Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

138
Eugene O’Neill
even extending it outside the immediate family to Adam Brantome,
who looks like Ezra and Orin, and his mother, Marie, who has the
same seductive hair as Christine and Lavinia. Even Seth, the family
gardener, has taken on the mask-like characteristics of the Mannon
family! “Ultimately,” Moorton summarizes insightfully, “the Mannons
may be reduced to the same tragic couple.” (Moorton 319). The effect
of this marked physical resemblance between characters is to erase their
individual identities and replace them with that of archetypes.
To understand this, we must go back to roots of the play in the
curse that has been passed down from father to son, husband to wife,
parent to child. Each generation is desperately trying to escape the
curse of the Puritan mores that have shaped their approach to life, a
worldview that values Thanatos over Eros, death over life; that thrives
on hatred rather than love, and, perhaps most importantly, that rejects
sexuality as sinful and damning. “That’s always been the Mannon’s
way of thinking,” Ezra says. “They went to the white meeting-house
on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was dying. Being born was
starting to die. Death was being born.” (O’Neill 269). To embrace
death means to reject life, and thus to reject the sexuality that leads
to new life, which is at the very heart of the Mannon curse, and is the
cause of all of the violence and hatred that fills the play. Sex is the catalyst
for every condemnation, every act of violence, every rejection.
Each grouping, each identical tragic couple, makes their own
attempt to escape the Mannon curse, but none are successful until
finally, after multiple murders, suicides, and emotional self-destruction,
only one character is left to claim the final, ironic victory over the past.
O’Neill takes us through a process of spiritual exorcism that begins in
punishment, proceeds to flight, and is ended by defiant resignation.
The first attempts to break the curse use condemnation, punishment,
and destruction as their primary weapon. Confronted with
sexuality in the form of the “foreign” French Canuck nurse and his
smitten brother, Abe Mannon, like the Old Testament God faced
with the sin of Adam and Eve, condemns his brother’s act, punishes
the guilty with banishment and poverty, and destroys the very house in
which the sin occurred to prevent infection. But despite the seeming
clean sweep, the curse remains. Children must be sired to further the
Mannon line, which means sexuality must be enjoined, with the attendant
Puritan disgust. In short, for the House of Mannon to survive, it
must re-embrace the curse.