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Psychological Fate in Mourning Becomes Electra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Doris M. Alexander
Doris M. Alexander*
Affiliation:
University College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
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Extract

Mourning becomes electra began for Eugene O'Neill with a question. In his very first note for the play, he asked himself: “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?” Three years later, when he started sustained work on Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill had found his answer; he had discovered a modern equivalent for the Greek idea of fate. Since he went on to use this “psychological fate” as a formula for designing plot and characters, a clear definition of it will illuminate both the structure and meaning of Mourning Becomes Electra.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 5 , December 1953 , pp. 923 - 934
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 923 note 1 “Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Work Diary” in Eurepean Theories of the Drama: With a Supplement on the American Drama, by Barrett H. Clark, rev. ed. (New York, 1947), p. 530. This note is dated “Spring—1926.”

page 924 note 2 Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (New York, 1931), p. 96.

page 924 note 3 ON a letter to the author, 8 July 1952, Mrs. Mary S. Hamilton wrote: “Dr. Hamilton had great respect for Mr. O'Neill's ability as a playwright and enjoyed a pleasant friendship with him.”

page 924 note 4 “Georges Lewys, Plaintiff vs. Eugene O'Neill, Boni & Live-right, Inc., Horace Live-right, Inc. and Theatre Guild Inc., Closing speeches and Court's Opinion, 1931” (MS. In the New York Pub. Lib.), p. 16.

page 924 note 5 Letter to the author, 22 Oct. 1943.

page 925 note 6 By “Puritanism” Hamilton and Macgowan always mean, not a theology, but simply that attitude which considers sex and all things related to it a shameful. This is the part of his theological Puritanism that O'Neill stresses in Mourning Becomes Electre.

page 926 note 7 Mourning Becomes Electre, Part I, Act ii, p. 31. All references to MBE (O'Neill's abbreviation) will be to The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, 3 vols. (New York, 1941), Vol. II, and will be by part, act, and page.

page 926 note 8 According to Hamilton and Macgcwan, the most likely cause for serual disability is “psychological conditioning in childhood” (p. 215). This conditioning consists, as they explain at length, in the effects of the parental approach to sex as shameful, unclean (pp. 215–221).

page 927 note 9 For instance: Isaac Goldberg, “Of the Margin of a Copy of ‘Electra’,” Boston Evening Transcript, 16 Jan. 1932, p. 6; John Corbin, “O'Neill and Aeschylus,” Sot, Rev. of Lit., 30 April 1932, p. 695; Ivor Brown, “Mourning Becomes Electra,” London Observer, 21 Nov. 1937; Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the March (New York, 1941), p. 714.

page 928 note 10 Hamilton, p. 152. This idea was, of course, commonphce; it appeared, e.g., in Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord (1926). O'Neill's use of it is significant only in the light of the over-all relationship between Mourning Becomes Electra and What is Wrong with Marriage.

page 929 note 11 This idea is an extension of Freudian theory to a point of application which Freud himself never approached. When Freud said the mother is “the prototype of all later love relations,” he was thinking of a child's attitude toward his mother, not the color of the mother's eyes or the shape of her nose (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho analysis, trans. James Strachey, New York, 1949, p. 90). The ides that the literal details pf a mother's appearance influence her son's love choice is Macgowan and Hamilton's contribution to Freudian theory.