EUGENE O'NEILL: MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA (With Text)

Mourning Becomes Electra is no ordinary play. It is essentially different from the other late works of O’Neill, being neither a poem nor a slice of life, not a dramatized philosophy nor the evocation of a mood. Mourning Becomes Electra is a grandiose work, surely the most ambitious ever attempted by an American dramatist. O’Neill’s trilogy is a tearless tragedy, remote, detached, august, artfully shaped, cunningly devised, skillfully related and magnificently conceived. It is concerned only indirectly with life as most of us see and feel it. It is comparable not so much to music or painting as to architecture. Mourning Becomes Electra is no stunt. O’Neill does not trifle with theatre. Even in his most obviously experimental plays the form he uses is always the result of a conscious effort to dramatize clearly some aspect of human activity. O’Neill’s play remains a contemporary work. It presents, quite aside from its external form, another aspect of O’Neill’s development not only as a writer, but as a man of our day and civilization searching for a rational explanation of life and death, and what used to be called sin and evil. The present critical study seeks to analyse and examine the multi-layered play in all its aspects in order to make it more accessible to students in our universities. Shakti Batra has been Vice-Principal, Dyal Singh College (University of Delhi). He has also taught at the Kabul University and The International University of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek as well as students from the Tibetan Public Service Commission, Dharamsala, and Kiyushu University, Japan.

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