Home > Mourning Becomes Electra Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > "The Legacy of Melville's Pierre: Family Relationships in Mourning Becomes Electra"

Mourning Becomes Electra | "The Legacy of Melville's Pierre: Family Relationships in Mourning Becomes Electra"

In the following essay, Maufort argues that O'Neill used Melville's Pierre as a source, and that together O'Neill and Melville show a criticism of Puritan American family relationships.

O'Neill's dramatization of family relationships in Long Day's Journey Into Night, his culminating masterpiece, is admittedly autobiographical. Moreover, disguised portraits of the O'Neills abound throughout the entire canon, a feature which critics have repeatedly underlined. Mourning Becomes Electra undoubtedly represents a notable exception to that pattern. In this drama, O'Neill resorts to various artistic models to depict the conflicts besieging the house of the Mannons. Besides obvious references to Aeschylus and Shakespeare, there exists a more obscure...

[The entire page is 2953 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...