Eugene O’Neill’s Traumatic Memory And The Underclass Depicted In His Tragedies

Eugene O’Neill is a transformative playwright to the American theater who has introduced to the stage the most tragic and desperate underclass characters inhabiting the fringes of the society. O’Neill’s vivid and truthful description of the discrimination and oppression, disbelonging, and pipe dreams of the underclass is mainly derived from his own similar traumatic experiences. The collective trauma of the society and personal trauma either of his family or of his early adulthood enabled him, more than his contemporaries, to better understand, empathize with, and show his care about the underclass. By close reading of three of O’Neill’s plays, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and The Iceman Cometh, which are all centered around underclass characters and the most critical social issues of his generation, the thesis aims to explain that O’Neill has, by relating his personal trauma to the collective trauma of the underclass, eventually created these great plays. In The Emperor Jones, Jones’ s blackness echoes O’Neill’s Irishness; In The Hairy Ape, Yank’s disbelongingness under industrialization and capitalization coordinates with O’Neill’s rootlessness and derelict life experience; in The Iceman Cometh, the broken American Dream of a promising happy and successful life corresponds with O’Neill’s dysfunctional family and hopelessness during his early adulthood life. Traumatic memory is like a nightmare which haunts O’Neill’s life and he has to by no means speak it out. The writing of tragedies has become a way that O’Neill let out his negative emotions, a way of self-therapy and salvation. More importantly, it has functioned as a medium through which O’Neill sublimated his personal trauma to the general concern for the human condition. By the creation of these plays, O’Neill has given voice the underclass’ s collective trauma, revealed the predicaments of the underclass under the conflicts between different cultures, between material and spirit, and between their American Dream and the brutal reality in American society. By analyzing the underlining origins of the tragedy of the underclass, O’Neill also revealed his own reflection on the fate of human beings. As O’Neill pointed out, the tragedy of the underclass is inevitable and the reconciliation of trauma is doomed to fail because of their class limitations.