Mourning Becomes Electra As a Tragedy

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA ASATRAGEDY DURING ALL ms CAREER, in all likelihood, O'Neill looked back nostalgically to Greek tragedy. In his own words, he tried in all his plays "to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy, in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it, in seemingly the most ignoble, debased lives." And he added: "I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind-( Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls itMystery 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 infinitesimal incident in its expression. And my profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible-or can be-to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modem values and symbols in the theatre which may to some degree bring home to members of a modem audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theatre is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream is the noblest everl"l O'Neill wrote these lines in 1925 in a letter to Arthur Hobson Quinn. A few years later he tried to draw still closer to the Greek drama in Mourning Becomes Electra. As the superimposed Greek title shows, the subject of the play is an old Greek myth presented in modem dress. And the trilogy, with its division into parts, acts and scenes, and the presence of a confidant and a chorus, looks like a transfer of Aeschylus's Oresteia. But, what is more important still, the substance of Mourning Becomes Electra is essentially tragic and meets all the requirements formulated by Aristotle in his Poetics.2 If we are to believe the Greek philosopher, a tragedy is the representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude-namely the magnitude that admits of a change from good fortune to bad in a sequence of events which follow one another inevitably or according to probability. Or, to take up A. C. Bradley's definition, a tragedy is "a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death." It "leads up to, and includes, the death of the hero."3 Now Mourning Becomes Electra is indeed such a tale since, instead of a happy family reunion following the Civil War (the American equivalent of the Trojan War), we witness two murders on the stage and are 1. Quoted by A. H. Quinn in A History of the American Drama from the Cioil War to the Present {New York, 1936), II, p. 199. 2. One must assume that O'Neill read the Poetics while studying playwriting under the guidance of Prof. George Pierce Baker at Harvard. 3. CE. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy, 1905, p. 7. 143 144 ROGER ASSELINEAU December privy to two suicides in the wings. Yet, the titular heroine, LaviniaElectra , is physically untouched by this tragic chain-reaction and survives the general slaughter. But, in spite of appearances, she is no exception to the rule which demands the death of the hero, for, though she does not actually die in the last act of the trilogy, her life will henceforward be a form of death; she will be dead to the world, a lonely recluse shut up in the cursed house which witnessed her crimes and sufferings, a prey to remorse, torn by the ruthless Erinyes of her soul. Hers is a bloodless death, a death in life more cruel than real death-a moral suicide full of austere grandeur and no less tragic than the ostentatious death of a Greek or Elizabethan hero. As a matter of fact, it can even be maintained that Lavinia is a true tragic hero. In spite of her relative psychological complexity and the changes she undergoes in the last part, she has the monolithic quality of an archetypal tragic character. She is above all the embodiment of a passion. The intensity of the love which burns in her is such that on the least provocation it...