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The Haunted: Act 2
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 few moments later, Lavinia re-enters, struggling with the idea that she might actually want to kill Orin. Vinnie is interrupted by Seth, complaining again about the Mannon family cook (“that’s what we git fur freein’ em!”). Vinnie leaves, and Peter and Hazel enter the study. The two of them debate whether it is healthy for Orin and Lavinia to remain in this house, and Hazel wonders whether Vinnie is a bad influence on Orin. Quietly, Hazel warns Peter against marrying Vinnie.
The Mannon family fought on the abolitionist side of the Civil War, but Seth’s racist comment here (repeated from Homecoming) make clear that prejudice is soaked into every aspect of Mannon life—and thus, by extension, is a part of the larger American fabric the family epitomizes.
Themes
Peter leaves and Orin enters, holding a big envelope. He presses the envelope into Hazel’s hands, telling Hazel that the day before Vinnie’s wedding to Peter, Hazel needs to give the envelope to the groom-to-be. “She can’t have happiness,” Orin vows of his sister, “she’s got to be punished!” Still, Orin cannot decide if he wants to confess or if he wants to protect his sister.
Orin and Lavinia share a view of justice as defined by “punish[ment]” rather than repair or healing. This question—of how to move on after conflict and betrayal—was one that also haunted the United States in the Reconstruction years, as the country tried to put itself back together after turning brutally against itself.
Themes
Vinnie walks in, immediately suspecting that Hazel is hiding something. Hazel keeps the envelope behind her back, firmly telling Vinnie that Orin is going to come stay with her family. Finally, Lavinia tells Orin that if he makes Hazel give up the envelope, she will do anything he wants her to do. With that, Orin relents, and Hazel glumly gives up the envelope, along with her dreams of marrying Orin.
Lavinia, now as beautiful as Christine once was, also seems to hold the same power her mother used to hold over Orin—a pull that is at once sexual and familial. And rather than seeking a new life with Hazel, Orin sinks back into the Mannon morass, repeating his own history with Christine with Lavinia.
Themes
Hazel leaves, and Orin confesses that he loves Lavinia “too much”—sometimes he sees her as a beautiful stranger rather than a sister. “Perhaps you’re Marie Brantôme,” he muses, prompting Vinnie to cry out that she wishes Orin was dead. Orin wonders if Vinnie hopes to drive him to suicide just as they drove Christine to suicide. As Orin plans to shoot himself (“mother’s waiting”), Peter rushes in.
Though the characters have often acknowledged their proto-incestuous impulses, nowhere in the trilogy does anyone state these longings as explicitly as Orin does here. This essential exchange contains two vital pieces of information. First, Orin now identifies the root of his own incestuous desires in his father’s (and grandfather’s) longing for Marie Brantôme, suggesting an even more cyclical, inescapable view of history and biology. And second, in articulating the scope of his incestuous desire for Lavinia, Orin also becomes unable to bear his own life—and so decides to take it.
Themes
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Orin walks out of the room, clearly distraught, with a pistol in hand. Peter is troubled by this, but Lavinia tries instead to focus on their future together, imagining their home and garden. Then Vinnie shuts the envelope of Orin’s writing in a drawer and locks it, walking out of the room with the stiff back of a soldier. “I’m Mother’s daughter,” she tells the portraits on the wall, “not one of you! I’ll live in spite of you!”
Unlike Orin’s decision to commit suicide, repeating his mother’s tragic end, Lavinia’s resolve to “live in spite of” her family—at last distancing herself from Mannon blood—shows her intention to break with the cyclical patterns of history. At the same time, even as Lavinia tries to distinguish herself from her forebears, she also gives in to identifying as her hated “Mother’s daughter,” repeating her family just as she screams she is “not one” of them.
Themes
