An Archetypal Interpretation Of Beyond The Horizon

Eugene O’Neill is the father of American drama. This prolific dramatist’s plays with novel subject matters, wide fields, themes with profound philosophy and colorful styles push American drama to the mature period. Most of his plays are related to tragedy, and have strong features of naturalism, realism, expressionism and psychoanalysis. Beyond the Horizon is O’Neill’s first full-length play that causes a sensation on the tedious American theater in the early nineteen twenties and establishes O’Neill as the most brilliant dramatist in American drama. Since nineteen eighties, some scholars at home and abroad have successively done researches on Beyond the Horizon from different perspectives. However, the thesis tries to interpret the personality archetypes of the protagonist, the archetypal images and the tragedy archetypes in the play by Jungian archetypal theory, to further excavate the roots that cause the tragedy of the protagonist and the tragic consciousness contained in the play from social and historical background.Carl Gustav Jung is the founder of the Analytical Psychology. His archetypal theory mainly aims at the annotation of the collective unconscious and the psychological structures. The collective unconscious includes instinct and archetype. Instinct drives the movement of behavior, and archetype is the pattern of apprehension and constructive experience. Jung thinks archetype can be manifested by various forms, within which, the most important constitutions in personality are persona, shadow, anima (animus) and the Self. Based on the four personality archetypes, the author tries to analyze the protagonist’s life course:from an idealist in the beginning to a realist to death at last. so as to reveal the roots of his tragedy. At the same time. in the play. the four repetitive archetypal images:farm. sea. sunset and sunrise. are respectively connected with the protagonist’s life, namely, the pioneering spirit on land. the struggle with nature, the physical death and the spiritual rebirth. According to the analysis of the four archetypal images. the author tries to excavate the implications of these archetypal images for the development of the tragedy from American social history and cultural tradition. Moreover, the combination of the personality archetypes and the archetypal images intensifies the tragic color of the play, and further embodies the tragedy archetypes:Beyond the Horizon is the inheritance of the ancient Greek tragedy and the Renaissant tragedy, it is themed on the fate tragedy and the personality tragedy of the protagonist. and the tragic consciousness suffusing the society in nineteen twenties. The tragedy in the play is not only the tragedy of the protagonist, but also deeply reflects the life tragedy of thousands of ordinary American idealists. The family tragedy of the protagonist is not only one family tragedy, but also the archetype of thousands of ordinary family tragedies, and the real descriptions on the American social tragedy at that time.