Masking Becomes Electra: O'Neill, Freud, and the Feminine

Masking Becomes Electra: O'Neill, Freud, and the Feminine S. Georgia Nugent O'Neill's detailed stage set for Mourning Becomes Electra describes the Mannon mansion with its Greek "temple portico like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness." We might characterize the trilogy itself with a reversal of this image: O'Neill's work affixes a projecting façade of Freudian concepts to an underlying structure derived from Greek tragedy. Freudian theory would seem to offer the playwright a means of illumining the psyche of the Electra figure. Instead, O'Neill uses Freud not to reveal but to mask a darkness, specifically "the dark continent" of feminine sexuality. Overtly, Mourning Becomes Electra seems to be about unresolved Oedipal attachments. These, however, are so overt as to lack Freudian resistance and repression altogether. Something else, however, is systematically repressed in the trilogy—namely, non-Oedipal sexual relations and particularly feminine desire and sexual activity. I shall argue here that O'Neill, in the process of writing and re-writing the play, consistently cut passages revealing feminine desire or sexual activity and replaced them with passages which displace and conceal that activity. Moreover, that suppressed sexuality (we will discover) is displaced onto the author's own writing. An analysis of the trilogy clearly demonstrates O'Neill's fear of confronting or portraying desire, but the playwright's own commentary on the trilogy reveals a consistent system of sexual metaphor involving both male adequacy of performance and female parturition. The eroticism displaced from the play's narrative is transferred to the act of writing like a Freudian S. GEORGIA NUGENT, Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University, has written on ancient theories of comedy and lectured extensively on Greek tragedy. 37 38Comparative Drama "return of the repressed." Within the work itself, O'Neill's eroticization of writing is translated into epistolary terms with the result that in Mourning Becomes Electra a refusal to write signals a refusal of sexuality, while the choice to write signals an aggressive and dangerous entry into sexuality. From Fate to Freud. Most obviously by his naming of the trilogy (and by the use of the trilogie structure itself) O'Neill designates that his work is to be understood in the context of Greek tragic theater and, most especially, as a modernization of Aeschylus' Oresteia, the only complete Greek trilogy extant. Each major narrative element of the Greek drama finds its counterpart here. The war hero (Agamemnon/Ezra Mannon), returning home, is treacherously murdered by his unfaithful wife (Clytemnestra/Christine) with the aid of her lover, also a dispossessed heir of the household (Aegisthus/Adam Brant). Subsequently, the children (Electra/Lavinia, Orestes/Orin) take their vengeance upon both lover and mother and, in the final play, must come to terms with their own part in the family's history of crime and punishment. In other details as well, from providing a narrative background of lust and betrayal in the previous generation to experimenting with the formal use of a "chorus" of townspeople to introduce the plays, O'Neill attempts to transfer Greek tragedy to the American stage. In addition to specific narrative and formal elements of the Oresteia, what O'Neill has carried over into his modern version is the powerful force of a family curse working its way through generations. While others have seen economic determinism as the modern equivalent for the ancient concept of tragic fate, O'Neill sees in its place psychological complexes.1 He insists that "fate from within the family is the modern psychological approximation of the Greek conception of fate from without, from the supernatural."2 While O'Neill's debt to classical tragedy is undisputed, the extent of his familiarity with and exposure to psychoanalytic theory remains a topic of some debate.3 The playwright himself demurs when the question of his psychologizing in Mourning Becomes Electra is raised.4 Yet his working notes for the trilogy clearly indicate from the beginning his desire to experiment with the possibility of introducing psychological compulsion in the place of Greek tragedy's motivating Fate. If one of O'Neill's major motives in writing the trilogy...