『상복이 어울리는 엘렉트라』 (Mourning Becomes Electra)에 나타난 시간의 대립적 양상

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The theme of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is man's tragic struggle with the doomed Fate through love and hatred of the Mannon family. In this work he modernized the original Greek play Oresteia by Aeschylus. As most of his plays are autobiographical, the past is the main dramatic source to him. It is well known that he put his own tragic view of Life and Time into his main plays. For O'Neill, the past is not just a supernational power which oppressed the present and led to the end of the Mannons in this work. The past means inheriting some features of a character and the influence of an environment. The conflict between past and present is an everlasting subject for O'Neill.
In this work O'Neill heightens the dramatic effect using many Greek devices such as mask effects of the Mannon estate and the members of the house, chorus, song of 'Shenandoah,' etc. The settings are as imposing as the subject matter and play a role in the play itself as the past from which the Mannons are unable to escape. All members of the Mannon are trapped in a failed marriage; the power of the family and the sibling bond; the crushing effects of the past on the present.
The first two plays of his epic trilogy are highly melodramatic and highly plot driven dealing with mythic time as in the original. Adultery, incest, poisoning and a shooting are presented together with highly charged emotional scenes. The power of the past was so strong that the main characters couldn't escape into the world of the present. The final and O'Neill's own unique play The Haunted, deals with the effects of previous events and futures of the doomed brother and sister trapped in their forbidding family home.
In the original legend, the figure of Lavinia Mannon, a parallel to Electra who isn't mentioned in Homer's The Odyssey, and in Aeschylus, is a marginal figure. However, Lavinia is an O'Neill's persona. She rejected the marriage with Peter because she realized the past of the Mannon spread to the present from generation to generation. In Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill's big subject, Death in Life is embodied as man's tragic struggles against the past in the present.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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2 Bentley, "Trying To Like O’Neill" Prentice-Hall 89-98, 1964

3 Cohen, "The Theodicy of Aeschylus Justice and Tyranny in the Oresteia" 129-41, 1986

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12 Fergusson, "Four Decades of Criticism" 271-82,

13 Manheim,Michael, "Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship" Frederick Ungar 1982

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15 Robert, "A Reading of The Oresteia" 1-85, 1975

16 Freud,Sigmund, "A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis" Pocket Books 1952

17 Bigsby, "A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama" 1985

18 Floyd,Verginia, ".The Plays of Eugene O’Neill:A New Assessment" Unger 1987