The Family;
Mourning Becomes Electra is a family drama. And this is one seriously twisted family, locked in repetitive and compulsive (psychology) patterns that bring down everyone named Mannon and some people who aren't.
O'Neill presents the family as doomed (fate) to repeat the relationship that started the cycle of deception (act of deceiving ;fraud) and revenge.
They all are unfaithful in their relationships. He seems to suggest that certain character traits run in families, and that some patterns are just inescapable.
All families have conflicts (clash), of course; just think back on your own past 24 hours. But chances are they won't have involved murder, suicide, or incest (electral love oedipal love).These Mannons have it all. Even the Civil War, which provides the historical backdrop for the story, was a sad family affair. Brothers fought and killed brothers, families were divided. The war mirrors the horrible events taking place on a smaller scale in that dysfunctional family.
O’Neil shows the family who has electra complex in which daughter has a lustful desire for her father ,and Oedipus complex in which a son has lustful desire for his mother..
Lawrance A Johnson says about this play that;
“Mourning becomes electra is a tale of ancient hatrads ,illegitimacy(unlawful), revenge, family, secrets and murder.”
Lies and Deceite(cheating);
O'Neill makes it clear that the most dangerous kind of lying is lying to yourself. It leaves you wide open to a world of misery (a cause of distress).O’Neil says;
“To harden oneself is to die a little”
And
“To usurps, the emotions is self-annihilation(elimination), it substitutes death in life”
In a play full of characters described as "statues" or compared to breathing imitations of portraits, there's no character that tears things up, turns things over, and transforms herself like Lavinia Mannon.
“I can’t marry you Peter you must not see me again marry someone else.”
Sex and Lust;
One another theme he used The "original sin" in this trilogy is one of lust: David Mannon's illicit(unlawful) affair with the family's French Canadian nurse. This affair haunts the Mannon family and sets in motion all the revenge and murder that follows.
Conflict about sexual desire is what destroys Ezra and Christine's marriage and leads them to seek comfort in really inappropriate attachments to their children. There's constant friction in the trilogy between sexual repression and sexual longing. Reading these plays as someone not born in the 1800s, you might wonder what the big deal is. Is adultery a capital offense? Is it really shocking to be a sensual person?
“There is no disease so destructive as lust”
O'Neill's giving us a peek into a society where sex is best kept under wraps, where being a sexy person gets you labeled as strange or foreign. The result of all this repression is an explosion of twisted sexuality, in the form of incestuous feelings which ultimately destroy the Mannon family.
“Love is a rose and lust is thorn”
In fact, most of the sex (or sexual desire) in these plays are between parents and children, and between siblings or people who represent parents and children.
The Death:
Cashing in. Taking a dirt nap. Pushing up Daisies. We've got hundreds of different names for it, but they all mean the same thing: death. Death hangs over Mourning Becomes Electra like a black curtain. It's everywhere—the title's about mourning, the characters are emotionally dead, the house is a tomb, the shadow of the war haunts the male characters, there are two murders, and suicide seems to be the coping strategy. In Mourning Becomes Electra, death is never simply an escape or release from suffering. It's also used as punishment in one way or another. for example Ezra says;
“Life had only made me think of death….”
Death seems to be chasing everybody in the Mannon family, and it catches up to all of them one way or another.
“Life was dying, being born was starting to die.”
O'Neill seems to suggest throughout the play that a living death, tortured by guilt or with no human feeling or connection, can be worse than the real thing.
“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death”
“Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.”
In Mourning Becomes Electra, no major character is innocent. They're all guilty of something, whether or not it's something that's specifically against the law.
Justice and Judgement;
In The Oresteia of Aeschylus, there's no question that Orestes and Electra murder mommy dearest and her latest squeeze out of a sincere belief that knocking them off is the only way to make sure that justice is served. When it comes to O'Neill's versions of the famously fatal pair, Orin and Lavinia Mannon, things are a little less clear-cut. Is Lavinia just being bitter—jealous of her mother for doing so much to take her father's love from her for all those years and then getting busy with Adam Brant on top of all that? Does Orin really ever buy Lavinia's talk about justice being served and wrongs being righted? O'Neill said that one of his reasons for focusing his play on Lavinia rather than Orin was that he didn't think that Electra ever suffered any consequences in The Oresteia for her role in murdering her mother. He was interested in playing out the punishment for Lavinia, rather than just letting her end up happily married to Peter. What's important to know about the justice being served in this trilogy is that the characters punish themselves. They might seem to get away with murder, but they're sunk in guilt that eventually does them in.
“Punishment is justice for the unjust”
Society and Class;
Pop culture these days seems all about encouraging our fascination with the rich and famous. People Magazine, entire television channels that are like the CNN of celebrity gossip, movies about people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg—we've got tons of options when it comes to spying into the lives of the well-off. In Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill is playing with all of that. We're given an all-access pass to what goes on in the lives of these kinds of folks, and you've got to admit that the Mannons are like a reality TV show from hell. O'Neill drops hints that high social status really doesn't make life any better. In fact, it's the working- and middle-class folks who seem to have more freedom and happiness. They don't have that fancy Mannon name to uphold.
“If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence.”
Fatalism;
Since O'Neill's trilogy is based on a Greek tragedy, with all its kings and curses, we know that all the major characters are going to wind up dead; all we're waiting for is to find out how. Fate stalks the Mannons and shoves them along towards their inevitable end. The Greeks believed that Fate determines our lives; they even had a goddess called Tyche, who controlled the fortunes of men according to her whim. Today, most of us want to believe that we can affect our own destinies by the choices we make and how we manage our lives—study hard, get into Yale, etc--even if we believe that a higher power has a hand in it somehow. One of O'Neill's challenges was to adapt the Oresteia, with its obsession about Fate (with a capital F), for an audience who didn't really believe in fate.
“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
So O'Neill transferred the responsibility for Mannon family's fate from gods to people; what locks his characters into their inescapable doom is psychological, not supernatural. O'Neill was very clear that this was his intent. He wrote in his diary that;
"it must, before everything, remain [a] modern psychological play—fate springing out of the family."
The Mannons just can't stop acting out their twisted sexual dynamic with each other, generation after generation. Once David and Abe Manning act out the basic drama, it sets the inevitable in motion as the characters create relationships that just can't end well. They all try to escape in their own ways, and occasionally an outsider like Hazel or Peter seems on the verge of saving them from themselves. But the family curse always wins in the end.
“Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.”
Supernaturalism;
All of the spooky stuff that gets a mention in Mourning Becomes Electra in a series of plays where death is literally everywhere, it makes sense that a lot of otherworldly imagery—ghosts, the undead, evil spirits hell-bent on revenge—is hanging out in the trilogy. O'Neill uses the supernatural like some kind of ghost-story ninja, using it to talk about guilt and remorse, madness and fear, salvation and damnation, and a whole lot of other really heavy ideas. He said his goal was to achieve a; "power and drive and the strange quality of unreal reality I wanted …. attained without the benefit of the supernatural."
The Mannons are haunted as much by the memories of their own actions as by the (imagined) spirits of their dead. The title of the last play—The Haunted—is spot-on. Even if O'Neill intends the haunting to be a metaphor, the feeling of unreality is definitely there. In Mourning Becomes Electra, the ghosts are actually expressions of the guilt or shame that many major characters feel. In O'Neill's trilogy, ghosts are connected to the past and are one way that O'Neill introduces and plays with the idea of fate.
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness”.
Puritanism;
Mourning becomes Electra is a psychological dramatization of the evils of Puritanism .O’Neil used the hypocritical attitudes of Puritans in the texture of the play. He represents the drama of lust and love with its tragic climax under the influence of hard geographical settings and strict people.
“Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ”.
The members of the Mannon house are hard tradition-bound family .mannons are conservative and class-conscious, their puritan belief is only in appearance. Otherwise, in actual life, they are erratic, unstrained, greedy and heartless. There is no theological foundation to the Puritan code in Mourning becomes Electra. Mencken describes it as;
“An appearance without substance and an ethnic without a dogma.”
Though puritans believe in self-control and sex restraint yet. David has sex relation with nursemaid; and Christine had an adulterous relation with Adam. In actual they don’t practice self-control. Their approach to sex is hypocritical, they practice no virtue in matters of sex. The mannons publically represent a puritanical self-restrained behavior. But in practice, they are dominated by hatred, passion, and sex.
“When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, and he going to disturb the lives of others”.
The Mask Technique;
O’Neil the great modern American dramatist uses the technique of mask in his play “Mourning becomes Electra” to show the true inner self of his characters. O’Neil protagonists wear a mask to hide their true selves from the world and from themselves. But, in fact, O’Neil by using the masking technique unmask his characters and also his readers…YES, it’s true...!
O’Neil very artistically unmasks his characters.in mourning becomes Electra mannons are almost identified with the ‘mask’ of being virtuous, puritans whereas Merrie and Christine are with their true faces. He uses this technique as a visual idea and sometimes as a defensive function in the case of visual idea, according to the story if the characters are to be made a fatalist, determinist or a pessimist, O'Neil puts a mask of fatalism, determinism, pessimism on the true faces of his characters and makes his character visual idea of the mask. O’Neil holds the view that;
“Sometimes one’s outer life passes a solitude haunted by the masks of other, one’s inner-life passes in a solitude haunted by the mask of oneself.”
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