In the following essay, Young describes Lavinia as the "American Electra" but Christine as the "most tragic member of the Mannon family.''

It is often an intellectual game among students of drama to debate who is the center of a play, whose story is being told. With some plays it's not much of a game: Hedda Gabler, for instance, is appropriately named since Hedda is, shall we say, the cornerstone of nearly all the triangular relationships in Ibsen's play. Ultimately all roads lead to Hedda (until of course the very end, when George and Thea get together). Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is also, I think, properly named; but here, despite the title, it is not quite so clear to whom the play belongs. O'Neill set out to write a trilogy that would do for Electra what Aeschylus had done for Orestes, and in...