Earticle

초록

영어

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.

목차

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 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 채수경 [ Chae, Su-gyung | 원주대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810