For several reasons, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) should be considered together.  Superficially, they deal with the effects of the American Civil War on two families (albeit a Northern family in Electra and a Southern one in Foxes), both have strong female leads, and both have climactic “murder” scenes which mirror each other to a startling degree.  More intriguingly, however, both feature a psychological overlay in the construction of the mother-daughter relationships which are the crux of the two dramas.  Each features a mother who is a murderess and a daughter who wants revenge for the mother's murderous deed.  Each mother also attempts to control the sexuality of her daughter by deciding with whom she will (or will not) be “involved.” 

 

However, it is not the parallels but the contrast in these two relationships that is my interest at present.  On the surface, because of the events of the two plays, the mothers seem as if they should be discussed in tandem, as do their daughters.  But on closer examination, it becomes obvious that Regina, the mother in Foxes, corresponds to the daughter, Vinnie, in Electra; while Alexandra, the daughter in Foxes, parallels the mother, Christine, in Electra.  In examining the mother-daughter relationships in these two plays, I will also explore the family structure; for in order to understand Christine, one must also understand Orin's and Ezra's relationship to her.

 

The family structure of Mourning Becomes Electra, while simple, is integral to an understanding of the play.  Christine and Ezra Mannon have two children, Lavinia (Vinnie) and Orin.  Vinnie loves her father and hates her mother; for Orin, the situation is just the opposite.  The father is a nondescript character, a faded soldier whose presence in Homecoming, the first of the trilogy's three parts, is minimal.  He acts as a foil for the ensuing struggle between Vinnie and Christine, his ineffectualness throwing the mother-daughter relationship into high relief.  The reader of Homecoming is made fully aware of the battle between Vinnie and Christine.  The battle is presented as a quarrel over the affections of the dashing Captain Brant and Christine's “betrayal” of Ezra, even though Vinnie, in the midst of their fight in Act Two, says, “So I was born of your disgust!  I've always guessed that, Mother—ever since I was little—when I used to come to you—with love—but you would always push me away! ... Oh, I hate you!  It's only right that I should hate you!” (714).  From this point forward, the reader may still believe that Vinnie seeks revenge against her mother because she wants to protect the honor of the Mannons, not because she doesn't have her mother's love.

 

It is in The Hunted that the reader becomes fully confident of what the true conflict between mother and daughter is.  Vinnie is not angry at her mother because of Christine's “betrayal” or even her attempt to have Brant court her; she is angry because she is not loved by her mother.  Now, the reader understands that Vinnie was revealing her true motivation during the fight scene in Homecoming.

 

This awareness of Vinnie's motivation comes during a long patch of dialogue between Christine and Orin in The Hunted that demonstrates their mutual affection, which has always excluded Vinnie.

CHRISTINE: But we've always been so close, you and I.  I feel you are really—my flesh and blood!  She isn't!  She is your father's!  You're a part of me!

 

ORIN: (with strange eagerness) Yes!  I feel that, too, Mother!

 

CHRISTINE: I know I can trust you to understand now as you always used to. (With a tender smile) We had a secret little world of our own in the old days, didn't we?—which no one but us knew about.

 

ORIN: (happily) You bet we did!  No Mannons allowed was our password, remember! (771-772)

This scene underscores the alienation that Vinnie has experienced throughout her life.  Although she is of the same parentage as Orin, she is excluded from his secret club with their mother because she sides with her father; she is a “Mannon.”

 

Despite what Vinnie may say, the reader hereafter understands that all her actions in the play are motivated by her exclusion from the special relationship between Christine and Orin.  In short, Vinnie is competing against Orin for Christine's love.  However, since she is fully aware that she can never win that love, she wants Christine punished in order to reject her and show, psychologically, that she does not need her mother's affection.

 

Vinnie first attempts to punish Christine by trying to control her mother's sexuality; specifically, she tries to get her mother to stop her affair with Brant.  In Act Two of Homecoming, Christine concedes defeat:  “Ah!  I see what it's going to mean—that you'll always have this to hold over me and I'll be under your thumb for the rest of my life!” (718).  This satisfies Vinnie by making her the “winner.”  If she cannot be loved by her mother, at least she can control her and make her suffer.

 

In The Hunted, Vinnie realizes that she has been deceived: Christine, now that Ezra is dead, has no intention of giving up Brant.  Thus Vinnie has no control over her and is again excluded from the private club.  “No Mannons allowed.”  So Vinnie must play the only card she holds: she must kill Brant.  Oh, she could opt for matricide, but then the victim wouldn't suffer enough.  As her major triumph, she will force her mother into celibacy, something more painful for Christine than her own death would be.  Vinnie uses Orin as the tool of her destruction because, in making Orin commit the murder, she coerces him into an alliance with her against Christine.  The erstwhile sibling rivals are thus metamorphosed into partners in crime.

 

Conversely, in The Little Foxes, it is the mother, Regina, who attempts to control the sexuality of her daughter.  Throughout Hellman's play, the reader is often reminded that Regina will not allow Alexandra to marry her cousin Leo.  In the first act, the idea of a union between the two cousins is presented by Regina's brother Ben, who says, “So my money will go to Alexandra and Leo.  They may even marry some day” (169).  While not rejecting the notion outright, Regina equivocates: “You have my word that I will think about it” (170).  The reader understands that Regina is far from thrilled by the idea, but we are left unsure as to why.  The reason Regina opposes the union of Alexandra and Leo is not revealed until the third-act scene that mirrors Ezra's death scene in Electra.  Regina has a bitter quarrel with her husband, Horace.  Its substance, which precipitates Horace's death, is essentially the same as the quarrel in Electra that brings on Ezra's death.  In both fights, the wives state their reasons for their disgust at having sex with their husbands.  Here is Christine, confronting Ezra:

You want the truth?  You've guessed it!  You've used me, you've given me children, but I've never once been yours!  I never could be!  And whose fault is it?  I loved you when I married you!  I wanted to give myself!  But you made me so I couldn't give!  You filled me with disgust!  (746)

And here are Regina's words to Horace in Foxes:

It took me a little while to find out that I had made a mistake.  As for you—I don't know.  It was almost as if I couldn't stand the kind of man you were—(Smiles, softly) I used to lie there at night, praying you wouldn't come near....  I couldn't understand that anybody could be such a soft fool.  That was when I began to despise you.  (212)

These two scenes are probably the main reason that one would be tempted to see Regina and Christine as South/North counterparts of each other.  It is also during this scene in Foxes that Regina reveals why she has done all that she has in attempting to gain a greater percentage of the mill than her brothers.  Before the above-quoted remark, she tells Horace, “I was lonely when I was young....  Not the way people usually mean.  Lonely for all the things I wasn't going to get....  I wanted the world.  Then, and then—(Smiles) Papa died and left the money to Ben and Oscar” (211).  Hence the difference between Regina and Christine.  Christine's motivations came from a failed marriage.  Ezra was at fault; any passion that existed between them was killed by Ezra himself; Christine being a victim of her husband.  Regina's scars, on the other hand, go much deeper.  The pain that she feels is the love that her father showed to her brothers but denied to her.  Her father demonstrated his love to the sons by leaving everything to them, and rejected her by leaving her nothing.  So Regina acts out of a failure to have obtained the love of her father.  In other words, she acts out of the same sibling rivalry that Vinnie, in Electra, does.  Regina's attempts to control the sexuality of her daughter are really ways to wreak vengeance upon her brothers.  By not allowing Alexandra to marry Leo, she allows control of her shares of the mill to leave the family eventually.  Neither Ben nor Oscar nor their descendants will share in her profits from the mill; thus she exacts her revenge on her father and wins her sibling rivalry battle.  The point is reiterated at the end of the play in an exchange between Ben and Regina:

BEN: What is a man in a wheelchair doing on a staircase?  I ask myself that.

 

REGINA: (looks up at him)  And what do you answer?

 

BEN: I have no answer.  But maybe someday I will.  Maybe never, but maybe someday.  (Smiles.  Pats her arm)  When I do, I'll let you know.

 

REGINA: When you do, write me.  I will be in Chicago.  (Gaily)  Ah, Ben, if Papa had only left me his money.

This exchange emphasizes the fact that Regina acts out of a desire to “pay back” her father for the love he denied her by making sure that she gets all the money that he left Ben and Oscar and then some.  Ben, in his question to Regina, infers that there has been foul play in the death of Horace, but it is not his place to repay Regina's vengeance.  In both of these plays, Regina and Vinnie bring on their own final revenge; they punish themselves for trying to resolve their Electra complexes in whatever manner they can.  Thus can one understand Vinnie's shutting the house and Alexandra's last line (which is also the last line of the play): “Are you afraid, Mama?”  This last line, in the context of the interpretation of the play offered above, refers to Regina's fear of the retribution that she knows awaits her.  Both Vinnie and Regina know that they will be punished for trying to win the love of parents who offered them none.  By doing the “evil” that they did, they disobeyed the wishes of their parents in their efforts to control those siblings who did get the parent's love.  In short, bad children are punished; the crime of the parents is meaningless.  Vinnie and Regina are both at fault, no matter what they do.  Regina is afraid of being metaphorically spanked.  She does not know what punishment will come to her—Alexandra's marrying Leo, being rejected by Marshall in Chicago, Ben's turning her over to the police.  But she knows she'll suffer the consequences of her actions.

 

Not much can be said about Alexandra; her brief appearances do not allow us to get a sense of her in the way that we do of Christine Mannon.  Where the battle between mother and daughter is central to Electra, the battle between mother and daughter in Foxes is merely a vehicle for the reader's better understanding of Regina.  Alexandra's own nature is irrelevant.  She must be malleable or the power of the last scene, Regina's realization of the punishment ahead, would be diluted.  If Alexandra were a “stronger” character (as she is in William Wyler's film adaptation), she would detract from the reader's understanding of Regina, whose motivation would become clouded.  The question would then be whether Regina is controlling her daughter because of a conflict between the two of them, rather than the question that is the true focus of the play: why she is choosing to control her daughter in this way.

 

Symbolism plays an important role in each play's method of retribution.  For example, why does Vinnie try to control Christine through sexuality?  There are several reasons.  One: all the relationships in Mourning Becomes Electra are built on sexuality.  As Freud speaks of them, the Electra and Oedipus complexes are sexual in nature; thus any attempt to resolve those two complexes should be resolved through sexuality.  One might also note that sexuality is the tool Christine uses to gain freedom from the stifling New England life that she lives—a variation on the adage, “He who lives by the sword dies by it.”

 

Another reason is the setting of the play itself.  What better way for O'Neill to expose the hypocrisy of New England, the home of the Puritans, than to use sex—the bęte noire of Puritanism—as the method of its destruction?  And the destruction of the Mannon family is surely symbolic of the destruction of the old Puritan order of New England.  Why, then, does Hellman choose money as a symbol of control rather than sexuality, like O'Neill?  Note that, while Hellman is writing about the aftereffects of the Civil War, as is O'Neill, she is dealing with the effects of the war on the South rather than on the North.  The South has been portrayed, because of its literal heat and its figurative sinning (i.e., slavery), as a hotbed of sexuality; thus for Hellman to use sex as a metaphor would be trite.  Instead, she uses a Northern metaphor, commerce, to explore the effects of the North on the post-reconstruction South.  So, for Hellman, money exposes the same hypocrisy that sex does for O'Neill.

 

Both O'Neill and Hellman use Freudian configurations to add depth to what are, on the surface, melodramatic potboilers.  Their overlay of Freudian concepts allows the reader to feel genuine sorrow for Vinnie, to understand and sympathize with Christine, and to see Regina as a three-dimensional character rather than a prototypical movie monster that destroys without reason, existing only to kill.  In using the basic structure of melodrama, both Hellman and O'Neill revitalize it by their skill and their understanding of the psychological motivations behind “traditional” actions.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Hellman, Lillian.  Six Plays.  New York: Random House (Vintage Books), 1979.

 

O'Neill, Eugene.  Nine Plays.  New York: Modern Library, 1941.