“A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is an autobiographical 4 act play by America’s first major playwright Eugene O’Neill. Published posthumously in 1956 (he died in 1953), O’Neill was honored with a Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the play in 1957.
Eugene O’Neill was one of the first America playwrights to use realism (think Chekhov [Russia], Ibsen [Norway], Strindberg [Sweden]). His first published play, “Beyond the Horizon,” opened in 1920 and was successful enough to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. It was the beginning of a lengthy and successful career, but “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is widely recognized as his best. Another well-known play that you will probably come across is his “Mourning Becomes Electra,” which is based on the Oresteia cycle of the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus.
Summary of the plot: As the title implies, the plot only covers one day, from around 8:30 am to midnight in August, 1912. It presents to the audience a dysfunctional family of four: a “dope-fiend” mother, Mary Tyrone, an alcoholic and miserly ex-actor father, James Sr., and two alcoholic sons, James (33 yrs old) and Edmund (23 yrs old). The latter is dying of TB, a diagnosis confirmed in the course of the play midst the passionate denials of the mentally unstable mother. Edmund, one realizes as one reads about the play, is supposed to be O’Neill himself; and so the one character thought to be dying in this long journey into night is the sole survivor of the ‘true story,’ O’Neill’s life. The other three characters—mother, father, and older brother—indulge in their respective vices unto
death.
What is Realism?
Realism is a 19th and early 20th century literary (and theatrical) form that focused on depicting life as it “really was.” With this goal, realist authors often described banal or everyday activities. It is known for having started in literature in France in the 19th century (think Balzac and Flaubert). In theater, it began in 19th century Russia (think Chekhov). George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” stands as a milestone in realism.
Little really happens in the play, besides dialogue. The mother, Mary, opens the play with her husband, having recently returned from treatment for her willful self-delusion. The entire family spies on her, fearful that she will return to morphine, and she resents their lack of trust, constantly haranguing her husband for his cheapness and his belief that the shelter he provides is “a home” when it is “not a home.” James Sr., meanwhile, verbally abuses his older son, James Jr., for being a drunken failure with nothing to show for his life. Edmund, the baby of the family, is ill, sensitive, and intellectual, poetic but despairing. He constantly begs his mother to be strong, pleads with his brother to forgive his father for allowing his phobia of the poorhouse to destroy their family, and urges his father to show kindness to his brother despite mutual disappointment. Throughout the course of the day, each member of the family discloses memories, treasures, and hurts to Edmund, revealing their regrets but also revealing the hand of fate that forced them to do what they did. For example, Mary was planning to become a nun, but the Head Mother told her she must go into the world and enjoy life before taking her vows. When she did this, she met James Sr. and married him. She became addicted to morphine during the birth of Edmund, when James Sr. hired a cheap doctor who gave her bad drugs. Edmund’s father, in turn, explains his cheapness by telling how his father deserted his mother and 3 siblings when he himself was only 10 years old:
TYRONE “My mother was left, a stranger in a strand land, with four small children,
me and a sister a little older and two younger than me. My two older brothers had
moved to other parts. They couldn’t help. They were hard put to it to keep
themselves alive. There was no damned romance in our poverty. Twice we were
evicted from the miserable hovel we called home, with my mother’s few sticks of
furniture thrown out in the street, and my mother and sisters crying. I cried, too,
though I tried hard not to, because I was the man of the family. At ten years old!
There was no more school for me. I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop,
learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof,
where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got
numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows, so on
grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to
see! You talk of work! And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! It’s the
truth! Fifty cents a week! And my poor mother washed and scrubbed for the Yanks
by the day, and my older sister sewed, and my two younger stayed at home to keep
the house. We never had clothes enough to wear, nor enough food to eat. Well I
remember one Thanksgiving, or maybe it was Christmas, when some Yank in whose
house mother had been scrubbing gave her a dollar extra for a present, and on the
way home she spent it all on food. I can remember her hugging and kissing us and
saying with tears of joy running down her tired face: “Glory be to God, for once in
our lives we’ll have enough for each of us!” [He wipes tears from his eyes.] A fine,
brave, sweet woman. There never was a braver of finer.
EDMUND [moved] Yes, she must have been.
TYRONE Her one fear was she’d get old and sick and have to die in the poorhouse.
[He pauses—then adds with grim humor] It was in those days I learned to be a miser. A
dollar was worth so much then. And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to
unlearn it. [. . .] Yes, maybe life overdid the lesson for me, and made a dollar worth
too much.1
And that’s where this play leaves us: aside from all the brilliance, the sheer emotional beauty that makes you want to cry for O’Neill and his sorrow, apart from the part of you both angry and glad that his orders to keep the script of the play private for 25 years after his death were completely ignored, there is also the cold hard Aristotelian tragedy with a post-modern twist. Welcome to the 20th century says Eugene: we’re still bemoaning tragic flaws, twisting and writhing in the hands of fate, but deep down, there is a sinking conviction that perhaps (only perhaps, and mayhap the question is worse than anything... the foghorn constantly leading us nowhere but to a home that isn’t a home...) we are merely Frankenstein’s of fate (please watch the clip above to understand this reference).
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