ANALYSIS OF MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA

O'Neill - Analysis of Major Characters

Lavinia Mannon

Lavinia is Ezra's wooden, stiff-shouldered, flat-chested, thin, and angular daughter. She is garbed within the black of mourning. Her militaristic bearing, a mark of her identification along with her father, symbolizes her role as a functionary of the Mannon clan or, to use Christine's terms, as their sentry. Lavinia appears because the keeper of the family crypt and every one its secrets, figuring as an agent of repression throughout the play. she is going to urge Orin particularly to forget the dead, compulsively insist upon the justice of their crimes, and keep the history of the family's past from coming to light. Lavinia's repressive stiffness and mask-like countenance mirror that of the house, the monument of repression erected by her ancestors to hide their disgraces. Ultimately this manor becomes her tomb, Lavinia condemning herself to measure with the Mannon dead until she and everyone their secrets along with her die.

Despite her loyalties to the Mannon line, Lavinia appears as her mother double from the outset of the play, sharing the identical lustrous copper hair, violet eyes, and mask-like face. Christine is her rival. Lavinia considers herself robbed of all love at her mother's hands, Christine not only taking her father but her would-be lover additionally. Thus she schemes to require Christine's place and become the wife of her father and mother of her brother. She does so upon her mother's death, reincarnating her in her own flesh.

In doing so, Lavinia involves femininity and sexuality. Lavinia traces a classical Oedipal trajectory, during which the daughter, horrified by her castration, yearns to become the mother and bear a baby by her father that may redeem her lack. Orin figures as this child also because the husband she would go away to be together with her son, that is, Peter, substituting as Brant.

Orin Mannon

The Mannon son returned from the war, Orin is that the boyish counterpart to Aeschylus's Orestes. He loves his mother incestuously, searching for pre-Oedipal plentitude, the mythic moment before the intervention of the daddy into the mother-son dyad. This pre-Oedipal paradise appears primarily in two fantasies: that of the key world he shares with Christine in childhood and also the Blessed Island he imagines as a haven from the war.

As the stage notes indicate, Orin bears a striking resemblance to the opposite Mannon men though he appears as a weakened, refined, and oversensitive version of every. These doubles are his rivals within the Mother-Son romance that structures the trilogy, with Orin competing with Ezra and Brant for Christine's desire. Thus he flies into a jealous rage upon the invention of her romance that ends up in Christine and Brant's deaths. Orin will then force him and his sister to judgment for his or her crimes in an effort to rejoin his mother in death.

Christine Mannon

Christine may be a striking woman of forty with a fine, voluptuous figure, flowing animal grace, and a mass of gorgeous copper hair. Her pale face is additionally a lifelike mask, a mask that represents both her duplicity and her almost super-human efforts at repression.

Having long abhorred her husband Ezra, Christine plots his murder together with her lover Brant upon his return from the warfare. She loves incestuously, repudiating her husband and clinging to her son as that which is all her own. She repeats this incestuous relation in her affair with Brant, rediscovering Orin as a substitute.

Like her double, Brant's mother Marie, Christine moves with an animal-like grace, grace that codes for her sexual excess. This grace makes her exotic, or maybe of another race, aligning her with the recurring figures of the island native. It is sensible that Lavinia must go among the natives to completely assume her figure.

As her characteristic green dress suggests, Christine is consumed with envy. She envies Brant's Island women, hating them for his or her sexual pleasures. Despite the desperate veneer of kindness, she envies Hazel for her youth, imagining her as a figure for what she once was. Before the threat of her oncoming age, she must secure her relationship with Brant in any respect costs.

Ezra Mannon

As his homophonic name suggests, he's Agamemnon's counterpart, the nice general returned from the war to be murdered by his wife and her lover. We first encounter Ezra before his homecoming within the former of the ominous portrait hanging in his study. Here, as throughout the trilogy, Ezra is wearing his judge's robes and appears as a logo of the law.

Ezra's authority rests primarily in his symbolic form. Indeed, he's way more the figure for the law during this form than as a broken, bitter, ruined husband. Both before and after his death, Ezra will continuously appear in his symbolic capacities. His mannerisms, as an example, suggest the unyielding statue-like poses of military heroes; to Christine, he imagines himself as a statue of a good man standing during a square. After his death, Lavinia will constantly invoke his name and voice. Christine will hear herself condemned by his corpse. Ezra's various images will call his family to judgment from beyond the grave.

Adam Brant

Brant may be a powerful, romantic ship's officer. He incorporates a swarthy complexion, sensual mouth, and long, coal-black hair. He dresses, as if some romantic Byronic ideal, in almost foppish extravagance with touches of studied carelessness. the kid of the illegitimate Mannon line, he returns to wreak vengeance on Ezra's household. He steals Ezra's wife and seduces Lavinia to hide their affair. Brant also in fact bears a striking resemblance to the opposite Mannon men. He does so heretofore another son incestuously enthralled with Mother and her substitutes.