Thinking Activity on Long Day's Journey into Night

This Blog-post is a response of thinking activity on Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill, given by our professor ma'am Miss Yesha Bhatt. To know more about this play, CLICK HERE to visit Yesha Bhatt's blog. 

• About the Author:

Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times, first for Beyond the Horizon (1920), his debut play. O'Neill introduced psychological and social realism to the American stage. As his masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night opens in the West End, Sarah Churchwell assesses his impact on modern drama.O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel prize for literature, and the only dramatist to have won four Pulitzer prizes. He introduced psychological and social realism to the American stage; he was among the earliest to use American vernacular, and to focus on characters marginalised by society. Before O'Neill, American theatre consisted of melodrama and farce; he was the first US playwright to take drama seriously as an aesthetic and intellectual form. He took it very seriously indeed; one cannot accuse O'Neill of frivolity. Of more than 50 finished plays, O'Neill wrote just one ostensible comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), and even its plot hinges on drunkenness, prostitution, revenge and repressed desire. Of course, most of O'Neill's plays involve drunkenness, prostitution, revenge and repressed desire; Ah, Wilderness! is the only one that manages a happy ending, although A Moon for the Misbegotten (1946) does admit the possibility of forgiveness, a conclusion that for O'Neill seems downright giddy. (From Theguardian)

About the Play: 

This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis. (O’Neill himself suffered and recovered from a mild case of tuberculosis.)

In order to spare his family from pain, O’Neill requested that the play not be published until 25 years after he died. In 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, his widow Carlotta allowed the play to be published since the immediate family had predeceased the playwright. (from Kennedy Center )

• Long Day’s Journey into Night - ‘old sorrow, written in tears and blood’.

Some editions of the play include a letter from O'Neill to his wife as an epigraph. It's not "officially" an epigraph, since O'Neill didn't print it as such, but he did present it to his wife as a sort of introduction to the play, and you can see why publishers think it works as an epigraph:

For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary. 

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.

These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light – into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!

Gene

Tao House

July 22, 1941 (SOURCE)

The play seems completely autobiographical, his mother Mary Ellen Quinlan O'Neill, a sometime morphine addict. It's particularly poignant that O'Neill dedicated this play, with its strong themes of addiction, to his wife Carlotta. She was addicted herself to potassium bromide, a strong sedative that was available at the time. This caused unending trouble to their marriage (source). Evidently, though, it wasn't all depression and disintegration. O'Neill writes to Carlotta that their marriage has been a "Journey into Light – into love" (E.3). With the "epigraph," O'Neill lets us know that, ultimately, he wrote the play as an act of forgiveness – of the people he's loved and of himself.(Source)

• Theme of addiction - Long Day’s Journey into Night

The center theme of the play is Addiction.Whole Tyrone family was addicted. Marry addicted by Morphine and by overdosing of medicines. Jamie. Edmund and James both were addicted by Alcohol. Although, Marry's addiction was quite different from other family members.Dr. Hardy gave her medicine to kill her pain during Edmund's birth and after that, according to study by Pharmacologist, very few patients become addicted.

Dr. Ronald Melzack mentioned in his article 'The Tragedy of Needless Pain' that,

"When patients take morphine to combat pain, it is rare to see addiction. Addiction seems to arise only in some fraction of morphine users who take the drug for its psychological effects, such as its ability to produce euphoria and relieve tension" (Melzack,27).

Patients who do develop a dependence on morphine "are usually those who already have a history of psychological disturbance or substance abuse"(Melzack,29)

If we going to talk about the historical background or events in Marry's character, that there are some backstage events are happened in her life like, her child, Eugene's death, her two day dreams become incomplete  like her wished to become a nun and her lifelong living peacefully with her husband which is not complete. So, the history of her psychological disturbance or substance abuse by her one can observed in her character. 

The death of her father, whom she adored; the death of her second child from measles; her introduction to morphine after Edmund's birth; her eldest son's alcoholism and failed career; her social isolation and lack of a proper home; and finally the prospect of Edmund's death from consumption. These are the emotional disruptions, recollections, and fears that prompt Mary to seek her hidden syringe.(Hinden,48)

Along  with Marry, her husband and her two sons were also become addicted by alcohol. So the atmosphere of addictions such taking substance of alcohol and drugs were already there.Which also observed by her. Addiction of women also we can see in Jamie's character. 

So this addiction of either a kind of intoxicated things or person also we can read in the play. However in O'Neill's life also we can see that how he struggled and observed his family members to took addictions. 

Work Cited:

Hinden, Michael. “The Pharmacology of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night.’” The Eugene O’Neill Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1990, pp. 47–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29784382. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.

Melzack, Ronald. “The Tragedy of Hinden, Michael. “The Pharmacology of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night.’” The Eugene O’Neill Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1990, pp. 47–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29784382. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.

Needless Pain.” Scientific American, vol. 262, no. 2, 1990, pp. 27–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24996676. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.