O Cards Flashcards
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
Born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. Belongs to the same Southern Gothic school of literature as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers that focused on the decaying South and its damned people.
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Short story about a southern family driving through Georgia on the way to Florida. In the title story a grandmother, her son Bailey and daughter-in-law and their three children, June Starr, John Wesley, and a baby, are on a car journey. They encounter an escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers, Hiram and Bobby Lee. The family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from his ‘‘Wanted’’ poster. The hallucinating grandmother murmurs: “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” The Misfit shoots her and says: “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
A one-armed tramp, appropriately named “Mr. Shiftlet,” walks up to a run-down farm where an old woman and her retarded daughter, Lucynell, are sitting on the front porch. Lucynell cannot talk. Mr. Shiftlet persuades the old woman to hire him for work around the farm and for repairing a car. She says she can feed him but not pay him. Over a period of a few weeks he repairs the car (which is what he really wants) and offers to marry Lucynell if her mother will give him some money
After the wedding Mr. Shiftlet takes Lucynell on a honeymoon, but abandons her in a country diner the first day, claiming she’s a hitchhiker. As he drives towards Mobile, he picks up a boy and begins to lecture him about being good to his mother. The angry boy jumps out of the car, and Mr. Shiftlet prays that God will “break forth and wash the slime from this earth.”
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
America’s first major playwright. His play, Morning Becomes Electra, is based on the Oresteia cycle of the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus. He situated this story of family murder and divine retribution in Civil War America. He also wrote The Iceman Cometh (shattering the pipe dreams of the denizens of Harry Hope’s bar) and Desire Under the Elms.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
This play is deeply autobiographical. It tells of the “Tyrones”–a fictional name for what is clearly the O’Neills. Theirs is not a happy tale: The youngest son (Edmond) is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis; he despises his father for sending him; his mother, Mary, is wrecked by narcotics; and his older brother by drink.
“Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)”
Mourning Becomes Electra updates the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War. Agamemnon is now General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is his second wife Christine, Orestes is his son Orin, and Electra is his daughter Lavinia. As an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love, and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters’ actions in Greek tragedies, O’Neill’s characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters’ Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.
It is divided into three plays of four to five acts each. In order, the three plays are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are never produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Mourning Becomes Electra is thus extraordinarily lengthy for a drama, and in production is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O’Neill’s other major plays.
“The Iceman Cometh”
“The Iceman Cometh”
The Iceman Cometh stages the story of the whiskey-soaked and disillusioned denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon and the upheaval caused by the newly sober salesman Hickey, who — with all the annoying zeal of a recent convert — urges his former drinking companions to give up their “pipe dreams.”
Sean O’Casey
a major Irish dramatist and memorist. A committed nationalist and socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. His plays are particularly noted for his sympathetic treatment of his female characters.
The Plough and the Stars – deal with the impact of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city. The Plough and the Stars, an anti-war play, was misinterpreted by the Abbey audience as being anti-nationalist and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.
Innocence and Experience
