O’Neill was trying to interpret life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character: “I am always acutely conscious of force behind- Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it- mystery certainly – and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self respective struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. And my profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible – or can be – to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theater which may to some degree bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theater is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever!”
It was ‘the Greek dream in tragedy’ that O’Neill had in mind when he wrote his blatantly ‘Greek’ trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra. But that dream was also his when he was writing the two autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. They observe even more strictly than Mourning Becomes Electra the classical unities, they incrementally uncover secrets of the past, and they make an audience feel ‘the Force behind’. Like all great tragedy, these three ‘classical’ plays celebrate mystery and the nobility of man’s struggle and endurance. Like all great drama, they appeal to our emotions. O’Neill believed that ‘our emotions are better guide than our thoughts’. Our emotions are instinctive. They are the result not only of our individual experience but of the experiences of the whole human race, back through the ages. O’Neill insisted that the ‘truth usually goes deep. So it reaches you through your emotions’. He forever pursed the truth of man’s existence by appealing to emotions. He said he would ‘never be influenced by any consideration but one: Is it the truth as I know it – or, better still, feel it’. He himself felt deeply what he wrote, and here the autobiographical pressures exerted on his work – especially in Long Day’s Journey into Night.
To call Long Day’s Journey into Night a ‘domestic tragedy’ is to underestimate seriously its emotional effect. It is enlarged, not in the sense of Aristotelian ‘heightening’, but more by its constant movement ‘behind life’, in the phrase O’Neill once used to describe Strindberg’s expressionist dramas. For a play to move ‘behind life’ means that it expands inward, through the surfaces, and toward the core of life itself. The inner enlargement of the Tyrone plays not only scrutinizes the motives that produce the painful events, but somehow, also, enlarge an audience’s knowledge of the suffering these events produce. No drama of modern times contains more pain’s substance than Long Day’s Journey into Night, but in the final analysis, it is not the events, shocking through they are that grip the audience. The Tyrones suffer and the spectators or the readers are convinced that, when suffering is only reality, life is truly as it is depicted in the play.
The prison of the past is all the more tragic because the play shows not only the behaviors that led them into their current situation, but also what each of the Tyrones might have been had life taken a different course, had the prison walls not been built. As a young girl, for example, Mary had innocence, romantic ideals, and a strong religious faith centered on the Virgin Mary. That faith disappeared early in her marriage, and she desperately wants to rekindle it, because that would offer a way out of the prison.
At different parts, the past plays different roles. On one hand the past is a burden, Mary speaks with a terrible fatalism, claiming that nothing they are can be helped: past mistakes have fixed their present and future irrevocably: ‘The past is the present, isn’t it?’ cries Mary. ‘It is the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us’. It is the long day’s journey into the past. The past also takes the form of old hurts that have gone unforgiving. We hear the same arguments again and again in this play, as the Tyrones dredge up the same old grievances. Letting go is impossible, and so the Tyrones are stuck.
Although Mary is the character directly associated with living in illusion, all characters in the play try to hide from the truth in their own ways. At the beginning of the second act, O’Neill notes a change in setting which has taken place since the play opened. No sunlight comes into the room now and there is a faint haziness in the air. This haziness or fog obscures one’s perception of the world, and it parallels the attempts of each member of the family to obscure and hide reality. Tyrone, for example, drinks whiskey to escape his son’s criticism of cheap he is. The reference to fog always has a double meaning in this play, referring both to the atmosphere and to the family. Much of the activity carried on by the Tyrone family is under-handed and sneaky, they are always attempting to put something over on somebody and obscure the truth. Mary says she loves the fog because “it hides you from the world and the world from you”, but she hates the foghorns because “they warn you and call you back”. This escape is similar to the morphine she takes, and the foghorns are the family’s warnings against her addictions. Edmund tells the father he walked out to the beach to be alone with himself. When told that he should have more sense than to walk out in the fog, Edmund replies with a quotation from Ernest Dowson (English poet), part of which reads as follows:
“They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream”.
The first lines indicate the brevity of life – the three remaining lines indicate the mystical and mysterious elements of life. The concern with “misty dreams” repeats the fog imagery. And if we emerge from a dream and then our life closes within a dream, there is meaning to life and no purpose to existence. We cannot understand or explain whence we come whither we are going. Edmund proceeds to comment further on life saying he wants to be where “truth is untrue and life can hide for itself”. This desire to shun the truth and to hide from reality repeats the attempts of all of them to live in illusion by forgetting what is and was.
“There is no help for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.”
Since this is O’Neill speaking through Jamie, we again see the concern with fate, with Forces we cannot control. The bitterness of the world and of our life in the world accounts for our attempts to escape through illusion – or as O’Neill quoted earlier, “Be always drunken…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will do”.
To his friend George Jean Nathan, the famous drama critic, O’Neill mentioned that he was writing a play which would cover one day in a life, “a day in which things occur which evokes the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its inter-relationship. A deeply tragic play, but without violent dramatic action. At the final curtain there they still are, trapped within each other by past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget”. O’Neill feels a great sympathy for all four Tyrones and he does not condemn any one of these characters more than any other, as he wrote to his wife in 1940 when he completed the play: “All the characters have severe faults, and they are all part of one family that has stayed together throughout many years of hardship, and they can all be very loving and compassionate. One cannot single out any particular character as the protagonist or antagonist; one can instead see the themes that create strife in the family and the ways the family mends itself when it falls into disorder”. Long Day’s Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy – it leaves the audience with a sense of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing powerful events, and it depicts the fall of something that was once great. The play focuses on the Tyrone family, whose once-close family deteriorated over the years, for a number of reasons: Mary’s drug addiction, Tyrone, Jamie, and Edmund’s alcoholism, Tyrone’s stinginess, the boys’ lax attitude toward work and money, and a variety of other factors. As the play is set, the parents are aging, and while they always hoped that their sons would achieve great things, that hope is beginning to be replaced by a resigned despair. The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past.
References:
Ø Long Day’s Journey into Night
Ø ‘Eugene O’Neill: Three plays’ edited by Normand Berlin
Ø Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009.
Ø Monarch notes and study guides: Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.
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