Desire Under the Elms takes place on an 1850s New England farm, following characters who have lived practically their whole lives on the farm. In order to immerse the audience in the time period and setting, O’Neill writes all of the dialogue with a pronounced old New England dialect. Beyond adding to the realist writing style, the use of dialect conveys the characters’ anger and visceral emotions and their personalities through their speech patterns.
O’Neill uses many abbreviations to indicate how the words should be pronounced on stage. The use of dialect contributes to displaying the characters’ emotions, such as when they are frantic or angry. For example, their dialect is clear when Abbie first kisses Eben and they passionately argue, Eben struggling with his desire for her while simultaneously hating her for taking his dead mother’s place. After their kiss, they argue:
Abbie—(at last, painfully) Ye shouldn’t, Eben—ye shouldn’t—I’d make ye happy!
Eben—(harshly) I don’t want t’be happy—from yew!
Abbie—(helplessly) Ye do, Eben! Ye do! Why d’ye lie?
Eben—(viciously) I don’t take t’ye, I tell ye! I hate the sight o’ye
This is an example of the use of dialect contributing to the presentation of the characters’ heightened emotions. O’Neill employs phrases and words such as “Ye,” “aye,” “t’ye,” and “yew” to indicate their contracted speech. The characters combine words (such as "t’ye” instead of "to you"), illustrating their accent and accelerated, frantic speech. In this moment, both Abbie and Eben are full of desire, passion, and anger. Driven by their emotions, they both lash out at each other in their dialogue. Abbie exclaims, “Why d’ye lie?” when Eben says he does not want to be happy with her. The contraction “d’ye” emphasizes her country accent while also speeding up the pace of the dialogue by making the words physically shorter, contributing to the frantic and tense tone.
