Mourning Becomes Electra

Mourning Becomes Electra, dramatic trilogy by O'Neill, produced and published in 1931. Based on the ancient Greek legend, its three parts are: (I) Homecoming; (II) The Hunted; (III) The Haunted.

I. At the close of the Civil War, Brigadier‐General Ezra Mannon, descendant of a Puritan family, returns to his New England home, where he is awaited by his wife Christine and daughter Lavinia. During his absence and that of her adored soldier son Orin, Christine has had a liaison with the clipper captain Adam Brant, son of Ezra's brother and a family servant, who intended to avenge his mother's disgrace, but instead fell in love with the sensual Christine. Mother and daughter hate each other, for Lavinia is the victim of an inner conflict between her Mannon heritage and the elements of her nature inherited from Christine. Herself in love with Brant, she suspects her mother's relations with him and forces from him the truth. Peter Niles, a childhood friend, loves Lavinia, but she tells him that she hates love and will never marry. When Ezra comes home, it is revealed that he hates his son Orin for possessing Christine's love, which he himself never attained. Pretending to give him medicine, Christine poisons her husband from a box which Brant supplied her, and which Lavinia discovers.

II. Orin returns, to find his father dead and his mother distracted and changed. He resumes an old affair with Hazel, Peter's sister, but Lavinia persuades him to join her revenge plot. They follow Christine to a rendezvous on Brant's ship, and, after she leaves, Orin kills Brant. When Christine learns of this, she commits suicide.

III. Lavinia and Orin go on a long voyage that takes them to the South Sea islands. By the time they return, Orin, harried by guilt and remorse, has grown to resemble his father, while Lavinia, freed of the puritan repressions, has the beauty and amorality of her mother. She wants to marry Peter and now encourages Orin's affair with Hazel, but Orin, preoccupied with writing a confession, breaks with his fiancée, makes an incestuous proposal to Lavinia, and shoots himself. Lavinia makes love to Peter, but he leaves her, repelled by her eagerness. She concludes, “Love isn't permitted to me. The dead are too strong!,” and enters the shuttered house, to spend the rest of her life alone with the memory of the Mannon dead.