Summary
Act III
Ezra’s body, grim and austere in death, lies in his study. Orin stands stiffly like a sentinel over it. He talks to his father’s body, cursing Vinnie and death and wryly saying he and his father can be friends now that the latter is dead.
Lavinia enters and Orin chastises her and everyone else for taking death so seriously when it is really a joke. She tells him how proud Father was of him but he scoffs and tells of the Rebels he killed during the war. A few were so similar it felt like he was simply killing the same man over and over again. All of their faces keep returning to him in dreams.
Lavinia hastily urges him to stop thinking about it but Orin retorts that the war is inside him. Everything is a joke, he adds, and recounts how he realized this during the war and stood up and started to walk to enemy lines, laughing and holding his hand out. This is when they fired on him and he got his head wound, which should have been disgraceful but Father pretended he was a hero.
Lavinia tries to soothe him but Orin sprawls out in the chair, resentfully asking how she could have said those things about Mother. Lavinia begs him to remember that she’s never lied to him and tells him of the medicine used to kill Father. Orin is doubtful and angry, but Lavinia swears on their dead father that she is telling the truth. Orin is persuaded and demands she leave Father out of it and that she must be insane.
Lavinia spits that Orin is a spoiled baby and that Christine was right to say Orin wouldn't care even if Christine had murdered her husband because Orin hated him so much. Chastened, Orin says that is not true. Lavinia replies that he is a coward to let Christine escape and Christine is a low woman for caring about her lover. Orin cannot bear this talk. Lavinia continues about Christine’s visits to New York and that Orin has to believe her. She asks for a chance to prove it.
Orin is anguished and bursts out that he will kill Brant if it’s true but it is only Lavinia’s word against Mother’s. He agrees, though, to go with Lavinia and follow Christine to New York.
Christine pounds on the locked door of the study, panicked that Orin is in there. Lavinia whispers to put the medicine box on Ezra’s chest and watch Christine’s reaction.
Christine bursts in and Orin coolly asks why she is afraid. She stammers that Lavinia is crazy and must be plotting to go to the police with her lies. She looks at the corpse and defiantly declares that Ezra is the same in death as he was in living. Suddenly her eyes flick to the box and she twitches with a stifled scream.
Orin laughs savagely that he was stupid to think this homecoming would be a refuge from his island of peace. He stumbles from the room. Lavinia grabs the box and tells her mother she knows Brant got her the medicine. She leaves.
Christine looks at Ezra and implores his dead body not to let them hurt Adam. She sees something in the body and rushes out in terror.
Act IV
The deck of a clipper ship moored alongside a wharf at Boston Harbor, two days after Ezra Mannon's funeral. A Chantyman sings “Shenandoah” as he and a crew come in. This wakes the Chantyman, snoring drunkenly in the shadows of a warehouse on the wharf. The Chantyman is scraggly and unkempt but has a “romantic…queer troubadour-of-the-sea quality about him” (311). He praises the sounds of the song and begins to sing himself.
After a moment he stops, knowing he is not doing the song justice. He scrounges for a coin to buy a drink but realizes another man stole it. He sways in his inebriation.
Adam Brant steps out of the poopdeck door, dressed in a captain’s uniform. His face wears a suspicious and wary expression. He looks around tensely and nervously.
The Chantyman stumbles and falls and the noise causes Brant to whip out his revolver and ask who is there. The Chantyman tells him to relax and to stop threatening the life of an honest Chantyman.
Brant calms down and says he is missing his watchman. The Chantyman irritably talks about being robbed and Brant tells him to stop complaining. The Chantyman hears his authoritative tone and agrees, then asks him if he needs his services. He brags of his abilities but Brant explains he will not be leaving for some time. The Chantyman muses on Ezra’s death and how the dried-up old man must have left a pile of money.
Uncomfortable, Brant asks why he isn’t in a saloon, singing for money. The Chantyman sighs that he was robbed. Brant tosses him down a coin. He is pleased and praises the ship and begins to sing a dirge. Brant immediately orders him to stop and move on. The Chantyman obeys but keeps singing as he goes.
Alone, Brant mumbles to himself that he has a foreboding that he will never sail this ship again. Suddenly he hears something and Christine appears. She is frightened and embraces him. He asks what is wrong and she stammers that Vinnie knows. He is shocked and asks how she got away and where Vinnie is.
Christine replies that Vinnie and Orin went to visit cousins and she snuck away here. He brings her down into the cabin.
Orin and Lavinia appear, stealthily moving along the deck. She is grim and he is full of savage rage. They listen to the happenings in the cabin below.
Down in the cabin, Christine is telling Brant everything that happened. She admits that she fainted before she could hide the box of poison; she could not help it because Ezra was torturing her. Brant sinks down gloomily and says he should have fought Ezra but he has a coward’s rotten blood in him. Christine reiterates how afraid she is and how they should leave. Brant replies that this would cause suspicion but Christine believes Lavinia and Orin would have to lie for their own sakes. Brant dejectedly agrees that it is the only way; they can get passage on the Atlantis heading for China on Friday. He will have to leave his own ship, The Flying Trades, behind. Christine knows how hard this is for him but he reassures her she is worth it.
Christine trembles and says she will make herself beautiful again for him. He gruffly tells her to cease this sort of talk and says he is fine –the sea hates a coward anyway. He wonders if they could go to the Blessed Isles where there will be peace and forgetfulness. She agrees fervently.
Christine prepares to leave and warns him about Orin. She states suddenly that she fears she will never see Brant again and sobs hysterically. He comforts her.
As they step out into the deck Lavinia has to restrain Orin from jumping out at them. Christine leaves. Lavinia tells Orin bitterly he has his proof but has to wait and stick to their plan so no one knows it is them. Orin bemoans his mother’s reference to the island. He becomes grim, though, and tells his sister he knows what to do.
Brant stands in the doorway, sadly saying goodbye to his ship. Orin steps up to him and fires twice. Brant slumps to the ground. Lavinia approaches and tells her brother to do as they said and smash up the stateroom so it looks like he was robbed. Orin does so.
Lavinia stands over the body and asks how he could have loved her vile mother. She stares at him coldly and says she hopes he finds forgiveness for his sins. Orin returns and harshly says he will rest in hell.
The siblings finish their machinations, emptying Brant’s pockets. They look on the body once more. Orin remarks that it is like he is killing Brant again and again, just like his dream. He adds dreamily that he would have behaved just as Brant did. Lavinia grabs him and hisses for him to stop acting crazy. Orin looks one last time and comments that it is like a “rotten dirty joke on someone” (322).
Act V
Christine paces on the drive before the portico. It is a dark evening and she appears tense. Hazel appears and Christine thanks her for responding to her note. She says she is very sad and nervous. She continues to speak of how ugly she is and how Ezra is gone, and Hazel urges her to sleep. Her response is that it is only in the earth that one sleeps.
After a moment Christine says Orin and Vinnie ought to be back by now and she is too frightened to stay in the house alone. Hazel volunteers to stay and Christine is immensely grateful. Hazel has to run home to tell her mother and Christine urges her to be quick.
Christine watches as Hazel leaves but then sees her encounter people by the gate. She is seized by a panic. Orin and Lavinia approach, Lavinia stiff and Orin filled with morbid excitement.
Orin tells her they did not go to the Bradfords’ but instead went to Boston and followed her. Christine tries to interject but Orin tells her viciously to stop lying. He relishes telling her that he killed Brant just like she killed Father. Christine cries out in terror.
Orin hands her a newspaper that has a few lines about the murder, explaining it was robbers. He is gleeful. Christine sinks down, wringing her hands in anguish. Orin is agitated by her behavior and tells her to stop fretting over that evil man. Brant hypnotized her to seek revenge and she needs to break from his influence. Orin keels before her and says she will forget Brant and they will be happy again. Even when Lavinia sharply admonishes him he leans into his mother and begs her to answer him and forgive him. She remains shocked and silent.
Lavinia scornfully orders him into the house. He gets up mechanically and goes inside, commenting that the shutters must be open now that Father is home. Lavinia looks at her mother, whose face is a stony death mask. Lavinia says sternly that it was justice.
This wakens Christine to her despair. Lavinia cries out that she can live and Christine bursts into mocking laughter. She makes a gesture to blot her daughter out and rushes into the house. Lavinia considers following but does not. The strains of “Shenandoah” sound in the distance.
Suddenly a shot rings out. Lavinia stammers that it is justice and Orin can be heard yelling. He rushes out and says that Mother shot herself and he should never have driven her to it. He screams that he murdered her. Lavinia grabs him and shushes him. He cannot stop sobbing and she tries to comfort him.
Seth approaches, having heard the shot. Lavinia firmly orders him to Dr. Blake’s, saying he must convey that Christine shot herself due to Ezra’s death. Slowly and grimly, Seth agrees.
Analysis
The act set on the Flying Trades is the only not set at the Mannon house; it also falls roughly in the middle of the text. Indeed, O’Neill called it “the center of the whole work.” Here he introduces the curious figure of the Chantyman, an unkempt, elderly poet whose dirge prophesies Brant’s imminent death. Just like Walt Whitman’s famed poem “O Captain! My Captain!” in which Abraham Lincoln metaphorically sprawls out dead on the ship’s deck right as it—the Civil War—arrives in port, Brant will also die on a ship right as he is about to achieve freedom.
Critic Jesse Weiner has a fascinating analysis of the role of the Chantyman set in within his article on how Mourning borrows a great deal from Virgil’s Aeneid, not just Aeschylus’s Oresteia. He begins by noting the centrality of this act and the fact that there is no corresponding character in Aeschylus’s work. The Chantyman is pure fiction, and while he might seem irrelevant, he’s actually quite significant. He provides comic relief, his two songs foreshadow the tragedy to come, and, most significantly, he “can be read as a version of Charon, classical mythology’s ferryman of the underworld.”
First, like Seth, the only other character with whim the Chantyman has anything in common, he is non-aristocratic, sings, and has a choric function. Shanties themselves with their call-and-response form and their improvisational nature recall the Homeric bard tradition. “Shenandoah,” which both Seth and the Chantyman sing, “works as a symbol of death and contributes to the drama’s motif of fate” due to its placement before characters’ deaths. The shanty and its singers “signal the imminent fall of the house of Mannon. The socially leveling element to the fatalism represented by these two working-class characters is certainly reminiscent of classical epic, which presents death as the great and inevitable social leveler.”
In regards to Charon, the parallels are quite clear. Brant tosses the Chantyman a silver coin; this is a universally-recognized icon in Greco-Roman literature. Charon’s obol manifests in Brant’s coin, and his action “powerfully dramatizes this dread icon, foreshadowing his own impending demise.” The Chantyman is also in and out of the shadows, “[occupying] a liminal space between light and dark, life and death.” Finally, “Chantyman” even sounds like “Charon,” which is no doubt not a coincidence given O’Neill’s explicit modeling of his characters’ names on those on whom they are based.
Unsurprisingly in these acts, the Islands are back—here evoked as a refuge for Christine and Brant away from the Mannon curse. Critics for O’Neill’s official website suggest “the image of the Blessed is derived, in all probability, from the scene of the second book of [Friedrich Nietzsche’s] Thus Spoke Zarathustra…the islands, like the sea, like the longed-for mother, are all one, and, in them, man can sink into rapture and forgetfulness…the symbol of the Islands means…hope.” Brant’s hope that he and Christine can travel there is permeated with a subtle sense of mourning and foreboding, as if he knows it is a pipe dream: “I can see them now—so close—and so far away!...Aye! There’s peace, and forgetfulness for us there—if we can ever find those islands now!” (319). Christine picks up on this and tells him she senses she will never see him again, which is, of course, true. Ultimately, as O’Neill will detail in the final play of Mourning, “the dream of the Blessed Isles is a sham…[they] are only a refuge from new and more urgent compulsion: to atone for guilt;” they result in no lasting changes or redemption for Lavinia or Orin, the only two characters who actually make it there.
Before concluding, the reader should note the continuing obsessiveness of Orin for Christine -to the extent that after he kills Brant he begins to feel sorry for his mother when he sees the magnitude of her distress—as well as the continuing theme of Puritan punishment in Christine's suicide; the horrors of the Civil War as recounted by Orin's realization that it is a joke; and the addition of Ezra to the family ancestors via his physical, deceased body as well as his portrait.
