Mourning Becomes Electra: Morbid Psychology under the "Mask"

By giving his main characters all with the "life-like mask", Eugene O'Neill in his play Mourning Becomes Electra aims to reveal the morbid psychology behind that people at that time were facing. O'Neill deepens the tragic effect of excessively emotional self-restraint by intentionally making the conflict happen between family members in a puritanical family, and further making it become a family's doomed and repeated fate. O'Neill presents the awkward situation but he fails to presents the way out; he indeed leaves the remedy to his audience.