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Mourning Becomes Electra 137
In this speech of Lavinia’s, the Gelbs argue, O’Neill “forecasts
his own fate in the last years of his life” when he was facing his own
dead as he wrote his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
“I’m not going the way Mother and Orin went,” Lavinia asserts in the
final speech to which the Gelbs refer, meaning she will not commit
suicide, because
That’s escaping punishment. And there’s no one left to punish
me. I’m the last Mannon. I’ve got to punish myself. Living alone
here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison!
I’ll never go out or see anyone! I’ll have the shutters nailed
closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I’ll live alone with the
dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the
curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! (O’Neill 376)
Such an autobiographical interpretation is hard to resist, especially
given how much of O’Neill’s oeuvre has roots in his own experience,
and the Gelbs’ interpretation certainly makes sense of Lavinia’s
central role as the play’s protagonist. And indeed, other critics have
also taken an autobiographical view, but have found O’Neill hiding in
other characters than Lavinia. Richard F. Moorton, Jr., for instance,
in his essay “The Author as Oedipus in Mourning Becomes Electra and
Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” argues that Ezra represents O’Neill’s
father, James, Christine is his mother, Mary, and O’Neill is the
mother-obsessed Orin. But who, then, is Lavinia, who stands at the
play’s center? She is, rather improbably given Lavinia’s defiant character,
“a younger version of O’Neill’s mother.” (Moorton 312). And
the biographical identifications don’t stop there. What of Marie Brantome,
whose pregnancy sets off the Mannon curse? O’Neill’s mother,
too. And Adam Brant, Brantome’s sailor-son who is Chistine’s and
Lavinia’s lover? Why, O’Neill himself, in his former life as a sailor. In
Moorton’s interpretation, we soon find ourselves in a familial house of
mirrors baffling in its labyrinthine complexity.
However, while finding a one-to-one correspondence between real
people and fictional characters can be confusing and, in my opinion, not
very helpful in understanding the play itself, Moorton’s more general
observation that “All the Mannon men look alike, as do all the Mannon
women” is illuminating. (Moorton 319). O’Neill repeatedly makes this
family resemblance explicit through his stage directions and dialogue,