유진 오닐의 극에서 신화적 이미지를 가진 여성인물들의 실체

Abstract

This paper examines the female characters who have a mythical image, particularly, the image of the ‘Earth Mother’, in Eugene O’Neill’s plays. The Earth Mother was a Goddess worshiped in the Near and Middle East before the advent of the Christian religion. O’Neill’s female characters reflecting the image of the Earth Mother fall under the female stereotype the author craved to create throughout his career: a good woman like ‘a mirror’ possessing power, identity and autonomy to enlarge O’Neill’s male characters called ‘the misbegotten’. In O’Neill’s plays, the female characters who have a mythical image are Abbie in Desire under the Elms, Cybel in Great God Brown, Nina in Strange Interlude, Dynamo in Dynamo, and Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten. The female characters function as a ‘Mother-mirror’ satisfying the appetite of immature male characters’ desires. Although they are portrayed as the mythical women, they are the ‘others’ of men; the traditional females who sacrifice themselves only to lose their identity. That is, O’Neill’s female characters who have a mythical image are oppressed women in patriarchy however adroitly they are idealized and mythicized in his works. They are the result of the male writer’s masculine perspectives, and reflect a fictitious image men fake in their immature mind. Therefore, the readers are required to have a new critical reading to unveil the true nature hidden behind the distorted image of mythicized female characters in O’Neill’s plays.