Mourning Becomes Electra

Summary

Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town. Fate is replaced by the family's own past and by buried passions: love and hate between parents and children, and a Mannon likeness that every character seems to share. In the first play, Homecoming, Lavinia Mannon discovers that her mother, Christine, is having an affair with Adam Brant, captain of a clipper ship. Brant turns out to be a Mannon himself, the son of Ezra Mannon's disgraced uncle and a French-Canadian nurse, and he has come to avenge his mother's ruin. Brigadier General Ezra Mannon returns from the war hoping to begin again with his wife, but on his first night home Christine provokes a heart attack and gives him a poison she has obtained through Brant in place of his heart medicine. Dying, he points to her as guilty, and Lavinia finds the pill box. The town's doctor attributes the death to angina. In The Hunted, Lavinia's brother Orin comes home with a head wound and memories of killing at Petersburg. Christine, whom he adores, tries to hold him, but Lavinia convinces him of the truth by taking him to Brant's ship at an East Boston wharf, where they overhear the lovers planning to flee. Orin shoots Brant and makes it look like a robbery; when Christine learns of it she shoots herself in her husband's study. In The Haunted, a year later, brother and sister return from a voyage to the South Sea islands. Lavinia has bloomed into her mother's likeness and wants to marry her faithful suitor Peter Niles; Orin, consumed by guilt, writes a history of the family's crimes, clings to Lavinia with jealous and incestuous intensity, and finally shoots himself. Lavinia, about to accept Peter, calls him by Brant's name and sends him away. She orders the shutters nailed closed and, as the last Mannon, shuts herself inside the house with the family portraits and its dead. The old gardener Seth Beckwith, who sings the sea shanty Shenandoah, serves as a kind of chorus with the townspeople. The trilogy opened at the Guild Theatre in New York on 26 October 1931, with Alice Brady as Lavinia and Alla Nazimova as Christine, and its performances began in the afternoon with a dinner interval.

Plot or Argument

• Homecoming (four acts)

  Lavinia learns of Christine's affair with Brant and of his Mannon parentage; Ezra returns from the war and dies on his first night home after Christine substitutes poison for his heart medicine.

• The Hunted (five acts)

  Orin, wounded in the head, returns for the funeral; Christine tries to keep his loyalty, but Lavinia shows him the truth aboard Brant's ship in East Boston, Orin kills Brant, and Christine shoots herself.

• The Haunted (four acts)

  After a voyage to the islands, Lavinia resembles her mother and seeks marriage with Peter; Orin writes a confession of the family's history, presses an incestuous claim on her, and kills himself. Lavinia renounces Peter and shuts herself in the Mannon house.

Characters

• Lavinia Mannon, the Electra figure

  Ezra's rigid, devoted daughter who drives the revenge on her mother and finally condemns herself to live with the Mannon dead.

• Christine Mannon, the Clytemnestra figure

  Ezra's beautiful, alienated wife, who takes Brant as lover and poisons her husband.

• Ezra Mannon, the Agamemnon figure

  A brigadier general, judge and former mayor who returns from the war wanting to break through his family's coldness.

• Orin Mannon, the Orestes figure

  Christine's son, a lieutenant wounded in the war, who kills Brant and is destroyed by guilt.

• Adam Brant, the Aegisthus figure

  A clipper captain, son of a disowned Mannon and a French-Canadian nurse, who seeks revenge and becomes Christine's lover.

• Peter Niles, Lavinia's suitor

  A decent young army captain who hopes to marry Lavinia.

• Hazel Niles, Peter's sister

  A gentle girl engaged to Orin who tries to free him from the house.

• Seth Beckwith, the Mannons' old gardener

  A loyal servant who knows the family's past and acts with the townspeople as a chorus.

• Doctor Joseph Blake, family physician

  Attributes Ezra's death to angina and suspects nothing.

Lessons

• Fate becomes inheritance

  O'Neill keeps Aeschylus's chain of murders but removes the gods: the Mannons are driven by family likeness, buried resentments and the habits of a cold house. The play asks how far children are bound by what their parents did and were.

  • What takes the place of the Greek gods and the Furies in O'Neill's version?
  • Why do characters keep noticing that they look like one another and like the portraits?
  • Can a family escape its past, or only repeat it?

• Revenge that does not end

  In the Oresteia the cycle of blood ends in Athena's court and the Furies' acceptance of justice. The Mannons have no court and no forgiveness, so revenge passes from Brant to Christine to Lavinia and Orin, and ends only with Lavinia's self-imprisonment.

  • How does each killing grow out of the one before?
  • What is missing in the Mannons' world that Athena supplies in Aeschylus?

• Self-judgment

  Lavinia's final choice is to punish herself by living alone with the dead rather than seeking escape in marriage or death. The play presents this as her own verdict on herself and leaves the audience to weigh it.

  • Why does Lavinia send Peter away after calling him by Brant's name?
  • Is her final choice an act of justice, of despair, or of pride?
  • How does it differ from Orestes' acquittal at Athens?

• The house as a character

  The Mannon mansion, with its temple portico masking a grey stone house and its stern portraits, stands for Puritan pride and the denial of life. Characters long to escape it to the blessed islands of the South Seas, and the ending closes its shutters for good.

  • What do the islands represent to Brant, Orin and Lavinia?
  • How does the setting of each act's opening scene prepare its action?

Context

O'Neill wrote in the years when Freud's ideas about family desire and repression, popularly known through terms such as the Oedipus and Electra complexes, were widely discussed in America. He wanted a modern tragedy that would give the psychological equivalent of the Greek sense of fate, and he set it in New England at the close of the Civil War, using the region's Puritan heritage as the background for his family's rigidity and guilt.

Composition

O'Neill worked on the trilogy from 1929 to 1931, much of it in France, revising extensively; the published work notes its dependence on Aeschylus's trilogy. The Theatre Guild staged it at the Guild Theatre, New York, opening on 26 October 1931, with Alice Brady as Lavinia, Alla Nazimova as Christine and Earle Larimore as Orin; it ran for 150 performances. It was published by Horace Liveright in 1931.

Reception

The trilogy was hailed in 1931 as one of the summits of American drama and is often mentioned with the Nobel Prize awarded to O'Neill in 1936. Some critics have found its psychology schematic and its language below the Greek model, while others have praised its architecture and theatrical power. It was filmed in 1947 with Rosalind Russell and Michael Redgrave, adapted for television in 1978, and revived in London (2003-2004) and New York.

Comparisons

• the-oresteia

  Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides give the pattern of all three plays; O'Neill keeps the murders and the avenging son but ends not with Athena's court but with Lavinia's self-sentence.

• the-interpretation-of-dreams

  Freud's account of children's rivalry with the parent of the same sex, drawn from Oedipus, is the psychology that O'Neill sets in place of the gods.

• hamlet

  Both plays show a son bound to avenge his father against a mother and her lover, and both turn revenge into self-torment.

• the-scarlet-letter

  Hawthorne's New England of Puritan judgment, hidden sin and a guilty house is the literary ancestor of the Mannons.

• sartre-no-exit-and-three-other-plays

  Sartre's The Flies, in the same collection, retells the Orestes story as a drama of freedom, where O'Neill makes it a drama of inherited compulsion.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The stage directions describing the Mannon house and its Greek-temple portico at the opening of each play.
• How often characters remark that faces look like masks or like the Mannon portraits.
• The pill box in Homecoming, Act Four, and what Lavinia does with it.
• The change in Lavinia's appearance and manner after the voyage in The Haunted.
• Seth's singing of Shenandoah and his gossip with the townspeople at the start of each play.

Key terms and names

Trilogy

A sequence of three linked plays; O'Neill copies the form of the Oresteia with Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted.

House of Atreus

The cursed Greek royal family of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes, on which the Mannons are modeled.

Chorus

In Greek tragedy, a group commenting on the action; here Seth and the townspeople play a reduced, realistic version of it.

The blessed islands

The South Sea islands that Brant, Orin and Lavinia dream of as a place free of guilt and Puritan restraint.

Angina

Chest pain from the heart; Doctor Blake's explanation of Ezra's death, which hides the poisoning.

Mannon likeness

The mask-like family resemblance O'Neill uses to show inheritance taking the place of fate.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Who is Adam Brant, and why does he hate the Mannons?
2. Comprehension How does Lavinia persuade Orin of their mother's guilt?
3. Comprehension What does Lavinia decide at the end, and what orders does she give Seth?
4. Interpretation Is Lavinia driven more by justice, by love for her father, or by jealousy of her mother?
5. Interpretation Why does Lavinia come to resemble her mother after Christine's death?
6. Interpretation What does the play suggest is lost when the gods of Aeschylus are replaced by family psychology?
7. Big Question Can guilt be atoned for by self-punishment, or does it require forgiveness from outside oneself?

Faith Connections

• Ezekiel 18:19-20 (Scripture)

  Ezekiel denies that children must carry their fathers' guilt, yet the Mannons live as though every generation were bound to repeat the sins of the one before, down to Lavinia's last decision.

• Romans 12:19 (Scripture)

  Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Every killing in the trilogy is private vengeance, and none brings peace.

• 1 John 1:9 (Scripture)

  Confession meets forgiveness and cleansing. Orin writes a confession that leads only to despair, and Lavinia punishes herself, because neither seeks a mercy beyond the family.

• Aeschylus, The Eumenides (Great Conversation)

  Aeschylus ends his trilogy by turning the Furies into kindly guardians through Athena's court; O'Neill's ending, with no such court, invites comparison of human justice with self-condemnation.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The Mannons deny love and life under a Puritan rule of pride and duty. Denied passions return as adultery, hatred and revenge, and each crime breeds the next. Without gods or forgiveness to break the chain, the only end O'Neill allows is self-punishment: the last Mannon shuts herself up with the dead.

Rhetorical device: symbolic setting. Each play opens on the Mannon house with its white Greek portico pasted on a grey stone front like a mask, and The Haunted ends with Lavinia ordering the shutters nailed closed.

Debate: Resolved: that Lavinia's final choice is an act of justice rather than despair.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the image of the mask, in faces, portraits and the house front, through all three plays and argue what it says about the Mannon family.

Comparison with The Oresteia: Compare the ending of The Eumenides with the ending of The Haunted. What does each suggest about how a cycle of revenge can end?

Medical Lens

The trilogy is a landmark of the American stage's absorption of psychoanalysis: O'Neill replaced Greek fate with family likeness, repressed desire and compulsive repetition, and audiences and critics at once read it in terms of Oedipal and Electra complexes, a reading the play invites but never names. Its medical incidents are precise. Ezra Mannon has a heart condition treated with medicine he carries; Christine, who says the box holds something she takes to make her sleep, gives him a poison in its place during an attack, and the family doctor certifies death from angina without suspicion. Orin returns with a head wound and describes the fog, killing and wild charge at Petersburg in terms often discussed as combat trauma, and his later guilt, obsessive writing and suicide make him a study in breakdown; such readings are interpretive. Christine's and Orin's suicides by pistol frame the final play.

• Homecoming, Act Four

  During a heart attack Christine gives Ezra a pellet in place of his medicine; he accuses her before dying, and Lavinia finds the box.

  Pharmacology Poisons Death Dying Sleep Insomnia
• The Hunted, Act One

  Doctor Blake's view that Ezra died of angina, and gossip at the funeral about the general's heart.

  Physicians Doctors
• The Hunted, Acts Two and Three

  Orin, bandaged from a head wound, tells of being out of his head and of the killing and charge at Petersburg.

  WAR Wounds Trauma Shell Shock
• The Hunted, Act Five

  Christine shoots herself in Ezra's study after learning of Brant's death.

  Suicide
• The Haunted, Acts Two and Three

  Orin's guilt-ridden manuscript, his obsessive possessiveness toward Lavinia and his suicide.

  Madness Psychosis Psychology Unconscious Suicide

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a two-column chart pairing each Mannon with a figure in the Oresteia, then add a third column for what O'Neill changed and why.

• Essay

  Does Mourning Becomes Electra lose or gain by removing the gods from the Oresteia? Argue from the endings of both trilogies.

• Fiction

  Write the scene, never shown, in which Seth Beckwith tells the townspeople the old story of David Mannon and Marie Brantome.

Further Reading

• Strange Interlude, Eugene O'Neill

• Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill

• O'Neill: Son and Artist, Louis Sheaffer

• O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, Arthur and Barbara Gelb

• Electra, Sophocles

  The Greek Electra play in which the daughter's grief and resolve take centre stage.