Mourning Becomes Electra Analysis

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Mourning Becomes Electra: Morbid Psychology under the "Mask"

Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
Gong Yijin

Abstract: By giving his main characters all with the "life-like mask", Eugene O 'Neill in his play Mourning Becomes Electra aims to reveal the morbid psychology behind that people at that time were facing. O 'Neill deepens the tragic effect of excessively emotional self-restraint by intentionally making the conflict happen between family members in a puritanical family, and further making it become a family 's doomed and repeated fate. O 'Neill presents the awkward situation but he fails to presents the way out; he indeed leaves the remedy to his audience.

Key Words: mask; morbid psychology; emotional self-restrain; family; fate …show more content…

At the very beginning of O 'Neill 's creation, he in his first note for the play asked himself: "is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural, could accept and be moved by"? ( O 'Neill, 1926:530) O 'Neill 's intention for the play is to craft a Greek-like tragedy resulted from a seemingly unavoidable psychological fate. In his play, he considers the psychological fate more of the results of human beings themselves than by supernatural beings as what Greek tragedies might present. It is indeed the tragic morbid psychology men set for themselves that afterwards make them suffer from it, and more miserably, repeat

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