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The Haunted: 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
A month has passed, and Orin is now sitting in Ezra’s study, looking uncannily like his father. Sarcastically, Orin asks the portrait if what it wants is “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” Lavinia enters, wearing a green velvet dress. Vinnie wonders why Orin has shut himself inside, and Orin explains that he now hates the outdoors; the only comfort he gets is from studying “the law of crime and punishment.”
Orin’s word choice here nods pointedly to the American justice system: in addition to making “crime and punishment” a matter of “law” (rather than vigilante violence), Orin also quotes the swearing-in that begins U.S. trial procedures (“the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!”). Just like Orestes in the Oresteia, then, Orin longs to break the cycle of his family’s vengeful violence with an appeal to civil order and jurisprudence.
Themes
Vinnie worries about Orin’s health, and Orin jokes (to his sister’s horror) that Vinnie is just waiting for him to die. Now that Orin and Hazel are engaged, Vinnie is constantly hovering around them, terrified that Orin might let something about their various crimes slip. For his part, Orin feels guilty that his distress is rubbing off on the innocent, calm Hazel. “She’s another lost island,” he laments. Orin tells Lavinia that the only way they can escape their guilt is by confessing and atoning to the “full extent of the law.”
The parallels between Vinnie and Orin and Christine and Ezra are now unavoidable: Lavinia imagines the ease her brother’s death would allow her just as Christine once imagined the same thing of Ezra. In addition to catching Orin’s continued focus on formal law, it is worth noting the hypocrisy in the way he speaks—Orin bemoans Hazel as a “lost island,” but showed only revulsion and prejudice when he actually visited one of these dreamed-about islands.
Themes
Vinnie tells Orin she wants to forget it all and build a cozy life with Peter, but Orin tells Vinnie that he will not allow any such thing to happen. Instead, he tells her that the thing he is writing is “a true history of all the family crimes.” Orin hopes that by tracing the Mannon past, he can predict whatever cruel destiny is in store for the family. When Vinnie reacts with horror, Orin accuses her of trying to become just like their mother, wearing Christine’s old clothes and lusting after ship captains just as Christine lusted after Brant.
In this essential exchange, Orin gives voice to one of the trilogy’s central themes. If biology is “destiny,” Orin argues, then the only way to understand one’s future is to study one’s familial “history,” an ideology borne out in the circular structure of the play. Tellingly, however, Orin’s focus on history seems to distract from his focus on “the law,” one more way in which the Mannon siblings seem doomed to repeat their past rather than break from it (as their counterparts in the Oresteia are eventually able to).
Themes
Orin pushes further, suggesting that the whole reason Lavinia loved the islands was because they reminded her of Brant. At last, Vinnie admits that she kissed the islander Avahanni once—the first time in her life she ever felt that love could be “sweet and natural.” Orin wants to know if Vinnie slept with Avahanni too, and when Vinnie does not answer, Orin calls her a “whore.” Orin wonders if Lavinia will kill him, just as Christine killed Ezra; after all, Orin believes they have both become their parents (“that’s the evil destiny out of the past I hadn’t dared predict”).
Vinnie’s feelings for Avahanni (and later for Peter) mark the only time in the narrative that anyone feels desire outside of the incestuous, twisted context of the Mannon family. But even as Vinnie embraces these feelings as “sweet and natural,” Orin condemns her for them—reflecting not only his jealousy and his racial prejudice against islanders like Avahanni, but also the casual misogyny that has thrummed underneath the trilogy.
Themes
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