The Tragic Theory of Eugene O'Neill Author(s): JOSEPH P. O ... · Mourning Becomes Electra offers...

The Tragic Theory of Eugene O'NeillAuthor(s): JOSEPH P. O'NEILLSource: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 1963), pp. 481-498Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40753603 .

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JOSEPH P. O'NEILL^ S. J.

The Tragic Theory of Eugene O'Neill

AS A PRELIMINARY TO ANY DISCUSSION OF TRAGIC THEORY, TWO FACTS should be kept clearly in mind: the basic concept of tragedy differs among various authors; and tragic expression has always preceded theory. As Werner Jaeger notes in discussing drama in his excellent study of Greek culture : "It is ... useless to look for a general conception of tragedy. . . . The definition of tragedy was worked out only after the greatest Greek tragedies had been written."1 He further emphasizes the difference in the concept of tragedy even among the Greek dramatists. If the tragic differs among contemporary authors of a single, unified culture, we should readily expect it to differ even more among diverse authors of disparate cultures in the history of drama.

In this brief discussion I shall develop one modern conception of tragedy, the concept of Eugene O'Neill, and that as expressed in one representative play, Mourning Becomes Electra. Since O'Neill's dra- maturgy developed during his thirty-odd years as a playwright, a discussion based on a single play will obviously be a distortion. Any analysis that made the least pretense at completeness would necessarily include, at a minimum, such plays as Bound East for Cardiff, The Hairy Ape, Lazarus Laughed, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey Into Night as representative plays of distinct phases in his development. Since it is impossible to treat all these adequately in a brief essay, I make no pretense at completeness. How- ever, by concentrating on Mourning Becomes Electra it is possible, I believe, to sketch the basic structure of his tragic concept, for this play marks the peak of O'Neill's dramatic development. As a focus of pre- vious stages, it concentrates the technical and dramatic achievements only partly realized before; it further embodies the most perfect expression of his tragic concept.

In his early works, especially the Glencairn plays, O'Neill primarily seeks to create and sustain a single mood. The result is straight melo- drama. In the plays from Beyond the Horizon to The Hairy Ape, he emphasizes biological and environmental determinism, which he expresses in a predominantly naturalistic drama. From The Fountain

1 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York, 1945), p. 251.



482 JOSEPH P. O'NEILL, S. J.

through Lazarus Laughed, he is preoccupied with a philosophical af- firmation of life which might be summarized in the Nietzschean cries of Lazarus : "Men are also unimportant ! ... Man remains ! Man slowly arises from the past of the race of men that was his tomb of death ! For man death is not! Man, Son of God's Laughter, is'"2 As Francis Fergusson remarks in regard to these plays: "O'Neill, we find, is more interested in affirming his ideas than in representing the experience in which they are implied."3 Although in the next two plays, Strange Interlude and Dynamo, he is more successful in representing the experience itself - now affirming his ideas more by implication in the dramatic action than by bald pseudophilosophical statement - he remains somewhat abstract in that his characters are more like allegorical figures than they are suffering individuals. But profiting from the experimentation in these two plays, he fully realizes their inherent dramatic values in Mourning Becomes Electra, and he further embodies these values in full- (if somewhat cold-) blooded individuals. Since the only play after this likely to claim the distinction of being his most perfect tragic expression is Long Day's Journey Into Night (which does not add anything essential to his tragic theory) the distortion entailed in discussing that theory on the basis of a single play will not be as great as it might immediately seem.

Mourning Becomes Electra offers one final advantage in a discussion of tragic theory. As taken from the Greek trilogy of Aeschylus, it embodies a common structural element that helps to illustrate the contrast between ancient and modern tragedy and to highlight the comparison of modern concepts of tragedy as expressed in other versions of the Oresteia. Since an author's tragic concept is expressed in the dramatic action, I shall first present an objective sketch of O'Neill's version of the Greek trilogy, indicating the necessary adaptations for a modern audience, and then develop an interpretation of the play in terms of his tragic theory. In this second part I shall emphasize especially his notion of fate and human responsibility, for it is precisely within the expansive limits of fate and free will that various tragic concepts as- sume an individual form.

I

In the spring of 1926, O'Neill first conceived the idea of writing a 2 Eugene O'Neill, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, 3 vols. (New York: Random

House, 1954), II, 17. Further references will be cited in the text as Plays. Page references for this and other O'Neill plays are to this edition.

3 Francis Fergusson, Eugene O Neill, in Literary Opinion in America, ed. by Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York, 1937), p. 320. Reprinted from The Hound and Horn, III (January, 1930), pp. 145-160.



The Tragic Theory of Eugene O'Neill 483

"modern psychological drama using one of the old legend plots of Greek tragedy for its basic theme."4 His immediate problem was to create a modern tragic interpretation of the Greek concept of fate without bene- fit of the Greek gods. The very first question he asked himself was :

Is it possible to get [a] modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?5 Two years later he determined to answer this question, and began to work on a modern adaptation of Aeschylus' O res teia, a trilogy based on the Greek legend of the House of Atreus. This trilogy not only presented O'Neill with a convenient plot already superbly developed in dramatic form, but the legend of Atreus illustrates precisely the Greek concept of an external fate, working itself out in the inherited family curse, which he wanted to translate into modern psychological terms.

Atreus, King of Argos, defeated and banished his brother Thyestes, who had seduced his wife and disputed the throne. However, wishing to secure the rule of Argos for his own heritage, Atreus later pretended reconciliation and invited Thyestes and his children to return to Argos for a royal banquet. He then slaughtered the children (except Aegis- thus) and served them as a special dish to their father. When Thyestes discovered this hideous crime, he cursed the descendants of Atreus, and fled with his one remaining son, Aegisthus. This crime and subsequent curse set the pattern for the family fate. When Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, inherited the Kingdom of Argos, he married Clytemnestra, who bore him four children: Iphigeneia, Chrysothemis, Electra, and Orestes. To secure a favorable wind for the thousand ships launched to save that famous or infamous face, Agamemnon sacrificed Iphi- geneia on the Altar of Artemis. While he was away fighting at Troy, Aegisthus returned to Argos and became the lover of Clytemnestra. After surviving ten years of noble slaughter at Troy, Agamemnon returned home only to be butchered by his wife. Clytemnestra and Aegis- thus then ruled Argos until Orestes, previously sent away by his mother, returned in disguise and, by order of Apollo, avenged the death of Agamemnon by killing his mother and Aegisthus. Thereupon, Orestes was pursued by the Furies, or spirits of retribution. To escape them he appealed to the court of Athens, and, with the help of Athene, the protecting goddess of the city, he was finally freed.

4 Eugene O'Neill, "Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Work Diary," in European Theories of the Drama: With a Supplement on the American Drama, ed. by Barrett H. Clark (New York, 1947) , p. 530. 0 Ibid.




O'Neill traces the basic plot structure of this legend as expressed in the trilogy of Aeschylus, but does not shackle himself with details that would have no meaning for a modern audience. Set in New England just at the end of the Civil War, his Oresteia recounts the tragedy of the Mannon family. The ancestral background, corresponding to the fratricidal hatred of Atreus and Thyestes, is gradually revealed in the course of the action. Abe Mannon and his brother David, of a prom- inent New England shipping family, had both secretly loved Marie Brantôme, a low Canuck nurse. When David was forced to marry the girl, Abe Mannon drove him out of the house, ostensibly because of the scandal to the family. As though to wipe out the disgrace, Abe tore down the family home and built another, described by Christine ( Cly- temnestra) as, "... a sepulchre! The 'whited' one of the Bible - pagan temple front stuck like a mask of Puritan gray ugliness ! It was just like old Abe Mannon to build such a monstrosity - as a temple for his hatred." ("Homecoming," Act I, Plays, II, 17) In this temple of hatred, the family fate of murder and lust, hatred and jealousy is worked out.

The trilogy itself begins with Christine waiting for her husband - former judge and mayor, now General Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon) - to return from the Civil War. She has hated Ezra for many years, and while he was away, she fell in love with Adam Brant ( Aegisthus) , the son of David Mannon. She hoped that Ezra might be killed in the war, but when he returns, she is driven by her hatred for him and by her new love for Adam to poison her husband. She hopes by this to free herself for happiness with Adam, but her daughter Lavinia (Electra) discovers the crime and determines to punish her mother and Adam.

Lavinia tries to convince herself that her motive is just vengeance for the death of her father, but her real motive is hatred and envy for her mother. She has always vied with her mother for love, first for the love of Ezra - a more than mere filial love - and then for the love of Adam. Since she cannot have Adam, she tries to persuade her brother Orin (Orestes) to kill him for his part in the murder of their father, and thereby punish Christine. Orin, who loves his mother, would never do anything to harm her even if he knew she had murdered Ezra - until he discovers that Adam is her lover. Then he kills him. In a jealous rage he brags to Christine about killing Adam, and unwittingly drives her to suicide. Accusing himself of his mother's death, Orin is tormented by the psychological furies of his conscience.

In his demented state, Orin is haunted by the Mannon past. He sees in that past some evil destiny shaping his and Lavinia's life. In an effort




to predict their fate, he studies the Mannon history of jealousy, hatred, and murder that began with his grandfather Abe Mannon. He reveals that fate when he cries to Lavinia : "Can't you see I'm now in Father's place and you're Mother? That's the evil destiny out of the past I haven't dared to predict! I'm the Mannon you're chained to!" ("The Haunted," Act II, Plays, II, 155) When he sees their fate as becoming part of the past and reliving the crimes of their parents, he shoots himself.

Lavinia alone remains. In one final attempt to escape the Mannon fate she desperately throws herself at Peter, her faithful, innocent child- hood sweetheart. In the passion of her frantic abandonment she calk him Adam, and immediately realizes the futility of her struggle. "Al- ways the dead between! It's no good trying any more!" ("The Haunted," Act IV, Plays, II, 177) Seeing the full truth of Orin's prophecy, she knows her fate is to live out the family curse. Her final speech reveals her complete recognition and acceptance of that fate :

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 have the shutters nailed closed 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! I know they will see to it I live a long time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born. ("The Haunted," Act IV, Plays, II, 1 78)

As she "pivots sharply on her heel and marches woodenly into the house, closing the door behind her," she stoically moves to a personal doom and the family death. In her the Mannon traits combine and work to the ultimate destruction of the family; in her the Mannon fate of hatred, frustration, incest, lust, murder, and suicide carries to the end of the blood line.

In this modern version of the Oresteia, O'Neill necessarily and suc- cessfully made many adaptations. The setting and time are especially well chosen. As O'Neill notes: "New England background best possible dramatically for Greek plot of crime and retribution, chain of fate - Puritan conviction of man born of sin and punishment."6 And the Greek-temple-style mansion - "grotesque perversion of everything Greek temple expressed of meaning of life"7 - portrays the desired mood of ironic dignity and solemnity, and is perfectly justified as a common architectural style of the period. Although the primary significance of the action is essentially timeless, the rooting of that action in the specific time of the Civil War establishes precisely the distance and

6 Ibid., p. 531. 7 Ibid.




perspective O'Neill felt necessary for the audience to grasp immediately and, as it were, unconsciously, the action as a "drama of hidden life forces:"8 sufficiently remote to avoid a purely subjective response; yet close enough for their sympathies to bridge the temporal gap. Again as O'Neill notes: "Revolution too far off and too clogged in people's minds with romantic grammar-school-history associations. World War too near and recognizable in its obstructing . . . minor aspects and super- ficial character identifications. . . . Civil War is only possibility."9

Since human sacrifice to superstitious pagan gods went out of fashion with the end of the Salem witch hunts, O'Neill eliminates the Iphi- geneia incident, and substitutes Ezra's Puritan coldness and inability to love as the adequate motive for Christine's hatred. As he bluntly states in his notes: "reason for Clytemnestra's hatred for Agamemnon sexual frustration by his puritan sense of guilt turning love to lust."10 The in- tensity of her hatred is emphasized early in the play, in the bitter scene between Christine and Lavinia, when Christine reveals that her disgust for Ezra is even the cause of her hatred for Lavinia: "I tried to love you. I told myself it wasn't human not to love my own child, born of my body. But I never could make myself feel you were born of any body but his! You were always my wedding night to me - and my honeymoon!" ("Homecoming," Act II, Plays, II, 31) The hatred coiled in the savage irony of her final line is more deadly than the poison she later administers to Ezra, for it springs from the Puritan frustration of love behind their lives, from the dark hidden fate destroying the family. This Puritan sense of guilt that paralyzes Ezra's ability to love, which is central to the tragic action, is emphasized by Seth's ironic insistence that "He's able, Ezra is!" ("Homecoming," Act I, Plays, II, 7) All the Mannon's are: "able" to meet and conquer the hard realities of life except life itself; to attain the surface pleasure of wealth, prestige, social position, but not the one true peace and happiness they all so passionately seek : true, innocent love. In the raw mutilation and naked death of war, Ezra has seen a flash of life strong enough to convert his lust to love, but the insight comes too late. He returns to Christine's hatred and to his own death.

While O'Neill follows the basic structural outline of the Greek trilogy in his first two plays, "Homecoming," and "The Hunted," he radically changes the final play, "The Haunted." According to Barrett Clark, where Aeschylus degenerates into writing a political defense of the Athenian court in his "Eumenides," O'Neill alters the plot of "The Haunted" and pursues the logical consequences postulated by the inci-

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.




dents of the trilogy itself.11 Mr. Clark's enthusiasm for O'Neill is ad- mirable, but somewhat extravagant. O'Neill is a great dramatist; the first to raise a significant cry from the cradle of serious American drama; his voice is still the most articulate in our brief tradition. But one hardly compares him to Aeschylus in terms which suggest that O'Neill is superior. Still less does one imply that Mourning Becomes Electra, or any other modern version of the Oresteia, is an improve- ment on the trilogy of Aeschylus, which is reasonably considered by some critics the greatest tragedy of Western civilization. O'Neill was right to alter his play, but that does not make his version better. For the changes he made were dictated not so much by any intrinsic necessity of the material as by the external circumstances of the modern theater.

Aeschylus was writing for a society in which drama was intimately linked with the social, political, and religious life of the community. As Werner Jaeger mentions: "The state was not a chance detail in the background of his [Aeschylus'] dramas: it was the spiritual stage on which they were played."12 The tempo of Athenian life synchronized with the rhythm of the tragic festivals. Since we live at a time when personal, political, and social interests create a frantic, jarring rhythm of life, we find it difficult to understand the unifying influence of Attic drama. But again to quote Jaeger :

"The men of that age never felt that the nature and influence of tragedy were purely and simply aesthetic. Its power over them was so vast that they held it responsible for the spirit of the whole state; and although as historians we may believe that even the greatest poets were the representa- tives, not the creators, of national spirit, our belief cannot alter the fact that the Athenians held them to be their spiritual leaders, with a responsibility far greater and graver than the constitutional authority of successive political leaders.13

He clearly emphasizes the extent of the drama's influence when he insists that "it is no exaggeration to say that the tragic festival was the climax of the city's life."14

If the Greek tragedy in general reflects the national spirit, the O rest eia in particular illustrates the dramatic fusion of religious, political, and individual aspects of society. For this trilogy, more than any other, represents the unified solution to the central conflict in Aeschylus' tragic concept : how reconcile the suffering of man with divine provi- dence. As William Chase Greene states, Aeschylus "boldly addresses himself to no less a task than the reconciliation of timeless conflicting

11 Barrett Clark, Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York, 1947), p. 133. 12 Jaeger, p. 239. 13 Ibid., p. 247. 14 Ibid., p. 248.




principles of duties; fate and freedom, justice and mercy, the individual and the universal order, suffering and happiness."15 He ultimately harmonizes these conflicting principles in a new conception of man's essential relation to the gods, to the state, and to himself. The first two of these relations are especially emphasized in his final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, where the ritual purification of Orestes is sub- ordinated to the legal trial, and to the reconciliation of the conflicting powers of divine justice. Orestes is present as a human individual, but his primary significance at this point is not as an individual, but as the individual in whom fate and the divine will collide. In killing his mother by the command of Apollo, he is free of personal guilt; yet according to the Greek concept of morality, he incurs pollution by the mere external act. By resolving the just retribution for Orestes' involuntary but inevitable guilt in the Athenian court, with the divine intervention of Apollo and Athene, Aeschylus reconciles the old and the new order of divine justice and represents the city-state as the protector of human dignity and of individual freedom and security. Theodore Spencer lucidly summarizes the significance of the Eumenides:

When Athena solves the problem of Orestes' individual guilt she at the same time solves the problem of man's relation to the supernatural by appeasing the Furies, and she solves the problem of justice in the state by establishing the court of the Areopagus. The three realms of ethics, religion and government are all brought together in one solution, in one reconciliation. The intimate relation between drama and the life of the people in fifth-century Athens, combined with his own extraordinary genius, enabled Aeschylus to create a work which fused into a single unity the three essential aspects of the nature of man.16

In writing for the modern American theater, O'Neill did not have the advantage of this intimate relation between drama and life that ex- isted in Athens at the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles. He was pain- fully aware that the Greek theater was a thing of the past, that modern drama was not intimately linked with the social, political, and religious life of the American community. But because he fully realized the dis- sociation of drama and life and, more especially, the disintegration of life itself in a modern mechanized culture, he desired to create a modern

counterpart of the Greek theater, to reassert the socio-religious function of an imaginative truly vibrant theater :

15 William Chase Greene, Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought (Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, 1944), p. 109. 16 Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, iy*y;, p. 211. For the substance of this whole paragraph, cf. Spencer, pp. 210-211; Jaeger, p. 260; and Greene, pp. 109-1 10 and passim.




... a theatre returned to its highest and sole significant function as a Temple where the religion of a poetical interpretation and symbolical cele- bration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in spirit by their soul-stifling daily struggle to exist as masks among masks of the living.17 As he states in the manuscript version of his foreword to The Great God Brown, the theater "should give us what the church no longer gives us - a meaning. In brief, it should return to the spirit of Greek grandeur."18

If in his effort to create such a theater he returned to the Greek Oresteia trilogy, he knew that it would not be sufficient merely to shift the values of the Greek tradition to the American scene, but rather, that it would be necessary to re-create these values in modern designs. And the modern design he felt most likely to embody the values he desired was psychology. As he notes: ". . . if we have no Gods, [sic] or heroes to portray we have the subconscious, the mother of all gods and heroes."19 The necessity to adapt ancient values to modern circumstances, and to translate the Greek notion of an external fate into terms of modern psychology, explains the radical changes from the original in O'Neill's final play, The Haunted.

The most obvious change is seen, of course, in the psychological furies of Orin's guilty conscience. This haunting sense of guilt is the natural counterpart of the Greek Furies. A related adaptation, not quite so obvious, is the development of the guilt itself. Whether O'Neill was fully aware of it or not, by having Orin unwittingly drive Christine to suicide rather than actually kill her, as Orestes did, he achieves Orestes' ambiguous sense of guilt which, objectively speaking, was not really actual guilt. As stated above, Orestes was guilty and not guilty of Cly- temnestra's death: he incurred pollution by the external act, but no objective moral guilt since he was acting under the order of Apollo. Although Orin does not actually kill his mother, and though he is not even morally responsible for her suicide, he feels responsible for her death since his killing Adam and boasting about it caused her to kill herself. And this overwhelming sense of responsibility is precisely what brings on the furies of his conscience. This subtle re-creation of Orestes' ambiguous guilt in Orin and the more obvious adaptation of the Furies in terms of psychological guilt fit in well with O'Neill's general purpose.

A more significant change, and one as well motivated, is O'Neill's

17 Eugene O'Neill, "Memoranda on Masks," American Spectator Yearbook (New York, 1934), pp. 166-167. 18 Quoted by Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick, 1958), p. 26. The manuscript itself is in the Yale University Library. 19 Ibid.




emphasis on Electra in his version. Where Electra disappears entirely in the third play of Aeschylus, Lavinia dominates the final play - and really the whole trilogy - of O'Neill. I believe the reason for this is two- fold. First, O'Neill felt that Electra, as developed by Aeschylus and Euripides, was slighted of her inherent tragic possibilities - Sophocles at least gave her an equal place with Orestes. As he writes of Electra in his notes: "Such a character contained too much tragic fate within her soul . . . - why should [the] Furies have let Electra escape un- punished?"20 Or as he notes in another reference just after finishing the scenario of the entire play: "[I] have given my Yankee Electra [a] tragic end worthy of her . . ."21 - implying that the Greek tragedians did not. However, a more important reason for his emphasis of Electra is related to his general tragic purpose. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the somewhat abstract conflict of moral obligation and the reconciliation of the divine powers of justice are of primary importance, while the appeasement and purification of Orestes' individual guilt is purely secondary. Since O'Neill is not interested in abstract problems of moral obligation, and precisely denies - at least as far as this play is concerned - the very existence of divine powers of justice, he is wise to shift the emphasis away from Orestes, the individual through whom these con- flicts are resolved. Since O'Neill develops his drama within the frame of the family fate and individual responsibility, he rightly completes his trilogy strictly in terms of the vengeance theme, and he rightly emphasizes character. In the person of Lavinia he has not only a character relatively undeveloped in the Aeschylus version, and therefore a character that offers him more of a challenge for original development, but he also has an individual who is not intimately associated with the primary conflict of the Eumenides.

Although O'Neill's version of the Oresteia, with its necessary adaptations for an audience of today, represents, in general, a translation of ancient values into modern terms, it expresses an entirely different concept of tragedy. Having considered the dramatic expression of this concept in Mourning Becomes Electra, it remains to develop an interpretation of his expression in terms of tragic theory.

II In an excellent article in a recent issue of Thought, Oskar Seidlin

pieces together a picture of "The Oresteia Today" by analyzing three modern versions of the Greek trilogy: Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies ;

zu "Working Notes, p. oôU. 21 Ibid., p. 532.




Gerhart Hauptmann's four tragedies, Iphigenia in Aulis, Agamemnon9 s Death, Electra, and Iphigenia in Delphi; and Robinson Jeffers' "Tower beyond Tragedy." According to Mr. Seidlin, these works represent "the dehumanization of the myth, a process from which we can read, as from a fever chart, the afflictions and inflictions, the affections and infections of our age."22 He chooses these three almost at random, claiming that all versions since Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris fit into his pattern of dehumanization, since all depict subhuman characters, and all end in some type of "desperate triumph or triumphant despair."23

With only a brief reference to Mourning Becomes Electra, he fits O'Neill into the puzzle as simply another piece that completes the modern picture of the Oresteia. And, in a way, O'Neill slips nicely into place without forcing the piece. For his characters are at least partly inhuman ; their animal qualities, for example, are emphasized in various descriptions. Christine "has a fine voluptuous figure and moves with a flowing animal grace. . . . Her chin is heavy, her mouth large and sensual, the lower lip full, the upper a thin bow, shadowed by a line of hair." ("Homecoming," Act I, Plays, II, 9) Lavinia "has the same sensual mouth and heavy jaw." (p. 10) Adam Brant "has a broad, low forehead . . . bushy eyebrows, swarthy complexion. . . . His mouth is sensual and moody." (p. 2 1 ) All of the Mannons possess similar physical traits. And some of their actions are clearly subhuman. Certainly La- vinia, in the frantic abandonment of her passionate appeal to Peter near the end of the play, is on a par with Hauptmann's hysterical Iphigenia, Jeffers' animal Clytemnestra in her exhibitionist orgy, and Sartre's Electra in her wild, ecstatic dance. And although O'Neill's vision of life resembles neither Jeffers' "violent abdication of man as man, the reduction of existence to nothingness,"24 nor Sartre's inhuman pretense at a new and higher form of humanism in which man creates himself out of nothingness by a deliberate choice of action - instead of expiation for the crime and purification from the incurred pollution through sacrifice, the crime itself is the expiation and act of liberation - his vision does resemble, at least somewhat, Hauptmann's fatalistic submission to the human condition, a stoic acceptance of suffering, a feeble admonition to human courage which seems to be the one slight hope of so much modern tragedy.

But if O'Neill's play readily fits into the modern picture of the Oresteia put together by Mr. Seidlin, it is a detail that clearly stands

22Oskar Seidlin, "The Oresteia Today," Thought, XXXIV (Autumn, 1959), p. 435. 23 Ibid., p. 437.

**lbtd.9 p. 444.




out from the rest of the picture. For he embodies in his trilogy the one element that Seidlin claims is lacking in the others, the moment of recognition which illumines human existence :

Hauptmann ends on the note of blind submission, tempered by the vague hope that destiny, inscrutable as it is, may hold in its cloak something else but slaughter and destruction. In Jeffers' "Tower beyond Tragedy," there is no eye to see, no deed that can be seen, but only dead eternity which obliterates all, action as well as recognition. And the deed of Sartre's Orestes is a blind deed, refusing to be weighed and measured, an act of wilfull and violent engagement; but recognition can only be the fruit of dis-engagement; of detaching oneself from one's own involvement in the maelstrom of life.25

In the final scene of "The Haunted," Lavinia achieves this disengage- ment that leads to her ultimate recognition and acceptance of her fate and of her own responsible contribution to that fate. In the very midst of her final, passionate attempt to escape from the Puritan hate of the Mannon past and to reach her island of pure and sinless love, she is forced by her inadvertent reference to Peter as Adam to step away from herself, to recognize the absolute futility of her struggle against herself and against the Mannon dead. Although her recognition is but a dim illumination of human existence, it is sufficient to give her a human dimension completely lacking in the characters of these other modern versions of the Oresteia.

This dimension is implicitly denied by Mr. Seidlin, and simply dis- regarded by many other critics, who automatically stuff O'Neill into the convenient pigeon-hole of naturalism.26 But O'Neill is really too big to fit. He does embrace characteristics of naturalism : after all, he breathes the literary atmosphere of his age; he shares common elements with contemporary dramatists. Some of his characters shout their impotent rage at an overwhelming universe in the noble gesture of defiance which, according to William Lynch, predominates in modern drama; others blindly move about in a naturalistic world of biological and environmental determinism. And though these characteristics pertain mainly to his earlier plays, aspects of both romantic defiance and naturalistic determinism are present even in Mourning Becomes Electra. Certainly Lavinia's violent response to Hazel - "I'm not asking God or

25 Ibid., p. 449. 26 See, for example, Henry Alonzo Myers, 1 ragedy: A View of Life (JNew York, 1956); and Sophus K. Winther, Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study (New York, 1934). Though in general an excellent critical analysis, Edwin A. EngePs The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill also tends toward a naturalistic interpretation of O'Neill.




anybody for forgiveness. I forgive myself!" ("The Haunted," Act IV, Plays, II, 14) - is as defiant as Cassandra's abdication of humanity in Jeffers' "Tower beyond Tragedy." And, as mentioned above, the obvious animal qualities and actions of the Mannons are clearly naturalistic. But despite these characteristics, the play is not pure naturalism. For O'Neill passes beyond mere defiance and determinism in his development of fate and human responsibility.

The balance and tension established by fate and free will are essential to O'Neill's tragic expression in this play, as it is in all true tragedy. Those who insist that the play is purely naturalistic eliminate precisely the element of responsibility; they upset the balance, and destroy one force of the tension, leaving the Mannons helpless victims of an overwhelming fate beyond their control. O'Neill's own preoccupation with fate in the composition of this play, his constant reiteration that the play "must, before everything, remain [a] modern psychological play - fate springing out of the family - "27 has encouraged many critics to over- look or simply deny any human responsibility. Statements by the dramatic characters of the play itself have led others to reject this responsibility. However, O'Neill emphasizes the notion of fate in his notes precisely because the Greek fate and not human responsibility presented a problem of translation to modern terms. And separated statements of the characters must first be considered in the context of the play, and then, must not be attributed directly to O'Neill, but simply to the dramatic character. For example, Christine complains: "Why can't all of us remain innocent and loving and trusting?" ("The Hunted," Act I, Plays, II, 73) ; and then she answers her own question with a self-pitying rationalism meant to comfort her sense of guilt and to shift the blame for the murder of her husband to some force outside herself: "But God won't leave us alone. He twists and wrings and tor- tures our lives with others' lives until - we poison each other to death!" In a similar way, she attributes the flaw in her well-laid plans ( Lavinia's discovery of the poison) to simply an impersonal agent: "I'd planned it [the murder] so carefully - but something made things happen !" ("The Hunted," Act IV, Plays, II, 110) These statements are perfectly natural, since they represent the common human reaction to failure : lay the blame at any doorstep but one's own. But they do not make her any less responsible for her crime. And Christine knows this, for, every time she tries to shut out the painful sight of her guilt, she has the rigid Lavinia's cry for justice ringing guilt in her ear.

A far more significant statement urged to support a thesis of de-

27 "Working Notes," p. 533.



494 Joseph p. o'neill, s. j.

termining fate is Orin's revelation, near the end of the play, of the evil destiny out of the past controlling his and Lavinia's lives. Since this revelation is the emotionally climactic moment of the entire trilogy, it seems to release the full tragic force of the dramatic action. But Orin's prophetic words must be considered in the context of the whole play and in the light of his physical and psychological condition. Orín has never fully recovered from the head wound received in the war; nor has he regained a psychological stability after the violent shock suffered in his horrifying encounter with suffering and death - a shock violent enough to create a recurring illusion in which he sees his own face in the face of the men he kills, and wonders if in killing them he is not really killing himself. Half living in a world of shadow and illusion, probing through family documents in a dark, shuttered room lighted only by candles and a writing lamp even in the daytime, searching for some controlling force out of the past, he is bound to find the fate he desires, and further bound to distort the significance of that fate.

All this is not to deny the presence of any fate at all, but merely to qualify its determining force. There is unquestionably a fate hovering over the Mannon family, as O'Neill meant there to be. In creating his modern counterpart of the Greek fate, he insists throughout his notes on the play that "fate from within the family is modern psychological approximation of the Greek conception of fate from without, from the supernatural."28 But neither the Greek fate nor O'Neill's approximation of that fate denies human responsibility. Certainly the Greek drama is not fatalistic in any completely determined way. As William Greene notes: "The greatest Greek drama . . . rests on the interplay between fate and character, between what man can not change and what remains within his power."29 And O'Neill, I believe, was aware of this. In a letter to Arthur Quinn, written about a year before he began Mourn- ing Becomes Electra, he states :

. . . I'm always, always trying to interpret Life in terms of character. I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind - (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it - Mystery certainly) - and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infini- tesimal incident in its expression. And my proud conviction is that it is possible - or can be - to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols.30

28 Ibid., p. 534. 29 Greene, p. 92. 30 Arthur Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), II, 199.




The "Force behind" is always present, influencing the lives of men, but never exerting despotic control. Man is neither simply free, nor purely determined. Fate for the individual human being is not a force controlling his life, but the concrete physical and psychological circumstances that condition his life. His successful or tragic life fulfillment depends on his free, responsible reaction to these circumstances. On the one hand, the calm acceptance of those conditions which he cannot alter, and the energetic, rational struggle to change what he can, lead to success, to the full development of his human potential. On the other, the lack of self-knowledge and wisdom to recognize the limitation of human freedom within these circumstances leads to the irrational and, therefore, "self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him"; leads to pride and the tragic fall. This is the reaction developed by O'Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra.

The Mannon fate is the physical and psychological heritage of their New England past, a heritage especially manifest in the current of Puri- tan frustration that runs through the entire action and seems to carry with it driftwood characters. All of the Mannons desire pure love and happiness, symbolized in the recurring dream of the South Sea Islands. But just as each is about to reach his Paradise Island, this hostile tide of frustration bears him or her away: Ezra, with the knowledge of love he has gained from his contact with death and war, returns to express that love to his wife, and she kills him; Christine, by this murder, seeks to free herself for the love of Adam, but Lavinia thwarts her; Orin, by killing Adam, hopes to regain the exclusive love of his mother, but instead drives her, and then himself, to suicide; and finally, Lavinia attempts to escape the Mannon dead in a marriage with Peter, but discovers she cannot. However, if all the Mannons are borne away by the current of Puritan frustration, they are not mere driftwood. For they have plunged into the raging waters of family pride, hatred, and jealousy, and freely swim with the current; their tragedy is that they never see, or see too late, its direction.

Although their Puritan heritage destroys the Mannons, they are not the mere innocent victims of a family curse. The notion of hereditary guilt is present in the action, but not as punishment for the sins of their ancestors, nor as a determination to repeat their sins. It is present rather as in the later Greek tragedy. In discussing the hereditary curse in Greek drama, Greene makes an acute observation. According to him, "Aeschy- lus and Sophocles perceive the difference between suffering for another's guilt (a natural, physical fact, verified by all experience) and punishment for another's guilt (the result of an immoral vindictiveness) . The latter Aeschylus repudiates, and the hereditary curse now appears as an




inherited though not insuperable tendency toward guilt."31 O'Neill develops a comparable fate. Because of their physical and psychological heritage, the Mannons have a conditioning propensity to destroy themselves and others, but only when they responsibly cooperate with this tendency do they actually move to a tragic fall. While the family fate stems from Abe Mannon's hatred and jealousy, personal responsibility enters in at each step of the action. This element of responsibility is seen especially in Lavinia, since all of the family traits combine in her, and work to the ultimate destruction of the family through her. But all of the Mannons evidence some responsibility.

Ezra shares even in the responsibility of Abe's original hatred and jealousy, since he refused to help Marie Brantôme in her later years. As a child, Seth explains, Ezra was "crazy about her . . ., as a youngster would be. His mother was stern with him, while Marie, she made a fuss over him and petted him . . . - but he hated her worse than any- one when it got found out she was his Uncle David's fancy woman." ("Homecoming," Act III, Plays, II, 44) Later, when Marie was forced by poverty to the absolute humiliation of seeking help from the Mannon family, she wrote Ezra. "He never answered her He could have saved her - and he deliberately let her die!" ("Homecoming," Act I, Plays, II, 26-27) The bitter hatred engendered in his heart as a young boy never disappeared. And this hatred helps explain his inability to love or express his love for Christine, which becomes in turn the basis for her hatred and ultimate murder of him.

Although Christine and Orin are responsible for their respective murders of Ezra and Brant, and suffer accordingly, the primary responsible agent in the entire dramatic action is Lavinia. Ezra's guilt is already incurred before the action of the play itself begins. He merely comes on stage to suffer the death that starts the tragic action that in- evitably destroys the House of Mannon. Lavinia is directly responsible for all the subsequent action. In a sense, she even shares in the guilt of Ezra's death, since her jealous threats have given the final impetus to Christine's act. But Lavinia refuses to recognize any responsibility here or in her later actions. She dismisses the consequences of all her actions as just vengeance. However, this is merely a subjective blindness to the truth she does not want to see. Her insistence that Adam's death and Christine's suicide are "justice," is a defense mechanism, a wall of innocence that she erects to protect her from a sense of guilt. Orin weakens that wall when he shouts: "You know damned well that behind all your pretense about Mother's murder being an act of justice was your

ai Greene, p. 98.




jealous hatred ! ... You wanted Brant for yourself !" ("The Haunted," Act II, Plays, II, 154) The very fierceness of her protest - "It's a lie! I hated him !" - reveals her guilt and her fear of recognizing that guilt; it also shakes the subjective conviction of her innocence. Orín lets her remark pass for the moment: "I know it's the last thing you could ever admit to yourself !" And it is. When Orín shoots himself, the wall begins to crumble, and the feared guilt stealthily closes in. In one final attempt to avert defeat, she seeks to flee with Peter. But when she calls him Adam, her defenses completely collapse: her illusion of innocence is completely destroyed; her way of retreat is cut off; she knows she cannot flee from herself. She returns to live with the Mannon dead.

Twice before in the play she has faced the Mannon dead, and twice refused to submit to them. Near the beginning of "The Haunted," just after she and Orin have returned from their voyage to the South Seas, she stands before the Mannon portraits and insists that the past is finished and forgotten. At the end of Act Three, when Orin has killed himself, she goes further and disowns them: ". . . I'm through with you forever now, do you hear? I'm Mother's daughter - not one of you ! I'll live in spite of you!" (Plays, II, 168) But as O'Neill comments in a stage direction : "She squares her shoulders, with a return of the abrupt military movement copied from her father which she had of old - as if by the very act of disowning the Mannons she had returned to the fold." Her return to the fold is complete when she enters the house at the end of the play. And it is especially to the room of the Mannon portraits that she must return. The appropriateness of her living death among the Mannon dead is ironically described by Orin earlier in the play when he says: ". . . darkness of death in life - that's the fitting habitat for guilt." ("The Haunted," Act II, Plays, II, 150) She has insisted on justice throughout the play. With the final recognition of her guilt she can accept, and even impose, the ultimate justice of her punishment.

The personal guilt developed by O'Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra implies a human freedom and responsibility which acts as a balancing force to the conditioning psychological fate of the Mannon family. This responsibility gives the characters a human dimension denied by many critics. Just as many have considered the tragic fall of the Greek heroes as determined by an external fate, some have insisted that O'Neill's heroes are determined by their environment or by their biological or, in this instance, psychological inheritance. But in re-creating the Greek concept of fate in terms of modern psychology, O'Neill is not presenting a drama of pure determinism. His insight into human nature, dim though it be, is sufficient to indicate that regardless of how influential the forces of the universe are, they are not coercive; that man




is ultimately responsible for his own destiny. If his work retains elements of defiance and naturalism, the added element of human responsibility in the Mannon downfall at least mitigates that defiance and qualifies the naturalistic determinism.

However, even when human responsibility is accepted as an essential element in the tragic expression of Mourning Becomes Electra, what is its ultimate significance in O'NeilPs tragic concept? Does the mere presence of this responsibility place O'Neill's play among the greatest tragedies? The answer must be that it does not. Human freedom is essential to true tragic expression, since it is precisely the basis of the human potential destroyed in the tragic fall. Of itself, human responsibility is sufficient to distinguish the tragic from the merely pathetic (the only term that can be applied to purely determined suffering or human destruction). In so far as O'Neill's dramatic expression embodies human responsibility, it at least moves into the realm of the tragic. And in this his play stands out from the other modern versions of the Oresteia, and from the whole mosaic of modern drama. However, in spite of all this, O'Neill's concept of tragedy is still very limited. For though he develops a tragic fall through fate and responsibility, he makes the fall itself the end of the tragic action. His play lacks a final redemptive resolution that is found in the greatest tragedies. The resolution of the Mannon fall is strictly in terms of justice - a vague sort of justice at that, which is in- dependent of an external order, and which seems to embody its own justification for existence. There is neither the purification of Orestes, as in the Oresteia, nor the spiritual redemption of the tragic hero as in such eminent tragedies as Oedipus at Colonus or King Lear. O'Neill's plays manifest a constant search for some redemptive element, but never the actual discovery. Although his dramatic expression attains a tragic level, Mourning Becomes Electra remains essentially a detail in the modern picture of drama. Though his tragic concept passes beyond mere romantic defiance and naturalistic determinism in expressing a tragic fall through human responsibility, it fails to achieve a human redemption. In so far as O'Neill fails to achieve this redemption, he fails to express a complete concept of tragedy.

Campion Jesuit High School Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin



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