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Mourning Becomes Electra 141
their evil talk. We’ll make an island for ourselves on land, and we’ll
have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they
can never be possessed by hate and death! . . . I want to be rid of the
past.” (O’Neill 349).
But it is not to be. Orin, consumed by guilt, has written all the
crimes of the Mannons into a book, a confession of the Mannon sins,
including his and Lavinia’s murder of Adam. He will destroy it only
if she agrees to give up Peter and, as a way of making sure she never
leaves him, consent to have sex with him. “You would feel as guilty
then as I do!” he reasons. (O’Neill 365). Lavinia reacts with disgust
and rage at his suggestion, and rejects his plea that they confess their
crimes and accept their punishment. “I hate you!” she shouts. “I wish
you were dead! You’re too vile to live!” And she concludes, “You’d kill
yourself if you weren’t a coward!” (O’Neill 365). Seeing the escape
hatch open, Orin accepts her directive, following his mother’s path
and forgiving her trespasses along the way.
But Lavinia is not so easily beaten. “I’m not asking God or anybody
for forgiveness,” she cries defiantly. “I forgive myself!” (O’Neill 372).
Although she resumes wearing mourning clothes following Orin’s
suicide, and her face and body have once again assumed their angular,
masklike look, she is still determined to marry Peter and escape the
curse of the Mannons. “Love can’t live in it,” she says of the house.
“We’ll go away and leave it alone to die—and we’ll forget the dead.”
(O’Neill 372). But the Mannon ancestors are not to be gotten rid of
that easily. Lavinia feels doubt creeping into her relationship with
Peter, the shadow of Orin and the Mannon dead coming between
them. In desperation, she pleads with Peter to marry her that day,
without waiting. “Kiss me! Hold me close! Want me! Want me so
much you’d murder anyone to have me! I did that—for you! Take me
in this house of the dead and love me! Our love will drive the dead
away! It will shame them back into death!” Carried away completely,
she cries out “Want me! Take, me Adam!” (O’Neill 374). And in that
moment when she calls Peter the name of the man she really wanted,
Adam, the man her mother took from her, the spell is broken and she
realizes the impossibility of escape. “I can’t marry you, Peter,” she says
numbly to her stunned and baffled beau. “Love isn’t permitted to me.
The dead are too strong!” (O’Neill 374).
Nevertheless, she will not be defeated by the dead, but instead will
remain defiant. In her final speech, quoted above, she takes her stand