(2 of 3)
The Mannons are a strange lot, proud, rich, a family 200 years old. They hate well, too. Ezra, general and judge, and his son Orin are expected home from the Civil War. One who wants Ezra back is his stark daughter Lavinia (Miss Brady). One who does not want him back, hates him, wishes him in his grave is his wife Christine (Miss Nazimova). Beautiful, full-blown, she has fallen in love with a seaman, Brant. It does not take long to find out that Brant is a Mannon, too. His father was Ezra's uncle, who got a hired girl in trouble, had to marry her and leave town. Lavinia, who finds out about the affair, loathes her mother a little bit more, threatens to tell her father about it unless Christine dismisses Brant. Out of this situation arises the first of Mourning Becomes Electra's four deaths. Tired of war, sick, wishing to patch it up with his wife, Ezra returns. It is hard for him to forget four years of carnage. "That's always been the Mannon's way of thinking," says he. "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 to live." As the next grey dawn shadows his sleepless bed, Ezra Mannon is "born to live." Christine poisons him.
When Orin comes home a struggle between the two Mannon women waxes bitter. Orin is not a little attached to his mother, Oedipus-wise. He never liked his father. But when Lavinia makes him track down their mother's rendezvous with Brant on his ship, Orin's eyes open. He shoots his mother's lover. His mother returns home, commits suicide. That accounts for Parts I and II, "Homecoming" and "The Haunted."
"The Hunted," which winds up the play, finds Orin in sorry shape. He mourns his mother's death, blames himself for it. Lavinia has taken him on one of the Mannon ships to China. The trip does only one of them good. Lavinia, having tarried on a Pacific isle long enough to have had a sentimental interlude with a native chief's son, has grown as beautiful as her mother. Orin's mind has become deranged. Peter Niles wants to marry Lavinia, his sister wants to marry Orin. But Orin threatens to air the family's bloody linen if Lavinia leaves him. Seeking peace in a "bottomless hell," he then proposes to his sister that they live together as man-&-wife. His reaction to her disgust is to shoot himself. Her fiance guesses, quite correctly, the worst.
On the gloomy verandah, Lavinia, aware that "the damned don't cry," speaks her elegy to faithful Seth, the gardener: "I'm bound here—to the Mannon dead! Don't be afraid. I'm not going the way mother and Orin went. That's escaping punishment. . . . I'll never wear anything but mourning again. Life doesn't fit the Mannons. Only death becomes them!"
Significance. Even before they went out to dinner, it was fairly obvious to first-afternooners that Playwright O'Neill had moved Greece to New England. Those who knew their Euripides were quick to detect a parallel between Mourning Becomes Electra and the classic tragedy, recalled how Agamemnon, returning from the Trojan War, was killed by his wife (Clymnestra), how the long-lost son Orestes finally killed his mother's lover and his mother at the instigation of Elektra.