EUGENE O'NEILL'S VISION OF AMERICAN HISTORY: A STUDY OF THE CYCLE PLAYS (DRAMA, UNITED STATES)

Eugene O'Neill regarded the cycle to which he gave the title "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed" as the most significant challenge of his career as a playwright. Its subject was the history of an American family, the Harfords of Massachusetts, from the beginnings of the American Revolution in 1775 to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. O'Neill's intention was to represent, in a cycle which was eventually to include eleven plays, epochal events in the history of a powerful American family, events which he conceived as symbolizing patterns in the larger context of American history.; The two texts and the single scenario which survive from the project give evidence of some aspects of the comprehensive pattern of history he proposed to treat. The first of the plays, A Touch of the Poet, and the second, More Stately Mansions, were to have treated intellectual, social and economic developments which defined "The Age of Jackson." In a third work, The Calms of Capricorn, he thought to engage these and other developments, accelerated by the expansion of the geographic boundaries of the new nation.; The cycle reflects O'Neill's growing preoccupation with the problem of identifying and giving form to the realities shaping character, action and thought in American history. While the epic form which he projected was to trace patterns of continuity in American history--through the representation of events in the story of a family--it was to be modernist in its design. In the three surviving works, O'Neill created modes of exposition which emphasize patterns of discontinuity in character, action, language and setting. He drew from several theatrical sources. While A Touch of the Poet uses themes drawn from the romantic drama, its treatment of character is modern. More Stately Mansions employs expressionistic modes of exposition in order to reveal "interior" planes of action. In design, The Calms of Capricorn is perhaps the most innovative of the three. While it draws upon popular American forms--including theatrical melodrama, film, and music--these elements are composed within a complex pattern of theatrical imagery.; The principal achievement of Eugene O'Neill's unfinished cycle lies in the playwright's creation of modern dramatic forms for the treatment of history, ones comparable in significance to those created by major playwrights of earlier epochs.