Mourning Becomes Electra Study Guide

Eugene O’Neill was born in New York City and raised between New York and the seaside town of New London, Connecticut. O’Neill had a difficult childhood: his father, an Irish immigrant and a prominent stage actor, struggled with alcoholism, while his mother developed an dependency on morphine following O’Neill’s birth. After being expelled from Princeton University for a series of elaborate pranks, O’Neill got a job on a ship, fostering a lifelong love of the sea that would later show up in many of his plays. When O’Neill returned to American shores, he befriended writers and communist activists in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where he began to write plays. O’Neill’s first published play, Beyond the Horizon, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama after it premiered on Broadway in 1920. O’Neill continued to build critical and popular success with The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1922), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), which many saw as a turning point in his career toward even darker material. Later in life, as O’Neill struggled with Parkinson’s disease, he penned Long Day’s Journey into Night (1943), a largely autobiographical play that many consider to be the greatest play in the American canon.

Mourning Becomes Electra begins in the final days of the American Civil War, as the Union army—in which patriarch Ezra Mannon was a general—triumphed over the Southern Confederacy. Because the Civil War involved Americans fighting against one another, it is commonly talked about as pitting “brother against brother,” lending an explicitly familial undertone to the violent conflict (the deadliest in United States history). It’s no wonder, then, that just as the Civil War sometimes reflected domestic tensions, the domestic unit in O’Neill’s play so often feels warlike. Equally interesting is the impact O’Neill’s own era—the late 1920s and early 1930s—has on the play. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had recently achieved global fame with his concepts of the “Oedipal complex” and the “Electra complex,” both of which posited that all children subconsciously lust after their parents (as Lavinia and Orin do in Mourning Becomes Electra). And perhaps unsurprisingly, O’Neill was watching members of his own generation process some of the same traumatic war experiences as the characters in Electra, as O’Neill and his community had come of age during the carnage of World War I.

Mourning Becomes Electra explicitly rewrites and updates the trilogy the Oresteia (written in the fourth century B.C.E.), by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus. Both three-play cycles concern themselves with revenge, incestuous relationships, tragic destiny, and legal justice. Both trilogies also focus on the difficult transition from wartime to peace. In writing his own Electra, O’Neill was also likely influenced by other Greek plays with the same central storyline, like Euripides’s Electra and Orestes and Sophocles’s Electra. But if Electra’s subject matter stems from the ancient Greeks, O’Neill’s stylistic influences were more contemporary. Specifically, O’Neill often cited the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (most famous for his 1888 play Miss Julie) as influencing his focus on realistic dialogue and domestic settings. Alongside the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Strindberg is often credited with pioneering the dramatic style of “realism,” which aimed to capture the rhythms of quotidian human speech. O’Neill is largely responsible for importing that style to the United States (replacing the highly stylized melodrama that was popular at the time).