Assignment Paper 108

Name: Divya Sheta

Paper Name: 108. The American Literature

Assignment Topic: Long Day’s Journey as a Semi-Autobiographical Play 

Subject Code No:22401

Roll No.:06

Enrollment No :4069206420210033

Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com

Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-II

Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University. 

• Introduction: 

There are such a great autobiographies in the literature. It’s written in real based life events of author’s life. However, it is also quite difficult to reveal oneself among the world who will read the particular work. But this is what perhaps the only a certain way to declare one self that about what happened in the life, about tragic events, comic as well absurd experiences with family, friends and what one can felt that how he or she adjust with society also. Their reactions and projections of ideas about personal life. 

• About the Author:

Eugene O’Neill was born in October 16th, 1888, in New York City. He said while receiving Nobel Prize. Son of James O’Neill, the popular romantic actor. First seven years of my life spent mostly in hotels and railroad trains, my mother accompanying my father on his tours of the United States, although she never was an actress, disliked the theatre, and held aloof from its people.From the age of seven to thirteen attended Catholic schools. Then four years at a non-sectarian preparatory school, followed by one year (1906-1907) at Princeton University.

After expulsion from Princeton I led a restless, wandering life for several years, working at various occupations. Was secretary of a small mail order house in New York for a while, then went on a gold prospecting expedition in the wilds of Spanish Honduras. Found no gold but contracted malarial fever. Returned to the United States and worked for a time as assistant manager of a theatrical company on tour. After this, a period in which I went to sea, and also worked in Buenos Aires for the Westinghouse Electrical Co., Swift Packing Co., and Singer Sewing Machine Co. Never held a job long. Was either fired quickly or left quickly. Finished my experience as a sailor as able-bodied seaman on the American Line of transatlantic liners. After this, was an actor in vaudeville for a short time, and reporter on a small town newspaper. At the end of 1912 my health broke down and I spent six months in a tuberculosis sanatorium.

Began to write plays in the Fall of 1913. Wrote the one-act Bound East for Cardiff in the Spring of 1914. This is the only one of the plays written in this period which has any merit. In the Fall of 1914, I entered Harvard University to attend the course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker. I left after one year and did not complete the course.

The Fall of 1916 marked the first production of a play of mine in New York – Bound East for Cardiff – which was on the opening bill of the Provincetown Players. In the next few years this theatre put on nearly all of my short plays, but it was not until 1920 that a long play Beyond the Horizon was produced in New York. It was given on Broadway by a commercial management – but, at first, only as a special matinee attraction with four afternoon performances a week. However, some of the critics praised the play and it was soon given a theatre for a regular run, and later on in the year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I received this prize again in 1922 for Anna Christie and for the third time in 1928 for Strange Interlude.

The following is a list of all my published and produced plays which are worth mentioning, with the year in which they were written:

Bound East for Cardiff (1914)	The Dreamy Kid (1918)	The Fountain (1921-22)
Before Breakfast (1916),	Where the Cross is Made (1918)	The Hairy Ape (1921)
The Long Voyage Home (1917)	The Straw (1919)	Welded (1922)
In the Zone (1917)	Gold (1920)	All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923)
The Moon of the Carabbees (1917)	Anna Christie (1920)	Desire Under the Elms (1924)
Ile (1917)	The Emperor Jones (1920)	Marco Millions (1923-25)
The Rope (1918)	Different (1920)	The Great God Brown (1925)
Beyond the Horizon (1918)	The First Man (1921)	Lazarus Laughed (1926)
Interlude (1926-27)	Dynamo (1928)	Mourning Becomes Electra (1929-31)
Ah, Wilderness (1932)	Days Without End (1932-33)

After an active career of writing and supervising the New York productions of his own works, O’Neill (1888-1953) published only two new plays between 1934 and the time of his death. In The Iceman Cometh (1946), he exposed a «prophet’s» battle against the last pipedreams of a group of derelicts as another pipedream and managed to infuse into the «Lower Depths» atmosphere a sense of the tragic. A Moon for the Misbegotten (1952) contains a strong autobiographical content, which it shares with Long Day’s Journey into Night (posth. 1956), one of O’Neill’s most important works. The latter play, written, according to O’Neill, «in tears and blood… with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones», had its premiere at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Sweden grew into an O’Neill centre with the first productions of the one-act play Hughie (posth. 1959) as well as A Touch of the Poet (posth. 1958) and an adapted version of More Stately Mansions (posth. 1962 ) – both plays being parts of an unfinished cycle in which O’Neill returned to his earlier attempts at making psychological analysis dramatically effective.

• Semi-autobiography: 

Semi-autobiography is a work (such as a novel or film) that is partly autobiography and partly fiction : a fictionalized account of the author's life. Semi-Autobiographical Fiction (SAF), also known as roman à clef , is any work of fiction wherein the central elements of both the narrator and the plot are based on the author themselves. The “semi” exists in the definition because the author may explore fictional hypotheticals, introduce fictional characters, or else digress from what happened in real life.

Many literary experts consider Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to be an example of a semi-autobiographical novel. Much of the plot, as well as many of the characters, resemble Plath’s own life and struggle with mental illness. Plath may have chosen to write this story as SAF because, sometimes, it is easier to tell one’s own story when it has the façade of fiction.

• Long Day’s Journey into Night:

Aspiring writers are often told, “Write what you know.” Writers are thus encouraged to draw on their personal experiences to craft their narratives. Experienced authors often choose to create semi-autobiographical works, which contain a blend of some elements of their real lives and some of their own fictional creation. Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill is one such author who drew largely from personal experience to create his plays. Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely considered to be his finest literary achievement and also his most personal play. This drama has many autobiographical elements but with some important fictional characteristics. An understanding of how O’Neill draws on personal elements in the creation of this text can deepen our appreciation of this powerful work.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is a truly unique play in the way that it differs from most semi-autobiographical works. Many works in this genre are initially based on life events, but then the author chooses to veer the work in another direction. O’Neill, however, remains largely true to the events of his life. As O’Neill scholar Michael Hinden explains, O’Neill had “no need to fabricate family incidents for his plot” and actually “pruned additional family troubles from the finished play”. In fact, compressing the events into a twenty-four hour period is arguably the most fictional part of the production.

 As Michael Hinden writes, “The play fixes a moment of time shared equally by its protagonists, reaches into the past to illuminate that moment, and presents it without editorial comment”. 

We can pin down some facts about the O’Neills’ lives in the moment, but we as the audience are left to speculate about the remainder of the characters’ lives. When examining the O’Neills’ lives, we must remember that several events and details were intentionally left out of the production. With an acknowledgment of the unusual nature of O’Neill’s writing, we can begin to examine the autobiographical elements in the play.

The four central characters in the play are based on O’Neill’s immediate family. First, James Tyrone is based on Eugene’s father, James O’Neill (1846-1920). Like his character in the play, James was an actor best known for the role of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. Despite this being his most successful role, it also became the “fatal turning point in his career” He was typecast and could not find another role after it. The O’Neills spent much of their life traveling and living out of hotels due to James’s acting career. Eugene believed that this led to his mother’s morphine addiction. While Eugene’s portrayal of his father’s career appears accurate, James’s personal traits in the production may have been biased, particularly in regards to James’s handling of money. 

Michael Hinden argues:

“Friends who remembered James O’Neill protested that his presentation as a miser in the play was inaccurate. They recalled the actor as an open and generous man who always was happy to provide a handout”. Eugene portrays his family from his own personal lens, which is subject to bias. His characters thus closely resemble but do not completely reflect the members of his family.

Mary Tyrone is based on Eugene’s mother, Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922). Like her character in the play, Ella met her future husband backstage at one of his New York performances. The two were married on June 14, 1887, and their first son James Jr. (Jamie) was born a year later. Five years later their son Edmund was born. He quickly died, however, after contracting measles from his older brother. Ella lived in conflict between blaming herself and blaming Jamie for the baby’s death. Eugene chose to exchange his name in the play with his brother’s. His character is named Edmund Tyrone in the play, and the dead brother is referred to as Eugene. Some scholars speculate that Eugene made this choice to emphasize how he felt living in the shadow of a “ghost child”. Some believe that the play suggests Eugene’s birth indirectly led to his mother’s drug addiction. A doctor prescribed her morphine after a painful and traumatic childbirth. However, “whether the doctor who introduced her to morphine was a cheap hotel quack, as Mary charges in the play, or a respectable practitioner, cannot be ascertained”. Her drug addiction spanned many years and deeply troubled the O’Neill family. Her addiction is central to the plot of the play. Her unusual behavior in the play, such as wearing her wedding dress, is also true. However, what is left out of the play is Ella’s surprising recovery. In 1914 she retired to a convent and found the strength to give up morphin. In the play Eugene chose to focus on her earlier life which was still ravaged by addiction.

Jamie Tyrone in the play is based on Eugene’s older brother James O’Neill, Jr. (1878-1923). Scholars claim that Jamie’s character is the most lifelike in the productionql[. As Hinden writes, “The measles episode, school expulsions, bitterness, drinking, whoring, and the train ride are the legacy of James O’Neill, Jr.” In real life, Jamie was a troubled soul who could not find a healthy way to cope with his problems. He cared deeply for his younger brother, but he was always afraid his troubles would bring his brother down. In the play and in life, he was addicted to alcohol for almost all his life. In fact, after his mother’s death in 1922, he “never had another sober day”. His drinking eventually became so terrible that Eugene had to distance himself from his brother in real life. Jamie actually tells his brother to keep his distance in the play. His character warns, “At the first good chance I get, I’ll stab you in the back”. As is predicted in the play, Jamie slowly drank himself to death and died at age forty-five.

Edmund Tyrone is O’Neill’s self-portrait, and as Hinden describes is “somewhat disingenuous” O’Neill looks back on his younger self from a place of experience. Many details of his own life are intentionally left out. Hinden argues, “Edmund’s inexperience in the play is crucial: through his passivity the family’s aggression comes sharply into focus” Edmund in the play is a sensitive person but with a dark edge, friends of the true O’Neill seem to agree that he had a sensitive but dark personality. What is left out of the play is his failed marriage to Kathleen Jenkins and his strained relationship with his son Eugene O’Neill, Jr. His character would have already experienced his marriage and the birth of his son by the time the play took place. As was his character, O’Neill was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium in 1912. It appears as though his character may die in the play, but the real O’Neill did recover within a year. His time dealing with illness actually inspired him to pursue a career in writing. Though he received success as a writer, he lived to see a grim life. He could not escape the influence of his older brother and became a chronic alcoholic. O’Neill experienced multiple failed marriages, the suicide of his eldest son, and a Parkinson’s-like tremor which kept him sick for many years. He died of pneumonia in 1953, and his last words were, “Born in a hotel room– and God damn it– died in a hotel room”. His character Edmund is a version of O’Neill isolated in time, written by an experienced O’Neill looking backward. He intentionally removes his character from the tarnish of his own experience.

Long Day’s Journey into Night was birthed out of O’Neill’s experience in a broken family that was ravaged by pain and addiction. His portrait of his family is grim, but the O’Neill family did not experience only darkness.

Michael Hinden explains:

Each of the four O’Neills lived to see a wish fulfilled. James watched his son develop into the fine artist he might have been, Ella conquered her addiction, and for a few years Jamie finally had his mother all to himself. As for O’Neill, his third marriage was a fulfilling one despite its stormy quarrels.

It is important to acknowledge that, despite what the play suggests, not every moment of the O’Neills’ lives was depressing. They experienced their own moments of love and of triumph. O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical work may be a criticism of his family and the pain they inflicted upon him, but it is also his way of remembering his family and paying tribute to them. A better understanding of O’Neill’s life helps us see the way the work actually honors his family. The characters in the production as well as the members of O’Neill’s family are broken and beautiful, and because of the success of O’Neill’s work, they will always be remembered.

• Conclusion:

O’Neill presented the story at the very close sight of his dark life. We can conclude his biographical work by quoting his very famous line said by Marry while she wrote the letter to her husband that,

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. O’Neill not changed the names of characters he used in the play which symbolized that he was highly depressed with his family members. 

Worked Citation:

 Eugene O’Neill – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Sun. 8 May 2022. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1936/oneill/biographical/

“Semi-autobiography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semi-autobiography.Accessed 8 May. 2022.

“The Autobiographical Truth in Long Day's Journey into Night.” Literatureessaysamples.com, 1 Mar. 2019, literatureessaysamples.com/the-autobiographical-truth-in-long-day-s-journey/.