Summary
Act III
Evening. The Mannon house is closed and gloomy. Lavinia sits on the portico steps like a statue and Seth can be heard singing in the distance. Lavinia disapproves of his drunkenness but he is mourning Lincoln’s assassination. Lavinia asks what Marie was like and Seth tells her she was full of life and always sang and laughed. He adds that even Ezra as a boy was crazy about her until he found out she was David’s woman. Lavinia thinks this is all strange.
Christine steps out into the moonlight; the resemblance between mother and daughter is striking. Christine teases her daughter that “Puritan maidens shouldn’t peer too inquisitively into Spring” (262) and that she ought to focus on Peter. Lavinia accuses her mother of plotting something. Christine demurs and mocks Lavinia for waiting for Ezra this evening as if he is her beau.
Ezra begins to walk up the driveway. He is tall with wooden movements, a masklike face, and a deep and hollow voice. Lavinia rushes forward and, crying, kisses him. Ezra walks stiffly to Christine and says she looks prettier than ever. Christine forces lightness and invites him in. Lavinia hovers and coddles him and though embarrassed, he is pleased.
Ezra tells them Orin was wounded but he will be fine; he was wounded in the head and now has brain fever from the shock but is alive. He did seem to be acting like a little boy again, though, calling for his mother.
Lavinia asks her father how his heart is and he gruffly says he is fine and does not want to talk about death anymore. He looks seriously at Christine and says he is ready for sleep but not quite yet. Flustered, Lavinia tries to pull him over to talk. She mentions that they have a lot to tell about Captain Brant.
Christine does not flinch and Mannon asks who he is. Christine smiles that he is Lavinia’s beau but Lavinia laughs that Mother was flirting with him too. Mannon becomes angry and Christine tells Lavinia she has done enough mischief. Mannon is annoyed with their squabbling.
Lavinia kisses him and tells him he is the only man she will ever love. He kisses her gruffly and tenderly and sends her off.
Mannon looks at Christine and she tells him how she met Brant at Grandfather’s and the only talk is that he wants to court Vinnie. Christine likes him because he brings news of Father. Mannon softens and regrets his unjustness. He begins to talk to her about how he missed her and her strange, beautiful hair. She shrinks in repulsion but then forces herself to be friendlier.
Mannon sighs that he was jealous and isn’t used to being home yet. It has always been hard for him to talk about feelings and her eyes are always so full of silence. He has seen so much death and now he thinks of life. All the Mannons always think of death; they even did it on the Sabbath. Ezra comments that he has seen so many blood-splattered white walls and now the white meetinghouse seems useless.
Christine looks at him strangely and asks what sort of talk this is for her. He speaks about lying awake at night and thinking of why there is a barrier between them. She must know it is there. She has never loved him and perhaps she wanted him killed. He always tried not to hate Orin and turned to Vinnie but he still wanted Christine’s love more than anyone else. He came home to surrender to her and to love her.
Christine is distracted and tries to make him stop but he continues, saying he has never been good at sharing his feelings and just wants to pull down the wall between them. He suggests going on a voyage. Christine wildly orders him to stop talking, which wounds him greatly. He becomes mechanical and she tries to correct herself. She says she loves him and he grabs her and says he’d give his soul to believe that.
They kiss passionately and Lavinia steps out and sees them. She shrinks in aversion. Christine tells her they are going to bed and they go inside. Lavinia stares up at their window and rages that her mother has stolen her father’s love and that she is a shameless harlot. She starts yelling Ezra’s name and he exasperatedly asks what she wants. She falters and says goodnight.
Act IV
Ezra Mannon’s dark bedroom. Christine steals silently out of bed but Ezra is awake too. He says he wants to talk and assumes she wants it to remain dark so she doesn’t have to see his face. He then apologizes for his bitterness and says he feels strange. He admits he feels like he is waiting for something to happen. It seems like this isn’t really his house and she isn’t his wife and she is waiting for something too.
Christine orders him to stop these suspicions and that he treats her like property. He scoffs that bodies mean nothing to him now that he’s seen so many rotting in the sun. He accuses her of lying to him tonight as she always did and making him feel lie a lustful beast; he might as well have gone to a brothel. He laughs harshly.
Christine retorts that it’s been too many years and she has never been his. He made her feel disgust for him. Ezra’s temper flares and he tries to quell it. Christine barrels forward with the truth and Ezra tries to stop her. She bursts out with the truth about Captain Brant and how he is her lover and Marie Brantome’s son. Mannon, frenzied with rage, struggles toward her. His heart begins to pain him and he begs Christine for his medicine.
Christine rushes out to grab the poison Brant gave her. Ezra takes it and notices it isn’t his, but it is too late. He begins to scream for Vinnie and Christine tries to hide the box. Lavinia appears, dazed and scared. She rushes over to her father, who looks faint. Ezra manages to point and stammer at Christine—“she’s guilty—not medicine!” (277). He collapses.
Lavinia is horrified and Christine admits she told him Brant was her lover. Lavinia cries that she murdered him but the asks what his last words meant. Christine is acting strange and sways weakly. She faints and the box tumbles out of her hand.
Lavinia checks her mother’s pulse and, seeing that she is alive, declares that she will find a way to punish her. She then sees the box and certainty and horror flood her face. She kneels by her father and sobs for him.
Analysis
In the second two acts of “Homecoming” Ezra, the Agamemnon figure of the Oresteia, returns home, and is subsequently murdered by Christine. There are many things that factor into Christine’s hatred of her husband. First, she insinuates that their sexual relationship is problematic, to say the least. The wedding night for her was disgusting, and as for Ezra, he was frustrated that she “made me appear a lustful beast in my own eyes!...I would feel cleaner if I had gone to a brothel! I would feel more honor between myself and life!” (275.) Second, Christine is simply not a Mannon. Not only does she look different –foreign and queer, as the townsfolk say –but she views herself quite distinct from them. Their crimes and obsessions and twisted religious fixations on guilt and sin repel her, though she ends up joining them in such crimes. Third, Christine has fallen in love with another man whom she is sexually attracted to, and Ezra threatens that. And fourth, Ezra’s association with her hated daughter, Lavinia, and his sending of her beloved son off to fight in the war exacerbate her resentment.
Critic Lisa Miller locates her Christine’s animus for Ezra in those “feelings of anger and resentment at the loss of Orin.” She forgets her duty as a wife because she is bereft of her child whom she loves (too) intensely. She begins an affair with Brant, whom she tells flat-out reminds her of Orin, not Ezra. The loss of Orin to war created a “profound psychic wound [that] initiates her desire for an equally ignominious end for her husband.” Mannon is like Agamemnon in that he “substitutes the glory of war for the sanctity of the family. When he abruptly severs the abnormally close bond between mother and son, Christine no longer feels her obligation to her unloved husband in his role as patriarch.”
Lavinia’s complex, Electra-esque feelings for her father manifest themselves most potently in these two acts. She tells her mother “I’m not marrying anyone. I’ve got my duty to Father” (262). She welcomes him home with effusive displays of emotion and near-suffocating coddling. She is visibly uncomfortable that he wants to be intimate with Christine, hovering over him and trying to distract him with food. She tries to besmirch her mother by bringing up Adam Brant. She “[watches] him jealously” (265), and when he finally sends her off, she bursts out, “You’re the only man I’ll ever love! I’m going to stay with you!” (266). She stares fixedly at her parents’ bedroom window, knowing that they are going to have sex, and in an extremely anguished tone, cries, “I hate you! You steal even Father’s love from me again! You stole all love from me when I was born!...Father, how can you love that shameless harlot?” (271).
Ezra’s portrait acts as a stand-in for the man himself both before his homecoming and after his death. O’Neill initially describes Ezra’s face as “handsome in a stern, aloof fashion. It is cold and emotionless and has the same strange semblance of a life-like mask” (247). After she accuses her mother of adultery with Brant, Lavinia stares fixedly at the portrait and “goes to it and puts her hand over one of [Ezra’s] hands with a loving, protective gesture” (247). When Christine tries to get her daughter to understand what it is like to be married to a man she does not love, Lavinia screams that she cannot say such things in front of “him” –meaning the portrait. Christine also talks to the portrait when she and Brant collude on killing Brant, saying, “No! I’ve been afraid of you long enough!” (255). After Brant leaves and she is alone in the room, she seems to feel a sense of Ezra’s presence and has a “little shudder she cannot repress” (259). Later in the play when Lavinia and Orin return from their journey, all of the portraits seem alive: “in the flickering candlelight the eyes of the Mannon portraits stare with a grim forbiddingness” (341).
Critic Miriam Chirico explains how O’Neill uses these portraits as additional characters and how they seem to exercise power over the main characters. Portraits “possess the ability to keep the dead among the living,” a statement that is borne out in how the characters modulate their behavior due to the presence of the portraits. O’Neill clearly “intended for the onstage portraits of the Mannons to incriminate and judge the living family members. Audiences clearly must ‘read’ the portraits as the stand-ins for the actual living characters.” Thus, he is able to solidify his assertion that it is the family ancestors, not nebulous external forces, which constitute the family fate.
