Cannibals and Vampires in Aeschylus and ONeill :: Biography Biographies Essays

Cannibals and Vampires in Aeschylus and ONeill Aeschylus and Eugene ONeill have populated their trilogies with cannibals and vampires. Family members feed off one another both literally and figuratively. For the houses of both Agamemnon and Ezra Mannon, this bloodlust is insatiable and inherited, an inevitable curse. A family curse provides the dramatic force necessary to push characters toward pivotal actions and events. At the conclusion of both trilogies the curse is finally broken (or at the very(prenominal) least supplanted). While ONeill and Aeschylus articulate the destructive and violent effects of the curse in similar terms, each playwright breaks the curse to achieve distinctly several(predicate) thematic goals. The curse is described and decentered in order to be critiqued. Both families attempt to consume themselves. A desire for revenge, to enforce a personal enter of justice, carries the family curse from generation to generation. The house of Agamemnon is virtu ally born out of cannibalism. Tantalus, the founder of the house, is tormented eternally in Hades for feeding the gods the flesh of his sons Pelops. Much later, Agamemnon himself is held responsible for his fathers cannibalism by Aegisthus. Aegisthus desire for revenge is overshadowed only by Clytemnestras thirst for her husbands blood. She speaks of his corpse as a sacrificial animal and analogousns his blood to wine. Compelled by Apollo, Orestes also carries the curse. He was fed by his mothers milk as a child but now he will only be satisfied with his mothers flesh. Only Orestes and Electra survive. The Mannon family implodes, release only one survivor, Lavinia. The Mannons self destructive hunger has a sexual tension absent in the Greek trilogy. This incestuous obsession reiterates the self perpetuating nature of their legacy of hatred and violence. They too feed off each others distraint, yet there is an almost symbiotic need for each member to survive. More like vampire s than cannibals, they drain their victims slowly over time. However, no Mannon thrives from this practice. As the action of the play unfolds Ezra and Christine are drained and cast aside. Their deaths, coupled with Orins death which follows, bring greater suffering to Lavinia not release from responsibility as she might have hoped. Like Orestes she is both an agent and a victim of her familys curse. Though achieved by different methods, conception is passed in each play. The family curse will not claim another generation.