Mourning Becomes Electra Themes

Over the three plays that make up Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, members of the central Mannon family betray their children and their siblings, murder their spouses, and seek revenge on their parents. Each new killing or cruelty originates with one of the Mannons—patriarch Ezra, his wife Christine, and their children Lavinia and Orin—deciding that someone has “got to be punished.” But in trying to establish justice, the Mannons actually only…

Throughout Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy of tragic plays, the four central characters—wealthy Ezra Mannon, his traitorous wife Christine, and their children Lavinia and Orin—weep, lie, and kill for the other members of their family. But over and over again, the plays suggest that this devotion goes beyond the purely familial. Christine tells her lover Adam Brant (her husband’s nephew) that she was initially drawn to him because he reminded…

Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s three-play cycle about the troubled Mannon family, begins just as the Union soldiers are triumphing in the American Civil War. But when General Ezra Mannon and his son Orin return home to their prosperous New England home, they do not arrive to domestic bliss. Instead, the Mannon house merely functions as a smaller-scale recreation of the violence and betrayal (father against son, sister against brother) that defined the Civil…

Over and over again, the stage directions in Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy of tragic plays, assert just how much members of the central Mannon family look like each other. All of them have the same “mask-like” features; patriarch Ezra has passed on his soldier-like stance to both his son Orin and his nephew Adam Brant, and Ezra’s wife Christine gives her long, auburn hair to her daughter Lavinia…