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Homecoming: Act 3
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
Later that night, Ezra and Christine are lying in bed together. Ezra has noticed that Christine snuck out of the room for much of the night, and he wonders where she has gone. Ezra goes to light a candle, though Christine claims that she prefers the dark—and Ezra correctly intuits it is because she cannot bear to see his face in the light (though Christine does not admit this).
Here, as in earlier scenes, Ezra is no fool; he sees through Christine’s performance of attraction to notice her true disgust. But Ezra’s desire for his wife is so intense that he actively chooses to ignore the warning signs, signaling that his passion makes him willfully blind.
Themes
Ezra confesses that he feels strange, and Christine muses that his heart is giving him trouble. Ezra wonders if the reason Christine was willing to have sex with him tonight is because she hopes he will die soon of a heart attack. Upset, Ezra expresses that even though Christine has given him her body, he does not feel that she is really his wife. “What are bodies to me?” Ezra wonders. “I’ve seen too many rotting in the sun to make grass greener.”
Ezra’s conflation of bodily intimacy and bodily decay (like the kind he saw on Civil War battlefields) shows just how much wartime angst can extend into ostensibly peaceful domestic life. It is also worth noting Ezra’s blasé attitude to the corpses he encountered: just as he mused that “victory ends in the defeat of death,” he now again paints death as almost inevitable, noting that deteriorating bodies are just part of the life cycle (making “grass greener”).
Themes
Unable to conceal her true feelings any longer, Christine confesses that she feels she has never really loved Ezra—not since the first years of their marriage. Ezra worries that if they fight he will have a heart attack, but Christine pushes forward, telling her husband about her affair with Brant and revealing that the captain is actually Marie Brantôme’s son.
By telling Ezra about the affair, Christine is being vengeful in two ways. First, Christine is telling Ezra information that she knows will wound him, tied up not only in his martial pride but in his whole family’s legacy. And second, by intentionally trying to shock Ezra, Christine is likely aiming to worsen her husband’s heart condition.
Themes
Ezra begins to collapse at the shock, and he calls for his medicine. Christine presents him with some tablets and a glass of water, which Ezra quickly takes. In a moment, however, Ezra realizes that he has been poisoned, and he calls for Lavinia in a panic. But it is too late: Ezra falls into a coma before Vinnie can find her way to the room.
In the Oresteia, Clytemnestra kills her husband by stabbing him in the bath. The murder here is no less intimate—but it is sneakier, suggesting that modernity has allowed evil to hide itself under more respectable appearances (or “masks”).
Themes
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A few minutes later, Vinnie arrives to her parents’ bedroom, thinking she heard her father call for her in a nightmare. When Lavinia sees her father on the ground, she runs to him, feeling for his pulse. With his last breath, Ezra points to Christine accusingly: “she’s guilty—not medicine!” As Ezra collapses, Christine assures her daughter that all she did was inform her husband about her affair, and the stress was enough to kill him. Lavinia falls to her knees, disbelieving and begging for her father to come back. The whole time, Christine keeps the poison hidden behind her back.
Just as Orin called for his mother in his hospital dreams, Lavinia longs for Ezra to need her in moments of terror (rather than Christine). The fact that Christine holds the poison behind her back throughout this whole exchange provides important foreshadowing, but it also shows just how calm and calculating this matriarch can remain even under intense pressure.
Themes
