In the following essay, Curran discusses how the concept of the islands fails for certain major characters in O'Neill'splay, dominated as they are by Puritanism.

Approximately at midpoint in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1929, 1931), Orin Mannon leans his head on his mother's knee and in a "dreamy and low and caressing" voice announces that Melville's Typee (1846) provided him with a sense of peace in the midst of the American Civil War and stimulated "wonderful dreams" about her:

Someone loaned me the book. I read it and reread it until finally those Islands came to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security. I used to dream I was there. And later on all the time I was out of my head I seemed really to be there. There was no one there but you and me. And yet I never saw...