Mourning Becomes Electra
General Ezra Mannon comes home at the end of the Civil War to a white-columned New England house hung with ancestor portraits, to a wife who has taken a lover carrying a grievance against the family and a daughter who never takes her eyes off her mother. Across thirteen acts in three parts the son returns from the army, the sea captain waits aboard his ship at the wharf, and the house takes each of them in turn. O'Neill moved the Oresteia to Puritan New England and put Freud where the Furies had been, in what he offered as proof that modern tragedy was possible without gods.
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- reworks ↑ The Oresteia
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
- 64% · 12 shared
- 56% · 11 shared
- 55% · 13 shared
- 55% · 12 shared
- 53% · 12 shared
- 53% · 11 shared