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The Hunted: Act 5
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
A year later, on a clear day in summer, a group of townsfolk—Amos Ames, Ira Mackel, Joe Small, and Abner Silva—gather outside the Mannon household with Seth. Silva is a Portuguese ship captain, and he breaks out into a sea chanty; all of the men are drunk. The group dares Small, a local clerk, to spend the night in the Mannon house. Small insists he doesn’t believe in ghosts, though his nervousness is obvious.
As the trilogy progresses, the ocean—and the symbolic islands it contains—starts to feel closer and closer to the Mannon family, as here embodied by Silva. It is also important to catch the juxtaposition between the daytime setting, bright and summery in a way no other scene has been, and the ghosts that still seem to haunt the Mannon home.
Themes
Small goes inside, and the other men discuss whether or not they believe the Mannon house is actually haunted. Hazel and Peter arrive, informing Seth that Lavinia and Orin have just arrived in New York City. Suddenly, Small rushes out of the house, terrified that he has just been chased by Ezra’s ghost “dressed like a judge comin’ through the wall.”
Ghosts have long metaphorically flitted through the narrative, as Brant and Orin appear to almost reincarnate their shared ancestors. But now, the possibility of haunting becomes literal—and ties into the play’s thematic focus on justice, with Ezra’s “judge” garb signaling that his ghost has come to punish his family’s crimes.
Themes
Small and the other men leave, and privately, Seth confesses that he thinks there really are ghosts: “there’s been evil in that house since it was first built in hate.” Seth tells Hazel and Peter that they should convince Vinnie and Orin to live somewhere else. Seth goes inside to neaten the mansion for the Mannon siblings’ arrival. Left alone, Hazel wonders what really happened the night Christine died; she thinks there is something suspicious about the fact that Vinnie took Orin on a cruise right away.
Electra plays with many genres—Greek tragedy, melodrama, and O’Neill’s signature naturalism—but now, it also delves into horror, positioning the Mannons’ stately mansion as a haunted house of sorts. It is also essential to note that Orin and Vinnie’s cruise likely means the siblings have finally reached the Pacific islands that have long tempted them.
Themes
Vinnie and Orin arrive. Vinnie now looks more like Christine, having filled out and grown more graceful; she also wears Christine’s signature green color. Similarly, Orin has taken on the “statute-like” posture Ezra used to have. Orin is scared to go in the house, though he tells Vinnie that “I’ll be all right—with you.” Vinnie is cheered by this, assuring her brother that if their dead parents have forgotten them, then they must forget their dead parents.
Despite the fact that Orin claims to loathe Ezra and Lavinia claims to loathe Christine, they have now become their parents in almost every way—Christine has taken on her mother’s exotic beauty, while Orin has assumed Ezra’s role as a tragic hero in the “statuesque,” ancient Greek mode. So even as the siblings try to forget their parents, they replicate Christine and Ezra’s bond at almost every moment, even down to the more explicitly romantic way they now seem to interact.
Themes
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The scene shifts to the study. Lavinia addresses the portrait of her father; even though she feels she has done right by Ezra, the portrait still haunts her. Orin comes in, panicked to be in the house now that Christine is forever gone from it. Vinnie calms her brother down and reminds him that he will soon get to see Hazel, insisting that they must both start new lives.
Vinnie’s desire to pair Orin off with Hazel recalls Christine’s identical strategy in the previous play—a similarity that Orin cannot help but eventually notice.
Themes
Orin notes that Lavinia now looks just like Christine. More than that, Orin feels that Lavinia has taken on Christine’s personality; “as if her death had set you free,” he speculates, “to become her!” Vinnie tries to change the topic, so Orin begins to think about their time on the islands. He hints to Vinnie that if he hadn’t taken her away from the islands, she might have begun to behave inappropriately.
The Freudian elements of the trilogy are especially evident here, as Lavinia fully assumes her mother’s role (just as Freud’s aptly titled “Electra complex” would suggest). And in “becoming” like her mother, Orin seems to think, Vinnie has also taken on some of Christine’s carnal “freedoms,” turning the siblings’ shared dreams of island sensuality into a reality (one Orin instinctively rejects).
Themes
Vinnie tries to laugh this off, and she makes Orin repeat that Christine’s suicide was an act of justice, as was their murder of Brant. Orin breaks down, and Vinnie holds him tenderly against her breast. As Orin weeps, Peter walks in, thinking for a moment that Lavinia is Christine’s ghost.
Though Vinnie is no less a participant in the Mannons’ vicious cycle of revenge than her mother, she frames her acts as “justice”—not considering that if Christine deserved punishment, she herself might be deserving of some punishment, too.
Themes
Once Peter calms down, he is quick to compliment Vinnie on her beauty. Vinnie is warm to Peter, excited to see him and almost possessive over him. But Orin is harsher, scoffing that Vinnie now wears green because of the “influence […] of the Islands.” Orin also asks why Vinnie has chosen to wear Christine’s colors in particular. Though Vinnie tries to shush her brother, Orin tells Peter that he was disgusted by the islands and the naked women he saw on them. Vinnie took to the islands right away, however, even dancing alongside some of the scantily-clad men. “Do you remember Avahanni?” Orin asks suggestively.
While Orin spent years dreaming of islands, when he actually encounters this fantasy, he feels only disgust—as he expresses here, in barbed language tinged with racism and xenophobia. In other words, even as the Mannon family dreams of escape, they are too prejudiced against those who do not share their upper-class white New England norms to ever actually leave the town that stifles them. And crucially, just as Christine took Adam Brant as a lover (much to her son’s devastation), it now seems that Lavinia might have found a “Brant” of her own in the similarly named islander Avahanni.
Themes
Orin leaves, giving Peter and Vinnie a moment alone with each other. Vinnie confesses that she has missed Peter, explaining that the islands and the island people always made her think of him. Vinnie tells Peter that she wants to marry him, much to Peter’s delight. “We’ll make an island for ourselves on the land,” she muses, where they can teach their children to love life “so they can never be possessed by hate and death.”
Even as Vinnie tries to distinguish herself from the “hate and death” that defined her own childhood, she inadvertently repeats the Mannon tendency to isolate, proudly declaring that she and Peter will “make an island” on the land—and thus trap their own descendants just as she was trapped as a child.
Themes
Vinnie tells Peter not to worry about Orin’s morbid mindset, assuring Peter that Orin blames himself for Christine’s death only because his grief has confused him. Peter and Vinnie kiss—but as they do, Hazel and Orin appear in the doorway. Orin is outraged to see Vinnie kiss Peter, though he tries to play it off by telling his “Fuss Buzzer” sister that he was only trying to scare her. Orin moves to congratulate Peter, and Vinnie watches the moment with dread in her eyes.
In a sign of how corrupted the once-pure bond between Vinnie and Orin has become, Orin’s tender childhood nickname for his sister (“bossy fuzz-buzzer”) now holds only menace and sexual envy. Structurally, too, the foreboding around Orin’s discovery of his sister’s romance parallels Orin’s similarly threatening language to his mother around Brant.
Themes
