Justice, Revenge, and Lasting Peace Theme Analysis

BRANT—[…] Does Orin by any chance resemble his father?

CHRISTINE—(stares at him—agitatedly) No! Of course not! What put such a stupid idea in your head? […] It was Orin you made me think of! It was Orin!

BRANT—I remember that night we were introduced and I heard the name Mrs. Ezra Mannon! By God, how I hated you then for being his! I thought, by God, I’ll take her from him and that’ll be part of my revenge! And out of that hatred my love came […]

CHRISTINE—What made you sit there? It’s his chair. I’ve so often seen him sitting there—(forcing a little laugh) Your silly talk about resemblances—Don’t sit there. Come. Bring that chair over here.

BRANT—If I could catch him alone, where no one would interfere, and let the best man come out alive—as I’ve often seen it done in the West!

CHRISTINE—This isn’t the West.

BRANT—I could insult him on the street before everyone and make him fight me! I could let him shoot first and then kill him in self-defense!

CHRISTINE—(scornfully) Do you imagine you could force him to fight a duel with you? Don’t you know dueling is illegal? Oh, no! He’d simply feel bound to his duty as a former judge and have you arrested! (She adds calculatingly, seeing he is boiling inside) It would be a poor revenge for your mother’s death to let him make you a laughing stock!

MANNON—Peace ought to be signed soon. The President's assassination is a frightful calamity. But it can't change the course of events.

LAVINIA—Poor man! It's dreadful he should die just at his moment of victory.

MANNON—Yes! (then after a pause—somberly) All victory ends in the defeat of death. That's sure. But does defeat end in the victory of death? That's what I wonder!

CHRISTINE—Why can't all of us remain innocent and loving and trusting? But God won't leave us alone. He twists and wrings and tortures our lives with others’ lives until—we poison each other to death! (seeing Hazel’s look, catches herself—quickly) Don't mind what I said! Let's go in, shall we? I would rather wait for Orin inside [...]

ORIN—(as they enter looks eagerly toward the house—then with bitter hurt, disappointment in his tone) Where’s Mother? I thought surely she’d be waiting for me […] God, how I’ve dreamed of coming home! I thought it would never end, that we’d go on murdering and being murdered until no one was left alive! […] But the house looks different. Or is it something in me? […] Did the house always look so ghostly and dead?

Portraits of ancestors hang on the walls. At the rear of the fireplace, on the right, is one of a grim visaged minister of the witch burning era. Between fireplace and front is another of Ezra Mannon's grandfather, in the uniform of an officer in Washington's army. Directly over the fireplace is the portrait of Ezra's father, Abe Mannon, done when he was sixty. Except for the difference in ages, his face looks exactly like Ezra's in the painting in the study.

Of the three portraits on the other walls, two are of women—Abe Mannon’s wife and the wife of Washington's officer. The third has the appearance of a prosperous ship owner of colonial days. All the faces in the portraits have the same mask quality of those of the living characters in the play.

CHRISTINE—We’ve always been so close, you and I. I feel you are really—my flesh and blood! She isn’t! She’s your father’s! You’re a part of me!

ORIN—(with strange eagerness) Yes! I feel that too, Mother!

CHRISTINE— […] We had a secret little world of our own in the old days, didn’t we?—which no one but us knew about.

ORIN—(happily) You bet we did! No Mannons allowed was our password, remember!

CHRISTINE—And that’s why your father and Vinnie could never forgive us! But we’ll make that little world of our own again […] I want to make up to you for all the injustice you suffered at your father’s hands. It may seem a hard thing to say about the dead, but he was jealous of you. He hated you because he knew I loved you better than anything in the world!

ORIN—Before I had gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams—and they change to Father’s face—or to mine— What does that mean, Vinnie?

LAVINIA—I don’t know! I’ve got to talk to you! For heaven’s sake, forget the war! It’s over now!

ORIN—Not inside us who killed!

ORIN—Vinnie! Do you realize what it would mean—?

LAVINIA—I realize only too well. You and I, who are innocent, would suffer a worse punishment than the guilty—for we'd have to live on! It would mean that Father's memory and that of all the honorable Mannon dead would be dragged through the horror of a murder trial! But I'd rather suffer that than let the murder of our father go unpunished!

ORIN—I heard you planning to go with him to the island I had told you about—our island—that was you and I! […] But you’ll forget him! I’ll make you forget him! I’ll make you happy! We’ll leave Vinnie here and go on a long voyage—to the South Seas […]

LAVINIA—(with bitter scorn) Orin! After all that’s happened, are you becoming her crybaby again? […] Leave her alone! Go in the house! (As he hesitates—more sharply) Do you hear me? March! […] He paid the just penalty for his crime. You know it was justice. It was the only way true justice could be done.

ORIN—I hate the daylight. It’s like an accusing eye! No, we’ve renounced the day, in which normal people live—or rather it has renounced us. Perpetual night—darkness of death in life—that’s the fitting habitat for guilt! You believe you can escape that, but I’m not so foolish!

[…] And I find artificial light more appropriate for my work—man’s light, not God’s—man’s feeble striving to understand himself, to exist for himself in the darkness! It’s a symbol of his life—a lamp burning out in a room of waiting shadows!

LAVINIA—(sharply) Your work? What work?

ORIN—(mockingly) Studying the law of crime and punishment, as you saw.

LAVINIA—What kind of history do you mean?

ORIN—A true history of all the family crimes, beginning with Grandfather Abe’s—all of the crimes, including ours, do you understand?

LAVINIA—(aghast) Do you mean to tell me you’ve actually written—

ORIN—Yes! I’ve tried to trace to its secret hiding place in the Mannon past the evil destiny behind our lives! I thought if I could see it clearly in the past I might be able to foretell what fate is in store for us, Vinnie—but I haven’t dared predict that […]

So many strange hidden things out of the Mannon past combine in you! For one example, do you remember the first mate, Wilkins, on the voyage to Frisco? […] Adam Brant was a ship’s officer, too, wasn’t he?

HAZEL—You don’t want her to marry Peter?

ORIN—No! She can’t have happiness! She’s got to be punished! (suddenly taking her hand—excitedly) And listen, Hazel! You mustn’t love me any more. The only love I can know now is the love of guilt for guilt which breeds more guilt—until you get so deep at the bottom of hell there is no lower you can sink and you rest there in peace!

ORIN—I love you now with all the guilt in me—the guilt we share! Perhaps I love you too much, Vinnie!

LAVINIA—I don’t know what you’re saying!

ORIN—There are times now when you don’t seem to be my sister, not Mother, but some stranger with the same beautiful hair— (He touches her hair caressingly. She pulls violently away. He laughs wildly.) Perhaps you’re Marie Brantôme, eh? And you say there are no ghosts in this house?

LAVINIA—I’m not going the way Mother and Orin went. That’s escaping punishment. And there’s no one left to punish me. I’m the last Mannon. I’ve got to punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I’ll never go out or see anyone! I’ll have the shutters nailed close so no sunlight can ever get in. I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! […] It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!