Mourning Becomes Electra (By Eugene O'Neill)

Mourning Becomes Electra (By Eugene O'Neill)

Mourning Becomes Electra is a dark tragedy featuring adultery, incest, murder, suicide, revenge, madness. As the play opens, Ezra Mannon returns from the war, only to be poisoned by his adulterous wife, Christine. His daughter Lavinia and son Orin avenge their father's death by killing their mother's lover. The mother, Christine, commits suicide. Orin later also takes his own life. Lavinia shuts herself up in the house, with the memories of her dead relatives to haunt her.

The triology is closely based on the Greek myth of Orestes - especially on the Aeschylus trilogy Oresteia. The title of the play itself suggests the relation of the play to the Greek drama.In Aeschylus’ play, Agamemnon returns to his wife, Clytemnestra, who has been unfaithful to him with Aegisthus (Agamemnon’s cousin); Clytemnestra murders him beacause he has sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia , because he brings home with him a concubine, and because she wants Aegisthus to rule over the kingdom. To this foundation, O'Neill adds American history and Freudian psychology to present the self-destruction of one family in New England at the end of The Civil War. He explores the psychological implications of the tragedy far more than the Greeks did. Greek tragedians really didn't care about in-depth psychology.

As with the original Atreidae, the family fate of the New England Mannons is ancestral not limited to one generation. It has been set in motion before the opening of the play by Abe Mannon, father of Ezra (Agamemnon) and grandfather of Lavinia and Orin (Electra and Orestes). Abe’s younger brother, David had been involved in a relationship with a French-Canadian governess, Marie Brantome, resulting in her pragnancy. David married her, but Abe (in Lavinia’s words) put them both out of the house and then afterwards tore it down and built this one because he would not live where his brother had disgraced the family. The child of David and Marie is Adam Brant, the Aegisthus of the play, who returns to avenge his parents’ death in poverty and misery after their exile.

The house of Mannon, therefore, was built upon outraged pride and puritanism, leading inevitably to death for the Mannon line. For them, pride is the source of death, and love is the source of life. Existence for the Mannons is life-in-death from which love, represented by Marie Brantome, has been shut out. In their longing to escape the ugly reality of their actual lives the Mannons yearn for release in love untainted by pride and sin, and in death itself. Christine’s acceptance of sexualtity, has been embittered by Ezra’s puritanism – distorted into a possessive passion; but to her husband, lover, and children, she still represents release and sinlessness. Whereas the father, Ezra, embodies the characteristics of the family which constitute their fate – pride, puritanism, and a strong sense of malicious justice. Ironically, ability to love and insight into life come to Ezra only when he returns home to Christine’s hatred and his own death.

The central theme of Mourning Becomes Electra is the evil of love of self and high price one has to pay for it. O’Neill relentlessly analyzes the lives of five persons (Lavinia, Christine, Orin, Ezra and Adam) at the centre of his drama. They are concerned with nothing but themselves, and even that concern is limited to the psycho-sexual problems which they all fatally share.

The Mannons are shown as victims of evil infected by the taint of mortality, representing in a way the fate of mankind. To stress this point, O’Neill has focused his attention on the character of Lavinia. Lavinia, the product of those very forces in her family which precipitated its peculiar and inevitable fate, discovers that she has at last become like her own mother, that in demanding payment for sin that grew out of lust and hatred, she herself is inevitably drawn to her own brother and even to the naked savages, now that her own father, toward whom she was also drawn is no longer alive. All her natural instincts, thwarted by a maniacal desire for vengeance, have turned in upon her. This is her fate, and she marches to doom which is actually inescapable, from which no god-from-the-machine, no benign court, no accommodating dramatist, is able to save her. For such victims of the evil that seems inherent in life there is no salvation.

Towards the end, Lavinia enters the house, to remain there in lifelong expiation and locks herself in with her memories. Thus the trap of self has finally and with finality claimed its inevitable prey.