Mourning Becomes Electra

Mourning Becomes Electra is written by Eugene O’Neill an American playwright. The play is divided into three parts. Home Coming, The Hunted and The Haunted. In this modern play O’Neill has juxtaposed myth and nineteenth century American society.

The house appears as a mere physical entity. He regards physical landscape as just a shadow of mental image. The haunted house in Mourning Becomes Electra is like a monster swelling its own breed. It is a visual symbol of Mannon fate. The white portico as contrasted with the house is a false façade hiding the truth that the house is the camera-eye of destiny. To Christine, the house appears like a mask on Puritan grey ugliness. While to Lavinia it is a temple of Hate and Death, to Orin it looks Ghostly and dead like ‘a tomb’, but none of them can sneak away from the sinister grip of the house. The momentary escape and release promised by sea only intensifies the feeling that the characters are doomed to wither their life in it. Ezra, Christine, Orin and Lavinia (entombing herself in the house) die in the house; the house works out their destruction and thus is a symbol of Mannon’s way of life. The house is an artistic symbol with multiple layers of meaning. O’Neill himself points out the Mannon house emerges in the context of modern man’s dilemma as a grotesque perversion of the Greek meaning of life. Thus the house here is an emblem of decay and waste and meaninglessness in modern life. So the house here is just a house, it is not a home. The idea of ‘home’ is an obsessive one with O’Neill. He was never at rest with the idea of ‘home’.

The house is a general setting of the play. It is the large building of the Greek temple type that was in vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. It evokes most prominently the contrast between the Greek way of life and modern man’s perversion of everything that is Greek. The house, either interior or exterior, remains the scene of action and the Mannons, with a brief illusory escape into the sea, are finally drawn to be doomed in the house. In the beginning of the play windows are open, but when Ezra returns they are shut. The house turns out to be a death mask. The shutter remains closed even after Ezra’s death, for the house is virtually a tomb with his corpse in it.

So in Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill has portrayed a family but the family is a fragmented family. They live in their world. Here we see lack of love and care, lack of understanding, lack of feeling etc… It’s because they live in a house not in a home.

Drama represents the cultural attitudes of the age to which it belongs and also presupposes the existence of a dramatic tradition which it uses. The plot and the characters of a play relate to the cultural situations and embody the problems and the question of the time. In Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill portrays the nineteenth century attitude and the Freudinaism, juxtaposing Greek myths with modern problems. O’Neill has created a modern tale of the Oresteia theme of Greek mythology, transmuting the background, and embodying modern cultural attitudes, in place of those embedded in the Greek story.

The Brigadier Ezra Mannon recalls to our mind Agamemnon. His wife Christine hates him, and her dislike for her husband may be attributed to the first night of their marriage and also to the fact that Ezra compelled his Orin to join the war. Christine poisons her husband to be able to carry on her love affair with Adam Brant whose prototype is Aegisthus, the lover of Clytemnestra. Adam Brant is the son of Marie Brantome and David Mannon, Ezra’s uncle who was expelled from the house for his illegitimate love, by Ezra’s father Abe.

In The Hunted, Lavinia Ezra’s daughter attached to her father and suspicious of her mother’s amorous feelings for Adam Brant, decides to take revenge in collaboration with her brother Orin who has been freed of his attachment to his mother. Christine commits suicide to learn the death of Brant who has been murdered by Orin.

In The Haunted, Orin and Lavinia sail to the South East Pacific Islands in search of oblivion and peace. Lavinia after visiting the islands which represent peace and innocence returns with Orin, enthused with a new spirit, and overcome an ardent desire to enjoy life. Her immediate proposal to Peter for marriage is abhorrent to him and the charms of marriage having been lost, she decides to immure herself in a cell, in the Puritan Mannon way, away from the company of men, doors barred and the sunlight denied. Orin also has left her, and is driven to shoot himself. Orin-like-Orestes, has murdered Aegisthus-like-Adam, and has a sense of attachment to Electra-like-Lavinia.

The events in the first two plays cover a period of a fortnight in the spring of 1805, and the third part covers more than a month in the summer of 1866. Nearly all the incidents except Adam Brant’s murder take place in front of the Mannon house or inside. The characters of Seth (the gardener) with Amos-Ames, Lousia, and Minnie constitute the chorus, the people watching and spying on the aristocratic and the rich Mannons. Their use of the local dialect is significant. O’ Neill, besides introducing the elements of chorus, has depicted the mask-like faces of his characters. Describing Lavinia, O’Neill observes “Above all, one is struck by the same strange, life like mask impression her face gives in repose.”Eve Ezra’s face has the same strange semblance of life like mask that we have already seen in the faces of his wife and daughter and Brant.” Their faces bear an impress of the characteristics of the Mannon passion of destroying one another. The Mannon house, the White Grecian Temple itself is mask-like.