Mourning Becomes Electra
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1931
- Form
- Tragedy
- Language
- English
- Length
- Medium · 290 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThree Plays, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes ElectraVintage, 1995The standard paperback grouping of O'Neill's middle-period plays.
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A trilogy of plays, Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted, that transposes Aeschylus's Oresteia to New England at the end of the American Civil War. Brigadier General Ezra Mannon returns to his wife Christine, who has taken his cousin Adam Brant as a lover, and she poisons him. Their daughter Lavinia, who loves her father and hates her mother, drives her brother Orin to kill Brant; Christine shoots herself; Orin, consumed by guilt, kills himself; and Lavinia shuts herself up alone in the Mannon house with the dead. The whole runs some five hours in performance.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Mourning Becomes Electra are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
