Cashing in. Taking a dirt nap. Pushing up Daisies. We've got hundreds of different names for it, but they all mean the same thing: death. Death hangs over Mourning Becomes Electra like a black curtain. It's everywhere—the title's about mourning, the characters are emotionally dead, the house is a tomb, the shadow of the war haunts the male characters, there are two murders, and suicide seems to be the coping strategy du jour. Death seems to be chasing everybody in the Mannon family, and it catches up to all of them one way or another. O'Neill seems to suggest throughout the play that a living death, tortured by guilt or with no human feeling or connection, can be worse than the real thing.
Questions About Death
- What are some of the ways in which death figures into O'Neill's trilogy? How are they similar or different?
- Which characters seem the most obsessed with death? Why do you think that is?
- Of all of the different ways in which O'Neill's trilogy shows us death, which do you find the most disturbing and why?
Chew on This
In Mourning Becomes Electra, death is never simply an escape or release from suffering. It's also used as punishment in one way or another.
We get front-row seats for both Ezra Mannon's murder and the murder of Adam Brant, but we do not see Orin or Christine's suicide. O'Neill seems to feel that suicide is the more horrific of the two, and therefore too terrible to witness.