Themes of Mourning
Becomes Electra
Prepared by:
Richa Pandya
M.A. English
Semester – 3
Roll no- 28
Enrolment No: –
206910842019003
Batch:
2018- 20
Submitted
to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU
Paper no- 9 The
American Literature
Topic: Themes of Mourning Becomes Electra
Introduction
Mourning Becomes Electra is play Written by American
Playwright Eugene O’Neil. Mourning Becomes Electra is
divided into three plays with themes that correspond to the Oresteia trilogy. Much like
Aeschylus' plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, these three plays
by O'Neil are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are
normally not produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy.
Each of these plays contains four to five acts, with only the first act
of The Haunted being
divided into actual scenes, 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.
The
Inner Conflict
In Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill leaves for a
while war between God and Science and returns to the more limited conflict
within the “suffering” individual. But the conflict and suffering were
traceable more specifically than ever to the fixations upon father and mother,
to the tension between Puritanism and freedom, pride and love, death and life. As
before, in most of the plays since Desire Under the Elms all
other masks and values stem from a fragmentary work Diary, O’Neill outline his
purpose and method in Mourning Becomes Electra, emphasizing, repeatedly his
equation of the complex with destiny. There were a modern tragic interpretation of classic fate
without benefit of gods for it must before everything. Remain modern
psychological play fate springing out of the family.
Working
out of the family Fate
As with the
original Atreidae, the family fate of the new England Mannon, father of Ezra
and grandfather of lavinia and orin. Abe’s younger brother, David, has been
involve in a liaison in her pregnancy. David married her, but Abe put them both
out the house and then afterwards tore it down and built this one because he
wouldn’t live where his brother had disgraced the family. The child of David and
Marie was Adam Brant the aegisthus
of the play, who returns to avenge his
parents death in poverty and misery after their exile.
Pride
as a source of Death
The
house of mannon, therefore is built upon outraged pride and Puritanism,
leading, inevitability to death for the Mannon line. For the pride was the
source of death and love was the source of
life. Existence for the Mannons
was life in death from which love, represented by Marie. Brantone, has been
shut out. In their longing to escape the ugly reality of their actual lives the
Mannons yearn for release in love untainted by pride and sin and in death
itself. Christine’s acceptances of sexuality, have been embittered by Ezra’s
Puritanism distorted into a possessive passion but to her husband, lover and
children . she still represent release and sinlessness. Even to Lavinia, who
hate her because she stole all love from me when I was born. Christine is still
the longed for mother as well as the image of herself, Lavinia as giver and
lover.
Shift
and Emphasis
Since O’Neill has shifted the emphasis of the
trilogy from Orestes to Electra the changes which take place in the character
of lavinia provide a father complex. she struggle at
once to realize and to escape from a self –image which was only a reflection of
her soldier father. Her physical appearance tells the story tall like mother
her boys are thin flat-breasted and angular, its unattractiveness was
accentuated by her plain black dress. Her movement were stiff and she has a
flat dry voice and a habit of snapping out her words like an officer giving order. But in spite of these dissimilarties one is
immediately struck by her facial the mother . this facial resemblance the mask
of the mother in Lavinia. Will have its
moment of fulfillment, but only briefly, until god the father lightning strikes again.
Pride,
Puritanism and vindictive justice
The father, Ezra embodies the characteristics of
the Family which constitute their fate pride Puritanism and a strong sense of
vindictive justice. Because of his ingrown egotism and his guilty attitude
towards sex Ezra does not at the comradeship of other men on the battlefield and
has seen death does he become aware of the significance of love and life death
made me think of life. Before that life had only made me think of death …
that’s always been the mannons way of thinking they went to the white meeting-
house on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a
dying. Being born was starting to die death is being born Ironically his
ability to love and his insight into life come to Ezra only when he returned
home to Christine hatred and his own death.
Suicidal
frustration
Christine has fallen in love with Adam Brant the
son of Marie Brantome. When Ezra was in the throes of a heart attack Christine deliberately with
holds his medicine. To the outside world Ezra appears to have died from natural
causes; Lavinia however discover her
mother’s guilt. She plans her vengeance driven not only by the mannon sense of
justice and her loves for her father, but by her frustrated love for Adam and
hatred and jealously of her mother. Since Christine has stolen the love of both
men from lavinia the fitting relation for Lavinia was not to take her mother’s
life but to take from her the love which is her life. At Lavinia’s instigation,
Orin murders Adam Brant Christine takes her own life and after Christine’s
suicide the spirit of vindictiveness and death in the Mannons seem to be
temporarily satisfied and Lavinia can
come to life. She takes on all the attributes of her mother : she seems a
mature women, sure of her feminine attractiveness. Her brown gold hair is arranged as her mother’s has been.
The movements of her body now have the feminie grace her mother had possessed.
Now at perhaps her guiltiest, she has lost her sense of sin and death. Her
father’s ghost in Lavinia has now been placated like him, she could find life
only after experience of death.
Chained
to Mannons
And as Lavinia assume the characteristics of the
mother Orin takes on those of lose of his father. He even wears a beard and
walks like a “tin Solider”. Together they take a trip to the EAST, stopping at
the south sea Islands. Orin watches Lavinia’s new sexuality with puritanical
disapproval and jealously. He feels that he and Lavinia have actually becomes
their father and mother can’t you see I’m now in father’s place and you’re
mother? I’m the mannon you’re chained to!
Symbolic
Incest Pattern
To complete the symbolic incest pattern
representing the lonely mannons’
introversion and their narcissitic inability to love any but another Mannon,
Orin falls in love with his sister. The Same duality of love and loathing for
oneself and its reflection in another which have always dominated Mannon
relationship now governs this one. Orin hates Lavinia as much as he desire her
she has become to him what the furies were to Orestes, a constant reminder of
guilt, diving him towards, madness. He wants become her lover in order to force
her to share his guilt. How else can I be sure you won’t leave me? You would
never dare to leave me thanyou would feel as guilty then as I do. Lavinia both fascinated and repelled. Shouts her hatred at him I have you! You’re
too vile to live you’d kill yourself if you weren’t such a cowered.
Crumbling
of the Illusion
With these words Lavinia has committed her last
murder. When Orin shoots himself Lavinia’s last illusion of her own innocence
begins to crumble. The puritan conscience from which she has found release in
identification with the mother, now reasserts itself. She shouts defiance at
the portraits of her ancestors, I’m mother’s daughter – not one of you! But
even as she does so, the mannon pride claims its own. The feminine lavinia now
squares her shoulders with a return of the abrupt military movement copied from
her. Father which she had of old as if by the very act of disowning the Mannons
she had returned to the fold and marches stiffly from the room.
Last
Effort to Reach For Life.
Lavinia takes one more desperate effort to reach
from behind her mask of death toward life. She begs her childhood sweetheart
the innocent untempted and unsuspicious peter to marry her. Even as she pleads
with him however she knows that the dead have not forgotten and will not rest
until justice has been performed. She must pay for their lives with her own,
not in the easy expiation of actua death that would be the living death which
is the Mannon fate and which as always is to be accomplished by mannon pride.
She tells peter goodbye, as seth, the gardener, sings the refrain of his
“Shenandoah”.
The
Trap of self Claims Its Pray
When Lavinia “pivots sharply on her heel and
marches woodenly into the house, closing the door behind her”, the tension
between love and pride, life and death is dissolved only pride and death
remain. Violated order has been restored: the trap on self has finally and with
finality claimed its inevitable pray.
Conclusion
The play Mourning Becomes Electra divided in three
part. We see the theme of the play. How O’Neill describe the theme and use the
element of the play.
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