Hello friends!
In this blog I am going to discuss Long Day's journey into night. This task given by our Ma'am Yesha Bhatt.
1)"Old Sorrow, written in tears and blood":-
In only a little more than three years, Eugene O’Neill lost his father, mother and only brother. Two decades later he would restore that family to its troubled wholeness in arguably the greatest of all autobiographical dramas, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. James O’Neill, Eugene’s famous actor father, died of cancer in the summer of 1920 after living just long enough to witness his son’s breakthrough to Broadway success, Beyond the Horizon, which won the second Pulitzer Prize ever awarded in the drama category. The occasion of the father’s sudden illness and the son’s sudden acclaim coincided with a moment when they gained new sympathy, understanding and respect for each other in conversations that formed the basis for the dialogue in Act 4 of Long Day’s Journey.
After the lacerating experience of his father’s painful end Eugene plunged into a prolonged period of drinking, but soon after he sobered, he wrote a play that led to his being seen as the single most significant playwright in America. The Emperor Jones was hailed as the first play of the American art theater. An experiment in expressionism, the play takes us through the dark night of the soul of its title character, an African-American Pullman porter and escaped felon who connives his way to becoming emperor of a West Indian island. In the midst of a revolution and lost in a forest at night, Jones faces a series of apparitions taking him deeper and deeper into his past and ultimately into his race memory to discover the moment when he became alienated from his own soul and permanently lost his sense of belonging.
Like Long Day’s Journey, it is a memory play, which takes us into the process of guilty and sad remembrance. In that sense, it tells the story O’Neill had heard from his father, of a man who through greed and theatrical fakery became an emperor of sorts as Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo. James O’Neill played this part over four thousand times after buying rights to an adapted version of the Dumas novel in 1883, the same year his second son Edmund was born and two years prior to that boy dying of the measles. Probably the last time he ever played the part was in 1912, the year in which Long Day’s Journey is set, when he played Dantès in a 56-minute feature film. At the time of filming, his son Eugene was coming down with consumption (tuberculosis), and a day of diagnosis was unfolding into a night much like the one in the play.
Two years later, Eugene’s mother died of a brain tumor, and his brother Jamie died of alcoholism. O’Neill’s whole experience of birth family abruptly became memory, and it is no wonder that elements of his origin story adhered to many of the characterizations and plots in his plays, culminating in Long Day’s Journey. All four members of the family in this play descend into memory in search of the moment when they lost a sense of belonging, but no one more so than Mary Tyrone, who, like Brutus Jones, faces a series of ghosts or apparitions of the past and finally revisits the moment when her soul was severed from God.
In the decade following The Emperor Jones, O’Neill was wildly exploratory in his plays, and the American theatrical world sat back in amazement even when his experiments proved flops. With the sudden flux of income he, along with his wife Agnes Boulton, moved restlessly from house to house in search of what he called his “final harbor,” a sufficient home. In October 1925, during a stop in New London on business (selling those “bum” properties in which his father had invested), he drove out Pequot Avenue to look at the home of his youth. A “Monte Cristo” signboard still hung over the front door, but the house was vacant. In his diary he wrote: “Decay & ruin sad.” That night, he met Doc Ganey and a few of his other old pals at “the Club” in town and got thoroughly drunk. A few years later, his marriage to Boulton fell apart, and he sailed off to Europe with a woman who would become his third wife and surrogate mother the beautiful Carlotta Monterey.
O’Neill’s search for home would continue for the rest of his life, but Carlotta was, with a few lapses, a constant. When they returned from France in 1931 for the production of his massive trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, which was modeled on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, they bought a second-hand Cadillac and, driven by a chauffeur, motored up the New England coast, stopping in New London to revisit O’Neill’s “home.” Carlotta remarked what an inadequate house it was, calling it “a quaint little birdcage.” O’Neill could not bear to enter, but perhaps it was on that occasion he drew an accurate plan of the ground floor. New London and a house like this were clearly on his mind when two months later he awoke one morning with a play called Ah! Wilderness fully developed in his mind. It’s a comedy, a fantasy of what he called “the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.”
He turned to the real story of his family in 1939–1940 when a worsening tremor in his hand made it clear that his writing career would soon come to an end. It was time to address the ghosts of his past. Over 147 days he wrote Long Day’s Journey, at a time when World War II was breaking out and he was visited by his own “misbegotten” sons. The elder, Eugene Jr., was losing himself to dissipation and squandered talent and the younger, Shane, was lost in a vague sense of art and soon to go to sea. Eugene O’Neill’s “play of old sorrow” was haunted in many ways by the past, but we know it was also troubled by the present, and of that torment came one of the masterpieces of American drama.
He knew that his family’s life would be affected by the play’s private disclosures, and so he asked that it not be published until twenty-five years after his death. Carlotta released the play for publication and production just three years after O’Neill’s death in 1953 because she understood the profundity of his intentions in writing the play. Critics and audiences, too, understood that the character Edmund, the “stammering” poet, was a stand-in for Eugene O’Neill himself who, because of what he had watched of his family drama, was capable of turning the painful and personal facts of this “night” into illuminative art. On O’Neill’s twelfth wedding anniversary in 1941, he gave Carlotta a typescript of the play with the following inscription, which she insisted must appear in all publications of the play. It is a moving testament to his achievement:
"Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones."
2) Theme of addiction :-
Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night depicts the struggles of Mary Tyrone, a woman who abuses prescription painkillers and relapses into full-blown morphine addiction. It is also the story of how Mary's addiction rips her family apart, as her morphine use slowly becomes apparent to her husband and two sons. It is widely believed that Long Day's Journey into Night is an autobiographical play, and that the troubled characters in it are based on members of O'Neill's own family, including his mother, Ella, who struggled with morphine addiction for most of her life. In his dedication of the play to his wife Carlotta, O'Neill states that it is a "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood," and that he wrote it "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones."
Sense of failure :-
Long Day´s Journey into Night, one recognizes that each guilty character which appears in the play has to face the fact of having a moral responsibility rather than a criminal one. None of the family members can or will be imprisoned for the mistakes he or she has done, but each of them has to explain himself or herself in front of the accusations of the other members of the family. Having stated that moral guilt weighs heavily on each of the characters, the notion of guilt and blame will now be explained further.
James Tyrone, the head of the family and father of two sons, Jamie and Edmund, seems to be the man who is most to blame. Firstly, he seems to be responsible for the loneliness and morphine addiction of his wife, Mary Tyrone. Being a miser, Tyrone missed the chance to give her a real home with friends she could talk to and made his wife depressed and hopeless, so that her only escape was taking morphine: “I´ve never felt it was my home. Your father would never spend the money to make it right. But he´s never wanted family friends." Mary herself accuses his missing understanding for her, his drinking, and his unwillingness to give her a decent home. James Tyrone´s stinginess also brought him to the decision to call a cheap doctor when Mary was in pain after the birth of their younger son, Edmund. This doctor gave Mary morphine to stop the pain and started her addiction, which is another aspect of Tyrone´s guilt, as Edmund states: “I know damned well she´s not to blame! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you´d spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was born, she´d never have known morphine existed!” Another result of his miserliness is the choice of a cheap doctor for Edmund, who finally gets the diagnosis that he has got consumption. Jamie, the older brother of Edmund, accuses his father of being responsible for Edmund´s illness because he did not send him to a decent doctor when Edmund got sick. On top of that, James Tyrone feels guilt over his elder son, Jamie, because Mary accuses him of “making Jamie into a boozer", “Since he first opened his eyes, he´s seen you drinking. And if he had a nightmare when he was little, or a stomach ache, your remedy was to give him a teaspoonful of whiskey to quiet him.” Being addicted to alcohol, Tyrone has always been a bad example for his elder son, who is now hanging around in bar rooms in order to get drunk.
Because of all these mistakes he has made, and his enduring stinginess, from which he cannot escape, Tyrone is accused by all the family members and is called a miser. Tyrone´s elder son blames him for almost everything; in his opinion, his father is to blame for Mary´s addiction, for Edmund´s ruined life, and even for his own failed career.
The second guilty character is Mary Tyrone, the wife of James and the mother of Jamie and Edmund. All over the play, one can recognize Mary´s permanent and strong sense of guilt and her desperation. One guilty action she seems to be most aware of is the fact that she is responsible for the death of her second child, Eugene. Even if she is not directly responsible for it, she accuses herself of not being at home when Jamie infected his brother Eugene with measles, from which the little child died. Mary´s thoughts always circle around this incident and she permanently states that she blames herself for Eugene´s death: “It was my fault. I should have insisted on staying with Eugene. Her only hope is that, some day, she does not “have to feel guilty any more”. But Mary also feels guilt over her living sons, Jamie and Edmund. When he says that he had “never dreamed before that any woman but whores took Jamie explains his hopelessness which results from the discovery of his mother´s morphine addiction. The knowledge about his mother´s illness traumatized him and the knowledge that Mary is a drug addict is a burden on him, which disillusioned him and made him hopeless. Jamie´s failure in life and his escape into drinking alcohol is closely connected with the state of health of Mary – when Mary returns to taking morphine, Jamie starts drinking again. Another behavior one can blame Mary for is her rejection of Jamie, which results from the incident with Eugene. This rejection and her missing love has destroyed Jamie´s life and hurts his feelings. Furthermore, Hinden assumes that Mary riddled her son with guilt and always told him that he killed Eugene out of jealousy, which made Jamie feel blameworthy and desperate. Mary´s younger son, Edmund, suffers in almost the same manner from thinking that his mother is an addict. “God, it made everything in life seem rotten!”, Edmund tells the reader in Long Day´s Journey into Night. With this statement, he makes his mother responsible for his own failed life because Mary traumatized him, as well as she traumatized Jamie. Moreover, Mary feels guilt over having born Edmund because she had not wanted another child after the death of Eugene and is now of the opinion that she is responsible for the misfortune and sickness of Edmund.
To sum up, one can say that she feels, in general, inadequate for her role as wife and mother – a feeling which results from her morphine addiction, which takes her away from her family and into a dream world.
There are not just the parents who are affected by the notion of guilt and responsibility, but also the two brothers, Jamie and Edmund Tyrone.
Thank you!!
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