ARTicles vol. 3 i.3b: Stones Atop o’Stones

The hardness and durability of stone have always impressed men. The stone when whole symbolized unity and strength; when shattered it signified dismemberment, psychic disintegration, infirmity, death and annihilation. Stones fallen from heaven served to explain the origin of life. – J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1962 When ye kin make corn sprout out o’ stones, God’s livin’ in yew! – Ephraim Cabot For Ephraim Cabot, rugged patriarch of Desire Under the Elms, the heavy stones embedded deep within the landscape evoke an eternal, unrelenting God; “God o’ the old! God o’ the lonesome!” Steadfast in his belief that “God’s in the stones,” Cabot drives his resentful sons to mine the fields and build walls as a sign of their devotion to a demanding deity. According to scholar Travis Bogard, O’Neill’s tragedy depicts, “the response of the characters to the land on which they lived. Close to the soil, their identities and destinies were shaped by a force they sensed moving in the earth … [by] the hardship that comes when the land turns sterile or in the joy that the land in springtime brings to its people.” O’Neill pronounced Desire “a tragedy of the possessive – the pitiful longing of man to build his own heaven here on earth by glutting his sense of power with ownership of land, people, money – but principally the land and other people’s lives.” The isolated, lonely world of the farm is for Cabot a kind of promised land in which God blesses His faithful with prosperity but demands unconditional sacrifice. All of the characters on the farm have biblical names: Peter, widely known as the leader of Christ’s Apostles, derives from the Greek petros or “rock;” Simeon, one of the twelve tribes of Israel, comes from the Hebrew Shim-on which means “God has heard;” Eben, the shortened form of Ebenezer, means “stone of hope” and recalls the stone monument erected by Samuel to commemorate the defeat of the Philistines; Abbie references King David’s wife Abigail (or “father’s joy”), who is described in the Book of Samuel as “good in discretion and beautiful in form”; and Ephraim, a son of Joseph and the Egyptian Potiphera, means “fruitful” in Hebrew. Although Simeon and Peter succumb to the allure of “the sinful, easy gold o’ Californi-a,” escaping the farm on which they proudly toiled for so many years proves formidable. Their lives have been devoted to the back-breaking work of hauling stones, tending cattle, and chopping wood, to the never-ending, seasonal process of transforming dormant land into fertile fields. Before the boys can break out of the stone prison erected by their domineering father, they must honor the land they cultivated. Simeon’s departing eulogy illustrates how deeply he has become attached to the earth: “Waal – ye’ve thirty year o’ me buried in ye – spread out over ye – blood an’ bone an’ sweat – rotted away – fertilizin’ ye – richin’ yer soul – prime manure, by God, that’s what I been t’ ye!” For Simeon and Peter, freedom means parting with Ephraim’s immortal God dwelling in the rocky soil. The youthful Eben – “dead spit an’ image” of his father – struggles against Ephraim’s demanding God even as he envies the old farmer’s intimacy with the land. Eben seethes with rage as he comes to know the plight of his dead mother, whose spirit still haunts the farm. He is convinced that Ephraim “murdered her with his hardness,” denying Eben the maternal warmth and softness he craves and finds (if only temporarily) in Abbie’s embrace. To Eben, every rock represents Ephraim’s culpability and drives the son to renounce his father’s stifling path to heaven: “Yew ‘n’ yewr God! Allus cussin’ folks – allus naggin’ ’em! T’ hell with yewr God!” Unlike his sons, who feel imprisoned by the stone walls, Ephraim embraces the dry, rocky terrain of his farm because he feels God’s presence in the earth. In the daily grind of his life, he trusts that the hand of God is testing him to the limits of human endurance, both in his physical strength and his capacity for loneliness: “Stones. I picked ’em up an’ piled ’em into walls. Ye kin read the years o’ my life in them walls, every day a hefted stone, climbin’ over the hills up and down, fencin’ in the fields that was mine, whar I’d made thin’s grow out o’ nothing’ – like the will o’ God, like the servant o’ His hand. It wa’n’t easy. It was hard an’ He made me hard fur it.” According to scholar Jean Anne Waterstradt, the stone monuments suggest that “Ephraim is the most creative, the most fulfilled member of the Cabot family; that he is the only one that knows who he is; that he has a sense of his own identity and realizes how and where he belongs.” Ephraim condemns his sons for giving in to their “lust fur gold – fur the sinful, easy gold o’ Californi-a,” because of his own experience of that same temptation. Exhausted from “nothin’ but fields o’ stones,” he fled west dreaming of an easy life only to hear the thundering voice of God demanding his return to struggle and sacrifice. By surrounding the farm with stone walls, evidence of his faith and penitence, Ephraim can remind himself of the idle, godless life he renounced and imagine the path to righteousness. He believes that God’s hands have transformed his stones into a source of life. As Waterstradt concludes, “Only Ephraim has the strength to make the earth produce; only Ephraim has the will to toil to the end of his days to preserve that productivity; only Ephraim loves the land; only Ephraim is ‘fruitful’; and ultimately only Ephraim values life.” O’Neill’s characters recognize the elementary nature of stone as immovable, unbreakable, and immortal, as representative of endless toil. But their responses vary sharply: for Ephraim, they represent a path to salvation while for Eben, Simeon, and Peter, the stones are bleak obstacles to a freedom just beyond reach. O’Neill crafts his conflict, rock by rock, to illuminate his tragic vision of life under the scrutiny of a relentlessly demanding God, a life of “makin’ walls – stone atop o’ stone – makin’ walls till yer heart’s a stone ye heft up out o’ the way o’ growth onto a stone wall t’ wall in yer heart!” Stella Gorlin is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.