek a lost innocence and
sheltering womb. The Straw, Welded and Different emphasizes the images of mutual
salvation, and recreation of mother-child relationship. In Desire Under the Elms, the
mother of Eben Cabot has recently died - as had the actual mother of Eugene O’Neill and
the son accuses the father of treating her badly. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the
son accuses the father for ill-treating his mother. He has given her nothing, not even a
home. Moon for the Misbegotten deals with the tragic life of O’Neill’s sister, Jamie, and
it tells the literal truths about James O’Neill, Jr.

CONCLUSION
In his personal life and herein might be found the greatness of the plays of this period.
He had achieved a dynamic synthesis between the autobiographical and objective reality.
He achieved objectivity toward his O’Neill’s vision of reality is not stereotyped or fixed
in any way. It has a steady growth and it moves from realism to psychological realism
and finally to autobiographical realism. In his early sea-plays, he catches the reality of
common people living on sea or land. The playwright is clearly using material he has
gathered from his own experiences at sea. The plays show the painstaking m detailed
realism of European naturalistic drama. His realism, though it may occasionally appear
stale, began as a fresh attitude to the possibilities of drama. Here the autobiographical
element is valid rather than explicit. Realism was a dead end to O’Neill in 1921. “He had
completed his first phase”, observed Tiusanen, “in the surrounding which he knew by
experience and which were thus easily turned into realistic milieus on the stage”. The
Middle Phase deals with psychological realism. The plays like The Great God Brown and
the Strange Interlude take him inward and downward to himself. The range is narrowed
but is extremely revealing. The subject becomes what lies within himself. In 1940,
O’Neill had said: “There are moments in it that suddenly strip the secret soul of a man
stark naked”. As always, that naked soul was O’Neill’s: In his later plays, he resorted to
direct autobiographical statements which emerged directly from the depths of his being.
The dramatist was frank in the depiction of his experiences. He had impregnated drama
with life, and drama and life become one. He used episodes and characters which he had
known autobiographical self. The autobiographical elements in O’Neill’s dramas
contributed toward a deeper knowledge and understanding of both.