Mourning Becomes Electra
A trilogy by Eugene O'Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra Comments
Mourning Becomes Electra, trilogy of plays by Eugene O'Neill, produced and published in 1931. It is divided into three plays with themes corresponding to the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. The trilogy, consisting of Homecoming (four acts), The Hunted (five acts), and The Haunted (four acts), and are never produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Each of these plays contains four to five acts, and so Mourning Becomes Electra is extraordinarily lengthy for a drama. In production, it is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O'Neill's other major plays. They represent 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, while retaining the forms and conflicts of the Greek characters.
When the war hero General Ezra Mannon returns from the war he is murdered by his wife, Christine, who has been having an affair with Captain Adam Brant. Mannon's daughter Lavinia, who adored her father and hates her mother, learns of the murder and swears to avenge her father's death. Her brother Orin returns home for his father's funeral, and though he is devoted to his mother, Lavinia manages to enlist his aid in seeking revenge against her. When they learn that Christine and Adam are planning to run away together, Orin kills Adam in a fit of jealousy. Christine then commits suicide, and Orin is overwhelmed with guilt. He and Lavinia take a trip to the South Seas, but upon their return home Orin remains obsessed with what they have done. Lavinia subtly convinces Orin to kill himself, then orders the windows of their house boarded and shuts herself away in the gloomy, decaying mansion to spend the rest of her life with the doomed family's ghosts.
Mourning Becomes Electra is the title for a trilogy of plays by Eugene O'Neill, first performed in 1931. It updates the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War. Agamemnon is now General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is his second wife Christine, Orestes is his son Orin, and Electra is his daughter Lavinia. As an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love, and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters' actions in Greek tragedies, O'Neill's characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters' Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.
Eugene O'Neill wrote of Mourning Becomes Electra to Joseph Wood Krutch on July 27, 1929, he wrote of the necessity for selecting a big subject for his art, and described his current projects as one of the biggest ever attempted in modern drama, comparing it to plays by the Greeks and the Elizabethian in its possibilities. In the same letter he cried, "Oh for a language to write drama in! For a speech that is dramatic and not just conversation. I'm so strait jacketed by writing in terms of talk. I'm so fed up with the dodge-question of dialect. But where to find that language?" In a later letter to Benjamin de Casseres, he said that he finished the first draft of his new work, and that he worked on it harder than any other play that he had written up to that point. Then on August 23rd, 1930 he revealed his subject matter to Manuel Komroff and only said that "it is a retelling of the Orestes story laid in New England at the close of the Civil War, that is a psychological drama of lust and that it has more complicated relationships than any Greek treatment"- and this was all sent under strictest confidence. Even though the process was kept under secrecy, he kept a work diary during that period. He said that he chose the Greek Electra and family because they were, " psychologically most interesting-most comprehensive intense basic human interrelationships", and also that Electra needed a tragic ending worthy of her.
Character List:
Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon
Christine, his wife
Lavinia (Vinnie), their daughter
Orin, her son, First Lieutenant of Infantry
Captain Adam Brant, of the clipper Flying Trades
Captain Peter Niles, Captain of U.S. Artillery
Hazel Niles, his sister
Seth Beckwith
Amos Ames
Louisa, his wife
Minnie, her cousin
Josiah Borden, manager of the shipping company
Emma, his wife
Everett Hills, D.D., of the First Congregational Church
His wife
Doctor Joseph Blake
The Chantyman
Ira Mackel
Joe Silva
Abner Small
Themes:
Oedipus
Although O'Neill supposedly derived Mourning Becomes Electra from the Oresteia, the myth that actually structures the play's action is overwhelming that of Oedipus. Oedipus was the Theban king who unwittingly killed his father and murdered his mother, bringing ruin to the land. Famously Freud elaborated this myth into his Oedipus complex, the structure through which children are conventionally introduced into the social order and normative sexual relations.
At the center of this complex in what Freud defined as its positive form is the child's incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex, a desire possibly surmounted in the course of the child's development or else subject to repression. Its development is starkly differentiated for boys and girls. Both begin with a primary love object, the mother. The boy child only moves from the mother upon the threat of castration posed by his rival, the father. In other words, the boy fears that the father would cut his penis off if he continues to cling to the mother who rightfully belongs to her husband. By prohibiting incest and instituting the proper relations of desire within the household, the Father becomes a figure of the law. In surmounting his Oedipal desires, the boy would then abandon his mother as a love object and identify himself with his father.
In contrast, the girl abandons the mother upon realizing both the mother's castration and her own. To her dismay, neither she nor her mother have a penis. She then turns to the father in hopes of bearing a child by him that would substitute for her missing penis; the girl would become a mother in her mother's place. Thus, whereas castration ends the Oedipus complex for the boy, it begins it for the girl.
The Oedipal drama in its many permutations determines the course of the trilogy. Lavinia, for example, yearns to replace Christine as wife to her father and mother to her brother. Christine clings to Orin as that the "flesh and blood," entirely her own, that would make good on her castration. Brant, in turn, is but a substitute for her precious son. Orin yearns to re- establish his incestuous bond with his mother. But the war, where he would finally assume the Mannon name, forces him from their pre-Oedipal embrace in the first place.
Though titled after Electra, the predominant pair of lovers in Mourning is the Mother-Son. Put bluntly, the male Mannons in some way or another take their female love objects as Mother substitutes, and the women pose them as their sons. The Fathers of the play, Ezra and otherwise, figure as the rival who would break this bond of love. As we will see, what is primarily being mourned here is the loss of this love relation, this "lost island" where Mother and Son can be together.
Fate, Repetition, and Substitution
As Travis Bogard notes, O'Neill wrote Mourning to convince modern audiences of the persistence of Fate. Accordingly, throughout the trilogy, the players will remark upon a strange agency driving them into their illicit love affairs, murders, and betrayals. What O'Neill terms fate is the repetition of a mythic structure of desire across the generations, the Oedipal drama.
As Orin will remark to Lavinia in "The Haunted," the Mannons have no choice but to assume the roles of Mother-Son that organize their family history. The players continually become substitutes for these two figures, a substitution made most explicit in Lavinia and Orin's reincarnation as Christine and Ezra. In this particular case, Lavinia traces the 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 at once figures as this child as well as the husband she would leave to be with her son.
The Double/the Rival
The various substitutions among the players as structured by the Oedipal drama make the players each other's doubles. The double is also the rival, the player who believes himself dispossessed convinced that his double stands in his proper place. Thus, for example, Lavinia considers Christine the wife and mother she should be.
To take another example, Mourning's male players universally vie for the desire of Mother. The Civil War, generally remembered as a war between brothers, comes to symbolize this struggle. The men's rivalries are murderously infantile, operating according to a jealous logic of "either you go or I go." Because in these rivalries the other appears as that which stands in the self's rightful place within the Oedipal triangle, the rivals appear as doubles of each other as well. Orin's nightmare of his murders in the fog allegorizes this struggle, Orin repeatedly killing the same man, himself, and his father. This compulsive series of murders demonstrates the impossibility of the lover ever acceding to his "rightful place" within the Oedipal triangle—Mother will always want another, producing yet another rival.
The Law of the Father
In the Oedipal myth, what tears the son away from his incestuous embrace with the mother is the imposition of the father's law. Mourning's principal father, Ezra, serves as figure for this paternal law, though more in his symbolic form than in his own person. Ezra's symbolic form includes his name, the portrait in which he wears his judge's robes, and his ventriloquist voice. Indeed, his symbolic form almost usurps his person. Note how Ezra, in fearing that he has become numb to himself, muses that he has become the statue of a great man, a monument in the town square.
Ezra's death makes the importance of his symbolic function even more apparent. With the death of his person, he exercises the law with all the more force, haunting the living in his various symbolic forms. Thus, for example, Christine will cringe before his portrait, Lavinia will invoke his voice and name to command Orin to attention.
Motifs
The Blessed Islands
The fantasy of the Blessed Island recurs among the major players as the lost Mother-Son dyad disrupted by the Oedipal drama. It, rather than any of their deaths, is the trilogy's principal object of mourning.
Orin offers the most extensive vision of the Blessed Island to Christine in Act II of "The Hunted." A sanctuary from the war, the Island is a warm, peaceful, and secure paradise composed of the mother's body. Thus Orin can imagine himself with Christine without her being there. In terms of the trilogy's sexual drama, the Blessed Island is the realm of the pre-Oedipal, the time of plentitude and wholeness shared by mother and child. However, Orin goes to war to do his duty as a Mannon.
The Natives
The Blessed Islands are also populated, in the players' imaginations, by natives, which entwine their fantasies of sex with those of race. Generally the native appears through two divergent images: the sexual innocent and the sexually depraved. Thus, for example, Lavinia will recall the islands as the home of timeless children, dancing naked on the beach and loving without sin. This island is the perfect home for a prelapsarian love affair. For Orin, however, the natives display an almost bestial sexual prowess, stripping his sister with their lascivious gazes. The native assumes these proportions when imagined as rivals, the prowess and pleasure they would ostensibly provide the lover becoming objects of envy.
Symbols
Though Mourning is rife with symbolism, the symbol that dominates the playing space is certainly the Mannon house. The house is built in the style of a Greek temple, with white columned portico covering its gray walls. As Christine complaints in Act I of "Homecoming," the house is the Mannons' "whited sepulcher." It functions not only as crypt to the family's dead but also to its secrets. Its founder, Abe Mannon, designs it as a monument of repression, building it to cover over the disgrace that sets this revenge cycle in motion. What symbolizes this repression in turn is the house's distinguishing feature, the "incongruous white mask" of a portico hiding its ugliness. This mask doubles those of its residents, evoking the "life-like masks" the Mannons wear as their faces.
Author:
Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) 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 Everywoman. 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 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 Theater, which he had long bemoaned as a constraint on the playwright's creative freedom.
For more information on the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_O%27Neill also Drew Collin's paper on him
An Overall Image of the Shows:
General Scene of The Trilogy
The action of the trilogy, with the exception of an act of the second play, takes place in or immediately outside of the Mannon residence, on the outskirts of one of the small New England seaport towns.
A special curtain shows the house as seen from the street. From this, in each play, one comes to the exterior of the house in the opening act and enters it in the following act.
This curtain reveals the extensive grounds-about thirty acres-which surround the house, a heavily wooded ridge in the background, orchards at the right and in the immediate rear, a large flower garden and greenhouse to the left.
In the foreground, along the street, is a line of locust and elm trees. The property is enclosed by a white picket fence and a tall hedge. A driveway curves up to the house form two entrances with white gates. Between the house and the street is a lawn. By the right corner of the house is a grove of pine trees. Farther forward, along the driveway, maples and locusts. By the left corner of the house is a big clump of lilacs and syringas.
The house is placed back on a slight rise of ground about three hundred feet from the street. It is a large building of the Greek temple type that was the vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. A white wooden portico with six tall columns contrasts with the wall of the house proper which is of gray cut stone. There are five windows on the upper floor and four on the ground floor, with the main entrance in the middle, a doorway with squared transom and sidelights flanked by intermediate columns. The window shutters are painted a dark green. Before the doorway a flight of four steps leas from the ground to the portico.
The three plays take place in either spring of summer of the years 1865-1866.
Review:
The play was reviewed of the University of Toronto, Hart House Theatre by Michael R. Booth in fall of 1969. He said that,
"What emerged with great clarity and distinction of performance from this production was O'Neill's enormous cumulative power, his remoreseless dramatic logic, his pursuit of his characters to the uttermost frontiers of terror and exhaustion, is methodical assembly-piece by slow piece- of his jigsaw-puzzle landscape of determinism, myth, psychiatric theory, and family torment.
Technically, the sheer volume of love, hate and fear released by the principal characters was remarkably well modulated and controlled, never appearing repetitive or monotonous. The acting of these roles revealed an aspect of O'Neill's writing and plotting skill in this play that had not struck me before. After the death of Ezra Mannon, played with a full sense of doom by William Needles, our interest is centered upon the struggles of Christine Mannon to escape the ever-constricting net entangling her; after her suicide the haunted Orin confronts us in Act III; and finally, although she has been gathering strength and prominence all along, Lavinia Mannon thrusts her own agony upon our now undivided attention. Anna Reiser's Lavinia was, in fact, splendid, and with frozen hatred and terrifying ego at times completely overpowered the perhaps too motherly Christine; there was a certain lack of balance between these two roles. A weathered Mannon house brooded appropriately over the action.
Major Motion Picture:
In 1947, the play was made into a movie starring Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Raymond Massey, Katina Paxinou, Leo Genn and Kirk Douglas. It was adapted and directed by Dudley Nichols.
The movie was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Michael Redgrave) and Best Actress in a Leading Role (Rosalind Russell).
The film was reviewed, "I found this film fascinating, stimulating, and a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Though I have no ever seen a stage production of the O'Neill original, this nearly 3 hour long film seemed to be essentially a filmed version of that play. And for that I thank the filmmakers of this production, actors, directors, producers and studio. In reviewing other opinions about this film, I am amazed that so often the negative criticisms concern exactly those strengths I found in this film. That it was not full of artificially cooked-up atmosphere from Steiner (whom I do truly respect and enjoy elsewhere) that it was not full of quick cuts and microscopic close-ups were something I found wonderful. Those sets were very detailed and not skimpy at all. This was a filmed play! That some should state that as a negative is beyond me. There are so many films (even in this film's release era of 1947) available to so many people in so many areas, but how many of us have been lucky enough to experience a great playwright's work, brought to life by great acting and deliver? Far far fewer folks, in far far fewer venues, and far far fewer locations. This then is what I mean when I say that this film was one example of something Film can offer and so rarely does. The opportunity to experience a play! And what a wonderful experience it was. The acting was terrific. After more than one scene between Christina and Lavinia, I fairly exclaimed with pleasure at the dramatic interplay between the two. What some called disdainfully "overacting", I found thrilling and stimulating. After all, one is not watching a home movie of one's family or friends. So-called "realism" in many modern films is in my mind vastly overrated. A work of film, or of the stage, should be "realistic" it is true, but should not eve e so real as to distract from the art itself. Tastes change and filmmaking is an industry to make money like other manufacturing methods. But part of the admiration for what is often called the "Golden Age of Hollywood" is attributable to the then less uncommon understanding that "Art" was as valid the goal as earning profit! At least by the people involved in the acting and production, if not by the investors themselves. Sure there are occasionally great films made toady, and there were plenty of "B" pictures made then too, but to critically dismiss this film for not being something other than what it was, is to miss the point."
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