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Mourning Becomes Electra Eugene O’ Neill

Iqra Aqeel

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IQRA AQEEL-007 B.S. ENGLISH 8TH

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Significance of the South Sea Islands The carefree islands of the South Sea are a most desirable locale for a vacation or

honeymoon. In the play Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O'Neill, the islands are a

place where sex is not seen as a sin and people live life freely, as nature intended people

to do so. This play was written in a setting where such actions were frowned upon. It was

also these islands where escaping to them with Christine Mannon, was a goal never

achieved by two men, both who met a painful, vain death. Orin Mannon and Captain

Adam Brant fell to the femme fatale that was Christine Mannon. Both of them were

sucked into the whirlpool of destruction as Christine sung her siren's song, lulling them to

come to her and escape to the South Sea Islands. It was also here where girls became

women and complete freedom was found.

Adam Brant wanted to take Christine and Lavinia to "The Blessed Isles." He had

previously been there before and had resided in the land where "the natives walked

around naked." He remembers them vividly as he describes them to Lavinia.

Lavinia: I your admiration for the naked native women. You said they had found the

secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

Brant: so you remember that, do you? Aye! And they lived in as near the Garden of

Paradise before sin was discovered as you'll fin on this earth! Unless you've seen it, you

can't picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea! The clouds like

down on the mountaintops, the sun drowsing in your blood, and always the surf on the

barrier reef singing a croon in your ears like a lullaby! The Blessed Isles I'd call them!

You can forget there all men's dirty dreams of greed and power (279)!

Adam Brant speaks of these islands like a heaven that no one can go to and find bliss. He

tells Lavinia that he wants to take her there, the isles where innocence can be found.

However, these picturesque islands are the places he really wants to go with Christine, for

Adam loves her. This messy love triangle only proves that getting to these islands of

innocence are truly beyond the scope of morality. "O'Neill re-employs in various forms

the conventional image of exotic islands in order to gain a universally-conditioned

response from his audience--escape from unpleasant reality--" (Ronald T. Curran

Literature Resource Center). Curran defines the islands as the only innocent object in the

play. It is the last normal thing left in the mess of the Mannons. He only tells Lavinia of

these islands to deter any suspicion of adultery between himself and her mother. Anthony

S. Abbott wrote of the Mannon family all trying to find freedom through murder and sex

but as he says two wrongs don't make a right:

Christine Mannon and Adam Brant try to break out of the repressive world of the

Mannons through the life-giving freedom on sexuality. Sex in the Mannon household is

associated with sin, and the only way that Christine and Adam can find to overcome this


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repressive attitude is to kill Ezra. But murder only begets murder, and all of the

characters' attempt to gain freedom and peace, to find "the Blessed Isles," end in disaster

(Abbott 55).

These Islands becomes a form of escapism for Christine and Adam for she wants to go

there after being caught red handed with Adam by Lavinia:

Christine: Don't talk like that! You have me, Adam! You have me! And we will be

happy- once we're safe on your Blessed Islands! It's strange. Orin was telling me of an

island-

Brant: Aye-the Blessed Isles- Maybe we can still find happiness and forget! I can see

them now- so close- and a million miles away! The warm earth in the moonlight, the

trade winds rustling the coco palms, the surf on the barrier reef singing a croon in your

ears like a lullaby! Aye! There's peace and forgetfulness for us there- if we can ever find

those islands now (363)!

Adam felt the foreboding sense of despair when he found out his attempt to murder Ezra,

head of the Mannon house, had succeeded. However, Lavinia discovered the poison and

sensed foul play in Ezra's death. Christine also realized that Orin had wanted to take her

to the islands as well. What would be the outcome if she did leave with Adam and Orin

found out? Christine loved Brant as well as her son but she decided to be with the captain

in the end. She wanted to forget the crime she had committed and wished to escape her

inevitable punishment. Everyone in the play was looking for some form of escape

through the South Sea Islands. Horst Frenz also spoke of Lavinia and even though she

seems to have the most dominant role in the play she too is looking for an escape, "Now

Lavinia does not differ from the others in her attempt to escape into illusion; she tries

harder than anyone else. She differs from the other characters in being herself the

obstacle to her own happiness" (Horst Frenz Literature Resource Center).

Orin came home from the war and find Lavinia and Christine bickering about something

he doesn't fully know, yet. In the scene he arrives home, his Oedipus Complex stands out

vividly as he holds Christine's hand lovingly. He describes the island with the same

dreaminess that Adam Brant had as he described the islands himself.

Orin: Someone loaned me the book. I read it and reread it until finally those islands came

to mean everything that wasn't war, everything that was peace and warmth and security. I

used to dream I was there. And later on all the time I was out of my head I seemed really

to be there. There was no one there but you and me. And yet I never saw you, that's the

funny part. I only felt you all around me. The breaking of the waves was your voice, the

sky was the same color as your eyes. The warm sand was like your skin. The whole

island was you. A strange notion wasn't it? But you needn't be provoked at being an


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island because this was the most beautiful island in the world- as beautiful as you mother

(342)!

The difference in explanation, between Adam's island and Orin's, is that on Orin's island,

the island is his mother. Orin also wished to escape, from the war, the pain, the suffering,

the death, and the numbness he felt while fighting the war. He wants to forget his injuries

and stay with his mother, who he loves dearly, and escape. Orin's Oedipal Complex was

acutely shown here. He lovingly speaks to his mother as more than a maternal figure but

more as a lover. He also speaks of his father as a barrier between the two of them. As

critic, Frederick I. Carpenter once wrote, "…The fatal necessity for the Oedipus and

Electra complexes. It has described the sinful love of the son for the mother and of the

daughter for the father as a universal, compulsive pattern. The protagonists seem to have

been born damned" (Carpenter 129). Carpenter speaks of people born with these

obsessions for their parents, of the opposite gender, are doomed to have a tragic ending.

He also wrote, "the avenging furies strike, and the family destroys itself until only

Lavinia is left" (Carpenter 72). This critic is saying that in a household where the

Oedipus and Electra Complexes prevail, only doom awaits them.

Long after Ezra Mannon was cold-heartedly murdered, by his wife, and Christine

committed suicide, Lavinia and Orin decided to go to the "Blessed Islands" themselves. It

was here Lavinia changed into a beautiful woman, after experiencing the love that only a

native, Avahanni, could offer.

Lavinia: I loved those islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there

mysterious and beautiful- a good spirit- of love- coming out of the land and sea. It made

me forget death. There was no hereafter. There was only this world- the warm earth in the

moonlight- the trade wind in the coco palms- the surf on the reef- the fires at night and

the drum throbbing in my heart- the natives dancing naked and innocent without the

knowledge of sin! But what in the world! I'm gabbing like a regular chatterbox. You must

think I've become awfully scatterbrained!

Peter: Gosh, no! I'm glad you've grown that way! You never used to say a word unless

you had to (394)!

While Lavinia is describing the island to Peter, her soon-to-be fiancé, she describes the

islands with the exact words Adam Brant once used to describe the islands to her. She

wanted to go there with Adam Brant, but he was dead now. She had killed what she loved

the most. It was also the Islands, where she found peace and relaxation, where she could

undergo a metamorphosis, from a block-like girl into a graceful woman, love on an island

can change anyone. She changed into almost a spitting image of her mother. Lavinia had

a sort of sexual awakening there. Almost like Eve biting into the forbidden fruit of

knowledge. She had her eyes open to the humanly pleasure that there was to offer. Critic


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Bette Charlene Werner wrote that, "But peace is impossible in Eden, given the nature of

Eve. Woman is the first betrayer, who lets pure love turn to passion. She is the original

deceiver, who is not only mother, but mistress" (Bette Werner Literature Resource

Center). This critic portrays that in opening the eyes of a woman, peace cannot be found

afterward. In that way the islands can also be viewed as the Freudian Id. As Judith E.

Barlow wrote in her criticism of the play she describes how Eugene O'Neill used the

Freudian Id to describe the change in Lavinia:

In his depiction of Christine Mannon and her daughter, Lavinia, O'Neill again seems to

have taken his cue from Freud. Freud postulated that a girl's "turning away from the

mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of

that kind may become very striking and last all through life" Lavinia eventually comes to

empathize and identify with her mother, but only after her mother's death (Barlow 168).

Barlow shows how after her change on the island she learns to become like her mother

and take her place, but this change could only be the outcome of the mother's suicide.

The South Sea Islands were Islands where people escaped and changed. Mourning

Becomes Electra is filled with escapists, all trying to flock to these "Blessed Islands" to

find a moment's peace and rest from the cacophony in their lives. Adam Brant and Orin

Mannon were both men on a quest to go to the islands with Christine Mannon, the love of

both their lives. Sadly, neither of them made it there with her; they all met a gruesome

death in their attempt. Adam died trying to take Christine, Christine committed suicide

not being able to bear the death of the man who she loved and Orin committed suicide as

well, not being able to handle the death of his mother, who he loved more than a mother.

In a crazy world peace cannot be found on this earthly plane, so it seem

Play About Murder incest and suicide.

Incest

Incest and incestuous desire lie behind most of the relationships central to Mourning Becomes Electra. Ezra’s daughter Lavinia loves her father; Christine’s son Orin loves his mother, and Lavinia and Orin love each other.

While O’Neill presents these relationships as unconsummated desires, Orin does urge Lavinia to sleep with him in act three of The Haunted, hoping that by committing incest that they will be bound together in sin and guilt. His sister refuses.

Play as a Sin and guilt.

Sin and Guilt

O’Neill’s work illustrates his fascination with sin, guilt, punishment, and redemption. In Mourning Becomes Electra,the sins include murder (Christine’s killing of her husband;


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Lavinia and Orin’s killing of Adam); adultery (Christine’s with Brant); suicide (Christine’s and Orin’s); and premarital sex (Lavinia’s with the islander).

In a sense, Ezra murders Brant’s mother by refusing the sick woman money for food and

medicine. Also, Lavinia “kills” Christine and Orin by driving them both to commit suicide.

Orin’s feelings of guilt lead him to write his confession, which he threatens to give to Peter if Lavinia marries him. At the play’s end, Lavinia’s guilt forces her to give up

hopes of happiness and to punish herself, as the last Mannon, by rejecting love and shutting herself in the house.

Fate of Mannons:

The Inner Conflict

In Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill leaves for a while the war between God and science and returns tothe more limited conflict within the ‘suffering’ individual. But the

conflict and the suffering are traceable more specifically than ever to the fixations upon father and mother, to the tension between puritanism and freedom, pride and love, death and life. As before, in most of the plays since Desire Under the Elms all other masks and

values stem from the power of the father-and-mother- images, the Oedipus and Electra complexes.

In his detailed “Working Notes and Extracts, froth a Fragmentary Work Diary”, O’Neill outlines his purpose and method in Mourning Becomes Electra,emphasizing repeatedly

his equation of the complexes with destiny. They are “a modern tragic interpretation of classic fate without benefit of Gods––for it (the play), must before everything remain (a) modern psychological play––fate springing out of the family.”

Working oat of the Family Fate

As with the original Atreidae, the family fate of the New England Mannons is ancestral, not limited to one generation. It has been set in motion before the opening of the play by Abe Mannon, father of Ezra (Agamemnon) and grandfather of Lavinia and Orin (Electra

and Orestes). Abe’s younger brother, David, had been involved in a liaison with a French-Canadian governess, Marie Brantome, resulting in her pregnancy. David

married her, but Abe (in Lavinia’s words) put them both out of the house and then afterwards tore it down and built this one because he wouldn’t live where his brother had disgraced the family. The child of David and Marie is Adam Brant, the Aegisthus of the

play, who returns to avenge his parents death in poverty and misery after their exile.

Pride as a Source of Death

The house of Mannon, therefore, was built upon outranged

pride and puritanism, leading inevitably to death for the Mannon


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line. For them pride is the source of death, and love is the source of life. Existence for the Mannons is life-in-death from which love,

represented by Marie Brantome, has been shut out. In their longing to escape the ugly reality of their actual lives the Mannons yearn

for release in love untainted by pride and sin, and in death itself. Christine’s acceptance of sexuality, has been embittered by Ezra’s Puritanism––distorted into a possessive passion ; but to her husband,

lover, and children, she still represents release and spinelessness. Even to Lavinia, who hates her because she “stole all love from me when I was born”,

Christine is still the longed-for mother, as well as the image of herself, Lavinia, as giver and lover.

Shift of Emphasis

Since O’Neill has shifted the emphasis of the trilogy from Orestes to Electra, the changes

which take place in the character of Lavinia provide a new dimension to the theme of the play. Caught like Nina Leeds in the father-complex, she struggles at once to realize and

to escape from a self-image which is only a reflection of her soldier father. Her physical appearance tells the story : tail like her mother, her body is thin, flat-breasted and angular, and its unattractiveness is accentuated by her plain black dress. Her movements are stiff

and she carries herself with a wooden, square shouldered, military bearing. She has a flat dry voice and a habit of snapping out her words like an officer giving orders. But in spite

of these dissimilarities one is immediately struck by her facial resemblance to her mother. This facial resemblance, the mask of the mother in Lavinia, will have its moment of fulfilment, but only briefly, until God the Father’s lightning strikes again.

Pride, Puritanism and Vindictive Justice

The father, Ezra, embodies the characteristics of the family which constitute their fate––pride, puritanism, and a strong sense of vindictive justice. Because of his ingrown

egotism and his guilty attitude towards sex, Ezra does not, at the beginning of the play, know how to love. Desire for his wife takes the form of brutal and clumsy lust. Not until he has known the comradeship of other men on the battlefield and has seen death, does he

become aware of the significance of love and life ; “Death made me think of life. Before that life had only made me think of death……That’s always been the Mannons’ way of

thinking. They went to the white meeting-house on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die Death was being born.” Ironically, his ability to love and his insight into life come to Ezra only when he returns home to

Christine’s hatred and his own death.

Suicidal Frustrations

Christine has fallen in love with Adam Brant, the son of Marie Brantome. When Ezra is

in the throes of a heart attack, Christine deliberately withholds his medicine. To the outside world, Ezra appears to have died from natural causes ; Lavinia however,

discovers her mother’s guilt. She plans her vengeance––driven, not only by the Mannon sense of justice and her love for her father, but by her frustrated love for Adam and hatred and jealousy of her mother. Since Christine has ‘stolen’ the love of both men from

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Lavinia, the fitting relation for Lavinia is not to take her mother’s life, but to take from her the love which is her life. At Lavinia’s instigation, Orin murders Adam Brant.

Christine takes her own life, and after Christine’s suicide the spirit of vindictiveness and death in the Mannons seems to be temporarily satisfied, and Lavinia can come to life. She

takes on all the attributes of, her mother ; “She seems a mature woman, sure of her feminine attractiveness. Her brown-gold hair is arranged as her mother’s had been … The movements of her body now have the feminine grace her mother had possessed.” Now, at

perhaps her guiltiest, she has lost her, sense of sin and death. Her father’s ghost in Lavinia has now been placated ; like him, she could find life only after experience of

death.

Chained to Mannons

And as Lavinia assumes the characteristics of the mother, Orin takes on those of his father. He even wears a beard and walks like a “tin soldier”. Together they take a trip to

the East, stopping at the South Sea Islands. Orin watches Lavinia’s new sexuality with puritanical disapproval and jealousy. He feels that he and Lavinia have actually

become their father and mother ; “Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s place and you’re mother ?…I’m the Mannon you’re chained to !”

Symbolic Incest Pattern

To complete the symbolic incest pattern representing the lonely Mannons’ introversion and their narcissistic inability to love any but another Mannon, Orin falls in love with his sister. The same duality of love and loathing for oneself and its reflection in another

which has always dominated Mannon relationships now governs this one. Orin hates Lavinia as much as he desires her ; she has become to him what the Furies were to Orestes, a constant reminder of guilt, driving him towards madness. He wants to become

her, lover in order to force her to share his guilt. “How else can I be sure you won’t leave me ? You would never dare to leave me––then ! You would feel as guilty then as I

do……” Lavinia, both fascinated and repelled, shouts her hatred at him: “I hate you You’re too vile to live ! You’d kill yourself if you weren’t such a coward.”

Crumbling of the Illusion

With these words Lavinia has committed her last murder. When Orin shoots himself Lavinia’s, last illusion of her own innocence begins to crumble. The puritan conscience (or superego or father-god), from which she has found release in identification with the

mother, now reasserts itself. She shouts defiance at the portraits of her ancestors, “I’m Mother’s daughter––not one of you……!” but even as she does so, the Mannon pride

claims its own. The feminine Lavinia now “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––and marches stiffly from the

room.”

Last Effort to Reach For Life

Lavinia takes one more desperate effort to reach from behind her mask of death toward

life. She begs her childhood sweetheart, the innocent, untempted, and unsuspicious Peter,


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to marry her. Even as she pleads with him, however, she knows that the dead have not forgotten, and, will not rest until justice has been performed. She must pay. for their lives

with her own, not in the easy expiation of actual death––that would be the release for which,’ she has always longed––but in a return to the living death which is the Mannon

fate, and which, as always, is to be accomplished by Mannon pride. She tells Peter goodbye, as Seth, the gardener, sings the refrain of his “Shenandoah”.

The Trap of Self Claims Its Prey

When Lavinia “pivots sharply on her heel and marches woodenly into the house, closing

the door behind her”, the tension between love and pride, life and death, is dissolved ; only, pride and death remain. Violated order has been restored the trap of self has finally

and with finality claimed its inevitable pre

Electra complex and Oedipus complex:

Freudianism and Crime

Freudian theories of character are a version of reality that explains the crimes of the

Mannons as their puritans heritage explains their feelings of guilt. When intellectuals of

the twenties characterized puritanism as repressive, they were using a word, that has

explicit Freudian sanction, When O’Neill chose Freudian psychology to motivate the

action, he extended the dimensions of his play-world into areas as broad as the Olympus

of Aeschylus.

The Freudian view of behaviour invokes a region as mysterious as the dwelling-place of

the gods and sees human motivation as guided by impulses as imperative as divine

commands. As the social dimension of O’Neill’s action extends into, the puritan past, so

the broader dimension extends into the unconscious where drives are determined by

infantile experience.

Unscientific Freudianism

Like the puritanism, the Freudianism of the play is popular and unscientific. Mourning

Becomes Electra is not a carefully documented case study nor was intended to be. The

fact that the doctrines of Freud were widely misunderstood and vastly oversimplified by

the public and the popularizers, did not prevent the playwright or the novelist––who often

did not understand them either––from using the attitudes towards human behaviour that

the theories suggested. However imprecisely, the public knew that Freud insisted on the

relevance of the sex drive to life-adjustment, on the dangers of repression, on the

importance of dreams as a key to self-knowledge in these areas. The unconscious or

subconscious was a deep, dark, cellar-like place from which proceeded equally dark


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impulses like the urge to marry your mother ; repression was a dangerous damming-up of

such urges and led to abnormal inversions. The biological determinism of nineteenth-

century Naturalism also had prepared the ground for the psychological determinism of

these theories. Whether or not the public approved, Freudianism, as it was understood or

misunderstood, represented in the 1920’s a definite complex of attitudes about the

importance of the psyche as a key to human behaviour.

O’Neill’s Psychological Intuitions

O’Neill himself insisted that his knowledge of the psychoanalysts was unscientific and

fragmentary, and that he was guided more by intuition than by any theory :

There is no conscious use of psychoanalytic material in any of my plays. All of them

could easily be written by any dramatist who had never heard of the Freudian theory and

it was simply guided by an intuitive psychological insight into human beings and their

life-impulsions that is as old as Greek drama. It is true that I am enough a student of

modern psychology to be familiar with the Freudian implications inherent in the actions

of some of my characters while I was portraying them ; but this was always an

afterthought and never consciously was I for a moment influenced to shape my material

along the lines of any psychological theory. It was my dramatic instinct and my personal

experience with human life that alone guide me.

Autobiographical Element

There are pieces of autobiography to which O’Neill could have pointed to justify his

stand, for instance, Jamie O’Neill’s devotion to his mother and the fact

thatEugene always thought that this devotion kept his brother unmarried. Eugene’s own

attachment to his mother’ was deep and firm, even under the strain of Ellen O’Neill’s

dope addiction. In his own experience, too, there was the idealistic Irish-Catholic

identification of mother with the Virgina –– a Jansenistic preoccupation with purity that

was tied tightly to the mother-image. In the broader cultural perspective, there is the

American reverence for “Ma” that assumes almost a mythical proportions in folk

traditions. The woman keeps the flame, “not only of the hearth, but of duty and purity

and faith and hope” in a rude masculine world. Nonetheless, in spite of O’Neill’s

contention, there is a psychological theory built into the plot and characters, of Mourning

Becomes Electra.If O’Neill is working from his own experience, he interprets it

according to the categories that popular Freudianism offered him. That hypothesis

attached a darker significance to the traditional attachment to mother, and to mother’s

attachment to her “boy”. The folk tale attitude towards mother, the American experience

and O’Neill’s own heritage established a background for the Freudian position and

indicate how the playwright is likely to interpret the “complexes”.

Specific Details of Freudianism


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The specific details of O’Neill’s Freudianism inMourning Becomes Electra are

elaborated from the oversimplified proposition that every male is attracted to the woman

who resembles his mother in physical appearance and every female desires a man who

resembles her father. The prototype of the female in the play is Marie Brantome.

Christine and Lavinia both, resemble her, especially in their “peculiar shade of copper

gold hair”. Adam says to Lavinia : “Lavinia, you’re so like your mother in some ways.

Your face is the dead image of hers. And look at your hair. You won’t meet hair like

yours and hers again in a month of Sundays. I only know one other woman who had it.

You’ll think it strange when I tell you. It was my mother.” The Mannon women are

identified with one another through this symbol. The Mannon men, too, look alike––

Adam, Ezra and Orin. These similarities visualize the tangled, interlocked relationship

among the members of the family at the same time as they “explain” them. Given this

pattern, according to the Freudian hypothesis, the involvements are predictable. Adam

loves Christine ; Lavinia loves her father, Adam and Orin ; Ezra loves his wife and

daughter ; Orin loves his mother and his sister. Reciprocally Lavinia hates Christine ;

Adam hates Ezra and Orin ; Orin hate rivals for his mother’s love, Adam and Ezra.

Christine’s revulsion for her husband is explained by another Freudian postulate, her

unfortunate experience on her wedding night, presumably Ezra’s ineffective love making.

Orin’s complex and Lavinia’s are treated specifically in the course of the dialogue ;

Lavinia has a fixation on her father and her brother, and Orin is still his mother’s “boy”.

Orin’s Mother-Complex

Orin’s mother complex is developed at some length. He has had his mother’s love, he is

her “baby”. And his love for her, while rife with sexual overtones, is reverential. His

greeting on their first encounter in the play contains a curious juxtaposition “Mother !

God, it is good to see you !” Christine deals with him in seductive terms, emphasizing the

physical in their relationship ‘You’re a big man now, aren’t you ? I can’t believe it. It

seems only yesterday when I used to find you in your night shirt hiding in the hall

upstairs on the chance that I’d come up and you’d get one more goodnight kiss.”

According to the play, the “Oedipus complex” arises because the mother loves the father

too little and the son too much. This Freudian hypothesis explains the attraction and

attachments that motivate the events––each Mannon is drawn by an unconscious impulse

to that person who resembles the parent of the opposite sex. In Orin and Lavinia, the third

generation, this impulse has grown into a fixation, a love-hate directed primarily at

mother. The most illuminating instance of the operation of this Freudianism is the hero’s

mother-fixation. His fate turns on his complex ; in him the pattern of psychological forces

work out to a conclusion. He is mother’s boy, with all that implies, and his attachment,

moreover, includes an explicit connection of mother with peace, innocence and the

security of infancy. While away at war, Orin dreamt of his mother as anIsland of peace.

The playwright leaves little to the imagination. The Island surrounds Orin ; it is warm,


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secure amid the wash of waters. It does not take a particularly acute dream-diagnostician

to recognize the desire to return to the womb. Supplementary to this dream was the

illusion that each man he killed at the front resembled his father. The wish to possess

mother and the acting out of the father-murder give Orin the classic Oedipal symptoms.

This complex moves him to murder Adam, and the brunt of his hatred falls on the father-

figure, not on the mother. Christine’s presence always has a softening effect. When he

witnesses Christine’s disintegration because of Adam’s death, he pleads with her :

“Mother ! Don’t moan like that ! How could you grieve for that servant’s bastard ? 1

knew he was the one who planned Father’s murder! You couldn’t have done that ! He got

you under his influence to revenge himself ! …But you’ll forget him ! I’ll make you

forget him ! I’ll make you happy.” In the midst of his jealousy, he is suffering from

fractured idealism a desire to preserve his mother immaculate.

Lavinia Becomes Mother

This image of Mother remains inviolate throughout the play. As Mother, Christine

symbolizes “pre-natal, noncompetitive freedom from fear”, as O’Neill says elsewhere.

Even Christine’s rejection of Lavinia does not make her an “unnatural mother” ; it is the

result of not being able to consider Lavinia her child. And Lavinia’s hatred screens a

longing for mother-love. After Christine’s suicide Lavinia becomes Mother––she has

assumed Christine’s function along with her personality. She takes care of Orin, watches

over him. More than ever Orin is caught by his complex : Orin says to Lavinia ; “You

don’t know how like Mother you’ve become, Vinnie. I don’t mean only how pretty

you’ve gotten……I mean the change in your soul, too……little by little it grew like

Mother’s soul––as if you were stealing hers––as if her death had set you free to become

her.” And further he says : “Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s place and you’re Mother

?” The transformation into “Father and Mother” is complete, and Orin’s complex made

completely explicit, when he makes his proposal to his sister : “I love you now with all

the guilt in me––the guilt we share ! Perhaps I love you too much, Vinnie……There are

times now when you don’t seem to be my sister, nor Mother, but some stranger with the

same beautiful hair––”. He touches her hair caressingly. She pulls violently away. He

laughs wildly. He continues, “Perhaps you’re Marie Brantome, eh ? And you say there

are no ghosts in the house.” Lavinia says, “For God’s Sake––! No ! You’re insane ! You

can’t mean–– !” Then Orin says, “How else can I be sure you won’t leave me ? You

would never dare leave me then. You would feel as guilty as I do ! You would be as

damned as I am!” By taking Lavinia, Orin would fulfil his desire to possess Mother

completely ; he would also be able to share the burden of his guilt. The pivotal point of

the action here is Lavinia’s horror at Orin’s proposal ; there is simply no question in her

mind of actual incest. Lavinia in theIslands and with “clean, honest Peter” was

sufficiently emancipated : “Any love is beautiful.” But emancipation draws the line at

incest. The mother is ultimately attainable only by another, even darker, door.


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Orin’s Return to Personal Unconscious

Stripped of its “Island” imagery, the way back to the womb, to peace and security, is a

return to the oblivion of personal unconsciousness. Orin cannot confess his guilt publicly

; he cannot face life with its burden. When Lavinia cries out that he should commit

suicide, he hears his mother’s voice : he says, “Yes, that would be justice-now you are

Mother ! She is speaking now through you !……It’s the way to peace––to find her

again––my lost Island––Death is an Island of Peace, too––Mother will be waiting for me

there.” Orin’s suicide is presented as a return to Mother ; this is the judgment rendered by

his complex. Death is the way to peace, rest, freedom from fear. It is also a passage into

oblivion.

Freudian Undertones

As Orin’s suicide is the judgment levelled by his complex, Lavinia’s self-immurement is

the judgment of her puritan heritage and her complex. She tries to break out of the circle,

to escape with Peter and live, but her resolution breaks down when, in a Freudian slip,

she calls Peter “Adam”. The dead thrusting themselves between her love for Adam,

Orin’s jealousy sealed in an incriminating letter. She accepts this fate with puritan spirit

and locks herself in the Mannon house to live with the ghosts of the past in expiation for

all their crimes. The “Mannon way” catches Lavinia in the end ; being born is starting to

die. The house is a sepulchre, and her life henceforth a living death, So her

determination––so much admired by the humanist critics––really amounts to the same

decision Orin makes. She shuts herself off from the world to await the inevitable end. In

Lavinia and Orin the Freudian and the puritan, so opposed in particulars, meld into a

unity.