Discuss Mourning Becomes Electra as a tragedy in modern

sense. (P.U 2007)

In Mourning Becomes Electra, ONeill exemplified what Schopenhauer declared to be the truesense of
tragedy, namely that it is not his own individual sins the hero atones for, but original -sin, i.e., the crime
of existence itself. So devoted was he to this .conception, that he permitted it to inform the entire trilogy.
The pessimism of the Greeks may have been equally black, their tragedies just as aware of the crime of
existence, still they would have despised, as William James observed, a life set wholly in a minor key,
and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The unfulfilment, exhaustion, and
apathy which ONeills tragedy increasingly reflected were conditions completely foreign to Greek tragedy.
The Greeks were never so contemptuous of life as to seek consolation in death, nor so afraid of death as
t( calm their fears by promising themselves the fulfilment after death o .all that they had vainly yearned
for in life. ONeill is not to be censured for the predicament in which he found himself, or for the fashion
in which he chose to extricate himself, but rather f misinterpreting his dream. For however ingeniously he
substituted the premises of a rationalistic psychology, however adeptly h interpolated his allegory,
however glibly he spoke of fate and destiny crime and retribution, guilt and atonement, his dream in
tragedy was not the Greek dream.
It Reconciles to Death
The appearance of Mourning Becomes Electra subsequent to Krutchs estimate in 1929 of modern tragedy
gave Crutch no cause to revise his assertion that the tragic solution of the problem o existence, the
reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is only a fiction surviving in art. Indeed, ONeills play
bears out the statement by achieving precisely the opposite results : Electra offers a solution not to the
problem of existence but to that o nonexistence ; it reconciles not to life, but to death. Nor did ONeil
invoke that Tragic Spirit which Krutch regarded as the produce either of a religious faith in the greatness
of God or of faith in the greatness of man although by 1932 it seemed to Krutch that he had satisfied
this demand, that he had, in short, succeeded it investing man once more with the dignity he has lost.
The greatness of the plays, he insisted, begging the question, lies it the fact that they achieve a grandeur
which their rational framework is impotent even to suggest.
Horrible and Cleansing
In Mourning Becomes Electra, he was convinced that once more we have a great play which does not
mean anything in the sense that the plays of Ibsen or Shaw mean something, but one which does, on the
contrary, mean the same thing that Oedipus and Hamlet and Macbeth meannamely, that human

beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions, and that
the spectacle of them is not only absorbing but also and at once horrible and cleansing. Here, it seems
Krutch is entirely wrong. Not only has he missed the meaning of ONeills trilogy, he has discerned in
ONeills characters qualities that are mostly nonexistent. They are characters, moreover, whose passions
are infantile rather than great, are a spectacle that is horrible but scarcely cleansing. Catharsis is a
condition which ONeill seldom achieved, preferring, as he did, narcosis or necrosis. That the deficiencies
of MourningBecomes Electra, when it is compared with the very greatest works of dramatic literature,
are limited only to its language, is an opinion which, if our judgments have been even moderately sound,
has little to be said in its support. There is equally little to be said for Krutchs contrast of Ibsen and
ONeill and, wherein he finds that ONeill avoided the central fault of Ibsens tragedies, namely, that they
are too thoroughly pervaded by a sense of human littleness to be other than melancholy and dispiriting.
Instinctive Perception of Tragedy
Having defined true tragedy...as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principle personage
is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character, Krutch concludes that ONeill is almost
alone among modern dramatic writers in possessing what appears to be an instinctive perception of what
a modern tragedy would have to be. Yet one has only to stripMourning Becomes Electra of its spiritual
malaise, its Freudian machinery, its self-conscious symbolism, its Gothic properties, its turgid style, is see
how little better ONeill has succeeded than Ibsen in satisfying Krutchs definition of true
tragedy. Ghosts, too, was a tragedy of family guilt in which the original scene is traced to the life-denying
impulse. One side is happiness, on the other is the source of the misery in the world : law, order, duty.
Living in the house polluted by her husbands profligacy, Mrs. Alving, the counterpart of Christine,
revolts against the restrictive virtues which society has imposed upon her and which prevented Alving
from finding any outlet for the overmastering joy of life that was in him. Oswald, haunted by his fathers
sin, suffers not only physical consequences thereof, but repeatslike Orinthe parents behaviour.
Where Orin is afflicted with a stubborn case of Weltschmerz,and. complications induced by a wound in
the headthe dowry of the Mannons in general, Ezra in particularOswald suffers from congenital
syphilisthe indirect inheritance of the Mannons way of like, but the direct consequence of his fathers
dissolute actions. When, at the conclusion of the tragedy, Oswald locks himself and his mother inside
their haunted house for paying out the family curse much as Lavinia is. Surely the madness of a paretic is
not more melancholy and dispiriting than the masochism of a woman who denies herself the pleasure of
dying.
The Emotional Dynamics

More restrained than Krutch, George Jean Nathan never, compared Mourning Becomes Electra with the
very greatest works of dramatic literature, but he did declare it to be indubitably one of the finest plays
that the American theatre has known. Like Krutch, he mistook Weltschmerz for tragedy and ascribed
purgative powers to hyper-emotionalism and to the manifestations of a neurotic sensibility. But Nathan
came closer to the truth when he observed that ONeills passionate inspiration the sweep and size of
his emotional equipment and emotional dynamics transcended the characters and the play., This is a
euphemistic way of saying that Mourning Becomes Electra contains no adequate equivalent for the
playwrights excess of feeling. It is a fault that is present in most of ONeills plays, and ONeill himself was
apparently aware of it when in Mourning Becomes Electra he consciously shunned the many
opportunities for effusions of personal writing about life and fate. If the trilogy is less effusive than some
of the preceding plays, its grandiosity lots threefold greater than most. If it contains less personal
writing, it is far from reticent concerning the authors conception of life and fate, a conception which
suggests that the glow felt by Nathan to be spreading over all the glow that is ONeill is less
luminous and radiant than feverish