-Anup Joshi
Cycle
of Guilt and Self-Punishment in O’Neil’s Mourning becomes Electra
This paper explores the theme of
guilt and self-punishment in Eugene O’Neil’s very popular revenge tragedy Mourning
becomes Electra first performed in 1931. The play is the modern retelling
of Greek tragedy Oresteia by Aeschylus. Written as a play cycle
constituting three plays, homecoming, the hunted and the haunted, the play also
follows a cyclic motion in its content. As Flink puts it, “Circular stories
follow a “round” pattern. Like the cycle of seasons or the life cycle, circular
stories follow a predictable series of events that returns to the starting
point” (par 1). The generations of Mannon face the same fate in a loop which
keeps repeating itself. Heredity is very much dominating in the Mannon family.
Every last Mannon is bound to suffer. The offspring are doomed to face the same
plight of their ancestors. Lavina shares the guilt of her mother Christine.
Orin recognizes with his father and later shoots himself like his mother did.
There is rivalry between mother-daughter and father-son relationship as Freud
explains in his concept of Oedipal and Electra complex.
Work Cited
Work Cited
Epitome
of Modern life, the Mannon family members are crooked by lust, greed and
selfishness. They are ready to deceive the purest relationship to fulfill their
lust. When they are discovered and truth is about to burst, they commit murder
or go through Masochism and self-punishment in the pretext of family shame. As
Xia puts it, Mourning becomes Electra is “a story of murder and
intrigue, a bloodline of jealousy and terrible deeds, sealed with an enchanted
ditty, like a spirit lurking in the cracks of time, and it’s waiting to be
awakened by the same melody” (par 1). Jealousy, lust and incestuous pull are
the major causes for the damnation of the characters.
The tension unfolds in the play with the homecoming of
Brigadier General Ezra Mannon from the civil war. Though Mannon is a war hero
and deserves to be welcomed with celebration and triumph, he is mischievously poisoned
by his own adulterous wife, Christine for the sake of her lover Brant, in the
very first night of his return. Lavinia who is attracted to her father in
unnatural way, is jealous of her mother from the very beginning and when she
discovers the truth about the death of her beloved father, she is determined to
avenge his death. “I love Father better than anyone in the world. There is
nothing I wouldn’t do-to protect him from hurt!” (14). Lavinia even deserts her
intention of marriage for her father. She is infatuated with her father. As her
mother rightfully holds her father as her husband, Lavinia turns jealous
towards her. She urges to be in-charge. After her father’s murder she
manipulates her brother Orin to destroy her mother. Orin, sick of Oedipal
complex, on the other hand is infatuated with his mother. But once he discovers
that Christine is playing with him and her true intention is to achieve Brant,
he goes mad with outrage and murders Brant. With all of the Mannons dead, at the end of
the play Lavinia becomes an alienated figure and orders her house to be nailed
so that she will be alone with her guilt.
The chain of guilt becomes apparent in the Mannon family
with Ezra and Christine. At the time of marriage, both were in deep love. But
as Lavinia and Orin are born, tension builds up between them. As Christine
recalls, “I loved him once—before I married him—incredible as that seems now!
He was handsome in his lieutenant’s uniform! He was silent and mysterious and
romantic! But marriage soon turned romance into—disgust!” (19). This disgust as
Christine blames is Lavinia. She always hated her daughter. On the contrary,
Ezra found Christine’s affection for Orin envious. So, he stayed out of home
for most of the time. In the night of his homecoming he confesses the guilt and
suffering in his heart with his wife. “When I was back you had turned to your
new baby, Orin, I was hardly alive for you anymore. I saw that. I tried not to
hate Orin. I turned to Vinnie, but a daughter’s not a wife” (33). It looks like
the Mother-son and Father-daughter bonding destroyed their marriage. Due to
this incestuous hangover, the guilt is accumulated in the family over time.
When we trace the family history, we can trace this chain of guilt to a long
period of time. Brant is also a product of Mannon’s family guilt. He is to
avenge Ezra and rest of the Mannons. As an illegitimate Mannon, he proclaims
“My only shame is my dirty Mannon blood!” (15). His grandfather and uncle Ezra
threw his father from home because of marriage to his mother Marie Brantome
whom both the men physically desired. With the guilt to be an illegitimate one,
he is successful in stealing Ezra’s wife, a woman he imagines in his mother’s
image and seduces Lavinia to conceal their affair.
Furthermore,
Orin writes Mannon family tree and witnesses this guilt residing in the family
lives from many generations. “A true history of all the family crimes,
beginning with Grandfather Abe’s—all of the crimes, including ours” (88). The
guilt of lust, incest and desire seems to be prevailing in the family for a
long chain. Orin and Lavinia are just on the line of continuum. Orin thus
attempts to dig the history “to foretell what fate is in store” (88) for him
and his sister.
Christine shoots
herself after her son murders Brant for her adulterous affair with him. As
Brant is also from the Mannon line, their affair is incestuous. Their love is
not the real love but the union to avenge the common enemy Ezra Mannon. With
Brant’s death, and Orin discovering all about her adultery, Christine is
doomed. She has lost her husband, lover and even son. As by that time Orin
hates and despises her, she has no recluse. She might be arrested by police or
be ashamed in the society as the adulterous and murderer woman. With no option
left, she undergoes through self-punishment and kills herself for all the crime
she has committed.
After the death of Ezra and Christine, Lavinia and Orin
live like an incestuous couple. The pattern of their relationship is similar to
that of their parents. Orin now identifies himself with his father and Lavinia
who despised her mother so much, now adopts the same role of her mother. Orin
distances himself from Christine and says, “What is she to me? I am not her son
anymore. I’m father’s! I am a Mannon!” (80). Moreover, he becomes totally
infatuated with her sister Lavinia. He cannot distance himself away from her.
On the other hand, alike mother despises father, Lavinia starts to be weary
from Orin. She urges to become a carefree woman and plans marriage with Peter.
Her closeness with Peter is a threat to Orin. He cannot let her go. Outraged he
threatens her, “You are scheming now to leave me and marry Peter! But by God,
you won’t! You’ll damn soon stop your tricks when you know what I’ve been
writing! ... I warn you I won’t stand your leaving me for Peter” (87, 90). Orin
is filled with guilt conscience. He finds himself responsible for the suicide
of his mother. And he cannot be separated from Lavinia. He concludes that he is
dammed with his sister. “Don’t cry. The dammed don’t cry” (90). Like his
father, he also becomes maddened by the idea of death and keeps taking about
death prior to his suicide. Lavinia wants to get rid of Orin for the sake of
Peter. Like her mother poisoned her father to death, she also encourages Orin
to commit suicide so that she will be left alone with Peter and she would get a
carefree life. She pushes him, “I hate you! I wish you were dead! You’re too
vile to live! You’d kill yourself if you weren’t a coward!” (95). Lavinia is
totally responsible for the suicide of Orin. In the two generation we witness
in the play, we can see same things repeating parallelly in the Mannon family.
The plot of the play is thus not linear and moves to nowhere ahead. It is
cyclic and same cycle of guilt, murder and suicide recur time and again.
As Billington puts it, Orin among all the Mannons is
“flakily neurotic” (par 2). He keeps talking about the guilt before he himself
commits suicide. Unlike Lavinia, who urges to start a fresh life ahead, he
cannot tackle with public sphere and loiters around his own private sphere.
First his love towards his mother and now towards his sister has made himself
feel guilty. So, he says to Lavinia, “I love you now with all the guilt in
me—the guilt we share! Perhaps I love you too much Vinnie” (95). He is haunted
by the guilt of Brant’s murder and forcing his mother to commit suicide. He
feels guilty that he begins to see Lavinia not as a sister or mother, but “some
stranger with a beautiful hair”. All the guilts are accumulated in his mind and
is about to burst. He wants to confess his guilt through letter to Hazel but
his sister restricts him to do so. He becomes a very oppressed person, guilt
running through his veins all the time. As a result, he seeks a way out for the
self-punishment. He gets the pistol which his mother used to shoot herself and
departs from the world. But Lavinia refuses to share his guilt at that moment.
She lets her brother kill himself alone.
Lavinia turns out to be the most stubborn of all the
characters in the play. She does not give up so easily. She does everything in
her power to protect the guilt and crime Mannon family name holds. She attempts
to start anew and determines to marry Peter, not because she loves him, but as
she sees him as her liberator from the Mannon’s guilt. She tries to move
forward. She wants to forget the dead and her past. But with Orin’s inability
to move ahead, she too becomes crippled. Its like she is in the cobweb of
psychological fate, destined to suffer at any cost. She screams to herself,
“The dead! Why can’t the dead die!” (99). She transforms herself and tries to escape
from the past but past keeps haunting her. At the last act of the play, when
Peter pushes her to reveal the truth, she is finally forced to embrace her
guilt. She cannot hold the deranged past for so long and confesses, “Orin
Suspected I’d lusted with him! And I had!” (101). Before her confession, she
called the death of Brant and Christine as “justice” and aggrandized it. It was
her way of coping with life and moving ahead. Once she herself accepted her
guilt deep from her heart her feet turned lame and she stumbled. After the
incestuous curtain is pulled, alike all the Mannons, she too goes for the
self-punishment. But the masochism she inflicts upon herself is most dreadful
among all.
“I’m
not going the way mother and Orin went. That’s escaping punishment. And there
is no one left to punish me. I’m the last Mannon. I’ve got to punish myself!
Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison!
I’ll never go out or see anyone! I will have the shutters nailed closed so no
sunlight can ever get in. I’ll live alone with the dead and keep their secrets
and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let
die!” (102).
To
conclude, O’Neil’s play uses the classical template to explore the modern life
of the modern people in late 19th century. Modernists writers and
thinkers incline towards cyclic plot rather than chronological one. Modern
people are driven by lust, desire, greed, warfare and envy. And these
characteristics are bound to repeat in every generation. There is no way
escaping this fate. In the play, civil war is responsible to break the Mannons’
psyche and drive them crazy. The play is very similar to the W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory
which also tells a family saga of decline and fall. The cycle of guilt and
punishment are recurring in a loop. There is no end to it. Yeats’ protagonist,
the old man moves ahead and stabs his son to break the cycle of crime but still
his mother resides on purgatory and there is no escaping to it. Similarly,
O’Neil’s characters are also dammed with the cycle of guilt and
self-punishment. The plot structure is in a way linear in structure as Rush
calls “to describe the events in the order in which they happened” (37) linear
arrangement of plot. The plot moves with time but using flashbacks to talk
about the Brant’s origin and Orin’s tour to the island with Lavinia makes the
plot complex. The content of the play is very circular. The playwright even
loops around the setting of the play from interior and exterior part of the
Mannon’s house to give circularity. The characters out of their oedipal and
electra complexes, indulge themselves in a guilty act. When their sinister acts
reach to the apex, they finally accept their guilt and punish themselves as a
way of balancing. Lavinia will have to be haunted by the dead and the past up to
eternity. She could not escape this terrible fate. She turns the house as a
prison and nails herself inside.
Billington, Michael. “Mourning
Becomes Electra”. The Guardian. 18 Nov. 2017. Web.
<https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/nov/29/theatre>
Flink, Lisa Storm. “Unwinding
A Circular Plot: Prediction Strategies in Reading and
Writing”.
Read Write Think. 18 Nov. 2017. Web.
<http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/unwinding-
circular-plot-prediction-292.html>
O’Neil, Eugene. “Mourning
Becomes Electra”. Project Guttenberg Australia. 18 Nov.2017.
Ebook.
<http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400141h.html>
Rush, David. A student
Guide to Play Analysis. New York: Library of Congress, 2005. Print.
Xia, Ran. “Mourning
Becomes Electra”. Theatre is Easy. 18 Nov. 2017. Web.
<
http://www.theasy.com/Reviews/2017/M/mourningbecomeselectra.php>
Yeats, W.B.
"Purgatory." Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama. Ed. John p.
Harrington.
Second
ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. 29-35. Print.
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