Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

134
Eugene O’Neill
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is “about” patricide and incest (Freud to the
contrary) or Hamlet is “about” fratricide and regicide. Rather, the
sensationalist events of the plot are the outward manifestations of a
toxic and extreme belief system that permeates the characters’ past,
present, and future. It is this worldview, which O’Neill ascribes to
the Puritan values of the New England patrician family of Mannon,
that is the focus of O’Neill’s play and the true antagonist of Mourning
Becomes Electra. This worldview is characterized by an obsessive focus
on sexuality and past actions, one’s own and those of others. Like the
Greek gods from whose rivalries and curses the characters of ancient
tragedies struggled to free themselves, the dour and oppressive Puritan
God likewise dominates the future of the Mannons by chaining them
to the past.
Their past, like that of the House of Atreus which serves as the
source material for O’Neill’s modern variation, is dominated by a curse
the nature of which differentiates the ancient story from the modern.
As Barrett H. Clark notes, “externally, [Mourning Becomes Electra] is a
retelling of the tragic tale of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes
and Electra . . . [but] here no mortal has offended a divinity; it is an
American New Englander who has transgressed the moral code of
his time and people . . .”(Clark 123). Just so, and yet the contrast goes
deeper than that, for in O’Neill’s quest to write a “modern psychological
drama using one of the old legend plots of Greek tragedy,” (Clark
128) he has not only secularized the curse, but he has moved its source
from an external action to an internal belief, which has the effect of
making the curse more powerful because more inescapable. In order
to make this contrast plain, an examination of the backstories for The
Orestia and Mourning Becomes Electra might be helpful.
The central conflict between Aeschylus’ brothers Thyestes and
Atreus, like that between O’Neill’s David and Abe Mannon, is
centered on sexual rivalry. Among other things, Thyestes has an affair
with Atreus’ wife, and is banished; David, however, had an affair not
with his brother Abe’s wife but with “the Canuck nurse girl who was
taking care of father’s little sister who died, and [he] had to marry her
because she was going to have a baby.” Abe, perhaps reacting with moral
fervor fueled by jealousy, “put them both out of the house . . .” (O’Neill
239). However, this is where the stories diverge. When Atreus finds
out about his wife’s affair with Thyestes, he seeks revenge: pretending
forgiveness, Atreus invited Thyestes and his young sons to return for