Word: oresteia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mourning Becomes Electra is like a day of wild wind and rain that finally reduces everyone and everything to a sodden, nerveless pulp. O'Neill transposed the Oresteia-the legend of the doomed Greek house of Atreus-to post-Civil War New England and laced it with Freudianism. O'Neill never achieves the catharsis of pity and terror, only the strangulated sob of a guilty Christian conscience: "I believed in heaven. Now I know there is only hell...