Long Day's journey into Night as an autobiographical and Psychological novel and as a Modern Tragedy 

            By SANA ALI        

Department of English (Literature and Linguistics) M.A-4, National University of Modern Languages 

Introduction: 

This paper aims to examine the elements which are depicted by Eugene O’Neill, in his great play “Long Day’s Journey into Night ''. This paper clears autobiographical elements and the writer’s assimilation of Greek Tragedy and his development of modern tragedy as well as psychological issues of the life of the characters. This play really won him glory and brilliance. This tragedy play is semi-autobiographical in which he depicted the psychological issues of the characters. This drama is explicit in style but Eugene depicted the agonized connection between father, mother, and two sons. Eugene showed the life of these four characters. The mother as a vetoed addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disappointed youth with only the slenderest chance for biological and sacred survival. The play was penned in 1940 and released in 1956 posthumously. This play is Eugene's description of the acute psychological stress that he himself was undergoing and the suffering his family was facing. The drama was performed in Sweden and on Broadway, it has been enacted several times all over the world, and has been given rise to a film. The drama was performed in Stockholm even before the published play came out in the American market, which indicates its universal interest. Long day's journey into night basically is a Tragedy. As we know that this play is autobiographical, tragedy played a unique role in the life and death of Eugene O'Neill. He led a life of great distress and hardship, owing to personal stress and psychological problems. He felt that this agony to which such a sensitive mind had been subjected should be conveyed through drama to the public so that other people in distress would engage in a 'collective catharsis', and thereby receive a degree of relief. In Greek drama, the struggle is between man and the gods. In O'Neill's play, there is a struggle between man's past, present and future. O'Neill's tragic heroes are modelled on the ideas of Freud and Jung, in which conscious ego is to a great extent responsible for their tragedies. O'Neill conceived of tragedy as something that celebrates life. He says life in itself is nothing. It is a dream that keeps us fighting, willing, and living! In his play, O'Neill has tried to highlight this celebration of life. O'Neill does not criticize any of his characters, instead, he is deeply emotional towards all four Tyrones. This play is the brief background of O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' which is widely perceived as his enormous academic success. 

Long Day’s journey into Night as an autobiographical play

Experienced Authors often choose to create semi-autobiographical works which contain a blend of some elements of their real lives and some of their fictional creations. Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill is one such author who drew largely from personal experience to create his plays. Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely considered to be his finest literary achievement and also his most personal play. This drama has many autobiographical elements but with some important fictional characteristics. An understanding of how O’Neill draws on personal elements in the creation of this text can deepen our appreciation of this powerful work.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is a truly unique play in a way that it differs from most semi-autobiographical works. Many works in this genre are initially based on life events, but then the author chooses to veer the work in another direction. O’Neill, however, remains largely true to the events of his life. As O’Neill scholar Michael Hinden explains, O’Neill had “no need to fabricate family incidents for his plot” and actually “pruned additional family troubles from the finished play” (94). Compressing the event into a twenty-four hour period is arguably the most fictional part of the production. Eugene portrays his family from his own personal lens. His characters thus closely resemble but do not completely reflect the members of his family.

The four central characters in the play are based on Eugene’s immediate family. First, James Tyrone is based on Eugene’s father. James O’Neill (1846-1920). Like his character in the play, James was an actor best known for the role of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. He was a typecast and could not find another role after it and Eugene O’Neill spent much time of his life travelling and living out of hotels due to James' acting career.

Mary Tyrone’s character is based on Eugene’s mother, Mary Ellen (“Ella”) Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922). Like her character in the play, Ella met her future husband backstage at one of his New York performances. The two were married on June 12, 1887, and their first son James Jr. (Jamie) was born a year later. Five years later their son Edmund was born. He quickly died, however, after contracting measles from his older brother. Ella lived in the conflict between blaming herself and blaming Jamie for the baby’s death (Hinden 98). Eugene chose to exchange his name in the play with his brother’s. Edmund is his character in the Play and the dead brother is named Eugene. Some scholars speculate that Eugene made his choice to emphasize how he felt living in the shadow of a “ghost child (101). Some believe that the play suggests Eugen’s birth indirectly led to his mother’s addiction (98).  A doctor prescribed her mother morphine after painful and traumatic childbirth. Her drug addiction spanned many years and deeply troubled the O’Neill family. Her addiction is central to the plot of the play. Her unusual behaviour in the play, such as wearing her wedding dress, is also true. She was a middle-class woman expected to provide the aura of domesticity and homeliness, pay ritual homage to her expected role and condemn her family for failing to support her. They have, it is true, all the material possessions—servants, car and chauffeur, and even property investments. But Mary Tyrone pinpoints the anguished lack in a tirade against her husband:

Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending that this is a home! You won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You really don’t know how to act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never have wanted one!—never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms! (She adds rather strangely as if she were talking aloud to herself rather than to Tyrone.) Then nothing would ever have happened.

Yet her accusation concluded in the last line is followed by an even more disturbing statement. It then becomes clear, despite her periodic pro­testations, her concern over Edmund’s health and her bitter attacks on her husband, that she has abdicated from her conventional family role and long ceased trying to create a “home.”

 

Jamie Tyrone in the play is based on Eugene O’ Neill’s older brother James O’Neill, Jr. (1878-1923). Scholars claim that Jamie’s character is the most lifelike in the production (Hinden 100). As Hinden writes, “The measles episode, school expulsions, bitterness, drinking, whoring, and the train ride are the legacy of James O’Neill, Jr. (100)”.  In real life, James was a troubled soul who could not find a healthy way to cope with his problems. He cared deeply for his younger brother but he was afraid his troubles would bring his brother down (101). In the play and real life, Jamie was addicted to alcohol for almost all his life. After his mother died in 1922, he “never had another sober day” (99).  In real life, Eugene had to distance himself from his brother because of his drinking habit (101).

The fourth character is Edmund Tyrone, Eugene O’Neill’s self-portrait. He is a sensitive person but with a dark edge. Many details of his own life are intentionally left out which are about his failed marriage to Kathleen Jenkins and his strained relationship and his son Eugene O’Neill, Jr. His characters would have already experienced his marriage and the birth of his son by the time the play took place. As Edmund was his character, he also suffered from tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium in 1912. In the play, it is shown that he would die but in real life, he recovered within one year. His time dealing with illness inspired him to pursue a career in writing (Clark 24). Though he received success as a writer, he lived to see a grim life. He could not escape the influence of his older brother and became a chronic alcoholic.

So, we can acknowledge that Eugene’s play is autobiographical. 

 

Long Day’s journey into Night as a psychological play

We can find the influence of Ibsen’s psychological realism as well as Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis. In this drama, there is no protagonist or antagonist. Different characters’ life experience has been fully expressed by the detailed psychoanalysis. The major four characters of this play are shown by Eugene O’Neill as druggist and alcoholic. If the mother is involved in morphine addiction, her husband and two sons are shown alcoholic and drunk. Most specially James and Jamie are much addicted but Edmund was less alcoholic. In this play, Eugene has depicted the psychological disorder of these characters. One can assume the life of druggist people in this play. How they behave, how they react and how they spend their life. Eugene showed the isolation and breakdown of communication. How the characters do not try to resolve their issues. They start quarrelling and after that, they leave the place and isolate themselves besides resolving the problems. Jamie’s psychological issues are shown. All those problems were caused by his Oedipus complex. He makes desperate efforts to reach Mary but Mary is constantly drawing away from him. So, he resorts to alcohol and tries to destroy Edmund’s career.

The character of Mary is also addicted to morphine and that’s why Jamie loses his mother completely. Because of it, he tries to destroy his brother’s career. He was jealous of him and that’s why he tries to corrupt his brother and he tries to make him involved in women and booze. He expressed his feelings of jealousy and hatred by saying” I know that was not your fault but all the same, God damn you, I can’t help hating your guts.”---- “But don’t get me wrong, kid. I love you more than I hate you.” Here Eugene described Jamie’s loss of psychological need. He also shows love and hatred in the family.      

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. For instance, Jamie often fights amongst themselves over Mary's addiction, but no one is willing to confront her directly. Instead, they allow her to lie to herself about her addiction and Edmund's illness. Edmund and Jamie do not communicate well until the last act.

Long Day’s journey into Night as a modern tragedy

The concept of tragedy was given by Aristotle in his 'Poetics' in which he described  the social status of a hero as being a king or a prince and his death, caused by 'Hamartia' or an error of judgment. According to him, poetry is fundamentally creative, flourishing out of a tendency among humans to mimic. Its general classifications are epic and tragic. Tragedy struggles to provoke pity and fear in the audience who view the life of a heroic personality, feel pity for his past and present weaknesses, and are frightened for his future hardship. It intends to impact a purgation of these feelings. The play 'Long Day's Journey into Night', explains the story of James Tyrone who was neither a prince nor a king. However, the definition of tragedy in Greek drama made sense to O'Neill. He saw people persecuted, distressed in suffering, like in the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.

O'Neill's voyage of the human mind is a significant characteristic of this play. The most significant point of departure from Greek tragedy in this play is that it is a tragedy of the living and not of the dead. There is no death in the play. In 'Long Day's Journey into Night', all four characters are common people. The play is a mood piece that puts one into a certain frame of mind. The intensity of distress becomes intolerable towards the end because it is the discomfort of living.  O'Neill's idea of tragedy is a blend of contemporary psychological determinism and the fatalism of ancient Irish or Greek mythology and drama.

All the four members of Tyrone family in this drama appear to harm and demolish one another by their continual dispute, their true tragedy is affected by what life has done to them, by the forces of heritage and habitat, over which they have no control.

When Jamie complains about his father's stinginess, Mary defends her husband and prompts her son that his father had struggled hard all his life so that Jamie's life may become easier and better. She accepts that Tyrone had some drawbacks, but says that no one is perfect in the world. "Remember your father is getting old, Jamie. You really ought to show more consideration".

 Edmund suffers from tuberculosis and his end is true. Jamie is an idler and an alcoholic. Mary is an addict and she has also gone through the disaster of detecting the demise of a baby son. Mary lodges the charge for her distress squarely on Jamie's shoulders by saying, "Jamie should never have been allowed when he still had measles to go into the baby's room. 'I've always believed Jamie did it on purpose.' She blames Jamie for baby Eugene's death. He was jealous of the baby and had hated him."

 Mary appears to be a woman in investigation of her past. Her true self is bound as discreetly to her memory of romance with James as it is to her appetite of becoming a nun.Act four shows Mary's last line: 'Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.'

If at times she believes that meeting Tyrone was the core of her troubles, she also feels that nothing in her life has been more valuable to her than his love but she also accuses him of not understanding her, of drinking excessively, of depriving her of friends and a decent home at the same time. Mary's attacks on her family seem to be prompted by her defensiveness. Mary's central drawback is her denial to acknowledge that there is a problem with herself or Edmund. We can see that she likes to live in a world of fiction and the morphine enables her to develop it.

This play illustrates a contemporary arrangement of Aristotelian tragedy in the shape of the economic, ethical and social destruction of all four major characters. Aristotle believed in the individual as a social animal, who was required to interact with fellow beings in a society, practising obligations and fulfilling duties. A transgression of one's social responsibilities would steer to a state of social anarchy, therefore Aristotle insisted on civil harmony based on moral manners and a political system that would oversee the well being of the individual as a unit in a community.

This play is more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the destiny for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and morphine. This play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, and it has persisted as one of the most cherished plays of the 20th century. Perhaps most importantly, it has attained commercial achievement because nearly every family can see itself revealed in at least some parts of the play. 

References:

 Gelb, B. and Gelb, . Arthur (2021, November 23). Eugene O'Neill. Encyclopedia Britannica  

Albert E. Avey, A Hand Book in the History of Philosophy (New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1874), 36.

Hurt W. and etl,(2010), Sydney Theatre Company Education Resources, Sydney Theatre co.

AuthorneoenglishPosted on October 27, 2010CategoriesMA English-LiteratureTagsMA English-Literature

Electronic Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eugene-ONeill

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Long+Day%27s+Journey+into+Night%27+-+A+Macrocosm+of+Tragedy.-a0277986789

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/longdays/section8/

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