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Homecoming: Act 1
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
The scene shifts to inside the Mannon house, where a giant portrait of Ezra adorns the study. Like Christine, Lavinia, and Brant, Ezra wears that same mask-like expression. In distress, Vinnie enters. She holds her hand up to the picture, as if to gain comfort from Ezra. Christine joins her daughter, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Again, O’Neill emphasizes that whoever stages this play must make the family resemblance between parents and children and siblings and cousins completely evident. This similarly points towards a confusion of familial roles that will only intensify as the narrative progresses.
Themes
Vinnie reveals to her mother that the last few days, she actually followed Christine to New York, where she saw that Christine and Brant were having an affair. Christine quickly admits to the adultery. But when Lavinia accuses her mother of being “shameless and evil,” Christine shuts her down, explaining that she fell out of love with Ezra almost as soon as they were married. Christine then goes on to explain that her resentment of Ezra has passed on to Lavinia—which is why, ever since she was a little girl, Vinnie has sensed that her mother loathed her.
Clytemnestra, Christine’s analogue in the Oresteia, is pushed to murder her husband after he sacrifices their daughter to the gods. Christine has no such clear motivation—other than perhaps a knee-jerk reaction against the stoicism and propriety Ezra represents, and which Lavinia has now come to embody. Interestingly, Christine’s resentment of her daughter reverses the traditional pattern of a Freudian “Electra complex,” which suggests that only women envy their mothers; here, that distaste seems to flow both ways.
Themes
Bitterly, Vinnie wonders why her mother’s hatred of Ezra did not translate to Orin, Vinnie’s little brother. Christine explains that she was able to separate Orin from his father because Ezra was fighting in the Mexican-American war during most of Orin’s childhood. More painfully still, Christine insists that she would never have fallen in love with Adam Brant had Orin not gone off to war.
Christine now exhibits some of her own incestuous feelings, hinting that her sexual affair with Brant might have originated in a desire to sleep with Orin, her young son. The Mexican-American war, fought just before the Civil War, was an explicitly expansionist conflict—but paradoxically, as Ezra was fighting to make the United States bigger, Christine’s world was only getting smaller, as Ezra’s absence allowed her to turn all her attention on Orin.
Themes
Hoping to shock her mother, Vinnie reveals that Brant is actually David Mannon’s son—but to Vinnie’s dismay, Christine has long been aware of this fact. Indeed, one of the things that bonded Brant and Christine was their mutual hatred of Ezra, paired with a desire for revenge against him.
The information that Vinnie hoped to use as a trump card over her mother—namely, that Brant is related to the husband Christine claims to hate—is in fact knowledge Christine already has. Lavinia must then deal with the humiliation of Christine’s true intimacy with Brant, rather than the false flirtation Brant pretended with Lavinia.
Themes
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Vinnie tells her mother that she needs to break things off with Brant, or she will tell Ezra the whole thing. At first, Christine is unfazed, snapping back that Vinnie is merely jealous of Brant’s affections as she has a crush on him herself. But when Vinnie explains that Ezra could easily blacklist Brant, destroying any future Christine might have with him, Christine panics, calling her daughter “the devil.”
As the play later makes clear, Vinnie has long been jealous of her mother’s relationship with Ezra. But now, it seems that Vinnie is jealous of whoever her mother chooses, suggesting that Vinnie’s attractions are driven less by natural desire and more by an impulse to compete with Christine.
Themes
Christine agrees to break things off with Brant, with a suddenness that shocks Vinnie. Realizing that Vinnie will always have this secret to hold over her, Christine starts to threaten her daughter, saying “you’ll be responsible if—!” Ominously, Christine cuts herself off before she can finish the thought. Vinnie leaves, and Christine starts to think through her options, her face becoming like “an evil mask.”
The Greek tragic roots of Mourning Becomes Electra are especially evident in this exchange: Christine cuts herself off from finishing this threat, a piece of ominous foreshadowing that recalls the similarly suggestive structure of Greek drama, while the “evil mask” of Christine’s face gestures to the masks that Greek performers used to signal various emotional states.
Themes
Brant enters, looking almost identical to the picture of Ezra that hangs in the study. Christine tells Brant that Vinnie knows everything. As they debate solutions, the lovers are struck by the resemblance between Brant and Ezra. Brant wonders if Christine loves him because he reminds her of her husband, but Christine insists that “it was Orin you made me think of!” Collapsing into tears, Christine wishes Ezra had been killed in the war.
Even as Christine longs for Ezra’s death, the resemblance between the three main men in her life—her lover Brant, her husband Ezra, and her son Orin—makes it unlikely that Christine will ever truly feel free from Ezra. Christine’s essential confession here (“it was Orin you made me think of!”) demonstrates just how much Christine’s love for Brant sees her trying to displace the sexual desire she feels for her own young son.
Themes
Brant wonders if he should just confess to Ezra and then kill him, but Christine points out that Brant would be hanged for murder (“this isn’t the West,” she reasons). Brant fantasizes about having a ship of his own and escaping with Christine to tropical islands in the South Pacific, but Christine is more realistic—she fears that she will grow too old for adventure if they have to wait for Ezra to die of natural causes.
The tension between the vigilante justice Brant wants to practice and the more calculated, “civilized” plan Christine is concocting points to their personal differences. But there is also an important historical parallel here. Christine, having lived in the birthplace of colonial America, is used to ordered forms of trial and punishment (courts and laws and governments). By contrast, Brant’s home in the “West” had only recently been formally colonized by the United States, meaning at this time, frontier justice (e.g., violent duels) was still commonplace.
Themes
Slowly, however, Christine begins to form a plan: what if they could kill Ezra but make it look like a natural death? After all, Ezra does have heart issues, a fact widely known in town. Christine could poison Ezra to mimic a heart attack, using the notoriously gossipy family doctor to spread the news. And then Brant could escape and wait for Christine on his ship, the Flying Trades.
The chorus of villagers that introduced Homecoming now takes on a second purpose: rather than providing purely objective narration, these gossipy townsfolk (when properly manipulated) can also spread whatever false stories Christine wants them to, helping her cover up her crimes.
Themes
Brant detests this plan, believing it is cowardly to use poison instead of killing in broad daylight. To get Brant to agree, Christine goads him for being a “hypocritical Mannon” with silly “romantic scruples.” In the distance, a cannon booms, signaling that the war is over and Ezra will soon return home. Brant leaves, and Christine rejoices: “you’ll never dare leave me now, Adam—for your ships or your sea or your naked Island girls—when I grow old and ugly.” For a moment, Christine catches Ezra’s painted eyes in the portrait.
Christine’s accusation that Brant is “hypocritical” is itself filled with hypocrisy, as Christine plans to use her husband’s respectable reputation to mask her ugly murder. Like Lavinia, Christine seems to feel the same mixture of exotic envy and disgust when she imagines (with a great deal of prejudice) the “naked Island girls” Brant used to spend his time with.
Themes
