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How is Desire Under the Elms similar to a Greek tragedy?
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Desire Under the Elms is similar to a Greek tragedy in its focus on family rivalry, incest, and murder. The Oedipal themes, akin to those in Hippolytus, reflect primal and universal human conflicts. The characters' acceptance of their transgressions and awaiting punishment mirror Greek tragedy's sense of fate and inevitable consequences, highlighting the dark forces driving human behavior.
Desire Under the Elms is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy in its emphasis on the domestic politics of family rivalry, incest, and murder.
Eben's desire for his stepmother Abbie as he mourns the death of his real mother is Oedipal. Eben wants Abbie both sexually and as a mother. Like Oedipus, Eben has sex with a mother. Eben's hatred of Ephraim, his father, continues the Oedipal pattern. He holds Ephraim responsible for his mother's death and prays for Ephraim's death in turn—though, unlike Oedipus, he doesn't kill his father. Eben sleeps with Abbie, however, in part to get revenge on his father.
O'Neill's play is based most fully, however, on Euripides's tragedy Hippolytus. Eben is modeled on the character Hippolytus, whom Phaedra (the Abbie figure) tries to seduce. Ephraim is likewise modeled on Phaedra's husband, Theseus. In Hippolytus, Phaedra commits suicide, but in Desire Under the Elms , Abbie...
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murders her child by Eben. In both cases, a domestic triangle leads to a tragic death.
Overall, Desire Under the Elms mimics a Greek tragedy in its revelation of the incestuous sex, hatred, and violence that can occur within a tragic family unit.
I think that O'Neill's basic premise is similar to a Greek tragedy. There is a desire to evoke something primal and universal in the individual exploration of a family or a specific person. The triangle of Ephraim Cabot, his son Eben, and Ephraim’s new wife, Abby Putnam, helps to bring this out. Naturally, the delving into the dark forces that drive human beings in a very base state is Greek, in its nature. Infanticide, incest, and the Oedipal challenges between father and son are all a part of this delving that O'Neill brings from the Greek setting to the New England condition. The fact that O'Neill presents his characters as having committed transgression and then accepting and awaiting punishment for their actions is reflective of the Greek conception of tragedy. There is no evasion of responsibility. Eben and Abby both have committed unspeakable acts and like Greek conceptions of tragedy, individuals assume the maintenance of the social and ethical order of being. When Ephraim remarks, "God's hard," it is almost a Tiresias- like statement on the nature of being in the world. The Greek element of seeing fated forces, something outside the realm of free will that drives individuals, is also evident, helping to make O'Neill's work powerful and compelling in scope.