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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mourning Becomes Electra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Justice, Revenge, and Lasting Peace
Familial Love vs. Carnal Desire
History and Repetition
Wartime Horror vs. Domestic Discontent
Lineage, Biology, and Destiny
Summary
Analysis
It’s April 1865, and the sun is setting on the Grecian architecture of the Mannon family’s New England mansion. The stark white columns cast menacing shadows. In the distance, a group of villagers sings the marching chant “John Brown’s Body.” Seth Beckwith, the Mannons’ elderly gardener, enters and begins to sing an old sea chanty called “Shenandoah.”
Right away, the play contrasts the reality of its time period—the end of the American Civil War, in which the Union Army emerged victorious in this same month of April 1865—with allusions to its classical source material. The Greek columns and temple-like structure here nod to the architecture of the Oresteia, the fourth-century B.C.E. tragedy on which O’Neill based his own plays. And even as the chanting is period-appropriate (“John Brown’s Body” was a Union marching song), it is also a reference to the chanting that traditionally began some ancient Greek dramas.
Themes
Seth is approached by three villagers: carpenter Amos Ames, his wife Louisa, and his wife’s cousin Minnie. These three villagers, known to love gossip and scandal, function as “a chorus representing the town, come to look and listen and spy on the rich and exclusive Mannons.” Seth shows off the Mannon home, explaining the family made their money in shipping. Although the Mannons are known for being stand-offish to villagers, Seth is proud that patriarch Ezra Mannon is a Union general in the Civil War.
The “chorus” of villagers here is perhaps O’Neill’s most direct formal allusion to the Oresteia, with its traditional “Greek chorus” of narrators; in both cases, each play of the respective trilogies begins with a different “chorus” weighing in on the central family’s dynamics. Ezra’s high status as a military general and shipping magnate hints why the Mannons, marked as more elite than their neighbors, isolate themselves: perhaps they consider the rest of the villagers beneath them.
Themes
Louisa notes that while the townsfolk admire Ezra, they distrust his wife Christine. Christine is beautiful, though her French heritage makes her seem too “foreign.” Amos is even more critical, arguing that there’s something “secret lookin’” about Christine’s unusual beauty—“‘s if it was a mask she’d put on. That’s the Mannon look.” Amos recalls the Mannon family’s greatest scandal: Ezra’s brother David got a “French Cannuck nurse girl” pregnant and then married her. Seth just ignores this, out of loyalty to the Mannons. Instead, he gripes about the family’s Black cook (“you’d think I was her slave,” he whines. “That’s what we get fur freein’ ‘em”).
Signs of the villagers’ racial and xenophobic prejudices are everywhere in this exchange, whether they are disparaging Christine for being “foreign” or implicitly affirming the cruel hierarchy of racial slavery (as Seth does with his jab about the cook). It is also important to note the “mask”-like features that all of the Mannons have, suggesting both the family’s secrecy and its shared visual “look” (even between family members who are not biologically related, like Ezra and Christine). Lastly, Amos’s story here about the “Cannuck” (Canadian) nurse is a crucial piece of foreshadowing for the family’s most painful scandal.
Themes
Lavinia (known as “Vinnie”) Mannon emerges from her house. Lavinia has her mother’s same angular features, but unlike Christine, Lavinia is not beautiful. Lavinia looks at her mother with deep hatred. Seth tells Vinnie the good news—the Confederate soldiers have suffered another major loss, and Union victory looks imminent.
Just as Christine has inherited the “Mannon” look, the stage directions now make clear that Christine and Lavinia—even if they seem to hate each other—are profoundly connected by their genetics. Moreover, just like the Oresteia, the play now juxtaposes military peace (the Civil War is ending) with domestic conflict (Lavinia and Christine despise each other).
Themes
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Seth asks Vinnie where she has been the last several days. At first, Vinnie says she has gone to stay with her friends Hazel and Peter—but Seth knows this is a lie. Vinnie then confesses that she actually went to New York. Seth seems unsurprised, hinting that he understands what Vinnie is struggling with. Before the two can connect more honestly, however, Hazel and her brother Peter arrive.
Seth and Vinnie emerge here as each other’s confidantes, a structural clue that Lavinia is the closest thing the Mannon family has to a protagonist. In contrast to the calm of the family’s New England town, the play often uses New York City to represent scandal and iniquity.
Themes
Peter is nervous around Lavinia, and Hazel teases him for having a crush on her. Meanwhile, Hazel is anxious for news from Orin, Vinnie’s brother, who has also gone off to fight with the Union. After Hazel leaves, Peter tells Vinnie that Hazel is in love with Orin. Peter then asks Vinnie to marry him—and she rejects him as she has done several times before, stating that she loves him “as a brother.” Peter wonders if Vinnie is rejecting him because she is in love with the ship captain who has recently been calling on her, but Vinnie insists that she just “hate[s] love” in general.
The quotidian sweetness of Peter and Hazel’s mirrored crushes stands in clear opposition to the tensions roiling underneath the Mannon family’s daily life—just one of many juxtapositions the plays use to emphasize the characters’ tragic fates. Lavinia’s comment that she loves Peter “as a brother” is tinged with dramatic irony, as the “love” Lavinia and her real brother Orin feel for each other often tips beyond the platonic into the incestuous.
Themes
Just as Vinnie starts to talk about the captain’s “romantic” adventures overseas, Christine appears, and Peter leaves. Christine chastises Lavinia for being rude to her “one devoted swain,” while Lavinia asks her mother about her trip—allegedly, Christine was in New York City to visit her ailing father. Christine dodges the question, instead complaining that the Mannons’ marble home looks too much like the “whited sepulcher” from the Bible.
Christine’s cruelty to her daughter, mocking Lavinia for the beauty she lacks, signals a mother-daughter relationship founded on competition and jealousy. The biblical “whited sepulcher” Christine references is often used to indicate hypocrisy—a building that appears to be outwardly virtuous or holy (painted “white”) is in fact filled with corruption inside.
Themes
Christine also mentions that she ran into the ship captain Adam Brant on the street in New York, and now he wants to call on Lavinia. Lavinia tells Christine that she will need to have a talk with her later that evening and wonders if Brant’s visit has anything to do with the flowers Christine has spent the whole day gathering. Frustrated by Vinnie’s foreboding manner, Christine leaves, and Seth returns, warning Vinnie about Captain Brant—and suggesting that he might look familiar to Vinnie.
It now becomes clear that whatever brought Lavinia to New York had something to do with spying on her mother—and possibly with trying to better understand her mother’s ties to Adam Brant. Seth’s hint to Vinnie that Brant should look familiar is especially notable given how much the play has already emphasized the Mannon family members’ resemblances to each other.
Themes
After a second, Vinnie realizes why she recognizes Brant: he is her uncle David’s son, the child he had with the Canadian nurse. Indeed, Seth has figured out that Brant’s real last name is Brantôme—Brant is short for his mother Marie Brantôme’s surname. As Vinnie wonders how she can test out Seth’s theory, Brant appears in the drive. He is handsome and striking, with the same sense of wearing a “life-like mask” that all the Mannons seem to possess.
Already, the Mannons’ incestuous undertones begin to show through: Brant, initially presented as a potential lover for Lavinia, is actually her cousin. And indeed, once audiences get a glimpse of Brant, the “mask”-like expression he wears immediately links him to the Mannons—in their classical, almost ancient stoniness, and in the sense that they are all hiding their true identities and feelings behind their stoic “masks.”
Themes
Brant approaches Lavinia, telling her he is glad to be alone with her and reminding her of when they kissed on a late-night walk a few weeks ago. Lavinia ignores this, instead telling Brant that the war will soon end, meaning that Ezra will return home. Lavinia also passionately insists that she loves her father “better than anyone in the world.” Brant wonders why Lavinia is so odd, refusing to give into his advances.
Though Lavinia has earlier claimed to “hate love” as a whole, Brant’s words now suggest that Lavinia really did feel some attraction to him—even if she tries to deny those feelings now (perhaps because of what she has found out in New York). Lavinia’s passionate love for her father also gestures to Vinnie’s incestuous desire for Ezra (which Christine will later directly name).
Themes
Vinnie pushes on, accusing Brant of preferring his ships and his adventures—including the indigenous women he met on a journey to the Blessed Isles—to her. When Brant tries to assure Vinnie that he only has eyes for her, Vinnie explodes, telling Brant that she knows he is actually the son David Mannon had with Marie Brantôme. In his shock, Brant confesses that this is the truth and accuses Vinnie of the same Mannon elitism that destroyed his mother.
Vinnie’s simultaneous enchantment with and prejudice against the indigenous women in these so-called “Blessed Isles” hints at the paradoxical obsession all of the Mannons seem to have with island imagery, blending excitement with disgust. And the fact that this conversation is followed by Brant’s outburst about the Mannon family’s cruelty to working-class Marie only cements that Lavinia’s exoticism of these islands is deeply linked to the same Mannon elitism that destroyed Brant’s youth.
Themes
Brant then goes further, telling Vinnie she is a coward, “like all Mannons, when it comes time to facing the truth about themselves.” Brant believes that part of the reason Ezra was so cruel to David is because he was jealous—and because he himself loved Marie. With great pain, Brant recalls how David’s financial loss caused him to turn against Marie and a young Brant, even beating them once in a drunken rage. Eventually, David killed himself, leaving Brant and Marie to fend for themselves, destitute.
Brant’s motivations now come into focus: he resents all of the Mannons for their “masks,” suggesting the family members hide their “truths” not just from others but from themselves. The fact that Ezra let his nephew starve, despite his tremendous wealth, speaks to the depth of his selfishness (and perhaps Ezra’s bitterness over his own thwarted crush on Marie Brantôme).
Themes
When Marie got sick, Brant begged Ezra for help—and Marie died shortly thereafter. Ezra is “as guilty of murder as anyone he ever sent to the rope when he was a judge,” Brant insists. Brant then swears that he will take revenge on Ezra. Vinnie hints that Brant might be using Christine to take his revenge, and the insinuation makes Brant panic. But Vinnie will not say anything else, only promising to talk to her mother that night. “With a grotesque catching at a lover’s manner,” Brant tries to convince Vinnie that she is the only person he loves—but she will not hear it.
Like the Oresteia before it, Electra is fascinated by the difference between vigilante revenge and formal trial justice—but in raising the matter of Ezra’s guilt, despite his status as a “judge,” Brant casts doubt on the entire court system. It is also important to question Brant’s “grotesque catching at a lover’s manner”—is his pursuit of Lavinia just a ruse, covering up something more sinister (maybe involving Christine)?
Themes
