Depicting of the Woman in Eugene O’Neill’s – A Moon for the Misbegotten

Abstract

The current study aims to discover how the woman was depicted and the way gender roles were defined and described in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten”. The importance of this paper is obtained from the broad subject of gender in general. Depicting women is highly suitable topic to many domains and fields to discover the impact of sex type in one domain donates to the comprehension of sex in another domain. The purpose of this study is to expose the playwright’s potentiality to go beyond a narrow image of the woman in the western metaphysics, to depict the way he adopted in his play to present female’s orientations, perceptions, and opinions associated with gender functions. This paper focuses on Eugene O’Neill’s heroine; (Josie Hogan) as she reflected the playwright’s increasing concern for woman’s acknowledgement, self- fulfillment, and integration in a man dominated society. Eugene O’Neill; the playwright, has demonstrated that the act of composing this play, can play just like a mirror to reflect his contemporary given culture’s lifestyle, mores, and values, by which these are considered the essence critiques of any society. The study has concluded that, Josie Hogan was described as an idealistic lady both mentally and physically, she represented the essential part of Jim Tyron, she was not a traditional stereotypical woman, she devoted and sacrificed herself for other people in the play. She dramatized the playwright’s composite heroine and his most comprehensive description of self-renunciation, she was not depicted as a defeated sex but a female who extremely aware of her own social and cultural limitations.