The Oresteia Term Analysis

It is shortly before sunset and the soft light of the declining sun shines directly on the front of the house, shimmering in a luminous mist on the white portico and the gray stone wall behind, intensifying the whiteness of the columns, the somber grayness of the wall, the green of the open shutters, the green of the lawn and shrubbery, the black and green of the pine tree. The white columns cast black bars of shadow on the gray wall behind them. The windows of the lower floor reflect the sun's rays in a resentful glare. The temple portico is like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness.

BRANT—If I could catch him alone, where no one would interfere, and let the best man come out alive—as I’ve often seen it done in the West!

CHRISTINE—This isn’t the West.

BRANT—I could insult him on the street before everyone and make him fight me! I could let him shoot first and then kill him in self-defense!

CHRISTINE—(scornfully) Do you imagine you could force him to fight a duel with you? Don’t you know dueling is illegal? Oh, no! He’d simply feel bound to his duty as a former judge and have you arrested! (She adds calculatingly, seeing he is boiling inside) It would be a poor revenge for your mother’s death to let him make you a laughing stock!

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!

CHRISTINE—Why can't all of us remain innocent and loving and trusting? But God won't leave us alone. He twists and wrings and tortures our lives with others’ lives until—we poison each other to death! (seeing Hazel’s look, catches herself—quickly) Don't mind what I said! Let's go in, shall we? I would rather wait for Orin inside [...]

ORIN—(as they enter looks eagerly toward the house—then with bitter hurt, disappointment in his tone) Where’s Mother? I thought surely she’d be waiting for me […] God, how I’ve dreamed of coming home! I thought it would never end, that we’d go on murdering and being murdered until no one was left alive! […] But the house looks different. Or is it something in me? […] Did the house always look so ghostly and dead?

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—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 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—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!