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136
Eugene O’Neill
are themselves prosecutor, defense, judge, and jury. Heredity is destiny
in O’Neill’s world; the past is the future, and the present is poisoned
by it. There is no escape.
The central role played in O’Neill’s play by the Electra-character,
Lavinia, is also a significant departure from the source material, and
demands further investigation. Electra appears in only the middle
play of The Oresteia, and after she gains Orestes’ commitment to
murder Clytemnestra, she virtually disappears. She is not present for
the return of her father, Agamamenon, from the Trojan War in part
one, nor is she brought to trial along with her brother Orestes for
murdering Clytemnestra in part three. Even in the play Euripides
wrote that is named after her, Electra’s ultimate fate is to be forced to
marry Orestes’ friend, Pylades, a rather tepid end to such an important
character. O’Neill seems to have agreed, writing in his notebook about
his own play, “have given Yankee Electra tragic end worthy of her”
(Floyd 401). That end, as noted previously, is to be the only surviving
Mannon. As O’Neill’s biographers, Arthur and Barbara Gelb, write
“Finally Lavinia condemns herself to a life locked away from the
world—bound, as she declares, ‘to the Mannon dead’ . . .” This is
significant, the Gelbs assert, because it paralleled O’Neill’s own life.
Like Lavinia, they argue, “O’Neill felt himself bound to and haunted
by his own dead. “I’m the last Mannon,” says Lavinia at the end of
the play, echoing O’Neill’s mournful cry to a friend, soon after [his
brother] Jamie’s death, “I’m the last of the O’Neills!” (Arthur Gelb &
Barbara Gelb 721).
Arguing that Mourning Becomes Electra was “yet another examination
of the emotional fabric of the O’Neill family”—an observation
made by other critics as well—the Gelbs go on, in a statement that is
as daring as it is insightful, to say that “As [O’Neill] conceived it, the
legend [of the House of Atreus] now fitted into his own specific frame
of reference. Lavinia (here a symbolic representation of O’Neill himself)
loses, in rapid succession (and in the same order as O’Neill) first her
father, then her mother, then her brother.” Indeed, they continue,
“Although Lavinia is a woman, she is, in many ways, one of the most
personally revealing characters O’Neill ever created, and her final
speech is one of the most soul-baring O’Neill ever wrote; it incorporates
both his consuming preoccupation with the act of suicide and his
mordant belief in the inevitability of an even crueler self-punishment.”
(Arthur Gelb & Barbara Gelb 721).