Analyze the Relationship between the Father and His Sons in Desire Under the Elms?

Or What forms the tragic conflict' in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms? 

Relationship between the Father and His Sons in Desire Under the Elms

The story in Desire Under the Elms revolves around a struggle for dominance between a son, Eben, and his father, Ephraim Cabot. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex serves as an introduction to this struggle or conflict in this drama. Oedipus unknowingly killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. His story is a classical representation of the fight between a father and a son for mother’s love and the son’s rebellion against a father. 

 

 

Eben has a grievance against his father for the ill-treatment that his mother received from his father, Cabot. His mother was a kind-hearted woman. He thinks that his mother had died because his father made her work hard. He also believes that the farm originally belonged to his mother from whom their father had taken away the farm without having any right to it. When Cabot arrives with a new wife, Abbie, she becomes a new claimant to the farm. Eben, therefore, begins to burn with a desire for revenge on his father and to take the possession of the farm. 

Cabot is determined to retain the ownership of the farm too. He can part with his sons but not with his farm. He does not admit Eben’s claim that the farm originally belonged to his mother. He asserts, on the contrary, that the relatives of Eben’s mother had falsely filed a suit against him in order to take possession of the farm which had always been his and only his. He would rather set fire to the farm than allow anyone else to possess it. 

Abbie also wants to acquire the farm. Cabot promises that he will give the entire farm to Abbie if she produces a son by him. As Cabot is impotent, she devises to produce a son by Eben in order to possess the farm. Eben responses to her amorous advances in order to take revenge upon Cabot. After spending the first night with Abbie in the parkour,  he looks satisfied in the morning. He says that his mother’s spirit has now gone back to her grave and can sleep peacefully because her mother has been able to take revenge on old Cabot by making Eben fall in love with Cabot’s new wife. Thus, Eben thinks that his having sex with his stepmother Abbie is sweet revenge on his father. 

Then, it is the turn of Cabot to mock Eben. When Eben claims the ownership of the farm, Cabot tells him that the farm will go to Abbie’s newborn son. Eben now misunderstands Abbie. He thinks that she has fallen in love with him in order to produce a son by him, not for her love for him. By producing a son by him, she wants to become the sole owner of the farm. He threatens to leave her. She kills her child to prove her love for him. At the end, Abbie and Eben are taken into custody and Cabot is destined to live alone on the farm.

Thus, O’Neill very successfully portrays the conflict between a father and a son. Their desires for the possession of the farm lead them to their tragedy.