Summary
Act I
It is April 1865; the setting is the Mannon house, a somber, imposing edifice with a temple portico like a mask. A band in the distance plays “John Brown’s Body” and the chanty “Shenandoah” wafts through the air as well. The singer is Seth, a thin, elderly man with a grim face that still possesses elements of ribald humor; he is the Mannon gardener and handyman. His friend Amos Ames, a fat, gossipy figure, and Ames’s wife Louisa and her cousin Minnie, are with him.
Seth is gleeful about the end of the war. Minnie marvels at the house and asks if the family is rich. Seth explains that Ezra’s father Abe built the house after he made his fortune starting one of the first Western Ocean packet liners. Ezra is the well-known general, and his father made him attend West Point; he also studied law and became a judge. He fought in the Mexican American War, went West, was made mayor here, and just rose to be General. The town is very proud of him, Seth boasts.
Louisa interjects coolly that no one cares much for Christine, his wife, since she isn’t Mannon kind –she is of French and Dutch lineage. Seth says they ought not to talk about her, and that he must find Vinnie, their daughter. He tells the others they can look around.
Louisa, Amos, and Minnie hear someone coming and duck out of sight. Christine steps out. She is forty but looks younger, is strikingly and uniquely beautiful and sensuous, and has a face that in repose looks like a mask. Her hair is thick and curly and a copper hue; she has dark eyebrows and a strong mouth. Minnie is in awe of her beauty but Louisa whispers that she has that queer look that all the Mannon women have. She nudges her husband to tell Minnie about the French Canuck nurse Abe Mannon’s brother consorted with, but they hear Seth returning, grumbling about the black cook who asked him to get her wood.
At that moment Lavinia, or Vinnie, steps out. She is twenty-three but looks older, and while she resembles her mother she has none of her beauty. She wears black and pulls her copper hair back tightly. She watches her mother walk toward the greenhouse with a bitter look in her eyes.
Seth steps forward and tells his companions to leave. Lavinia listens to the music in the distance and Seth approaches her and says her father ought to be coming home now that Lee has surrendered.
He looks at her keenly and asks where she was recently. She lies and says she was at Hazel and Peter’s house, but then admits to him she went to New York. He frowns and hesitates a moment, and says he does not want to bother her but has to warn her about Captain Brant. She starts and asks coolly what he means, but Hazel and Peter approach at that moment and Seth says he will return later.
Hazel is pretty and sweet, her demeanor one of innocence. Her brother Peter is plain and stocky but guileless. He wears a Union Army uniform. Lavinia greets them and invites them to sit. Hazel asks Lavinia if she’s heard from her brother Orin, and frets that maybe he met another young woman. Lavinia has not.
After a few minutes, Hazel departs, but she gently teases her brother that he has something to ask Lavinia. Embarrassed, Peter tries to deflect by asking if Orin really loves Hazel. Lavinia bursts out that she doesn’t know anything about love and hates love. Peter is dismayed that she is in this mood, but says that she told him to wait until the war was over. Lavinia sighs that she cannot marry anyone and has to stay at home with Father. She tells him she loves him as a brother.
Peter replies that he will hold out for hope for her, but asks who the mysterious clipper captain Adam Brant is. Angry, Lavinia replies that he is no one and she hates the sight of him. Peter is relieved, and muses that he looks familiar but he cannot place him. He asks who he is, and Lavinia responds that he didn’t say much but has sailed around the world. Bitterly she adds that his “trade” is being romantic.
Christine appears, carrying flowers. There is a bitter tenseness between mother and daughter. Christine greets Peter and he says he will be going. After he departs Christine inquires why her daughter had locked herself in her room. Lavinia replies that she had a headache and had to think over things. Christine asks what things, but then abruptly changes the subject to Seth’s guests.
Lavinia looks fixedly at her mother and asks how Grandfather is, as her mother had told her she was going to New York to see him. Christine avoids her eyes and says he is better. She then looks at her flowers and says this monstrous, whited sepulcher of a house needs brightening. Abe Mannon built this thing as a “temple for his hatred” (237).
Changing the subject once more, Christine calmly mentions that she ran into Captain Brant and he said he’d be stopping by. Lavinia mentions in a rather threatening tone that Father will be coming home soon. Christine warns her about this tone but all Lavinia says is that she will talk to her soon. Christine looks at her with dread and anger, but goes inside.
Lavinia motions to Seth and asks what he knows about Captain Brant. He asks her if Brant looks like someone. Lavinia thinks, and then says her father. She then tries to discount this but realizes it is true. Seth tells her the story of David Mannon, Abe’s brother. He fell in love with the Canuck nurse, Marie Brantome, and when she became pregnant Grandfather ousted them. Brant is about the right age for their son, and his name is even similar to hers. (though he clearly changed it, Seth says, to avoid a run-in with Ezra). Lavinia is anguished at this news but Seth tells her she ought to make sure by catching Brant off-guard and asking him.
They see Brant approaching in the distance and Seth marvels that even his walk is similar to David’s. Seth departs. Brant stands before Lavinia. He is handsome and dark with the same masklike face as the Mannons. He is dressed foppishly and extravagantly.
He tries to charm her but her manner is strange. She talks of her father’s return and he tries to compliment her by saying she looks like her mother. He adds that he knew of only one other woman with hair like theirs –his mother. Lavinia jumps but then retorts that she looks like Father, not Mother. Brant is puzzled at her behavior and tries to remind her of the night they went walking in the moonlight and he kissed her. He laughs that maybe she is jealous of his clipper ship, which he loves so much. In a dry and brittle tone, Lavinia tells him she remembers that part of his tale when he expressed admiration for the naked native women. Brant dreamily recalls the green land and blue water of the South Seas.
Lavinia cuts him short but he confusedly tries to pursue her further. In fury, she orders him not to touch her and calls him a liar. She utters the phrase “Canuck nurse girl” and Brant angrily yells that she cannot insult her. Lavinia is shocked that what she heard is true and Brant spits out that of course it is and he is proud of his blood –just not his Mannon blood, which disgusts him. Lavinia turns to go and he grabs her and calls her a coward who cannot face the truth. He tells her bitterly that Abe Mannon also loved Marie and it was his revenge that made him disown his son David and cheat him out of the business. Lavinia refuses to believe this but Brant continues the story of how David was poor and drunkenly because of what Abe did and how David in his despair beat Marie and Brant had to intervene. He ends by saying grimly that David hanged himself in a barn and it was the only decent thing he ever did. Lavinia is horrified but he persists and tells of how his mother struggled to send him to school and how when he went off on ships he came back to find her dying because she’d asked Ezra for a loan and he would not respond to her. She died in his arms. Brant concludes that Ezra is guilty of murder.
Lavinia defends her father but Brant sneers that he swore revenge over his mother’s body. Lavinia asks if “she” is how he is doing this and Brant is confused. Lavinia icily tells him not to do anything until she returns. He is desperate in his confusion but Lavinia silences him with a look of pure hatred.
Act II
Ezra Mannon’s study, a large, austere room. Portraits of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and Ezra Mannon himself hang on the walls. Ezra appears tall and handsome in an aloof way; he has a masklike expression and Brant looks very similar to him.
Lavinia stares at her father’s portrait. Christine enters and asks, annoyed, why Lavinia disturbed her and why they have to meet in this musty old room. Lavinia simply says it is Father’s room and then tells her mother that she did not visit Hazel and Peter but actually went to New York. She had a suspicion Christine was not visiting Grandfather and observed her actually visiting Brant. Christine tries to lie but Lavinia furiously tells her mother she heard them kissing and professing their love.
Christine finally admits defiantly that she loves Brant and that her relationship with Ezra is nothing. Lavinia is appalled and bitterly asks if Christine always hated Ezra. Christine says not before they married but marriage “turned his romance into—disgust!” (249). Lavinia winces at this, now knowing that she was born of this disgust. Christine shudders that she tried to love Lavinia but could only see her as her honeymoon and wedding night. She was able to love Orin because Ezra went away to Mexico and Orin seemed like he was only hers.
When Christine adds that she hates that Lavinia urged her brother to go to war, Lavinia sternly says it was Orin’s duty as a Mannon. Christine says she wanted the love Adam Brant provided but Lavinia scoffs that he only wants revenge because he is Marie Brantome’s son. Christine starts but says she knew this. Lavinia warns her that she would tell Father but for his health, but that she will not say anything of Christine gives up Brant and is a dutiful wife to her husband.
Christine laughs drily and accuses Lavinia of wanting Brant herself and of wanting to “become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You’ve always schemed to steal my place!” (251.) Lavinia is wild in her rage and demands Christine tell her she will give up Brant and that if Father finds out he will blacklist Brant and he will lose his command and not get another. Father would also come to hate Christine and she would grow ugly and old.
Christine is stung but tells her daughter that she will tell Brant tonight that it is over. She taunts her daughter that she made Brant flirt with her, but Lavinia insists she always saw him for the liar he was. Lavinia spits out that she wrote to Father and Orin to start their suspicion of Brant already. Christine threatens her daughter that she ought to take care.
Lavinia departs and Christine stands there “in tense calculating thought. Her face has become like a sinister evil mask” (253). Brant arrives and Christine tells him what happened. Brant sits and unconsciously resembles Ezra’s portrait. He remembers how he hated Christine and her name at first, but he loves her now. They embrace passionately.
Christine wants to go into another room but then declares she has been afraid of Ezra for long enough. She rues her blunders and wishes Ezra were dead. Brant declares he will tell Ezra but Christine replies that this will not work. Ezra will never divorce her, he will never duel Brant. Christine murmurs how afraid she is that she will grow old, then how she wishes Ezra had been killed in the war so she and Brant could be together now. Brant agrees and says he’d have his clipper ship too.
Slowly Christine looks at him and asks if he has heard about Ezra’s heart problem. He says that he has, and she explains that he takes medicine for it. She writes something on a piece of paper and gives it to Brant to get at the druggist’s. He can mail it to her and she can give it to Ezra, and since everyone already knows he is ill they will not suspect. Brant is initially hostile to this cowardly murder but Christine riles him up with allusions to Marie Brantome’s death. She then taunts him and mentions how Ezra will take her to bed when he comes back. Brant is sufficiently irate and says he will get the poison.
Cannons sound in the harbor to herald Ezra Mannon’s return and Christine and Brant clutch each other. She urges him to leave now and after he is gone, whispers to herself in sinister elation that Brant will never leave her again. She stares into Ezra’s portrait’s eyes and then leaves the room.
Analysis
Mourning Becomes Electra isn’t an easy work or a simple one. It not only draws on a classic Greek tale of betrayal, lust, and murder, but weaves in threads of Freudian theory, history, Puritanism, other Greek tragedies, and more. It is perhaps O’Neill’s greatest work—he called it “a complete upheaval, a total revaluing of all my old values”—and one that has inspired a plethora of critical work and interpretation. O’Neill’s extensive notes for the characters and settings as well as his own preferences about how to approach the work lead readers and critics to treat it almost as more of a novel than as a play (the immense length of the work also adds to that).
O’Neill spent a long time (533 days) developing and writing Mourning. He started with the idea of fate as seen in the traditional Greek tragedy milieu but updated in a modern setting devoid of gods. He also stated a desire to create a “modern psychological drama.” He based his work on Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy but set it during the Civil War in Puritan-infused New England; that setting matters, but he wanted to make sure it was only a mask over the “drama of hidden life forces—fate—behind the lives of the characters.” Indeed, the characters allude, via assonance in their names and/or actual likeness, to Aeschylus’s. Ezra Mannon is Agamemnon, Christine is Clytemnestra, Adam Brant is Aegistheus, Lavinia is Electra, Orin is Orestes, Peter is Pylades, Seth is derived from Electra’s servant, and the gossipy townsfolk are the Greek chorus.
Despite O’Neill’s use of the Oresteia, the parallels are not exact. Ezra is less cruel than Agamemnon and Christine, as critic Stephen Black says, “has no interest in the community her husband has led, but instead wants to escape…Clytemnestra is politically shrewd and has a warrior’s spirit; Christine is a romantic who seeks escape from boredom.” And when O’Neill introduces Orin in Act I of “The Hunted,” it also becomes clear he is not that similar to Orestes. Whereas Orestes is certain of what is right and just and what the gods require of him, Orin is weak, profoundly affected by his wartime experience, and overwhelmed by his sense of alienation from both man and God.
In her discussion of how Mourning diverges from Greek tragedy critic Miriam Shapiro begins by referencing the work of an earlier critic, Walter Prichard Eaton, who stated “O’Neill’s play is not great tragedy because it does not cause us to ‘pity’ the Mannon family as victims of their fate, as we might pity Orestes. Nor does the audience empathize with the characters.” While this certainly somewhat of a value judgment, Eaton is right in that O’Neill was deviating from certain aspects of Greek tragedy –but on purpose. He might depict the individual in conflict with incomprehensible forces, but those forces are not gods or anything actively working in the present. Shapiro writes that O’Neill “locates fate as an element in the family’s past” and ultimately “[transforms] fate from a vague, ill-defined force to an inexorable series of events within the family’s past.” He erases the voices of gods and replaces them with ancestors. Even in these first two acts of the first play, the characters are described as deeply interwoven with one another in terms of their appearances, their behavior, their sexual longings, and more. The Mannon women of Marie, Christine, and Lavinia embody the idea of the sins of the father being passed to the sons (but here, the sins of the mother); this is seen in “genetic similarities…[that] make this point about transmission of wrongdoings, rather than ...agents of fate.” There are no external, malignant supernatural forces; all of the problems the Mannons have are within their own family. When fate manifests itself, such as later in the play when Lavinia seems to resemble her mother to a striking degree, it is “the voice or voices of one’s ancestors who return from the dead,” which is markedly different from classical views of tragedy. Shapiro suggests that the Furies of the Oresteia are now simply the voices, portraits, etc. of family ancestors, hounding their descendants.
Let’s return to the setting of the play, as it is very consequential for the characters’ behavior and that sense of fate. The play is set as the Civil War comes to a close. Even though this would not be classified as a “history” play, O’Neill does an impressive job of getting to the war’s horrors and irreconcilable traumas. Orin is not insane but he does suffer from what we now know as PTSD; Ezra comes home with all manner of desires, dreams, and assumptions accumulated from his time away from his wife. War with its backdrop of death and instability seems to be an ever-present reality for Mannons, given the fact that another served during the Revolutionary War. The fact that the play is set in New England is also significant, for the region’s entrenched Puritanism permeates the play. The Calvinist strain of Puritanism that the Mannons adhere to is fixated on guilt, expiation of sin, and punishment. one’s conscience is almost inescapable regardless of the degree to which a person embraces the faith. Thus, it’s not only the other characters that persecute each other but also the darkness of Puritanism that encourages self-punishment.
The play isn’t set on a battlefield or in a church, however; every scene save one is set in or just outside the Mannon house. O’Neill devotes plenty of words to describing the house. On the exterior there is a “white Grecian temple portico” that "is like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness” (228). In the evening the moonlight falls on it in a way that gives it “an unreal, detached, eerie quality” (260). Ezra’s study is “stiff, austere” (247). The sitting-room is a “bleak room without intimacy, with an atmosphere of uncomfortable, stilted stateliness” (291). Later this room has a “dead appearance” and the furniture a “ghostly look” (341). Except for a brief moment in time when Lavinia thinks she will be able to be happy and thus opens the windows to the house and sets out flowers, it is shuttered, closed-up, and impervious to the outside world. The description of its masklike façade is appropriate given the fact that all the Mannons possess this same feature and, according to Christine, Abe built this house as a temple to his hate. The house certainly isn’t possessed by any sort of external spirit, but it is tainted by the family’s lusts, feuds, and crimes –the family is the house, the house is the family (see a discussion of the family portraits in a later analysis). Ezra, Christine, and Orin cannot free themselves from the house and what it represents; Lavinia is only able to grow as a person when she is away from it, but once she realizes her fate she is absorbed back into it.
O’Neill develops many of the play’s motifs and themes from the very first pages, so before we conclude we will trace what these first two acts in “Homecoming” have to say about the Oedipal and Electra complexes, islands, and portraits. First, it is very clear that all is not right with the familial relationships. Christine despises Lavinia because she reminds her of how much her husband disgusts her but admits she loves Orin passionately. Lavinia seems excessively fond of her father, telling Brant “I love Father better than anyone in the world. There is nothing I wouldn’t do –to protect him from hurt!” (241), and Christine tells her daughter “You’ve tried to become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You’ve schemed to steal my place!” (251). Second, Brant is the first character to mention the Islands that will be powerful symbols throughout the play. He muses dreamily to Lavinia, “Unless you’ve seen it, you can’t picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea!...The Blessed Isles, I’d call them! you can forget there all men’s dirty dreams of greed and power!” (243). He suggests he and Christine decamp there on their honeymoon after Ezra is gone. Third, the portraits loom grimly over the characters in the Mannon study and sitting-room. O’Neill describes them vividly and they seem to have inner lives; they also seem to engage with the characters, or, rather, the characters engage with them. Both Christine and Lavinia talk to the portraits often, strengthening the idea that the family ancestors are the ones who haunt these characters.
