"The Inscrutable Forces Behind Life"

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), America's foremost dramatist and the winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, made great contributions to American drama, culture and thought. He held a mirror up to American society in a period bracketed by World War I and World War II and became its conscience. Yet the dramatist transcends the barriers of time and place. As the poet of the human heart, O'Neill bears a message for all men of every era.The tragedy All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) was regarded as a controversial work along with Desire Under the Elms. It tells a love story between a black man Jim Harris and a white woman Ella Downey leaping over several life stages from childhood acquaintanceship, adulthood marriage to Ella's subsequent mania. Until now, many scholars have interpreted and given a high evaluation of this work from many angles. However, almost no critic has done a thoroughly comprehensive analysis of it from the psycho-archetype angle. Therefore, this thesis takes a psycho-archetype approach to...