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142
Eugene O’Neill
to defeat the Mannon curse. While she will not be allowed to grasp
the paradise she found in the South Seas, not be allowed to find her
way to an innocent, healthy love, she will break the curse nonetheless
through her isolation. There will be no more Mannons, no more
sexuality necessary to bring into being another generation, and thus
no more hunted and haunted children polluting the earth with their
condemnation, punishment, and destruction. “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 to die!” (O’Neill 376).
It is a Pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless, one that, while
not restoring life and health, at least ends death and disease. The final
sound of the play is the sound of the shutters slamming closed and the
door shutting behind Lavinia. Unlike Aeschylus’ play, O’Neill’s Furies
are not transformed into benevolent Eumenides—that would be too
easy for a modern audience to accept, and certainly too easy for the
tormented O’Neill to do so—but they are confronted, and they do, at
last, die.
And perhaps that, for O’Neill, is the best that one can hope for.
WORKS CITED
Clark, Barrett H. Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays. 1926. New York:
Dover, 1947.
Falk, Doris V. Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension, 2nd ed. Staten Island, NY:
Gordian Press, 1981.
Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, A New Assessment. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1985.
Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Moorton, Richard F. “The Author as Oedipus in Mourning becomes Electra
and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Papers on Language and Literature 25
(Summer 1989): 304–25.
O’Neill, Eugene. Three Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Vintage Books, 1958.