S. KRISHNAN
Eugene
O’Neill is a significant figure in the history of the tragic theatre. To a
remarkable degree he represents a major shift of emphasis from a fatalistic,
supernatural view of destiny to a naturalistic and humanistic view. The
intellectual milieu of the twentieth century which was primed for a philosophy
of concrete things rather than abstract ideas had prepared an audience for his
tragedies whose philosophic tragic tone is distinctly modern. For, man in
relation to a destiny uniquely his own,–not mythical gods arbitrarily ordaining
human destiny now occupies the centre of the sombre arena.
The
mediaeval mind, in the tradition of mythology, conceived tragic conflict in
terms of the devil and the angel contending for the possession of the human
soul. This mythical “motif” has its modern counterpart in the psychoanalytic
picture of the human mind as an ambivalent entity of the conscious and the
unconscious. Man’s unconscious is a primordial reservoir of instincts and
racial tendencies and is an inextricable mixture of good and evil. Man’s Ego
tries to reconcile the demands of the socialised
urges of the super ego with those of the Id which is a complex of unsocialised tendencies. This psychological background is
essential for an understanding of O’Neill.
O’Neill
recognised the basic irrationality of man’s
unconscious; but he, nevertheless, averred man’s free will and judgment. Man
must assert his essential humanity by the moral exercise of his judgment.
Otherwise he will become a victim of the drives and fantasies of his
unconscious. Philosophically speaking, he will become an easy prey of his own
Fate. This view is the very antithesis of the Greek fatalistic view. O’Neill
holds in steady balance the view of man as he is with the ideal view if only
man would act in accordance with his free will. His answer to the enigma of
human mind is the classic one. Man must find self-knowledge and
a middle way by reconciling the unconscious and the conscious tendencies.
Running
as a leitmotiv in Mourning Becomes Electra is the idea of pride and
humility. A lofty sense of pride can inspire man to ideals greater than the
self; an overweening pride will be his nemesis. Humility should be an innate
quality and not a self- abasing servility. O’Neill seems to say that man must
achieve a middle way between pride and humility and is thus significantly
restating the theme of an oedipus,
a Satan or a Faustus.
The
pride which traps the protagonists of Strange Interlude, Dynamo, and Mourning
Becomes Electra, wears the mask of father. The father is the symbol of
racial tyranny; and represents the super ego which forbids the individual’s
expression of the drives of the Id–the libido. Now, this repression creates a
state of violent tension between the ambivalent states of the individual’s
mind. Hence when the censoring threshold of consciousness is lowered the influx
of the instinctual drives of the unconscious begins. Lavinia
and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra are torn by the basic divergence
towards the father and mother images within themselves.
The
overweening pride of the elder Mannons continues to
haunt the younger generation; “the biological past creates the present.” In
Greek dramas the curse is pronounced by a supernatural power. In O’Neill’s
drama the curse is the creation of the Mannons
themselves who unleash the dark forces of their soul. After the suicide of
Christine, Orin is seized with a neurotic mania and suggests that Lavinia should kill him; “Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s
place and you’re Mother? That’s the evil destiny out of the past I haven’t
dared to predict.” It is the ghost of the Mannons
again who appears in Act III of The Haunted. Orin tells Lavinia that they should confess and pay the penalty for
their Mother’s murder and find peace together. Lavinia
supresses a momentary temptation to make penance and
cries: “No! You coward! There is nothing to confess! There was only justice!”
Orin turns and addresses the portraits of the Mannons
on the wall; “You hear her? You’ll find Lavinia Mannon harder to break than me! You’ll have to haunt and
hound her for a lifetime!”
O’Neill’s characters at
the peak of their passions achieve a sheer mythical grandeur. It is not fanciful
to see in Christie a reincarnated clytaemenestra or
in Lavina a modern Electra. The characters of Mourning
Becomes Electra do not have an immediate psychological reality. Their
reality depends on our recognition in them, of some of our own impulses straining
at the leash.
In
writing the play O’Neill faced a searching question: How to achieve an
approximation of the Greek idea of tragedy that could be
made convincing to a modem audience having no belief in the supernatural? It is
true that the tragic art form co-exists with a certain naivete
in the mind of a race of people, that is, when there is a prevalent belief in
rituals, in a realm of invisible powers controlling or influencing human life.
But Mr. Krutch’s view that there has been a decline
in the tragic ideal is too facile and fails to take note of the inevitable
shift of emphasis in the philosophic view of tragedy. O’Neill’s play, for all
its psychological interest, is not a theatre for a mere psychoanalytic
dissection of the human personality. The play ultimately, though impliedly,
raises the very question of existence and answers that if life is to have
significance man must be able to assert his essential humanity and nobility
over the atavistic instincts of his unconscious which threaten to overwhelm
reason. The final value that emerges from his play is the imperative need for
man to regain the dimension of depth, that is, to recover the religious
consciousness. The history of the characters in Mourning Becomes Electra dramatically
exemplifies Carl Jung’s significant observation: “The modem man is so
perilously one-sided, so certain of his conscious control of himself and events, that his mind, no longer fortified by symbols of
religion, is almost entirely at the mercy of his unconscious drives and
fantasies. O’Neill has confronted us with the religious problem by dramatising the psychological tensions of his protagonists.
In spite of the general loss of dimension, of depth, in the modern
consciousness, its power is present in the sensitive souls of the artists and
philosophers who are aware of the loss, and are striving to regain it with
ultimate seriousness. O’Neill’s play makes a significant return to the sole and
highest function of the theatre as “a temple where the religion of a poetical
and symbolic celebration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in
the spirit by their soul-stifling daily struggle to exist, as masks among the
masks of the living.”
To
O’Neill the order of existence which he refers to as “Fate” “Mystery”, the biological
past” is to be sought in the forces at work in the human psyche. The O’Neillean protagonists are aware of the sense of struggle
between the ambivalent planes of their personality. The
tragic sublimity of Lavinia, Orin and Christine lies
in the dynamism of tension of their inner conflict. It is true that they fail
to assert themselves and become victims of their own Fate. But the ultimale result of their spiritual struggle is of secondary
significance to the struggle itself. The tragic sublimity of Hardy’s Tess is not
detracted by the fact that she is conquered by the inscrutable forces of
destiny. For, even at the threshold of death there is a magnificent triumph
because ‘man may be defeated but never destroyed.’ In the magnificent futility
of the struggle of O’Neill’s protagonists is a fragment, at least, of the
history of humanity. In a strictly objective view the story of the Mannons concerns a family of Schizophrenic neurotics
involved in an obsessional self-struggle. But singled
out against the background of destiny it is elevated as the very paradigm of
human life.
Mourning
Becomes Electra reclaims a dark region of the human soul
and restores a necessary dimension to our concept of reality. In implicitly
raising a central problem of humanity (to regain the religious consciousness)
the play refers to a realm of values in which the mere psychological
significance is transcended. In short, the drama gives us a meaning to
live by.