The Psychology of Home: A Reading of Memory, Nostalgia and Feminist Consciousness in O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms

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This paper argues that home in Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) exceeds its function as a physical dwelling and becomes a psychic and cultural site shaped by memory, desire, and patriarchal power. Memory and nostalgia enable the characters to confront the meaning of home while exposing the conflict between emotional belonging and material possession. Using Freud’s theory of trauma and the return of the repressed, Lacan’s concepts of desire and lack, and Bhabha’s notion of the unhomely, the study examines how unconscious impulses and fractured domestic histories shape Eben, Abbie, and Ephraim Cabot. The farmhouse emerges not as a source of security but as a space of emotional injury, longing, and inherited trauma. A feminist reading further reveals patriarchal oppression: Eben’s mother is compelled into exhausting labour until her death, while the elm trees and the locked parlour symbolize a confined feminine presence. Nostalgia creates a spectral bond between Eben’s dead mother and Abbie, his living stepmother. Whereas the land produces topophilia in Ephraim by affirming his power, it evokes topophobia in Eben’s mother through its associations with suffering. Ultimately, home becomes a psychological landscape in which the repressed past persists and suppressed feminine consciousness endures.