MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA THEME OF FATE
Since O'Neill's trilogy is based on a Greek tragedy, with all its kings and curses, we know that all the major characters are going to wind up dead; all we're waiting for is to find out how. Fate stalks the Mannons and shoves them along towards their inevitable end. The Greeks believed that
Fate determines our lives; they even had a goddess called Tyche, who controlled the fortunes of men according to her whim.
Today, most of us want to believe that we can affect our own destinies by the choices we make and how we manage our lives—study hard, get into Yale, etc--even if we believe that a higher power has a hand in it somehow. One of O'Neill's challenges was to adapt the Oresteia, with its obsession about Fate (with a capital F), for an audience who didn't really believe in fate. So O'Neill transferred the responsibility for Mannon family's fate from gods to people; what locks his characters into their inescapable doom is psychological, not supernatural. O'Neill was very clear that this was his intent. He wrote in his diary
Since O'Neill's trilogy is based on a Greek tragedy, with all its kings and curses, we know that all the major characters are going to wind up dead; all we're waiting for is to find out how. Fate stalks the Mannons and shoves them along towards their inevitable end. The Greeks believed that
Fate determines our lives; they even had a goddess called Tyche, who controlled the fortunes of men according to her whim.
Today, most of us want to believe that we can affect our own destinies by the choices we make and how we manage our lives—study hard, get into Yale, etc--even if we believe that a higher power has a hand in it somehow. One of O'Neill's challenges was to adapt the Oresteia, with its obsession about Fate (with a capital F), for an audience who didn't really believe in fate. So O'Neill transferred the responsibility for Mannon family's fate from gods to people; what locks his characters into their inescapable doom is psychological, not supernatural. O'Neill was very clear that this was his intent. He wrote in his diary
"it must, before everything, remain [a] modern psychological play—fate springing out of the family." (Source)
The Mannons just can't stop acting out their twisted sexual dynamic with each other, generation after generation. Once David and Abe Mannon act out the basic drama, it sets the inevitable in motion as the characters create relationships that just can't end well. They all try to escape in their own ways, and occasionally an outsider like Hazel or Peter seems on the verge of saving them from themselves. But the family curse always wins in the end.
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