A Modern Psychological Treatment Of An Ancient Theme

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was the son of James O'Neill, one of the most popular American actors of his day; this might have helped O'Neill become a playwright. During his long and productive career, Eugene O'Neill wrote more than fifty plays, most of which are full-length works and only a few are one-act plays. He won the Nobel Prize in 1936, the first American playwright to receive the honor; and for four times he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. He has been rightly praised as the father of serious drama in American literature.Eugene O'Neill was indebted to many foreign influences, one of which was ancient Greek drama. He wrote some plays whose plot and characters closely resemble those of Greek drama; examples are O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Euripides's Hippolytus; and O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electro and Aeschylus's Oresteia.A survey of the two plays will reveal that Mourning Becomes Electra and Oresteia share a number of affinities: both have wars as their background; both include the practice of adultery on the part of the mothers and wives during their husbands' absence; the two husbands are both army leaders; elements of vengeance abound in both works; the daughters and sons in both plays love, respectively, their father and mother, and hate their parents of the opposite sex; in both plays the husbands fall victims of their wives, who in turn are chased and murdered by their children; and many others. Those similarities are by no means coincidental; they are the deliberated result of Eugene O'Neill.Mourning Becomes Electra is O'Neill's monumental revision of Aeschylus's Oresteia. It is O'Neill's attempt to find a modern analogue to an ancient mode of experience. Mourning is to provide a modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate. It is necessary, therefore, for readers to treat Oresteia as a typical fate drama and Mourning as a psychological one. It is also significant to recognize that O'Neill had both imitated and surpassed, in some aspects, the Greek counterpart.