Genre 

· Tragedy/Psychological Drama

→ Mourning Becomes Electra is divided into three plays with themes that correspond to
the Oresteia trilogy. 

→ These three plays by O'Neill are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted.

However, these plays are normally not produced individually, but only as part of the larger
trilogy. Each of these plays contains four to five acts, with only the first act of The
Haunted being divided into actual scenes. Thus, Mourning Becomes Electra is extraordinarily
lengthy. 

♦ 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.

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Themes · Oedipus, Fate, Repetition, and Substitution, The Rival and Double,
Motifs · The Blessed Islands, The Native
Symbols · The Mannon house

Plot Overview
Plot Overview

The first part of O'Neill's trilogy is called Homecoming, and it begins with the end—the end of
the Civil War, that is.

Lavinia Mannon is crazy excited for the return of her father, Brigadier General Ezra Mannon,
and her brother, Orin Mannon, both of whom have been fighting for the Union during the war.
Seth Beckwith, an old groundskeeper who's worked for the Mannons for decades, tells Lavinia
that he's worried that Captain Adam Brant—a single sea captain who's been spending a little too
much quality time with Lavinia's mom Christine—may actually be the illegitimate child of
Lavinia's long-lost great uncle, who was disowned for having an affair with a nursemaid and
getting her pregnant.
Not long after that, Lavinia sees Brant coming up the driveway. Lavinia's nasty insinuations
about his low-class mother are so insulting that eventually Brant admits to being the illegitimate
son of Lavinia's (not-so) great uncle.

Lavinia storms off and starts an argument with her mother, Christine, who admits that she's
sleeping with Brant and knows all about his past. Lavinia threatens to tell Ezra everything if
Christine doesn't stop messing around with Brant. Then she storms off again.

Desperate, Christine manipulates Brant into helping her poison her husband. The night that Ezra
returns home from the war, Christine ends up murdering him by swapping out his heart medicine
for tabs of arsenic. Ezra dies, but not before he manages to clue Lavinia in to the fact that
Christine killed him.

It's two days after Ezra Mannon's murder at the start of The Hunted, the second play in O'Neill's
trilogy. Lavinia's still furious, and Christine's terrified of what she might do. Lavinia manages to

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convince Orin—who's way, way too devoted to his mother (seriously, it's creepy)—that
Christine's having an affair with Brant and that both of them conspired to murder their father.
A couple of days and some heated arguments later, Orin and Lavinia make their way down to the
harbor where Brant's ship is docked. Orin, in what looks a lot like a jealous rage, puts a bullet
into Brant. Lavinia and Orin steal a bunch of stuff from the ship and dump it into the water to
make it look like a robbery. Then they go home and confront Christine, letting her know that
they just killed her lover. Apparently overcome with grief, Christine goes inside the Mannon
home and kills herself.

On that cheerful note, we head off into The Haunted, the third play of the trilogy. Orin and
Lavinia have just gotten back from a long vacation in the South Seas, and they run into their two
friends (and soon-to-be more than friends) Peter and Hazel. Lavinia looks healthy, hot, and
happy; Peter insists she looks a lot like her dead mother. Orin, on the other hand, is a hot mess of
guilt and borderline insanity.

Lavinia tries to manage her brother's moods, and is super worried he'll tell somebody they
murdered Brant. Everybody tries to make the best of it while Orin seems to get weirder and
weirder. Consumed by guilt, and wanting to rejoin mommy, he kills himself, even though he was
supposed to marry Hazel. Lavinia, who was supposed to marry Peter, lies about having an affair
so he'll dump her, which he does.

Lavinia decides that she's doomed to live out her days in the Mannon home, surrounded by the
ghosts of her dead relatives, as punishment for what her family's done. Guilt's going to keep her
company for the rest of her life, and the play ends as Lavinia retreats into the house forever.

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 Themes

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.
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.

Electra
Dupa un mit grecesc, ea ar fi dat nastere Armoniei in urma legaturii pe care a avut-o cu Zeus.
Electra este cunoscuta din tragedia greaca, unde apare ca fiica a lui Agamemnon si Clitemnestrei.
Dupa uciderea lui Agamemnon, savarsita de Egist, iubitul Clitemnestrei, Electra va fi macinata
de dorinta de a-si vedea mama murind. Complexul Electrei corespunde in spatiul psihanalizei
complexului lui Oedip, insa cu nuante feminine.

Electra il va impinge pe Oreste, fratele ei, sa o ucida pe Clitemnestra, ajutandu-l sa infinda

pumnalul.

Fate, Repetition, and Substitution

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.

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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.

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