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Eugene O'Neill

idea of what medical bills should cost. It was a turbulent childhood: periods of prosperity alternating with lean seasons, meeting the literati and the road-weary with almost equal regularity, having both parents attempt to instill their particular Irish perspective on life in the O'Neill siblings. Growing up in this rootless, conflict-laden household - bound together, nevertheless, by bouts of intense emotional love among family members - Eugene O'Neill's childhood was a microcosm of the social issues that would emerge in the early 20th Century.

It was also an Irish Catholic upbringing. "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," so the saying goes. At the most basic level, O'Neill never deviated from the essential dramaturgy of the Roman Catholic liturgy, noting himself: "In all my plays sin is punished and redemption takes place." There was a much deeper resonance of Catholicism running through his work than that simplification, however. Indicative of the Celtic individualism and mysticism running through the Irish' version of Roman Catholicism, Eugene O'Neill's body of dramaturgy is constantly concerned with the very private relationship of his characters with the larger forces of Life/God/Society surrounding them:

For O'Neill is a mystic. ... In him the Celtic nature, with its intimate relations with the past, catches a gleam now and then of the dim regions where God brought into being a nobler form of life than had existed before.

Though O'Neill was to proclaim an aggressive agnosticism during one period of youthful conflict with his father and to systematically avoid church-going rituals throughout his life, ever through the three decades of his active playwriting career his views were shaded in terms of society's relationship to God, a classic Catholic consideration:

...in O'Neill's [version of a] totalitarian "brave new world" godlessness, indifference and avarice cause [he writes in his notebooks] "the death of ...

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Eugene O'Neill. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681443.html