Eugene O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

By

Qaisar Iqbal Janjua From Lahore, Pakistan. Contact (92) 300 8494678

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

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MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA

Eugene O’Neill

(1888–1953)

“Mourning Becomes Electra aims to provide a

modern psychological approximation of the Greek

sense of fate”

Amar bil Adal

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LIFE AND WORKS OF EUGENE O, NEILL

Eugene O'Neill was the son of an actor whose work meant that the

family led a difficult life on the road. O’Neill would later deeply resent his

insecure childhood, pinning the family's many problems, including his

mother's drug addiction, on his father. Educated at boarding schools, O'Neill

gained admission to Princeton University but left after only one year to go to

sea. He spent his early twenties living on the docks of Buenos Aires,

Liverpool, and New York, sinking into an alcoholism that brought him to the

point of suicide. Slowly O’Neill recovered from his addiction and took a job

writing for a newspaper. A bout of tuberculosis left him incapacitated and he

was consigned to a sanitarium for six months. While in recovery, O'Neill

decided to become a playwright.

O'Neill wrote his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, in 1916, premiering

it with a company in Provincetown, MA that took it to New York that same

year. In 1920, O’Neill’s breakthrough came with his play Beyond the

Horizon. Historians of drama identify its premiere as a pivotal event on the

Broadway stage, one that brought a new form of tragic realism to an industry

almost entirely overrun with stock melodramas and shallow farces. O'Neill

went on to write over twenty innovative plays in the next twenty years, to

steadily growing acclaim. The more famous works from his early period

include The Great God Brown (1926), a study in the conflicts between

idealism and materialism, and Strange Interlude (1928), an ambitious 36-

hour saga on the plight of the every woman. His late career brought such

works as his masterpiece, The Iceman Cometh (1946), an Ibsenian portrait

of man's hold on his pipe dreams, and A Long Day's Journey into Night

(1956), the posthumously published and painfully autobiographical tragedy

of a family haunted by a mother's drug addiction.

O’Neill wrote morality plays and experimented with the tragic form.

O’Neill’s interest in tragedy began as early as 1924 with his Desire Under

the Elms, a tale of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, but would come

to maturity with his monumental revision of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Mourning

Becomes Electra (1931). O'Neill chose Electra because he felt that her tale

had been left incomplete. More generally, as his diary notes indicate, O'Neill

understood his exercises in tragedy as an attempt to find a modern analogue

to an ancient mode of experience. Thus Mourning aims to provide a

“modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate” in a time

in which the notion of an inescapable and fundamentally non-redemptive

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determinism is incomprehensible. Accordingly, the setting of the trilogy, the

American Civil War, springs from O'Neill's attempt to negotiate the chasm

between ancient and modern. For O'Neill, the Civil War provided a setting

that would allow audiences to locate the tragic in their national history and

mythology while retaining enough distance in time to lend the tale its

required epic proportions. Mourning also provided O'Neill with an occasion

to abandon the complex set design of the Art Theatre, which he had long

bemoaned as a constraint on the playwright's creative freedom.

SUMMARY OF THE PLAY

Book 1, HOMECOMING

It is late spring afternoon in front of the Mannon house. The master of

the house, Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon, is soon to return from war.

Lavinia, Ezra’s severe daughter, has just come, like her mother Christine,

from a trip to New York. Seth, the gardener, takes the anguished girl aside.

He needs to warn her against her would-be beau, Captain Brant. Before Seth

can continue, however, Lavinia’s suitor Peter and his sister Hazel, arrive.

Lavinia stiffens. If Peter is proposing to her again, he must realize that she

cannot marry anyone because Father needs her.

Lavinia asks Seth to resume his story. Seth asks if she has not noticed

that Brant looks just like her all the other male Mannons. He believes that

Brant is the child of David Mannon and Marie Brantôme, a Canuck nurse, a

couple expelled from the house for fear of public disgrace. Suddenly Brant

himself enters from the drive. Calculatingly Lavinia derides the memory of

Brant’s mother. Brant explodes and reveals his heritage. Lavinia’s

grandfather loved his mother and jealously cast his brother out of the family.

Brant has sworn vengeance.

A moment later, Lavinia appears inside her father's study. Christine

enters indignantly, wondering why Lavinia has summoned her. Lavinia

reveals that she followed her to New York and saw her kissing Brant.

Christine defiantly tells Lavinia that she has long hated Ezra and that

Lavinia was born of her disgust. She loves her brother Orin because he

always seemed hers alone. Lavinia coldly explains that she intends to keep

her mother’s secret for Ezra’s sake. Christine must only promise to never see

Brant again. Laughingly Christine accuses her daughter of wanting Brant

herself. Lavinia has always schemed to steal her place. Christine agrees to

Lavinia’s terms. Later she proposes to Brant that they poison Ezra and

attribute his death to his heart trouble.

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One week later, Lavinia stands stiffly at the top of the front stairs with

Christine. Suddenly Ezra enters and stops stiffly before his house. Lavinia

rushes forward and embraces him. Once she and Ezra alone, Christine

assures her that he has nothing to suspect with regards to Brant. Ezra

impulsively kisses her hand. The war has made him realize that they must

overcome the wall between them. Calculatingly Christine assures him that

all is well. They kiss.

Toward daybreak in Ezra’s bedroom, Christine slips out from the bed.

Mannon’s bitterly rebukes her. He knows the house is not his and that

Christine awaits his death to be free. Christine deliberately taunts that she

has indeed become Brant’s mistress. Mannon rises in fury, threatening her

murder, and then falls back in agony, begging for his medicine. Christine

retrieves a box from her room and gives him the poison.

Mannon realizes her treachery and calls Lavinia for help. Lavinia rushes

to her father. With his dying effort, Ezra indicts his wife: “She's guilty—not

medicine!” he gasps and then dies. Her strength gone, Christine collapses in

a faint.

Book 2,THE HUNTED

Peter, lavinia, and Orin arrive at the house. Orin disappointedly

complains of Christine’s absence. He jealously asks lavinia about what she

wrote him regarding Brant. Lavinia warns him against believing Christine’s

lies.

Suddenly Christine hurries out, reproaching Peter for leaving Orin

alone. Mother and son embrace jubilantly. Suspiciously Orin asks Christine

about Brant. Christine explains that Lavinia has gone mad and begun to

accuse her of the impossible. Orin sits at Christine’s feet and recounts his

wonderful dreams about her and the South Sea Islands. The Islands

represented all the war was not: peace, warmth, and security, or Christina

herself. Lavinia reappears and coldly calls Orin to see their father’s body.

In the study, Orin tells Lavinia that Christine has already warned him of

her madness. Calculatingly Lavinia insists that Orin certainly cannot let their

mother's paramour escape. She proposes that they watch Christine until she

goes to meet Brant herself. Orin agrees.

The night after Ezra’s funeral, Brant’s clipper ship appears at a wharf in

East Boston. Christine meets Brant on the deck, and they retire to the cabin

to speak in private. Lavinia and an enraged Orin listen from the deck. The

lovers decide to flee east and seek out their Blessed Islands. Fearing the

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hour, they painfully bid each other farewell. When Brant returns, Orin

shoots him and ransacks the room to make it seem that Brant has been

robbed.

The following night Christine paces the drive before the Mannon house.

Orin and Lavinia appear, revealing that they killed Brant. Christine

collapses. Orin knees beside her pleadingly, promising that he will make her

happy, that they can leave Lavinia at home and go abroad together. Lavinia

orders Orin into the house. He obeys. Christine glares at her daughter with

savage hatred and marches into the house. Lavinia determinedly turns her

back on the house, standing like a sentinel. A shot is heard from Ezra's

study. Lavinia stammers: “It is justice!”

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BOOK 3 THE HAUNTED

A year later, Lavinia and Orin return from their trip east. Lavinia's body

has lost its military stiffness and she resembles her mother perfectly. Orin

has grown dreadfully thin and bears the statue-like attitude of his father. In

the sitting room, Orin grimly remarks that Lavinia’s has stolen Christine’s

soul. Death has set her free to become her. Peter enters from the rear and

gasps, thinking he has seen Christine’s ghost. Lavinia approaches him

eagerly. Orin jealously mocks his sister, accusing her of becoming a true

romantic during their time in the islands.

A month later, Orin works intently at a manuscript in the Mannon study.

Lavinia knocks sharply at the locked door. With forced casualness, she asks

Peter what he is doing. Orin insists that they must atone for Mother’s death.

As the last male Mannon, he has written a history of the family crimes, from

Abe’s onward. Lavinia is the most interesting criminal of all. She only

became pretty like Mother on Brant’s Islands, with the natives staring at her

with desire. When Orin accuses her of sleeping with one of them, she

assumes Christine’s taunting voice. Reacting like Ezra, Orin grasps his

sister’s throat, threatening her murder. He has taken Father’s place and she

Mother’s.

A moment later, Hazel and Peter appear in the sitting room. Orin enters,

insisting that he see Hazel alone. He gives her a sealed envelope, enjoining

her to keep it safe from his sister. She should only open it if something

happens to him or if Lavinia tries to marry Peter. Lavinia enters from the

hall. Hazel moves to leave, trying to keep Orin’s envelope hidden behind her

back. Rushing to Orin, Lavinia beseeches him to make her surrender it. Orin

complies.

Orin tells his sister she can never see Peter again. A “distorted look of

desire” comes into his face. Lavinia stares at him in horror, saying, “For

God’s sake—! No! You’re insane! You can’t mean—!” Lavinia wishes his

death. Startled, Orin realizes that his death would be another act of justice.

Mother is speaking through Lavinia.

Peter appears in the doorway. Unnaturally casual, Orin remarks that he

was about to go clean his pistol and exits. Lavinia throws herself into Peter’s

arms. A muffled shot is heard.

Three days later, Lavinia appears dressed in deep mourning. A resolute

Hazel arrives and insists that Lavinia not marry Peter. The Mannon secrets

will prevent their happiness. She already has told Peter of Orin’s envelope.

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Peter arrives, and the pair pledges their love anew. Started by the

bitterness in his voice, Lavinia desperately flings herself into his arms

crying, “Take me, Adam!” Horrified, Lavinia orders Peter home.

Lavinia cackles that she is bound to the Mannon dead. Since there is no

one left to punish her, she must punish herself—she must entomb herself in

the house with the ancestors.

ANALYSIS OF MAJOR CHARACTERS

LAVINIA MANNON

Lavinia Is Ezra’s wooden, stiff-shouldered, flat-chested, thin, and

angular daughter. She is garbed in the black of mourning. Her militaristic

bearing, a mark of her identification with her father, symbolizes her role as a

functionary of the Mannon clan or, to use Christine’s terms, as their sentry.

Lavinia appears as the keeper of the family crypt and all its secrets, figuring

as an agent of repression throughout the play. She will urge Orin in

particular to forget the dead, compulsively insist upon the justice of their

crimes, and keep the history of the family’s past from coming to light.

Lavinia's repressive stiffness and mask-like countenance mirrors that of the

house, the monument of repression erected by her ancestors to conceal their

disgraces. Ultimately this manor becomes her tomb, Lavinia condemning

herself to live with the Mannon dead until she and all their secrets with her

die.

Despite her loyalties to the Mannon line, Lavinia appears as her mother

double from the outset of the play, sharing the same lustrous copper hair,

violet eyes, and mask-like face. Christine is her rival. Lavinia considers

herself robbed of all love at her mother's hands, Christine not only taking her

father but her would-be lover as well. Thus she schemes to take Christine's

place and become the wife of her father and mother of her brother. She does

so upon her mother's death, reincarnating her in her own flesh.

In doing so, Lavinia comes to femininity and sexuality. Lavinia traces a

classical oedipal trajectory, in which the daughter, horrified by her

castration, yearns to become the mother and bear a child by her father that

would redeem her lack. Orin figures as this child as well as the husband she

would leave to be with her son, that is, Peter substituting as Brant.

ORIN MANNON

The Mannon son returned from war, Orin is the boyish counterpart to

Aeschylus's Orestes. He loves his mother incestuously, yearning for pre-

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Oedipal plenitude, the mythic moment prior to the intervention of the father

into the mother-son dyad. This pre-Oedipal paradise appears primarily in

two fantasies: that of the secret world he shares with Christine in childhood

and the Blessed Island he imagines as a haven from the war.

As the stage notes indicate, Orin bears a striking resemblance to the

other Mannon men though he appears as a weakened, refined, and

oversensitive version of each. These doubles are his rivals within the

Mother-Son love affair that structures the trilogy, with Orin competing with

Ezra and Brant for Christine's desire. Thus he flies into a jealous rage upon

the discovery of her love affair that leads to Christine and Brant's deaths.

Orin will then force he and his sister to judgment for their crimes in an

attempt to rejoin his mother in death.

CHRISTINE MANNON

Christine is a striking woman of forty with a fine, voluptuous figure,

flowing animal grace, and a mass of beautiful copper hair. Her pale face is

also a life- like mask, a mask that represents both her duplicity and her

almost super-human efforts at repression.

Having long abhorred her husband Ezra, Christine plots his murder with

her lover Brant upon his return from the Civil War. She loves incestuously,

repudiating her husband and clinging to her son as that which is all her own.

She repeats this incestuous relation in her affair with Brant, rediscovering

Orin in a substitute.

Like her double, Brant's mother Marie, Christine moves with an animal-

like grace, grace that codes for her sexual excess. This grace makes her

exotic, or even of another race, aligning her with the recurring figures of the

island native. It makes sense that Lavinia must go among the natives to fully

assume her figure.

As her characteristic green dress suggests, Christine is consumed with

envy. She envies Brant’s Island women, hating them for their sexual

pleasures. Despite the desperate veneer of kindness, she envies Hazel for her

youth, imagining her as a figure for what she once was. Before the threat of

her oncoming age, she must secure her love affair with Brant at all costs.

EZRA MANNON

As his homophonic name suggests, he is Agamemnon's counterpart, the

great general returned from war to be murdered by his wife and her lover.

We first encounter Ezra prior to his homecoming in the former of the

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ominous portrait hanging in his study. Here, as throughout the trilogy, Ezra

is dressed in his judge's robes and appears as a symbol of the law.

Ezra’s authority rests primarily in his symbolic form. Indeed, he is far

more the figure for the law in this form than as a broken, bitter, ruined

husband. Both before and after his death, Ezra will continuously appear in

his symbolic capacities. His mannerisms, for example, suggest the

unyielding statue-like poses of military heroes; to Christine, he imagines

himself as a statue of a great man standing in a square. After his death,

Lavinia will constantly invoke his name and voice. Christine will hear

herself condemned by his corpse. Ezra's various images will call his family

to judgment from beyond the grave.

ADAM BRANT

Brant is a powerful, romantic sea captain. He has swarthy complexion,

sensual mouth, and long, coal-black hair. He dresses, as if some romantic

Byronic ideal, in almost foppish extravagance with touches of studied

carelessness. The child of the illegitimate Mannon line, he returns to wreak

vengeance on Ezra's household. He steals Ezra's wife and seduces Lavinia to

conceal their affair. Brant also of course bares a striking resemblance to the

other Mannon men. He does so as yet another son incestuously enthralled

with Mother and her substitutes.

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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS

Q: DISCUSS “MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA” AS A

TRAGEDY IN MODERN SENSE?

Q: GIVE A CRITIQUE OF THE PLAY “MOURNING BECOMES

ELECTRA”?

Ans:

Eugene O’Neill is a one of great playwrights that America has ever

produced. His plays reflect classical sense of tragedy coupled with modern

psychology. His play “Mourning Becomes Electra” qualifies this statement

on great extent. The classic and notorious problem about tragedy in modern

appearance has been that the characters, not being over life-size but rather

below it, excite pity without admiration and therefore without terror. Though

O’Neill has talked of an “ennobling identification” with protagonists, he has

only once tried to do anything about it: only in “Mourning Becomes Electra”

are the characters over life-size. Unhappily this is no because of the size of

their bones but, as it were, by inflation with gas, cultural and psychological.

One of the modern critics Schopenhauer declares that in “Mourning

Becomes Electra” we find the true sense of tragedy that “it is not his own

individual sins, i.e. the crime of existence itself”. So devoted was he to this

conception, that he permitted it to inform the entire trilogy. The pessimism

of the Greeks may have been equally black, their tragedies just as aware of

the crime of existence, still “They would have despised”, as William James

observed,

“a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the

proper bounds of lachrymosity”.

The unfulfilment, exhaustion, and apathy which are significant

possessions of O’Neill’s tragedy are effectively manipulated in the play. The

Greeks were never as contemptuous of life as to seek consolation in death,

nor as afraid of death as to calm did their fears by promising themselves,

have the fulfilment after death of all that they vainly yearned for in life.

O’Neill is not to be censured for the predicament, in which he found himself,

or for the fashion in which he chose to extricate himself, but rather for

misinterpreting his dream. For however ingeniously he substituted the

premises of a rationalistic psychology, however adeptly he interpolated his

allegory, however glibly he spoke of fate and destiny, crime and retribution,

guilt and atonement, his dream in tragedy was not the Greek dream.

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The appearance of “Mourning Becomes Electra” subsequent to Krutch’s

estimate in 1929 of modern tragedy gave Crutch no cause to revise his

assertion that the:

“tragic solution of the problem of existence, the reconciliation to life

by means of the tragic spirit is…. Only a fiction surviving in art”.

Indeed, O’Neill’s play bears out the statement by achieving precisely

the opposite result: Electra offers a solution not to the problem of existence

but to that of non-existence; it reconciles not to life, but to death. Nor did

O’Neill invoke that Tragic Spirit which Krutch regarded as the product

either of a “religious faith in the greatness of God” or of “faith in the

greatness of man” although by 1932 it seemed to Krutch that he had satisfied

this demand, that he had, in short, succeeded in investing man “once more

with the dignity he has lost”. He insisted, begging the question,

“The greatness of the plays lies in the fact that they achieve a

grandeur which their rational framework is impotent even to

suggestion”.

In “Mourning Becomes Electra”, he convinces, that human beings are

great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions, and

that the spectacle of them is not only absorbing but also and at once horrible

and cleansing. Here, it seems Krutch is entirely wrong. Not only has he

missed the “meaning” of O’Neill’s trilogy, he has discerned in O’Neill’s

characters qualities that are mostly non-existent. They are characters,

moreover, whose passions are infantile rather than great, are spectacle that is

horrible but scarcely cleansing. Catharsis is a condition, which O’Neill

seldom achieved, preferring, as he did, narcosis or necrosis. That the

deficiencies of “Mourning Becomes Electra”, when it is compared “with the

very greatest works of dramatic literature” are limited only to its language is

an opinion, which, if our judgments have been even moderately sound, has

little to be said in its support. There is equally little to be said for Krutch’s

contrast of Ibsen and O’Neill and, wherein he finds that O’Neill avoided the

central fault of Ibsen’s tragedies, namely, that they are

“Too thoroughly pervaded by a sense of human littleness to be other

than melancholy and dispiriting”.

Having defined “true tragedy … as a dramatic work in which the

outward failure of the principle personage is compensated for by the dignity

and greatness of his character”, Krutch concludes that “O’Neill is almost

alone among modern dramatic writers in possessing what appears to be an

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instinctive perception of what a modern tragedy would have to be”. Yet one

has only to strip “Mourning Becomes Electra” of its spiritual malaise, its

Freudian machinery, its self-conscious symbolism, its Gothic properties, its

turgid style, to see how little better O’Neill has succeeded than Ibsen in

satisfying Krutch’s definition of “true tragedy”. Ghosts, too, was a tragedy

of family guilt in which the original scene is traced to the life- denying

impulse. One side is happiness; on the other is “the source of the misery in

the world”: law, order, and duty. Living in the house polluted by her

husband’s profligacy, Mrs. Alving, the counterpart of Christine, revolts

against the restrictive virtues which society has imposed upon her and which

prevented Alving from finding “any outlet for the overmastering joy of life

that was in him”. Oswald, haunted by his father’s sin, suffers not only

physical consequences thereof, but repeats –like Orin –the parents’

behaviour. Where Orin is afflicted with a stubborn case of Weltschmerz, and

complications induced by a wound in the head –the dowry of the Mannons

in general, Ezra is particular –Oswald suffers from congenital syphilis –the

indirect of the Mannons way of life, but the direct consequence of his

father’s dissolute actions. When, at the conclusion of the tragedy, Oswald

locks himself and his mother inside their haunted house for paying out the

family curse much as Lavinia is. Surely the madness of a paretic is not more

melancholy and dispiriting than the masochism of a woman who denies

herself the pleasure of dying.

More restrained than Krutch, George Jean Nathan never compared

“Mourning Becomes Electra” “with the very greatest works of dramatic

literature”, but he did declare it to be “indubitably one of the finest play that

the American theatre has known”. Like Krutch, he mistook Weltschmerz for

tragedy and ascribed purgative powers to hyper-emotionalism and to the

manifestations of a neurotic sensibility. But Nathan came closer to the truth

when he observed that O’Neill’s “passionate inspiration”, “the sweep and

size of his emotional equipment and emotional dynamics” transcended the

characters and the play. This is a euphemistic way of saying that “Mourning

Becomes Electra” contains no adequate equivalent for the playwright’s

excess of feeling. It is a fault that is present in most of O’Neill’s plays, and

O’Neill himself was apparently aware of it when in “Mourning Becomes

Electra” he consciously shunned “the many opportunities for effusions of

personal writing about life and fate”. If the trilogy is less effusive than some

of the preceding plays, it’s grandiosity is threefold greater than most. If it

contains less “personal writing”, it is far from reticent concerning the

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author’s conception of life and fate, a conception which suggests that the

glow felt by Nathan to be spreading over all “the glow that is O’Neill” is less

“Luminous and radiant” than feverish.

Q: WHAT ARE THE MAIN INFLUENCES OF PSYCO-ANALYSIS

ON “MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA”?

Q: WHAT IS FREUDINISM? DO WE HAVE ANY TRACE OF

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXES IN “MOURNING BECOMES

ELECTRA”?

Q: O’NEILL HAS CAPTURED A MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL

ENIGMAS IN A CLASSICAL STORY, DISCUSS?

Ans:

In “Mourning Becomes Electra” O’Neill highlights the darker and

criminal aspects of the so-called “Puritan Mannon’s” in terms of

psychoanalysis. His presentation is powerfully modern that the play seems to

be an artistic interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis and Oedipus and

Electra complexes. O’Neill’s frequent use of Freudian concept in some of

his plays is so evident that it declares that O’Neill follows the Freudian

theories of psychoanalysis. But O’Neill regarded himself as an

“intellectually been analytical psychologist”.

He sharply declared,

“I respect Freud’s work tremendously –but I am not an addict.

Whatever of Freudianism is in Desire must have walked rightly in

through my unconsciousness”.

O’Neill himself insisted that his knowledge of the psychoanalysis was

unscientific and fragmentary and he was guided more by intuition than by

any theory:

“..… It was my dramatic instinct and my personal experience with

human life that alone guided me”.

While responded to friend’s criticism he commented on psychological

complexes of characters in

“… I think I know enough about men and women to have written

“Mourning Becomes Electra” almost exactly as it is if I have never

heard of Freud or Jung or the others”.

However, it is difficult to accept his contention that he had nothing to do

with Freudian psychoanalysis. Indeed with the help of such psychoanalytical

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devices as “mask” and “asides”, O’Neill aims at depicting the deeper

working of human psyche.

Taking the story of brother and sister, O’Neill has been able to

dramatize convincingly the sequence of dualism, steaming from the basic

tension between the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Its characterization,

symbolism and tone are determined by O’Neill’s interpretation of the puritan

heritage by Freudian psychology. Freudian hypothesis explains the

attractions and attachments that motivate the events –which every male is

attracted to the woman who resembles his mother in physical appearance

and every female desires a man who resembles her father.

In “Mourning Becomes Electra” incest, Oedipus complex and fixations

motivate characters. The prototype of the female in the play is Marie

Brantome. Christine and Lavinia both resemble her, especially copper gold

shade of their hair. Adam loves Christine because of her resemblance with

his mother. And his affection for Lavinia can also be attributed to her

resemblance with Marie Brantome.

He says to Lavinia,

“Lavinia, you are so like your mother in some ways. I only know one

other woman who had it you will think it strange when I tell you. It

was my mother”.

His Freudian view of love has been illustrated through this attraction

and revulsion of characters. Adam is attracted towards Christine and Lavinia

and hates Ezra and Orin. Orin loves Christine and Vinnie and hates Adam

and Ezra. Lavinia is fascinated towards her father, Orin and Adam and hates

her mother. Christine dislikes her husband and likes Adam Brante and her

son, Orin. These attractions and revulsions can be explained in the light of

Freudian thesis.

O’Neill adopted Freudian emphasis upon the sexual instinct, especially

Oedipus complex and Electra complex. According to play, “Oedipus

Complex” arises because mother loves her husband too little and she loves

her son too much. The Oedipus complex is more obvious in the case of Orin

that he is his mother’s boy. And his love for her is prevailed by sexual

association but there is also on element of honour in it.

He is very happy when he sees her mother first on his return from war.

He says,

“Mother! God, it’s good to see you”.

Christine also deals with him in seductive terms.

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Christine: (again with tenderness, stroking his hair --smiling)

His mother also declares such feelings when she looks at his son:

“You are a big man now, are not you? I can’t believe it. It seems only

yesterday when I used to find you in your nightshirt hiding in the hall

upstairs on the chance that I would come up and you’d get one more

good night kiss!”

The most important operation of this Freudianism is the hero’s mothers

–fixation. His fate depends upon this complex. Orin is utterly attaching with

his mother that he identifies his mother with peace and sense of security. He

wants to go to South See islands (islands of peace) with his mother. His

dreams of island are like return to Womb and Security of infancy. He does

not like her mother in possession of his father. That is why he imagines

every man killed in war is like his father. This fixation motivates him to kill

Adam or father figure. He keeps on loving his mother inwardly even after

the exposure of her love affair with Adam. He says to her:

“Mother! Don’t moan like that!

… But you will forget him!

I will make you forge him!

I will make you happy!

We’ll have Vinnie her and go away on long voyage –to the

South Seas”.

Christine is his “only girl”. Her influence on him is always soothing.

She tells him about her husband’s jealousy for Orin.

“I want to make up to you for all the injustice you suffered at your

father’s hands. … He was jealous of you. He hates you because he

knew I loved you better than anything in the world”.

After Christine’s suicide, Lavinia assumes the role of her mother. Orin

on perceiving this change says,

“You don’t know how like mother you have become Vinnie. I don’t

mean only How pretty you’ve gotten”.

Orin’s attachment to Lavinia becomes incestuous. He says to her,

“Can’t you see? I’m now in father’s place and you are mother?”

Orin’s complex is made completely explicit, when he makes his

proposal to his sister,

“I love you now with all the guilt in me –the guilt we share! Perhaps I

love you too much. Vinnie… there are times now when you don’t

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seem to be my sister nor mother but some stranger with the same

beautiful hair. (He touches her hair caressingly).”

But Lavinia rejects his hands and calls him insane. She suggests him to

embrace death. He utters;

“Yes it is the way to peace—to find her again –my lost island –Death

is an island of peace, too –Mother will be waiting for me there”.

This shows that the image of mother as his beloved is never

extinguished from his mind. Orin’s predicament reveals the working of his

mind out of the Oedipus motive. Besides Orin, Adam and Ezra also suffer

from this complex. Adam loves Christine because she resembles his mother

and he wants to take revenge from Ezra through Christine because Ezra did

not help his mother in starvation and poverty. Ezra also loves Marie

Brantome, the wife of his uncle. She is like his mother.

Lavinia also goes to the Mannon way. From the beginning, she

experiences a deep sense of attachment towards her father. She also likes

Adam Brant and Orin because both of them resemble her father. And they

exercise a hold on her imagination.

She says:

“I love father better than anyone in the world”.

Brant says to her,

“Well, I suppose that’s the usual way of it. A daughter feels closer to

her father and a son to his mother”.

Lavinia feels some attraction towards Adams. She says to Seth.

“… Yes! He does –something about his face –that must be why I have

had the strange feeling. I have known him before….”

In the end in pure Freudian slip she calls Peter, Adam. She also loves

Orin a duplicate of Ezra, her father. Lavinia’s sense of love is also

incestuous. She spies on her mother and wants to degrade her in front of her

father. Christine also suspects her that she wants Adam for herself. Lavinia

blames her mother of being murderer of her father. Both Lavinia and

Christine hate each other.

Christine says:

“You are your father’s daughter”.

Christine suspects Lavinia that she is in love with Adam, She says,

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“I’ll show you to the world as a daughter who desired her mother’s

lover and then tried to get her mother hanged out of hatred and

jealousy”.

Both Lavinia and Christine want to hold on Orin. It is very difficult for

Lavinia to see her mother close to her father in their bedroom. Christine

knows Lavinia’s anxiousness for her father.

She says,

“I know you, Vinnie! I’ve watched you ever since you were little

trying to do exactly what you are doing now! You’ve tried to become

the wife of your father and mother of Orin! You’ve always schemed to

steal my place!”

Lavinia has her own grievance.

“No! It’s you who have stolen all love from me since the time I was

born”. It is Lavinia who makes Orin to believe that mother is in love with

Adam. As Orin’s suicide is the judgment levelled by his complex, Lavinia’s

self-punishment is the judgment of her puritan heritage and her complexes.

Q: MANNON’S FAMILY IN “MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA”

PERSONIFIES THE SHAMS OF PURITANISM, DISCUSS?

Q: “MOURNIGN BECOMES ELECTRA” IS A SATIRE ON

PURITANISM, ELABORATE?

Ans:

“Mourning Becomes Electra” is a psychological dramatization of the

evils of Puritanism. It is a play set in Puritanical surroundings in midst of

Puritanical people. The New England countryside in which the action of the

play takes place is full of almost barren and rocky countryside with barren

mountains; the people are equally austere, tough and thrifty. All this create

an atmosphere of severity, inflexity and firmness.

It is not a careful historical approximation of New England, it is

Puritanism which O’Neill understood through the eyes of his own

generation, it represents the sum total of everything that was wrong with

American Society. In the eyes of O’Neill, this Puritanism represents every

kind of suppression, hypocrisy and sham behaviour. O’Neill uses these

hypocritical attitudes in the texture of the play. He represents the drama of

love and lust with its tragic climax under the influence of hard geographical

settings and strict people.

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The members of the Mannon House represent a hard tradition bound

family. Mannons are conservation and class conscious. Christine is outsider

in their family; to her their house appears like a sepulchre, full of puritanical

ugliness, monstrosity and a temple of hatred. In words of Christine;

“Every time I come back after being away it (the house) appears more

like a sepulcher. The ‘whited’ one of the Bible –pagan temple front

struck a mask on puritan gray ugliness! It was just like old Abe

Mannon to build such monstrosity –as a temple for his hatred”.

Mannons have a complete Puritanical approach to life and relations at

least on the surface level. Their Grandfather Abe established the business of

shipping and made a pile of wealth. The family became very rich and

prosperous, and prominent in the community. But Christine is not as strict in

the moral puritan code as the rest of Mannons. She is “furrin looking and

queer, French and Dutch descended, she ain’t the Mannon kind.” She brings

the emotional streak in the prosaic Mannon family. Mannons are shown

hypocritical to all outward appearances. The Mannons are the elect.

David falls in love with a Canadian nurse Marie Brantome and marries

her. For this crime he is thrown out of the house. His family portion is

purchased at very low cast. Even when Marie is dying of starvation, Ezra

does not care for it. This hard heartedness and hatred expose their so-called

puritan piety. Their theology has no relish of Salvation in it. The Mannon’s

way of living leads them to their catastrophe i.e. death. To live preoccupied

with death shows the cold remnant of Calvinistic dogma.

For example Ezra says:

“Life had only made me think of death…”

And on another occasion she proclaims:

“Life was a process of dying; being born was starting to die.”

They outwardly possess all the Calvinistic and puritan virtues –industry,

thrifty, clock like regularity, and protection against an irretrievable lapse.

Social responsibility and careful avoidance of sensuality. There is no

possible redemption for a sinner against this code of life. If one falls is

forever reprobate. In “Mourning Becomes Electra” this puritanical belief is

only in appearance. Otherwise in actual life they are erratic, unstrained,

greedy and heartless.

There is no theological foundation to the puritan code in “Mourning

Becomes Electra”. Mencken describes it as an appearance without substance

and an ethic without a dogma. Puritanism believes in self-control and sex

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restraint. But David has sex with nursemaid; and Christine has adulterous

relation with Brant. In actual life they don’t practice self-control. Sex is

associated with the family curse. Abe Mannon throws out David for loving

and marrying a nurse –a servant in the family. Abe can’t tolerate the breach

of property. He throws David out, pulls down the house out of vengeance

and rebuilds on hatred. Abe Mannon’s curse of hatred is inherited by his

successors, Lavinia and Orin. Lavinia hates love.

Mannons have their own strict rules and regulations. Christine’s derides

her daughter for her prudish views. She says:

“Puritan maidens should not peer too inquisitively into spring! is not

beauty an abomination and love a vile thing”?

Ezra expresses his reaction to his wife in a typical puritan style:

“What are bodies to me? Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. Is that your

notion of love”?

But when he returns from war, in front of his wife he becomes

passionate and implores her for love. His puritanical behaviour with his wife

is changed. Lavinia hates her mother and her sensuality but she herself loves

Adam Brant and wants peter to have her. Orin shows the passionate

attachment even towards his sister with sexual overtones. He proposes her

that she should give up peter and brother and sister live like Ezra and

Christine. From a puritan point of view such a relation would mean full

damnation. So the curse begins with David and ends with Orin, both of them

commit suicide out of a sense of guilt. So the puritan approach to sex is

hypocritical. They practice no virtue in matters of sex.

Choral characters also consider their puritanical decency and self-

restraint false. The appearance and reality of the puritan way of life are poles

apart. The Mannons publicly represent a puritanical front of Poe’s self-

restrained behaviour. But in practice they are dominated by hatred, passion

and sex. Thus O’Neill tears apart the puritan façade of responsibility and

shows that puritan or not, men are men and are led by passions. O’Neill

hates puritan hypocrisy.

Q: WHAT IS NECESSITY OF MASKS IN “MOURNING BECOMES

ELECTRA”, DISCUSS?

Q: WHY AND HOW O’NEILL USES MASKS IN “MOURNING

BECOMES ELECTRA”, DISCUSS?

Ans:

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O’Neill is a great modern dramatist skilled in depicting his characters,

psychological insight. For this purpose most often he uses the technique of

mask in his play to meet his purpose of showing the true inner self of his

characters. O’Neill’s protagonists wear a mask hide their true selves from

the world and from themselves. But in fact through this technique, O’Neill

by masking his characters unmasks them, snatches their mask off from their

faces and he also unmasks his readers and wishes them to find their own true

identity behind the masks they wear on because of their circumstances and

do not want to come out their wore masks and to face their truer selves. But

O’Neill artistically unmasks both his characters and readers through the

technique of masking his characters.

He uses the device of “Mask” not only in his “mask plays” but also in

his “non-mask plays” as well. O’Neill is of the view that:

“Sometimes one’s outer-life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks

of others; one’s inner-life passes in solitude haunted by the mask of

one-self”.

On certain moments O’Neill uses the technique of “mask” as a visual

idea and sometimes as a defensive function. In the case of visual idea,

according to the story if the character is to be made a fatalist, determinist or

a pessimist, O’Neill puts a mask of fatalism, determinism or pessimism on

his character’s storical identity a visual idea. On the other hand, in the case

of defensive function of mask, his characters wear a mask on their faces, in

order to conceal their inner feelings, but masterfully, O’Neill by concealing

the face of his character (with a concealing mask), in fact sweat their true

and concealed faces behind a mask, wore by the circumstances of the outer

world. For example, in the case of the defensive function of he mask, in a

drama, one of O’Neill’s characters, Caled, on being rejected by Emma,

wears a mask of emotionlessness on his face to conceal his expressions on

his face but he is believed by his eyes, which:

“Can not conceal his inward struggle of hardening and stiffening his

face”.

And

“To harden one self is to die a little”.

And

“To usurp the emotions is self annihilation, it substitutes death in

life”.

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Sometimes his characters wear a mask on their face for a long time and

after a long time with the change of circumstances; they again come back to

their true faces and realize their true identity.

According to O’Neill,

“Before man discovered sin, when he was still enjoying heavenly bliss,

i.e. Nature, there as no need for hiding, no need to wear a ‘mask’. But

when the man was separated from Nature, the situation changed

altogether. Then man was unable to return to his harmonious origin,

unable likewise to accept his new painful status, thus man divided

against himself, now this open, naïve and romantic part of man, longs

to return to the cost paradise, while, on the other hand, the rational

part of him trying to adjust to the earthly hell. And no his one side

(romantic) or other side (romantic) becomes so predominant that the

total character of the man is nearly fused with it”. (means goes under

the control of dominant part of him).

Thus in the drama Mannons are almost identified with the “mask” of

being virtuous puritan, whereas Marie and Christine are with their true faces.

In the case of Lavinia there is a circular development from “mask” to face

and then back to “mask” when she decides to be amongst the ghosts of

Mannons.

On the symbolic level the characters can no longer be viewed as

individuals; instead they typify the two dispositions of human soul. The

marriage between Ezra and Christine, by the same token, becomes a symbol

of the unhappy state of man, it is man’s going under the influence of a

“mask”; on the other hand, she attempts to free herself from Ezra by being

divorced is man’s attempt to seek happiness, it means an attempt of a man to

free himself from “mask”. But her love for Brant and for Orin is an ironical

illustration of man’s disability to escape from his “mask”.

This “mask” is armour for a man to hide himself. But being a great artist

and psychologist O’Neill, by masking his characters, unmasks them and also

to his readers, only in order to make them, “to know thy self”.

Eugene O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

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