A Great Read by Eugene O'neill
So, I recently read Long Day’s Journey into Night and wanted to give you a little taste of the book. The book features a recollection of the past. Eugene O’Neill created this play using real life learned experiences from his own family to create this timeless play. In this play, O’Neill creates the Tyrone family and gives the reader a walkthrough of merely one day of the family. This one day however, seems to give us what feels like a lifetime of information. In this play, we see denial, addiction, unfaithfulness, prostitution, uncertainty, and overall utter dysfunction. The future and present seem to be out of sight as Mary, James (referred to as Tyrone,) Edmund, Jamie, and the house cleaner Cathleen are constantly reminiscing on the past…
Mary Tyrone is wife to the famous actor James Tyrone, by which she fell in love with early on in her life when she had seen him in a play. James and Mary fell in love and conceived their first child. Sadly, their first child died after becoming ill from Jamie (their second child.) In lieu of this, they conceived yet another child (Eugene) to fill the void. When Eugene was born, Mary felt as though he was going to be condemned to illness. While Mary was pregnant with Eugene, she was experiencing a difficult pregnancy and therefore the doctor that Mr. Tyrone had hired prescribed Morphine to ease the pain. However, the effects of the morphine fit into Mary’s addictive personality from then onwards.
Mr. Tyrone was always into drinking alcohol and as the children grew, they were continuously exposed to it. The solution for escaping the family depression was found in the comfort of alcohol and in the case of Mary, morphine as well. The image of “fog” is evident throughout the entire play. This fog is representing the clouding of the family’s minds when they are consumed by their addictions. Here we see Mr. Tyrone scolding his son, Jamie, for his past:
“…You never wanted to do anything except loaf in bathrooms! You’d have been content to sit back like a lazy lunk and sponge on me for the rest of your life! After all the money I wasted on your education, and all you did was get fired in disgrace from every college you went to!” Jamie responded, “Oh, for God’s sake don’t drag up the ancient history!” (P.32)
The addictions offer relief and it makes them feel as if they are in their own happy place. The contradiction to this however, is that repeatedly the family finds themselves lingering in the past, as they seek to place blame on one another for their sorrows and dysfunction. Their addiction leads to their obsession, the past that they cannot escape.
With the entire family living in the past, the reader learns of the regrets of the Tyrone family members. Mary seems to regret the most as she feels that she should not have married Mr. Tyrone in the first place. She feels that she let her dreams of becoming a nun and/or pianist die, that she is responsible for Eugene’s death because she was not home to tender to him, and that Eugene is being punished by God for her mistakes. Jamie is an alcoholic who is jealous of his younger brother Edmund. Jamie is also heavily into prostitutes. Edmond blames his mother and father for their alcohol and Mary’s morphine problem. Tyrone looks down upon his family at points and what the reader is seeing is a constant circle of blame. The ironic part of it all is that the family knows there is a hiding of the present, as seen here when Edmund speaks of Mary:
“Yes. It’s pretty horrible to see her the way she must be now. The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately — to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!” (P.133)
They all fall into this fog, but Edmund seems to see this in Mary’s addiction. No one in the Tyrone family can face reality and the fog helps them escape what they fear.
The blame is always easier to place on others, rather than on one’s self. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill created a world of reality that is easily changed based on life’s addictions. The Tyrone family drove themselves to be in an everlasting fog and their family was non-existent in every way except the DNA sense. Reliance on drugs lead to the dysfunction and the missing intervention from the parents led to the children having issues. The only question left by O’Neill is what happened to the family? With only knowing their story for one day’s time, one can only begin to imagine. The past will consume you if you let it. This play teaches you to live in the now and to face reality.
I highly recommend you pick up this book and give it a read on a rainy day or on a Long Day’s Journey!
You can pick up this copy at any local book store or online at the below link:
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Days-Journey-into-Night/dp/0300093055
Be sure to leave your thoughts on this recommended read!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great Book!