Places: Desire Under the Elms

Cabot Desire Under the Elmsfarmhouse. Isolated New England farm, originally belonging to Eben Cabot’s mother, that becomes the property of her widower Ephraim Cabot and his two sons after Ephraim works her to her grave, as Eben claims. Life on the farm, as on so many farms in New England in the mid-nineteenth century, is a challenging existence, which is one reason why Eben is able to bribe his half brothers to leave. After Ephraim arrives home with his new wife Abbie Putnam, who will inherit the farm if she produces a son, Peter and Simeon leave for California, and the passionate psychological struggle among the remaining three characters begins.

The action takes place in various rooms of the green and “sickly grayish” Cabot farmhouse: the kitchen, the porch, the bedrooms, and the parlor, described in stage directions as a “grim, repressed room like a tomb.” This room has been preserved as Eben’s mother left it and is where Abbie’s seduction of Eben takes place. At the end of the play, Abbie kills their love child to prove her love to Eben. The sheriff who comes to arrest them admires the farm and concludes, ironically given the tragedies the farm represents, that he wished he owned it.

Much of the action of the play takes place outside: by the gate, where characters stand at sunrise and sunset, and in the barn, where Ephraim sometimes sleeps with his cows. The most important features outdoors, however, are the “two enormous elms” which bend over the roof of the farmhouse and whose “sinister maternity” represents the spirit of Eben’s dead mother.

*California. Home of the gold strikes of 1849. Although never seen in the play, California represents escape for the inhabitants of the Cabot farmhouse. “They’s gold in the West,” Peter Cabot says to his brother Simeon at the play’s opening, and the dreams of “fields o’ gold” soon draw these two characters away from this farm strewn only with stones.