Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Mourning Becomes Electra 135
a banquet. When Thyestes accepts, Atreus extracts his revenge by
killing Thyestes’ sons and serving them to his unsuspecting guest as
the main course of the homecoming feast. When Thyestes discovers
this abomination after having eaten his fill, he curses Atreus and his
descendents, thus setting up the events that make up The Oresteia. The
curse, then, is based not only on an act of extreme violence, the killing
of a man’s progeny, but on the horrible violation of the taboo against
cannibalism. In short, this is no ordinary offense! In addition, the
curse comes from the victim of this act, not the perpetrator.
For Abe Mannon, however, there is no similar violent transgression,
nor is there an actual curse, for that matter. Rather, David and
his paramour Marie are banished to “the West,” apparently with little
resistance, after which Abe cheats David out of most of his inheritance,
leaving him destitute. In a final act of disgust and rejection, Abe
proceeds to tear down his own home and build a new one “because
he wouldn’t live where his brother had disgraced the family.” (O’Neill
239). The house he built resembles, to Christine, the “whited sepulcher”
of the Bible, “which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within
full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” (Matthew 23:27). It
is, Christine says, a “temple for [Abe’s] hatred,” with its “pagan temple
front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness!” (O’Neill 237). In
summary, the House of Mannon has been poisoned not by any curse
laid upon it by the victim, David Mannon, but rather by Abe Mannon
himself, and his Puritan hatred which is passed down from generation
to generation through the familial mansion itself.
Another revealing departure from the Aeschylean tragedy is
O’Neill’s treatment of the Furies, ancient gods whose role is to punish
those who violate long-standing taboos. Much of the third part of
The Oresteia is taken up with Orestes’ trial for matricide, in which the
Furies serve as prosecutor. In Mourning Becomes Electra, in contrast,
the Furies take the form of ancestors whose paintings hang in the
mansion, and whose way of viewing the world has been passed from
generation to generation as internalized guilt. The accusations that
would be spoken by the Furies in Aeschylus’ play are spoken by the
Mannons themselves in O’Neill’s play, accusations that are as likely
to be directed at the self as at others. And unlike the blood-thirsty
Furies, from whom Orestes is freed at the end of the trial and who
are ultimately transformed into the benevolent Eumenides, the overwhelming
guilt of the Mannons seems to be inescapable, because they