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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• The Hunted, Act One

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

• 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.

• The Hunted, Act Five

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

• The Haunted, Acts Two and Three

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