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MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
(EUGENE O’NEILL)
,.
“ ‘I Forgive Myself!’: Escaping the
Ever-Present Past in Eugene O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra”
by Scott Walters, University
of North Carolina at Asheville
It is fitting that Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 epic, multi-part family drama
Mourning Becomes Electra should appear in a volume of essays focused
on taboos in literature, for the play contains more prohibited desires
and forbidden acts per page, I suspect, than just about any work of
dramatic literature in the Western canon. Indeed, by the time the three
parts of the play have reached an end, the tally of taboos is impressive
indeed: one Electra Complex (Lavinia and her father, Ezra), two
Oedipus Complexes (Orin and his mother, Christine; and perhaps
more obliquely, Adam and the mother-daughter duo of Christine and
Lavinia, both of whom closely resemble Adam’s mother, Marie Brantome),
one instance of near brother-sister incest (Orin and Lavinia),
two murders (Christine kills her husband, Ezra; and Orin and Lavinia
kill their mother’s lover, Adam Brant), and two suicides (Christine
and Orin). In fact, at the end of the play there is only a single major
character left standing: O’Neill’s titular Electra-figure, Lavinia. And
even she, as the curtain falls, is about to lock herself inside the family
mansion never to return, a sort of living suicide, if you will.
However, don’t be overly distracted by this festival of the forbidden.
O’Neill’s play is not “about” the taboos themselves, any more than
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