Mourning Becomes Electra
Discuss Mourning Becomes Electra as a tragedy in modern sense. (P.U 2007)
In Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill exemplified what Schopenhauer declared to be the “true sense of tragedy”, namely “that it is not his own individual sins the hero atones for, but original -sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself.” So devoted was he to this .conception, that he permitted it to inform the entire trilogy.
The pessimism of the Greeks may have been equally black, their tragedies just as aware of the crime of existence, still “they would have despised”, as William James observed, “a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity”. The unfulfilment, exhaustion, and apathy which O’Neill’s tragedy increasingly reflected were conditions completely foreign to Greek tragedy. The Greeks were never so contemptuous of life as to seek consolation in death, nor so afraid of death as t( calm their fears by promising themselves the fulfilment after death o .all that they had vainly yearned for in life. O’Neill is not to be censured for the predicament in which he found himself, or for the fashion in which he chose to extricate himself, but rather f misinterpreting his dream. For however ingeniously he substituted the premises of a rationalistic psychology, however adeptly h interpolated his allegory, however glibly he spoke of fate and destiny crime and retribution, guilt and atonement, his dream in tragedy was not the Greek dream.
It Reconciles to Death
The appearance of Mourning Becomes Electra subsequent to Krutch’s estimate in 1929 of modern tragedy gave Crutch no cause to revise his assertion that the “tragic solution of the problem o existence, the reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is… only a fiction surviving in art.” Indeed, O’Neill’s play bears out the statement by achieving precisely the opposite results : Electra offers a solution not to the problem of existence but to that o nonexistence ; it reconciles
In Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill exemplified what Schopenhauer declared to be the “true sense of tragedy”, namely “that it is not his own individual sins the hero atones for, but original -sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself.” So devoted was he to this .conception, that he permitted it to inform the entire trilogy.
The pessimism of the Greeks may have been equally black, their tragedies just as aware of the crime of existence, still “they would have despised”, as William James observed, “a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity”. The unfulfilment, exhaustion, and apathy which O’Neill’s tragedy increasingly reflected were conditions completely foreign to Greek tragedy. The Greeks were never so contemptuous of life as to seek consolation in death, nor so afraid of death as t( calm their fears by promising themselves the fulfilment after death o .all that they had vainly yearned for in life. O’Neill is not to be censured for the predicament in which he found himself, or for the fashion in which he chose to extricate himself, but rather f misinterpreting his dream. For however ingeniously he substituted the premises of a rationalistic psychology, however adeptly h interpolated his allegory, however glibly he spoke of fate and destiny crime and retribution, guilt and atonement, his dream in tragedy was not the Greek dream.
It Reconciles to Death
The appearance of Mourning Becomes Electra subsequent to Krutch’s estimate in 1929 of modern tragedy gave Crutch no cause to revise his assertion that the “tragic solution of the problem o existence, the reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is… only a fiction surviving in art.” Indeed, O’Neill’s play bears out the statement by achieving precisely the opposite results : Electra offers a solution not to the problem of existence but to that o nonexistence ; it reconciles