Lavinia “Vinnie” Mannon Character Analysis

LAVINIA—(in a dry, brittle tone) I remember your admiration for the naked native women. You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

BRANT—(surprised—sizing her up puzzledly) So you remember that, do you? (then romantically) Aye! And they live in as near the garden of paradise before sin was discovered as you'll find on this earth! Unless you've seen it, you can't picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea! The clouds like down on the mountain tops, the sun drowsing in your blood, and always the surf on the barrier reef singing a croon in your ears like a lullaby! The Blessed Isles, I call them! You can forget there all men's dirty dreams of greed and power!

CHRISTINE—I know you, Vinnie! I've watched you ever since you were little, trying to do exactly what you're doing now! You've tried to become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You've always schemed to steal my place!

LAVINIA—(wildly) No! It’s you who have stolen all love from me since the time I was born!

MANNON—Peace ought to be signed soon. The President's assassination is a frightful calamity. But it can't change the course of events.

LAVINIA—Poor man! It's dreadful he should die just at his moment of victory.

MANNON—Yes! (then after a pause—somberly) All victory ends in the defeat of death. That's sure. But does defeat end in the victory of death? That's what I wonder!

ORIN—My mind is still full of ghosts. I can’t grasp anything but war, in which he was so alive. [Ezra] was the war to me—the war that would never end until I died. I can’t understand peace […]

Oh, I know what you’re thinking! I used to be such a nice gentlemanly cuss, didn’t I?—and now— Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn’t improve one’s manners!

CHRISTINE—We’ve always been so close, you and I. I feel you are really—my flesh and blood! She isn’t! She’s your father’s! You’re a part of me!

ORIN—(with strange eagerness) Yes! I feel that too, Mother!

CHRISTINE— […] We had a secret little world of our own in the old days, didn’t we?—which no one but us knew about.

ORIN—(happily) You bet we did! No Mannons allowed was our password, remember!

CHRISTINE—And that’s why your father and Vinnie could never forgive us! But we’ll make that little world of our own again […] I want to make up to you for all the injustice you suffered at your father’s hands. It may seem a hard thing to say about the dead, but he was jealous of you. He hated you because he knew I loved you better than anything in the world!

ORIN—Finally those islands came to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security. I used to dream I was there. […] There was no one there but you and me. And yet I never saw you, that's the funny part. I only felt you all around me. The breaking of the waves was your voice. The sky was the same color as your eyes. The warm sand was like your skin. The whole island was you. […]

You’ve still got the same beautiful hair, Mother. That hasn’t changed. (He reaches up and touches her hair caressingly. She gives a little shudder of repulsion and draws away from him but he is too happy to notice). Oh, Mother, it’s going to be wonderful from now on! We’ll get Vinnie to marry Peter and there will just be you and I!

ORIN—Before I had gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams—and they change to Father’s face—or to mine— What does that mean, Vinnie?

LAVINIA—I don’t know! I’ve got to talk to you! For heaven’s sake, forget the war! It’s over now!

ORIN—Not inside us who killed!

ORIN—Vinnie! Do you realize what it would mean—?

LAVINIA—I realize only too well. You and I, who are innocent, would suffer a worse punishment than the guilty—for we'd have to live on! It would mean that Father's memory and that of all the honorable Mannon dead would be dragged through the horror of a murder trial! But I'd rather suffer that than let the murder of our father go unpunished!

ORIN—God! To think I hoped home would be an escape from death! I should never have come back to life—from my island of peace! (then staring at his mother strangely) But that’s lost now! You’re my lost island, aren’t you, Mother?

ORIN—This is like my dream. I’ve killed him before—over and over!

LAVINIA—Orin!

ORIN—Do you remember me telling you how the faces of the men I killed came back and changed to Father’s face and finally became my own? (He smiles grimly.) He looks like me, too! Maybe I’ve committed suicide!

ORIN—I heard you planning to go with him to the island I had told you about—our island—that was you and I! […] But you’ll forget him! I’ll make you forget him! I’ll make you happy! We’ll leave Vinnie here and go on a long voyage—to the South Seas […]

LAVINIA—(with bitter scorn) Orin! After all that’s happened, are you becoming her crybaby again? […] Leave her alone! Go in the house! (As he hesitates—more sharply) Do you hear me? March! […] He paid the just penalty for his crime. You know it was justice. It was the only way true justice could be done.

ORIN—Did you ask her why she stole Mother’s colors? I can’t see why—yet—and I don’t think she knows herself. But it will prove a strange reason, I’m certain of that, when I do discover it!

PETER—(surprised) You stopped at the Islands?

ORIN—Yes. […] But they turned out to be Vinnie’s islands, not mine. They only made me sick—and the naked women disgusted me. I guess I’m too much of a Mannon, after all, to turn into a pagan. But you have seen Vinnie with the men—!

[…] Handsome and romantic-looking, weren’t they, Vinnie?—with colored rags around their middles and flowers stuck over their ears! Oh, she was a bit shocked at first by their dances, but afterwards she fell in love with the Islanders! […] Oh, I wasn’t as blind as I pretended to be! Do you remember Avahanni?

LAVINIA—I loved those Islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there mysterious and beautiful—a good spirit—of love—coming out of the land and sea. It made me forget death. There was no hereafter. There was only this world—the warm earth in the moonlight […] the natives dancing naked and innocent—without knowledge of sin!

[…] Oh, Peter, hold me close to you! I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! (She kisses him passionately. He returns it, aroused and at the same time a little shocked by her boldness. She goes on longingly.) We’ll be married soon, won’t we […] We’ll make an island for ourselves on the 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!

ORIN—I hate the daylight. It’s like an accusing eye! No, we’ve renounced the day, in which normal people live—or rather it has renounced us. Perpetual night—darkness of death in life—that’s the fitting habitat for guilt! You believe you can escape that, but I’m not so foolish!

[…] And I find artificial light more appropriate for my work—man’s light, not God’s—man’s feeble striving to understand himself, to exist for himself in the darkness! It’s a symbol of his life—a lamp burning out in a room of waiting shadows!

LAVINIA—(sharply) Your work? What work?

ORIN—(mockingly) Studying the law of crime and punishment, as you saw.

LAVINIA—What kind of history do you mean?

ORIN—A true history of all the family crimes, beginning with Grandfather Abe’s—all of the crimes, including ours, do you understand?

LAVINIA—(aghast) Do you mean to tell me you’ve actually written—

ORIN—Yes! I’ve tried to trace to its secret hiding place in the Mannon past the evil destiny behind our lives! I thought if I could see it clearly in the past I might be able to foretell what fate is in store for us, Vinnie—but I haven’t dared predict that […]

So many strange hidden things out of the Mannon past combine in you! For one example, do you remember the first mate, Wilkins, on the voyage to Frisco? […] Adam Brant was a ship’s officer, too, wasn’t he?

ORIN—(with a quiet mad insistence) Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s place and you’re Mother? That’s the evil destiny out of the past I hadn’t dared predict! I’m the Mannon you’re chained to!

HAZEL—You don’t want her to marry Peter?

ORIN—No! She can’t have happiness! She’s got to be punished! (suddenly taking her hand—excitedly) And listen, Hazel! You mustn’t love me any more. The only love I can know now is the love of guilt for guilt which breeds more guilt—until you get so deep at the bottom of hell there is no lower you can sink and you rest there in peace!

ORIN—I love you now with all the guilt in me—the guilt we share! Perhaps I love you too much, Vinnie!

LAVINIA—I don’t know what you’re saying!

ORIN—There are times now when you don’t seem to be my sister, not Mother, but some stranger with the same beautiful hair— (He touches her hair caressingly. She pulls violently away. He laughs wildly.) Perhaps you’re Marie Brantôme, eh? And you say there are no ghosts in this house?

LAVINIA—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 […] Take me, Adam! [She is brought back to herself with a start by this name escaping her—bewilderedly, laughing idiotically) Adam? Why did I call you Adam? I never even heard that name before—outside of the Bible! (then suddenly with a hopeless, dead finality) Always the dead between! […]

PETER—Vinnie! You’re talking crazy! […] What happened to you on the Islands. Was it something there? Something to do with that native?

LAVINIA—[…] I won’t lie anymore! Orin suspected I’d lusted with him! And I had! […] He had me! I was his fancy woman!

LAVINIA—I’m not going the way Mother and Orin went. 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 close 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! […] It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!

LAVINIA—(in a dry, brittle tone) I remember your admiration for the naked native women. You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

BRANT—(surprised—sizing her up puzzledly) So you remember that, do you? (then romantically) Aye! And they live in as near the garden of paradise before sin was discovered as you'll find on this earth! Unless you've seen it, you can't picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea! The clouds like down on the mountain tops, the sun drowsing in your blood, and always the surf on the barrier reef singing a croon in your ears like a lullaby! The Blessed Isles, I call them! You can forget there all men's dirty dreams of greed and power!

CHRISTINE—I know you, Vinnie! I've watched you ever since you were little, trying to do exactly what you're doing now! You've tried to become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You've always schemed to steal my place!

LAVINIA—(wildly) No! It’s you who have stolen all love from me since the time I was born!

MANNON—Peace ought to be signed soon. The President's assassination is a frightful calamity. But it can't change the course of events.

LAVINIA—Poor man! It's dreadful he should die just at his moment of victory.

MANNON—Yes! (then after a pause—somberly) All victory ends in the defeat of death. That's sure. But does defeat end in the victory of death? That's what I wonder!

ORIN—My mind is still full of ghosts. I can’t grasp anything but war, in which he was so alive. [Ezra] was the war to me—the war that would never end until I died. I can’t understand peace […]

Oh, I know what you’re thinking! I used to be such a nice gentlemanly cuss, didn’t I?—and now— Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn’t improve one’s manners!

CHRISTINE—We’ve always been so close, you and I. I feel you are really—my flesh and blood! She isn’t! She’s your father’s! You’re a part of me!

ORIN—(with strange eagerness) Yes! I feel that too, Mother!

CHRISTINE— […] We had a secret little world of our own in the old days, didn’t we?—which no one but us knew about.

ORIN—(happily) You bet we did! No Mannons allowed was our password, remember!

CHRISTINE—And that’s why your father and Vinnie could never forgive us! But we’ll make that little world of our own again […] I want to make up to you for all the injustice you suffered at your father’s hands. It may seem a hard thing to say about the dead, but he was jealous of you. He hated you because he knew I loved you better than anything in the world!

ORIN—Finally those islands came to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security. I used to dream I was there. […] There was no one there but you and me. And yet I never saw you, that's the funny part. I only felt you all around me. The breaking of the waves was your voice. The sky was the same color as your eyes. The warm sand was like your skin. The whole island was you. […]

You’ve still got the same beautiful hair, Mother. That hasn’t changed. (He reaches up and touches her hair caressingly. She gives a little shudder of repulsion and draws away from him but he is too happy to notice). Oh, Mother, it’s going to be wonderful from now on! We’ll get Vinnie to marry Peter and there will just be you and I!

ORIN—Before I had gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams—and they change to Father’s face—or to mine— What does that mean, Vinnie?

LAVINIA—I don’t know! I’ve got to talk to you! For heaven’s sake, forget the war! It’s over now!

ORIN—Not inside us who killed!

ORIN—Vinnie! Do you realize what it would mean—?

LAVINIA—I realize only too well. You and I, who are innocent, would suffer a worse punishment than the guilty—for we'd have to live on! It would mean that Father's memory and that of all the honorable Mannon dead would be dragged through the horror of a murder trial! But I'd rather suffer that than let the murder of our father go unpunished!

ORIN—God! To think I hoped home would be an escape from death! I should never have come back to life—from my island of peace! (then staring at his mother strangely) But that’s lost now! You’re my lost island, aren’t you, Mother?

ORIN—This is like my dream. I’ve killed him before—over and over!

LAVINIA—Orin!

ORIN—Do you remember me telling you how the faces of the men I killed came back and changed to Father’s face and finally became my own? (He smiles grimly.) He looks like me, too! Maybe I’ve committed suicide!

ORIN—I heard you planning to go with him to the island I had told you about—our island—that was you and I! […] But you’ll forget him! I’ll make you forget him! I’ll make you happy! We’ll leave Vinnie here and go on a long voyage—to the South Seas […]

LAVINIA—(with bitter scorn) Orin! After all that’s happened, are you becoming her crybaby again? […] Leave her alone! Go in the house! (As he hesitates—more sharply) Do you hear me? March! […] He paid the just penalty for his crime. You know it was justice. It was the only way true justice could be done.

ORIN—Did you ask her why she stole Mother’s colors? I can’t see why—yet—and I don’t think she knows herself. But it will prove a strange reason, I’m certain of that, when I do discover it!

PETER—(surprised) You stopped at the Islands?

ORIN—Yes. […] But they turned out to be Vinnie’s islands, not mine. They only made me sick—and the naked women disgusted me. I guess I’m too much of a Mannon, after all, to turn into a pagan. But you have seen Vinnie with the men—!

[…] Handsome and romantic-looking, weren’t they, Vinnie?—with colored rags around their middles and flowers stuck over their ears! Oh, she was a bit shocked at first by their dances, but afterwards she fell in love with the Islanders! […] Oh, I wasn’t as blind as I pretended to be! Do you remember Avahanni?

LAVINIA—I loved those Islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there mysterious and beautiful—a good spirit—of love—coming out of the land and sea. It made me forget death. There was no hereafter. There was only this world—the warm earth in the moonlight […] the natives dancing naked and innocent—without knowledge of sin!

[…] Oh, Peter, hold me close to you! I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! (She kisses him passionately. He returns it, aroused and at the same time a little shocked by her boldness. She goes on longingly.) We’ll be married soon, won’t we […] We’ll make an island for ourselves on the 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!

ORIN—I hate the daylight. It’s like an accusing eye! No, we’ve renounced the day, in which normal people live—or rather it has renounced us. Perpetual night—darkness of death in life—that’s the fitting habitat for guilt! You believe you can escape that, but I’m not so foolish!

[…] And I find artificial light more appropriate for my work—man’s light, not God’s—man’s feeble striving to understand himself, to exist for himself in the darkness! It’s a symbol of his life—a lamp burning out in a room of waiting shadows!

LAVINIA—(sharply) Your work? What work?

ORIN—(mockingly) Studying the law of crime and punishment, as you saw.

LAVINIA—What kind of history do you mean?

ORIN—A true history of all the family crimes, beginning with Grandfather Abe’s—all of the crimes, including ours, do you understand?

LAVINIA—(aghast) Do you mean to tell me you’ve actually written—

ORIN—Yes! I’ve tried to trace to its secret hiding place in the Mannon past the evil destiny behind our lives! I thought if I could see it clearly in the past I might be able to foretell what fate is in store for us, Vinnie—but I haven’t dared predict that […]

So many strange hidden things out of the Mannon past combine in you! For one example, do you remember the first mate, Wilkins, on the voyage to Frisco? […] Adam Brant was a ship’s officer, too, wasn’t he?

ORIN—(with a quiet mad insistence) Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s place and you’re Mother? That’s the evil destiny out of the past I hadn’t dared predict! I’m the Mannon you’re chained to!

HAZEL—You don’t want her to marry Peter?

ORIN—No! She can’t have happiness! She’s got to be punished! (suddenly taking her hand—excitedly) And listen, Hazel! You mustn’t love me any more. The only love I can know now is the love of guilt for guilt which breeds more guilt—until you get so deep at the bottom of hell there is no lower you can sink and you rest there in peace!

ORIN—I love you now with all the guilt in me—the guilt we share! Perhaps I love you too much, Vinnie!

LAVINIA—I don’t know what you’re saying!

ORIN—There are times now when you don’t seem to be my sister, not Mother, but some stranger with the same beautiful hair— (He touches her hair caressingly. She pulls violently away. He laughs wildly.) Perhaps you’re Marie Brantôme, eh? And you say there are no ghosts in this house?

LAVINIA—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 […] Take me, Adam! [She is brought back to herself with a start by this name escaping her—bewilderedly, laughing idiotically) Adam? Why did I call you Adam? I never even heard that name before—outside of the Bible! (then suddenly with a hopeless, dead finality) Always the dead between! […]

PETER—Vinnie! You’re talking crazy! […] What happened to you on the Islands. Was it something there? Something to do with that native?

LAVINIA—[…] I won’t lie anymore! Orin suspected I’d lusted with him! And I had! […] He had me! I was his fancy woman!

LAVINIA—I’m not going the way Mother and Orin went. 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 close 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! […] It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!