Mourning Becomes Electra and The Prodigal: Electra and Orestes

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA· AND THE PRODIGAL ELECTRA AND ORESTES OFF BROADWAY, this season, a striking psychological portrait of a modem Orestes has been created by twenty-four year old Jack Richardson. His play, The Prodigal, based on the original House of Agamemnon legend, recreates the spirit of Athenian times. In the fifth century B.c., a middle-aged Athenian could have seen during his lifetime the original productions of Aeschylus', Euripides', and Sophocles' plays based on this legend. Today a middle-aged New Yorker could have seen the original productions of two great modem psychological dramas based on the same legend, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Prodigal. The Prodigal is as reflective of today's generation as O'Neill's play mirrored the mood of the preceding generation. For both O'Neill and Richardson are clairvoyant spokesmen of their respective eras. The late twenties and early thirties were imbued with the new discoveries of Freud. Man's fate and destiny were reshaped and re-evaluated by artists as well as scientists in the context of this new knowledge. O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra succeeded in such an undertaking. In his working notes on this play, O'Neill commits himself to create a drama in which he can "give modem Electra figure (Lavinia) in the playa tragic ending worthy of character." He wanted to convey "a modem tragic interpretation of classic fate without benefit of gods-for it must, before everything, remain [aJ modem psychological play-fate springing out of family life." O'Neill's sense of tragedy, often referred to as his sixth sense, seems to stem from his tragic personal life. Biographical and pathographical studies of O'Neill show that he was unconsciously not allowed to enjoy a happy fulfillment of family life and fatherhood. From this design of his own destiny, he was sensitive to an original artistic understanding that Electra was not fated to "peter out into undramatic married banality." (O'Neill did not note that the Greek word "Electra"- "A-Iektra"-means "the Unmated.") He recreated her as an eternally haunted character, such as he himself was. So personal was his empathy, that O'Neill, who was raised in New London, Connecticut, could only envision Electra's tragedy in terms of Lavinia Mannon, a New England character of the latter half of the nineteenth century. 257 258 MODERN DRAMA December Although he has deprived us of the universality of the original legendary images, his more personal and contemporaneous transformation of the characters has enriched them with more vitality than they originally had. We. can more readily feel a personal identity with O'Neill's less dated alternates. His portrayal of the members of the Mannon family finds confirmation in the most recent psychoanalytic concepts on the process of mourning. Mourning Becomes Electra antedates . the fuller scientific formulations on the structure of mourning by some years. Nevertheless, his is not the mastered knowledge of the scientist. In his attempts to understand himself, his insight is mundane. Only in his created characters does he approximate exquisite psychoanalytic elaboration of personality structure. Today's young men are the children of O'Neill's generation. The understanding minds of the thirties had tried to instill in this generation the right to be free-as they themselves were not-of unconscious blind ties to their parents. It seems to me that young Richardson is a hopeful spokesman of this .effort. The misinformed parents of the thirties, equally in pursuit of psychological liberation for their offspring, reared their children to be free to yell "nol" much beyond a permissible age. The child's negativism was never modified into justifiable dissent and meaningful cooperation because these parents feared that such direction might be regarded as expressed hatred towards the child. To what extent such upbringing has given rise to a flOurishing new generation of nihilistic and angry artists and citizens, is an important problem for psychological and sociological research. Richardson's Orestes can be taken as a symbol of the more successful results of the experimental efforts of the thirties. We see a clear-minded Orestes who wishes to disentangle himself from the pre-ordained, childhood phenomenon of either rigid loyalty to...