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The Hunted: 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
Now, the action moves to the Mannon study, where Orin is staring at his father’s collapsed form. Though Vinnie wants Orin to grieve for Ezra’s death, Orin feels that this is just one more corpse; how can he feel anything about one dead body after he has seen fields strewn with them? Orin also reminds Vinnie that he was never close with Ezra to begin with.
Orin’s loss of feeling for his father here shows just how much war deforms family bonds. When enemy life becomes so devalued, Orin’s reflections seem to ask, how can soldiers continue to give worth to their own lives and domestic connections?
Themes
Lavinia tells Orin that Ezra was proud of him for a heroic deed, but this only makes Orin sadder. What Ezra framed as heroism—slaughtering a Rebel soldier with his bayonet, then going temporarily mad and walking behind enemy lines—seems like nothing more than cold-blooded violence to Orin. “I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over again,” Orin reflects, “and that in the end I would discover the man was myself!” In dreams, Orin confesses, he sees his victims with his father’s face.
In this essential passage, Orin links his traumatic wartime memories to the sense that he is slowly transforming into the “same man” he claims to hate, out of control of his own identity. In other words, Orin seems to be grasping at the idea that violence to others also does violence to oneself, a concept that has particular ramifications in the Mannon home—where children both loathe and envy their parents, trying to become them and destroy them all at once.
Themes
Vinnie tries to tell Orin the truth about what happened between Christine and Brant. At first Orin dismisses Vinnie’s story as a lie, but when Vinnie reminds Orin she has never lied to him, he grows willing to accept the truth of Christine’s affair—if he and Vinnie can catch Christine and Brant in the act. Though Orin does not seem terribly upset by Vinnie’s accusation that their mother might have murdered Ezra, he cannot bear the idea that Christine would be sleeping with Brant.
Christine, panicked, arrives outside the study door and pleads with Orin and Lavinia to be let in. To prove her mother’s guilt, Vinnie finds the box of poison Christine used to kill Ezra and sets it on the table where Christine will be able to see it. Vinnie opens the door and Christine comes in. When Orin sees his mother’s reaction to the poison, he becomes convinced of her guilt. “You’re my lost island,” Orin tells his mother, leaving the room. Distraught, Christine wonders aloud to Ezra’s dead body if Orin will murder Brant. “I’m the only guilty one,” weeps Christine.
In addition to embodying many of the Mannons’ most complicated sexual desires, “lost islands” were also an important driver in American colonial history, as early colonizers like Christopher Columbus sought out paradise in the New World (and wreaked genocidal chaos in the process of doing so). By calling Christine his “lost island,” Orin not only gestures to his lust for her, but he also gestures to a large American narrative of craving and violence. Christine’s acknowledgement of her own “guilt” here nods to the play’s ultimate conclusion: more than any court system or vigilante revenge, Electra suggests, it is up to individuals to acknowledge their own guilt.
Themes
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