Girls, gold, and gods: perverted individualism and heightened secularism in O’Neill‘s Desire Under the Elms

ABSTRACT Beyond the archetypal themes and motifs such as chauvinism, family dysfunctions and conflicts, Nietzschean and Freudian elements, Desire Under the Elms was a critique of America’s brands of individualist and secularist ideologies. Spreading in the US at the time was a faulty form of individualism which continues to affect and permeate other parts of the world through cultural imperialism. Concomitant with perverted self-reliance was a growing secularist worldview that was challenging established religion, as if demanding freedom from hundreds of years of clout from Calvinist Christianity. In this article, I will emphasize that the drama captured an increased preference for an extreme form of individualism that was going wayward, juxtaposed with the movement toward secularization before and during the early 1900s. Further, I will highlight that these twin ideologies underpin the three major themes in the award-winning drama: the peripheralization, objectification, and often negative portrayal of women, the obsession over possessions and of persons, and the rejection of religion.