Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Long Day's Journey Into the Night  

    

This Blog is response of thinking Activity given by Professor Yesha Ma'am. Here I discuss about the questions of the play. 

About the author:

It was because Long Day’s Journey into Night was so transparently autobiographical that Eugene O’Neill forbade the play’s production and publication during his lifetime. The main characters are thinly veiled portraits of his father, James, his mother, Ella, his brother, Jamie, and himself.

James Gladstone O’Neill was born on October 6, 1888, in a Broadway hotel, son to the popular actor, James O’Neill, and Ella Quinlan. He was raised in the world of theater, and, as a result, in his boyhood and teen years he traveled all over America.In 1912, the year in which Long Day’s Journey into Night is set, O’Neill broke off his three-year marriage to Kathleen Jenkins. In that same year, ill with tuberculosis and haunted by his “rebellious dissipations,” he reached a personal low point and even attempted suicide.

While in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, O’Neill studied the master dramatists of the world and set out to become a playwright. Dissatisfied with his early efforts in the form, he enrolled at Harvard to study the craft, becoming the most celebrated member of George Pierce Baker’s famous “47 Workshop.” His first plays were published in 1914, and his first staged play, Bound East for Cardiff, was produced in 1916. It was followed by Thirst, produced by the Provincetown Players in the summer of 1917. It was that group that gave O’Neill his artistic arena and, with its move to New York, quickly established his reputation as the chief innovator in theater.

In his last active years, O’Neill finished plays that now rank among his very best, including The Iceman Cometh (1946) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). Other later plays include A Touch of the Poet (1957) and Hughie (1959), which, like Long Day’s Journey into Night, were first produced posthumously. By the time he died in 1953, O’Neill had written over thirty significant dramatic works and solidified his reputation as America’s premier dramatist.

1, Long Day's Journey Into the Night- old sorrow, written in tears and blood'. 

Ans, Written in tears and blood

THERE is a relentless logic in the fact that Eugene O'Neill, America's greatest tragic playwright, ended his career with the writing of a starkly autobiographical play. “Long Day's Journey Into Night” is the story of the four O'Neills—called the Tyrones in the play—at a moment of anguished crisis in the summer of 1912. The play's names and events are, so thinly disguised that there is no disputing the literal nature of its revelations. 

Like James and Mary Tyrone of “Long Day's Journey,” James and Ella O'Neill fought an endless, losing battle to adjust to each other's totally dissimilar natures. Ella came from an emigrant Irish family that had attained middleclass respectability by the time she was growing up. James's own emigrant family never made it up from poverty, and James struggled desperately to attain success—though not respectability—as a leading actor of his day. Actors were not, in the 1870's, quite socially acceptable. But they could achieve a kind of raffish glamour, and the sheltered, delicately bred Ella became infatuated with the handsome young matinee idol.

The glamour soon rubbed off, under the stress of years of touring back and forth across the country, which provided James with his chief income. By the time Ella realized that she was miserable in her life as an actor's wife, she also realized that she and James were bound to each other by a helpless love that was stronger than any disaffection for their mode of living. Shortly after the birth of her younger son she became a morphine addict. The O'Neills’ unsettled life and Ella's drugged acceptance of it had a predictable effect on their sons,. James Jr. (Jamie) and. Eugene.

At the time in which “Long Day's Journey Into Night” is set, James and Ella had settled fatalistically for the cycle of love‐hate, guilt and forgiveness, depicted in the play. Their son Jamie, at 33, had become a cynical, alcoholic has‐been, his chief preoccupation to goad his long‐suffering father, whom he blamed for his mother's illness. And Eugene (called Edmund in the play) was, indeed, at 23, on the verge of a severe breakdown in health, brought about by the derelict life he had led since dropping out of college at 18.

While “Long Day's Journey” is the final, naked revelation of O'Neill's “truth” about his family, it is by no means O'Neill's only significantly autobiographical play.

But it was not until the publication of the play in 1956, three years after O'Neill's death, and the recognition of its autobiographical content, that it became possible to discern how very autobiographical many of his earlier plays had been. It then was apparent that such plays as “All God's Chillun Got Wings,” “Deiire Under the Elms,” “The Great God Brown,” “Mourning Becomes Electra,” “A Touch of the Poet” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” (written just after “Long Day's Journey,” but published in O'Neill's lifetime) had been symbolically disguised portraits of the members of O'Neill's family, locked in various stages of conflict with each other and God. A number of other O'Neill plays, notably “Beyond the Horizon,” “Anna Christie,” “The Iceman Cometh” and O'Neill's only comedy, “Ah, Wilderness!” contain subtler autobiographical references. But it is the plays dealing with the husbandwife, parent‐child relationships that suggest O'Neill had been testing, and steeling himself for, the ultimate soul‐baring of “Long Day's Journey.”

“All God's Chillun Got Wings,” written in 1923, is the first play in which O'Neill portrayed his parents in conflict. In this undeservedly neglected work, O'Neill, not bothering to disguise his parents' given names, called his two protagonists Jim Harris and Ella Downey. He did not deem it necessary to disguise the names because Jim was black and the play, extremely daring for its time, seemed, on the surface, to be a study of miscegenation. He correctly assumed that it would be impossible for anyone to identify the Jim and Ella of the play with his father and mother.

But with “Long Day's Journey” as key, it becomes obvious that Jim and Ella Harris symbolically represent James and Ella O'Neill, just as James and Mary Tyrone represent them literally.

The father is neither an actor, as he is accurately portrayed in “Long Day's Journey,” nor the symbolic black man of “All God's Chillun Got Wings,” but a domineering, hard‐bitten, frugal Yankee farmer named Ephraim Cabot, who has clawed a living from a rockbound New England farm, crushing his fragile wife in the process, and inspiring in his sensitive younger son an Oedipal complex to warm the cockles of any Freudian heart.

“I have always loved Ephraim so much!,” O'Neill once wrote to a close friend. “He's so autobiographical!”

O'Neill, speaking through the character of Lavinia Mannon (Electra), ends the play with a line that is part despair, part masochistic gloating: “I'm the last Mannon.” O'Neill used precisely that phrase after the death, in rapid succession, of his parents and brother. He wrote to a friend, “I'm the last O'Neill.”

In his dedication to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, of “Long Day's Journey” in 1941, O'Neill wrote: “I give you this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood . . . You will understand I mean it as a tribute to your love . . .that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”

With “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” the last play O'Neill was able to cornplete, he achieved a blending of literal autobiography and poetic fantasy that lifts it, in some ways, above even the powerful “Long Day's Journey Into Night.” It has been given several very good productions both here and abroad, but it has yet to be universally acknowledged as the soaring masterpiece it is.

The play describes the last, bitter days in the life of Jamie O'Neill, here called, as in “Long Day's Journey,” Jamie Tyrone. At the time of its writing Eugene O'Neill was seriously ill with the nervous disorder that shortly would end his career, and both because of his illness and the play's painful content, he suffered even more over its writing than he had over “Long Day's Journey.”

Most tormenting of all—perhaps even more so than facing, again, as he did in “Long Day's Journey,” his mother's drug addiction — was reliving his mother's death. (Continued on Next Page) Ella O'Neill did not, in the end, succumb to her morphine habit, as is implied by Mary Tyrone's final Scene‐hi “Long Day's Journey.It was almost as though O'Neill feared that the Tyrones of “Long Day's Journey” might have, been construed still to have some life in them. And so he polished off Jamie and created one more blazing epitaph for his family.

It was in 1923 that he became “the last O'Neill.” It was in 1943, the year “A Moon for the Misb gotten” was written, that Hiness ended O'Neill's career. He lived on another 10 years, much of that time a helpless invalid, dying in November, 1953, of pneumonia.

To O'Neill, the whole thing might have appeared to be just one more monstrous irony: He was a man who could say, and mean it: “Life is a tragedy. Hurrah!” 

2, Theme of Addiction - Long Day's Journey into night.

Ans,  The plot of Long Day’s Journey into Night focuses on a dysfunctional family trying to come to grips with its ambivalent emotions in the face of serious familial problems, including drug addiction moral degradation, deep-rooted fear and guilt, and life-threatening illness.

This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis.It’s a story of love, hate, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the fragility of family bonds—particularly between fathers and sons.It’s an August morning at the summer home of James and Mary Tyrone. James (also called Tyrone) is an aging actor, and even though he has done well financially, he’s a miser. Mary has recently returned from a sanatorium for her addiction to morphine.Breakfast has just ended, and a day of discord is just beginning. It’s obvious that Mary has started taking morphine again. It’s also clear that Edmund has tuberculosis, but the men try to shield Mary from the truth, making her think that Edmund has a bad cold. Jamie accuses Tyrone of sending Edmund to a cheap and terrible doctor and suggests that Edmund would be in better health if Tyrone weren’t so cheap. As the day goes on, a thick fog surrounds the house. Secrets are revealed and old emotional wounds are reopened.

It seems that Tyrone caused Mary’s morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat Mary’s pain after Edmund’s birth. Mary refuses to believe that she’s an addict, even as she continues to take morphine just to get through the day. The three men drink heavily as the hours pass…to the point where Tyrone and Jamie are barely functioning as night settles in. The literal fog outside the house and the metaphorical fog of addiction have overtaken the family.The play tells the story of one family over the course of one day. O’Neill shows us the passage of time in a particularly heartbreaking way: through the family’s addictions. As the day progresses, Mary becomes more and more affected by the morphine that she takes. Here we see that theme of addiction as ruined entire Tyrone femily. 

3, Long Day's Journey into night - Sense of failure '

 

Ans,Concerning Long Day´s Journey into Night, one recognizes that each guilty character which appears in the play has to face the fact of having a moral responsibility rather than a criminal one. None of the family members can or will be imprisoned for the mistakes he or she has done, but each of them has to explain himself or herself in front of the accusations of the other members of the family.The play focuses on the Tyrone family, whose once-close family has 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 largely autobiographical; it resembles O'Neill's life in many aspects. O'Neill himself appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the younger son who, like O'Neill, suffers from consumption. Indeed, some of the parallels between this play and O'Neill's life are striking. Like Tyrone, O'Neill's father was an Irish Catholic, an alcoholic, and a Broadway actor. Like Mary, O'Neill's mother was a morphine addict, and she became so around the time O'Neill was born. Like Jamie, O'Neill's older brother did not take life seriously, choosing to live a life of whores, alcohol, and the fast-paced reckless life of Broadway. Finally, O'Neill had an older brother named Edmund who died in infancy; in this play, Edmund has an older brother named Eugene who died in infancy.

The play also creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the great conflicts in the play is the characters' uncanny inability to communicate despite their constant fighting.The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and morphine. This novel this all the scenes are represent of sense of failure.

Thank you 😊