O’Neill’s Aeneid: Virgilian Allusion in Mourning Becomes Electra

With a primary focus on the character of the Chantyman, this essay traces a system of allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid in Eugene O’Neill’s adaptation of the Oresteia, Mourning Becomes Electra. O’Neill’s drunken and enigmatic sailor has no corresponding character in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, nor in its subsequent classical iterations. As I show, the Chantyman is explicitly crafted after the mythological Charon, imported from Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Moreover, the use of this epic archetype serves to promote O’Neill’s mechanism of predetermined causality, both by means of its thematic implications and structural position within the narrative of Aeneid 6. The allusion recalls the Virgilian unveiling of Aeneas’ familial destiny and thereby underscores the broader and inevitable consequences of Brant’s death upon the House of Mannon. Ultimately, this intertextual strategy augments O’Neill’s self-professed project in this play: to recreate on the modern stage a tragic world order governed by fate, in the conspicuous absence of a divine apparatus.