The South Sea Islands The carefree islands of the South Sea are a most desirable locale for a vacation or honeymoon. In the play Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O'Neill, the islands are a place where sex is not seen as a sin and people live life freely, as nature intended people to do so. This play was written in a setting where such actions were frowned upon. It was also these islands where escaping to them with Christine Mannon, was a goal never achieved by two men, both who met a painful
Eugene O'Neill, an American play writer, is the author of Mourning becomes Electra, one of the most controversial plays in American history. O'Neill had been happily married at one time, but his marriage fell apart and it ended in divorce. During this time, O'Neill became enthralled with the psychoanalytical view on life, which continued to haunt him for most of his life. After the divorce, O'Neill remarried, but was still fascinated with psychoanalytical views. His obsession with such views became
The House of Mannon Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is a play of revenge, sacrifice, and murder conveyed through visible references to Aeschylus' House of Atreus. O'Neill alludes to The House of Atreus in order to ground the play; attaching the plot to well-known aspects of history. As well, it brings a certain significance that otherwise would be neglected if their underlying manifestations went unnoticed. The most prominent of these allusions is that to Aeschylus' House of Atreus.
Sophocles Electra centres on the murdered king, Agamemnon’s daughter. Who is all-consumed with grief and hatred towards her father’s killers, is forced to live in slave like conditions adding to the turmoil she lives with daily. Navigating the years since her father’s murder, isolated in grief, desperate for justice and an inability to cease her relentless mourning. Electra believes that the only way for relief from her suffering is to exact justice on his murders. With death and misfortune following
In the Sophocles play Electra, the character of Electra is more involved and stronger. Orestes is on his way back to Mycenae and plots revenge for his father death. While Orestes is travelling back Electra is seen arguing with Chrysothemis about her accommodation with their father’s murders. Electra is still enraged about her father’s murder; she resents her mother and wants Orestes to avenge Agamemnon. When Orestes arrives at the palace no one recognizes him, a messenger then announces that Orestes
bourgeois the social order. Postmodernism involves not only extension, occasionally conceded to tremendous, on the oppose traditional experiments of modernization, but also different attempts to rupture away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist "elevated sculpture "by an alternative to the models of "accumulation
. 06 Jan. 2014. . "Play by Play." PBS. PBS, 24 Jan. 2006. Web. 03 Jan. 2014. . SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Long Day's Journey into Night.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 6 Jan. 2014. . SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Mourning Becomes Electra.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 6 Jan. 2014. Whitley, Peggy. "American Cultural History - The Twentieth Century: 1910 - 1919."American Cultural History. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Jan. 2014. . Phelps, William L. "Eugene O'Neill, Dramatist
contributed so much to the field of theatre. Eugene O'Neill's greatest plays, was presented by the National Theatre in 2003 celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the playwright's death. A reworking of the “Oresteia” trilogy by Aeschylus and the Electra tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, O’Neill’s epic American tragedy of hatred, passion, jealousy and greed is set in New England after the Civil War. Using Freud’s theories, as O’Neill had done earlier in “Strange Interlude,” he now views classical
The optimist sees the rose and not its thrones; the pessimist stares at the thrones, oblivious to the rose. There are two types of people in the world—optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic persons always look the positive side of the thing even in tragic consequences and live a cheerful life. On the other hand, pessimistic persons always look at the dark side of a thing even in happy conditions. The negative attitude of these persons makes their life tragic and full of tension. Economic depression
ghost of his father tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his brother, Claudius. Hamlet’s father tells him to seek revenge for his death. After having had his father’s ghost tell him to seek vengeance it seems logical for Hamlet to lose sanity and become thirsty for revenge. He did not seem to be incapable of putting his thoughts into action because he killed Polonius, Ophelia’s father, right in front of his mother without any hesitation. Only because Hamlet thought Polonius was spying on him and
Attempting to circumvent this undesirable outcome his parents abandoned him and ironically set this sequence of events in motion causing Oedipus to unwittingly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea of a curse of fate is very important as it correlates with Freud's opinion that it is intrinsic in human nature, the famous quote from which Freud extrapolated and used to back much of his theory being: "Before
decided who is the speaker in poem "Daddy". This issue as well as the controversial use of Holocaust imagery by Sylvia Plath may be resolved with quoting here her own words, which explain who the speaker is : The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the
Yet as we journey from the dark to the light in Aeschylus, we cannot leave the dark behind – the darkness breeds the light. ⎯ Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford, “Introduction: The Serpent and the Eagle” It is without fail that throughout Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, the presence of light and dark can be found in the characters, the plot and the themes. The trilogy follows the House of Atreus its emergence from darkness into the light. However, the light and darkness are often presented symbolically
INTRODUCTION I’m convinced that what happens in my plays could happen anywhere, at any time, in any place, although the events may seem unfamiliar at first glance. (Pinter, Harold Pinter: Plays, 2 ix) Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest post-war generation dramatists, Harold Pinter’s fame rests on not only his popular dramas, poems, sketches, short stories, but also on his political activism which is rooted in his concern for people and their impoverished mental and