Author

Eugene O'Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the
first U.S. playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Who Was Eugene O'Neill?

Eugene O'Neill was a famed playwright and his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night
(produced posthumously 1957), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the
Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933) and The
Iceman Cometh (1946). O'Neill died on November 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Early Life

Born on October 16, 1888, in a New York City hotel room, writer Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is one of
the most admired playwrights of all time. His talent for poignant and piercing dramas sprang from a
life marked by challenges. He was the son of Mary Ellen "Ella" and James O'Neill, a stage actor.

After O'Neill was born, his mother developed an addiction to morphine. She had been given the drug
to help her through her particularly difficult childbirth. Ella was also still grieving for O'Neill's older
brother, Edmund, who had died of the measles three years earlier. (The couple also had another
son, James Jr.) His father continued on with his role in a touring production of The Count of Monte
Cristo shortly after O'Neill's birth.

O'Neill spent much of his early life on the road with his father. Shortly before his 7th birthday,
however, he was sent away to boarding school; O'Neill spent years at the St. Aloysius Academy for
Boys, where he received a strict Catholic upbringing. In 1900, he returned to New York City, where
he attended the De La Salle Institute for two years. He then went to Betts Academy, a prep school in
Stamford, Connecticut. In 1906, O'Neill enrolled at Princeton University, but his heart wasn't in his
studies, and he was either dismissed for missing too many classes or left after only 10 months at the
school.

Career Beginnings

After leaving Princeton, O'Neill floundered for a time. He took several sea voyages, ran around town
with brother James and indulged heavily in alcohol. He had a brief marriage to Kathleen Jenkins,
which resulted in one son, Eugene O'Neill Jr.

In 1912, O'Neill battled tuberculosis. While recuperating from his illness, he found his calling as a
playwright, finding inspiration from such European dramatists as August Strindberg and later
enrolling in a writing class at Harvard University. O'Neill had his first play produced in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, in 1916: Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act play that was staged in New York later that
year.

Also in 1916, O'Neill made a second attempt at domestic bliss. He married fellow writer Agnes
Boulton, and the couple eventually had two children together, son Shane and daughter Oona. O'Neill
took the theatrical world by storm in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Later that year, another O'Neill masterpiece, The Emperor Jones, made its Broadway debut.

Leading Playwright
In 1922, O'Neill brought his drama Anna Christie to the Broadway stage; this tale of a prostitute's
return home netted the playwright his second Pulitzer Prize. O'Neill suffered a personal loss with the
death of his brother the following year. By this time, the playwright had also lost both of his parents.
But O'Neill's private struggles seemed to aid him in creating greater dramatic works for the stage,
including Desire Under the Elms (1924) and Strange Interlude (1928).

Around this time, O'Neill left his second wife and quickly began a relationship with Carlotta
Monterey, whom he married in 1929.

O'Neill re-imagined the mythic tragedy Oresteia in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), exchanging
ancient Greece for New England in the 19th century. Five years later, he became the first American
playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was given this honor "for the power, honesty
and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy,"
according to the Nobel Prize website.

Later Years

O'Neill completed Long Day's Journey Into Night in the early 1940s, but he refused to have this
autobiographical play produced until long after his death. Around this same time, he had a falling
out with daughter Oona; he chose to end his relationship with Oona after she married actor Charlie
Chaplin.

After several years' absence from the stage, in 1946, O'Neill returned with one of his most heralded
works, The Iceman Cometh, a dark drama that explores the lives of a group of barflies. The following
year, the playwright learned that he had Parkinson's disease, and found it impossible to write due to
the tremors in his hands.

In 1948, O'Neill, never a supportive parent, cut ties with his youngest son, Shane, after Shane was
arrested for drug possession. Two years later, his eldest son, Eugene, committed suicide.

O'Neill died of bronchial pneumonia on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65, in Boston,
Massachusetts, leaving behind a tremendous literary legacy of more than 50 plays. In 1957, Long
Day's Journey Into Night was performed on Broadway to rave reviews; O'Neill received a
posthumous Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for the drama. His work continues to move and fascinate
audiences today.

Citation Information

Article Title

Eugene O'Neill Biography

Author

Biography.com Editors

Website Name

The Biography.com website

URL

https://www.biography.com/writer/eugene-oneill
Access Date

October 18, 2019

Eugene O'Neill

AMERICAN DRAMATIST

WRITTEN BY: Arthur GelbBarbara Gelb

LAST UPDATED: Oct 12, 2019 See Article History

Alternative Title: Eugene Gladstone O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill, in full Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, (born October 16, 1888, New York, New York, U.S.—
died November 27, 1953, Boston, Massachusetts), foremost American dramatist and winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced
posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon
(1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman
Cometh (1946).

Summary

(MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE)

O’Neill conceived of creating a modern psychological drama rooted in Greek legend in the spring of
1926, but Mourning Becomes Electra was not completed until the spring of 1931. Actually a trilogy
of three full-length plays, it opened in October and was deemed a masterpiece by more than one
critic. O’Neill said: “By the title Mourning Becomes Electra I sought to convey that mourning befits
Electra; it becomes Electra to mourn; it is her fate; black is becoming to her and it is the color that
becomes her destiny.”

The Greek source for O’Neill was the Oresteia of Aeschylus, from the fifth century b.c.e., the trilogy
detailing the relationships of the house of Atreus. In the first play, after the siege of Troy,
Clytemnestra murders her husband, the victorious Agamemnon; in the second, their son Orestes,
with his sister Electra, murders his mother and her lover Aegisthus; in the third, Orestes is hounded
by the Furies for matricide but is eventually freed from his guilt and acquitted of the crime. O’Neill
reworked much of this story; he also drew upon the versions of Electra by Sophocles and Euripides,
which focus upon the daughter, a haunted woman, torn by hate and love and never at peace.

The Mannon family (the name may be associated with “mammon” and the family’s materialism) is
the center of O’Neill’s play, which is set in New England immediately after the Civil War. The house is
described in the stage directions as resembling a white Greek temple, with six columns across the
front porch. In the first play, The Homecoming, Christine Mannon (Clytemnestra) has taken a lover,
Adam Brant (Aegisthus), while her husband, Ezra (Agamemnon), has been fighting in the war.
Daughter Lavinia (Electra) is jealously aware of the affair and threatens her mother with exposure. In
this section, mother and daughter are rivals for the love of Ezra and Adam.
When Ezra returns, Lavinia desperately tries to win his love and attention from her mother, as Ezra
makes an impassioned effort to communicate with Christine, begging her to love him. Thinking only
of her lover, she rejects him, and when he has a heart attack, she administers poison rather than
medicine. In his death throes, he reveals Christine’s crime to Lavinia.

The triangular structure of the second play, The Hunted, includes Lavinia, Christine, and the newly
returned battle-scarred Orin (Orestes). Each woman is seductive and persuasive with him, but
Lavinia is victorious in convincing him that Christine killed Ezra and that he should avenge their
father’s murder by killing Adam Brant. He accomplishes the act, which drives Christine to commit
suicide and leads to Orin’s mental deterioration through his burden of guilt. In the final play, The
Haunted, both Lavinia and Orin struggle to transcend their past crimes, first through incestuous love
of each other, then through relationships outside the family. When this is impossible, Orin commits
suicide, and Lavinia secludes herself in the Mannon mansion.

Although the plot represents another reworking of the O’Neill family drama, with the author infusing
autobiography into both Lavinia and Orin, it is also faithful to the Greek legend. In addition, O’Neill
borrowed other elements from the Greeks. He adopted the form of the trilogy, and he created the
character of Seth to function as the leader of the chorus. The townspeople act as that chorus. Most
important, O’Neill sought to find an equivalent to the Greek sense of fate, the inescapable destiny
toward which the characters rush, which the Greeks achieved through their culture’s belief in gods
and goddesses and in their shared morality.

Such a climate was difficult to approximate in a modern culture that does not believe in such
external forces.

Themes

1.Revenge

Revenge serves as a primary motivation for the play's actions. Seeking to revenge the death of his
mother, Marie Brantome, Adam hopes to destroy the Mannon family, especially Ezra.

The Mannon family is a complex web of revenge scenarios: Christine wants revenge on her husband
for her unhappy marriage; Lavinia wants revenge on her mother for killing her father; Orin wants
revenge on Brant for sleeping with his mother.

2. Paradise

Paradise is an obsession for many of the play's characters. As a seafaring family, early generations of
Mannons had sailed to beautiful South Pacific isles. Orin wants to run away with his mother
Christine—an attempt to escape societal norms so that he can sleep with his mother. Christine
wants to go with her lover, Adam.

Eventually, Orin does eventually go to the islands with his sister Lavinia. During their visit, she has
sex with one of the islanders. In O'Neill's play, the island paradise—offering erotic possibilities and
freedom from materialism—becomes a symbol of all that New England society is not.

3.Incest

Incest and incestuous desire lie behind most of the relationships central to Mourning Becomes
Electra. Ezra's daughter Lavinia loves her father; Christine's son Orin loves his mother, and Lavinia
and Orin love each other.
Chracters

Lavinia Mannon - The Mannon's daughter. Lavinia is wooden, stiff-shouldered daughter, flat-
chested, thin, angular and dressed in simple black. She shares her mother Christine's lustrous copper
hair and mask-like face. The severe Lavinia considers herself robbed of love at her mother's hands.
Thus she schemes to take Christine's place and become the wife of her father and mother of her
brother. She ultimately does so upon her mother's death, reincarnating her in her own flesh.

Christine Mannon - A striking woman of forty with a fine, voluptuous figure, flowing animal grace,
and a mass of beautiful copper hair. She wears green, which symbolizes her envy. Her pale face is
also a life-like mask, a mask that represents both her duplicity and her almost super-human efforts
at repression. Having long abhorred her husband Ezra, Christine plots his murder with her lover
Brant upon his return from the Civil War.

Orin Mannon - The Mannon son returned from war. Orin bears a striking resemblance to his father
and Captain Brant, though he appears as a weakened, refined, and oversensitive version of each. He
possesses a boyish charm that invites the maternal favors of women. He loves his mother
incestuously, flying into a jealous rage upon the discovery of her love affair that leads to Christine
and Brant's deaths. Orin will then force he and his sister to judgment for their crimes in an attempt
to rejoin his mother in death.

Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon - The great Union general. Ezra is a spare, big-boned man of exact
and wooden movements. His mannerisms suggest the statue-like poses of military heroes. His
brusque and authoritative voice has a hollow and repressed quality. As his near- homophonic name
suggests, he is Agamemnon's counterpart, the general returned from war to be murdered by his
wife and her lover. He continues to exert his influence in symbolic form. His various images, and his
portrait in particular, call his family to judgment from beyond the grave.

Captain Adam Brant - A powerful, romantic sea captain. Brant has a swarthy complexion, sensual
mouth, and long, coal-black hair. He also of course bares a striking resemblance to the other
Mannon men, sharing their same, mask-like faces. The child of the illegitimate Mannon line, he
returns to wreak vengeance on Ezra's household. He steals Ezra's wife, a woman he imagines in the
image of his mother, and seduces Lavinia to conceal their affair.

Hazel Niles - A longtime friend of the Mannon children. Hazel is a pretty, healthy, dark- haired girl of
nineteen. O'Neill describes her character as frank, innocent, amiable, and good. She functions as
Orin's would-be sweetheart, and both Christine and Lavinia attempting to pass Orin off onto her so
they can flee with their suitors. Hazel also haplessly attempts to rescue Orin from his fate.

Captain Peter Niles - An artillery captain for the Union. Peter resembles his sister in character. He is
straightforward, guileless, and good-natured, failing to apprehend the machinations afoot in the
Mannon house until the very end of the trilogy. He functions as the suitor Lavinia first rejects and
later takes up as a substitute for Captain Brant.

Seth Beckwith - The Mannons' aged gardener. Seth is stoop-shoulded and raw-boned but still strong.
Like his employers, his gaunt face gives the impression of a life-like mask. In his time with the
Mannons, he has learned most of the family's secrets and colluded in keeping them. A watchman
figure of sorts, he is repeatedly seen wandering the grounds and singing the sea chanty
"Shenandoah."

Amos Ames - A fat carpenter in his fifties. Ames is a typical and relatively benign town gossip-
monger.
Louisa Ames - Amos's wife. Louisa is similarly a gossip though much more maliciously.

Minnie - Louisa's meek middle-aged cousin and most eager listener.

Josiah Borden - A small, wizened man of sixty. Borden is the shrewd manager of the Mannon
shipping company.

Emma Borden - Josiah's wife. Emma is a typical New England woman of pure English ancestry, with
a horse face, buckteeth, and big teeth. Her manner is defensively sharp and assertive.

Everett Hills, D.D. - The well-fed minister of a prosperous small town: snobbish, unctuous, and
ingratiating in his demeanor.

Mrs. Hills - A sallow, flabby, and self-effacing minister's wife.

Dr. Joseph Blake - The Mannon's kindly family physician, stout, self-important, and stubbornly
opinionated.

The Chantyman - A drunk, weather-beaten man of sixty-five. Though dissipated, he possesses a

romantic, troubadour-of-the-sea air. Critic Travis Bogard considers his cameo appearance in "The
Hunted" as O'Neill's farewell to the seaman heroes of his earlier plays.

Abner Small - The shrill, goat-bearded clerk of the town hardware store who breaks into the Mannon
house on a wager.

Ira Mackel - A sly, cackling farmer who helps goad Small into the house.

Joe Silva - A fat, boisterous Portuguese fishing captain who also helps goad Small into the house.

Oedipus

Although O'Neill supposedly derived Mourning Becomes Electra from the Oresteia, the myth that
actually structures the play's action is overwhelming that of Oedipus. Oedipus was the Theban king
who unwittingly killed his father and murdered his mother, bringing ruin to the land. Famously Freud
elaborated this myth into his Oedipus complex, the structure through which children are
conventionally introduced into the social order and normative sexual relations.

At the center of this complex in what Freud defined as its positive form is the child's incestuous
desire for the parent of the opposite sex, a desire possibly surmounted in the course of the child's
development or else subject to repression. Its development is starkly differentiated for boys and
girls. Both begin with a primary love object, the mother. The boy child only moves from the mother
upon the threat of castration posed by his rival, the father. In other words, the boy fears that the
father would cut his penis off if he continues to cling to the mother who rightfully belongs to her
husband. By prohibiting incest and instituting the proper relations of desire within the household,
the Father becomes a figure of the law. In surmounting his Oedipal desires, the boy would then
abandon his mother as a love object and identify himself with his father.

In contrast, the girl abandons the mother upon realizing both the mother's castration and her own.
To her dismay, neither she nor her mother have a penis. She then turns to the father in hopes of
bearing a child by him that would substitute for her missing penis; the girl would become a mother
in her mother's place. Thus, whereas castration ends the Oedipus complex for the boy, it begins it
for the girl.
The Oedipal drama in its many permutations determines the course of the trilogy. Lavinia, for
example, yearns to replace Christine as wife to her father and mother to her brother. Christine clings
to Orin as that the "flesh and blood," entirely her own, that would make good on her castration.
Brant, in turn, is but a substitute for her precious son. Orin yearns to re- establish his incestuous
bond with his mother. But the war, where he would finally assume the Mannon name, forces him
from their pre-Oedipal embrace in the first place.

Though titled after Electra, the predominant pair of lovers in Mourning is the Mother-Son. Put
bluntly, the male Mannons in some way or another take their female love objects as Mother
substitutes, and the women pose them as their sons. The Fathers of the play, Ezra and otherwise,
figure as the rival who would break this bond of love. As we will see, what is primarily being
mourned here is the loss of this love relation, this "lost island" where Mother and Son can be
together.

Fate, Repetition, and Substitution

As Travis Bogard notes, O'Neill wrote Mourning to convince modern audiences of the persistence of
Fate. Accordingly, throughout the trilogy, the players will remark upon a strange agency driving
them into their illicit love affairs, murders, and betrayals. What O'Neill terms fate is the repetition of
a mythic structure of desire across the generations, the Oedipal drama.

As Orin will remark to Lavinia in "The Haunted," the Mannons have no choice but to assume the
roles of Mother-Son that organize their family history. The players continually become substitutes
for these two figures, a substitution made most explicit in Lavinia and Orin's reincarnation as
Christine and Ezra. In this particular case, Lavinia traces the classical Oedipal trajectory, in which the
daughter, horrified by her castration, yearns to become the mother and bear a child by her father
that would redeem her lack. Orin at once figures as this child as well as the husband she would leave
to be with her son.

The Double/the Rival

The various substitutions among the players as structured by the Oedipal drama make the players
each other's doubles. The double is also the rival, the player who believes himself dispossessed
convinced that his double stands in his proper place. Thus, for example, Lavinia considers Christine
the wife and mother she should be.

To take another example, Mourning's male players universally vie for the desire of Mother. The Civil
War, generally remembered as a war between brothers, comes to symbolize this struggle. The men's
rivalries are murderously infantile, operating according to a jealous logic of "either you go or I go."
Because in these rivalries the other appears as that which stands in the self's rightful place within
the Oedipal triangle, the rivals appear as doubles of each other as well. Orin's nightmare of his
murders in the fog allegorizes this struggle, Orin repeatedly killing the same man, himself, and his
father. This compulsive series of murders demonstrates the impossibility of the lover ever acceding
to his "rightful place" within the Oedipal triangle—Mother will always want another, producing yet
another rival.

The Law of the Father

In the Oedipal myth, what tears the son away from his incestuous embrace with the mother is the
imposition of the father's law. Mourning's principal father, Ezra, serves as figure for this paternal
law, though more in his symbolic form than in his own person. Ezra's symbolic form includes his
name, the portrait in which he wears his judge's robes, and his ventriloquist voice. Indeed, his
symbolic form almost usurps his person. Note how Ezra, in fearing that he has become numb to
himself, muses that he has become the statue of a great man, a monument in the town square.

Ezra's death makes the importance of his symbolic function even more apparent. With the death of
his person, he exercises the law with all the more force, haunting the living in his various symbolic
forms. Thus, for example, Christine will cringe before his portrait, Lavinia will invoke his voice and
name to command Orin to attention.

symbols

Though Mourning is rife with symbolism, the symbol that dominates the playing space is certainly
the Mannon house. The house is built in the style of a Greek temple, with white columned portico
covering its gray walls. As Christine complaints in Act I of "Homecoming," the house is the Mannons'
"whited sepulcher." It functions not only as crypt to the family's dead but also to its secrets. Its
founder, Abe Mannon, designs it as a monument of repression, building it to cover over the disgrace
that sets this revenge cycle in motion. What symbolizes this repression in turn is the house's
distinguishing feature, the "incongruous white mask" of a portico hiding its ugliness. This mask
doubles those of its residents, evoking the "life-like masks" the Mannons wear as their faces.

KEY FACTS

Full Title · Mourning Becomes Electra

Author · Eugene O'Neill

Type Of Work · Drama

Genre · Tragedy/Psychological Drama

Language · English

Time And Place Written · Written largely in France, from 1926–1931

Date Of First Publication · 1931

Publisher · Random House, Inc.

Narrator · None

Point Of View · Not applicable

Tone · Tragic

Tense · The play unfolds in the time of the present

Setting (Time) · Spring or Summer, 1865–1866

Setting (Place) · The Mannon house in New England; a harbor in East Boston

Protagonists · Lavinia Mannon, Orin Mannon, Christine Mannon, Ezra Mannon

Major Conflict · Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon has returned from the Civil War. His duplicitous wife
Christine and her lover, Adam Brant, plot his murder. Mannon's daughter, Lavinia, and son, Orin,
discover their mother's treachery and destroy the two lovers in turn. They must then suffer the
vengeance of the dead.
Rising Action · In "Homecoming," rising action consists of the confrontation between Ezra and
Christine. In "The Hunted," it consists of the revelation of Brant's murder to Christine. In "The
Haunted," it consists of Orin's incestuous proposition to Lavinia.

Climax · In "Homecoming," Ezra's murder functions as climax and closes the play. In "The Hunted,"
Christine's suicide does the same. In "The Haunted," Orin's figures as climax.

Falling Action · Breaks follow the first two climaxes leading into the townsfolk scenes that open the
subsequent plays. A brief interlude with Seth follows the break after Orin's suicide.

Themes · Oedipus, Fate, Repetition, and Substitution, The Rival and Double, the Law of the Father

Motifs · The Blessed Islands, The Native

Symbols · The Mannon house

Foreshadowing · The foreshadowing in Mourning is oppressive and omnipresent. For example, Ezra's
apprehension of his imminent death, and Christine's fear that she will soon lose Brant forever

RRL

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1999.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Oxford University Press,
1988.

Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill.
Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2001

Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Eugene O'Neill and the Emergence of American Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1989.

File on O'Neill. Ed. Stephen Black. London: Methuen Drama, 1993.

Perspectives on O'Neill: New Essays. Ed. Shyamal Bagchee. Victoria, BC., Canada: University of
Victoria, 1988.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O'Neill Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984

Readings on Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Thomas Siebold. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1998.