It is very interesting to ask: what do we mean by the word tragedy when we refer to certain Greek, Shakespearean and modern plays, and how  do we know it when O’Neill’s (and other modern) plays do or do not seem tragic to us in the way that certain Greek or Shakespearean plays do? I refer to subjective impressions felt by people who have long experience with such plays, rather than conformity to a theory. I want to point to the subjective experience that has led knowledgeable readers and audiences in various historical eras to say that the Oresteia or Lear or Long Day’s Journey into Night is tragic, and to speculate how and what people have sensed or felt affectively to be hallmarks of tragic drama. I am specifically interested in the questions of whether and how the word tragic applies to Mourning Becomes Electra. The word tragic is tricky because it not only refers to certain sorts of characters and actions, but it also, in scholarly or critical usage, often means that the play in question is of exceptional quality. It means not only that things probably turn out badly for the characters in a play but also that the events of the play seem in some way momentous, that somehow the experience of seeing or reading the play has caused us to feel we have seen something about the world that we had not noticed before; or, put another way, we have discovered something that has caused a shift in our sense of the world.

At the end of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, a play widely called tragic, we may find that our day-to-day belief that through thinking and planning we can control the future of our lives has been shaken or disturbed. The Bakkhai of Euripides begins as if we were to see an old and familiar fable retold: a thoroughly unpleasant local bully (Pentheus) picks on the wrong stranger (a god in human form) to torment. We sit back, perhaps a little smugly, to await the comeuppance we know the bully will get. But what the play presents is such a particular and specific unmanning of the bully that we begin to feel a little sympathy for him; and by the end we are horrified, not only at what has happened to the bully but far more, by what we have learned about the nature of god-ness, and the relation of people to their gods. We have learned that a god is nothing at all like one of us insulted and vengeful, but something completely different. The god of Bakkhai is simply the power to create or destroy. We learn that whatever motives we find in the god arise from our own notions.

I think it is not wrong, and not too great a claim, to compare the change in the way we think about the world after learning about Oedipus and Pentheus to other major shifts in the way we understand the world in which we live. The individual experience is not unlike that which followed the general publication of claims by Galileo or Newton or Darwin or Freud that the world is nothing like we have previously believed it to be.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell has written about such discovery in the context of philosophical inquiry. Comparing Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods with “the progress of a psychoanalytic therapy,” Cavell writes of a moment of change. He seems to mean an experience something like that which the Greeks called anagnorisis—a moment of great discovery or recognition. As in a psychotherapy, Cavell writes, philosophical “problems are solved only when they disappear, and answers are arrived at only when there are no longer questions—when, as it were, our accounts have cancelled them.” Cavell writes: “The more one learns, so to speak, the hang of one’s self, and mounts one’s problems, the less one is able to say what one has learned; not because you have forgotten what it was, but because nothing you said would seem like an answer or a solution: there is no longer any question or problem which your words would match. You have reached conviction, but not about a proposition; and consistency, but not in a theory. You are different, what you recognize as problems are different, your world is different” (85).¹

Cavell’s description may be aptly applied to the experience of Oedipus at the moment late in the play when the king, after cross-examining witnesses, after considering all the evidence he can find in the killing of Laius, after quarrelling with the blind seer Tiresias, after his wife has implored him to stop asking questions—after all this, he suddenly knows what everyone else in the city has figured out along the way. The questions he has asked refer to the world he formerly perceived, not the world as he now knows it to be. The audience may also perceive the change in the world and the world of the drama is now seen to be filled with the most complex ironies (e.g., the blind seer had seen everything that the king could not see, including what Oedipus saw when he looked upon his wife). Tragedy is not Cavell’s particular topic in the essay quoted. But the point cited may help one identify a fundamental aspect of the experience of tragedy. If sadness and loss seems an inevitable part of tragedy, Cavell’s formulation accounts for it. The loss is nothing less than the loss of the world as the character, and the audience, previously knew it.

In the case of Oedipus, the loss is related to reason, a quality whose value he takes for granted, and one that people, presumably throughout our existence, have taken as the prime quality which, as we say, defines our difference from animals, that which allows us to plan and foresee. The king who has revered reason must now look back upon the young man he was who assumed, upon hearing the warning that he was fated to kill his father and beget children upon his mother, that he could avoid such a destiny by making the painful decision never to see again his beloved parents. And so on. As the number of such ironies and such recognitions mounts, he and we get a notion of how profoundly ignorant we may be about ourselves and the world. Our experience of empathy with the anagnorisis of Oedipus is one of the ways, I believe, we know we have experienced dramatic tragedy.

Experiences of recognition, not dissimilar to that dramatized by Sophocles, occur in life; presumably they are common enough that many people feel a twinge of personal recognition when they see such a moment on stage. As I have pointed out in connection with O’Neill’s life, the playwright must have experienced such an anagnorisis in 1902 when he was told that his mother was a morphine addict and that her addiction had been caused by his own birth. At that moment the world that the thirteen year old Eugene thought he knew must have disappeared and been replaced by a fundamentally different world, one in which he had unknowingly caused his mother’s affliction and so altered the life of everyone in his family (Black 73-75).

It should therefore not surprise us that a sense of the tragic, discernible from the beginning of O’Neill’s playwriting, and that an interest in Greek tragedy becomes clearly visible in 1918 when he wrote Beyond the Horizon. The interest is explicit in Desire Under the Elms (1924), the plot of which derives, as Louis Sheaffer and Travis Bogard have pointed out, from the Hippolytos of Euripides and to the myth of Phaedra and her son-in-law. Abbie’s killing her son reminded Bogard of Medea. Most of O’Neill’s plays from Beyond the Horizon through the end of the 1920s show the influence of the Greeks. Bogard wrote that O’Neill used the psychoanalytic idea of psychic determinism to give Mourning Becomes Electra, his modern Oresteia, a sense of inevitability akin to the ancient Greek sense of moira—sometimes translated as “fate,” or one’s lot in life (Bogard 344-48).

O’Neill almost certainly read Greek tragedy long before he began to write plays, and well before he encountered Nietzsche about 1907. He probably read, at the least, Euripides’s Bakkhai and Oedipus the King at De La Salle Institute or even in his last year at Mt. St. Vincent Academy (at age 12 or 13), for in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the plays were usually taught to the Catholic young as lessons against dissipation, arrogance and excess. I think we can assume that O’Neill found more than moral homilies in those plays. Beyond the Horizon, The Hairy Ape, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms have all been compared by critics to Greek tragedies, and the influence of Greek tragedy is evident in The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude and Dynamo. In the unlikely event that he had not already read the Greek myths at home, he would surely have done so at Betts Academy, the curriculum of which heavily favored the classics.

We know that O’Neill saw Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler ten times in 1907. He probably also saw Hofmannsthal’s Elektra with Mrs. Patrick Campbell that same season. Nearly two decades later, on 4 April 1926 he wrote Kenneth Macgowan that he was reading Arthur Symons’s translation of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and thought it “beautifully written.” O’Neill urged Macgowan to bring Hofmannsthal to NewYork and to arrange for a production. Two weeks after the letter to Macgowan, he wrote in the Work Diary: “Germ idea use Greek Tragedy plot in modern setting—made note.” When he made the note, on 26 April 1926, he was working on Lazarus Laughed, a play whose central character has been said by critics to resemble Dionysos, the god who dies and returns to life.

As we know, O’Neill’s work of the 1920s has a distinctly Greek flavor. The Work Diary records that in the late twenties he spoke of the subject with his son, Eugene Jr., who was then studying classics at Yale. The interest shows itself in many ways. As Louis Sheaffer, Travis Bogard and others have mentioned, Desire Under the Elms takes its plot and central situation from the myths of Theseus and the Hippolytos of Euripides. Dion Anthony and Cybel, in The Great God Brown, get their identities from Greek myths. The masks used in Brown and Lazarus show O’Neill experimenting with the resources and conventions used by the ancient playwrights. In 1926 and ’27 O’Neill records in the diary that he is rereading Nietzsche on tragedy, and also Goethe’s Faust, and The Tempest. He reads works on pre-socratic philosophers, and other books about early Greek cultures and mythology (including Pater’s Greek Studies, Robert H. Lowie’s Primitive Society, and Freud’s Group Psychology).

On 22 March 1926 he told his friend Manuel Komroff that he was starting to study the ancient Greek language and hoped to be able to read it “in three or four years” (Selected Letters 200). On O’Neill’s request, Komroff, an editor at Boni and Liveright, sent the playwright several books about the ancient world including Murray’s Greek Literature, Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth, and Stace’s Critical Study of Greek Philosophy (SL 200). The influence of his reading is evident in the plays he was writing. Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude invokes “God the Mother” in her struggle against paternalistic Christianity and the play as a whole seems suffused with a Greek sense of moira. O’Neill takes the image of the mother god further in Dynamo, the central image of which is the maternal, mindlessly creative and destructive hydro-electric generator upon whose great electrical body Reuben Light immolates himself. The play is one of the most throroughly “Greek” in spirit of O’Neill’s plays, and seems to a reader to have enormous potential. O’Neill believed that if he had not written and sent it off so hastily, it might have been one of his finer works.

On 17 October 1928, while working on a scenario for an idea he called “It Cannot be Mad” (which was to have been a part of a trilogy begun with Dynamo), he noted in the Work Diary “ideas on Greek tragedy plot notion.” The notion he referred to had probably been on his mind since April-May 1926 when he interrupted work on Lazarus to record an idea for “for Greek Tragedy plot in modern setting.” In the “Fragmentary Diary” for November 1928 he writes: “Use the plots from Greek tragedy in modern surroundings— the New England play of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra & Orestes— Oedipus.” O’Neill would use the general plot of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. But, as Virginia Floyd notes, O’Neill turns “to Sophocles for his interpretation of Electra” (185). The isolated word “Oedipus” in the above quotation could refer to the myth, the character or to the play by Sophocles, or to the Freudian complex—or perhaps to all.

O’Neill does not seem to have learned very much Greek, but he probably read Sophocles’s Electra, we do not know in whose translation. (The most widely available English translation at the time was in quasi-Elizabethan diction and iambics by Gilbert Murray.) As previously mentioned, he read the play Elektra by Hofmannsthal, based on Sophocles, in Arthur Symons’s (1908) translation from the German (which he praises in the 1926 letter to Macgowan).

Notes and scenario material at Yale, quoted or summarized by Virginia Floyd in Eugene O’Neill at Work (1981), suggest that O’Neill’s initial idea of writing a “Greek Tragedy” was to confront the (Freudian) Oedipal elements which had interested him since his first experiences of psychotherapy in 1921, and the related ideas inherent in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Travis Bogard argued at length that O’Neill’s motives in choosing the Oresteia for his model had to do with psychoanalysis (344 ff.). The motive seems to have been largely personal, to continue to work through the thoughts and fantasies that had driven O’Neill into psychoanalytic therapy at least three times in the 1920s. Oedipal themes, in the Freudian sense, dominated most of the plays O’Neill wrote from 1917 and are prominent in Beyond the Horizon, Chris Christophersen, “Anna Christie,” Desire Under the Elms, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude and Dynamo.

Notes and scenarios for the new Electra play show that O’Neill became more explicit and blunt in the new project than in those named above. In the scenario, the affair of the mother-character and her lover is conceived in more sensual terms than the affair between Christine and Brant is rendered in the published version. As Virginia Floyd noticed, some of the more direct ideas link the characters to the members of the O’Neill family. In the scenario, the poison used to kill the father is morphine, and the same drug is used by the daughter and son to kill their mother and her lover. The daughter Elena (later called Lavinia) is described in terms that, as Virginia Floyd points out, remind one of O’Neill’s later description of Edmund Tyrone in Long Day ’s Journey into Night: “extremely thin—arms and legs long with long tapering hands and feet. . . . She has great black eyes like her mother’s. Her mouth is also a sensually-accentuated replica of her mother’s, even to the trace of a moustache on the short upper lip” (Floyd 189). The description might describe O’Neill’s image in photos from the 1920s. Elena, like Lavinia, is at times rigidly mannish and ambivalent about her sexual desires, alternately attracted and repelled by her mother’s lover, and “jealous of ‘passionate love her mother is capable of feeling and inspiring,’” O’Neill writes. Elena “is filled with ‘envious rage because she has no male admirers. She treats males of her age with a timid protective mask of severe frigidity’” (Floyd 190).

In the first sketches for the scenario, Orin and Elena have a brother who resembles Jamie in Long Day’s Journey, and also two other sisters, all of whom are eliminated as the story develops. Orin also physically resembles Eugene. He loves and imitates his father in everything, but his father cannot show love to his son any more than to the others in his family. The older son, who is adored by his mother, is killed in action and Orin secretly hopes to take his place in his mother’s feelings (Floyd 191-2). The implication of the scenario is that Orin feels unloved by both parents. Elena preoccupies herself in thinking of her mother “go[ing] without a qualm from her lover’s arms to her husband’s,” and of “lascivious” letters to her mother from her lover that she has found and read. O’Neill describes in notes Elena’s feelings about the letters, which she cannot stop thinking about: “What filth physical passion is, yet how it attracts her! She hates herself” (Floyd 196). The play ends with the father dying in bed. Elena incites Orin’s anger, as in the published text, by showing him the empty bottle of poison and by describing their mother’s motive for killing their father, to be with her lover.

After finishing the scenario for the first play O’Neill spends six days “studying Greek plays” (as he writes in the Work Diary on 26 June 1929), then begins the scenario for the second play. The notes for the second act show the mother being very seductive with her son and talking him out of the suspicions his sister has created. He draws closer and closer to his mother and for weeks they are together alone because Elena has left the house to stay with friends. Orin turns against Elena and relations with his mother become such that Orin, as O’Neill writes, “‘takes his mother in his arms— his attitude is like a lover’s,’” “‘kisses her lips,’” and tells his mother he no longer wants to marry his fiancée but to remain always with her (Floyd 199­200). But Elena sends to Orin a message and two of the lover’s letters to their mother, causing Orin to feel betrayed by his mother, and jealous of her lover. He aligns himself again on his sister’s side of the battle.

In the third play, the mother and her lover have decided to elope to Europe—as Eugene and Carlotta have done—and she is packing. Elena has persuaded Orin to help her kill the lovers and pours glasses of wine to which they will add morphine. Orin struggles with himself but puts poison in the lover’s glass; but he cannot put it in his mother’s glass. Elena kisses Orin’s lips, takes the morphine and pours it in her mother’s glass saying she would rather do it herself. When it is done she announces to her dead father that she has avenged his murder and prays that he give her brother strength. The lover arrives, called by the son who pretends to accept the affair and the lovers’ love for each other, and gives them the drinks. When the poison has begun to take effect, Orin tells the lover about the poison and forces him to write a suicide note saying that he has poisoned his own wine and that the mother is innocent. It hardly needs saying that specifying morphine as the poison suggests a powerful link between Orin-Elena and Eugene.

In the scenario Elena has already poisoned her mother, who, feeling herself dying, goes to the bed where her dead lover lies and she also dies where Orin finds them and “sobs heartbreakingly.” The scenario for the second play ends with Elena asserting that she has brought peace to her father’s restless ghost, a ghost which had demanded justice (Floyd 202). It should be recalled that in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, it is the son who kills his mother.

Virginia Floyd compares the end of the second play to the discovery by Oedipus of Jocasta’s body after the revelation of his identity (203). I differ. I believe, to the contrary, that O’Neill would know the difference between the two situations, that Oedipus the King is not about such waking fantasies of incest as apparently plague Elena and Orin, and lead them to kill their mother and her lover, but is instead about a calamity that occurs because it was destined. If possible, the catastrophe of Oedipus is greater than an act of incest because the Oedipus story calls into doubt the meaning, purpose and value of human foreknowledge and planning. Jocasta kills herself because of unbearable shame for what she has unknowingly done. Oedipus refrains from killing himself because he has learned the folly of imagining that he can control his destiny, and because he believes that the gods require him to live until they end his life, and suffer with the knowledge he now has—as Tiresias has lived and suffered. Orin and Lavinia are driven by guilt, not shame.

No comparable draft scenario seems to exist for the third play, but there is a set of notes which includes the information that Lavinia (as her name now has become) orders Orin to “do your last duty as a Mannon”—to kill himself.

It seems to me that the early thoughts about the material for the first two plays of the trilogy—the material discussed just above—do not develop greatly from their early to the later versions. Clementina’s lover goes through several name changes but his character, remains essentially the same in the scenario. He is, like Clementina, a French Huguenot New Yorker who graduated from Harvard, and is a partner in a brokerage. He is smooth enough, unlike the later character Adam Brant, so that one can imagine the sophisticated and rather shallow Clementina or Christine falling in love with him. The later character Adam Brant is as plain spoken as Ezra Mannon, and as straightforward in his style, and has no visible virtues that Ezra lacks. Ezra and Adam both show—painfully—their adoration of and devotion to Christine, which apparently is what makes her so weary of Ezra, and makes her affair with Adam seem headed for the same outcome. The lover in the scenario conceals behind wit and irony his need for Clementina until they are both dying; with him, Clementina can forget who she is and simply enjoy being charmed. He is a stock character, whom no one would call earnest or serious as one might think Mannon and Brant.

There are times when Mourning Becomes Electra, in its published version, seems labored, as if certain scenes and characters are there chiefly because the Oresteia had such scenes and characters. Similar criticisms have been made of O’Neill’s two other long plays of the period, Strange Interlude and Lazarus Laughed. But there are also many very strong moments, such as Orin’s stunning account of killing the same rebel soldier over and over in the fog of battle. In the end, all three of these plays justify their length, I think, and I will try to explain what may make one feel satisfied to have spent about six hours following the situation of the Mannons (each play is slightly longer than Desire Under the Elms).

Some changes O’Neill made in the story he took from the Oresteia are fairly straightforward. Ezra Mannon and Agamemnon are both generals on the winning side in a prolonged war between related peoples. Neither is a brilliant officer, although the stolid Ezra shows little of Agamemnon’s stupidity or arrogance (he brings home as a slave from Troy a daughter of the Trojan king whom he has seized for his concubine). Ezra’s folly, if that’s what it is, is to be captivated by desire for his wife, a desire that seems to thrive on rejection. Clytemnestra has many good reasons for wanting her husband dead including the following: he has sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to appease Artemis in order to take his army to Troy. Furthermore, he has killed her previous husband and her children from that marriage in the sack of her former city, at which he claimed her as wife. During the nine years of Agamemnon’s absence at Troy, Clytemnestra has ruled Argos well enough to have her rule accepted by the people, and she has grown fond of power.

O’Neill makes Ezra far less brutal than Agamemnon; his Christine has no interest in the community her husband has led, but instead wants to escape the town and its people who dislike her as much as she dislikes them. Clytemnestra is politically shrewd and has a warrior’s spirit; Christine is a romantic who seeks escape from boredom. Clytemnestra plans and carries out the murder of Agamemnon as if it were a battle in a war, and faces down the citizens of Argos who seem about to rise against her when she tells them of murdering Agamemnon. The men grumble but no organized protest arises and the audience must assume that either they fear her or that she has governed no more poorly than her husband, or both. Clytemnestra plays peacemaker when some of the citizens show their resentment against her bullying lover, Aegisthus; she quietly calms both sides, saying that already too much blood has been shed.

At the beginning of Libation Bearers, the second play of the trilogy, a decade has passed. Clytemnestra brings belated offerings to the tomb of Agamemnon because of a terrifying dream: a snake she nursed at her breast has struck her. She attributes the dream to the neglect of her duty to mourn the husband she had slain, a neglect which has offended the gods who sent her the dream.

Clytemnestra is one of the more complex characters in surviving Greek tragedy. She brilliantly outwits Agamemnon upon his return. She shows him up to the people as arrogant, willing to commit what he thinks is a blasphemous act, and dull-witted. She can plan and act decisively and she has a conscience. When she first announces that she has slain Agamemnon she does not conceal her immediate sense of triumph, but neither does she gloat over the deed after the first moments. When he has grown to manhood, Orestes comes to confront her, driven by Apollo to avenge the murder of his father. Clytemnestra instantly recognizes him, senses his purpose and calls for a war axe. When none comes, she uses every wile of words to unman her son and deflect his purpose. When she sees that he is able to resist her appeals, she accepts her coming death with dignity, like a warrior from the Iliad.

It is immediately apparent how greatly O’Neill has altered the character of the wife and mother. Christine Mannon cannot plan effectively beyond her wish to be rid of her husband, and seeks only escape into a fantasy of romance in the South Seas with Adam. It is never clear why she seems to see no alternative to killing Ezra. She says she cannot bear his touch, but she seems not to have considered why she feels compelled to leave him, and then, to kill him—rather than, say, to continue with her affair while maintaining her marriage, like many a woman of her time. Divorce and separation were less common in the 1860s than today, but they did occur, even in “Puritan” New England. There would of course be consequences. It seems she cannot evaluate or anticipate what might follow from any of various decisions, and so she does not try to think of them except in extreme terms. She simply evades anticipating what she may feel over the murder of her husband by flights of fancy about being in paradise with Brant. Compare Clytemnestra who sees her son’s seriousness and immediately understands the meaning of the dream the god sent her: that Orestes is the snake who has nursed at her breast and would kill her. (In Greek mythology, snakes are often messengers from the chthonic earth gods—the maternal gods.)

Where Aeschylus’s first play, Agamemnon, is dominated by Clytemnestra, the second play is about her children, Electra and Orestes. They are the libation bearers of the title: they pour the gifts to the gods, and cut locks of their hair to place on their murdered father’s tomb, to make the ritual of mourning for him who had never been properly mourned. At the time of Agamemnon’s murder, the child Orestes is sent away to be raised by friends in an allied city-state. Now, ten years later, Orestes is a man and has been told his dreadful duty by Apollo. His duty places him in a true double bind: if he fails to avenge his father’s murder, he will be forever despised by his fellow Greeks, and by the gods; and if he does his duty—if he kills his mother—then he will never escape the name of matricide among men nor escape the fury of the Erinyes, ancient female earth gods, far older mythologically than the Olympian gods who usurped their place, their specific duty being to avenge family crimes, especially matricide, and who make a murderer of kin mad.

The scene of confrontation between Clytemnestra and the avenging Orestes is the center of the Oresteia. A brief retelling of the scene makes clear, I think, the difference between Orestes and Orin Mannon. Orestes seems never for more than an instant to hesitate in his duty nor to pity himself for his dreadful moira. When he has led his sister through the rites of mourning, he sets about the rest of his task. He never seems to imagine that he will not suffer unbearably for killing his mother. The verbal struggle between mother and son is as intense as one can imagine. Armed only with words, Clytemnestra asks her son if he has “no feeling for this, my child, / The breast you held drowsing away the hours, / Soft gums tugging the milk that made you grow” (238). Clytemnestra simultaneously infantilizes her son, and behaves with sexual provocation, making contradictory demands which the young man cannot ignore. Only at this point does Orestes hesitate and ask his companion, Pylades, what he should do. His friend simply reminds him of the God’s and the Greeks’ expectations. After a brief summary of her grievances against her husband Clytemnestra says she believes she is going to die, and Orestes takes her offstage. He is no monster; he shows no pleasure in his vengeance and seems never for an instant to imagine that he will not pay profoundly for his act, duty or not.

It will be immediately apparent how different Orin Mannon is from Aeschylus’s Orestes. Orin is courageous in battle despite fear and anxiety, and profoundly troubled by what battle has revealed to him about himself, and unable to escape the myriad forms and causes of guilt after his crimes. Orestes has never doubted that he knew what the god and what Greeks require of him. Orin, a man of O’Neill’s time—a character rather like Hamlet—is deeply alienated from God, humanity and himself and seems at times paralyzed by knowing too much.

Both children of Christine Mannon are quite different from those imagined by Aeschylus though they arise from similar situations. Aeschylus shows Electra to be pious and devoted to the memory of her father, and to be alienated from her mother. She immediateley cooperates with Orestes’s plan for vengeance. But Aeschylus goes no further in imagining her life during Clytemnestra’s rule of Argos. As we know, it was Sophocles’s version of Electra, via Hofmannsthall’s play Elektra, which fascinated O’Neill, and which for him was the starting point of the project.

The Mannon daughter, Lavinia, has apparently fought with and hated her mother for many years, since long before the Civil War separated her parents. She makes herself mannish in dress and behavior to show her mother that she is her father’s, not her mother’s daughter, and when her father returns, she walks like a soldier under the general’s command. Seeing her father die in her mother’s bed and hearing her father say he has been poisoned gives focus to her grievances against Christine and seems to validate her lifelong war with her mother. For most of the rest of the second play, The Hunted, Lavinia seems clearly stronger than Orin, particularly in the sense that she can command herself to avoid becoming as confused by all she has seen as Orin becomes. (Lavinia, of course, has not been in war.) She can continue to think and plan effectively as she plots the murder of Brant and the confrontation with her mother that will follow while Orin is glad to turn over command to her. She is able to prevent herself from feeling guilt or remorse about any of the acts she plans and carries out until almost the end of the third play. Until then it appears she will retain such control over her conscience that it cannot deflect her purpose and will even allow her to escape and survive the Mannon guilt.

Lavinia’s suppression of conscience seems related to thinking that is less than transparent. Consider the following. Once the father is dead, why should it be necessary to kill Brant or prevent her mother from running off with him? With the mother gone and discredited by her behavior, Lavinia and Orin should be able to get control of the family property and shipping business, and the Mannon name would probably survive the gossip, just as it had when the affair between David Mannon and Brant’s mother had become known. Every generation has its scandals. Lavinia’s actions, like her words, show her more interested in humiliating and destroying her mother and whatever her mother wants than in protecting the family name and place. She obviously wishes to take her mother’s place, and to become leader of the family.

But we soon see that Lavinia’s mother was more important to her than Lavinia allowed herself to know. The change in her personality and style after Brant and her mother are dead is remarkable. In Parts I and II, she had been plain, her hair severely bound and its beauty hidden; she had seemed flat­breasted and mannish. She had been officially engaged to marry Peter Niles, but seemed to have almost no interest in him. In Part 3, Scene 2, she now seems voluptuous and coquettish. Her hair is now radiant, “brown-gold” like her mother’s, and she wears a green dress that seems a copy of one her mother had worn at the beginning of the trilogy. She has had a sexual awakening while she and Orin had been on an island in the South Sea, carrying on voluptuously with an island man. Now, like her mother, she wants to live for pleasure and is terrified that Orin’s guilt about the deaths of his mother and her lover may spoil the happiness she now longs for with Peter.

Before the change, Lavinia had avoided feeling overwhelmed by her own anxiety and guilt by emphasizing to herself the magnitude of her mother’s guilt, and the by seizing responsibility to avenge her father’s death and to save the honor of the Mannons. In this she resembled her mother, and differed from Electra in the Oresteia. There are many other differences. None of Aeschylus’s characters, not Orestes or Electra and certainly not Clytemnestra, imagined that they would escape knowledge of guilt for any of their deeds. Lavinia more nearly resembles Lady Macbeth than she does anyone from the Oresteia. She had been able to postpone knowing or feeling guilt long enough to avoid being distracted from her purposes.

For most of the trilogy, Lavinia is able to avoid direct, compelling knowledge of her acts and their consequences, not only her acts against Brant and her mother, but her act against Orin in manipulating him to shoot Brant, and in forcing him tacitly to agree to urging their mother to kill herself. In Parts I and II, Lavinia seems to have no conscience; but since we learn later that she does, we must infer that she must work hard (unconsciously) to be able to avoid its pricks. Speaking psychologically, the outward signs of her psychological “work” to avoid feeling guilt include her generally flat affect, and her mannish dress and behavior. O’Neill creates his characters, particularly Lavinia, as if he had been reading psychoanalytic case-histories— which we know he had been doing since at least 1923 (Black 311).

The act of planning must also have helped Lavinia avoid knowing fully the consequences that would eventually come to her. The following lists some of the calculations she consciously or unconsciously made. In order to force Christine to end her life, Lavinia has to have Orin on her side. Christine has imagined that Orin would continue to love her without regard for his father’s death or the love affair, or would even sympathize with her love, so tightly does she believe that Orin is bound to her and identifies with her. The loss of Orin’s allegiance marks the beginning of loss of self that will eventually make death seem to Christine better than living. To win Orin to her side Lavinia must make him hate Brant so deeply and become so jealous of his mother that he will be willing to kill Brant. It must be Orin who kills Brant. It may be that Lavinia fears that some inhibition or qualm of conscience or ambivalence might prevent her killing him. Whether or not, it must be Orin, for nothing else will so thoroughly prove Orin’s judgment against her to his mother.

The concluding plays most distinguish the two trilogies from each other, O’Neill’s The Haunted and Aeschylus’s Eumenides (literally, blessed or kindly ones). The former gives us a glimpse at O’Neill’s sense of the tragic as it had developed by 1931. Aeschylus shows Orestes continually tormented to madness by the Erinyes who constantly remind him of his matricidal crime and mock his justification that filial duty as well as the gods demanded he avenge his mother’s assassination of his father. Followed by the Erinyes, he flees to the shrine of Apollo, who had sent him to his duty, and begs to know if there can be relief from his torment. In answer, Apollo strikes a bargain with the Erinyes. If they will permit it, they will all go to Athens where Orestes will be judged for his crime. He, Apollo, will represent Orestes, and the Erinyes will prosecute the case.

As mentioned above, the Erinyes represent the mytholoically primal maternal earth gods who were displaced by Zeus and the Olympian gods with the help of the Titans. In Eumenides Aeschylus shows the Erinyes still pouring scorn on the phallocentric Olympians who supplanted them in most of the Greek world. It is believed by some classicists that as late as the Homeric age or later the old gods were still worshipped as the prime deities in certain city-states, possibly including Eleusis, in some of which places, according to ancient travelers, the old mysteries including human sacrifice were still practiced. In the time of Aeschylus, in Athens, rationalists’ skepticism about the newer Olympian gods was becoming commonplace; it was the time of logic, rhetoric and geometry, of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Socrates and Pericles, Euripides and Plato. It was a time which celebrated the triumph of reason over the darkness of ancient times and cults. Rationalist interpretations of the old stories coexisted with festivals in honor of the Olympic gods, such as that for Dionysos, at which were enacted, each spring, tragic plays usually based on Olympian myths or on stories from Homer, with comic plays presenting revisionist versions of the gods and heroes.

In the trial of Orestes in Eumenides the Erinyes prosecute their grievance. Athena, parthenogenic daughter of Zeus, an Olympian associated with justice, pays honor to the more ancient gods and modestly asks the Erinyes if they will accept her as judge of the dispute, which they do. Arguments are made for and against the defendant, and between the old and new gods. At the end of the trial, after the arguments have been made, fifty jurors cast stones for acquittal, fifty are against. Athena must decide. She casts her ballot-stone for Orestes, saying “No mother gave me birth. / I honor the male in all things except marriage” (292).

Her decision leads to the extraordinary conclusion of the play. Athena persuades the Erinyes to take residence in Athens and to be known ever after as Eumenides, kindly ones, who will cast a protective mantle over the city in return for the reverence of the citizens. Fagles and Stanford, in the introduction to their translation, claim that the “closing pageant” of Eumenides represents “a civic marriage of men and gods, the civic birth of Athens” (98).² Probably some in Aeschylus’s audience found hope for an end to a problem that must have begun with the first murder within a family; for others, it must have seemed a hopeless hope. Nevertheless, it expressed the heart of classical humanism, the ideal that through reasoned argument and conciliation grievances may be solved, and even to hope that acts of vengeance may give way to something other than an endless chain of retaliations. O’Neill, in the conclusion to his Oresteia, had a much different aim from that claimed by Fagles and Stanford for Aeschylus. Where Aeschylus sought a quasi­political solution, O’Neill seeks one that is psychological and religious.

O’Neill’s concluding play begins just before Orin and Lavinia return from a year of travel during which they have visited a tropical island, trying to find for Orin the paradise he had once read of in Melville’s Typee, a paradise where people lived and loved without perpetual guilt, seemingly without knowledge of good and evil as the Mannons understand morality. There, Lavinia, not Orin, finds love, with a native man. In telling of it, after they have returned to New England, Orin recalls watching Lavinia bloom physically and emotionally, while Orin, instead of finding freedom from guilt is tortured by envy, half-conscious sexual desire, and guilt, all directed to his sister in much the way he had previously felt toward his mother.

They return to a house that is now regarded by the townspeople as one haunted by the ghosts of the Mannons and their crimes, a house in which men of the town test their nerve and bet each other who can remain longest without becoming so terrified they have to flee it. At first the house has no such effect on the Mannon young, at least not on Lavinia. She has little patience for Orin’s growing guilt and anxiety, and primps in front of him and before mirrors, making herself into a copy of her mother in physical appearance. Most strikingly, she is playful and flirtatious in ways she has never been before. She is said (in stage directions) to now look like Christine. Orin taunts her about her behavior with her lover with whom he found her when he went searching. Orin can’t escape thoughts of the Mannons, and of all the things he witnessed in war, in travel and at home. He feels compelled to make a record of everything he knows, and he sits writing a manuscript which he will not let Lavinia read and keeps locked away. Knowing what he is doing troubles Lavinia and fills her with dread which surfaces from time to time. For a while she is able to carry on despite Orin’s morbid obsession with remembering. Remembering is what Lavinia refuses to do.

Before the war there was an understanding that Orin would marry Hazel Niles, the sister of Lavinia’s fiance, though neither Mannon has seemed eager to marry. Now Lavinia can hardly wait to marry Peter to get away from the Mannon house. But she fears leaving Orin by himself, afraid of what he will do to himself, or do with his knowledge and his manuscript. Knowing that Lavinia wants to destroy the manuscript, and undecided about what to do with it, Orin tries to give it to Hazel, insisting that she must make Peter read it before he marries Lavinia. In the great confrontation between brother and sister, Lavinia forces Orin to take the manuscript back from Hazel. She promises that she will “do anything—anything you want me to do.” Most of what follows is given in stage directions:

ORIN. (stares into [Lavinia’s] eyes, bending his head until his face is close to hers—with morbid intensity) You mean that?

LAVINIA. (shrinking back from him—falteringly) Yes.

ORIN. (laughs with a crazy triumph—checks this abruptly—and goes to Hazel who has been standing bewilderedly, not understanding what is behind their talk but sensing something sinister, and terribly frightening. Orin speaks curtly, his eyes fixed on Lavinia.) Let me have it Hazel.

HAZEL. (hands him the envelope—in a trembling voice) I’ll go home. I suppose—we can’t expect you tomorrow—now. Hazel seems to recognize that the “something sinister, and terribly frightening” has already put an end to her betrothal, and shows her an Orin who is dead to her. Orin confirms what she senses.

ORIN. No. Forget me. The Orin you loved was killed in the war. (with a twisted smile) Remember only that dead hero and not his rotting ghost! (1040)

Hazel leaves. All that is left of Orin is a shell, not yet dead, reduced to the base, or basic, desire, an openly incestuous longing for his sister. Lavinia, for her part, agrees to renounce Peter, but her compliance brings Orin onl