- Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
Hardly anything is possible today without Oedipus, not family life, and not architecture.
When Austrian Novelist Robert Musil made this comment, it was, in all probability, from what we know of him, not meant to be a complementary one. But what it does, nevertheless do, is mark out for us how widespread and enormous the influence of Freud’s Oedipus Complex has had on modern thought and civilisation. The Oedipus Complex has become a term used and known even by people who have hardly any knowledge of psychoanalysis, and even less of Sophocles and Greece, which , though a statement perhaps of its popularity, is also emblematic of the way in which it has been reduced to its bare frame – Son desires-mother-and-therefore-wants-to-kill-his-father scenario.
However, it is Electra, rather than Oedipus who occupies centre stage in the latter years of modernism. After her initial popularity as a character in Attic Tragedies, her presence in literature has been rare, usually as silent helper to Orestes, until this re- emergence in the 20th century, in which there has been a large number of re-interpretations of the myth; Hoffmansthal’s Electra, Sarte’s The Flies, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy poems, even a Wagnerian opera based on Hoffsmansthal’s work.
This renewed interest in Electra could probably be attributed to two things. The first is, plainly, the Oedipus trope being done to death, she provided literary novelty. Secondly, and more importantly, the fact that she appears as a counter to the Oedipus Complex in terms of Psychoanalysis.
The nature of this opposition, however, is, at best, strained. The term ‘Electra Complex’ was first used by Jung, to provide a counter to the male sexual theory that the Oedipal complex of Freud was. However, Jung is vague about the definite nature of this phenomenon. He merely substitutes in the Oedipus Complex, the daughter for the son, and the father for the mother. His writings show no sustained engagement and involvement in the understanding of the phenomenon, which have lead to speculations about his creating this complex merely to counter Freud. Its ‘openness’ therefore allows for greater freedom for a literary reworking of it.
At this point, it would perhaps be wise to ask what the nature of the relationship between myth and psychoanalysis is, given the large number of complexes that are explained using mythic models. Jung, for example, said that Mythology, as a product of culture, attempts to elucidate the nature of that aforesaid culture, and therefore works with generalizations and universals that can be applied to all of humankind, leading to the creation of a cultural or collective unconscious. This produces what are known as archetypes, that, though from a alternative context, continue to have relevance today.
However, a close examination of the actual story of these myths and the manner in which they are rendered in psychoanalysis reveals that there is an inherent gap between the two. This is because these myths are divorced from the social contexts that they originated in. Take the Oedipus myth; whereas the complex definitely registers a sexual attraction between mother and son, and therefore the male desire to kill the father, the myth replaces what Freud sees as deliberate with accident. Oedipus is not incestuous by choice, but rather, his being incestuous is the result of a political situation gone horrible wrong, and this is supposed to make the play , as Alison Burke points out, the tragedy that it is, and not an arena for sexual secret fantasies.
The myths, therefore, instead of providing a universal common situation, provide a paradigm into which multiple meanings can be read, and this is why their relevance has persisted into modernity.
What I propose to do in this paper is look examine the gaps between the Electra Myth, and the manner in which it is reworked in modern drama, under the influence of psychoanalysis, taking O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra as an example.
O’Neill’s play does maintain the presence of a continuity between the past and the present, and therefore the modern day relevance of myth at several points. The setting of the play, for example, is during the American Civil war, an intermediate time frame between Classical Greece and O’Neill’s 1931. The fact that Electra’s story can exist in each of these different time frames could perhaps be seen as establishing a continuity in meaning, down the ages, a sort of universalizing agenda that psychoanalysists also have. Secondly, there is a constant feeling that the past controls the present, a statement made by more than one character in the play. This is best exemplified by the fact that they are always being watched by the eyes of the deceased Mannons, from the portraits of the wall. Their greatest dilemmas are always enacted in front of these portraits.
The use of an ancient Greek myth in a modern play did pose problems for O’Neill. In his Work Diary, during the early stages of his writing, he notes –
Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of today, possessed by no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?
His answer to that is a movement towards psychoanalysis, the positioning of a psychological realism over the idea of fate and determinism, a concentration instead on the actual actions and motives of the characters in the play.
What O’ Neill does, like Freud and like Jung is divorce the myth from its social and political positioning, and move it to an entirely personal one, reinforced by the domestic setting of the play, and the negligent importance of the Civil War present in the back drop.
The extent to which Electra and Agamemnon are sexually linked in the manner that psychoanalysis is responsible for is problematic. Her reaction to her father’s death is one that is ground in social convention, rather than repressed sexual desire. As his daughter, she is the inheritor of the oikos that is household of the sons of Atreus, not her mother, who is an outsider linked to them by marriage. It becomes a social necessity, therefore, to kill the mother, to balance the pollution that has occurred through her aberrational and adulterous desires.
In conjunction with this, there is very little reference to Electra’s sexuality, or femininity, in the myth per se, or in either of the Sophoclean, Euripidean and Aeschylean plays that discuss it. Rather, it is her lack of sexuality, her inability to live up to her gender expectations in terms of intercourse, marriage, children and public lamentation that is stressed. At no point is there any evidence that she sees herself as her mother’s sexual competitor.
The domestication of the myth in O’Neill’s play moves it into the personal sphere, and therefore the sexual. This manifests itself primarily in the use of the trope of incest in the play, and therefore of sexual desire. There is an attempt by Lavinia to justify the death of her mother and her lover Adam on grounds of justice, constant blackguarding of the mother, the reiteration on phrases like ‘It was for father’, putting herself on the same scale of social justice as the mythical Electra. However, it is not impossible to neglect the incestuous web that runs through the play and entangles, not just one character, but all. This is reinforced by the fact that all the male characters look similar, as do the female, making, in the sexual imagination of the play, one as a substitute for another. Ezra Mannon, for example, falls in love with his wife Christine, because she reminds him of the Canuck Nurse his uncle runs away with, Christine with Adam, the son of that relationship, because he reminds her of her son Orin. Orin and Christine thus share an Oedipal relation, which is then transferred to Lavinia, his sister, to whom he even suggests an actual physical relationship towards the end of the play. Lavinia too, sees her father, to whom she is ‘electrically’ connected, in Adam, which validates in her eyes, her love for him.
Sexual jealousy and desire therefore become the primary forces that drive the characters of the play, rather than the gods and social duty and fate. In this manner, unlike Electra, she becomes, very overtly, her mother’s sexual competitor, rival for the affections of both Ezra Mannon, as well as Adam Brant. Their interactions are stained with an intense, bitter enmity. Lavinia’s desire for her father – ‘You’re the only man I’ll ever love’, the fact that she rejects suitors on the grounds that she needs to be with her father, is a definite indicator of the sexualisation of their relationship. Her mother is aware of this as well – ‘You’ve tried to become the wife of your father, and the mother of Orin’. Lavinia’s electral jealousy of her mother leads to the murder of Adam, and subsequently, the suicide of Chrisitine.
After Christine’s death, Lavinia moves out of her grave and mourning image, clad in black, and becomes more and more like her mother; in life usurping her dead rival completely. Peter, her friend, notes this, with satisfaction, so does Orin, with accusations – ‘You stole mother’s colours’! Her lover Peter becomes literally, her mother’s lover, when she calls him Adam.
With this alteration, she also becomes like her mother in the futile search for true love. The text plays with what it calls ‘the right to love’, and sympathizes with the characters search for it. Christine’s rejection of Ezra is on the grounds that he has not been a sexually satisfying husband (although this fault is nothing compared to Agamemnon’s), she kills him to be with Adam and instead find an alternative source of tenderness. This is not rejected by the text. The mental idea is concretized through the image of the south sea islands Adam tells Christine about, which Orin does as well. All the characters who search for love are connected through this island – Christine and Adam want to run away there, Orin suggests that he goes there with his mother; Lavinia does go with Orin and discovers a love that is not a sin, as she puts it. What the text is advocating perhaps is an association between paganism and free love. If it is doing so, O’Neill’s intentions are displaced. Greek society, as a pagan society, rather than allowing for free sexual association, tightly regulated the sexual activities of its women. Clytemnestra, Christine’s counterpart in the myth, therefore, is condemned in a manner that Christine is spared. The two reasons for her murdering Agamemnon are the fact that he sacrifices Iphigenia before the Trojan war, and because of Aegisthus. The first is overshadowed by the enormity of the second. She is seen as an adulteress and not as a pain-stricken mother; sex as a motive delegitimises her actions.
Most strikingly, however, is the manner in which O’Neill’s play ends. Vinnie says –
I'm not going the way Mother and Orin went. That's escaping punishment. And there's no one left to punish me. I'm the last Mannon. I've got to punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I'll never go out or see anyone! I'll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I'll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! (with a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self-torture) I know they will see to it I live for a long time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!
The fact that Electra escaped without being punished in the Greek myth disturbed O’Neill greatly, and this ending can be seen as his correction of this myth, with Vinnie’s punishment being a correction of aberrational sexual desire, as the death of Clytemnestra was in the eyes of her children.
These gaps are also seen in other Electra plays which are not in the scope of my paper to discuss. The point that this paper has worked towards is that in spite of there being these gaps, myth has the ability to take on new meaning, in what ever context it is placed. Through the psychologisation of the Electra figure in his play, O’Neill is transposing the relevance of the myth into modern times, and giving it a new and alternative possible significance. And so in this manner, Oedipus will continue, and Electra will remain electric.
Bibliography
Burke, Alison. ‘From Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra : Text, Adaptation and Performance’.
Borove~ki-Jakovljev, Sanja. ‘The Oedipus Complex in the Contemporary Psychoanalysis’.
Scott,Jill.Electra after Freud – Myth and Culture. Cornell University Press, 2005
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