THE IMAGE OF THE MOTHER EARTH IN EUGENE O'NEILL'S PLAYS : MAINLY THE GREAT GOD BROWN

Abstract

I have so far attempted to a certain extent to investigate the image of the Mother Earth which has been analyzed in many angles connected with the problems of human being. O'Neill did hardly treat the problems of the world-social, political, and economic in his plays. His main interest is on the problems of man as human being of its life, death, and love. O'Neill manifested the image of womanhood in his plays which he regarded a woman as virgin-become-mother. The virgin must suffer herself to mate and to become the mother who has the female mystery of creation through the wifehood, in other term, prostitute. Love is a dynamic force in man's life. It makes man agitated and rushed even to death. O'Neill demonstrated how various aspects of love are implicated in the relation of men and women, and especially in the family mesh through his plays. He investigated the neurotic side of love of man at the present day and sought the solution of man's agony. O'Neill's ultimate purpose of human life is peace. He emphasized that it means the Mother's womb. The individual man turns out Man through the Mother Earth's love and rests in the "womb-in-birth" of the Mother. The peace is not like Christian Paradise but like Greek mythological recurrence. He viewed that life is to renew itself. It means that life is "life-in-death." There is an abyss between life and death, but O'Neill attempted to bridge this abyss in respect of Greek mystery, which means life renews itself through death-"death-born-of-birth" which is nothing to fear, because life is recurred by virtue of love of the Mother Earth. The Mother Earth is, for O'Neill, the embodiment of redemption of men, and she who embraces the manhood under her love, tenderness, and understanding is repressented as the primordial image. In some sense, the man is not husband but son or child in Her, and through Her the individual man becomes Man. He reveals that the individual man can die but Man is not dead. Perplexed by the problems of existence and non-existence, men sought peace and completeness in the concept of the renewal of life and in a sense of the pagan Mother Earth's annunciation that "spring comes again bearing life always again." Man crave for love and peace, and return to the source of life and love through the Mother Earth.