A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "Ile"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "Ile," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535825627

Book preview

09

Ile

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

1917

Introduction

Ile, first performed in 1917 and published in 1919, is among the earliest dramatic works of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, who went on to become the leading American playwright of his generation. Its title represents pronunciation of the word oil, referring to whale oil, in the dialect, or specialized language, of New England whale fishermen. O'Neill came from a family of actors, so he naturally turned to the stage as a profession after his health failed, ending his first chosen career as a merchant sailor. Most of O'Neill's early plays reflect, as does Ile, his experiences at sea. Like all of O'Neill's earliest work, the play consists of only one act and runs little more than twenty minutes in performance. For this reason, it is still among the more commonly performed of O'Neill's works, especially by amateur and student groups. It is also frequently anthologized and is included in O'Neill's 2007 collection from Yale University Press, Collected Shorter Plays. Ile explores what O'Neill considered to be fundamental incompatibilities between the temperaments of men and women, and, brief as it is, touches upon autobiographical themes that would be prominent in his mature work, especially in his posthumously premiered masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night. The setting of Ile aboard a whaling ship trapped in the ice for a year, under the command of a ruthless and fanatical captain, inevitably recalls themes found in Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, particularly humans' alienation from nature and each other.

Author Biography

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in New York City on October 16, 1888, in the bedroom of a hotel suite on Times Square where his parents were living while his father James played on Broadway. James O'Neill was a successful actor who eventually gained great economic, if not artistic, success, in the then-popular genre of melodrama, in particular playing the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo more than four thousand times. As he grew older, the younger O'Neill spent much of his time at the family home in New London, Connecticut, and, growing fascinated with the romantic image of life at sea, became a sailor after being suspended from Princeton University. When sailing was denied him due to ill health, he turned to professional writing, first as a reporter and poet, but, by 1916, as a professional playwright, becoming intimately involved with the avant garde Provincetown Players. This group first performed