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The Hunted: Act 3
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
Two days later, Ezra’s funeral has come and gone. Captain Brant is preparing to take off on a ship bound from Boston. The wind blows as an elderly, drunken chantyman sings the “Shenandoah” sea chanty. The chantyman, slurring his words, asks Brant for a job. When Brant refuses, the chantyman begins to reflect on his past working for the Mannon shipping operation. But now, the chantyman laments, “everything is dyin’”—Lincoln died, and now the news has gotten out that Ezra Mannon has died of a heart attack.
Sea chanties, frequently recurring throughout the play, both hint to the Mannon family’s oceanic obsessions and imbue the play with a tone of ominous melancholy. Importantly, by linking Ezra Mannon’s death to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the chantyman ties the Mannon family to a broader U.S. historical arc. And more than that, the comparison between Ezra and Lincoln demonstrates that “every victory” might indeed “end in the defeat of death”—and that peacetime does not always bring true peace.
Themes
Brant, exhausted and stressed out by the chantyman, gives him a dollar to leave. Privately, Brant admits to himself that he does not know if he’ll ever be able to take his next planned voyage. At that moment, Christine appears from behind a stack of boxes.
Brant’s premonition that he will never get to sail again speaks once more to the force of destiny throughout the trilogy (as Brant accepts his lack of agency in his own fate).
Themes
Christine kisses Brant, then tells him that Vinnie has found out about their affair. Brant takes Christine below deck, into one of the ship’s cabins. While Christine embraces her lover, Vinnie and Orin appear, looking down at the adulterers through the ship’s skylight (though Brant and Christine do not see them). Orin and Vinnie watch, their faces taut with rage.
By positioning Orin and Vinnie literally above the adulterers they will soon take revenge on, The Hunted endows its central characters with an almost godlike power of revenge, looking down from the heavens at this distinctly human betrayal.
Themes
Christine tells Brant what Lavinia knows—including the fact that Ezra used his dying breath to call attention to Christine’s guilt. Brant wishes he had just challenged Ezra to a duel to begin with; “I have my father’s rotten coward blood in me,” he laments. Christine begs Brant to leave town immediately, though Brant’s ship is not due to set sail for another month. Reluctantly, Brant agrees.
Even in this most dire moment, Brant does not feel like an agent of his own destiny, instead believing that his lineage and biology (David Mannon’s “rotten coward blood”) are alone determinative of his fate.
Themes
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Brant and Christine now plan to escape to an island off the Chinese coast. The mention of islands makes Christine think of Orin—and when he hears his mother mention his name, Orin, still on the deck of the ship but listening in, clenches his fists. Brant begins to dream of escaping to island sand and palms, though Christine is less optimistic. Christine hurries away, not wanting to be caught with Brant.
On the one hand, Christine’s mention of Orin here suggests her awareness that her affair with Brant is a way of playing out her own incestuous desires for her son. But for Orin, who would be more than happy to fulfill those desires himself, Christine’s displacement of her lust onto Brant is only enraging.
Themes
The scene shifts back to Orin and Lavinia. Vinnie is vindicated by what they’ve seen, though she worries that Orin might act rashly. Indeed, Orin is quick to vow that he will kill Brant then and there. Not wanting to be discovered when the shot rings out, Lavinia tries to stop her brother—but she is too slow. Orin shoots Brant dead in the cabin, then rummages through the cabinets, trying to make it look like a burglary.
Lavinia, like her mother, is more patient and calculating, able to plot revenge over a long period of time rather than immediately diving in to execute it. But Orin, perhaps trained by his time in the Union Army, defaults to violence, seeming to feel that immediate justice is the only path to justice at all.
Themes
Vinnie looks mournfully at Brant’s corpse, wondering how such a man could love her mother. As Orin prepares to throw Brant’s belongings overboard, he reflects that this is like his dreams, in which he kills people with Ezra’s face. “He looks like me, too,” Orin reflects of Brant. “Maybe I’ve committed suicide!” Orin declares that he would have loved Christine as Brant did, if he were given the chance.
This pivotal moment calls back to Orin’s reflection that war meant killing “the same man over and over” until he would eventually kill himself. Now, Orin realizes that in killing the man his mother loved—a man Christine wanted largely because Brant reminded her of her son—Orin has also killed a part of himself, “commit[ing] suicide” even as he commits murder.
Themes
