Eugene O'Neill's Achievements In The Portraits Of Women In His Later Plays

Eugene O'Neill is a prolific playwright. He is a prolific writer and fifty-one plays of his are available to readers. His early plays are rigid and naturalistic. The middle period is the time he experimented various techniques to redefine theater. After that O'Neill seemed to forget techniques and explored deeper themes, sharpened his pen of depicting characters. The portraits of women Mary and Josie in his last two plays Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten are very prominent.I use feminist theory in the thesis to analyze how these two women portraits are successfully displayed. The thesis is composed of four parts. The first part introduces Eugene O'Neill's life, his plays and their features, and some literary critics' review about his works. The second part takes the play Long Day's Journey into Night to analyze O'Neill's depiction of the woman character Mary. O'Neill is concerned with Mary's miseries and reveals the cause of her bad situation from two aspects: family and society. He sympathizes with Mary's desperate struggle and lonely resistance. The third part relates the good delineation of Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten. O'Neill insightfully displays Josie's longing for love and her bitterness and torture after she is disappointed. He also appreciates her kindness to sacrifice her own wish and play the role Jim needs. Josie's strength and courage to live on is affirmed too. The fourth part concludes O'Neill's achievements in the portraits of women in Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.These two portraits are quite different from the early women characters who are portrayed as simplified and stereotyped ones. O'Neill went beyond his previous narrow vision of women to see and to depict feminine frustrations and difficulties associated with gender roles. He sympathizes with women who live under patriarchal confinements. Mary and Josie are the two heroines O'Neill successfully portrayed.