Thematic Characterization

O’Neill experimented with different techniques of characterization in

different plays. He was a restless experimenter and he tried to invent
dramatic techniques that could faithfully project his vision of life. His art
of characterization, therefore, depends upon what kind of theme he is
handling in a particular play. It is the theme that primarily dictates the
style of characterization.
Since in Mourning Becomes Electra his theme is concerned with evil,
death, war, puritanism, freedom and love etc., he resorts to a technique
of characterization that brings out the hidden force of these powerful
concepts. His characterization, therefore, is fundamentally thematic and
meant to help in understanding the central idea of the play more clearly
and easily.
Quintessential Selves
In Mourning Becomes Electra, which O’Neill patterned on ‘Greek
tragedy, he was determined to reduce his story to its
barest outlines and characters to their quintessential selves, either
divining -or having read in Aristotle that in tragedy “character comes in
as subsidiary to the action”, since the “incidents and the plot are the end
of tragedy ; and the end is the chief thing of all.” Precisely as in The Great
God Brown he had avoided showing us the individual peculiarities of
facial expression through the use of masks, and in Strange
Interlude and Dynamo resorted to the aside and the soliloquy because
he Wanted to get at the mental processes of his people without making
every speech seem “natural”, so in Mourning Becomes Electra he used a
ready-made story into all the details and motives and reasons of which
it was cot necessary to go. If he had lived in Elizabethan England, he
would probably have gone over to the Backside and written plays in
blank verse.
Victims of Evil
O’Neill’s characters in Mourning Becomes Electra, particularly those
belonging to the Mannon clan, are victims of evil. To stress this point,
O’Neill has focused his attention on the character of Lavinia. Lavinia, the
product of those very forces in her family which precipitated its peculiar
and inevitable fate, discovers that she has at last become like her own
mother, that in demanding payment for sin that grew out of lust and
hatred she herself is inevitably, drawn to her own brother and even to
the naked savages, now that her father, toward whom she was also
drawn by forces not exactly filial, is no longer alive. All her natural
instincts, thwarted by a maniacal desire for vengeance, have turned in
upon her. This is her fate, and she marches to a doom which is actually
inescapable, from which no god-from-the-machine, no benign court,
no accommodating dramatist, is able to save her. For such victims of the
evil that seems inherent in lice there is no salvation.
Symbolic Device
Instead of using masks to show what has happened to Orin and Lavinia,
O’Neill simply states in his stage directions that they have come to
resemble their parents, a bit of symbolism more strikingly dramatic than
he could have achieved if he had actually made the actors put on masks.
“I’m now”, says Orin, “in Father’s place and you’re Mother……That’s the
evil destiny out of the past I haven’t dared predict! I’m the Mannon
you’re chained to !” Out of the mouth of this demented man has come
the ultimate truth. Like the inspired Cassandra; he perceives through his
disordered mind the meaning of the curse.
Mannons as Mankind
The Mannon mansion is infected by the taint of mortality, representing
in a way the fate of mankind. As Seth, the hired hand, says in the first
scene of The Haunted : “There’s been evil in that house since it was first
built in hate-and it’s kept growin’ there ever since, as what’s happened
there has proved.” There is in the trilogy the usual hint, in the
imagination of a woman, that some kind of evil and implacable deity is
behind it all. This notion is given to Christine Mannon in Act I of The
Hunted in a dialogue with Hazel, the ‘nice’ young lady of the play.
Christine too had once been innocent and loving and trusting, like Hazel,
but “god won’t leave us alone” ; He tortures and wrings and twists
human lives with “Others’ lives until ––we poison each other to death !”
But, as in most of O’Neill’s tragedies, no exact balance is ever struck
between fate and free will. And the men, on their part, think, simply, that
a Mannon is a Mannon and this signifies death. Thus Orin sets out to
write a history of the Mannon family in order to trace out to its secret
hiding place the evil destiny that has dominated the Mannon family. He
finds no answer and can only make the observation to Lavinia that he
finds her the “most interesting criminal” of them all. And he concludes
too that the Mannons are not special in any way but are only mankind
writ large. He thus takes himself, prematurely aged, guilt ridden,, sitting
in a dark room and writing about sin and death by a dim, lamp, to be a
symbol of man’s fate––”a lamp burning out in a room of waiting shadows
!”
Psychological Motivation and Complexes
In Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill appears to have made the
psychological motivation too explicit and on much too a neat pattern.
And although this motivation has seemed Freudian, it has exaggerated
to the point of incredibility the fatal necessity of the Oedipus and Electra
complexes. It has described the sinful love of the son for the mother and
of the daughter for the father as a universal, compulsive pattern. These
protagonists seem to have been born damned. Except for Electra, they
do not achieve tragedy ; they become merely the helpless victims of their
inherited natures. And this psychological equivalent of original sin, which
motivates the action of the play but destroys the conviction of its
tragedy, is further explained intellectually by references to the New
England puritanism of the Mannons. But clinical psychology and
puritanism remain abstractions ; they do not produce the dramatic
illusion of reality.
“Chorus” Characters
O’Neill seems to have been aware of this difficulty, and he attempted to
meet it by introducing a “Chorus” of “townsfolk... as a human
background for the drama of the Mannons.” Contrasting with the
inhuman Mannons, he introduced these “types, together with two
individual “normal” characters, Peter and Hazel Niles. This brother and
sister are described as in love with Lavinia and Orin Mannon, but they
seem so innocent as to be unreal. They woodenly persist in their love for
the Mannons, despite repeated rejections, insults and desertions. And
their total unreality makes the unrelieved depravity of the Mannons
seem all the more incredible. A true Inferno must establish some
dramatic relationship with the work-a-day world. But only
Seth Beckwith, the caretaker for the Mannons, successfully relates them
to the world of the living.
Psychoanalytic Approach
O’Neill relentlessly analyzes the lives of five persons at the centre of his
drama. While Peter, Hazel and the townspeople are deliberately
characterized by purely external means, and Seth is left on the edges of
the action, Lavinia, Christine, Orin, Ezra and Adam are placed in
a crucible. They are concerned with nothing but themselves, and even
that concern is limited to the psycho-sexual problems which they all
fatally share. The psychoanalytic approach makes such concentration
possible, perhaps inevitable, and it is extraordinary that a play of this
length, with so small a cast and so little variety of subject matter, can
hold an audience for the length of such remorseless investigation. That
it works is because, with the psychoanalytic lead, O’Neill provides an
essentially purgative action. Whereas nothing happened to Nina Leeds
(in Strange Interlude), much happens to the Mannons. They discover,
they grow, and they change, and what happens to them is therapeutic as
psychoanalysis is therapeutic.
Exchange of Roles
Characters in O’Neill’s plays often exchange roles at different points in
the drama. This is particularly true of Strange Interlude and Mourning
Becomes Electra. After Christine has killed herself’ and Lavinia
becomes a fully developed woman, she takes Christine’s place in the play
as a whole, but especially for Orin who was so close to his mother. Adam
Brant includes the identity of Marie Brantome and takes her place from
the beginning of the play, thus continuing her dramatic impact, even
after her death, upon the Mannon family. When Lavinia returns with
Orin from clipper ship in the fifth act of The Hunted, she represents all
the Mannon harshness, stiffness, and formal ‘justice’. At that point,
before her dramatic change in the last play, she has completely taken the
place of Ezra. When Lavinia becomes feminine, and in the process
“becomes” Christine, there is no one left to play Ezra, and to fill this
character vacuum Orin becomes more and more like his father, obsessed
with the idea of a special doom reserved for all the Mannons. We learn
that in the South Seas he had been jealous of Lavinia’s interest in other
men, in exactly the same way that Ezra was jealous of Christine. What is
in fact happening at this point in the play is that Orin and Lavinia are
reliving their parents’ marriage and tragedy. Once Orin is dead, Lavinia
loses her identification with Christine and once again assumes the stiff,
repressed, and dead attitudes of a Mannon.
Basic types
Characters substitute for each other in Mourning Becomes
Electra because in spite of separate identities there are only two basic
characters, the repressed, moralistic man dominated by a will to death,
and the voluptuous, exotic, and sensual woman, dominated by a will to
life through sex. All the characters in this play are variants of these two
basic types. Character substitution, then is the strongest support for the
idea that the play is dominated by the basic polarity’s or duality’s of life;
and that these have to be resolved before the play can end.
Guilty Characters
The main burden of guilt in the play is borne by the male characters,
despite the fact that Christine and Lavinia are more directly responsible
for violence and death. Guilt is inevitably bound up with being born a
man, for men grow up to be fathers. Fathers inevitably commit crimes
against the women, both as wives and mothers. Men are by nature
clumsy in expressing love, while women are, in themselves, love’s living
expression. The men in the play regard women as goddesses, possessing
the secret of happiness and peace, which can only be won by a man if he
possesses the woman. Yet in possessing a woman, they destroy her
capacity to love, and for this “murder” they must be punished. Their guilt
is due to treason against the life-giving, love-affirming force represented
by the female. The older men in the Mannon family are all guilty of loving
Marie Brantome, Adam Brand’s mother selfishly and destructively. Ezra
Mannon is guilty of letting Marie die unaided, and he repeats this crime
when he kills Christine’s love for him during their marriage. Lavinia, while
she is still part of the father force and not a woman herself, is guilty of
helping Ezra tear Orin from his mother to go to war. The mother is left
bereaved and alone, through the fault of others, and she is not to be
judged harshly for taking another “son-lover” in her desperate need.
Orin wishes to be faithful to all that his mother represents, but his male,
Mannon heritage, plus the masculine heritage of war, overcomes him.
He is guilty, like the other Mannon men, of desiring to possess and thus
to destroy the mother and love itself. He results Lavinia’s effort to love
and die fully, just as he did Christine’s. His guilt lies in his rejection of love
and embrace of death.
Not Fully Rounded
The characters in Mourning Becomes Electra are not fully rounded.
Because they are representatives of basic character types, which in turn
are based upon the most elemental patterns of terrestrial life, they are
dominated by a single motive, a single desire, and a single destiny. They
are totally unlike, for example, the characters of Shakespeare, which are
infinitely various. When Shakespeare created a character he did not look
beyond the thing itself, except, perhaps, in his last plays, and even in
those the matter is open to debate. Shakespeare gave us separate
beings, diverse in their natures as people in reality are. That is because,
to use Aristotelian language, he gave us true imitations of action, true
imitations of life. O’Neill did not give us imitations of life, but rather
projected upon life his intuition, often weird, often primitive, but always
profound, of the underlying patterns of life.