Long Day’s Journey into Night
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
2. Primary
Texts: Drama
Eugene
O’Neill. Long
Day’s Journey into Night.
Supporting References:
- "Long Day's Journey into Night." Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable. Eds. Ayto, John, and Ian Crofton. : Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2011. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Long Day's Journey into Night. A Pulitzer-prize-winning
play (1956) by the US playwright Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953)
depicting the four self-destructive members of the Tyrone family, who
variously seek salvation in drugs and drink. The partly
autobiographical work was written by O'Neill in the early 1940s but
not produced until after his death. Its title reflects the time
sequence within the play, which begins at 8.30 in the morning and
ends around midnight on the same hot August day in 1912.
“A play of old
sorrow, written in tears and blood.”
“Eugene O'Neill:
description of Long Day's Journey into Night”
- Hart, James D., and Phillip W. Leininger. "Long Day's Journey into Night." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Long Day's
Journey into Night, semi-autobiographical play by Eugene
O'Neill, written in 1941, posthumously produced
and published (1956).
“Recently released from an
institution as cured of her drug addiction, Mary Tyrone, a handsome,
nervous woman, is, in August 1912, once again at her summer home with
her husband James, an aging former matinee idol, and their sons,
Jamie, at 33 a hard-drinking, cynical Broadway hanger-on, and Edmund,
a sickly, morbid intellectual. Mary's appearance and detached
conversations soon make clear that she is not cured, and as the men
drink heavily to escape reality, she nostalgically revives past
dreams of becoming a nun or a concert pianist, and seems an innocent
girl again. But she also reveals her addiction began when her miserly
husband chose a quack doctor who treated her with morphine after her
sickness in giving birth to Edmund. Like his mother, Edmund wants to
“be alone …in another world …where life can hide from itself.”
Like her too, he shows both love and hate for his family as he
confronts his limited future as a consumptive, realizing that his
father will send him to the cheapest state sanitarium, since he is
expected to die. A similar ambivalence is exhibited by the debauched
Jamie, who drunkenly tells Edmund how much he loves him and yet how
much he hates him as responsible for their mother's addiction. As
James curses the sad spectacle, Mary appears, trailing her wedding
gown, utterly immersed in the happier past. Realizing that she is
forever lost to them and that their fates are intimately bound with
hers, they impassively contemplate their own destruction.
- Patterson, Michael. "Long Day's Journey into Night." The Oxford Dictionary of Plays. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2006. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Long Day's
Journey into Night. A: Eugene O'Neill W: 1940–1 Pf:
1956, Stockholm; 1956, New York Pb: 1956 G: Drama in 4
acts S: Summer home in Connecticut, August 1912 C: 3m,
2f
“James Tyrone, a
famous 65-year-old actor, has made a fortune repeating his most
successful role across America. He is now on summer holiday with his
wife Mary and his two sons Jamie and Edmund. Mary is 54, of a nervous
disposition, and has recently been released from hospital. Jamie, 33,
who has never succeeded at anything, is a cynic who is too fond of
his drink. Edmund, 23, is sensitive and intelligent, and is racked by
a disturbing cough. Jamie attacks his father's meanness in taking
Edmund to cheap quacks, when what Tyrone pretends is a cold might in
fact be consumption. Jamie also believes his mother to be taking dope
again, the addiction which caused her hospitalization. Edmund too
warns his mother about a relapse, but she denies taking drugs.
However, she hates their cheap summer home and cannot forget the
past, so says that it would serve them all right if she were to
return to her addiction. Before lunch, Tyrone has a drink with his
sons. Mary, left alone, has clearly taken drugs. She blames Tyrone
for giving Edmund a drink, since this hastened her consumptive
father's death. She is horrified at voicing her fear that Edmund has
consumption, momentarily admits that she has returned to her
addiction but then denies it once more. After lunch, the doctor,
having diagnosed Edmund's consumption, asks him to come to see him.
Mary, insisting on being driven to the drugstore, reveals that it was
the morphine given her for the pains of Edmund's childbirth that
began her addiction. Back from the drugstore, Mary recounts her past
to the maid: how she had wanted to be a nun or a concert pianist but
how she met and fell in love with Tyrone. Tyrone and Edmund return
from the doctor, but Mary does not even ask about the diagnosis. It
is midnight and the fog is closing in. Edmund returns home drunk, and
he and his father play cards and talk. Edmund is dismayed that his
father wants to save money by sending him to a state sanatorium.
Tyrone justifies his meanness by referring to his impoverished youth,
and confesses that he has ruined his artistic career by repeating one
box-office success. Jamie comes home very drunk and tells his brother
that, though he loves Edmund, he also hates him, and is trying to
dissipate him with drink. Piano playing is heard, and then Mary
appears in a drug-induced trance clutching her wedding-dress. She
does not even hear Edmund's despairing cry that he has consumption,
but recalls that, after meeting Tyrone, she ‘was so happy for a
time’.
“Often regarded
as the greatest American play, this long naturalistic piece is a
relentless exploration of O'Neill's own life, and the sensitive
nature of the content delayed performance until three years after the
author's death. A remarkable achievement, it concentrates into one
day the depiction of four tortured lives, their loves and hates,
their dreams and their despair.”
- Hart, James D. "O'Neill, Eugene." The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1986. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 21 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of the author and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“O'Neill, Eugene [ Gladstone]
(1888–1953), born in New York City, as a child accompanied
his father, James O'Neill (1847–1920), a popular romantic actor, on
theatrical tours, and later attended a Catholic boarding school and a
Connecticut preparatory school. He entered Princeton (1906), but
remained there only a year. After secretarial work in New York, he
went on a gold prospecting trip to Honduras (1909), but contracted
malaria, and returned to the U.S. to be assistant manager of his
father's company. Soon tiring of their mediocre vehicle, he shipped
as a seaman for Buenos Aires. Employed for a time in Argentina, he
then worked his way to South Africa and back on a cattle steamer, and
after a period of beachcombing in Buenos Aires returned to New York.
His last experience at sea followed, when he worked on ships between
New York and Southampton. Next he tried acting during one of his
father's tours, and reporting for a Connecticut newspaper, but
suffered a physical breakdown and was sent to a sanatorium for six
months. He had already written verses, and during this period of
enforced rest and reflection turned to the drama as a medium for
expressing the view of life he began to develop, based on his life at
sea and among outcast and oppressed people in many places.
“During the
following winter (1913–14), he wrote his first play, The Web,
seven other one-act plays, and two long plays. He gained further
experience as a student in G. P. Baker's 47 Workshop (1914–15), and
spent a winter in Greenwich Village. In 1916 he became associated
with the Provincetown Players, who during the next three years
produced many of his one-act plays, including Bound
East for Cardiff (1916) and The
Moon of the Caribbees (1918). This period of
practical experiment brought to a climax his years of apprentice
work, and he began to win general recognition when three of his plays
were printed in The Smart Set. With the New York production
of Beyond
the Horizon (1920, Pulitzer Prize), O'Neill was
acknowledged as the foremost creative American playwright.
“Although he was
associated with Robert Edmond Jones in managing the Greenwich Village
Theatre (1923–27) and was a director of the Provincetown Players
and a founder of the Theatre Guild, which produced his later plays,
he became increasingly absorbed in writing, to the exclusion of other
interests. He followed Beyond the Horizon with further
naturalistic studies of tragic frustration set in modern American
backgrounds: Chris Christopherson (1920), rewritten as “Anna
Christie” (1921, Pulitzer Prize); Diff'rent
(1920); Gold (1921); The Straw (1921); and The
First Man (1922). From the same period came his achievements in
symbolic expressionism: The Emperor Jones
(1920) and “The
Hairy Ape” (1922); but he continued the
naturalistic approach in All God's Chillun Got Wings
(1924), and Desire Under the Elms
(1924). In the same year he turned to the use of symbolic masks in a
Provincetown production of Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner,
which he adapted and directed.
“The romantic and
poetic elements of his nature, which had hitherto appeared in details
of his plays, dominated The Fountain (1925), an affirmation
of life and spirit, and “the Eternal Becoming which is Beauty.”
His next play, The
Great God Brown (1926), fused symbolism,
poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idealism, in an ironic tragedy
of modern materialism; and Lazarus Laughed (1927) and Marco
Millions (1928) similarly attack the contemporary emphasis on
acquisition and material standards, in terms of poetic emotion,
exotic color, and satirical irony. Always an experimenter in forms,
O'Neill attempted in Strange
Interlude (1928, Pulitzer Prize) to create a
dramatic technique using the stream-of-consciousness method, in a
nine-act tragedy of frustrated desires. This psychological analysis
of motives was followed by a trilogy, Mourning
Becomes Electra (1931), adapting the Greek
theme and preserving the dominant emotions of fear, horror, and a
brooding sense of a malignant fate. O'Neill'sdeep interest in
problems of religion in the modern world appears in two plays of this
later period: Dynamo (1929), in which an electrical dynamo
becomes a divine symbol, replacing the old God but destroying its
worshippers; and Days Without End (1934), in which the hero
is irresistibly attracted to Catholicism.
“Ah,
Wilderness! (1933) is a pleasant New England folk comedy, very
different from O'Neill's usual concerns. The
Iceman Cometh (1946) is a tragedy,
realistically set in a Bowery bar, symbolically portraying the loss
of illusion and the coming of Death. Long Day's Journey into
Night
(1956), Pulitzer Prize), an autobiographical tragedy written in 1940,
and depicting a day in 1912 in the unhappy life of the Tyrone family,
was the first of his posthumously produced and published plays. In
1958 came Hughie, a one-act character study, and of his
projected eleven-play cycle, “A Tale of Possessors
Self-Dispossessed,” about the effect possessions had on an American
family from the colonial era to the present day, two have been acted
and issued: A Touch of the Poet (published 1957, produced
1958) and its immediate sequel, More Stately Mansions
(1964).
“O'Neill's works
are deeply affected by his wide reading, especially in Greek
tragedies, Ibsen, and Strindberg, but it is his own stage experience
and his own insight into character that made them so distinguished
and earned him a Nobel Prize (1936). His Poems, minor works, were
collected in 1980.”
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