Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night - Essay Example

Analysis on Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey into Night The drama Long Days Journey into Night is written by an American playwright Eugene ONeill. This piece has four acts and is considered as his best work, even earning him a Pulitzer Prize for Drama award. The play is about a family called the Tyrones who live at a beach house at Connecticut. It starts off at a morning in August of 1912, ending the same day at midnight. The family consists of James Sr. and Mary Tyrone who have two surviving children James (Jamie) Jr. and Edmund. The Tyrones may seem like a normal family to an outsider who has no idea of their personal life, but they what they actually are is dysfunctional. The play mostly consists of painful admissions and bitter exchanges amongst the family until problems after problems pile together and the family gets engulfed in complete despair. It is said that O’Neill based the characters off himself, his older sibling and both their parents. James Tyrone Sr. was born in Ireland but his family migrated to the United States of America when he was just eight years old. Two years later, his father abandoned the family and went back to Ireland where he died with rat poison in his system. It was thought to be suicide but James remained adamant that it was not. Being fatherless forced him to get employed so he could support himself, which led to him having a strong work ethic. Also, having to work for money led him to having a great appreciation to it, almost going overboard and turning miserly. He does not seem to have any worries in his life but his greatest fear is losing all his money and ending up in a poorhouse. The play proves this by showing him to be dressed in shabby clothes as he seems to wear the clothes till they are worn out and cannot be used any further. He was a famous actor during his youth when he toured the United States of America with Mary. But playing the same character repeatedly let him to being unable to develop further as an actor and he was not able to go higher in the acting industry much to his everlasting regret. However, despite being sixty five years old, he has managed to retain his good looks and even looks younger than his age. Despite no longer being an actor, his mannerisms are those similar to one but that does not make him pretentions or even temperamental. This is because of “his humble beginnings and Irish farmer forbears” (ONeill 2). He is a healthy man in spite of smoking cigars and being a perpetual alcoholic. Mary is fifty four years old but, despite the age, still remains pretty. She loves her husband James but she often has thoughts in which she regrets marrying him as it led to her sacrificing her dreams of becoming a concert pianist or even a nun. Instead, she ended up being a mother of three boys, two of who survived, Eugene having died of measles in his infancy. His death, too, she has never gotten over and it has influenced her relationship with her other two sons Jamie and Edmund. She has been taking in morphine since around twenty years. Despite having treatment to get rid of the addiction several times, she cannot overcome the urge of wanting to have more morphine every time she is with her family. She knows it is bad and believes that her prayers would not be answered if she was high, but she cannot resist the temptation. Throughout the play she is shown to be in a daze, which slowly increases as the day seems to end. Till, in the final scene, she is shown dressed in her wedding gown and kneeling as she prays. James Jr., affectionately called as Jamie is the oldest son of the family. He is in his early thirties and has certain habits which reflect off badly on his body. He seems to be a cynic but there are “rare occasions when he smiles without sneering, his personality possesses the remnant of a humorous, romantic, irresponsible Irish charm – the beguiling neer-do-well, with a strain of the sentimentally poetic, attractive to women and popular with men” (ONeill 6). He dropped out of many colleges and seems to have no ambition whatsoever over which he has several arguments with his father. He does go after his father in looks as well as the acting talent, but he has problems finding work because of his reputation of being irresponsible, an alcoholic and a womanizer to boot. The squandering of money on alcohol and the women and very few jobs results in him being out of money and so he has to depend on his parents for financial support. He cannot help but continue to descent into dissipation. He also has issues with Edmund and confesses that he wants him to fail. Then there is Edmund, the youngest of the family, conceived in place of the dead baby. He is more of an intellectual and is even poetically inclined than the other family members. He is also into politics and was employed by the merchant navy. He used the job to travel around the world and there is where he caught something. In the play, he is shown to be sick and the family is worried that he may have some major disease. Later, he discovers that he is suffering from tuberculosis and to get treated for that he has to spend over a period of twelve months in a sanatorium. This is more of a worry because his maternal grandfather died because of the infection. The youngest Tyrone is also very nervous like his mother but also loves her a lot, always wondering whether she is fine or not, even though he does seem to be a bit on the naïve side. Like his father and brother, he is a partial alcoholic. Even though he puts a greater effort in his work than Jamie, he still has a penchant of wasting money. Despite this, his mother seems to believe that he would improve and become successful someday in the future. This may be because she has a propensity of favoring her youngest son. There are obvious issues the members of the Tyrone family have with each other. On the whole they may look like they get along, the domestic setting is normal, but the secrets and the background information about every member tells the reader that it is not quite so. The relationships with each other are convoluted; they love and hate each other at the same time. There are major communication problems which make it almost impossible for the family to get closer, instead, during some parts of the play they are often shown to be quoting poetry or passages from famous pieces of literature to try to express their feelings. O’Neill’s characters are not perfect and they do not have a perfect life. This is what makes the play seem realistic. It is not just the present which has an effect on people’s lives, but also their past. Case in point is James, the fact that his father abandoned his family and fled, and then actually committed suicide. James is in denial about this but it has only eaten him up inside and affected his overall personality, thus the relationships he has with his wife and two sons. They continuously complain about how the house is in a poor condition and needs to be repaired. What is cares most about is just money and that is it, his family is not the top most priority as it should be. His son says it is “a summer dump in a place she (Mary) hates and you’ve (James has) refused even to spend money to make this look decent” (ONeill 85). If James had been a little less economical, the family would have been a little happier; they would have less to complain about. It is often argued whether parents love all their children equally of if there is one favorite. Some may prefer the eldest child whereas some go for the younger, or even the middle one. In Long Days Journey into Night, Mary proves the latter theory to be correct. She seems to love Edmund more than James. This may be because Edmund was the replacement for the dead baby, the baby who died of measles which were passed on to him by a seven year old James. A young, sick child knows not what is better for him and James entered the nursery where his little sibling was. Being too young to fight off the infection, Eugene eventually died. Mary seemed to believe James ignored her warnings on purpose, which does seem to be a tad too harsh, but it did affect her love for her eldest son. As Mary says about James in Act III, “Hes jealous because Edmund has always been the baby – just as he used to be of Eugene. Hell never be content until he makes Edmund as hopeless a failure as he is” (ONeill 64). In her eyes, Edmund is the better son who can do no wrong. It is this belief which makes her oblivious to the fact that Edmund has a life threatening illness, she seems unable to accept the fact that another of her sons could die even though her own father died under similar circumstances. James, on the other hand, does not seem to have such love for his son. The betrayal of his father and his inability to accept it was so great, he took it all out on money and how he should never suffer from being poor again. This leads to him making a decision of sending Edmund to an inexpensive institution for treatment as he did not want to spend much money even if his youngest son’s life was at stake. When he had originally discovered that his son was not well, he had taken him to an incompetent and cheap doctor. If James had been willing to part with his beloved money and actually paid for a qualified doctor, Edmund’s condition would not have been so bad. But it seems that James understands where he made the mistake and is willing to change his decision send Edmund to a better hospital once Jamie convinces him to do that. The blatant favoritism of Edmund over James by their mother obviously had an effect on Jamie. Mary thinks badly of Jamie, of how he wanted to harm Eugene and succeeded, too, and also how he wants Edmund to fail. What she does not realize is that Jamie might have been feeling guilty about it all of his life, might be blaming himself for his younger brother’s death when, in fact, it was not his fault, he was too young to know the consequences. He may also feel bad about how much he has hurt his mother and he has no one to talk about this. It has been up eating him up in the insides since the tender age of seven years (Hinden 54 - 55). He obviously cares about Edmund, at least more than his father. This is shown when he is arguing with James about sending Edmund to a proper sanatorium: “Well, for God’s sake, pick out a good place and not some cheap dump!” (ONeill 45) On the same hand, he also shows signs of jealousy towards his younger brother, probably because Edmund received more affection from their mother. This may be why he hates Edmund and wants him to fail in life. “He hated the baby because Eugene got more attention than him … Jamie hates Edmund for precisely the same reasons” (Brietzke 154). Eugene’s death also led to other problems such as Mary’s morphine addiction. Unable to contain her grief any longer, she chose to take the wrong road so that she would not feel the pain anymore. Now she could have probably been straightened out if her husband had bothered to step up and do something about it. But, as usual, he chose to get drunk and ignore this problem as well. What he did do was send her off to rehabilitation clinic a few times but every time she returned clean, she would start taking morphine again. If had bothered to step out of his comfort zone and talked to his wife about the pain she still felt over their son’s death, this might have come to a stop. Instead, she continued to take morphine and blame her husband for trying to replace Eugene’s memory by having another baby: Edmund. It was his birth which led her to be in so much pain that she was first given morphine, something she would be addicted to the rest of her life (Payrhuber). And this only served to make Edmund guilty that it was his birth which led to his mother turning into a morphine addict. Almost all the characters in this play are guilty of something or the other. But it is not the guilt for which they can be put on a trial for and gotten imprisoned. It is more of a moral responsibility, knowing what they were doing was wrong but either they continuing to doing it anyway or it was unconsciously done. But what is notable is that even if the Tyrone family did not go along well with each other, they had it in themselves to take care of each other in their own different way, to forgive and forget and move on. Bibliography Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene ONeill. McFarland & Co Inc Pub, 2001. Hinden, Michael. Long Days Journey into Night: Native Eloquence. Twayne Publishers, 1990. ONeill, Eugene. Long Days Journey Into Night. Nick Hern Books, 1991. Payrhuber, Martin. About Eugene ONeills "Long Days Journey Into Night". Term Paper. Munich: GRIN Publishing GmbH, 2001. Read More