A Doomed Tragedy essays

A Doomed Tragedy essays Mourning Becomes Electra(1931), a masterpiece play in American literary history, is a trilogy dealing with the tragic story happening to a New England family in the Civil War period. As T.S. Eliot once observed, good poets borrow, while great poet steal. The great playwright Eugene ONeil also stole the plot for Mourning Becomes Electra from Oresteia by Aeschylus, a noted Greek tragedian. He successfully situated the ancient story of family murder and divine retribution in civil war America and proved it to be an artistic triumph. Apparently, the title indicates ONeils interest in the daughter, Lavinia Mannon(Electra), who avenges the murder of her father Ezra( Agamemnon) by his wife Christine(Clytemnestra) and her lover, Ezras cousin Adam Brant(Aegisthus). Part one of the trilogy, Homecoming, describes Ezras poisoning upon his return to New England in 1865 from serving as a Union general in the American civil war; part two, The Hunted, depicts the outraged Lavinia manipulating her neurotic, Oedipal brother Orin(Orestes) into killing Brant and goading Christine into taking her life. The final play, The Haunted, finds Lavinia worried that Orin, driven half-insane by guilt and incestuous desire, will confess and tarnish the Mannon name. She drives her brother to suicide, then entombs herself within the family mansion for the remainder of her life. At the heart of the play lies the central theme, the stranglehold of past on present. The past is governed by ones ancestors. The ancestral Mannnon family was powerful and respectable, it was not doomed until Ezras father expels his brother, Brants father, from the family when both lust after the same woman. This may be the primal sin that set off the scenario of mishap in the Mannon house. And , along with Lavinias growing resemblance to Christine, Orins to Ezra, and Ezra to the zealots, generals and judges who prece...