In the spring of 1926, Eugene O’Neill posed a problem to himself. Thinking hard about the Greek tragedies and Aeschylus’ Oresteia in particular, he wondered in his journal whether it were “possible to get [a] modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed by no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by.”¹ This challenge to find a modern equivalent to fate epitomizes his continual process of experimenting with drama and reshaping tragedy for the twentieth-century stage.

While working on Mourning Becomes Electra, he revised the trilogy in its entirety three times, writing three successive drafts in long-hand, analyzing the style of his dialogue and the choice of characters in his work journals. He made four significant revisions in his own manuscripts as he moved from a classical paradigm to a more contemporary application of tragedy: the deliberate elimination of the word “fate,” the emphasis on self-punishment, the use of questions that lead to self-examination, and the removal of the figure of Cassandra. These four revisions register O’Neill’s gradual transformation from a classical understanding of tragedy, revolving around unseen gods, to one that locates tragedy within the immediate setting of the family.

O’Neill’s conscious effort to revise or argue with accepted rules of tragedy at the beginning of the twentieth century caused a great deal of concern for the dramatist—or a great deal of anxiety as Harold Bloom would describe it. He was highly aware of his role in revising another writer’s work and struggled with this “anxiety of influence” as he made Aeschylus’ drama his own. He spent more time on this play—533 days, to be exact—than he had spent on any other play up till that moment. Desire Under the Elms, his earlier play based on Greek mythology, took a mere 62 days in comparison; while Strange Interlude, his longest play until then, took 231.² It is interesting to note that while working on Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill stopped at one point and began writing notes for a play on the life of Aeschylus, as if in rewriting his predecessor’s play he somehow attempted to move into Aeschylus’ mind, further indicating how highly conscious he was of writing in his precursor’s place.³ Even the manner in which he describes the project indicates his worry over whether or not he can accomplish this monumental task. He refers to the play as doing “something bigger than I’ve done before” and expresses his desire to “fail at something big and thus be a success in my own spiritual eyes” (Selected Letters 350-351). These comments reveal O’Neill’s own recognition of how serious and significant his proposed project was. Not only was he revising myth, he was also revising traditional understandings of tragedy.

Revising a twentieth-century paradigm of tragedy is a complicated task. The elements that Aristotle identified in classical tragedy—such as pity, fear, catharsis and, certainly, fate—are so strongly entrenched in the way audiences perceive and evaluate tragedy that it is difficult for any writer seeking to rewrite or emulate a Greek classic to break away from these descriptors. Walter Prichard Eaton was one critic among many who criticized O’Neill’s play for its failure to capture the same quality of tragedy as the classical theatre had. In his essay “O’Neill —‘New Risen Attic Stream’?” (1937), written six years after Electra was produced, Eaton noted that O’Neill’s play is not great tragedy because it does not cause us to “pity” the Mannon family as victims of their fate, as we might pity Orestes. Nor does the audience empathize with the characters; thus the spectators never share the “horror” that the events might apply to them. He reasons that because the play focuses on the individual—on psychological delineation and development instead of plot—the audience members are too tightly enmeshed in the character details to fully grasp the plot, and thus they never experience the catharsis achievable from seeing the play’s events as a whole. Eaton summarizes the problem by stating that the “inexplicable beauty and satisfaction of great tragedy, … of something triumphant in the human soul” is missing (310-311).

Eaton’s critical approach finds a parallel reading by Norman Pratt, a classicist who, twenty years later, demonstrated no new conceptualization of tragic theory. Instead, he criticized O’Neill’s revision of the Oresteia in his essay “Aeschylus and O’Neill: Two Worlds” (1956). He argued that “the whole significance of the trilogy rests upon psychotic and neurotic impulses which do not allow for a sense of larger moral forces, nor permit a redemptive ending of purification and forgiveness” (166). Pratt does not find O’Neill’s use of Aeschylus’ plot sufficient; he prefers that the playwright incorporate the classical world view of suffering and forgiveness to give his play worth. He also finds O’Neill’s focus upon unseemly emotions and dark murderous passions to have no humanistic qualities. Without appreciating that the structure and framework of tragedy have been modified by twentieth-century artists, he clearly indicates his preference for a Greek aesthetic “which in this same world find[s] order instead of chaos, purpose instead of instability, and elevation instead of degradation” (167). That a scholar writing in the second half of the twentieth century should cling steadfastly to values of redemption and cohesion is surprising after two World Wars, avante-garde artistic movements such as expressionism and surrealism, and the existentialists’ dismissal of God. Clearly a new paradigm for tragedy was required, but Eaton and Pratt clung resolutely to such defining concepts as “pity,” “purification” and “catharsis.” O’Neill, writing Mourning Becomes Electra in the years between the two wars (specifically from 1926 to 1931), undoubtedly knew the kind of critical reception he would encounter.

Arthur Miller explicitly established his definition of tragedy in his 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” as an attempt to rebuff exactly this kind of limited public definition of tragedy. Unlike Miller, O’Neill never provided a theoretical position on tragedy, but rather offered bits and pieces of dramatic theory through his notes, his letters, and his work diaries. Barrett Clark collected some of O’Neill’s ideas about drama in his anthology European Theories of the Drama (1965) from O’Neill’s letters, interviews and notes. In a piece that Clark entitled “Neglected Poet,” (which was originally a letter from O’Neill to Arthur Hobson Quinn), the playwright writes:

And just here is where I am a most confirmed mystic, too, for I’m always, always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character. I’m always acutely conscious of the Force behind —(Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly) —and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. And my profound conviction is that it is possible—or can be—to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theatre which may to some degree bring home to members of the audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theatre is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever!

O’Neill’s ideas correspond to certain aspects of classical tragedy, such as the depiction of the human individual in conflict with incomprehensible forces. O’Neill is not content to illustrate a slice of human life, but wishes to depict an understanding of Life’s spirit through the characters’ struggles. Yet O’Neill, as much as he avows he is a mystic, will not resort to the dreamlike tactics of the Symbolist playwrights, such as candles flickering out or animals quieting when death arrives. O’Neill wished instead to place this awareness of spirituality within a realistic frame, to find a contemporary corollary for these forces that a modern audience could readily grasp.

Turning to O’Neill’s “Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Diary,” we can trace the trajectory of his efforts to find a corollary to classical tragedy while still rooting his play in a contemporary idiom. In an entry dated 1927, he describes fate as the “hidden life forces” that he wants the audience to sense when viewing Mourning Becomes Electra in performance. Later, he gives himself a more specific directive—“emphasize this motivating fate out of past”—and advises that “the unavoidable entire melodramatic action must be felt as working out of psychic fate from past—thereby attain tragic significance—or else!” Already, he locates fate as an element in the family’s past, rather than an agent working actively in the present. This is very much in line with the Naturalists, whose characters were victims of their own family’s history, such as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, whose dislike of men is attributed to her masculine upbringing. Like Ibsen and Strindberg before him, O’Neill provides sufficient family history to explain his characters’ behavior, but suggests that fatalistic forces are at work; he insists that his trilogy “must, before everything, remain modern psychological play—fate springing out of the family.” His note to himself on July 19, 1930, regarding the language appropriate for the play, specifies a rhythm that will capture the “driving insistent compulsion of passions engendered in family past, which will constitute family fate.” In these work entries, O’Neill begins to articulate his understanding of fate as well as a modern definition of tragedy: that fate is a force or compulsion located in the past, specifically in the family’s history. These deliberations that gradually transform fate from a vague, ill-defined force to an inexorable series of events within the family’s past are more apparent in the revisions that he makes in his own manuscripts.

O’Neill’s manuscripts of Mourning Becomes Electra are noticeably marked by his deliberate removal or alteration of lines that originally had the word “fate” in them. His characters’ numerous references to fate in those early drafts (the word occurs at least nine times) suggest that O’Neill allowed the classical weight of Aeschylus’ play to color his own work with traditional ideas of tragedy. But in the final published edition, the word appears only four times. Examining the etymology of the word “fate” reveals that it comes from the Latin word fatum, which is the past participle of fari meaning “to say.” Fatum originally meant “an utterance” and this root appears in such words as “ineffable,” as well as “preface.” The same Indo-European root, bha, which gave us the Latin verb fari gave rise to the Greek word phanai which also means “to speak,” as in the suffix “phasia” or in our word “prophet.” Thus rooted in the very origins of the word fate is the act of speaking or foretelling, and the concept of speech itself. O’Neill’s conscious deletion of the word throughout his manuscript is akin to erasing the act of speaking. O’Neill, in erasing the voices of the gods from his text, replaced them with the voices of the family’s ancestors instead.

This erasure of the word fate is evidenced in a scene early in the play. In the dialogue from the second draft of Mourning Becomes Electra, Christine Mannon, the Clytemnestra figure, discusses with her lover Adam Brant how his father had been disinherited from the Mannon family property because he married a Canuck girl. However, she explains the plan to rectify this disinheritance. She proposes that if her husband Ezra were to die, then Brant could receive his rightful inheritance by marrying Christine:

Second Longhand Script:

Christine: [talking to Brant] (Calculatingly—without looking at him) If he would only die before—! We could be married and I would bring you my share of the Mannon estate. That would be like the justice of fate because it is yours by right, it is what his father stole from yours. (Second Longhand Script: Mourning Becomes Electra: Homecoming Act II 35)

Final Version:

Christine: (calculatingly – without looking at him). If he had only been killed, we could be married now and I would bring you my share of the Mannon estate. That would only be justice. It’s yours by right. It’s what his father stole from yours. (Act II 36)

In the earlier version, Christine suggests that returning the property to Brant would be akin to a metaphysical reckoning. Her use of the word fate implies that unseen forces wish to rectify the injustice of stolen property by replacing it in the legitimate owner’s hands. However, as O’Neill argued in his Work Diaries, he clearly wished to show fate working out of the past. Thus he deletes the word “fate,” and breaks Christine’s last sentence into three separate ones in order to remove attribution to a divine agent, and to focus attention on the family’s earlier wrongdoings to Brant’s father.

The next example of O’Neill’s elimination of the word fate revolves around the eerie family resemblance among the Mannon women: Christine, her daughter Lavinia, and the Canuck nurse, Marie Brantôme. Marie was the nursemaid who came to the house to take care of Ezra Mannon’s father years earlier, but who seduced Ezra’s brother, resulting in tumultuous family relations and ultimate disinheritance. The hired hand, Seth, reminds Lavinia that Marie Brantôme looks like her and her mother, making a seemingly innocuous statement carry considerable weight. O’Neill goes to great lengths in his play to make it appear that all the Mannon women are in some way connected by their personalities, their appearances, and their love for life that is thwarted by the Puritanical ethos around them. What O’Neill emphasizes through Seth’s comment is the pattern in classical tragedy of the sins of the fathers passed on to the sons that forms the basis of so many tragedies—whereas in this case it is the sins of the mothers passed on to the daughters. But he relies upon genetic similarities to make this point about transmission of wrongdoings, rather than show how agents of fate will ensure the retribution. In the early version, Seth tells Lavinia that Marie Brantôme was very much like her mother, describing her as always laughing, singing, joking, and very pretty with hair the same color as Christine’s. To this, Lavinia responds:

Second Longhand Script:

Lavinia. (Brusquely) I know. (With a strange, harsh laugh – in a low voice, as if to herself, staring at the house.) It’s queer. It’s like an evil fate!

(Second Longhand Script Mourning Becomes Electra: Homecoming Act III 5)

The stage direction “staring at the house” further drives home the point that the family heritage has been tainted by some dark force brooding over them. Yet in the published version the conversation is less meaningful:

Seth. . . . Hair just the colour of your Maw’s and yourn she had.

Lavinia. I know.

(Mourning Becomes Electra: Homecoming, Act III 41)

In the published version, O’Neill’s altering Lavinia’s response to a terse “I know” eliminates the suggestion that a malignant supernatural force exerts control over the family. The fact of familial resemblance is left to float over the surface of the conversation, subtly hinting at possible connections, but without creating any framework of mysterious forces residing outside the Mannon family. In the final version, the coincidence is noted without attributing responsibility to anything beyond the family’s own genetic similarities.

O’Neill eradicated beliefs in unseen gods up until the last minute, as is apparent by another change in the Second Galley Proofs they are the 1931 typed copy that O’Neill used during rehearsals to indicate the cuts and rewritten parts for the performance. He notes that these changes were “done with the aim of shortening the playing time of the trilogy, mainly,” and can be considered merely as reductions that enable a tighter performance. But in light of O’Neill’s careful review of his manuscripts to eliminate the word “fate,” it is worth observing the following change. In this scene, Orin, the Orestes counterpart to the myth, voices aloud his feelings of remorse over the death of his mother because he believes he caused her suicide, and he hints at his incestuous desire for his sister, Lavinia, whom he will love in place of his mother. At one point, Lavinia, frustrated by Orin’s self-castigation and morbid thoughts, suggests that he kill himself.

Second Galley Proofs:

Orin. (stares at her with the lost stricken expression for a moment more – then the obsessed wild look returns to his eyes and he mutters to himself) Yes – the act of justice – the exact retribution – it was fated.

(Second Galley Proofs Mourning Becomes Electra: The Haunted, Act IV 9)

Final Version:

Orin. . . . Vinnie! (He stares at her with the lost, stricken expression for a moment more—then the obsessed wild look returns to his eyes—with harsh mockery.) Another act of justice, eh? You want to drive me to suicide as I drove Mother! An eye for an eye, is that it? But—(He stops abruptly and stares before him, as if this idea were suddenly taking hold of his tortured imagination, and speaks as if hypnotized) Yes! That would be justice—now you are Mother! She is speaking now through you. (The Haunted Act III 150)

The revised version—which rather than providing a tighter performance time actually contributes a lengthier speech—strongly exemplifies O’Neill’s dramatic goal of showing how tragedy works out of the family’s past. He eliminates the idea than an event was “foretold” by removing the word fate, and he transfers this capacity to punish—the “retribution”—from vague, unknown hands of fate, to the hands of the family members themselves. Orin believes that his mother has returned to punish him by speaking through Lavinia. Fate, in this example, has been silenced, and what has been given a voice is the family member—specifically Christine—who ventriloquizes through her daughter. O’Neill has transformed fate into the voice or voices of one’s ancestors who return from the dead. This shift is a considerable revision from classical views of tragedy. Not even Antigone, aware that the curse of her father had been passed on to everyone in the family, believed that it was Oedipus who had willed her to suffer.

This last example, regarding Orin’s choice to commit suicide at Lavinia’s suggestion, corresponds to another way in which O’Neill revised Aeschylus’ play: he increased the number of deaths, and he transformed them from murders to suicides. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, four deaths occur. When Agamemnon returns home to Mycenae from the Trojan War with the Trojan prophetess Cassandra, they are both slaughtered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. Shortly thereafter, Orestes returns home to avenge his father’s death by killing both his mother and Aegisthus, thereby contributing two more murders to this gory tale. By contrast, O’Neill’s modern massacre involves two murders, two suicides and one self-immolation; he has in effect changed two of the murders to acts of self-destruction, and even added a third. First, Christine kills her husband, Ezra Mannon, with poison. Then Lavinia and Orin murder Adam Brant, Christine’s lover and the counterpart to Aegisthus, aboard his ship to avenge the death of their father. Christine and Orin later commit suicide, and finally Lavinia literally buries herself in the Mannon home at play’s end, which can likewise be read as an act of self-murder since the house is described as a “white sepulcher.” What is even more remarkable is that O’Neill originally intended for the play to consist of four acts of self-execution. In an earlier draft of the play he wrote a scene in which Lavinia successfully talks Adam Brant into taking his own life by playing on his feelings of guilt and insinuating that this action is the “manly thing to do”—a scene that clearly indicates how O’Neill altered the axiology of the myth—the shared system of values—from sanctioned vengeance to self-torture and self-disgust.⁴

A question arises: why this emphasis on self-punishment? Why would O’Neill have three of his characters—originally four—punish themselves in his modern revision? This fascination with the Greek concept of heautontimoroumenos—that is, with a character who is his own executioner—corresponds with O’Neill’s theory that the forces that determine one’s fate are no longer external to the human being’s world. Several critics, most notably C.W.E. Bigsby, have suggested that O’Neill selected ante-bellum New England because of its Puritan belief system that encourages self-punishment. Bigsby points out that Puritan religious practices, centered on “notions of sin, guilt and punishment,” allowed O’Neill to translate the “self-destructive fatalism of Greek theater, symbolised by the Furies” into “a Calvinist conscience which makes the self its own enemy” (57). He demonstrates how O’Neill takes the avenging goddesses of matricide, the Furies, and creates a psychological equivalent for them as his characters’ conscience. But this model ignores the significant pressure that family members exert over one another. I propose that the Furies do not become one’s conscience; rather, the Furies are transformed into Mannon family members that harangue and torture one another until the point of death.

One could certainly argue that the choice to commit suicide comes from one’s own conscience, but this is not the case in Mourning Becomes Electra. The following scenes reveal that it is the members of the family who prompt or provide the directives for a victim to commit suicide. O’Neill altered the values of Aeschylus’ world—a world of divine retribution and justice—to a system where family members point out one another’s guilt and instruct one another in feelings of self-disgust. When Christine kills herself in the final moments of The Hunted, it is clear from the scene that both Orin and Lavinia have blamed their mother’s actions for Brant’s death and that their comments have driven her to regard suicide as the only warrantable outcome. Lavinia will next turn her doctrinal nature upon her brother Orin as she hints to him that his incestuous feelings for her are so morbid and horrible that he, too, should commit suicide. “You’re not my brother,” she tells him in the Second Galley Proofs. “You’re vile! You’re disgusting! I hate you… . You ought to be ashamed to live! You’d kill yourself if you weren’t such a coward!” (Second Galley Proofs: The Haunted, Act III). Although the final published version is more subtle, what remains constant is the implicit command that Lavinia gives to Orin to take his own life. Finally, Lavinia locks herself in the darkened, shuttered mausoleum of the Mannon home, not because she elects to, but because she believes the Mannon ancestors have commanded her to spend her days isolated from humanity, as a kind of living death. Her family members still control her, as voices that speak from beyond the grave.

The inordinate amount of power one must have over another person to force him or her to take his or her own life is difficult to fathom, and even harder to stage convincingly; and yet this palpable drive towards self-harm and self­destruction dominates the play and motivates the characters. In all of these examples, we see family members insist to one another that they should take their own lives, that it is the “right” and “just” thing to do. This revision is not merely a forerunner of Sartre’s “hell is the others,” where the gaze of the other fixes each character’s sense of self, but a deliberate construction on O’Neill’s part to suggest that judgment and punishment come from the members of one’s family. Rather than use the Furies to prick the conscience of the Orestes­figure, O’Neill extends the responsibility of torture over all the family members, and makes them share the experience of suffering and guilt.

The way by which the Mannon family members act as each other’s judges and castigators becomes strikingly clear if one notes how O’Neill incorporates the family portraits as additional stage characters. Both the stage directions and the property list for the play mention the portraits, and the property list goes so far as to describe them in detail, specifying images of a “minister of the witch-burning era,” “Ezra Mannon’s grandfather,” as an officer in Washington’s army, and “a prosperous ship owner of colonial days” with additional portraits of their wives (“Property Plot”). The consequential effects these portraits have over the characters during the action of the play suggest that they are more than mere stage properties. Even critical reviews of the original production called attention to the portraits, such as the Variety critic who described Ezra Mannon as “the father of one of the First Families of New England” (Rush 54), a description that comes not from the text but from viewing the long line of ancestors portrayed on the set. Brooks Atkinson, in his review for The New York Times, specifically described the Mannon house as “a little island walled round with the dead,” evidently referring to the tangible presence of the ancestors’ portraits hanging on the walls, which both circumscribe the family as well as isolate them.

David Freedberg, in The Power of Images, discusses the visceral response most people have toward portraits because portraits possess the ability to keep the dead among the living. This is clearly evidenced by the reaction people express when they see the portrait of a deceased family member or a friend. Freedberg traces the history of responses to images, such as great iconoclastic movements where images and symbols were destroyed because of the shame and rage they aroused in people. The emotional response that people show towards portraits suggests that these images attain the status of living beings. The ways in which people adjust their behavior around portraits implies that somehow the image not only represents the real person but has become him. O’Neill’s use of the portraits as a chorus of omniscient ancestors who watch and silently incriminate the living Mannon family is reminiscent of the chorus of Furies who watch and judge as well. Stage directions such as “in the flickering candlelight the eyes of the Mannon portraits stare with a grim forbiddingness” (124) or “the eyes of the portraits seem to possess an intense bitter life” (142) testify to the intense quality that these portraits contributed to the performance.

The lighting cues from the Bound Prompt Book of the Theater Guild’s production reveal how special spot-lights aimed at the portraits were turned on at key moments to animate the images of these dead ancestors, as if they were fully present in the on-stage action. For example, Act I of Homecoming finds Christine and Brant planning the murder of Ezra Mannon. Just before Christine mentions her plan to poison Ezra, she rises and pulls the curtains together and the “LIGHTING FADES FROM EZRA’S PICTURE” (“Bound Prompt Book”), indicating how his presence weighs heavily on her conscience, and how “in the dark” he is regarding the plans to murder him. Similarly, the lighting cue returns the light to the portrait after Brant leaves to purchase the poison at the druggist’s, pulling Christine’s attention back to her husband’s face melodramatically and transfixing her in a moment of guilt-ridden trance. It becomes evident through all of these movements that O’Neill intended for the onstage portraits of the Mannons to incriminate and judge the living family members. Audiences clearly must “read” the portraits as the stand-ins for the actual living characters. This device allows O’Neill to lessen the role of unseen forces of fate working on humans, and to emphasize instead the role of the family ancestors in controlling the characters’ own understanding of their selves and their actions.

Another example of how the vengeful ancestors control the living is revealed in Lavinia’s reactions to the Mannon portraits that survey her actions. She continually speaks to the portraits as if they were alive, insisting that they have no right to disturb her with feelings of guilt. The use of the portraits allows the living characters to talk to these dead spirits in a way that is credible, as well as promote a semi-mystical belief in ghosts. The stage directions read:

Her eyes are caught by the eyes of the MANNONS in the portraits and she approaches as if compelled in spite of herself until she stands directly under them in front of the fireplace. She suddenly addresses them in a harsh resentful voice. Lavinia. Why do you look at me like that? I’ve done my duty by you! That’s finished and forgotten! (124).

In refusing their demand for further retribution, she treats the portraits as some type of unsatisfied tribunal that relentlessly exacts payment. Endowing these ancestors with the roles of both Furies and judges implies that fate is now in the hands of one’s family members, and that this fate is of an unappeasing sort. The family members in fact inhabit the same qualities of revenge and surveillance that the Furies originally brought to the myth. But unlike Orestes, who was granted absolution by the Council of the Aeropagus that Athena established, the Mannon family have no one to whom they may appeal for clemency.

*          *          *

We have thus far examined several ways in which O’Neill rewrote Aeschylus’ story to redefine tragedy for the twentieth century. Beginning with the concept of fate as a large, impersonal force outside the individual, he anthropomorphizes it as the members of one’s family; he reduces the number of times the word “fate” is used; he emphasizes self-punishment; and he endows family members, especially those long dead, with the power to incriminate one another. In all of these shifts he transforms the representation of fate. O’Neill also made a revision to the classical myth early in his drafting process by deliberately eliminating a character—a revision which would probably go unnoticed except for the fact that the character plays such an integral role in the myth. The prophetess Cassandra never appears in Mourning Becomes Electra, but what few scholars realize is that O’Neill originally did intend to use her.

When inheriting a myth, a writer must make specific choices as to how much he wishes to retain or exclude from the original. The writer is under no obligation to follow the myth precisely and may certainly expurgate or condense at will. Some writers have even chosen to add an additional character to a myth, as Mark Twain did with his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. O’Neill consciously chose to remove the character of Cassandra from his work after considering the impact of this character. He notes on April 1929 in his “Working Notes and extracts,” “omit Iphigenia and Chrysothemis from children—only Orestes and Electra—no Cassandra.” He had decided early in the writing of Mourning Becomes Electra that she would not appear, without indicating why. It is probable that he wanted to focus on the myth’s family members and did not want to trouble the audience with superfluous figures.

Cassandra, in Aeschylus’ version, appears only briefly as Agamemnon’s war prize. As a prophetess, she envisions the bloody end awaiting Agamemnon; but because of the curse upon her, no one believes her words. Her nightmarish vision of Agamemnon’s demise is a key speech in the play due to its grotesque imagery, and she is frequently associated with this myth because of her powerful, prophetic vision. Although O’Neill did not originally want to incorporate her into his play, he changed his mind about the character five months into the project. While working on the first draft in September of 1929, he suffered from a month-long debilitating bout with writer’s block. His Line-a-Day Work Diaries are filled with his complaints of writer’s block: “false start,” he notes on September 16; “another false start—stale on it—depressed” and “false start again,” he complains on September 17 and 21. Then, on September 25, he records that he has hit upon a “brilliant notion” for the play: “introduction Cassandra—no N. E. [New England]—straight Greek characters—work enthusiastically on scenario along these lines.” Rather than transpose the characters to ante-bellum New England, he decides at this point to abandon this historical conversion and set the Greek characters in classical antiquity, similar to the model that his contemporary French counterparts, such as Giraudoux and Cocteau were employing.⁵ His decision to draw Cassandra back into the myth renews his creative energy and he is able to continue writing. For three days O’Neill works “enthusiastically” in this direction, but then becomes completely disgusted with the project and abandons the Greek setting as well as the Cassandra scenario altogether. Only after a brief parlay with the classical model does he then return in earnest to his modern scenario, as if this brief venture into the roots of classicism provided him a renewed energy for his own work.

O’Neill’s attempt to adopt the character of Cassandra into his revision and his ultimate rejection of her signify, at one level, a writer making choices for his work, but on another level they demonstrate a creative mind struggling with traditional readings of classical myth. Because O’Neill associated the prophet Cassandra so much with the Greek myth itself, when he discarded the classical context, he found he had to eliminate her as well. One could assume that a realistic, modern-day equivalent to a prophetess would be difficult to create, or that even the series of events necessary for her appearance on-stage was improbable: certainly the sexually repressed Ezra Mannon, the counterpart to Agamemnon, would not have brought a mistress back from the Civil War. What often transpires in mythic revision, however, is the reappearance of these classical characters in another guise. The characters seep into the text unbeknownst to the audience and, often, to the writer himself.

Examining the drafts of the scenario that O’Neill wrote for the play, we do find that he had originally created a wife for Seth, the hired hand, and that his wife is likened to a prophet. His description of the wife resembles that of an occultist: “Eva is superstitious to a degree and is reputed to possess powers as a seeress, being frequently consulted by her compatriots. She reads cards and tea leaves, and has trances.”⁶

O’Neill’s description of Eva as a witch doctor implies a modern-day parallel to Cassandra. As a seeress character, she would have possessed Cassandra’s ability to read the future. After all, her trances, which are paranormal states of mind, bear a striking resemblance to the visions that Cassandra sees. And as a domestic servant, Eva would have held a disempowered position in the family, not akin to a prisoner of war, but certainly of a subordinate status. Her function and description suggest that people within the family might have visited her for advice or secrets about their future. Including a character with these visionary traits would have created a supernatural tone to the trilogy—a tone that O’Neill only hints at in his third play, The Haunted. The gardener, Seth, refers to that “durned idjut, Hannah,” the Mannon’s black cook, who “is throwin’ fits again” because “she felt ha’nts crawlin’ behind her” (142). This comment is the only appearance of Eva—now Hannah—in the play. Although Lavinia will soon come to comprehend the abiding ghosts of her family members, Seth’s disrespectful comments diminish any power these visions of ghosts might have. Even with the residual reference to Hannah, it is as if O’Neill deliberately chooses to diminish the mythic role of Cassandra from his work, first when he discards the classical plot, and later when he removes the on­stage character of Eva.

Several possible reasons could be proposed for his decision to “silence” her twice, as it were; but the most noticeable one is that the very notion of prophecy implies foreknowledge of the future. If this is so, a character who can witness “what is ordained” presumes the existence of a pre-scripted future. Having the character of a prophet in one’s play implies a belief in destiny—the same concept that O’Neill wished to avoid in re-focusing the seat of tragedy on the family. Tiresias, in Greek mythology, warns countless individuals about their future and reveals to men the secrets of the gods. He speaks in riddles to Oedipus and Creon, because he possesses knowledge about their future, and he advises Odysseus in the Odyssey about how to appease the anger of Poseidon. Thus a prophet figure presumes the existence of the gods, of creatures who control man’s fate. O’Neill decidedly omits the prophet figure—“she who speaks the future”—from the text.

But she does not disappear entirely. The character of Seth absorbs his wife’s prophetess identity; not so much her ability to predict the future as her ability to ask provocative questions—the secondary role of prophets. Eva Kushner, analyzing how Greek myths are transformed into modern drama, points out what she calls the maieutic function that often appears in Greek texts, in which one character prompts another to reveal information that the second character is not aware he knows. Tiresias, for example, is more than just a visionary. As a prophet, his function is to lead characters to truths about their identities through a series of pointed remarks and questions. He tempts Oedipus to question his background: “I say you are the murderer whom you seek,” he tells him at one point and later goads him with “You cannot see the wretchedness of your life, Nor in whose house you live, no, nor with whom. Who are your father and mother? Can you tell me?” This interrogatory practice or maieutic function that Tiresias performs impels Oedipus to examine himself.

For O’Neill this maieutic function serves both a dramat purpose and an expository one. O’Neill revised his early drafts of Mourning Becomes Electra in such a way as to give Seth—if not the prophet-like wife—the prophet-like role of maieutic questioning. Seth prompts Lavinia to reveal information essential to the plot of the first play: that Adam Brant is really Ezra Mannon’s cousin, disowned by the family because his mother was a lower-class nurse who was living in the house at the time. In earlier drafts, O’Neill had Lavinia quiz Seth about the family background. But his decision to have Seth take on the maieutic function—to play the role of the prophet as it were—indicates his intention to bring the family history out of Lavinia’s self.

In the Galley Proofs, which were O’Neill’s print copies during rehearsals of the play, Lavinia questions Seth as a means of testing her own hypothesis about Adam Brant’s identity:

Lavinia: You know that Captain Brant —the man from New York who recently got command of her [the clipper, “Flying Trades”].

Seth: (watching her non-committally) Ayeh. Lavinia: What do they say about him in town?

Seth: Nothin.’ Nobody seems to have seen him. He goes aboard the “Flying Trades” and stays mostly in his cabin, the little he’s up here—so a feller workin’ at the yard told me.

Lavinia: You have seen him, haven’t you, when he came here to see me?

Seth: Ayeh.

Lavinia: Did you take a good look at him?

Seth: Not ‘speshul.

Lavinia: I don’t believe that. You always manage to see everything without seeming to. (He looks flattered. She turns away from him—slowly) I’m asking you all this because Captain Brant is courting me—and I want to know all I can about him.

Seth: (Managing to convey his entire disbelief in one word). Ayeh.

Lavinia: (sharply) You say that as if you didn’t believe me.

Seth: I believe anything you tell me to believe. I ain’t been with the Mannons for sixty years without learning that.

Lavinia: (after a pause). Has anyone ever said he reminded them of someone in looks?

Seth: No. But he does me. (Then quickly) You mean he does you, Vinnie? Then, by gosh, there must be somethin’ to it! I called myself a durn fool and put it down to my eye-sight failin’. He has a Mannon look to me. Is that what you thought?

Lavinia: Yes. There’s something about his face—like Father—or Orin.

Seth: More speshully like another. But you wouldn’t know. He was before you was born.

Lavinia: Maybe I can guess. You mean Grandfather’s brother, David, don’t you? And it just struck me a few days ago—the coincidence that the name he claims is Brant—and that woman’s name was Marie Brantôme, wasn’t it? I know it sounds far-fetched, but—

Seth: (gives a low whistle of astonishment) Say! You don’t think—?

Lavinia: I don’t know enough about it to think. David Mannon’s name was never mentioned in our house. Anyone in town probably knows more of that old scandal that I do. Orin picked up scraps of it and told me that David fell in love with the Canuck nurse girl who was taking care of Father’s little sister who died, and that he had to marry her because she was going to have a baby; and that Grandfather put them both out of the house and disowned him.

Seth: Ayeh. He got wild at ‘em and never forgave David. He was so wild he even tore down the old house and built this one—said he wouldn’t live in a place where David had disgraced the family! But you’ve heard that story.

Lavinia: No. I told you all I’d ever heard. (Then slowly) Do you know anything about her child? Was it a boy?

Seth: I dunno, Vinnie. Right after they were throwed out they married and went away. There was talk they’d gone out West but no one knows nothin.’ Your Grandpaw knew, but you bet he never let out. (Then slowly, shaking his head) I see what you’re suspectin’, Vinnie, but if this Brant was David’s child his name would be Mannon, wouldn’t it?

Lavinia: Unless he had taken his mother’s name—or part of it—for reasons of his own… . That’s all, Seth.

(Second Galley Proofs: Mourning Becomes Electra)

As a hired hand who has been with the Mannon family for several generations, Seth’s familiarity with the family makes him the perfect character to relate to the audience how the family first erred and brought the curse upon themselves. Rather than straightforward exposition, however, O’Neill has Seth use his maieutic skills. This emphasis on Seth’s function as analyst is most apparent in the way O’Neill alters the scene. Now Seth prompts Lavinia into revealing what she already senses about past family events, by asking such leading questions as “Ain’t you noticed this Brant reminds you of someone in looks?” (17). I have indicated with asterisks the lines where O’Neill has reversed the speakers, giving Seth Lavinia’s lines:

Lavinia: (abruptly) Well? What is it about Captain Brant you want to warn me against? (Then as if she felt she must defend her question from some suspicion that she knows is in his mind.) I want to know all I can about him because—he seems to be calling to court me.

Seth: (managing to convey his entire disbelief of this statement in one word) Ayeh.

Lavinia: (sharply). You say that as if you didn’t believe me.

**Seth: I believe anything you tell me to believe. I ain’t been with the Mannons for sixty years without learning that. (A pause. Then he asks slowly.) Ain’t you noticed this Brant reminds you of someone in looks?

Lavinia: (struck by this). Yes. I have—ever since I first met him—but I’ve never been able to place who—Who do you mean?

Seth: Your Paw, ain’t it, Vinnie?

Lavinia: (startled—agitated). Father? No! It can’t be! (Then as if the conviction were forcing itself on her in spite of herself) Yes! He does—something about his face—that must be why I’ve had the strange feeling I’ve known him before—why I’ve felt—(Then tensely as if she were about to break down). Oh! I won’t believe it! You must be mistaken, Seth! That would be to—!

**Seth: He ain’t only like your Paw. He’s like Orin, too—and all the Mannons I’ve known.

Lavinia: (frightenedly) But why—why should he—?

**Seth: More speshully he calls to my mind your Grandpaw’s brother, David. How much do you know about David Mannon, Vinnie? I know his name’s never been allowed to be spoke among Mannons since the day he left—but you’ve likely heard gossip, ain’t you—even if it all happened before you was born?

Lavinia: I’ve heard that he loved the Canuck nurse girl who was taking care of Father’s little sister who died, and had to marry her because she was going to have a baby; and that Grandfather 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. But what has that old scandal got to do with—

Seth: Wait. Right after they was throwed out they married and went away. There was talk they’d gone out west, but no one knew nothin’ about’em afterwards—‘ceptin’ your Granpaw let out to me one time she’d had the baby—a boy. He was cussin’ it. (Then impressively.) It’s about her baby I’ve been thinkin’, Vinnie.

Lavinia: (a look of appalled comprehension growing on her face.) Oh!

Seth: How old is that Brant, Vinnie?

Lavinia: Thirty-six, I think.

**Seth: Ayeh! That’d make it right. And here’s another funny thing—his name. Brant’s sort of queer fur a name. I ain’t never heard tell of it before. Sounds made up to me—like short fur somethin’ else. Remember what that Canuck girl’s name was, do you, Vinnie? Marie Brantôme! See what I’m drivin’ at?

Lavinia: (agitated, and fighting against a growing conviction). But—don’t be stupid, Seth—his name would be Mannon and he’d be only too proud of it.

Seth: He’d have good reason not to use the name of Mannon when he came callin’ here, wouldn’t he? If your Paw ever guessed—! Lavinia: (breaking out violently). No! It can’t be! God wouldn’t let it! It would be too horrible —on top of —! I won’t even think of it, do you hear? Why did you have to tell me?

(Mourning Becomes Electra: The Homecoming Act I 17-18)

Seth clearly drives the conversation in this scene; he asks the leading questions in order to provoke Lavinia into analyzing Brant’s identity and his connection to the Mannon family. In this final version, it is Seth who prompts Lavinia into revealing what she already senses about her family past, asking her the question she originally asked him—“Ain’t you noticed this Brant reminds you of someone in looks?”—and suggesting to her the family resemblance. O’Neill decided, however, as he watched the play in rehearsal, to reverse these two roles in the final version, whereby Seth took the role of the questioner and Lavinia took the role of respondent—or perhaps more accurately, of analysand. This reversal of roles from the early version indicates that O’Neill preferred to show how recognition of Brant’s identity had been with Lavinia all along, but only needed to be drawn out of her unconscious self. He diminishes the role of Cassandra on the one hand, but on the other, he accentuates the handy-man’s role as one who prompts others towards the truth.

O’Neill, even while struggling to reinvent a drama for his time, borrowed genre patterns and forms from earlier writers, highly cognizant of the fact that these generic conventions might no longer work and that he would have to adjust the elements of tragedy for a modern audience’s reception. We have thus seen how O’Neill’s work in revising his Greek precursor involved successive eliminations or erasures of the word fate in his own writing, preventing the word which means “to speak” from speaking. In each of these four shifts—eliminating the word fate, emphasizing self-punishment or suicide over murder, transforming the Furies into family members, and incorporating the prophet’s secondary function of maieutic questioning—O’Neill has shifted his own understanding of the Greek concept of fate to one which originates within the ties that bind the family together.

O’Neill set himself the task of revising a Greek myth from antiquity that would be accepted by modern audiences. One image from this play encapsulates particularly this practice of mythic revision completely. It is the picture of Orin, the counterpart to Orestes, sitting in a darkened room, and writing in his journal as a way to expurgate his own guilt by fixing in print for all time his family’s dark secrets. He occasionally turns to the figure of his father in the portrait and chuckles darkly, asking him, “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth! Is that what you’re demanding, Father?” (The Haunted, Act II 134). Because O’Neill was so highly cognizant of rewriting his classical precursor’s work with this play, we can view this character of the writer-in-the­text as an analogy for the playwright himself, certainly when most of O’Neill’s own familial experiences found their way into his plays in one way or another. Richard F. Moorton even suggests that Mourning Becomes Electra actually prefigures Long Day’s Journey Into Night because the familial grouping in the two plays is similar and because Orin seems an earlier version of Edmund. Thus Orin, the man furiously writing in the dark with the eyes of his ancestors upon him, represents O’Neill, writing under the weight of Aeschylus and of classical tradition. Through this representative figure of the writer in the text, he attests to the struggle of bringing a new conception of fate and of tragedy to the light of the stage.

NOTES

¹ Prefatory Notes to The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Wilderness Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.

² O’Neill recorded his written productivity in “Line a Day” Work Diaries, four of which are held at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The diaries are in various colors—green, purple-blue, and two navy-blue—and they indicate what project he worked on each day, when he thought of the ideas for each play, where he was at the time, how he felt about the work he was doing, or whether he was unable to work because of illness. At the end of the fourth diary, he tallies up the number of days he spent working on each play, from 1924 to 1936.

³ He writes the entry “Idea play on life Aeschylus (notes)” on May 7 to 8, 1929 in his “Line a Day” Work Diaries.

⁴ In the “First Longhand Script (1929 - 30),” Lavinia urges Adam Brant (called Byrne in the first draft) to commit suicide while Orin holds him at gunpoint. She tells him that she and Orin will turn their mother in to the police for plotting her husband’s death unless Brant kills himself first.

Lavinia. You are my gallant, Adam Byrne! But I’ll be frank with you! I don’t want to go to the police! I don’t want my mother hung—for the family’s sake. So Orin & I have taken the punishment of our father’s murderer on ourselves.

Byrne. (Staring at her—quietly) And what is my punishment?

Lavinia. (Sternly) To punish yourself! Your father knew what to do when he had reached the end.

Byrne. (Quietly) Aye. The only decent brave thing he did!

Lavinia. (Deliberately goading him) But perhaps you’re too great a coward—even to save the life of the woman you pretend to love! (“Original and First Longhand Script: Mourning Becomes Electra.”)

⁵ Cocteau rewrote the Antigone and Orpheus myths in 1922 and 1924, while Giraudoux wrote Amphitryon 38 in 1929.

⁶ The full descripton of Eva, found in O’Neill’s “Ideas: 1921-1931 Notebook,” reads: “Eva is a sort of assistant-housekeeper under Elena. She is a woman of nearly 70, stout full- [bosomed? boned?] and square-shouldered, still strong and active. She has a square, extremely swarthy-complected [sic] face, heavy features, a big [stick?]-lipped mouth with teeth still round and white, and brooding, passionate black eyes.”

WORKS CITED

Atkinson, Brooks J. “November Nights Along Broadway: Tragedy Becomes O’Neill.” New York Times, 8 Nov 1931: VIII:1.

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: 1900­1940. Vol. 1. Cambridge UP, 1982.

Clark, Barrett H. European Theories of the Drama, rev. ed. New York: Crown, 1947.

Eaton, Walter Pritchard. “O’Neill —‘New Risen Attic Stream’?” The American Scholar. 6. 3 (1937): 304-312.

Floyd, Virginia, ed. Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.

Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1989.

Kushner, Eva. “Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation.” Literary Criticism and Myth. ed. Joseph P. Strelka. Pennsylvania State UP, 1980: 198-209.

Moorton, Richard F. “The Author as Oedipus in Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in Eugene O’Neill’s Century: Centennial Views on America’s Foremost Tragic Dramatist, ed. Richard F. Moorton, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991.