Mourning Becomes Electra Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 115 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Mourning Becomes Electra.

Mourning Becomes Electra Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 115 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Mourning Becomes Electra.
This section contains 2,777 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Mourning Becomes Electra Study Guide

In the following essay, Maufort argues that O 'Neill used Melville's Pierre as a source, and that together O 'Neill and Melville show a criticism of Puritan American family relationships.

O'Neill's dramatization of family relationships in Long Day's Journey Into Night, his culminating masterpiece, is admittedly autobiographical. Moreover, disguised portraits of the O'Neills abound throughout the entire canon, a feature which critics have repeatedly underlined. Mourning Becomes Electra undoubtedly represents a notable exception to that pattern. In this drama, O'Neill resorts to various artistic models to depict the conflicts besieging the house of the Mannons. Besides obvious references to Aeschylus and Shakespeare, there exists a more obscure literary allusion in Mourning Becomes Electra: muted reminders of Herman Melville's neglected novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, that have hitherto largely escaped critical attention.

At first glance, to assert that O'Neill may have been indebted to Melville in the composition...

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This section contains 2,777 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Mourning Becomes Electra Study Guide
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