Subject: The American Literature (Paper-10)
Study: MA
Year: Semester – III
Guided By: Heenaba Zala
Submitted To: Department of English
University: MKBU
‘The Mourning Becomes Electra’
Prologue:
‘Mourning
Becomes Electra’ is a play or rather we can say it a play cycle because
it is a Trilogy. It was a part of The American Literature. It was written quite
earlier but it was first executed on 26th October, 1931 at Broadway,
New York City. And here we can mention that this play performed very well on
stage and on audience’s mind because it was run for more than 140 shows in a
year only. It was written by Eugene O’Neill, an Irish American Playwright.
He
was Noble Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner for his plays. These names are
enough to just sketch his image and place in field of literature. He was born
and brought up in New York City and his life was much reflected in his works of
literature.
“There is no present or
future- only the past, happening over and over again” -Eugene O’Neill(O'Neill)
Here
he tries to put his feelings and emotions about life into words. He resolutely
believes that life ha so contemporary time or no upcoming time. Life is just
past. Life is just a former. Life is just a history. And as we also believe
that history repeats itself and so it occurs repetitively in one’s life. As he
was a son of an actor, plays, dramas, and theaters are inheritance for him. But
he also saw a very dark phase in his life, too. His dark side is also reflected
in most of his works. He was bitterly pinned by problems and destiny during his
childhood. He also suffered from alcoholism and depression, too. He was hunted
by problems and that situation leads him to the point of suicide, too. (Editors) But at the end he
died natural death after so many health problems. May be he was destine for it
only.
Tragedy:
Basically ‘Tragedy’ is a form of drama. It contains human suffering.It generates catharsis
among the audience. This word basically derives from classic Greek language.
“It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy
hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world
on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout -- not moan, or complain,
but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What
you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.” -Jean Anouilh
‘Tragedy’
gives chance to make their self free and relax to the audience. It is very
famous and prominent form of literature. The pessimism of the
Greeks may have been equally black, their tragedies just as aware of the crime
of existence, still “they would have despised”, as William James observed, “a
life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds
of lachrymosely”. The dissetisfaction, exhaustion, and apathy which O’Neill’s
tragedy increasingly reflected were conditions completely foreign to Greek
tragedy. The Greeks were never so contemptuous of life as to seek consolation
in death, nor so afraid of death as calm their fears by promising themselves
the fulfillment after death. All that they had vainly earned for in life.
O’Neill is not to be censured for the predicament, in which he found himself,
or for the fashion in which he chose to extricate himself, but rather of
misinterpreting his dream. For however ingeniously he substituted the premises
of a rationalistic psychology, however adeptly h interpolated his allegory,
however glibly he spoke of fate and destiny crime and retribution, guilt and atonement,
his dream in tragedy was not the Greek dream. The play ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ has much in common with the grand
style of ancient Greek tragedy. It is the suffering of human beings that
results in an ennobling effect. The characters have complex psychological
hang-ups which contribute towards their doom. On the Greek pattern we have a
trilogy with three parts: The Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. Whereas
in the Greek cases, the psychological aspect is disguised and barely
identifiable, in O’Neill it constitutes the essence of drama.
‘Mourning Becomes
Electra’ is also that type of tragic drama which
creates such catharsis among the audience. It creates flow of emotions among
the audience. This play is divided into basic three parts:
-
Homecoming
-
The Hunted
-
The Haunted
In
Mourning Becomes Electra,
O’Neill exemplified what Schopenhauer declared to be the “true sense of
tragedy”, namely “that it is not his own individual sins the hero atones for,
but original -sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself.” so, devoted as he to
this conception, that he permitted it to inform the entire trilogy. It
Reconciles to Death the appearance of Mourning Becomes Electra subsequent
to Krutch’s estimate in 1929 of modern tragedy gave Crutch no cause to revise
his assertion that the “tragic solution of the problem o existence, the
reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is… only a fiction
surviving in art.” Indeed, O’Neill’s play bears out the statement by achieving
precisely the opposite results : Electra offers a solution not to the
problem of existence but to that o nonexistence ; it reconciles not to life,
but to death. Nor did O’Neil invoke that Tragic Spirit which Krutch regarded as
the produce either of a “religious faith in the greatness of God” or of “aith
in the greatness of man” although by 1932 it seemed to Krutch that he had
satisfied this demand, that he had, in short, succeeded it investing man “once
more with the dignity he has lost”. “The greatness of the plays”, he insisted,
begging the question, “lays it the fact that they achieve a grandeur which
their rational framework is impotent even to suggest.”
No play is ever written with a critical theory in
mind. The creative writer doesn’t adopt a framework within which he has to put
together his ideas. Such an attitude would place a severe restriction on his
literary creation. Once the intended piece of literature takes a final shape
and comes in the public domain, it is then that literary criticism and
appreciation is applied. So is it with Mourning
Becomes Electra. O’Neill is a master craftsman but in this play it so
appears that he was
writing
within the psychological and psychoanalytical framework. The play opens with
ordinary people gossiping about the extra marital affairs of Christine, wife of
Ezra Mannon. This is a Freudian start as sex is the base of human emotions. We
come across the servant/gardener Seth who has the role of chorus of the old
Greek tragedy. His comments are in the psychoanalytical tradition as he gives a
free narration of the past, present and the future of the Mannon family. The
arrival of Ezra Mannon introduces Lacan’s concept of the “Law of the Father”. He is the perfect patriarch who has exhausted
himself in the struggle for gender and phallic supremacy. He served in the
army, and then became the Mayor of the town, then a Brigadier-General in the
civil war. On top of all he was a judge. When the head of the family is the
be-all and end-all, it is natural that his offspring are likely to be stunted
while growing in the shade of this majestic tree. This dwarfing of personality
gives birth to castration complex of Lacan. The son feels obliged to love only
one woman that is his mother. In the Freudian tradition this love to begin with
may be innocent – the natural baby feeling for mother canget transformed into
carnal emotion with clear physical characteristics. Same is the case with
daughter Lavinia. She is in love with her father which Freud wouldinterpret as
a consequence of Electra complex. This is explained in the play byher obsession
for Adam Brant – her mother’s lover. Instead of going for the morebenign and
gentle suitor Captain Peter Niles she is consumed by the passion forthe look
alike of her father – Adam Brant. The playwright tells us that the loverhas all
the features of Ezra Mannon. They look one and the same. Therefore, shebecomes
a natural enemy of her mother. When it becomes clear to her she cannotpossess
what she desires, she decides to put an end to the object of desire. Thedeath
of Ezra Mannon through a heart attack induced in a moment of extremestress is
both clinical and psychological in the Freudian context.
In Mourning Becomes Electra, he was convinced that “once
more we have a great play which does not ‘mean’ anything in the sense that the
plays of Ibsen or Shaw mean something, but one which does, on the contrary,
mean the same thing that ‘Oedipus’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’ mean––namely,
that human beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of
great passions, and that the spectacle of them is not only absorbing but also
and at once horrible and cleansing.” Here, it seems Krutch is entirely wrong.
Not only has he missed the “meaning” of O’Neill’s trilogy, he has discerned in
O’Neill’s characters qualities that are mostly nonexistent. They are
characters, moreover, whose passions are infantile rather than great, are a
spectacle that is horrible but scarcely cleansing. Catharsis is a condition
which O’Neill seldom achieved, preferring, as he did, narcosis or necrosis.
That the deficiencies of Mourning
Becomes Electra, when it is compare “with the very greatest
works of dramatic literature”, are limited only to its language, is an opinion
which, if our judgments have been even moderately sound, has little to be said
in its support. There is equally little to be said for Krutch’s contrast of
Ibsen and O’Neill and, wherein he finds that O’Neill avoided the central fault
of Ibsen’s tragedies, namely, that they are “too thoroughly pervaded by a sense
of human littleness to be other than melancholy and dispiriting.”
The Emotional Dynamics
More restrained than Krutch, George Jean Nathan
never, comparedMourning Becomes Electra “with the very greatest works of
dramaticliterature”, but he did declare it to be “indubitably one of the finest
playsthat the American theatre has known”. Like Krutch, he mistookWeltschmerz
for tragedy and ascribed purgative powers to hyper emotionalismand to the
manifestations of a neurotic sensibility. ButNathan came closer to the truth
when he observed that O’Neill’s“passionate inspiration “the sweep and size of
his emotional equipmentand emotional dynamics” transcended the characters and
the play., This isa euphemistic way of saying that Mourning Becomes Electra contains
noadequate equivalent for the playwright’s excess of feeling. It is a fault
thatis present in most of O’Neill’s plays, and O’Neill himself was
apparentlyaware of it when in Mourning Becomes Electra he consciously
shunned “themany opportunities for effusions of personal writing about life and
fate.”If the trilogy is less effusive than some of the preceding plays,
it’sgrandiosity lots threefold greater than most. If it contains less
“personalwriting”, it is far from reticent concerning the author’s conception
of lifeand fate, a conception which suggests that the glow felt by Nathan to
bespreading over all–– “the glow that is O’Neill” ––is less “luminous
andradiant” than feverish.
Instinctive
Perception of Tragedy:
Having defined “true tragedy...as a dramatic work in
which the outward failure of the principle personage is compensated for by the
dignity and greatness of his character”, Krutch concludes that “O’Neill is
almost alone among modern dramatic writers in possessing what appears to be an
instinctive perception of what a modern tragedy would have to be.” Yet one has
only to strip Mourning Becomes Electra of its spiritual malaise, its
Freudian machinery, its self conscious symbolism, its Gothic properties, its turgid
style, is see how little better O’Neill has succeeded than Ibsen in
satisfying Krutch’s definition of “true tragedy”. Ghosts, too, was a
tragedy of family guilt in which the original scene is traced to the
life-denying impulse. One side is happiness, on the other is “the source of the
misery in the world” : law, order, duty. Living in the house polluted by her
husband’s profligacy, Mrs. Alving, the counterpart of Christine, revolts
against the restrictive virtues which society has imposed upon her and which
prevented Alving from finding “any outlet for the overmastering joy of life
that was in him”. Oswald, haunted by his father’s sin, suffers not only
physical consequences thereof, but repeats––like Orin––the parents’ behaviour.
Where Orin is afflicted with a stubborn case of Weltschmerz, and.
complications induced by a wound in the head––the dowry of the Mannons in
general, Ezra in particular––Oswald suffers from congenital syphilis–– the indirect
actions. When, at the conclusion of the tragedy, Oswald locks himself and his
mother inside their haunted house for paying out the family curse much as
Lavinia is. Surely the madness of a paretic is not more melancholy and
dispiriting than the masochism of a woman who denies herself the pleasure of
dying.
‘The
Mourning becomes Electra’ with Greek Myth:
It is acontinuation of the
Greek tradition. It is rare to find two principal complexes“Electra” and
“Oedipus” in one work of art. Here we have both as parallelthemes. The tragic
implications as will be observed are of the kind that generatesemotions of
purgation and emotional relief. However, it’s set in a modern (20thcentury)
milieu. The characterization, the story line, the plot are all reflective ofthe
ancient traditions. The names and sequence have been modified to serve
theplaywright’s intentionality. The substitution is shown with the main
charactersresembling the principal dramatis personae of the past: Lavinia
Mannon –Electra; Christine Mannon – Clytemnestra; Ezra Mannon – Agamemnon;
CaptainAdam Brant – Aegisthus; Orin Mannon – Orestes; Captain Peter Niles –
Pylades.Instead of the Trojan War, here in the background we have the American
CivilWar. Clytemnestra had waited for ten years for her husband to return from
the
conflict.
Although she had governed well, she had committed the mistake oftaking on a
lover in the form of Aegisthus. With him she had conspired to put todeath her
hero husband. In the play under review, it is Christine who hascuckolded Ezra
Mannon. Christine is far more venomous than Clytemnestra.Whereas the latter had
some grievance because her spouse had sacrificed theirdaughter Iphigeneia to
please the gods; Christine had no such anger to beredressed. For her it was a
simple case of husband change. Having got bored orfed up with one Patriarch,
she wanted to experience the ecstasy of love. Up to thispoint the story may be
taken as a recasting of the Greek myth. What happensahead is O’Neill’s own
interpretation. In this case the daughter Lavinia too is in
love
with the mother’s paramour and hence an opponent. There is a strong
psychoanalytical stance as the daughter is expressively preoccupied
with“Electra” complex. She is consumed by love for father and is
obsessivelyinvolved in revenge for his death. Christine is sly and malicious
and she plans themurder in a cunning manner. Knowing that the husband has a
heart condition, shelets it be known in the public about the gravity of his
ailment. Meanwhile sheconspires with Brant to make sure that the plans do not
prove abortive. She asksfor poison with the stratagem being that on his return
she would copulate withhim and in a fit of frenzy make him suffer from an
induced heart attack. Ithappens as planned and when Ezra asks for his medicine,
she gives him thepoison. Consequently he dies, only to give birth to a series
of violent revengekillings. When the brother Orin returns from the war, the
sister Laviniamanoeuvres him in a situation where he kills Brant. Before he
does so, thereader/audience has to undergo the sordid experience of yet
anotherpsychological aberration, in the form of incestuous relationship between
motherand son. Thus the killing of Brant serves three purposes; the father is
avenged,the mother is punished and the rival is eliminated. The cursed house of
Atreus(Mannon) suffers multiple moral lapses. There is incest between the
brother andsister. In all the tragic happenings, it is Lavinia who is the prime
factor of
personality
shortcomings. She would neither like her brother to have a normalrelationship
with Hazel nor allow herself to have ties with Captain Peter Niles. Inthe end,
she drives Orin to madness and suicide just as she had driven her motherto
frustration and suicide. Finally she draws the curtains on her own self and
optsfor the life of a recluse. A mood of tragedy prevails over the entire
unfolding ofthe dramatic sequences. All the characters yearn for respite and
redemption butthere is none. The most pitiable individual is the mother
Christine who one feelsdeserves a break from the monotony and misery of a
star-crossed marriage. It isin her death that the audience reach the climax of
tragic empathy. The therapeuticeffect is felt as the viewer is shocked into a
trance like state of cataclysm.
