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The Hunted: 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
The scene shifts to the sitting-room of the Mannon house, which is decorated with giant posters of Ezra’s ancestors. The paintings date from hundreds of years ago: one of Ezra’s forefathers is a minister who was involved in the Salem Witch Trials, while his grandfather served in George Washington’s army. Hazel and Peter are sitting on the sofa, fretting about Christine’s distressed state. In the hallway (offstage), Orin calls for his mother.
By highlighting just how intertwined Ezra’s ancestors are with these key moments of American history, the play implicitly links the Mannon family’s story to the story of the nation as a whole. And by gesturing towards moments of American shame (like the Salem Witch Trials, when New Englanders turned the court system into the site of a crazed witch hunt), O’Neill hints that the Mannon family’s deviance is perhaps not as much of an aberration as it might initially seem.
Themes
Christine arrives with Orin tailing behind. Though Hazel expresses worry for Christine’s mental state, Christine assures Hazel that having Orin home will be just the “medicine” she needs to “bear things.” Hazel and Orin tease each other flirtatiously, but when Vinnie comes up, Orin grows more somber. As he tells Hazel, Orin was always jealous of Vinnie’s tenderness towards Ezra—a tenderness she never shows to anyone else, not even him.
Even after just a moment in the stately Mannon house, Orin’s feelings about Vinnie, so sweet a minute ago, are poisoned and deformed by jealousy and proto-incestuous feeling. As the chorus of townsfolk will discover in The Haunted, it almost seems the house (the “whited sepulcher,” in Christine’s words) has some malevolent power of its own.
Themes
Orin then changes subjects, telling Christine how grateful he is to be home with her, even though he feels she has changed in the months he has been at the war. Just as Orin begins to talk about how Christine has become even more beautiful, Lavinia appears in the doorway, unnoticed as she watches her mother and brother talk.
Again, Orin parallels his father, paying Christine almost exactly the same compliment that Ezra did. Lavinia’s ability to watch her family unseen makes particular use of theater as a medium, in which audiences can watch characters watch each other—picking up on nuances that escape even the central players.
Themes
Orin now shifts his focus to Hazel. He is touched by Hazel’s youth and naivete, but he is also envious of it. Angrily, Orin wishes that women were given a taste of the brutality of war (“after that, maybe they’d stop waving their handkerchiefs and gabbing about heroes!”). Surprised at her brother’s anger, Lavinia interrupts, at last making her presence known. Vinnie tries to get Orin to come with her to see Ezra’s body, but Christine holds him back with flattery.
Part of Orin’s resentment of Lavinia seems to stem from his feeling that his sister and Hazel have access to a peace and domesticity (as symbolized by the “handkerchief”) that war has forever taken from him. At the same time, though, Orin’s sharpness here speaks to the undercurrent of misogyny evident in the first scene of The Hunted.
Themes
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Hazel and Peter head home, and Christine and Orin are left alone together. Orin wonders why Christine is suddenly so eager for him to marry Hazel, as she never used to like it when they spent time together. Orin accuses Christine of not wanting to spend time with him and reveals that he only flirts with Hazel to make Christine “jealous.” Finally, Orin tells Christine that Vinnie has written to him hinting that something is going on between Christine and Captain Brant; he wonders if Christine’s new support of Hazel is linked to her affair.
Like his father, Orin sees through his mother’s schemes—and like his father, Orin ignores his intuition, driven almost insane by the depth of his love and desire for Christine. Now, for the first time, Orin makes the romantic and sexual aspects of his feelings for Christine clearer, telling his mother that he wanted her to feel jealous of any carnal relationship he might have with Hazel.
Themes
Christine laughs off the accusations, telling Orin that she has never loved Vinnie the way she loves him. Orin softens, recalling his youth, when he and his mom built a secret clubhouse with the password “no Mannons allowed.” Christine insists to Orin that Ezra and Vinnie were always just jealous of their mother-son bond; “we’ll make that little world of our own again, won’t we?” Christine asks.
Just as Lavinia tries to differentiate herself from her mother, Orin and Christine are desperate to set themselves apart from the Mannon family they are both a part of. In addition to catching the deeply incestuous undertones of this exchange, it is also important to see how the language here (“that little world of our own”) echoes the island symbolism in other parts of the trilogy. In each case, the Mannon family looks to isolate themselves, whether shutting themselves away inside the house or traveling to remote locales in the Pacific Ocean.
Themes
Christine then tells Orin an entirely false version of the story of what happened between her and Captain Brant, inventing explanations for each of Vinnie’s specific accusations. After calling Vinnie “crazy,” Christine bursts into tears, and Orin assures Christine that he believes her narrative: Brant was only ever interested in Vinnie, and Vinnie was just too fixated on Ezra to see. Christine hints that she is afraid Lavinia might commit violence. Orin promises his mother that he loves her more than anything, picturing her as one of the Pacific islands he read about in the novel Typee.
Christine here capitalizes on the Freudian tensions so evident in Lavinia’s manner, using her daughter’s real jealousy to obscure her own equally real crimes. The mention of Typee, Herman Melville’s popular adventure narrative set in the Pacific Islands (where Brant himself traveled), helps to indicate that the Mannon family’s island obsession is rooted in a larger American culture.
Themes
However, Orin feels that if he found out Christine and Brant were really sleeping together, he would never be able to forgive Christine—“I’d show you then that I hadn’t been taught to kill for nothing!” Orin grows angry, remembering the cruelty of the war and the fact that Christine rarely wrote him (even though he frequently heard from Lavinia). Christine calms Orin down, and Orin decides that he wants Vinnie to get married—so he and his mother can be alone together.
Rather than being motivated by any sense of justice or duty to his father, it is clear that Orin is guided above all by his carnal desire for Christine. In referencing how he has been “taught to kill,” Orin once again demonstrates that the wartime violence he became accustomed to is not so easily shed now that he has returned to this familial context.
Themes
Lavinia appears in the door, hoping to bring Orin to come see their father. Annoyed, Orin leaves, and Lavinia starts to follow. Before she can go, however, Christine begins to boast of her scheme; having convinced Orin of her innocence, Christine feels that she is invincible against Vinnie’s accusations. Still, Christine worries that the war has made Orin into a much more vengeful, murderous person. As the scene ends, Christine decides she must warn Brant.
Christine’s behavior recalls the tragic Greek concept of hubris, in which a character’s overconfidence led to their inevitable ruin. At the same time, Christine has some real awareness of the dangers of her situation, perhaps suggesting that these more modern tragic figures have learned something from their Greek predecessors’ mistakes.
Themes
