Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA

                             -Eugene O’Neill

                   Mourning Becomes Electra, trilogy of plays by Eugene O’Neill, produced and published in 1931. The trilogy, consisting of Homecoming (four acts), The Hunted (five acts), and The Haunted (four acts), was modeled on the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus and represents O’Neill’s most complete use of Greek forms, themes, and characters. O’Neill set his trilogy in the New England of the American Civil War period.

                   Mourning Becomes Electra is considered O'Neill's most ambitious work. In the play, he adapts the Greek tragic myth Oresteia to nineteenth-century New England. Generally, critics praised the play as one of O'Neill's best. Even though performances ran almost six hours long, audiences seemed to agree; it ran for 150 performances. Like Oresteia, O'Neill's play features themes of fate, revenge, hubris, adultery, and honor. Many critics note that the play reflects his recurring concerns about the unsuccessful struggle of an individual to escape a tragic fate and the dark nature of human existence. The play is structured as a trilogy, with three different plays The Homecoming, The Hunted, The Haunted comprising the story.

                   Mourning Becomes Electra is a family drama. And this is one seriously twisted family, locked in repetitive and compulsive patterns that bring down everyone named Mannon and some people who aren't. O'Neill presents the family as doomed to repeat the relationship that started the cycle of deception and revenge. He seems to suggest that certain character traits run in families, and that some patterns are just inescapable. All families have conflicts, of course; just think back on your own past 24 hours. But chances are they won't have involved murder, suicide, or incest. These Mannon have it all. Even the Civil War, which provides the historical backdrop for the story, was a sad family affair. Brothers fought and killed brothers, families were divided. The war mirrors the horrible events taking place on a smaller scale in our dysfunctional family.

                   Almost every single major character in Mourning Becomes Electra is lying about something. There are lies about everything: parentage, love affairs, murder plots, who said what, who did what. Most of the lies are quite intentional, and they're aimed at protecting someone or some secret. Christine's definitely the best liar of the bunch. Her bold-faced lies to her husband and children make it hard for her to keep her story straight. Orin has the most trouble lying; he's too disorganized and disturbed to do much else than spill his guts. O'Neill makes it clear that the most dangerous kind of lying is lying to your-self. It leaves you wide open to a world of misery.

                   The "original sin" in this trilogy is one of lust: David Mannon's illicit affair with the family's French Canadian nurse. This affair haunts the Mannon family and sets in motion all the revenge and murder that follows. Conflict about sexual desire is what destroys Ezra and Christine's marriage and leads them to seek comfort in really inappropriate attachments to their children. There's constant friction in the trilogy between sexual repression and sexual longing. Reading these plays as someone not born in the 1800s, you might wonder what the big deal is. Is adultery a capital offense? Is it really shocking to be a sensual person? O'Neill's giving us a peek into a society where sex is best kept under wraps, where being a sexy person gets you labeled as strange or foreign. The result of all this repression is an explosion of twisted sexuality, in the form of incestuous feelings which ultimately destroy the Mannon family. In fact, most of the sex (or sexual desire) in these plays are between parents and children, or people who represent parents and children. 

                   Death hangs over Mourning Becomes Electra like a black curtain. It's everywhere—the title's about mourning, the characters are emotionally dead, the house is a tomb, the shadow of the war haunts the male characters, there are two murders, and suicide seems to be the coping strategy du jour. Death seems to be chasing everybody in the Mannon family, and it catches up to all of them one way or another. O'Neill seems to suggest throughout the play that a living death, tortured by guilt or with no human feeling or connection, can be worse than the real thing. In a series of plays where death is literally everywhere, it makes sense that a lot of otherworldly imagery—ghosts, the undead, evil spirits hell-bent on revenge—is hanging out in the trilogy. O'Neill uses the supernatural like some kind of ghost-story ninja, using it to talk about guilt and remorse, madness and fear, salvation and damnation, and a whole lot of other really heavy ideas. He said his goal was to achieve a "power and drive and the strange quality of unreal reality I wanted attained without benefit of the supernatural."  The Mannon’s are haunted as much by the memories of their own actions as by the (imagined) spirits of their dead. The title of the last play—The Haunted—is spot-on. Even if O'Neill intends the haunting to be a metaphor, the feeling of unreality is definitely there.