Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Eugene O’Neill’s

Long Day’s Journey into Night New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Long Day’s Journey into Night—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa­tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953. Eugene O’Neill’s Long day’s journey into night / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-390-5 (hardcover) 1. O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953. Long day’s journey into night. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PS3529.N5L634 2009 812’.52—dc20

2008049240

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Contents Editor’s Note

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Introduction 1 Harold Bloom O’Neill’s “Presence” in Long Day’s Journey into Night Bruce J. Mann Long Day’s Journey into Night: Descent into Darkness Laurin Porter

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American Flowers of Evil: Long Day’s Journey into Night and Baudelaire Marc Maufort

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Long Day’s Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal Loss Gerardine Meaney Eugene O’Neill and the Sense of the Tragic Richard B. Sewall The Spare Room: Long Day’s Journey into Night Kurt Eisen “Like . . . So Many Small Theatres”: The Panoptic and the Theatric in Long Day’s Journey into Night Michael Selmon

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53 69 85

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Contents

Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Seen and the Unseen Anne Fleche Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Question of Blame Barbara Voglino

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143

The Tyrone Anthology: Authority in the Last Act of Long Day’s Journey into Night Lawrence Dugan Long Day’s Journey into Night Egil Törnqvist

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The S(ub)lime Symptom and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night 203 Magdalen Wing-chi Ki Chronology

223

Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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Editor’s Note My introduction quests to appreciate the eloquent gestures of O’Neill’s stage directions and their function as theater poetry. Bruce J. Mann traces the apparent presence of the older Eugene O’Neill alongside Edmund Tyrone, portrait of the artist as a young man, after which Laurin Porter meditates on the play’s image of despair. The influence of a major French poet, Charles Baudelaire, on Long Day’s Journey is seen as dialectical by Marc Maufort, since aesthetic transcendence was not an option for O’Neill. Gerardine Meaney argues that O’Neill usurped the image of Irish maternal loss, while Richard B. Sewall luminously defends the tragic eminence of the play. For Kurt Eisen, Long’s Day’s Journey is a nostalgic defense of the individual will, while Michael Selmon emphasizes the mute, endemic loneliness that dominates the drama. Anne Fleche shows how the play gives us a clear, realistic representation of the mother figure as a matrix of male dread and desire. Blame, a nightmare in O’Neill, is exonerated by Long Day’s Journey in the critical vision of Barbara Voglino, after which Lawrence Dugan addresses the difficult question of authority in the Tyrone family. The autobiographical weight of the play is assessed by Egil Törnqvist, while Magdalen Wing-chi Ki rather darkly shies away from the “deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all four Tyrones” that O’Neill asserted he himself felt.

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HAROLD BLOOM

Introduction

By common consent, Long Day’s Journey into Night is Eugene O’Neill ’s masterpiece. The Yale paperback in which I have just reread the play lists itself as the fifty-sixth printing in the thirty years since publication. Since O’Neill, rather than Williams or Miller, Wilder or Albee, is recognized as our leading dramatist, Long Day’s Journey must be the best play in our more than two centuries as a nation. One rereads it therefore with awe and a certain apprehension, but with considerable puzzlement also. Strong work it certainly is, and twice I have been moved by watching it well directed and well performed. Yet how can this be the best stage play that an exuberantly dramatic people has produced? Is it equal to the best of our imaginative literature? Can we read it in the company of The Scarlet Letter and MobyDick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Portrait of a Lady, As I Lay Dying and Gravity’s Rainbow? Does it have the aesthetic distinction of our greatest poets, of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery? Can it stand intellectually with the crucial essays of Emerson and of William James? These questions, alas, are self-answering. O’Neill’s limitations are obvious and need not be surveyed intensively. Perhaps no major dramatist has ever been so lacking in rhetorical exuberance, in what Yeats once praised Blake for having: “beautiful, laughing speech.” O’Neill’s convictions were deeply held but were in no way remarkable, except for their incessant sullenness. It is embarrassing when O’Neill’s exegetes attempt to expound his ideas, whether about his country, his own work, or the human condition. When one of them speaks of “two kinds of nonverbal, tangential poetry in Long Day’s Journey into Night” as the characters’ longing “for a mystical union of sorts,” and the 



Harold Bloom

influence of the setting, I am compelled to reflect that insofar as O’Neill’s art is nonverbal it must also be nonexistent. My reflection, however, is inaccurate, and O’Neill’s dramatic art is considerable, though it does make us revise our notions of just how strictly literary an art drama necessarily has to be. Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Molière are masters alike of language and of a mimetic force that works through gestures that supplement language, but O’Neill is mastered by language and relies instead upon a drive-toward-staging that he appears to have learned from Strindberg. Consider the close of Long Day’s Journey. How much of the power here comes from what Tyrone and Mary say and how much from the extraordinarily effective stage directions? Tyrone (trying to shake off his hopeless stupor): Oh, we’re fools to pay any attention. It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this. (Gruffly.) Pass me that bottle, Jamie. And stop reciting that damned morbid poetry. I won’t have it in my house! (Jamie pushes the bottle toward him. He pours a drink without disarranging the wedding gown he holds carefully over his other arm and on his lap, and shoves the bottle back. Jamie pours his and passes the bottle to Edmund, who, in turn, pours one. Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.) Mary (staring dreamily before her. Her face looks extraordinarily youthful and innocent. The shyly eager, trusting smile is on her lips as she talks aloud to herself ): I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good. A saint on earth. I love her dearly. It may be sinful of me but I love her better than my own mother. Because she always understands, even before you say a word. Her kind blue eyes look right into your heart. You can’t keep any secrets from her. You couldn’t deceive her, even if you were mean enough to want to. (She gives a little rebellious toss of her head—with girlish pique.) All the same, I don’t think she was so understanding this time. I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, that I had prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make me sure, and to find me worthy. I told Mother I had had a true vision when I was praying in the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the little island in the lake. I said I knew, as surely as I knew I was kneeling there, that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent. But

Introduction



Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we would talk it over again. (She tosses her head—indignantly.) I never dreamed Holy Mother would give me such advice! I was really shocked. I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time. After I left her, I felt all mixed up, so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her. (She pauses and a look of growing uneasiness comes over her face. She passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain—vaguely.) That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time. (She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.) CURTAIN

Critics have remarked on how fine it is that the three alcoholic Tyrone males slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them, as the morphineladen wife and mother begins to speak. One can go further; her banal if moving address to herself, and Tyrone’s petulant outbursts, are considerably less eloquent than the stage directions. I had not remembered anything that was spoken, returning to the text after a decade, but I had held on to that grim family tableau of the three Tyrones slowly lowering their glasses. Again, I had remembered nothing actually said between Edmund and his mother at the end of act one, but the gestures and glances between them always abide with me, and Mary’s reactions when she is left alone compel in me the Nietzschean realization that the truly memorable is always associated with what is most painful. (She puts her arms around him and hugs him with a frightened, protective tenderness.) Edmund (soothingly): That’s foolishness. You know it’s only a bad cold. Mary: Yes, of course, I know that!



Harold Bloom

Edmund: But listen, Mama. I want you to promise me that even if it should turn out to be something worse, you’ll know I’ll soon be all right again, anyway, and you won’t worry yourself sick, and you’ll keep on taking care of yourself— Mary (frightenedly): I won’t listen when you’re so silly! There’s absolutely no reason to talk as if you expected something dreadful! Of course, I promise you. I give you my sacred word of honor! (Then with a sad bitterness.) But I suppose you’re remembering I’ve promised before on my word of honor. Edmund: No! Mary (her bitterness receding into a resigned helplessness): I’m not blaming you, dear. How can you help it? How can any one of us forget? (Strangely.) That’s what makes it so hard—for all of us. We can’t forget. Edmund (grabs her shoulder): Mama! Stop it! Mary (forcing a smile): All right, dear. I didn’t mean to be so gloomy. Don’t mind me. Here. Let me feel your head. Why, it’s nice and cool. You certainly haven’t any fever now. Edmund: Forget! It’s you— Mary: But I’m quite all right, dear. (With a quick, strange, calculating, almost sly glance at him.) Except I naturally feel tired and nervous this morning, after such a bad night. I really ought to go upstairs and lie down until lunch time and take a nap. (He gives her an instinctive look of suspicion—then, ashamed of himself, looks quickly away. She hurries on nervously.) What are you going to do? Read here? It would be much better for you to go out in the fresh air and sunshine. But don’t get overheated, remember. Be sure and wear a hat. (She stops, looking straight at him now. He avoids her eyes. There is a tense pause. Then she speaks jeeringly.) Or are you afraid to trust me alone? Edmund (tormentedly): No! Can’t you stop talking like that! I think you ought to take a nap. (He goes to the screen door— forcing a joking tone.) I’ll go down and help Jamie bear up. I love to lie in the shade and watch him work. (He forces a laugh in which she makes herself join. Then he goes out on the porch and disappears down the steps. Her first reaction is one of relief. She appears to relax. She sinks down in one of the wicker armchairs at rear of table and leans her head back, closing her eyes. But suddenly she grows terribly tense again. Her eyes open and she strains forward, seized by a fit of nervous panic. She begins a desperate battle with herself. Her long fingers, warped

Introduction



and knotted by rheumatism, drum on the arms of the chair, driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent.) CURTAIN

That grim ballet of looks between mother and son, followed by the terrible, compulsive drumming of her long fingers, has a lyric force that only the verse quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and others in O’Neill ’s text are able to match. Certainly a singular dramatic genius is always at work in O’Neill ’s stage directions and can be felt also, most fortunately, in the repressed intensities of inarticulateness in all of the Tyrones. It seems to me a marvel that this can suffice, and in itself probably it could not. But there is also O’Neill’s greatest gift, more strongly present in Long Day’s Journey than it is even in The Iceman Cometh. Lionel Trilling, subtly and less equivocally than it seemed, once famously praised Theodore Dreiser for his mixed but imposing representation of “reality in America” in his best novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. One cannot deny the power of the mimetic art of Long Day’s Journey into Night. No dramatist to this day, among us, has matched O’Neill in depicting the nightmare realities that can afflict American family life, indeed family life in the twentieth-century Western world. And yet that is the authentic subject of our dramatists who matter most after O’Neill: Williams, Miller, Albee, with the genial Thornton Wilder as the grand exception. It is a terrifying distinction that O’Neill earns, and more decisively in Long Day’s Journey into Night than anywhere else. He is the elegist of the Freudian “family romance,” of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us.

BRUCE J. MANN

O’Neill’s “Presence” in Long Day’s Journey into Night

D

uring a performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical drama, the audience seems to sense the presence of the older playwright. He is not seen as a character onstage, where only the 1912 world of the Tyrone (read O’Neill) family is being presented, nor is he really evoked by Edmund Tyrone, O’Neill’s bland version of his younger self. Nevertheless, the audience experiences what seem to be the feelings and point of view of the O’Neill who is composing this work some thirty years after the play’s events. Several commentators have remarked upon this striking effect. “The consciousness of the playwright broods over” the play, according to Travis Bogard: “In the theatre, the suffering of the playwright is more real, if that is possible, than that of his characters.”1 Robert Brustein also writes that “There is a fifth Tyrone involved in [Long Day’s Journey]—the older Eugene O’Neill.”2 Little attention, however, has been given to the means by which this effect is achieved, and the reason for it. I would argue that the seeming presence of the aging playwright arises both from our knowledge that the older, more mature O’Neill is the play’s author/narrator and from subtle yet insistent patterns in the text itself that emerge during a performance or reading to suggest the narrator and his stance. O’Neill’s reason for creating such a complex dramatic texture stemmed from his need to achieve in drama what From Theatre Annual 43 (1988): 15–30. © 1988 by Theatre Annual.





Bruce J. Mann

had hitherto been attempted only in prose narrative and poetry, a ‘creative autobiography.’ This genre, with its specific conventions, mandates the inclusion of the older autobiographer/narrator in the world of the work. In Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams uses the term ‘creative autobiography’ to refer to modern works, such as Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, whose antecedents include St. Augustine’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In these autobiographies, the author’s life is presented “not . . . as a simple narrative in past time but as the present remembrance of things past.”3 Consequently, as Abrams notes in his discussion of The Confessions, there are “two distinct selves in the book—‘what I once was’ and ‘what I now am’;”4 hence, the younger Augustine coexists in The Confessions with the more mature Augustine. The function of these two selves becomes apparent from Abrams’ definition of a creative autobiography: . . . the more-or-less fictional work of art about the development of the artist himself, which is preoccupied with memory, time, and the relations of what is passing to what is eternal, is punctuated by illuminated moments, or “epiphanies;” turns on a crisis which involves the question of the meaning of the author’s life and the purpose of his sufferings; is resolved by the author’s discovery of his literary identity and vocation and the attendant need to give up worldly involvement for artistic detachment; and includes its own poetic, and sometimes the circumstances of its own genesis.5

Therefore, a creative autobiography, with its simultaneous presence of the author’s two selves, provides a rich self-portrait of the artist by allowing us to experience the older self returning in time to re-enact and meditate upon the discovery by his younger self of his life’s work. Abrams’ definition lays bare O’Neill’s strategy. Long Day’s Journey is his creative autobiography, a study by his older self of his “birth” as a writer from amidst the painful family experiences of his youth; O’Neill sets the play tellingly in 1912, the year he left home to recover in a tuberculosis sanatorium and to embark on his career as a writer.6 His younger self in the play is the naive, immature, two-dimensional Edmund Tyrone, whose illness prompts his mother’s resumption of her drug habit and also sparks a series of heart-wrenching revelations from his family members. While Edmund hardly casts the shadow of O’Neill the playwright, he represents the O’Neill who was buffeted, tormented, and wounded by his family’s arguments, accusations, and liquor and drug consumption. A reluctant quester, Edmund learns, through the revelations, a great deal about his parents and brother and grows to understand the specific reasons that spawned their guilt and anger. Nevertheless, he cannot recognize how his suffering and

O’Neill’s “Presence” in Long Day’s Journey into Night



the confessions of his family members have prepared him to be a successful writer. That perspective is available only to the older O’Neill who views these events from the distance afforded by time. This older self, who we identify in the play as the unseen narrator, is a more mature, knowledgeable, compassionate, and forgiving figure; in the dedication to Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill records that he wrote the play “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”7 Looking back, O’Neill now regards his family members somewhat less as tormentors and more as victims of human fate, and he also sees clearly that they made essential contributions to his career as a writer. He acknowledges those debts, in this play, by showing that from his father’s miserliness came the lesson that he needed to maintain uncompromising artistic standards; that from his self-destructive brother came his introduction to modern writers, especially poets, whose outlooks and styles shaped his own art; and that from his mother in particular came the insight into the nature of human existence that informs his plays, that a human life is a lonely, painful long day’s journey into a night that attracts and repels us. Long Day’s Journey is an act of atonement for his not having sufficiently appreciated what his family did in giving him “the wisdom and power to serve others”8 through his plays. To achieve his considerable aims, O’Neill translates the form of creative autobiography from prose narrative and poetry into drama. How can a play function like The Confessions, The Prelude, and Proust’s massive work? Each of these is written in the single voice of a speaker/narrator who recalls and reenacts an earlier time in his life. How can a drama accomplish this without bringing onstage, as another character, the older narrator? O’Neill’s solution is to turn Long Day’s Journey, perhaps as much as is possible without sacrificing dramatic interaction, into a lyric poem.9 In this way, the play’s speaker/narrator, whose identity in most dramas is masked by the onstage action, seems to emerge as an unseen observer/participant in the play’s world, a consequence of our knowledge that the older O’Neill is the play’s autobiographer/narrator and of the play’s own textual strategies. This speaker/narrator, the persona of the older O’Neill, in effect projects the entire play in his own voice, just like the speaker of a lyric poem. And since his voice is an ultimately lyric one, it makes everything in the onstage world seem highly suggestive, like the words of a lyric poem, so that what we see and hear onstage (the Tyrones’ world of 1912) also reflects the older persona’s state of mind (in the perceived present).10 This voice of the mature O’Neill is a primary source of our feeling that the older playwright is present during a performance of the play, although other, related patterns underscore this effect. One can see how Long Day’s Journey is projected in the speaker/narrator’s voice by examining the speech patterns of the characters. The Tyrones—

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Bruce J. Mann

James, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund—speak in remarkably similar ways; O’Neill has not differentiated their voices very much. When Edmund speaks in anger, his utterance is expressed in virtually the same way as James’ utterances in anger. When Mary is reflective, her voice is not unlike that of the others when they are speaking reflectively. And so forth. Here are excerpts from four speeches, taken from different parts of the play, delivered in the emotional register of anger: Tyrone: That’s a lie! You made no effort to find anything else to do. You left it to me to get you a job and I have no influence except in the theater. Forced you! You never wanted to do anything except loaf in barrooms!11 Mary: It’s you who should have more respect! Stop sneering at your father! I won’t have it! You ought to be proud you’re his son! He may have his faults. Who hasn’t?12 Edmund: It never should have gotten a hold on her! I know damned well she’s not to blame! And I know who is! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you’d spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was born, she’d never have known morphine existed!13 Jamie: What are you trying to do, accuse me? Don’t play the wise guy with me! I’ve learned more of life than you’ll ever know! Just because you’ve read a lot of highbrow junk, don’t think you can fool me! You’re only an overgrown kid! Mama’s baby and Papa’s pet! The family White Hope!14

All four outbursts—with their brief sentences, most punctuated with exclamation points—are delivered in the same manner, as if by the same voice. Again and again throughout the play, speeches echo ones heard earlier, some more obviously than others. For example, after James recalls the praise he once received from the actor Edwin Booth, he tries to remember where he put the written record of this event: . . . I kept it in my wallet for years. I used to read it every once in a while until finally it made me feel so bad I didn’t want to face it any more. Where is it now, I wonder? Somewhere in this house, I remember I put it away carefully—15

His lines not only echo those of Mary in the previous act, they also repeat one sentence exactly. In recalling her wedding gown, Mary says:

O’Neill’s “Presence” in Long Day’s Journey into Night

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It was so beautiful! Where is it now, I wonder? I used to take it out from time to time when I was lonely, but it always made me cry, so finally a long while ago— She wrinkles her forehead again I wonder where I hid it? Probably in one of the old trunks in the attic. Some day I’ll have to look.16

Some speeches, separated by many pages of text, sound almost as if the same person has simply resumed talking about the same subject. For instance, Edmund, discussing his love of fog in the final act, echoes Mary’s comments on fog in the previous act: Mary: (Dreamily) It wasn’t the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. . . . It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.17 Edmund: (Staring before him) The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. . . .18

Yet another example of the unity of the four main characters’ voices can be heard in the following endings of speeches; there is a distinctive rise and fall. The first unit in each (brackets are mine) indicates the rise; the second indicates the fall: Tyrone: . . . [What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—] [Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.]19 Jamie: . . . [I suppose I can’t forgive her—yet. It meant so much.] [I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too.]20 Mary: . . . [But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it.] [None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.]21

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Edmund: . . . [It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish.] [As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!]22

In addition, particular words are shared and repeated by the characters, further enhancing the effect of vocal unity: “gloom/gloomy,” “lonely,” “lie,” “alone,” “fog,” “lost,” “see,” “poison,” “peace/peaceful,” “happy,” “home,” “night,” “forget,” “understand,” “life,” and so on. All of these examples—and many more could be cited—illustrate that each Tyrone does not possess a unique, distinguishable voice. While James, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund appear to be autonomous characters, they are tied inextricably to the master voice of the speaker/narrator who, in effect, speaks the entire work. Although, as audience members, we believe we are hearing only one of the characters speaking, we at least feel the pedal tone suggestive of the older O’Neill’s voice within the utterances. If the narrator is “heard” in the sound patterns of language in the play, he is “seen,” or suggested strongly by, the characters themselves, again by means of a pattern of limited differentiation. The Tyrones may at first appear to be vastly different from each other—James, the professional actor; Mary, the morphine addict whose mind dwells on the past; Jamie, the cynical habitue of Broadway bars and whorehouses; and Edmund, the budding poet. But on closer examination, they are revealed to be variations of the same character. All four are lonely, self-conscious, talkative individuals who are slaves to tormenting memories. A chasm exists for them between their present-day realities and their past and present expectations for themselves. Memories therefore taunt them with their failure to fulfill their hopes and dreams. This sense of failure is felt by James, because, among other things, he sold his artistic promise for the surefire financial success of a poor play; by Mary, because she failed to fulfill her youthful wish to be a nun or a musician; by Jamie, for failing to be the son his father expected him to be; and by Edmund, because he was born, the event his family associates with the onset of his mother’s drug-taking. Every memory reminds them they have fallen short or let down someone else. To avoid these memories, the Tyrones turn to liquor or drugs as escape devices, or they lash out at each other in anger, starting arguments on the same tiresome subjects, such as Jamie’s laziness or Mary’s insistence that this summer house is not a home. The play demonstrates, however, that only by facing their past will they gain the peace afforded by self-knowledge and disarm the damaging power of their memories. Late in Long Day’s Journey, after the waves of arguments have successfully uncovered more and more

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information, the Tyrones are transformed, in turn, into narrators who tell long, highly confessional stories about their pasts. Consequently, James, Mary, and Jamie are able to discharge some of the agony which makes them feel like failures, and Edmund is able to understand and sympathize with them. In their makeup and their mission, the characters emblematize their creator, the older O’Neill. Like his characters, O’Neill is self-conscious, tormented, and obsessed by memories. He too feels a sense of failure, although he realizes, unlike the Tyrones, that such feelings are a condition of being human. Also like James, Mary, and Jamie, he is trying to come to terms with his past (“face my dead at last and write this play,” he writes in the dedication) by narrating this long tale in which he confronts his memories. Thus, as we are watching the Tyrones during their literal journey from day to night, we are “seeing” the narrator as well on his painful journey from the present deep into his past. Both journeys culminate in the play’s stunning final act, during which we feel most strongly the sense of the older O’Neill’s presence. The ambience of the fourth act seems much less realistic than in the earlier acts, and we may feel that we are as much in a mental landscape—the narrator’s consciousness—as in the Tyrones’ fogbound home. In terms of the narrator’s quest, we are located deep in his repository of memories where he now sees that the figures who hurt him also helped him become a writer. To shift our attention from the family’s arguments to the matter of his artistic mission, O’Neill provides many stage signals. For example, references to writers and plays proliferate: Swinburne, Wilde, Kipling, Rossetti, Dowson, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Whitman, Poe, Ibsen, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hamlet, The Bells, Richard III, and Othello. In addition, the family members are now characterized as artists who have failed in some way: James, for not becoming the great Shakespearean actor he could have been; Jamie, for not becoming the writer he wished to be, and Mary, for not becoming a concert pianist (she plays a few bars of Chopin in the play’s final scene). At one point, Edmund even characterizes himself as a writer who will inevitably fall short; he is responding to James’ compliment that Edmund has “the makings of a poet”: The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.23

All these signals, combined with the strategies discussed above and with our knowledge that this is the playwright’s own story, encourage us as

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audience members to view what happens here to Edmund, especially the famous climactic monologues, also in light of the older O’Neill. These monologues are directed at Edmund (except his own) and create moments of epiphany. In each case, Edmund listens, and as each speaker becomes more sympathetic, Edmund grows to understand the motives underlying the speaker’s behavior. The older O’Neill, and the audience, however, see more than can meet Edmund’s eyes. We sense that each family member’s revelation is also a gift, something to initiate and sustain his career as a writer. As a result, Edmund’s epiphanies are also O’Neill’s recognition and grateful acknowledgment of those gifts many years later, something we are privileged to experience by our awareness of his presence in the play. The first monologue comes shortly after Edmund, returning from a walk along the beach, joins James in a card game. James, having had several drinks, becomes garrulous and feels compelled to confess his own failure as an artist, a fact he connects with his penny-pinching ways. He explains that his beginnings turned him into a miser who bought the rights to a play that, while making him wealthy, destroyed his acting career: That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. They were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. . . . Bitterly What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth— Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.24

With the telling of his story, a deep connection is made. “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa,” Edmund replies. “I know you a lot better now.”25 In re-experiencing this moment, the older O’Neill sees that his father’s artistic failure became a lesson for him never to compromise the standards of his art. Drunken Jamie’s monologue, delivered because Jamie knows Edmund will be leaving soon for the sanatorium, shows Edmund that his hero-worship of Jamie has been misplaced. Jamie exposes his jealousy of Edmund, his self-destructive nature, and his unnatural dependence on his parents, especially his mother. Jamie links his own failures in life to Mary’s inability to stop taking drugs: “I suppose I can’t forgive her—yet. It meant so much. I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too.”26 He explains that while one part of him loves Edmund and wishes him success as a writer, the other part

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hates him because his birth prompted Mary’s drug habit. While these revelations stun Edmund, the narrator balances Jamie’s suffering and hatefulness with his gift for his brother; it was Jamie, we learn, who introduced Edmund to Swinburne, Wilde, and other writers whose works influenced him: And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did! And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you’d write! Hell, you’re more than my brother. I made you! You’re my Frankenstein!27

Throughout the rest of the act, O’Neill has Jamie recite poetry, reminding us of the importance of his contribution to O’Neill’s writing career. Mary’s monologue, the source of the final epiphany, centers on memories of her convent school, when she dreamed of becoming a nun or a concert pianist. Under the influence of a heavy dose of morphine, Mary re-enacts her memories while oblivious to her husband and sons, who have been drinking heavily and watch her with horror. In the previous act, Mary delivered a revelatory monologue in Edmund’s presence; hence, this final-act monologue serves more to highlight the differences between O’Neill’s two selves. Although he understands her motives, Edmund still finds her separateness intolerable and accosts her, his voice taking on “the quality of a bewilderedly hurt little boy:” “Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption!”28 But his plea does not penetrate her “fog,” and he feels rejected by his mother. Looking back at this moment, however, the older O’Neill is more resigned, and he finds a sad beauty in her speech. Listening to her, the narrator and we in the audience realize that Mary is like anyone who finds a gap between life’s realities and one’s youthful expectations and dreams. The older O’Neill understands how the pain of human existence lies behind her desire to escape from reality; and Edmund’s comments earlier, in his own monologue—his desire to travel into a realm “beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams” and his self-characterization as “a stranger who never feels at home” and “who must always be a little in love with death”29—demonstrate that Edmund might have been more forgiving of her loneliness and despair. In terms of O’Neill’s development as a writer, Mary charged his imagination with its theme, the predicament of the modern human being, who feels alone and abandoned (“a stranger who never feels at home”). Mary’s seeming rejection of him made him turn his predicament (which, in fact, was identical to her own) into art. To be a conscious being is to suffer, O’Neill’s work tells us, because one realizes the limitations of being a human and not a god. Humans dream and must fall short of their dreams, and then memories of their dreams and failures haunt them. On the one hand, humans look forward to death (the “night” of the play’s title) because it will end the pain

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and possibly mean a merging with some eternal force; but on the other hand, we fear death, because it is a mystery and means the end of individuality and may be a plunge into a purposeless void. The title of the play encapsulates these sentiments in a five-word lyric poem, emphasizing the importance of the insight provided by Mary’s monologue. From her seeming abandonment of him (and from the other family members), O’Neill gained the impetus and raw material for his artistic mission, chronicling the lives of “us fog people.” Smitty in the early Moon of the Caribbees and Yank in The Hairy Ape are but two of many O’Neill characters who find themselves on a long day’s journey into night. The complexity of this final act is made possible, I have argued, because Long Day’s Journey is a creative autobiography with its author’s two selves present. In his excellent study, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Travis Bogard complains that Edmund does not do justice to the playwright: [Edmund] is a figure from history and one upon whose truthto-life an audience has a right to insist. Yet he . . . emerges as a curiously two-dimensional reflection. . . . It cannot be. If Mary and Tyrone and Jamie are “true,” then Edmund should be equally so. If the characters in the play are “what the past has made them,” then Edmund’s past is of grave concern, as are the ambitions and desires that will move him on in the future. The past, however, is not there as it is with the others. The future is never suggested. He remains a participating observer, a little apart, an eavesdropping creature of the imagination. The truth, whatever it was, is at least distorted.30

Bogard’s comments do not, I believe, take into account the presence of the older persona, who provides the “future” dimension. A three-dimensional portrait of O’Neill, radiant with the truth an autobiography can deliver, emerges from the tension and contrast between Edmund, at the outset of his career, and the playwright’s older persona, experienced as a presence. O’Neill’s strategy is subtle, the rendering of his narrator not as an onstage character but as a ghostly aura. In Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, another creative autobiography, the playwright’s slightly older persona appears onstage as a narrator named Tom, who presents the play as a set of memories (Williams’ given name was Thomas Lanier Williams). Tom the narrator speaks calmly in a sad, poetic voice, unlike the angry, struggling Tom who is a character within the memory play. This contrast between the two selves of the playwright allows us to see that while Tom has escaped his oppressive home to become a writer, he still feels guilty and trapped. And he owes any of his artistic success to the mother and sister he abandoned; they taught him the power of the imagination. Ei-

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ther self—Tom the narrator or Tom the character—would be insufficient to characterize the playwright, but the interplay provides the complete story. O’Neill’s approach in Long Day’s Journey is similar in general outline, although he chooses not to make his narrator a visible character. Instead, he draws on our external knowledge that he is the narrator and uses suggestive patterns in the onstage story of his younger self to create aural and visual correlatives that manifest the narrator as a vivid presence. While we know that Edmund is an artifice, the narrator is not so easily accounted for, as Tom is. A brilliant effect, it makes us feel that O’Neill’s play reaches beyond the artifice of drama into reality itself.

No t e s   1. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 453, pp. 426–7. Bogard also refers to George Jean Nathan’s comment that “it sometimes paradoxically happens that it is O’Neill, the dramatist as man, rather than his characters and quite apart from them, who agitates and moves an audience.” See The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 195.   2. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1964), p. 355. In the conclusion of his chapter on O’Neill, Brustein writes that O’Neill “has superimposed his later on his earlier self ” although one can distinguish between “the author” (O’Neill) and “the character” (Edmund). Brustein’s argument is not concerned with establishing how we perceive the author’s involvement in the play.   3. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971), p. 75.   4. Ibid., p. 84.   5. Ibid., p. 80.   6. See Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1968), pp. 244–57. The chapter is entitled “Birth of a Playwright.”   7. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1956), dedication page.   8. This phrase is drawn from a discussion, by Joseph Campbell, of the quest motif. See Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 234.   9. Long Day’s Journey has been previously characterized as a “lyric” play, although not in terms of the single-voice effect of the entire text. See, for example, Bogard, Contour in Time, p. 409, and also his introduction to The Later Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Bogard (ed.), Modern Library College Editions (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. xix–xx. 10. Roman Ingarden, in a discussion of lyric poetry, writes: “Objects and states of affairs which are projected in the sentences of a lyric poem belong to the inner life of the lyrical ego or to his environment. This world is, in its basic existential character, an intentional correlate of the attitude and experience of the lyrical subject, although it is considered real in the intention of this subject.” See Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R.

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Olson, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 268. 11. O’Neill, p. 32. 12. Ibid., p. 60. 13. Ibid., p. 140. 14. Ibid., p. 163. 15. Ibid., p. 152. 16. Ibid., p. 115. 17. Ibid., p. 98. 18. Ibid., p. 131. 19. Ibid., p. 150. 20. Ibid., p. 162. 21. Ibid., p. 61. 22. Ibid., pp. 153–4. 23. Ibid., p. 154. 24. Ibid., pp. 149–50. 25. Ibid., p. 151. 26. Ibid., p. 162. 27. Ibid., p. 164. 28. Ibid., p. 174. 29. Ibid., pp. 153–4. 30. Bogard, Contour in Time, p. 435.

LAURIN PORTER

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eorge Cram Cook, a close friend of O’Neill, once remarked upon the playwright’s frequent habit of gazing at himself in the mirror: “You’re the most conceited man I’ve ever known, you’re always looking at yourself.” “No,” O’Neill replied, “I just want to be sure I’m here.”1 To some extent, all of O’Neill’s dramas are mirrors that reflect the protean playwright. The clearest image is found in the directly autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play of “old sorrow, written in tears and blood” (LDJ dedication). Among the last plays he would complete, it was the play he had been preparing to write from the beginning of his career. As he composed Long Day’s Journey, coming to terms with his present by confronting the past, O’Neill once again examined the critical questions that so obsessed him in this phase of his career. The search, now quite directly drawing upon memories of his father, mother, and brother Jamie, all long dead, led him back in time; in composing this play, O’Neill, like so many of his characters from this period, returned to his origins.2 Journey into Night The title of this play suggests from the outset the importance of time. The action, which chronicles a single day in the Tyrone family from morning to midnight, traces in linear fashion its inexorable descent into darkness. From The Banished Prince: Time, Memory, and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill, pp. 79–92, 121–123. © 1988 by Laurin R. Porter.

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The linear aspect of this experience is emphasized in various ways. One obvious instance is the appearance of the fog, which has dispersed with the new morning but gradually sets in again as the day wears on and thickens to an impenetrable blanket by night. The morning sunshine becomes a “faint haziness” (act 2.1) by lunch, increasingly dense by early afternoon (act 2.2), and a thick fog by evening, resembling “a white curtain drawn outside the windows” (act 3). By midnight, we’re told, the “wall of fog appears denser than ever” (act 4). The characters’ reaction to the fog is as noteworthy as the fog itself. Early in the play Mary Tyrone, the mother of Jamie and Edmund, who have joined their parents for the summer at the family’s seaside cottage, mentions that she didn’t sleep well because of the moaning of the foghorn; she is relieved that the fog has lifted. Her attitude, however, changes along with the weather. Though at first she finds the fog dreary and depressing, she begins to welcome it as a place to hide, as does Edmund, who declares in act 4 that the fog was where he wanted to be. This introduces another chronology in the play. As the action unfolds it quickly becomes obvious that something has happened in the past that haunts the Tyrones and has shaped both their individual experiences of life and their relationships to one another. This knowledge is communicated indirectly at first, chiefly by the discrepancy between what seem to be insignificant pleasantries and banter and the paranoid way in which the characters react during these exchanges. When Mary teases her husband James about his snoring early in act 1, for instance, Jamie quickly picks up on the fact that she couldn’t sleep and spent the night in the spare room. At his “uneasy, probing look” Mary becomes anxious and asks him, “Why are you staring, Jamie? Is my hair coming down? It’s hard for me to do it up properly now. My eyes are getting so bad and I never can find my glasses.” At this, Jamie looks away guiltily and says, “Your hair’s all right, Mama. I was only thinking how well you look” (LDJ 20).3 What, we wonder, are they hiding? This question piques our curiosity and holds our attention as the action unfolds; the first time we read or view the play we tend to focus on the unraveling of this mystery. The clues are revealed gradually, so that it is only in act 3 that we discover with certainty what we have suspected for some time, that Mary is a dope addict. She has just resumed her habit after an abstinence of two months, a development that decimates the family’s fragile hopes and dreams. Thus, though earlier Mary complains bitterly about her loneliness and the fact that she has no friends, toward evening she welcomes the obscurity that the fog provides, cutting the Tyrones’ cottage off from the rest of the town and isolating them from curious eyes. Edmund, too, seems relieved that he can lose himself in the fog; the phrase is apt.

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Both of these linear movements in the play, like that of morning to night, underline the irreversible nature of this mode of time. The fog steadily thickens; Mary’s past cannot be escaped.4 It haunts her unrelentingly, the play suggests, until she finally breaks down and succumbs to the morphine. Though at some point both Edmund and James try to persuade her to stop before it’s too late, the action of the play makes it clear that this is not a viable possibility—only what O’Neill was fond of calling a “hopeless hope.” It was already too late when she first became addicted. Mary herself puts it most succinctly. “The past is the present, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (LDJ 87).5 The inescapability of past influences is further emphasized by three related developments in the play: Mary’s regression into the past, the changes in her physical appearance, and the fragmentation of the family that results from her transformation. Mary takes morphine again, the play suggests, because of her anxiety over the likelihood that her favorite son Edmund has contracted consumption, a disease which at that time was nearly always fatal, and which killed her father.6 To escape the pain that this fear brings, a pain she cannot bear, Mary withdraws, via the morphine, into a happier past. Robert C. Lee points out that Mary moves steadily, by stages, in this direction. He writes: [Mary] “retreats in memory from the unmanageable present (1) to the history of her unhappy married life (2) to Edmund’s painful birth and her introduction to drugs (3) to Eugene’s tragic death (4) to her courtship with James Tyrone (5) to her pious convent days.”7 Mary’s increasingly disheveled appearance parallels this disintegration. As the play begins she is dressed simply but elegantly, her hair is arranged “with fastidious care,” and her voice is “soft and attractive” (LDJ 13). By lunchtime, having taken a shot of the “poison,” as James calls it, her eyes have become brighter and a peculiar detachment has crept into her voice and manner. By dinner, Mary is paler and more detached than before. She wears a simple, fairly expensive dress “which would be extremely becoming if it were not for the careless, almost slovenly way she wears it. Her hair is no longer fastidiously in place. It has a slightly disheveled, lopsided look” (LDJ 97). By the play’s final scene, Mary’s regression is complete. Her face now appears youthful, “a marble mask of girlish innocence” (LDJ 170). The elegant dress of act 1 is replaced by a sky-blue dressing gown worn over her nightdress; the painstakingly coiffed hair is now in pigtails. She is paler than ever, and her eyes, now enormous, “glisten like polished black jewels” (LDJ 170). Draped carelessly over one arm, her white satin wedding gown trails along behind. The morphine has served its purpose; Mary has escaped the pain of her present by retreating into the innocence of her past.

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This retreat, in turn, leads to and parallels the third development mentioned earlier, the increasing isolation of the individual family members and the disintegration of the family unit. When we first meet the Tyrones they seem an affectionate, cohesive family. Although the seeds of dissension are buried just below the surface, as Edmund regales the others with a tale about Tyrone’s shiftless tenant Shaughnessy and his taunting of Harker, the Standard Oil millionaire, they momentarily share the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the “insider” (i.e., the Irish) against the “outsider” (the Yankee). From this moment forward, the play begins to move toward the final disintegration of the family. This movement is reflected in the symbolic arrangements O’Neill has prescribed for each of the three family meals, events that mark the passing of time. As the curtain rises, the family has just finished breakfast. Tyrone and Mary enter the living room together, his arm around her waist, and he gives her a playful hug. Soon joined by Jamie and Edmund, the family unites in laughter over Shaughnessy’s “great Irish victory” (LDJ 25). Within a few short hours, this happy scene undergoes a drastic transformation. Mary has given way to the temptation of morphine, a fact which has become obvious to her husband and sons. Although the family remains together physically, each member responds to Mary’s relapse by withdrawing silently from the others. Tyrone “lights a cigar and goes to the screen door, staring out,” Jamie fills a pipe and goes to look out the window at right, and Edmund “sits in a chair by the table, turned half away from his mother so he does not have to watch her” (LDJ 71). By dinnertime, even the pretense of unity has gone by the board. Neither Jamie nor Edmund has returned for supper, and Mary uses the pain in her hands as an excuse to go upstairs and “rest.” As she moves off through the front parlor, James “stands a second as if not knowing what to do. He is a sad, bewildered, broken old man. He walks wearily off through the back parlor toward the dining room” (LDJ 123). Their final reunion at the end of act 4, when Mary, trancelike, rejoins the men at midnight, becomes a mockery of the closeness suggested by the opening scene. These linear features of the play are subtly reinforced by a strategy similar to one already encountered in both A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, having to do with patterns of cultural assimilation. O’Neill, as has been frequently observed (most notably by critics like Raleigh and Chothia), is extremely accurate in his depiction of cultures and dialects, which in his late plays are primarily Irish and New England Yankee. Long Day’s Journey into Night is no exception. The Tyrones, their maid Cathleen, and even the neighbor Shaughnessy tell the story of Irish immigrants in America. While this is interesting in and of itself, as we regard the characters not just as individuals, but also as representative stages of assimilation into the American mainstream, we see still another instance of the impact of linear time.

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As is so often the case, the first generation immigrant (here, James Tyrone) remains proud of his heritage and recalls the “old country” with fondness, while subsequent generations typically renounce the old customs and strive for complete integration into the new society. Thus, when Jamie berates his father for his “Irish bog-trotter idea” that consumption is fatal, Tyrone snaps back, I have every hope Edmund will be cured. And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland! You’re a fine one to sneer, with the map of it on your face! Jamie: Not after I wash my face. (LDJ 80)

The exchange is typical (and, like many in the play, is taken from real life).8 The various generations’ response to their Irish heritage can also be observed in their language. Cathleen represents the Irish immigrant fresh from the shores of the old country. Described as a “buxom Irish peasant . . . with a red-cheeked comely face, black hair and blue eyes,” she is “amiable, ignorant, clumsy” (LDJ 51). Supplied with a generous stock of Irish aphorisms and superstitions, she has a ready response for all situations. At Mary’s mention of fog, Cathleen notes, “They say it’s good for the complexion” (LDJ 98); a reference to James’ snoring brings, “Ah, sure, everybody healthy snores. It’s a sign of sanity, they say” (LDJ 99). The foghorn reminds her of a banshee;9 “bad cess to it,” she adds (LDJ 98). Her attitude toward alcohol is also typically Irish. Like Bridget, Cathleen “loves her drop.” She views Tyrone’s drinking as “a good man’s failing,” insisting that she “wouldn’t give a trauneen for a teetotaler. They’ve no high spirits” (LDJ 101). Yet—also typically Gaelic—she can just as easily become primly virtuous, as she does when she tells Edmund, “I’d never suggest a man or a woman touch drink, Mister Edmund. Sure, didn’t it kill an uncle of mine in the old country” (LDJ 52). Cathleen, then, represents the untutored peasant, complete with Irish brogue, syntax, and lexicon. The next level of assimilation is represented by James, a first-generation immigrant. To succeed as a Shakespearean actor, we are told, he got rid of an Irish brogue so thick “you could cut [it] with a knife” (LDJ 150). Although he has left his brogue behind, he still lapses into an occasional Irish phrase or cadence. Early in act 1 he compliments Mary “with Irish blarney” (LDJ 28); upon hearing Jamie’s late arrival in act 4, he scowls, “That loafer! He caught the last car, bad luck to it” (LDJ 154). All Irish traces have disappeared from the speech of Mary, a secondgeneration immigrant, though she still sometimes laughs with an “Irish lilt” (LDJ 28). Jamie, on the other hand, has not only erased all Irish elements from his speech; he has replaced them with a peculiarly American speech pattern—the patois of Broadway. This is decried not only by Tyrone, but by

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Edmund as well, representing still another sociological, if not biological, generation. When, for example, Jamie responds cynically to Mary’s relapse into addiction, Edmund “scornfully parod[ies] his brother’s cynicism”: “They never come back! Everything is in the bag! It’s all a frame-up! We’re all fall guys and suckers and we can’t beat the game!” (LDJ 76). Their altercation is broken up by James, who responds, Shut up, both of you! There’s little choice between the philosophy you learned from Broadway loafers, and the one Edmund got from his books. They’re both rotten to the core. You’ve both flouted the faith you were born and brought up in—the one true faith of the Catholic Church—and your denial has brought nothing but selfdestruction! (LDJ 77)

The profile of each generation emerges in sharp relief: James relies on “the one true faith of the Catholic Church”; Jamie substitutes the lifestyle of Broadway, with its American values of money and fame and flashy clothes; Edmund turns to philosophy and literature, to Nietzsche and the Decadents. Even the pattern of literary allusions documents their differences. James, the traditionalist, quotes only Shakespeare (who, of course, was an “Irish Catholic”). Jamie, next in line, mixes allusions to Shakespeare with references to the Decadents—Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde; whatever the source, his quotations are used as weapons against his father. While Tyrone’s Shakespearean quotations are primarily moralistic aphorisms (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings”), Jamie’s are either sarcastic (“The Moor, I know his trumpet,” he says of Tyrone’s snoring) or cruel (“The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!”). Twice he quotes the villainous Iago. He is not of Tyrone’s generation; as a “modern,” Jamie has his own taste in literature (e.g., the Decadents). However, his use of Shakespeare suggests that he has not completely broken away from his father’s influence, although he turns Tyrone’s own tradition against him. Edmund, representing still another generation, quotes only Nietzsche, whom Jamie has not read, and the Decadents.10 Thus each character in Long Day’s Journey functions simultaneously as an individual and the representative of a different generation, though of course, literally, there are only three immigrant generations in the play.11 This insistence upon linear time—seen variously in the steadily encroaching fog, Mary’s regression into the past and physical deterioration, the breakdown of the family unit, and the pattern of cultural assimilation that emphasizes the passing of successive generations—makes sense when we understand that each of the Tyrones locates either some ideal or lost ideal in the

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past. Thus, the moving hand becomes their arch enemy, as it distances them from that moment of peace, happiness, and integration. These ideal moments, in which opposites were cancelled out and everything seemed possible, are revealed in act 4 as the play builds to its climax. For James, life reached its apex in 1874 when Edmund Booth, the great Shakespearean actor, said to the stage manger of Tyrone’s acting, “That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did!” (LDJ 150). At that point, James tells Edmund in his midnight confession, “I had life where I wanted it!” The crest of his happiness included Mary: “Her love was an added incentive to ambition,” he says. For a brief period he was able to integrate his profession and his family life, opposites that would never be reconciled again. Shortly thereafter he was corrupted by the easy money and sure success of The Count of Monte Cristo.”12 “What the hell was it I wanted to buy,” he wonders, “that was worth—Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets” (LDJ 150). But of course, regrets and memories are all that are left him. Jamie’s moment is not that of an ideal realized, but of one lost. Just before his confession to Edmund, he describes the time he discovered his mother “in the act with a hypo.” Before that, he says, he “never dreamed any women but whores took dope!” (LDJ 163). His discovery changes his entire perspective on life, and he longs to return to his former innocence. This helps explain why it is so desperately important to Jamie that Mary “beat the game.” If she can remain abstemious, he can once again believe in her innocence—and hence, in his own: “I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too” (LDJ 162), he says. Mary associates her ideal moment with the day of her wedding. At that moment opposites were reconciled and dreams were within reach. But it is an experience that can never be repeated. Her attempts to recreate this past can only be accomplished by totally divorcing herself from reality and disappearing into a morphine fog, at disastrous cost to her family. The culmination of act 4—in fact, of the entire play—is Mary’s reunion with the family around the living room table, an ironic parody of the happy scene which began their long journey. Throughout the play, Mary has been looking for something she has lost. Although this is imaged in her lost glasses (she cannot see herself accurately), she is actually searching for her lost innocence, associated with her convent days and her desire to be a nun. Yet in an equally real sense, Mary finds fulfillment and joy in her role as mother. “She was never made to renounce the world,” Tyrone tells Edmund. “She was bursting with health and high spirits and the love of loving” (LDJ 138). Both needs coalesce in the figure of the Virgin Mother. In the final scene, Mary is wearing a sky-blue dressing gown, a color associated with the Blessed Virgin. Her braids imply her youthful innocence; her wedding gown suggests her potential motherhood—and even recalls the security she

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associates with her father, who would spare no expense to make her happy. All her desires converge in this moment. Edmund’s ideal is also embodied in an experience which he tries to recapture, but one which differs significantly from that of the others. The ideals of his parents and older brother have both individual and familial components. James’s includes fame as a Shakespearean actor and contentment as a husband, Mary’s is a wish for chastity and motherhood, and Jamie’s combines a desire for self-sufficiency (i.e., independence from his alcoholism) with a dependent, childlike relationship with his mother. All three, of course, are irresolvably contradictory. Edmund’s ideal, on the other hand, does not include the family as a whole or depend upon any of its members individually. The moments of transcendence that he experiences take place when he is alone with the sea—once on the bowsprit of a square rigger late at night, once in the crow’s nest during a dawn watch, other times while swimming or lying alone on the beach. Indeed, it is the vicious cycle of family disintegration that drives him out onto the beach in the first place. The familial component, then, is clearly missing in his ideal. For the essence of these moments is a merging with the elements, a phenomenon he describes in this celebrated passage: I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it [the sea], and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. (LDJ 153)

Unable to experience unity with his family, Edmund seeks union with the cosmos.13 Another significant difference is that Edmund’s ideal moments can be repeated. Unlike the ideals of the other Tyrones, which are experienced at a specific point in the past and are therefore irretrievable, Edmund’s transcendent moments seem to hold out hope for the future, since they are repeatable. This potential, however, is ironically mocked by Edmund’s consumption, which threatens to rob him of life itself. Thus for Edmund, too, time is the enemy. Although the specific components of these ideals differ for each of the characters, for both Mary and James, the high point of life is forever past; each new day serves only to remove them ever further from their ideals. For Jamie, lost innocence also resides in the past. Edmund seems capable of

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reexperiencing his ideal moments with nature, but the hourglass is emptying; his time is running out. Memory: A Return to the Past As memory lures these characters back into the past in an effort to return to their beginnings, to reexperience paradise lost, time turns on itself and becomes cyclic, and their constant awareness of the past takes another shape. Suffering intensely from the vague, nameless guilt associated with their lost ideals,14 they lash out at each other in an endless round of guilt-accusationremorse-forgiveness-and-counterattack. Nearly every incident of the play provides an instance of this pattern.15 An altercation between Tyrone and Jamie is typical. At first, Tyrone is defensive about sending Edmund to Dr. Hardy. Then he attacks Edmund for “deliberately ruin[ing] his health by the mad life he’s led ever since he was fired from college.” When he adds, “Now it’s too late,” Jamie jumps on his father’s “bog-trotter” ideas about consumption. Tyrone counterattacks, alleging that Jamie’s adverse influence on Edmund is the real cause of his illness. Now it is Jamie’s turn to be defensive. He admits he “did put Edmund wise to things,” but suddenly becomes indignant and insists that he loves Edmund and would do anything for him. Tyrone in turn is mollified and retracts his accusation, but soon the cycle recurs, this time with Tyrone attacking Jamie’s “Broadway and bourbon” lifestyle. It is painfully obvious that these same battles have been waged before and will be fought again. The pattern is so deeply ingrained that they can even anticipate each other’s lines. When Tyrone gives Edmund ten dollars for carfare and Edmund is temporarily at a loss for words, James says, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is—!” and Edmund replies, “ ‘To have a thankless child.’ I know. Give me a chance, Papa. I’m knocked speechless” (LDJ 89). Later, when Tyrone quotes Lear’s “Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows!” Jamie responds, “I could see that line coming! God, how many thousand times—!” (LDJ 32–33). Yet he is guilty of the same kind of repetition. When Jamie refers to Tyrone as “Old Gaspard,” Edmund snaps irritably, “Oh, shut up, will you. I’ve heard that Gaspard stuff a million times” (LDJ 158). To reinforce the impact of this repetitious, interchangeable dialogue, O’Neill puts nearly identical lines in the mouths of different characters. Late at night, for instance, mulling over Tyrone’s crimes against Mary, Edmund says to his father, “Jesus, when I think of it I hate your guts!” (LDJ 141). Minutes later, Jamie says the same thing to Edmund. The Tyrones don’t even need each other to carry on an argument; each is so consumed by guilt that he can play both parts. When Tyrone praises Edmund’s success as a reporter, for instance, Jamie’s jealous response is typical:

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A hick town rag! Whatever bull they hand you, they tell me he’s a pretty bum reporter. If he weren’t your son— Ashamed again. No, that’s not true! They’re glad to have him, but it’s the special stuff that gets him by. Some of the poems and parodies he’s written are damned good. Grudgingly again. Not that they’d ever get him anywhere on the big time. Hastily But he’s certainly made a damned good start. (LDJ 36)16

These interactions recur because none of the Tyrones can respond to the present moment per se. The present always includes all the pressure of the past. To a certain extent, of course, that is true for everyone; from this perspective no individual moment is really totally new. Because for the Tyrones the good is defined by something irretrievable, however, no present experience can ever be fully satisfactory. Thus they not only react in terms of past grudges, betrayals, and suspicions; they try—albeit unknowingly—to escape present guilt by finding a scapegoat (the accusational cycles) or, as in act 4, an answer to what went wrong. This sets up a downward spiral, since movement away from the ideal can only serve to intensify individual pain and isolation as they lash out at one another in accusation and counteraccusation. The relationship of morning to night and clear skies to fog parallels this movement and compounds its implications. Although the movement of day to night suggests a linear paradigm, we know that the night will produce yet another morning; so also, with the fog and sunny skies. Neither travelling forward in time nor circling back via memory, in the last analysis, will make a significant difference. Paradise Lost: Confession as Escape from Time Throughout the play the downward spiral carries the Tyrones through steadily expanding cycles of guilt. As morning advances toward night, the accusations grow increasingly bitter. The passing of time simply intensifies these effects, and, with the exception of Mary’s temporary anodyne, all efforts to escape by retreating into the past are doomed to failure. The same movement structures Mourning Becomes Electra, the trilogy which O’Neill patterned on the Oresteia. As the Mannons endure the tragic consequences of the family curse, the cycle of love, infidelity, and murder repeats itself with each generation. The play ends with Orin Mannon’s suicide and his sister Lavinia’s self-immolation in the family manor, “living alone . . . with the dead . . . until the curse is paid out.”17 In Mourning O’Neill traces the consequences of guilt to its final desperate conclusion; there are no outs.

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Long Day’s Journey, however, entertains an alternative to the grim anagogue of the earlier play. While acts 1 through 3, which reveal a situation as guilt-ridden and hopeless as that of the Mannons, seem to be heading toward a similar conclusion, with act 4 the pattern changes, suggesting for the first time the possibility of hope. That this act is substantively different from the previous three is evident in the fact that for the first time, the characters are able to get beyond their deeply ingrained patterns of attack and counterattack and actually communicate with one another. James reveals his long-lost dream of being a great Shakespearean actor and his disillusionment with his misspent life, Edmund tries to explain his mystical experiences at sea, Jamie reveals his deepseated ambivalence toward his younger brother and his despair at discovering his mother’s addiction. The astonishing thing about all this is that they actually listen to one another and that this listening allows new insights. For the first time in the play, new ground is broken, suggesting that perhaps the tyranny of the past can at last be challenged, even overcome. Again, this potential breakthrough is presented in a ritual. With the confessions mentioned above, new insights and potentially, at least, fresh beginnings seem within reach. Thus, after Tyrone admits that his artistic ambitions were corrupted by his desire for financial security, Edmund, we are told, is “moved” and “stares at his father with understanding.” “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa,” he says. “I know you a lot better now” (LDJ 151). Jamie’s confession is equally revealing, as he admits his long-standing jealousy and even hatred of his younger brother. “Gone to confession,” he drunkenly concludes. “Know you absolve me, don’t you, Kid?” (LDJ 167). Morphine has taken Mary to a stage of childhood innocence that precludes the need for a formal confession, but her final speech performs the same function by allowing us to understand her lost ideal and her corresponding sense of guilt. The Tyrones’ willingness to at last confess their own guilt instead of merely accusing one another seems to hold out hope that the cycle of recrimination can be broken. This is, as we have seen, precisely the function of ritual—to allow the participant to begin life anew. Confessing one’s sins to a representative of God who is authorized to wipe the slate clean and reestablish harmony with the cosmos is a ritual that, for the believer, recapitulates Christ’s mediation between God and man. The past, present, and future of both the individual and humanity at large are thus contained in this reconciliation of the human and the divine. Further, both linear and cyclic modalities of time are operative in that the participant realizes that in spite of the sincerity of his/her confession, at some future point in time (the linear dimension) s/he will again need absolution and the ritual will be repeated (the cyclic modality). It is also important to note that confession includes both individual and communal dimensions. As the sins of the individual are forgiven, he or she is reunited with the Christian community, the family of believers.

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This accounts for the stirrings of hope we feel during the events of act 4. As first James and then Jamie make their confessions to Edmund, revealing their lost dreams and the sense of diminishment they have experienced since that loss (complicated for Jamie by his jealousy of Edmund, which he also confesses), we begin to hope that the insights these revelations make available will lead to a renewed unity among the Tyrones. But with Mary’s final entrance, a symbolic revelation, as we have said, of her lost ideal, it is clear that the confessional ritual has failed. As the curtain rings down, the Tyrones remain locked in time; nothing has changed. The ritual’s redemptive potential is not realized for at least two reasons. In the first place, Edmund, who serves as the principal confessor, does not qualify as priest. According to Catholic doctrine, the priest as healer and “ministering spirit” (Hebrews 1:14) must first belong to the community himself. He can only act for the Christian family as one of its members, equally in need of the ritual’s healing process. But unlike the other Tyrones, whose ideals all include both individual and familial components, Edmund’s ideal is exclusively individual. His transcendental moments can only be experienced when he is alone with nature. In fact, insofar as they require an abdication of individuality, they actually represent a kind of death wish. He describes the experience to James as becoming “the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide” (LDJ 153). The final image is particularly revealing in this regard. The seaweed, anchored firmly yet swaying in the tide, replicates the condition of the fetus in amniotic fluid. Whether a death wish or a desire to return to the womb (which come to much the same thing), Edmund’s ideal disqualifies him as priest-confessor; he cannot grant absolution since, in terms of his desires, at any rate, he is not a full-fledged member of this community. A second and perhaps more significant reason concerns the confessions themselves. We have said that each of the confessions is the source of new information, for the characters as well as the audience. For the first time we learn what has caused the vicious cycles of acts 1 through 3; we get a momentary glimpse of the Tyrones’ past and can finally comprehend the agonies of this long day. However, these new insights do not remove the problem or even relieve the pain. In the final scene, when Edmund reaches out for Mary, telling her that his consumption has been confirmed, she remonstrates gently but impersonally that he must not touch her since she hopes to become a nun. The Tyrones’ confessions have not led to forgiveness and reintegration; the family remains hopelessly shattered, its members isolated from each other as well as from the outside world. The ritual fails because, although the Tyrones share their lost ideals with one another in this final scene, one which is fraught with religious language and presented as a confession, they do not regard what they have done as

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requiring absolution. Unlike Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten, they are not so much confessing sins as they are revealing lost hopes. This varies somewhat from character to character, as we would expect. When James acknowledges his ambition to be a great Shakespearean actor, a goal which was subverted by the easy success of Monte Cristo, he simply wonders aloud, with a tinge of sadness, what it was he wanted to buy that was worth so much. Jamie, who acknowledges his ambivalence toward his younger brother, does confess in the strict sense of that word (hence, the greatest concentration of religious language is seen in his speech). But even more fundamental to our understanding of Jamie is his description of the first time he caught Mary taking morphine, the moment that left his youthful innocence irrevocably shattered. Being cast from the kingdom, like Simon’s banished prince, he wants to drag Edmund down with him—thus, his “poisoning” of his younger brother. Edmund’s transcendental experiences and Mary’s tacit confession of her dashed dreams as she trails her wedding dress behind her all bespeak not so much a sense of wrongdoing for which they feel remorse as a sense of regret at lost potential. Moreover, none of them seems to see these ideals as destructive. James can regret being seduced by fame and fortune, for instance, but he never questions the validity of his ambition itself nor recognizes the demands it has made on his family. Jamie’s searching for the warm haven of happiness he left behind leads him only to Fat Violet, yet he never questions the value of the search nor seeks a suitable adult replacement for youthful innocence. Mary cannot see the destructiveness of her desire to be a nun, though this is graphically demonstrated to the audience as she rebuffs Edmund’s appeal for affection on these grounds, nor can Edmund acknowledge the death wish inherent in his desire for a mystical union with the cosmos. Because the characters don’t see their lost ideals as potentially destructive, indeed, because they aren’t so much seeking absolution as they are sharing their disappointment at the hand life has dealt them, these confessions are not efficacious. They are not even confessions, in the strict sense of the word. Mary cannot “go to confession,” for instance, since she is not even in the present at the end of the play. Unlike Jim Tyrone in A Moon, for whom the past and present overlap, Mary is completely in the past at this point. The “sin” for which she might feel the need for forgiveness, the relapse into her addiction, is committed in the present, but she has left the present behind; she resides in the past, beyond the reach of this fact. For her, ironically, the present is memory, dimly recalled, if at all. As she plays her stiff-fingered Chopin waltz, her rheumatism reminds us of her encroaching age and its incumbent limitations, but Mary appears oblivious to this fact. When Edmund grabs her and cries that he has consumption, not a summer cold, we’re told that “for a second he seems to have broken through to her. She trembles and her

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expression becomes terrified” (LDJ 174). But then she calls out, “No!” and instantly “she is far away again.” At this point, when she makes her comment about hoping to be a nun, we receive the full impact of the destructiveness of her retreat. This is not the ritual return which regenerates, but its exact opposite: a return that destroys. Thus the Tyrones remain trapped in time, and the spiral continues downward. As the play ends, Mary is hopelessly beyond the reach of the three men who love her. The family, though physically united around the table, is tragically shattered. Their sacramental wine is a bottle of whiskey that fails to get them drunk; though they are together, there is no real communion. This hopeless conclusion is foreshadowed metaphorically in Edmund’s long, poetic prelude to his confession. Their card game interrupted by the sounds of Mary roaming the upstairs room, he says to James: Yes, she moves above and beyond us, a ghost haunting the past and here we sit pretending to forget, but straining our ears listening for the slightest sound, hearing the fog drip from the eaves like the uneven tick of a rundown, crazy clock—or like the dreary tears of a trollop, spattering in a puddle of stale beer on a honky-tonk table top! (LDJ 152)

His language is revealing. Both similes contain water images: the fog and the “dreary tears of a trollop.” Throughout the play, fog has been a symbol of isolation, as it is in the speech immediately following where Edmund speaks of being “alone, lost in the fog . . . stumbl[ing] on toward nowhere.” Here the dripping of the fog is equated with the “uneven tick of a rundown, crazy clock.” Although the clock is “uneven” and “rundown,” time still runs its course, even within the isolation that the fog provides. The reason is revealed in the next simile, where the dripping of the fog becomes the “dreary tears of a trollop, spattering in a puddle of stale beer.” The trollop suggests Mary, the mother-whore,18 whose footsteps upstairs have occasioned the speech. The juxtaposition of the trollop, the fog, and the clock explains the Tyrones’ desperate need to escape the present. The effects of Mary’s addiction and the family’s implicit guilt are intensified by the passing of time (the clock) and lead to individual isolation and alienation (the fog). Edmund has been able to escape in his transcendent experiences by the sea. The isolation suggested by the fog and the trollop’s tears contrast with the feeling of belonging that he experiences while at sea (a third water image). “I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy,” he says. He is able, momentarily, to transcend time. This, however, does not provide a permanent solution. It is no coincidence that the connotations of other water images in the play are destructive,

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associated with drinking and the use of drugs. The male Tyrones, for instance, use whiskey to “drown their sorrows.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Jamie complains that he’s “had enough to sink a ship, but can’t sink” (LDJ 156). When Mary enters the living room in the final scene in her morphine fog, Tyrone says, “I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this” (LDJ 174). Whether the protective isolation of the fog, the forgetfulness of alcohol or drugs, or the mystical merging with the sea, the alternatives associated with water images are not viable ones. So the confessions do not prove efficacious, in the last analysis. O’Neill, unflinchingly honest, refuses to force a resolution that does not emanate from the action itself; he will not impose a theophany upon the drama that the play itself does not suggest. Following his vision unflinchingly to its conclusion, O’Neill leaves the Tyrones in darkness. The bitter cycles will continue as before; the future holds no hope. Early in the play Mary says, “The past is the present . . . it’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (LDJ 87). O’Neill’s final tableau of the four haunted Tyrones is one of despair, a long journey into night.

No t e s   1. Sheaffer, Playwright, 240.   2. For information on the composition history of Long Day’s Journey see Floyd, At Work, 281–97 and Judith E. Barlow, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: From Early Notes to Finished Play,” Modern Drama, 22 (March 1979): 19–28. Barlow’s article traces the changes in characterization of each of the four Tyrones through successive drafts. In each case the final treatment is more sympathetic than the original one; “the act of composition apparently was, for O’Neill, a lesson in compassion,” she concludes (19). For further detail, see chapter 2 of Barlow’s Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985).   3. For a psychoanalytic analysis of the Tyrones’ interactional patterns, see Stephen A. Black, “The War Among the Tyrones,” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, 11 (Summer–Fall 1987): 29–31.   4. As we shall see shortly, however, this linear movement, like that of morning to night, will ultimately turn on itself and become cyclic.   5. It is an interesting biographical detail that, although most of the other elements of any importance in Long Day’s Journey correspond with the facts of O’Neill’s life as his biographers have been able to construct them, the biography does not corroborate this position. Ella O’Neill did, in fact, finally overcome her addiction in a manner symbolically similar to the one described at the end of act 2: she returned to a convent. After her stay there, she remained abstemious until her death in 1922. It would seem that as he writes this play the critical reality for O’Neill is not the fact that his mother overcame her addiction eventually but that she was addicted at all.   6. Although Eugene’s birth and its painful aftermath may have been the cause of Ella O’Neill’s addiction (and there is some reason to doubt even that), his bout with consumption did not occasion her return to morphine. This suggests,

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perhaps, that the guilt O’Neill felt for her addiction is exaggerated out of proportion to the facts. Ironically, it may also indicate a kind of wish fulfillment. In the play, Mary clearly favors Edmund over Jamie and is so distraught over her younger son’s illness that she turns to morphine to escape her pain. In real life, this does not seem to be the case. The biography suggests that Ella was actually closer to Jamie than Eugene and seemed almost indifferent to the playwright’s illness—or at least, certainly not as concerned as the play suggests.   7. Robert C. Lee, “Eugene O’Neill’s Remembrance: The Past is the Present,” Arizona Quarterly, 23 (Winter 1967): 296.   8. See Sheaffer, Playwright, 126.   9. According to Irish folklore, the wail of a banshee foretold the impending death of a family member; a banshee, I might add, is a female spirit. 10. For further discussion of O’Neill’s use of allusions in Long Day’s Journey, see Chothia, 175–81. 11. This phenomenon in the play is borne out in biographical fact. James O’Neill, a first-generation immigrant, was born in Ireland; Ella, second generation, was born in America of Irish parents; and the two sons, representing still another generation, were born in the United States, of American parents. 12. Although the play is not mentioned by name, this is clearly the melodrama Mary refers to on page 105. 13. At the end of his monologue, Edmund grins wryly and says, “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” (LDJ 153–54). This is as true of the playwright as it is of Edmund. O’Neill is a “stranger who never feels at home,” one “always . . . a little in love with death” (hence his switching names with his dead brother in the play). The guilt which he experienced as a result of Ella’s addiction could only be stilled in a transcendent mingling with the universe and concomitant abdication of identity or in the ultimate loss of identity—death. 14. One of the reasons this play speaks so movingly to American audiences is that, like the Tyrones, we experience a vague, nameless guilt associated with a lost ideal. The American dream stems from a collective vision of a past in which all opposites were reconciled; in the moment that informs this ideal, individualism and brotherhood, spiritual and material wealth, progress and traditionalism coexisted in some miraculous fashion. This “radical innocence,” to quote Ihab Hassan, is a “property of the mythic American Self ” and explains why, according to psychologists and cultural analysts like Rollo May, America is such a nation of self-haters: a disjuncture between the dream and the reality is inevitable from the moment it enters the stream of history. As a tale of lost innocence, then, Long Day’s Journey into Night recapitulates a major motif in the American experience (see Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961] 6). 15. What I call “accusational cycles” is similar to Manheim’s “language of kinship.” 16. This same pattern of accusation–retraction is found in O’Neill’s personal letters. The following example is taken from a letter written to Agnes Boulton shortly after he left her for Carlotta Monterey: “And won’t you be just too tickled

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to death to feel that you can—for the present, anyway—hurt my work! A grand revenge! But maybe I wrong you. If so, I apologize” (Sheaffer, Artist, 298). 17. Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1931) 256. 18. Jamie’s account of his discovery of Mary’s addiction points to this thematic connection; “I’d never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!” he says (LDJ 163). This relationship is reinforced by the parallels between Mary and Fat Violet, Jamie’s consort: both feel they are too fat (Mary has gained twenty pounds), both play the piano, both are lonely. Though at first glance the identification of Mary with prostitutes seems incongruous, biographical facts further substantiate this connection. O’Neill’s mother, though actually named Mary Ellen, at age fifteen dropped “Mary” for “Ellen” and after her marriage switched to the name “Ella,” which from that time forward she used on all her legal documents, including her will (Gelbs 11). Although psychiatrists and critics have suggested that by calling her “Mary” in Long Day’s Journey O’Neill intended to link his mother to the Virgin Mary, stressing symbolically her desire to renounce earthly responsibilities for loftier spiritual concerns, which is likely enough, the name “Mary Ellen” was also a slang expression for an amateur prostitute, a term with which O’Neill was familiar. By using the name Mary, the playwright reminds us that his mother’s given name was not Ella, but Mary Ellen.

MARC MAUFORT

American Flowers of Evil: Long Day’s Journey into Night and Baudelaire

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lthough Eugene O’Neill frequently acknowledged his literary indebtedness to Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Ibsen, he failed to comment on the influence of Charles Baudelaire on his masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night. And yet, the impact of the French poet upon the American dramatist’s late play could hardly be denied as Edmund Tyrone’s quotations from the prose poems “Enivrez-vous” and “Epilogue” reveal. In addition, the documents preserved in the O’Neill collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library indicate that the playwright owned copies of The Flowers of Evil, Little Poems in Prose, and Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals.1 In spite of these indisputable traces of influence, critics, with the notable exceptions of John Henry Raleigh and Edward P. Strickland, have hitherto neglected to examine in great detail the implications of such a literary relationship.2 In this paper, I propose to analyze the Baudelairean echoes which permeate the overall thematic texture of O’Neill’s play. Since the patterns of similarities existing between the works of the two authors do not necessarily reflect a direct influence, I shall use the term “confluence” in order to designate O’Neill’s affinities with Baudelaire. A study of these muted reminders, through a comparison between The Flowers of Evil, Little Poems in Prose, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, will offer an excellent vantage point from which to describe the structural complexity and artistic maturity characterizing O’Neill’s late drama.3 From New Essays on American Drama, edited by Gilbert Debusscher and Henry I. Schvey, pp. 13–28. © 1989 by Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam–Atlanta, Ga.

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I Both O’Neill and Baudelaire develop, in the works under consideration, a double-sided portrait of the artist-poet figure. In a poem such as “L’Albatros,” Baudelaire concentrates on an innocent poet, unable to experience freedom within the limits of human society: Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher (p. 31).4 The Poet, like that monarch of the clouds, To arrow and to storm alike defiant, Exiled on earth among the jeering crowds, Walks awkwardly because his wings are giant (p. 17).

Baudelaire subsequently contrasts this idealistic vision of the artist to his morbid caricature of “Le Mauvais Moine,” in which he vehemently debunks the poet’s inability to relate to other human beings: Mon âme est un tombeau que, mauvais cénobite, Depuis l’éternité je parcours et j’habite; Rien n’embellit les murs de ce cloître odieux. O moine fainéant! Quand saurai-je donc faire Du spectacle vivant de ma triste misère Le travail de mes mains et l’amour de mes yeux? (p. 40) Unworthy monk, in my soul’s tomblike cell, I’ve lived, and paced, as long as I can tell. No ornaments these hateful walls embellish. When shall I take, O idle cenobite, The living image of my sorry plight As handiwork that my dulled sight may relish? (p. 27)

A similar motif recurs in Little Poems in Prose, particularly in “La Solitude” (poem XXIII) and “Anywhere Out of the World” (poem XLVII), where Baudelaire again strongly emphasizes the poet’s antagonism towards society. A tension comparable to that which characterizes The Flowers of Evil emerges in Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which Jamie and Edmund

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Tyrone represent opposed facets of O’Neill’s artist figure. Indeed, the two brothers qualify as “failed” poets and writers. Jamie himself identifies the profound link that unites him to Edmund: Hell, you’re more than my brother. I made you! You’re my Frankenstein! . . . And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did! And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that some day you’d write! (p. 144)5

Despite their common love of poetry and literature, Jamie and Edmund nonetheless differ in essential aspects, as their very physical appearance suggests: Jamie, the elder, is 33 . . . the signs of premature disintegration are on him. . . . His nose is unlike that of any member of the family, pronouncedly acquiline. Combined with his habitual expression of cynicism it gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast . . . (p. 16). . . . Edmund . . . is more like his mother. . . . His mouth has the same quality of hypersensitiveness hers possesses. . . . It is in the quality of extreme nervous sensibility that the likeness of Edmund to his mother is most marked (p. 17).

Through his “premature disintegration,” “cynicism,” and “Mephistophelian” cast, Jamie can easily be compared to Baudelaire’s “moine fainéant,” whose soul constitutes a “cloître odieux.” On the contrary, Edmund’s hypersensitiveness strongly recalls Baudelaire’s innocent poet in “L’Albatros,” who feels exiled in our bourgeois materialistic society. The ensuing dramatic action of Long Day’s Journey into Night serves to accentuate the opposition between the two brothers detected in the opening stage directions. Towards the end of the play, Edmund chooses to quote from Baudelaire’s “Epilogue” in order to characterize Jamie’s immoral conduct: Edmund. (Baudelaire) was French and never saw Broadway and died before Jamie was born. He knew him and Little Old New York just the same. . . ‘With heart at rest I climbed the citadel’s Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells’ (p. 115).

By way of contrast, Edmund’s idealism manifests itself in his lyrical descriptions of his former sea adventures. In his ability to experience happiness

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beyond the narrow confines of civilization, he recalls Baudelaire’s poet, who found in the infinite expanses of the skies a shelter against the corruption of the land: I dissolved in the sea . . . I belonged . . . within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the Life of Man, to Life itself! (p. 134).

In Long Day’s Journey into Night as in The Flowers of Evil, one is immediately struck by the resemblance existing between Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s Janus-faced portrait of the artist-poet, alternately presented as a dissolute or innocent character. It is in large part to these poetic oppositions that O’Neill’s characterization in Long Day’s Journey into Night owes it powerful impact. The kinship linking Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s artists also marks itself in their common rejection of the Catholic God, a phenomenon clearly articulated in the French writer’s “Les Litanies de Satan:” Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs Du ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs De l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence! Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l’Arbre de Science, Près de toi se repose, à l’heure où sur ton front Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s’épandront! (p. 211) All praise and glory where you reigned, O Devil, In Heaven above, and at the lowest level Of Hell, where dreams for vanquishment console! Beneath the Tree of Knowledge may my soul Rest near you some day when, above your head, Like a new Temples roof its boughs shall spread! (p. 229)

Similarly, in Long Day’s Journey into Night, the artist criticizes established religious systems, without however readily associating with Satan. Commenting on the behaviour of his two sons, James Tyrone exclaims: “. . . You’ve both flouted the faith you were born and brought up in—the one true faith of the Catholic Church—and your denial has brought nothing but self-destruction.” (p. 66). Thus, it is the negation of religion and its tragic implications, that characterize the predicament of the artist-poet both in The Flowers of Evil and Long Day’s Journey into Night. As atheists, Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s protagonists revel in the evil pleasures of the city, whether Paris or New York. In The Flowers of Evil,

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Baudelaire gives us the most concise expression of this motif in “Le Crépuscule du Soir:” A travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent La Prostitution s’allume dans les rues; Comme une fourmilière elle ouvre ses issues; Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin, Ainsi que l’ennemi qui tente un coup de main; Elle remue au sein de la cité de fange Comme un ver qui dérobe à l’homme ce qu’il mange. (p. 163) Through wind-whipped pools of gas-lit brilliancy, The flames of Harlotry flare in the streets. Like ants, she opens underground retreats, And clears clandestine webs of mazy tracks As foemen burrow for surprise attacks, While in the city’s heart of muck she squirms As in Man’s larder writhe the robber worms. (p. 167)

“Epilogue,” from Little Poems in Prose, offers a similarly gloomy picture of the city. Significantly, Edmund refers to this prose poem in order to describe the New York environment in which Jamie leads a dissolute life: “. . . I saw the city as from a tower / Hospital, brothel, prison and such hells. / Where evil comes up softly like a flower . . . . I love thee, infamous city! . . .” (pp. 115–116). Taking delight in the morbid and immoral atmosphere of the city, Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s poets share unmistakably “fin-de-siècle” characteristics. As prostitution flourishes in the city, it is no wonder that female creatures in all their guises should keep haunting Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s artists. In Baudelaire’s poetic universe, female figures often qualify as whores and vampires: Toi qui, comme un coup de couteau, Dans mon coeur plaintif es entrée; Toi qui, forte comme un troupeau De démons, vins, folle et parée, De mon esprit humilié faire ton lit et ton domaine . . . —Maudite, maudite sois-tu! (“Le Vampire,” p. 67). Thou who, as trenchant as a blade Thrust into my desponding heart,

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As headstrong as some cavalcade Of demons, cam’st with scheming art Within my stricken soul to glide And make thy bed and thy domain, . . . —My curses on thee! Be accursed! (p. 59.)

The French poet, however, also endows his female characters with more innocent features. Typical in this respect is the poem “Réversibilité,” in which an angel-like woman soothes the poet’s sorrows: Ange plein de bonheur, de joie et de lumières, David mourant aurait demandé la santé Aux émanations de ton corps enchanté; Mais de toi je n’implore, ange, que tes prières, Ange plein de bonheur, de joie et de lumières! (p. 84) Angel of joy and brightness and delight, A dying David for his cure might ask That in your body’s aura he might bask; Yet, Angel, I do but your prayers invite, Angel of joy and brightness and delight! (p. 83)

Similarly, in Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill articulates a dichotomous vision of the woman in the lives of his artist protagonists. First, Jamie’s association with Broadway inevitably conjures up the image of the woman as a harlot. Upon hearing of Jamie’s infatuation with a New York whore, Edmund again quotes from Baudelaire’s “Epilogue:” Jamie . . . customers didn’t fall for Vi. . . . Well, that made me feel sorry for Fat Violet, so I squandered two bucks of dough to escort her upstairs. . . . All I wanted was a little heart-toheart talk concerning the infinite sorrow of life (. . .) Edmund “Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.” (p. 140).

But in Long Day’s Journey into Night as in The Flowers of Evil, the poet also conceives of the woman as an angel surrounded by an aura of religious innocence. Mary Tyrone, who were it not for her addiction could provide comfort for the tortured male protagonists of the play, clearly possessed such a degree of purity, as her former wish to become a nun indicates:

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Mary . . . I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth . . . I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, that I had prayed to make me sure, and to find me worthy. I told mother I had a true vision when I was praying in the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the little island in the lake. I said I knew . . . that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent . . . (p. 155).

At one point of her life, then, Mary Tyrone, whose very name suggests her association with the Blessed Virgin, resembled Baudelaire’s “Ange plein de bonheur, de joie, et de lumières.” Whether functioning as symbols of prostitution or of purity, Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s female characters never fail to fascinate the artists of The Flowers of Evil and Long Day’s Journey into Night and exert a powerful influence on their psychological life. If Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s kinship reveals itself in their multifaceted characterization of the poet figure, the thematic substance of The Flowers of Evil, Little Poems in Prose, and Long Day’s Journey into Night also presents interesting elements of confluence. II The American playwright and the French poet adopt a strikingly similar viewpoint towards the concept of time, old age, and death. In The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire sings compellingly of the destructive power of time in “L’Ennemi:” “—O douleur! O douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, / Et l’Obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur / Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!” (p. 41). (O sorrow, sorrow! Time our lifeline gnaws. The Enemy who makes our heart his prey / Feeds and grows stronger on the blood he draws.) (p. 27). In “Spleen”, the idea of death acquires obsessional characteristics. The poet observes that “. . . de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique, / Défilent lentement dans mon âme . . .” (p. 131). (Old hearses without music, without drums, / File slowly through my soul) (p. 131). In Baudelaire’s universe, however, time and death do not solely elicit feelings of morbid terror. In “La Mort des Amants,” physical annihilation evokes peaceful connotations: Nous aurons des lits pleins d’odeurs légères, Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux, Et d’étranges fleurs sur des étagères, Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux. (. . .)

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Et plus tard un Ange entr’ouvrant les portes Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux, Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes. (p. 215) Amid light perfumes we shall lie abed, As tight and snug as in sarcophagi, And on the shelves strange flowers shall be spread Which bloomed for us beneath a fairer sky. (. . .) And then an Angel shall slip through the door, Joyous and loyal, and make light arise From tarnished mirrors and dead coals once more. (p. 231)

Baudelaire’s opposition between the horror suggested by and the yearning for death also pervades Long Day’s Journey into Night. First, as in The Flowers of Evil, time represents a prison from which the Tyrones cannot escape. Mary herself acknowledges this limitation when reproaching her son Edmund for his intolerant attitude towards Jamie: “It’s wrong to blame your brother. He can’t help being what the past has made him. Any more than your father can. Or you. Or I.” (p. 55) Secondly, death is endowed with dark connotations analogous to those which it had received in The Flowers of Evil. Throughout the play, Edmund’s consumption and the possibility of his demise reinforce the tragic mood tearing apart the Tyrone family. On the contrary, Edmund also experiences an intense longing for death reminiscent of “La Mort des Amants.” Telling of his immersion into the fog, he enthusiastically proclaims: “. . . It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost . . .” (p. 113). In a subsequent scene, as Edmund remembers his mystical union with the sea, a comparable emotion re-emerges: “. . . I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” (p. 135) In the poetic universe of both Baudelaire and O’Neill, then, death possesses widely divergent connotations, oscillating between intense rejection or longing. Very often, our two writers’ poet figures, unable to bear the tensions provoked by such conflicting emotions, seek refuge in the unreal world of “pipe-dreams.” The conflict between illusion and reality, which constitutes a central concern of The Iceman Cometh, equally performs an important role in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Although critics have detected the origin of this so-called “pipe-dream” motif in the plays of Ibsen, especially The Wild Duck,6 it nonetheless seems warranted, in view of O’Neill’s explicit reference to

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Baudelaire, to compare his metaphysical reflections on the nature of reality with Baudelaire’s treatment of the dichotomy illusion/reality in The Flowers of Evil. In the artistic universe envisioned by the two authors, poetic illusions possess highly favorable connotations. The artist can identify with these dreams through dependency, i.e., wine addiction, as in Baudelaire’s “Le Vin des Amants:” Aujourd’hui l’espace est splendide! Sans mors, sans éperons, sans bride, Partons à cheval sur le vin Pour un ciel féérique et divin! (. . .) Ma soeur, côte à côte nageant, Nous fuirons sans repos ni trêves Vers le paradis de mes rêves! (p. 186) Space today is brightly lit! Scorning bridle, spur, and bit, Let us mount our fiery wine And ride for Paradise divine! (. . .) Floating side by side, my sister, We shall ride without a rest On my dream-paradise’s quest! (p. 193)

Likewise, in Little Poems in Prose, Baudelaire claims that “pipe-dreams” may prove necessary in order for us to bear the burden of living. In “L’Etranger,” the artist confesses to a friend his profound hate of humanity. The latter rejoins: “—Eh! Qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger,—j’aime les nuages . . . les nuages qui passent . . . là-bas . . . les merveilleux nuages!” (p. 33). (Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds . . . the clouds that pass . . . up there . . . up there . . . the wonderful clouds!) (p. 1). In “Les Projets,” the French poet again reasserts the supremacy of dreams and imagination in a mode reminiscent of “L’Etranger:” J’ai eu aujourd’hui, en rêve, trois domiciles où j’ai trouvé un égal plaisir. Pourquoi contraindre mon corps à changer de place, puisque mon âme voyage si lentement? Et à quoi bon exécuter des projets, puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante? (p. 98). I have possessed three homes today, and was equally happy in all of them. Why should I drive my body from place to place, when my

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soul travels so lightly? And why carry out one’s projects, since the project is sufficient pleasure in itself? (p. 49)

In O’Neill’s dramatic work, one finds a motif similar to that which characterizes “Les Projets,” as the playwright affirms the supreme value of dreams and illusions. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, he identifies alcohol as the means of penetrating into this imaginary universe. He offers us a careful delineation of the effects of imbibation which has marked correspondences to Baudelaire’s wine poems.7 In alcoholic dependency, the Tyrone males seek a shelter against the hardships of existence and attempt in this fashion to forget the terrible plight in which they are entrapped. Mary confesses of her husband: “. . . He has such a good excuse, he believes, to drown his sorrows.” (p. 86) Significantly, it is by quoting from Baudelaire’s “Enivrezvous” that Edmund describes his ability to distance himself from unpleasant reality through alcohol: “Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.” (p. 115). While being drunk, he identifies with the dream-like memories of his former sea adventures (pp. 134–135). Like Baudelaire in “Les Projets,” O’Neill stresses the paramount importance of pipe-dreams in human life: these illusions confer meaning upon Edmund’s earthly experience. Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction constitutes yet another means of escaping into a world of unreality. At the end of the play, the heroine, after absorbing an overdose of morphine, wilfully withdraws into the illusion of past happiness, symbolized by her wedding-gown: . . . Mary appears in the doorway . . . The uncanny thing is that her face now appears so youthful. Experience seems ironed out of it. It is a marble mask of girlish innocence, the mouth caught in a shy smile. Her white hair is braided in two pigtails which hang over her breast. Over one arm, carried neglectfully, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin weddinggown, trimmed with duchesse lace. (p. 150)

Mary’s “pipe-dream,” i.e. her desire to recreate the past, constitutes the only goal of her life. Like Baudelaire’s poet, she attempts to regress into an imaginary universe through dependency, in the form of drug addiction. O’Neill, voicing a metaphysical statement about the necessity of “pipedreams” and illusions comparable to that which Baudelaire articulates in The Flowers of Evil, qualifies as a truly romantic artist dedicated to the value of imagination.

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A specific manifestation of the two writers’ tendency to escape into a world of dreams consists in their kindred passion for the wild beauty of the ocean. Although the sea motif pervading O’Neill’s earlier plays bears marked similarities to the sea symbolism of works by Conrad, Melville, and Whitman, the veiled sea imagery of Long Day’s Journey into Night, evoked by Edmund’s travel reminiscences, exhibits striking points of confluence with Baudelaire’s sea poems. In The Flowers of Evil, the sea is associated with various connotations which prefigure O’Neill’s lyrical depiction of the wonders of the ocean. In the poem “L’homme et la Mer,” the French poet sings of the union of man’s soul with the oceanic environment: Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame, Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer (p. 45). Man—free man!—some day yet you’ll love the sea! The sea, your double, mirrors back your soul Reflected in its billows’ restless roll; Your aching heart shares its vast vacancy (p. 31).

In “l’Invitation au Voyage,” he presents us with a sea leading to idyllic and mysterious countries: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté.” (p. 98) (There, beauty and harmony dwell / Where springs of voluptuousness well.) (p. 99). To this exotic ocean, Baudelaire opposes the comforting sea of “Maesta et Errabunda:” La Mer, la vaste mer, console nos labeurs! Quel démon a doté la mer, rauque chanteuse Qu’accompagne l’immense orgue des vents grondeurs, De cette fonction sublime de berceuse? La mer, la vaste mer, console nos labeurs! (p. 114) The boundless sea consoles us for our toil! What demon gave the sea that raucity, Keyed to the organ-roar of wind’s turmoil, With which our fretfulness to pacify, The boundless sea consoles us for our toil! (p. 115) Finally, in the prose poem “Déjà,” Baudelaire obliquely compares the sea to a deity and underlines its encompassing nature:

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Semblable à un prêtre à qui on arracherait sa divinité, je ne pouvais, sans une navrante amertume, me détacher de cette mer si monstrueusement séduisante, de cette mer si infiniment variée dans son effrayante simplicité, et qui semble contenir en elle . . . les agonies et les extases de toutes les âmes qui ont vécu, qui vivent et qui vivront! (p. 128) I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest whose God has been snatched from him, I could not without heartbreaking bitterness tear myself away from the sea, so monotonously seductive, so infinitely varied in her terrible simplicity and seeming to contain and to represent by all her changing moods, the angers, smiles, humors, agonies and ecstasies of all the souls who have lived, who live, or who will some day live! (pp. 75–76)

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, as in Baudelaire’s poems, the ocean mirrors man’s soul, constitutes a source of exoticism and sensuousness, and represents the matrix of the universe. These qualities can be detected in Edmund’s lyrical description of his former adventures, when at sea, he felt unified with the All, or in Baudelaire’s words, with “. . . les agonies et les extases de toutes les âmes qui ont vécu, qui vivent et qui vivront. . . :” Edmund . . . I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern with the water foaming spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the Life of man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way (p. 134).

In the works of the two writers, then, the sea symbolizes a dream-like shelter against the corruption of modern civilization. But the beautiful images evoked by Baudelaire’s poems or Edmund’s recollections remain confined to the imagination, and therefore qualify as mere illusions and “pipe-dreams.” In Baudelaire’s and O’Neill’s romantic universe, the sea motif serves to epitomize the irretrievably lost happiness of a man divorced from nature, of a creature irremediably entrapped in the tragic predicament of life and death.

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III A skillful portrayal of a “fin-de-siècle” poet at war with God and society; a dichotomous vision of the woman; a profound obsession with death, time, and evil; a concern for the role of illusions and “pipe-dreams” in human life; and, a deep passion for oceanic immensities: these are the multifaceted romantic themes which structure both Long Day’s Journey into Night and Baudelaire’s works.8 These motifs do not, as a rule, reflect direct borrowings from Baudelaire’s poetry on O’Neill’s part. Rather, they indicate the existence of a confluence of vision between the two authors, manifesting itself in parallels in mood and tensions. Ultimately, these echoes stress the intensity of the two writers’ despair about the human predicament. Naturally, considered separately, none of these Baudelairean reminders would suffice to establish a relationship between the two artists. Viewed cumulatively, however, they do justify a comparative study of Baudelaire and O’Neill. O’Neill’s explicit or implicit allusions to the French poet serve to reinforce the general mood of sadness and disintegration pervading Long Day’s Journey into Night. By introducing into his play echoes of melancholy poems like “Enivrez-vous” or morbid works like “Epilogue,” O’Neill provides a suitable background for the tragedy of the four haunted Tyrones. The dramatist’s craftsmanship can be measured by the fact that these two overt Baudelairean quotations are, as I have shown, admirably blended within a context interspersed with subtle references to both The Flowers of Evil and Little Poems in Prose. In addition, as Jean Weisgerber has explained in an article entitled: “The Use of Quotation in Recent Literature,”9 O’Neill’s citations tend to universalize the significance of Long Day’s Journey into Night by transposing it into a context of past literary tradition. Baudelairean reminders contribute to equating the sufferings of the Tyrones with the human predicament at large. Simultaneously, they enable the American playwright to formulate a compelling statement about the plight of the artist in our universe, while transcending the narrow confines of New England society. But O’Neill distances himself from his model, particularly through the idiosyncracy of his aesthetic viewpoint. While Baudelaire’s poet manages to escape the limitations of existence through the sheer power of artistic experience, as the brilliant style of The Flowers of Evil and Little Poems in Prose indicates, in Long Day’s Journey into Night, the writer figure fails to achieve a comparable result and Edmund ironically comments on his mediocre poetic gifts: “. . . I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. . . . Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” (p. 135). Thus contrasting Edmund’s poor talents to Baudelaire’s polished poems, O’Neill seems to reject the possibility of aesthetic

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transcendence in the New World. As such, his philosophical vision presents overtones darker than those detected in the works of the French poet. Delineating in Long Day’s Journey into Night the predicament of American citizens deprived from the support of traditional European patterns, O’Neill remarkably amalgamates his sources within a personal dramatic texture to offer us the searing vision of American flowers of evil.

No t e s 1. This information is derived from the list of the holdings of O’Neill’s private library housed at C.W. Post College in Long Island, New York. A copy of this document is located in the files of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Moreover, Kathy Lynn Bernard in “The Research Library of Eugene O’Neill” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1977) specifies that O’Neill possessed the following editions of Baudelaire’s works: Flowers of Evil, trans. by George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936); The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire (New York, 1919); Intimate Journals, trans. by Charles Isherwood (London: The Blackmore Press, 1930). If one admits that O’Neill discovered Baudelaire’s works in these editions, then the publication dates suggest the possibility of an influence. Indeed, O’Neill started working on Long Day’s Journey into Night in the course of 1939. In interpreting the significance of Baudelaire’s poetry, the dramatist may have been aided by his reading of François Perché’s Charles Baudelaire, trans. by John Mavin (London: Wishart & Co., 1918). See Bernard, pp. 228, 294, 320. 2. Edward Strickland, “Baudelaire’s ‘Portraits de Maîtresses’ and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh,” Romance Notes, 22, iii (Spring 1982), pp. 291–294; John Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. 27–28, 231 & 236. Strickland examines a parallel between the plot of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Portraits de Maîtresses” and O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. In both works, the male protagonist kills his wife/mistress out of sheer hate. Raleigh, on the contrary, focuses on Long Day’s Journey into Night and indicates how O’Neill’s allusions to Baudelaire fit within the pattern of literary quotations pervading the text of the dramatist’s late play. Moreover, Jean Chothia asserts that O’Neill read Baudelaire’s poetry at school and college, i.e., up to 1912. See Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 199. 3. In my analysis, I shall link The Flowers of Evil and Little Poems in Prose since their thematic substance presents striking similarities. It is significant to note, for instance, that “l’Invitation au Voyage” can be found in the two volumes in slightly modified versions. My methodology clearly derives from the field of comparative literature. I have been influenced in this respect by Jean Weisgerber, Faulkner and Dostoevsky: Influence and Confluence, trans. Dean McWilliams (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974). In this study, the critic shows how it is possible to delineate relationships of confluence, i.e., resemblances in vision, between two authors. The work of one such writer thus serves as an observation post from which to describe kindred literary patterns in the work of another artist. 4. Throughout this essay, I shall use the following editions and translations of Baudelaire’s poems: Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Le Trésor des

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Lettres Françaises, 1967); Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil and Other Poems, trans. Francis Duke (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961); Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en Prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967); Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. L. Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970). 5. Subsequent quotations will be lifted from the same edition: Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). 6. See in particular Egil Törnqvist, “Ibsen and O’Neill,” Scandinavian Studies, 37 (August 1965), pp. 211–235. 7. In two recent articles, Stephen F. Bloom has examined O’Neill’s realistically accurate description of the symptoms of alcoholism in Long Day’s Journey into Night: “Empty Bottles, Empty Dreams: O’Neill’s Use of Drinking and Alcoholism in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” in James J. Martine, ed. Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984), pp. 159–177; and “The Role of Drinking and Alcoholism in O’Neill’s Late Plays,” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, 8, i (Spring 1984), pp. 22–27. 8. It would seem possible to suggest that traces of Baudelairean influence pervade other late works by O’Neill. In The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, composed around the same period, O’Neill introduces artist figures reminiscent of both Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and of Baudelaire’s poets. Hickey, Larry Slade, Erie, and Jim Tyrone share with the French writer’s poet a common cynical and mephistophelian personality. The link between these various characters of O’Neill’s late plays, based primarily on parallel characterizations, has been examined by Laurin R. Porter in “Hughie: Pipe-Dream for Two”, in Martine, James J., ed., op. cit., pp. 178–188 (in particular p. 184). 9. In Comparative Literature, 22 (Winter 1970), pp. 36–45.

GERARDINE MEANEY

Long Day’s Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal Loss

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“Loss of legitimation, loss of authority, loss of seduction, loss of genius—loss.” —Alice Jardine, Gynesis

eminist theory has for some time been concerned with the implications for women of the sense of loss which emerges in both modernism and postmodernism and has increasingly identified both movements as responses to a “crisis in figurability”, which is above all a crisis in figuring women. Alice Jardine, in particular, has pointed out that concern to articulate the “Other” may also be an attempt to pre-empt her articulation of her (other) self. Jardine’s definition of history through its relation to its “Other” is very much in keeping with the discourses of crisis and loss (of legitimacy) which she analyses. She goes further than the male writers she discusses, however, in re-defining the terms in which that “loss” is understood. The new space1 which is created by Jardine’s re-configuration of woman and modernity is one where history is defined by its interruption, an interruption by the voice of what it designates as its silent and formless opposite. These issues have been elaborated primarily in readings of fiction, poetry and theory. Theatre and drama, because they posed very specific problems for semiotics2 have not figured prominently in discussions of gender, modernism and post-modernism. Long Day’s Journey into Night may seem a From Irish University Review 21, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1991): 204–218. ©1991 by Irish University Review.

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strange starting place for a feminist analysis of modernism and post-modernism. Yet even the most conservative criticism reads this play as an enactment and embodiment of loss, specifically loss of the mother. That loss is rarely seen in the context of a more general “loss”, a cultural loss of legitimacy and authenticity, endemic in and enabling modernism, articulated as “disinheritance” by an Other “coded as feminine.” Critical emphasis has fallen on the play’s autobiographical aspects. As Judith Barrow has pointed out, “It is probably to Journey’s disadvantage that its biographical roots are so well known.”3 This concentration on its biographical “roots” long obscured its theatrical ones and, in some cases, blinded criticism to the play’s status as play and as cultural construct. Travis Bogard’s study, published in 1972, provides an extreme example of this in his criticism of O’Neill’s presentation of Edmund Tyrone. Edmund is the youngest son of the Tyrone family and the writer figure within the play too easily identified by criticism with O’Neill himself: Edmund is more than an imaginary figure. He is a figure from history and one upon whose truth to life an audience has a right to insist.4

This extraordinary insistence that the play be subsidiary to a (biographical) reality independent of it is the worst kind of literary voyeurism: a demand on the writer to exhibit all his scars. Such equations of the writer’s life and work seem all the more bizarre when one considers the extent to which the characters in Long Day’s Journey into Night self-consciously quote and construct themselves from other people’s lines, other plays, scraps of philosophy. In Act 5 alone there are twenty direct quotations as well as a string of literary allusions. The compulsion to quote, to refer, to allude, is interwoven with the more obvious compulsions of the Tyrone family. Jamie Tyrone replies to one of his father’s many literary rebukes with: I could see that line coming! God how many thousand times!5

Any exploration of the intertextual webs woven and unravelled in the play leads towards a very different Long Day’s Journey into Night to the confessional tour de force demanded by Bogard. This different play is structured by a “crisis in figurability” which is articulated, not as “the loss of the paternal fiction”,6 but as the loss of a maternal reality. The Play of Addictions Long Day’s Journey into Night is not so much a play about addiction, as a play of addictions, the inter-play of the individual and shared compulsions of the

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Tyrone family. Mary Tyrone is a morphine addict. Her husband, James, and sons, Jamie and Edmund, are, to varying degrees, addicted to alcohol. “Be always drunken”, Edmund exhorts, drunkenly quoting Baudelaire (p. 114). Most of the characters in Long Day’s Journey into Night are drunken, at least by the end of the play, and the men are throughout shown to be intoxicated by other men’s poetry. Repetition is the form of the action, though the form and the action are incomplete. Act 1 commences with a move from dining room to living room, from the shared meal, the traditional symbol of communality and family, to “living”, the disintegration of that ideal communality into conflicting individualities. It is this “living” area which occupies the stage. Each subsequent scene opens with an unsuccessful attempt to reverse or repeat the opening move. Initially it is the male characters whose timing disrupts the domestic rhythms Mary tries to maintain, but it is her desire to keep the maid with her for company which disrupts the dinner routine. Tyrone comments, “You’re for ever scolding me for being late, but now I’m on time for once it’s dinner that’s late.” (p. 100). Eventually all semblance of family life breaks down and Tyrone, “a sad, bewildered, broken old man” (p. 107), goes in to dine alone. Inheritance and Deficiency What is the root of these disrupted repetitions which are repetitions nonetheless? Mary speaks of “the things life has done to us” (p. 53), and this use of the passive mode is typical. There is an inexorable determinism at the heart of many of O’Neill’s plays. In Mourning Becomes Electra the Freudian family romance and heredity seem the strongest determining factors, exerting a kind of doom, the curse of the Mannons.7 The reproduction of physical characteristics through the generations, in this as in other O’Neill plays, emphasises the extent to which each individual has from birth or at least childhood been assigned a pre-existing role in a drama that has already been played out many times before. In Long Day’s Journey into Night Mary Tyrone comments: The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us. (p. 75)

The dramatic action confirms this, being primarily retrogressive rather than progressive. O’Neill’s characters play out their roles in the social dramas identified by Marx and the psychological dramas of Freud’s family romance. The Tyrone family are on one level case studies of the inevitable concentration of wealth in capitalism, the inevitable antagonism between brothers and between father and sons in the Oedipal family. Edmund posits a relationship between the two forms of determinism early in the play:

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our ruling plutocrats especially the ones who inherited their boodle are not mental giants. (p. 20)

Inheritance, heredity and deficiency, particularly mental deficiency, are all associated here. Such an association immediately links Journey to the Ibsen play which is never quoted or named, but which “haunts” Long Day’s Journey into Night as surely as the past haunts the Tyrone family. In Ghosts, Mrs Alving acts upon Edmund’s logic. In an attempt to save her son from heredity, she forestalls inheritance: I didn’t want Oswald, my son, to inherit a single thing from his father.8

In Ghosts the father’s legacy is one of dissipation of physical and mental health and of the family fortune. It has fallen to his wife to preserve and accumulate an estate to pass on to her son. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, as in Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra, the father figure is not only the quintessence of prohibitive patriarchy, but also of accumulative capitalism. James Tyrone is repeatedly accused of acquiring property at the expense of his family’s needs and desires. In both Ghosts and Long Day’s Journey into Night the individual is primarily a player of preordained roles rather than an independent actor. In Long Day’s Journey into Night determinism presents itself as repetition, repetition of action, of phrases and of conflicts. The characters repeat the move from dining to living room, and repeatedly reach for the bottle. Key phrases recur. Mary asks again and again is her hair all right, where are her glasses? (p. 59). Edmund describes her, again and again, as a “ghost haunting the past” (pp. 118, 133). The same conflicts occur between different characters. The same argument about Jamie’s worth takes place three times in Act 1; between Tyrone and Mary (pp. 15–16), between Tyrone and Edmund (pp. 22–23), and then between Tyrone and Jamie himself (pp. 26–28). The argument is reprised in Act 4, between Tyrone and Edmund (pp. 111–12). Stasis and circularity are the very texture of the play. The repetition reaches an apotheosis in the final scene, for this play does not culminate in catharsis, nor even in destruction. It ends instead in a stasis which implies an inexorable continuity without change.9 Mary has retreated into morphine and the past. The men are no longer capable of performing what must be their most basic and instinctive act: Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them. (p. 155)

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An intriguing set of Shakespearean resonances are sent echoing through Long Day’s Journey into Night from Act 2, Sc. 2. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is”, comments Tyrone on his younger son, “To have a thankless child”, (p. 77), Edmund concludes for him. The line comes from Lear’s curse on Goneril: If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits To laughter and contempt, that she may feel How sharper . . .10

This is Lear’s curse on his daughter, but it epitomises Tyrone’s sense of betrayal by his sons and describes Mary’s “curse”. Edmund, the “child” in question here, was the cause of the illness which initiated her morphine addiction. He is still stamping wrinkles on the brow of youth which the stage directions tell us is still occasionally evident in Mary. Shakespeare’s Edmund is the brilliant bastard, the original individualist, who is in every sense illegitimate. Edmund Tyrone is also a usurper. He has taken the place of Eugene, the dead son of Mary and Tyrone,11 and of the other absent Eugene, Eugene O’Neill, whose surrogate and distortion on stage he is. In the best tradition of modernist nostalgia, literary consumption is what prevents the “true” artist, the “original” O’Neill from presentation in and of himself. He is mediated by his representative, illegitimate Edmund, and his thought or meaning is displaced by its representation. Moreover, this ‘autobiographical’ ‘tragedy’ unfolds in the shadow of a long literary inheritance which not only determines the forms, but also the meaning of the life and the work. The Ghost of Meaning Artaud, using a very different vocabulary, but very similar imagery to the Tyrones, expressed the opinion that: a gifted actor instinctively knows how to tap and radiate certain powers [to do this] he must consider a human being as a double, like the Kha of the Egyptian mummies, like an eternal ghost, radiating affective powers.12

The actor (James Tyrone and his sons), the physical human being, becomes—in this description—only a double, an empty signifier referring

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to a reality elsewhere, a “real” entity which is not human but a “Mummy”, not living, but an abstraction from the human. The signified of which he is the ghostly double is always elsewhere. Therefore presence, order, identity are always somewhere else, somewhere other than where he is. Meaning, or rather his function in pointing to it, drains this signifier of substance. He becomes a ghost, a pointer always pointing away from himself towards the elusive other, the reference that will give his role meaning. Any signifier, but particularly a living, breathing one, is radically impoverished as well as aggrandised by its signifying function: The form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one’s disposal. The meaning will be for the form an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness . . . once made use of, it becomes artificial.13

Its specificity, its individuality and distinctness must disappear to refer to some universal “truth” elsewhere. O’Neill’s characters refer, pointing away from themselves, to the poetic personae and characters of previous players, previous writers. These previous figures are imbued with the authority of a “real” existence elsewhere, off-stage, albeit in the world of books. To some extent Tyrone, Jamie and Edmund are the ghosts of Lear, Othello, Iago, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Nietzsche. The play is haunted by the past and by other men’s words, but it also haunts them. These actors inhabit a present which can only, with horrifying persistence, refer back to the past. They are indistinct, one identity merging into another. Even their paralysis seems like a convention. They are conventionally modern and hover on the brink of actions and texts where progress and redemption were possible, where character was clearly defined and active. James Tyrone haunts, is the ghostly double of, the Shakespearian heroes he once played, but which his own ‘tragic flaw’, the greed bred by insecurity, has ensured he will never play again. His sons are the ghosts of ghosts, shades generated by the Post-Romantic anti-heroes, Baudelaire, Swinburne and Nietzsche. Medusa in the Holy Family Long Day’s Journey into Night is still a play of family ghosts. If Tyrone Senior is a pale shadow of an idealised Father and Jamie the all too inadequate ghost of the Son’s role, then Edmund is the holy consumptive Ghost of Eugene O’Neill. Edmund, “the sea-mother’s son”, concludes his first poetic monologue on fog and its merits by asking: Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It’s the three Gorgons in one. You look at their faces and turn to stone. Or it’s

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Pan. You see him and you die—that is, inside you—and hate to go on living as a ghost. (p. 113)

His father’s response is that Edmund has “a poet in you but a damned morbid one!” (p. 114). The reference to the Gorgons implies that “once again, only women are seen as responsible for, indeed guilty of, blocking the flow of desire.”14 Pan, the musical rival of Apollo,15 foreshadows the rivalry of moderns to Shakespeare which father and son debate in this act. Their ghostliness is thus attributed to the anxiety of (patrilinear) inheritance through this reference to Pan, even if death by seeing is an attribute borrowed from the maternal Gorgons. Pan’s closest associate, however, is Dionysus.16 The trinity which the Tyrone men parody inevitably invokes another submerged and far older one where the father and son are interchangeable (like two actors alternating roles) in relation to an eternal mother goddess, through whom rebirth and renewal are available. Mary Tyrone emerges in the closing moments of the play, not as this fierce pagan Goddess, but as her debilitated Christian displacement, Mary’s namesake. This figure has, of course, a very specific resonance in the Irish Catholic Tyrone household. Suddenly bursting in on the games of recollection, quotation and Casino of the male Tyrones, Mary makes her final entrance against a blaze of light, wearing a blue robe, her white wedding dress over her arm. She has returned in memory and psychological reality to the time before her marriage. She is the perfect, ambivalent embodiment of the Virgin Mother she invokes, her white dress the symbol of both virginity and marriage. Mary’s establishment of herself in this role offers no hope of renewal or salvation or nurture. In her retreat into a time before her marriage, she denies the reality of her husband and sons. For Edmund: The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately—to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us! (pp. 120–21)

In removing herself from them and from the social, historical, literary and interpersonal processes that define them, she denies the male Tyrones a sense of relation to the processes of life and death which, as mother, she is culturally constructed to hold in reserve for them. They wish her to make and to be “home” for them: the lack of homeliness in their lives

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is emphasised throughout Long Day’s Journey into Night. Instead Mary mourns that she has never had a home of her own; “I’ve never felt it was my home” (p. 38), “I am alone. I’ve always been alone” (p. 40). She retreats psychologically to her own childhood home. Mary, even in her druginduced stupor, thus transgresses a fundamental interdiction on women in patriarchy: that prohibition that enjoins woman—at least in this history— from ever imagining, fancying, re-presenting, symbolizing, etc. (and none of these words is adequate as all are borrowed from a discourse which aids and abets that prohibition) her own relation of beginning. The ‘fact of castration’ has to be understood as a definitive prohibition against establishing one’s own economy of the desire for origin. Hence the hole, the lack, the fault, the ‘castration’ that greets the little girl as she enters as a subject into representative systems.17

In establishing her own, “mad” relation to origin, Mary Tyrone denies her men the possibility of any sense of home. She denies them their relation to origin. This rupture of the “make believe of a beginning”18 denies the possibility of an ending. It marks the modernist dislocation of teleology and the displacement of purpose by drive, the displacement of a trajectory of beginning, middle and end by cycles of compulsion, repetition and addiction. The mother’s search for her own story, even if her search is thwarted until it becomes no more than the desire to return to oblivion through morphine, de-realises all of the diverse literary, philosophical and personal stories told by the men. Her attempt to represent herself situates them in a realm of representation and they are reduced to an attempt to construct an identity out of antecedent, more legitimate representations. They seek from her the consolatory denial of the fictionality of their identities. She punishes them with the truth. Quotation and Origin Mary’s strange truths frame and interrupt the literary disputes between father and sons. These disputes, particularly the long conversation between Tyrone and Edmund in the last act, are dialogues between a preand post-modern view of literary authority. Tyrone insists on the timelessness of Shakespeare, which makes him superior to the more modern poets and philosophers preferred by his sons. Great art, to Tyrone senior, is that which has universal significance. In the context in which Tyrone makes his defence of this aesthetic, however, its darker implications are foregrounded:

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Tyrone: Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters? You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him—as you’ll find everything worth saying. (He quotes, using his fine voice.) ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ Edmund (Ironical  ). Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea. (p. 114)

Pointing Edmund away from the modern and towards the distant “classic”, Tyrone underlines the position of inauthenticity which for his son is the central dilemma of the aspirant writer. This dilemma is one which Edmund shares with the writers he admires and quotes. A persistent pattern emerges in Edmund’s quotation of pre-modernist verse. His quotes are intrinsically misquotes, already revisions of earlier work. Both the Dowson poems quoted in Act IV, “Cynara” and “They Are Not Long”,19 derive from Horace’s Odes.20 Enclosed in “They Are Not Long” is another “misprision”21 of the lines James Tyrone will later quote from The Tempest,22 to counter this “third rate” stuff: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

The stage directions specify that it is “the Symons translation of Baudelaire’s prose poem” (p. 114) that Edmund quotes, a translation that did not appear until thirteen years after the “day in August, 1912” on which Long Day’s Journey into Night is set.23 T.S. Eliot objected that Symons had not only translated, but transformed Baudelaire, so that he “became a poet of the ’nineties, a contemporary of Dowson and Wilde” and contrasted this view with the earlier view of Baudelaire as a “classicist”. 24 The Shakespearian quotes follow a different pattern. They invoke a tragic paradigm where resolution, even redemption, is possible. The apparently innocuous quote by Jamie in the first act, “the Moor, I know his trumpet” (p. 18), identifies his father with the jealous hero of Othello.25 This foreshadows Mary’s later accusation, “He’s been jealous of every one of my babies” (p. 104). The same quote identifies Jamie himself with Iago. And of course in this scene it is Jamie who casts suspicion on Mary as Iago on Desdemona. As it is Iago who is truly jealous and a usurper so it is Jamie, too, who corrupts Edmund out of jealousy of his parents’ affections. By quoting Iago’s line, Jamie tells a kind of truth. The relationship to such authoritative texts (unlike that to Dowson and Swinburne) seems, at

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this stage, to offer the possibility of authoritative truth. The tragic paradigm invoked offers the possibility of an eventual and conclusive ending, but the offer is another fraud. Identity is as unstable in Shakespearian drama as elsewhere and Tyrone’s reminiscences emphasise that while the roles are fixed the actors are interchangeable and secondary: In 1874 when Edwin Booth came to the theatre in Chicago where I was leading man, I played Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next, Othello to his Iago, and so on. (p. 131)

Seen from the perspective of the conflict between the male Tyrones, the patterns of quotation become a case study in Bloomian agonistics. Edmund strives to be ‘original’. His struggle for priority in an Oedipal conflict with his father is also a struggle for priority in a struggle with his literary fathers. The struggle between father and son is the struggle for a literary authority which is unavailable, incomplete, and must remain so. Tyrone and Edmund’s conversation, sprinkled with quotations, full of aspirations towards artistic authority and integrity, significantly presents itself on stage as a period of anticipation. The audience, as well as the Tyrones, wait for Mary to put a stop to these frenetic attempts at validating reference, legitimising quotation. The Sea-Mother’s Son When O’Neill initially contemplated an autobiographical play (or series of plays) in 1927, it was under the working title of The Sea-Mother’s Son.26 Judith Barlow (p. 64) convincingly linked that project with another referred to in a letter to George Nathan in 1929, “a stage play combined with a screen talky background to make alive visually and vocally the memories in the minds of the characters.”27 The Sea-Mother’s Son was abandoned, but the autobiographical project metamorphosed into Long Day’s Journey into Night and the “screen talky background” became row after row of well thumbed books. Living memory was replaced by literary inheritance: Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Sterner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling etc. . . . In the left wall. . . . Farther back is a large glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three sets of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s History of England, Thiers’ History of

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the Consulate and Empire, Smollett’s History of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of old plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing about these sets is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread. (p. 9)

This meticulously documented library comprises the whole weight of a civilisation. Mary at one stage tells Edmund, “It’s just a pose you get out of books! You’re not really sick at all!” (p. 78). This is on one level true. Everything about Edmund is second or third hand. His sea journeyings in imitation of Conrad are described by his father as “a game of romance and adventure to you. It was play” (p. 128). The artist is an actor too and his disease is an intensification of the second-hand textuality of the others. In Ibsen’s Ghosts, Mrs Alving comments: It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all kinds of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they simply lodge there and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.28

Manders’s response is significant, “Aha, so there we see the fruits of your reading.” Literary consumption is Edmund Tyrone’s psychological and artistic disease and literature in Long Day’s Journey into Night plays much the same role as syphilis in Ghosts. Mary is not an actor nor an artist. In her drugged state, however, she utters strange truths.29 “Edmund is made apprehensive by her strangeness”, we are told (p. 53). When she is speaking honestly and uncovering painful truths, Mary is described as speaking in a “strange” voice. These strange truths she seems to bring back or dredge up from the past or “elsewhere”. “Mama, stop talking”, pleads Edmund (p. 58), but Mary has long ceased to be the silent object of the son’s discourse. Mary does not quote, she is an original and as damned as the bad copies. For her “truth” is an exile from the symbolic order, where meaning may be painful and inadequate but is sane and workable, an exile to insanity and the annihilation of self. “The woman has nothing to laugh about when the symbolic order collapses.”30 Her search for her own origin and refusal to be an origin is a refusal of her role in the socio-symbolic contract which “society as

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a whole understands as murder”31 and which her son understands specifically as the murder of God or any absolute: Edmund. (bitingly) Did you pray for Mama? Tyrone. I did. I’ve prayed to God these many years for her. Edmund. Then Nietzsche must be right. (He quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra.) ‘God is dead: of his pity for man hath God died.’ (pp. 66–7)

“Every God, even including the God of the Word, relies on a mother Goddess.”32 The mother in Long Day’s Journey into Night marks the collapse of the maternal guarantee against death and against the failure of “the lacunary network of signs” to uphold identity. No longer a Goddess, she is just one more bewildered ghost haunting her own past, asking her own questions. This should make her what her son aspires to be, an original, but for Mary this means taking up the only position of feminine uniqueness available, that of Virgin Mother, “universal and particular, but never singular . . . alone of all her sex.”33 This same unique role, says Kristeva (pp. 181–82), was inherited as a safeguard against maternal defection: A skilful balance of concessions and constraints involving feminine paranoia, the representation of virgin motherhood appears to crown the efforts of a society to reconcile the social remnants of matrilinearism and the unconscious needs of primary narcissism on the one hand, and on the other the requirements of a new society based on exchange and before long on increased production, which require the contribution of the superego and rely on the symbolic paternal agency.

“That clever balanced architecture”34 has been crumbling since the Enlightenment. In Long Day’s Journey into Night the image of the Virgin Mother in the play’s closing minutes represents not submission to the child-god,35 but his abandonment. The play exhausts literary discourses, undermines the “symbolic paternal agency” and denies primary narcissism the maternal idealisation for which it hungers. In other words, it exposes the fraud and fear which support the father’s word and the son’s argument with it. Such exposure is part of the modernist project insofar as any son’s attempt to re-define literature must undertake the risky project of providing a new covering for phallic power as linguistic and literary power and a more effective barrier against its maternal undertow. Long Day’s Journey into Night sets up a space where Mary, speaking from outside her allotted space in

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patriarchal discourse, from outside and beyond the crowded literary domain her husband and sons inhabit, can be the touchstone for a new kind of literary authority. The inscription of her “strange truths” in this play for literary validation signifies the aspiration towards an authenticity which would be once more a maternal resource available to the son. This time she will legitimise Eugene. O’Neill, in other words, is engaged in the attempt to pre-empt the mother’s articulation of her (other) self, identified by Jardine. In this context, the modernist confrontation with the Other, with the feminine, with maternal loss and maternal and semiotic power can be understood as a failed attempt to face and banish the Medusa once and for all or a (more successful) attempt to harness her power. Until the last act Long Day’s Journey into Night is resolutely post-modern; it “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself.”36 As origin, Mother, Mary should not be an actor, but the scene of the action. Yet Mary is there, on stage, and she speaks her “strange truths”. As lost origin, the loss of which denies the possibility of the original or truthful, she symbolises what modernism mourned, sought and feared. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the pain of loss, the understanding that the loss is necessary and the struggle to articulate from the other side of the unknown do battle. Only in Mary’s closing speech does it succumb to the nostalgia which besets modernism. In this respect O’Neill’s conclusion is reminiscent of Joyce’s conclusion to Ulysses. Both finally fake the voice of the (M)Other.

No t e s 1. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). The relevant chapter is entitled “Spaces for Further Research.” 2. See Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980). 3. Judith Barlow, Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late Eugene O’Neill Plays (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 66. 4. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 435. 5. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 28. Subsequent quotations from this text are given in parentheses in this essay. 6. Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 67. 7. Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 288. 8. Henrik Ibsen, The Oxford Ibsen, V (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), translated and edited by J.W. MacFarlane, p. 377. 9. I would argue this despite Judith Barlow’s conclusion from the pattern of O’Neill’s revisions to the play that he “de-emphasized the circularity as he worked on Journey.” See Final Acts, p. 81. There is a difference between de-emphasising and eliminating.

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10. William Shakespeare, King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, ninth edition 1972), edited by Kenneth Muir, 1.4.279–87. 11. O’Neill transposed his own name and that of his dead brother, Edmund, for the purposes of the play. 12. Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, IV, “The Theatre and its Double” (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974), translated by Victor Corti, p. 101. 13. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), translated by Annette Lavers, p. 118. 14. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, p. 68. See also Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1976, I, no. 1, pp. 875–899, on the reverberations of the Gorgon myth in patriarchal culture: “They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss” (p. 883). 15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 250. 16. That association is stressed in The Golden Bough. Dionysus sometimes appeared as a goat and in that guise “he can hardly be separated from the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs and Silenises.” See J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1900), 11, p. 291. 17. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), translated by Gillian C. Gill, p. 83. 18. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 35. 19. Ernest Dowson, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), edited by Mark Longaker, p. 58 and p. 38. 20. Horace, The Complete Odes and Epodes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), translated and edited by W.G. Shepherd. “Cynara” derives from Book 4.1.3–4, and “They Are Not Long” from Book 1.4.15. 21. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 83–105. 22. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966), edited by Frank Kermode, 4.1.156–58. 23. Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Petits poèmes en prose, Les paradis artificiels (London: Casanova, 1925), translated by Arthur Symons. 24. Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 313. Eliot’s review, “Poet and Saint . . .”, appeared in Dial 82 (May 1927), p. 427, and again, as “Baudelaire in Our Times”, in For Lancelot Andrews (1929). 25. William Shakespeare, Othello, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, seventh edition 1958), edited by M.R. Ridley, 2.1.177–8. 26. Judith E. Barlow, Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late Eugene O’Neill Plays, p. 63. 27. O’Neill to Nathan, 12 November 1929. 28. Henrik Ibsen, The Oxford Ibsen, V, p. 384. 29. Pan, associated by Edmund with the maternal Gorgons, is also associated with the Delphic Oracle, another speaker of strange truths. See Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley and Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, second edition 1980), pp. 408–9. 30. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 150. 31. Ibid., p. 200. 32. Ibid., p. 176.

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33. Kristeva, p. 183. 34. Kristeva, p. 182. 35. “The Virgin assumes the paranoid lust for power by changing a woman into a Queen in heaven and a Mother of the earthly institutions (of the Church). But she succeeds in stifling that megalomania by putting it on its knees before the child-god.” Kristeva, p. 180. 36. Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, p. 81.

R I C H A R D B . S E WA L L

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ince the lecture here recorded (with a few additions and subtractions) opened the yearlong celebration of Eugene O’Neill’s one hundredth birthday, I thought it fitting on that occasion to begin with some remarks on centennials in general, their purpose, and meaning. The gist was this: National events (the Revolution, the Constitution) get centennials; national heroes (Washington, Lincoln) get birthdays. The only individuals we Americans celebrate by centennials tend to be artists (by no means all Americans)—musicians, poets, playwrights—Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Pound, Dickinson, and now O’Neill. I found meaning here, implicit, often explicit: We revere our national past and its heroes, and we rightly honor them, but the artists speak to us differently; we take them unto ourselves. Why and how this is particularly true of O’Neill was my theme. Let me move up on O’Neill—and my theme—by way of a book that, by his own account, meant a great deal to him in his early years, Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). The book, we are told, “sparked” his first sea voyage and thus was instrumental in opening a wide area of material that O’Neill was to draw upon the rest of his life.1 But more than that, in a brief foreword to the American edition (1914), Conrad said some important things about writing that O’Neill, as he embarked on his literary career, could hardly have missed—notably, the need for integrity, truth, or (in Conrad’s From Eugene O’Neill’s Century: Centennial Views on America’s Foremost Tragic Dramatist, edited by Richard F. Moorton, Jr., pp. 3–16. ©1991 by Richard F. Moorton, Jr.

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phrase) “sincerity of expression.” Looking back on the novel, Conrad wrote: “It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea—the moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life.”2 He added that, upon finishing the novel, “I understood that I had done with the sea, and that henceforth I had to be a writer”—a conclusion that O’Neill reached after his two years at sea and with much the same feeling. We hear echoes of it in Edmund’s (the young O’Neill’s) impassioned reminiscence in the fourth act of Long Day’s Journey. But O’Neill’s major debt to Conrad (although he never said as much) may well lie in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” that first appeared in the American edition. It is a powerful and (again) very personal “poetics,” a kind of literary “This I believe.” O’Neill was first an artist, not a theorist, and Conrad’s meditation on the nature of art and on his own purpose as an artist might well have strengthened, given shape to, O’Neill’s thinking. Conrad wrote the preface with the feeling, the passion, the “utmost sincerity,” he gave to his novel. I sense O’Neill throughout, and I venture to say that O’Neill saw himself in it too. The preface begins with an important pronouncement: “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line” (xi), a challenge, certainly, to the careful craftsman O’Neill was endeavoring to become. But the heart of the preface lies in a distinction Conrad makes that may help us in our problem with centennials—why they go to the artists and not to the movers and shakers, even the Washingtons and Lincolns. On the one hand, Conrad wrote, there are practical people, the scientists, the thinkers, those who “appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices . . . our fears, often to our egoism . . . our ambitions . . . the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims” (xi). “It is otherwise,” he continued (and how could the young O’Neill have missed this?), “with the artist”: Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. . . . His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. . . . He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain;

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to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. (xi–xii)

How much of O’Neill is in those sentences! His metaphor for “solidarity” was loyalty to the ship—whatever it was that made sailors take such enormous risks in moments of danger at sea, risks way beyond the call of duty—and it should be remembered that O’Neill’s first ship, the Charles Racine, was one of the last of the square-riggers, where there was danger every time it breezed up. The “capacities” to which Conrad the artist made his appeal were precisely those that the American theater, dominated by various forms of claptrap, was, as O’Neill entered it, failing to reach. A passage a few paragraphs on in the preface might have been written by O’Neill himself addressing the jaded theatergoing public: [The artist’s] answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—my task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. (xiii–xiv)

“To make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see”—and I take it that the word see is underscored to bring out its meaning of “understand.” Understand what? All that Conrad described as the domain of the artist (and there’s no harm in repeating the litany): delight, wonder, the sense of mystery; pity, beauty, pain; the loneliness of the heart and yet its feeling of oneness with others “in joy, in sorrow, in aspiration, in illusions, in hope, in fear”—all of them (a veritable O’Neill checklist), and more, figure largely in Long Day’s Journey. Let me take another route in our attempt to close in on O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey. This route is by way of Tragedy (with a capital T ) and the tragic theater. Even here Conrad could have helped him, as witness the somber tone of the preface—the sense of mystery, the pain, the loneliness, the glimpses (but glimpses only) of truth. I don’t know how many other novels

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by Conrad that O’Neill read, but the tragic tone pervades almost all of them, from the death of James Wait on the “Narcissus” (it clearly foreshadows the death of Yank in Bound East for Cardiff ) to the “mist” that veils the truth about his young hero, Lord Jim, and “the destructive element” that eventually claims him. (The fog in Long Day’s Journey might well be a descendent of Conrad’s metaphor of the mist.) Conrad brought to the novel what O’Neill, historically, brought to the American theater and by much the same route. From his early years, O’Neill widely read other sources. Greek tragedy, Strindberg, Ibsen, the morose poets whom Edmund and Jamie quote so freely in Long Day’s Journey—Baudelaire, Dowson, Swinburne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski—added to the tragic set of his mind. He told one of his editors, later, that had it not been for Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Dostoevski’s Idiot he might never have begun writing.3 I would add Conrad. “The tragic set of his mind.” When George Pierce Baker, a professor at Harvard, asked his young friend Eugene O’Neill why he preferred “grim and depressing” subjects for the plays he was writing for the 47 Workshop and suggested that perhaps it was something of a pose, O’Neill, then twenty-six, replied simply, “Life looked that way”—an important clue to what determined the tone and tenor of his entire canon.4 I like to imagine that young O’Neill turned on his heel. In my career-long fumbling with the idea of Tragedy, I have come to at least one conclusion: If the set of your mind is not tragic, you’d better not try to write a tragedy. Another young man, twenty-six years of age, tried his hand at it in a play called The Cenci—and never tried it again. Later, Mrs. Shelley wrote in explanation: “The bent of his mind went the other way.”5 So did Byron’s and Tennyson’s, although they both wrote what they called tragedies. Goethe was wisest when he said, “The mere attempt to write tragedy might be my undoing”—this in spite of the fact that there are many tragic elements in Faust.6 This leads me to a crude but useful distinction between Tragedy and “the tragic.” A writer—dramatist or novelist—may have a deep and abiding sense of the tragic and yet never write a full-blown tragedy. But just what is a fullblown tragedy? There is much disagreement. There are very few plays or novels universally accepted as such—a few by the Greeks (notably Sophocles), a few by Shakespeare (even Hamlet has been questioned), Racine’s Phédre. A short list indeed, so sharp are the cutting edges of critical theory. Among novelists, Hawthorne, Melville, Dostoevski, Conrad, and Faulkner approach fullness of form. But tragedy as a term in criticism is in danger of becoming exclusive and academic. I have found the adjective more useful. It includes most of the values, the dynamics, we’re presently concerned with. Miguel de Unamuno’s great title The Tragic Sense of Life—like O’Neill’s reply, “Life looked that way”—gets to the heart of the matter.

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“It looks that way” to some, then, and not to others. Temperament is surely a decisive element. Unamuno described the tragic sense of life as a kind of subphilosophy, or prephilosophy, “more or less conscious,” not so much flowing from ideas as determining them.7 O’Neill read books, imbibed attitudes and ideas, took a course under Baker; but it was the temperament he was born with that determined what he took from them. Here is Conrad on temperament (again from the preface): “Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning” (xiii). O’Neill spoke in much the same way twenty years after his Cardiff was first produced (1916), only here he used the terms spirit and life-attitude: “In it [Cardiff ] can be seen, or felt, the germ of the spirit, life-attitude, etc., of all my more important future work.”8 The “subtle and resistless power” of temperament may well have been the driving force, “more or less unconscious” and not at the time articulated, behind those restless years of O’Neill’s early twenties that took him to sea on vessels of sail and steam and to waterfronts from New London to Buenos Aires. Like Conrad, he came back knowing he had to be a writer; and it was the same resistless power that drove him, more and more, to a life of obsessive dedication to his art—in the end, into a solitary, brooding world of his own, with Carlotta the guardian at the gate. Consider for a moment O’Neill in the tradition of the great tragic temperaments, a tradition with which he associated himself many times. Why did the Poet of Job redo the ancient orthodox folktale he found at hand into a protracted, agonized questioning of the central belief of his time, the belief that God was just? Why did the Greek tragedians redo Homer, that textbook on How to Be a Good Greek? What got into Shakespeare after the years of those sprightly comedies? Why Hamlet? Lear? Macbeth? (Surely more than a change in theatrical fashion.) What got into Melville that he poured so much of his lifeblood into the story of his doomed Ahab? What got into O’Neill that he set out to redo the American theater? It had treated his father well; there was a good living in it. But as with these others, he was confronted by something deeply unsatisfying. It did not square with his vision of life and with his sense of the purpose of art, and in his own way, he protested. So the tragic temperament is not for the acquiescent, the timid, the dull of soul. Part of it is the quality O’Neill saw in Strindberg and Dostoevski—in his words, “a powerful emotional ecstasy, approaching a kind of frenzy,” precisely what the flabby and derivative American theater lacked.9 This, he said, was what he wanted to communicate to his audience. This opens up another dimension in the O’Neill temperament. Let me get to it by way of another distinction. The qualities he responded to in The

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Idiot and The Dance of Death—the “ecstasy,” the touch of “frenzy”—are not the qualities we usually associate with writings we are apt to call satiric, or comic, or ironic. In these cases, the stance of the author seems more removed, aloof, Olympian, like George Meredith’s Comic Spirit on high, which showers down “silvery laughter” on the follies of humankind.10 Shaw, another important author in O’Neill’s development, wrote with feeling, but he prided himself on being an “artist-philosopher.” The Olympian stance is clear even in his most moving plays, Saint Joan and Caesar and Cleopatra. Even Conrad impressed O’Neill as being “detached and safe in the wheelhouse of the vessel, looking down at his men on the deck and describing their activities. When I write about the sea, I want to be on the deck with the men.”11 O’Neill was wrong, I think, about Conrad, but his remark points up the sense of personal involvement in the fictions that come from writers of tragic temperament. We can only guess at the personal involvement of the Greek tragedians; as to Shakespeare, we “ask and ask,” he “smiles and is still.” But we know enough about the lives of Hawthorne, Melville, and Dostoevski to know that much of the tragic in their fictions is autobiographic. As for O’Neill, his whole career has been described as an effort at autobiography, the search for self identity— “Who am I?”—in play after play.12 In the hands of the true tragedian, as it does in O’Neill, the question “Who am I?” becomes Job’s question “What is man that thou shouldst visit him every morning and try him every moment?” Was something like this in O’Neill’s mind when he said that his concern as a dramatist was not so much man’s relation to man as man’s relation to God?13 O’Neill may have been a renegade Catholic, but in the largest sense he never ceased being religious—like that renegade Congregationalist Emily Dickinson, who never went to church after she was thirty but was clearly the most religious person in town. O’Neill’s purpose, stated again and again, was to establish in America a theater comparable to the theater of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—and that was a religious theater, replete with smoking altars and priests in robes. But O’Neill, to his credit, did not start by staging revivals or by imitating the grand manner. He took themes and subjects from his own experience, “grim and depressing” as they were, and “with the utmost sincerity of expression” carried them to the bitter end. The series of one-acters put on by the Provincetown Players, beginning with Cardiff in 1916, was a clear and effective signal of his intention. From it grew the Little Theater movement and a resurgence of activity in the drama of schools and colleges—two phenomena, incidentally, whose influence on the American theater should not be underestimated. Suffering, as usual, from a cultural lag, the New York theater finally got the message. When, in a notable essay, Arthur Miller sized up the meaning of the first successful year of Death of a Salesman, he might have been quoting from O’Neill: “There is no limit,” he wrote, “to the expansion of the audience’s

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imagination. . . . They will move with you anywhere, they will believe right into the moon so long as you believe who tells them this tale.”14 Here we are back again to Conrad’s “utmost sincerity,” his sense of involvement, his belief in the sense of solidarity that “knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts.” These, loosely speaking, are religious matters that O’Neill transferred to the theater. More specifically, it could be said that, from the dying Yank in Cardiff, with his stammerings about God and judgment, to Mary Tyrone’s prayers to the Blessed Virgin, O’Neill never stopped asking, at least, the ultimate religious questions. To use a term from Dickinson, he never quite abdicated belief. She made a poem out of it: The abdication of Belief Makes the Behavior small— Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all—15

Dickinson’s “belief ” was more of a search than a finding. So was O’Neill’s. And there is nothing “small” about their achievements as artists. They never ceased—after their own fashions—to believe. There is also nothing “small” about Long Day’s Journey into Night. All the foregoing has been by way of preparing for an adequate—if that is possible— indication of its impressive proportions.16 But first a caution: To one coming to the play with a traditional Aristotelian view of tragedy, the experience is something of a shock. The materials are unpromising. Where is the tragic hero? What about catharsis? There is pity, perhaps, but where is the terror? As to the “tragic flaw,” the stage is littered with flaws, but are they tragic—dope? alcohol? miserliness? Here is a wrangling family (as it looks) of born losers seemingly with no other purpose than to chew each other up. Where is the “magnitude” that Aristotle found in true tragedy? And yet . . . and yet . . . Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in 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. These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light—into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!17

Many years ago, as I was beginning to think about a book on tragedy, I heard a lecture, “What Aristotle Left Out.” What the lecturer—a priest—

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found missing, or undeveloped, in Aristotle was precisely what O’Neill put into this birthday note to Carlotta and, as I shall try to show, into Long Day’s Journey, the blood, the tears; love, understanding, forgiveness. Later I asked my friend the priest where and how he thought I should start my book. “I don’t care where you start,” he answered, “so long as you start with the man of flesh and blood.” This suggests an important point about Long Day’s Journey. With this play, O’Neill’s career comes full circle. He had started with men of flesh and blood—his shipmates, often bloody in a quite literal sense—and he had found in that riotous crew the very qualities he speaks of to Carlotta: pity, understanding, forgiveness. Then followed years of experimentation with Greek, biblical, Freudian, sociological themes; with technical devices—masks, sound effects, spectacle; with asides beyond anything Hamlet ever dreamed of. Then, in this climactic play, he comes back to where he started: the simple, direct dramatization of a life situation he knew all too well—his own. He rides no theory; there is no experimentation: He “tells this tale”—and we are left to make of it what we can. The first two acts are mostly given to the chewing-up process. It’s a depressing sight. Here is a talented family on the brink of dissolution. The father, James Tyrone, is a washed-up actor, a compulsive penny-pincher, living on the glory of past triumphs that he realizes, too late, were hollow. Mary Tyrone, his wife, has slipped back into her dope habit on this very day of the Long Journey. Jamie, the older brother, is far gone in alcohol and whores. Edmund (O’Neill himself at twenty-four), the younger brother by ten years and recently returned from two years at sea, has been trying his hand at writing for the local newspaper but so far with little success. As the play opens, he is ill and learns (again on this very day) that he has consumption. The situation looks hopeless—the one thing they all seem to agree on. They see themselves as trapped, “walled in,” “fog people” unable to see their way. They look back in hopeless nostalgia on what might have been. Worst of all, they take it out on each other in an orgy of bickering and blame-laying. And such blame-laying! Nobody takes responsibility for anything. Tyrone blames his penny-pinching on the poverty of his childhood. Mary blames her addiction on the fact that Tyrone hired a cheap doctor who got her into the morphine habit when she was sick after Edmund’s birth and then never gave her a decent home where she might have conquered her addiction. She blames Jamie’s alcoholism on Tyrone’s giving him spoonfuls of whisky to get him over his childhood ailments. Tyrone accuses Jamie of purposely corrupting Edmund (and ruining his health) out of jealousy of his younger and more talented brother. Mary, toward the end of Act two, slips into the ultimate evasion. Speaking to Edmund about his brother, she says, “He can’t help being what the past made him. Any more than your father can. Or you.

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Or I” (64). In the last scene of the act, in a kind of ritual return, she says to her husband, “The things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain” (85). Tyrone, contemplating Mary’s return to drugs but, in a way, summing up the whole situation, says wearily, “There’s no help for it. . . . I wish she hadn’t led me to hope this time. . . . I never win again” (78). This isn’t tragic, it’s pathetic. At the end of Act two when the men leave the house—Edmund (with Jamie) to make his appointment with the doctor, and Tyrone to make his appointment at his club—one wonders why they should ever want to come back. After such recrimination, how can they face each other again? Each one has said enough, it would seem, to make further communication impossible. But Mary, left alone, at least can talk to herself; and what she says, I think, marks a turning point. (She stares about the room with frightened, forsaken eyes and whispers to herself ) It’s so lonely here. (Then her face hardens into bitter selfcontempt) You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone. (She gives a little despairing laugh) Then Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely? (95)

Pathetic, surely; pitiful. But something more. Mary has faced up to some solid truth. Shortly before, she had called herself a liar; but that was to Edmund, whom she was trying to comfort. Now, after two acts of blaming all the others, and Life, for her plight—even Edmund for having been born—she admits it to herself and means it. Five hours later (Act three) in this Long Day’s Journey, she completes the indictment, the first in the family to face herself squarely. (She had just been boasting to the maid, Cathleen, of her youthful romance with the great actor James Tyrone. Cathleen leaves the room; Mary is alone.) You’re a sentimental fool. What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent when you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin. (Longingly) If I could only find the faith I lost, so I could pray again! (She pauses—then begins to recite the Hail Mary in a flat, empty tone) “Hail, Mary, full of Grace! The Lord is with Thee; blessed art Thou among women.” (Sneeringly) You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her! (She springs to her feet. Her hands fly up to pat her hair distractedly) I must go upstairs. I haven’t taken enough. When you start again you never know how much you need. (107)

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But just then she hears the men coming back. Again she feels that strange ambivalence of wanting them to stay away, yet welcoming their return: “Why are they coming back? They don’t want to. And I’d much rather be alone. (Suddenly her whole manner changes. She becomes pathetically relieved and eager) Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely” (108). When Tyrone enters, she “rises from her chair, her face lighting up lovingly— with excited eagerness.” Mary’s confessional moment here is the first of a series, involving each of the men, that takes us in the last two acts beyond pity, beyond tears, to the awed silence (as it strikes me) of the last scene of the play. Part of the power of her confession is what Mary says about herself—that is, the truth—but perhaps as important is her ambivalent feeling about the men as they leave and as they return. She doesn’t generalize—she simply feels what it is to want solitude and yet be lonely; what it is to want, yet not want, her family with her; what it is to love and hate, condemn and yet forgive, at one and the same time. In the final act, the men reciprocate these feelings about each other—and, my feeling is, about Mary as she has her last say. Let’s see how O’Neill builds to this conclusion. Edmund, who had been relatively docile during the first two acts while the others tore each other apart, erupts twice in the final act, and each time his outburst brings, first, his father, and then his brother to their senses. The first outburst comes when Edmund learns that his father has decided to send him to a state sanatorium. The two have started what might have been an amicable card game. But it doesn’t last long. God, Papa, . . . I’ve tried to be fair to you because I knew what you’d been up against as a kid. I’ve tried to make allowances. Christ, you have to make allowances in this damned family or go nuts! . . . I’ve tried to feel like Mama that you can’t help being what you are where money is concerned. But God Almighty, this last stunt of yours is too much! It makes me want to puke! Not because of the rotten way you’re treating me. To hell with that! I’ve treated you rottenly, in my way, more than once. But to think when it’s a question of your son having consumption, you can show yourself up before the whole town as such a stinking old tightwad! . . . Jesus, Papa, haven’t you any pride or shame? (Bursting with rage) And don’t think I’ll let you get away with it! I won’t go to any damned state farm just to save you a few lousy dollars to buy more bum property with! You stinking old miser—! (He chokes huskily, his voice trembling with rage, and then is shaken by a fit of coughing.) (145)

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This is not the first time in the play that Tyrone has been so accused by one of his sons. ( Jamie led off in Act one.) Tyrone bristles for a moment (“Be quiet! Don’t say that to me! You’re drunk!”), but Edmund’s fury gets to him and he changes his mind about the state farm: “You can go anywhere you like. I don’t give a damn what it costs.” They both take large drinks, the card game forgotten. “Dully, without resentment,” Tyrone repeats the charge: “A stinking old miser. Well, maybe you’re right.” Then comes his own confessional—the trials of his youth (“He wipes tears from his eyes”), the hollowness of his early stage triumphs and the money he made. “I’ve never admitted this to anyone before,” he says. “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.” Edmund is moved. There is a glimpse of the truth (but only a glimpse) between father and son, a redeeming moment, at least. Edmund “stares at his father with understanding” and says “slowly”: “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now.” Then, after some more cards, a bit of a quarrel over Tyrone’s insistence on turning off a lamp to save electricity, and more drinking, Edmund’s turn comes: “You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine?” What follows has the qualities of an aria in an opera, dramatically and psychologically right, a moment of high emotion in which the stage is given over to a single lyric outpouring, with something of the “ecstasy, approaching a kind of frenzy” that O’Neill had found in Strindberg and Dostoevski. Here is Edmund (or the young O’Neill) bound for Buenos Aires on the square rigger, “the old hooker driving fourteen knots”: I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself ! To God, if you want to put it that way. . . . Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! (He grins wryly) It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death! (153–54)

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“For a second there is meaning!”—a glimpse, but a glimpse only, of a redeeming truth, the reward of O’Neill’s effort, as he told Carlotta, to “face his dead” and, by implication, to face his own past for some kind of understanding and forgiveness for “all the four haunted Tyrones.” (The emphasis on all was his.) His father “stares at him—impressed.” We are left to wonder whether Tyrone’s utterly inadequate comment covers the only thing that impressed him: “Yes, there’s the makings of a poet in you all right.” Then, “protesting uneasily,” he says, “But that’s a morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.” Edmund denies nothing but the “makings of a poet” in him: “I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” At this point brother Jamie stumbles in, well gone in whiskey. In the long alcoholic talk that follows between the brothers, the subject veers from Jamie’s sex life to their dope-addicted mother. Edmund, again, is driven to fury, this time violently; but again the result is salutary. For a redeeming moment, Jamie comes out of the “fog” into the clear. “What’s the use coming home,” he says, “to get the blues over what can’t be helped. All over—finished now—not a hope!” (He stops, his head nodding drunkenly, his eyes closing—then suddenly he looks up, his face hard, and quotes jeeringly) “If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still . . .” Edmund. (violently) Shut up! Jamie. (in a cruel, sneering tone with hatred in it) Where’s the hophead? Gone to sleep? (Edmund jerks as if he’d been struck. There is a tense silence. Edmund’s face looks stricken and sick. Then in a burst of rage he springs from his chair) Edmund. You dirty bastard! (He punches his brother in the face . . . For a second Jamie reacts pugnaciously and half rises from his chair to do battle, but suddenly he seems to sober up to a shocked realization of what he has said and he sinks back limply) Jamie. Thanks, Kid. I certainly had that coming. . . . My dirty tongue. Like to cut it out. (161–62)

Then comes Jamie’s confession, centering on his relations with Edmund. Again (as with Mary) comes the recognition of ambivalence—how he loved Edmund, yet hated him, how he tried to ruin him to save himself from being the only failure in the house. It is moving, passionate—and true. Finally, the liquor has its effect: “(very drunkenly, his head bobbing) That’s all. Feel better

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now. Gone to confession. Know you absolve me, don’t you, Kid? You understand. You’re a damned fine kid. . . . So go on and get well. Don’t die on me. You’re all I’ve got left. God bless you, Kid. (He falls into a drunken doze.)” It’s hard to do justice to the final scene—Mary’s scene, to which all has been moving—let alone to say precisely what it means. Mary’s entrance for her own little aria is beautifully prepared for. James Tyrone enters just as Jamie falls into his drunken doze. He looks down on his first-born on whom he had pinned such hope: “A waste! A wreck, a drunken hulk, done with and finished!” That’s enough to wake Jamie up, to start another row with his father (he’s sober enough to quote flawlessly from Richard III and Rossetti) until Edmund quiets them with a warning that they might disturb Mary’s sleep and bring her downstairs. The two quarrelers subside. There is a detailed stage direction: (Edmund sits tensely. He hears something and jerks nervously forward in his chair. . . . Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier in the front parlor are turned on from a wall switch, and a moment later someone starts playing the piano in there—the opening of one of Chopin’s simpler waltzes, done with a forgetful, stiff-fingered groping, as if an awkward schoolgirl were practicing it for the first time. Tyrone starts to wideawakeness and sober dread, and Jamie’s head jerks up and his eyes open . . . .Mary appears in the doorway. She wears a sky-blue dressing gown over her nightdress, dainty slippers with pompons on her bare feet. . . . Over one arm, carried neglectfully, trailing on the floor, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown, trimmed with duchesse lace. . . .) Jamie. The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia! (His father and brother both turn on him fiercely. Edmund is quicker. He slaps Jamie across the mouth with the back of his hand.) (170)

Mary is far away, a girl again, back in the convent. The men look on helplessly, trying to bring her back to them. Edmund grabs her impulsively and pleads with her: “Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption!” Mary: “You must not try to touch me. You must not try to hold me. It isn’t right, when I’m hoping to be a nun.” Jamie is the first to give up: “Hell! What’s the use? It’s no good.” He quotes Swinburne’s poem “A Leave-taking.” Tyrone: “Oh, we’re fools to pay any attention. It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this. Pass me that bottle, Jamie. And stop reciting that damned morbid poetry. I won’t have it in my house.” All three pour themselves drinks. But, strangely enough, they do pay attention. Mary wins, even over the alcohol. There is an important stage direction: “Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons

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follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.” Mary, dreamily, her face “youthful and innocent,” an “eager, trusting smile on her lips,” talks aloud to herself: I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good. A saint on earth. I love her dearly. It may be sinful of me but I love her better than my own mother. Because she always understands, even before you say a word. Her kind blue eyes always look right into your heart. You can’t keep any secrets from her. You couldn’t deceive her, even if you were mean enough to want to. (She gives a little rebellious toss of her head—with girlish pique) All the same, I don’t think she was so understanding this time. I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, that I had prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make me sure, and to find me worthy. I told Mother I had had a true vision when I was praying in the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the little island in the lake. I said I knew, as surely as I knew I was kneeling there, that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent. But Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we could talk it over again. (She tosses her head—indignantly) I never dreamed Holy Mother would give me such advice! I was really shocked. I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time. After I left her, I felt all mixed up, so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her. (She pauses and a look of growing uneasiness comes over her face. She passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain—vaguely) That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time. (She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.) (175–76)

What to make of it? It’s one of those endings that leave you, as I suggested earlier, in “awed silence”—like Jamie and Edmund, “motionless.” Tyrone “stirs in his chair”—to signify what? O’Neill does not tell; he simply presents.

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There is no summation as at Hamlet’s death: “For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov’d most royally.” There is nothing like Kent’s agonized “Break heart; I prithee, break” as he sees Lear die. O’Neill had given each of the men his little “aria.” Now he gives Mary hers—and leaves us to our own thoughts. How variously this last scene—and the whole play—can be read is strikingly illustrated by a New York production in 1986. Its New Yorker reviewer, Brendan Gill, praised it for at last facing up to what he considered O’Neill’s real theme, “that women are murderously destructive by nature and men are in constant peril of not surviving their machinations.” In this reading, Mary is seen as imposing, through her “ineradicable, maudlin narcissism,” a tyrannical hold on her “hapless husband and sons,” driving them, literally, to drink. Her final words fall upon James Tyrone “like a sentence of death.” This is why he “stirs in his chair.” The 1986 director had him “utter a groan.”18 My own thoughts, as should be clear by now, go in a different direction. They go back to the letter to Carlotta, to the “deep pity and understanding and forgiveness” that O’Neill had come to in this grappling with his past and that he had found, in varying degrees, in each of the “haunted Tyrones.” I think of the tiny epiphanies that illuminate the last two acts. I find it useless to ask “Will they last? What about tomorrow? Have we witnessed redemption?” No. We have witnessed what we have witnessed, seen what we have seen. Disturbing ambiguities remain, of course. O’Neill does not resolve them, either in bitterness or in soothing sentiment. The point is, he had found a way of living with them. He once described tragedy as ennobling in art “man’s hopeless hopes”—the hopes, I take it, that transcend the hopelessness of the here and now. So, nearly half a century later, he “ennobled” the seeming hopelessness of his one-time family situation by finding in it the possibility of pity, understanding, and forgiveness. Thus he could present the play to Carlotta in gratitude for their “twelve-year Journey into Light—into love.”

No t e s   1. Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 146.   2. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Concord Edition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1914), ix.   3. Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, 233.   4. Ibid., 604.   5. “Note on The Cenci by the Editor,” in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, ed. Mary Shelley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1865), 281.   6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Schiller, 9 December 1797, as quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge, Eng.: Bowes and Bowes, 1952), 31.

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  7. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921), 17.   8. Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, 260.   9. Ibid., 233. 10. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, ed. Lane Cooper (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 142. 11. Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, 146. 12. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), xii. 13. Eugene O’Neill, “On Man and God,” in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 115. 14. Arthur Miller, “The Salesman has a Birthday,” in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 14. 15. Emily Dickinson, Poem no. 1551, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), 1069. 16. See also Richard B. Sewall, “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” in The Vision of Tragedy, new ed., enlarged (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 161–74. 17. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 7. 18. Brendan Gill, “Unhappy Tyrones,” New Yorker, 12 May 1986, 93–94.

KURT EISEN

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n the early 1930s O’Neill observed to Barrett Clark, “All the most dramatic episodes of my life I have so far kept out of my plays,” though at the same time he envisioned writing a nine-play project that would serve as “a sort of dramatic autobiography” (Clark 162). This large ambition led him shortly thereafter to begin work on the American history cycle. But in 1940 with the cycle hopelessly stalled and the calamity of world war weighing oppressively on his mind and spirits, O’Neill told George Jean Nathan of a new play in progress, a play not concerned with the present world’s crisis, as the title might indicate, but the story of one day, 8 A.M. to midnight, in the life of a family of four—father, mother, and two sons—back in 1912,—a day in which things occur which evoke the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its interrelationships. A deeply tragic play, but without any violent dramatic action. At the final curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the 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. (AEG 202) From The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 124–153, 209–213. © 1994 by the University of Georgia Press.

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As if seeing suddenly that his history of the Melody-Harford family would inevitably lead him to the brink of world destruction, in the Tyrone family of Long Day’s Journey into Night O’Neill presents his most direct portrait of his own family and their position within the cultural-historical context he was tracing in the cycle. Family relations and the significance of home were of course themes that obsessed O’Neill throughout his career—even in the Glencairn plays, The Hairy Ape, or The Iceman Cometh, plays that seem more concerned with escaping from home and family but where the men in the forecastle or the barroom nonetheless convey a strong sense of kinship. In The Straw, Desire Under the Elms, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, A Touch of the Poet, and More Stately Mansions, O’Neill explores family relations more explicitly in ways that incorporate certain aspects of his own early life; but in Long Day’s Journey O’Neill’s autobiographical imperative decisively erases the boundary separating life and memory from theater and history. O’Neill uses the occasion also to come to terms with the values of domestic melodrama, perhaps the most pervasive in modern theater and certainly the foundation of English and American drama in the nineteenth century. Michael R. Booth calls domesticity “the backbone of Victorian drama,” a tradition culminating in the plays of Pinero, Jones, Wilde, and Shaw (Prefaces 23). In America, writes David Grimsted, “domestic dramas gave a highly emotional context to themes close to the life of everyone: the problem of courtship, the difficulty of family relationships, or the need for self-sacrificing love” (12). American plays from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century—from Royall Tyler’s comedy The Contrast to Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell—unfailingly affirm the recognizable values of home, motherhood, and filial reverence. Even the Fechter-O’Neill adaptation of Monte Cristo, in most respects a heroic rather than a domestic melodrama, stresses familial values in its significant departures from the Dumas novel, such as making Albert de Morcerf the son of Edmund Dantès: as if to ensure its popular appeal, the stage version closes not with Edmund’s betrothal to his Turkish concubine, Haydée, as the novel does (Haydée is entirely absent from the play), but with this declaration from Mercedes, Edmund’s lost love, whose curtain line evokes the very image of the devoted mother: “Your prayers have saved your father’s life, Albert—you are his son!” (Fechter and O’Neill 70).1 The structure and values of the melodramatic play depend on familiar domestic types. The psychological basis of melodrama—what gives depth and interest to an otherwise relentlessly formulaic genre—persists because the characters are so wholly subsumed by what Peter Brooks calls their “primary psychic roles.” Brooks’s analysis helps explain the tone of much of the dialogue in Long Day’s Journey (and indeed sounds very like O’Neill’s description

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of his new play to Nathan): “The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship. They assume primary psychic roles, father, mother, child, and express basic psychic conditions” (Melodramatic Imagination 4). Just as characters in melodrama strive to express, according to Brooks, “the whole lesson of their relationship,” in Long Day’s Journey, according to O’Neill, “things occur which evoke the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its interrelationships.” O’Neill’s choice of “interrelationship” instead of “relationship” itself suggests how Long Day’s Journey transforms the melodramatic self–other antithesis into a more complex intersubjectivity in which family is not merely a system of “primary psychic roles” but the scene of a continual construction and dissolution of identity for each individual and for the family as a whole. Traditional family roles still exert decisive force in Long Day’s Journey but most often negatively, in the form of ideals that each of the Tyrones fails to sustain. O’Neill noted this problem in his own family in a 1945 letter to his son, Eugene, Jr.: “My family’s quarrels and tragedy were within. To the outer world we maintained an indomitably united front and lied and lied for each other. A typical pure Irish family . . . a strange mixture of fight and hate and forgive, a clannish pride before the world, that is peculiarly its own” (SL 569). The outward unity belies the breakdowns of kinship within, and nothing provokes more “fight and hate” among the Tyrones than the sense that one has failed in his or her primary responsibilities as father, mother, son, or brother. For example, the elder James Tyrone is outraged that his own namesake Jamie fails to show a proper filial respect for his father’s profession, religion, or personal comportment; Jamie has in fact disappointed all of his father’s hopes. Late in the play Tyrone’s bitterness drives him to complain over the semiconscious Jamie: “A sweet spectacle for me! My first-born, who I hoped would bear my name in honor and dignity, who showed such brilliant promise!” (CP 3:822). For Edmund he expresses less outright dissatisfaction but tells him nonetheless, “You’re no great shakes as a son. It’s a case of ‘A poor thing but mine own’ ” (CP 3:804). On his side, Jamie ridicules his father as a miserly “Old Gaspard” (CP 3:815); he cynically calls his mother “the hophead” (CP 3:818) and a mad Ophelia (CP 3:824), and acknowledges having tried to make Edmund the morally depraved “bum” he perceives himself to be (CP 3:820). Likewise, Edmund is outraged at Tyrone’s compulsive stinginess; he considers his father’s plan to send him to the inexpensive “state farm” for tubercular patients an affront to the family honor and general standards of fatherly duty: “I’ve treated you rottenly, in my way, more than once. But to think when it’s a question of your son having consumption, you can show

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yourself up before the whole town as such a stinking old tightwad! . . . Jesus, Papa, haven’t you any pride or shame?” (CP 3:805). Such criticisms pervade the play. Their aggregate effect is to confirm the most damning criticism of all in terms of melodramatic rectitude and value: Mary Tyrone’s repeated and bitter complaint that the Tyrones have never had a “real home,” that they can never be a real family. This absence in the Tyrones’ family life marks the modern demise, as O’Neill envisions it, of the melodramatic sensibility that emerged so powerfully after the French Revolution and affirmed middle-class domesticity in both fiction and drama. In place of outmoded religious values the melodrama of the nineteenth century “urged men to purity, patriotism, and faith in providence, and it promised them earthly” happiness from God, home, and country; but the greatest of these was home with its cornerstone of female purity” (Grimsted 229). The sanctified mother featured in James Tyrone’s recollections of his own impoverished childhood, the “fine, brave, sweet woman” who cries with joy at being able to spend a one-dollar Thanksgiving bonus (“or maybe it was Christmas”) on food for her ill-fed and overworked children (CP 3:808) sets the standard to which Mary Tyrone is implicitly compared. O’Neill inverts melodramatic values so that Mary’s failings as a mother, especially her irremediable addiction to morphine, emerge as the actual cornerstone of the Tyrone household. As he descends deep into drunken candor late in the play, Jamie observes just how completely Mary’s addiction has shattered the image of maternal purity: “Christ, I’d never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!” (CP 3:818). Her desire for a home, along with the Tyrone men’s simultaneous feelings of a sincere love and an equal despair that she will ever escape her addiction, generate the play’s central thematic conflict. “Home” is ironically an absence at the center of the Tyrone family, and O’Neill’s postmelodramatic vision offers very little comfort from God, home, or country. None of the Tyrones therefore ever feels truly “at home,” literally or metaphorically. Mary remarks of Tyrone, “He doesn’t understand a home. He doesn’t feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home” (CP 3:749). Mary believes her husband actually prefers theaters and barrooms, which explains in part why their home has become the site of so much drinking and declaiming. In particular, Mary blames Tyrone’s itinerant acting career for their lack of a true permanent home and for her own chronic sense of alienation: “I’ve never felt at home in the theater. Even though Mr. Tyrone has made me go with him on all his tours, I’ve had little to do with the people in his company, or with anyone on the stage. . . . They have always been kind to me, and I to them. But I’ve never felt at home with them. Their life is not my life. It has always stood between me and—” (CP 3:775). Edmund, whose “extreme nervous sensibility” is likened to Mary’s near the beginning of the play, likewise considers himself “a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really

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want and is not really wanted” (CP 3:723, 812). For the Tyrones, to feel “at home” means to have an identity built on a strong sense of connection to a place and to a stable family architecture; paradoxically, their sense of family is built on a general mistrust of home as a concept—a clear index of how far O’Neill departs from conventional melodramatic standards of value in Long Day’s Journey. The play’s domestic ontology is such that to assume a stable notion of family such as dominates the early scenes of the play leads later to a sense of disintegration and discord. Throughout Long Day’s Journey we see a family defining itself through divisive emotional and ideological conflict, defying melodramatic conventions of family happiness even as it forges an inexorable kinship: to concur with John Orr that in Long Day’s Journey “there is no real centre to family life at all” (196) leads to the sense that the Tyrones prevail as a family despite their alternating love and faithlessness, that they are all the more bound to one another because of the shared absence at the center of their fate as a family and as individuals. Mary’s objections to the theater raise a key aspect of the play’s critique of domesticity: the opposition of home to theater. Even if melodramatic theater itself celebrates home and family, James Tyrone’s life as a matinee idol is deeply inimical, Mary argues, to domestic happiness. For Tyrone, in whom “the actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement and gesture” (CP 3:718), the home is a kind of theater where he has undertaken (to less than universal acclaim) the role of paterfamilias; his bitterness at Mary’s failings derives largely from his sense that she can never live up to her part in this family romance. As Gerardine Meaney notes, Mary denies her husband and sons “a sense of relation to the processes of life and death which, as mother, she is culturally constructed to hold in reserve for them” (211). Although home and theater are fundamentally antithetical for her, Mary has another part to play in a rather different domestic drama. Shocked when Cathleen, the maid, asks her why she herself never became an actress, she reveals the antitheatrical prejudice typical of her religious background: “I? What put that absurd notion in your head? I was brought up in a respectable home and educated in the best convent in the Middle West. Before I met Mr. Tyrone I hardly knew there was such a thing as a theater. I was a very pious girl” (CP 3:775). Mary associates her childhood home with the convent and the theater with worldliness—that is, the dubious, potentially corrupting world outside the home. Yet we also see Mary’s habit of casting herself in particular roles, in this case that of the beleaguered “very pious girl” taken from her home and forced to live among theater people. The death of her second son Eugene was for Mary the cruelest consequence of this conflict of theater and home: it is no exaggeration to argue that an absent character dominates Long Day’s Journey into Night. Mary blames Jamie for having maliciously infected the baby, Eugene, with a fatal case of

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measles; later she takes the responsibility herself but in a way that also implicates Tyrone and life as a touring actor: It was my fault. I should have insisted on staying with Eugene and not have let you persuade me to join you, just because I loved you. Above all, I shouldn’t have let you insist I have another baby to take Eugene’s place, because you thought that would make me forget his death. I knew from experience by then that children should have homes to be born in, if they are to be good children, and women need homes, if they are to be good mothers. I was afraid all the time I carried Edmund. I knew something terrible would happen. I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby, and that God would punish me if I did. I never should have borne Edmund. (CP 3:766)

It seems harshly appropriate that what becomes metonymic of Mary’s drug habit is the “spare room” upstairs where she habitually disappears to take her morphine. When Mary visits this room she slips into a narcotic haze that gradually nullifies the otherwise intolerable sense of what Meaney has called “the loss of a maternal reality,” the dead son’s inescapable legacy to the family (205). If the second Tyrone son had lived, this “spare room” would have been his room;2 in a sense the phrase, with its implications of a space occupied only fitfully, may be applied to the Tyrone home in general. Though her addiction stems from the painful birth of her third son, Edmund, Mary craves morphine because it allows her to believe she can recover her maidenly state unsullied by the corruptions of life in the theater. That she blames marriage for her broken life becomes quite plain in the second act when she tells Tyrone, “You should have remained a bachelor and lived in secondrate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms,” adding significantly, “Then nothing would ever have happened” (CP 3:753), including, she seems to imply, the death of Eugene Tyrone. Mary’s antipathy to the stage makes it especially ironic that she finds herself in a central dramatic position from the very beginning of the play, as suggested first by her acute self-consciousness—her sense that Tyrone, Jamie, and Edmund are always watching her (CP 3:721; 734; 740). In the spectacle of Mary descending with her wedding gown during the play’s final moments, the Tyrone men see all their sins remembered even through the fog of drunkenness. Tyrone, for example, perceives the sheltered young woman he married transformed into a neurotic, aging Ophelia, a dope addict who having failed to drown herself in fact has succeeded in drowning herself in spirit.3 Mary’s wedding gown, a memento of the crucial turning point in her life, signifies the whole history of her marriage—its initial bliss along with its defining

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disappointments—and serves to underscore Mary’s resentment of Tyrone’s stinginess by way of contrast to her father’s lavish generosity in buying her the gown: “My father told me to buy anything I wanted and never mind what it cost” (CP 3:784). Just as James and the two sons share a deep regret over Mary’s failings as a mother, James’s tight-fistedness and unsettled life signify his failure to build a solid and stable home for her: “You forget I know from experience what a home is like,” Mary tells him. “I gave up one to marry you—my father’s home” (CP 3:756). Through this gown O’Neill achieves the kind of metonymy that Roman Jakobson has attributed to realism in general: an object that evokes the distinguishing history of a person or group.4 Yet in the highly concentrated realism of Long Day’s Journey this wedding gown transcends its metonymy function to signify something broader and more formidable: it becomes a Balzacian peau de chagrin, a magic skin that shrinks even as it makes one’s initial wishes come true. In the play’s final moments Mary has drifted so far from her husband and two sons that they become for her “simply a part of the familiar atmosphere of the room, a background which does not touch her preoccupation” (CP 3:824). Her increasing detachment is central to O’Neill’s implicit critique of conventional images of home and motherhood, the two elements central to the melodramatic tradition that was both his professional and his filial heritage. Mary’s chilling, morphine-clouded monologues set the ideals of home and “female purity” against each other: in effect Mary relinquishes any remaining chance of creating the true home as she pursues her morphine-aided dream of a reclaimed maidenhood. Moving back into the past in search of a putative lost self—trying, that is, to free herself from the oppressive present by slipping into an idealized, virginal past—Mary ironically affirms, in Laurin Porter’s phrase, the “steadily expanding cycles of guilt” (Banished Prince 88) that the personal narratives of each Tyrone painfully chronicle and compulsively reenact. Having lost both a beloved son and the ideal self of her youth, Mary is thus in a state of perpetual mourning that merges both of Freud’s senses of the term “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 164). Mary’s regression to childhood governs the action of the play, not simply because O’Neill makes it theatrically compelling but also because it is central to the expository design in which each Tyrone recreates aspects of the family history. As Stephen Whicher remarked after the world premiere in Stockholm, however, “Audiences are not sitting on hard seats night after night, absorbed in this play for over four hours, just because it gives them information about O’Neill” (614). What does exert such fascination on audiences and readers is how this “information,” this story of a family’s troubled past and untenable future, presents a compelling image of complex familial

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involvement and identification; what might have been simply a sorrowful, sentimental play of a woman falling victim to drug addiction becomes instead the examination of a collective tragic fate. Whicher’s comment that just as “Joyce, Proust, and Woolf have written novels that abandon story, so this is a tragedy that abandons ‘drama’ ” (614) emphasizes O’Neill’s method of keeping incident and spectacle to a poignant minimum and instead presenting his characters through their various confessions and their conflicting accounts of the past. The result is a play that combines “the retrospective techniques of Ibsen with the exorcistic attack of Strindberg” (Brustein 348–49), and concentrates the force of a family-chronicle novel within a play conforming to the classical unities of space and time. Each Tyrone offers an autobiography in précis, focusing on crucial triumphs, painful discoveries, and moments of transition. O’Neill telescopes the Tyrones’ entire family history into a four-act play by means of these selfrevealing monologues and thus creates a dramatic form that emulates such lengthy family novels as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Balzac’s Cousine Bette—each of them rife with intrafamilial melodrama—as well as novels whose central themes are memory and the reconstruction of the past as a means of self-discovery, including such works as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! As in these novels O’Neill creates a multivalent reality wholly through the often contradictory perceptions and revelations of his characters. We learn of Mary’s Catholic girlhood in the Midwest and her dreams of becoming a nun or a concert pianist; of the crushing poverty of James’s early childhood and his great, unfulfilled promise as a Shakespearean actor; of Jamie’s brilliant prospects as a young boy, now turned to cynicism and disillusionment; of Edmund’s wanderings, his brushes with indigence and death.5 Each Tyrone’s personal history is brought out in the context of the play’s two unfolding crises—Mary’s latest bout with morphine and the onset of Edmund’s tuberculosis. Where The Iceman Cometh begins with the theme of the life-sustaining pipe dream—an idea that the play urges relentlessly into fact— Long Day’s Journey begins with biographical facts and gathers them gradually into an image of a family’s collective destiny. The Tyrones’ personal narratives are revealed to be subjective and sometimes illusory; however, it is not what happens—the play, as Whicher notes, is singularly lacking in incident—but the way the characters speak and the motives that drive them to these selfrevelations that create the compelling interest in Long Day’s Journey. Integral to O’Neill’s novelistic technique are the Tyrones’ different accounts of family history, usually setting one character’s idealized, sentimental version of the past against another’s more candid and factual report: the very “dialectic of ‘invention’ and ‘reality’ ” typical of novelistic representation (Robert, Origins 33). When a second version of events is offered, however—one

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seemingly more objective—it does not supersede the invented version, which may have superior imaginative or emotional power.6 An important example of this representational counterpoint may be discerned in Mary’s continual references to her happy childhood and generous father, along with Tyrone’s subsequent corrective account. Mary represents her father as the model parent—generous, supportive, sober, and stable—and her childhood home as “respectable” (CP 3:775), qualities she finds lacking in her husband and her current home. The account Tyrone gives Edmund in act 4 tries to strip away the sentimentality with which Mary shrouds her past: “Her wonderful home was ordinary enough. Her father wasn’t the great, generous, noble Irish gentleman she makes out. . . . he had his weaknesses. She condemns my drinking but she forgets his. It’s true he never touched a drop till he was forty, but after that he made up for lost time. He became a steady champagne drinker, the worst kind. That was his grand pose, to drink only champagne. Well, it finished him quick . . .” (CP 3:800). This version desanctifies Mary’s father, yet her ideal remains the more pertinent reality since it determines her own attitudes and behavior, which in turn govern the attitudes and behavior of the Tyrone men. Mary’s recollections of her childhood home in effect reverse the chronology of the Freudian “family romance,” helping her to retreat to a filial dependency by idealizing her parent to her husband’s disadvantage.7 “Only the past when you were happy is real” (CP 3:777) has become Mary’s credo: among her strongest motives for escaping into narcotic isolation is its power to shield her from accounts of reality that undermine the sustaining personal mythology she needs to believe in, which suggests that Mary is addicted to morphine less than to the lost reality that the drug helps to revive for her. In her careful cultivation of a particular version of the past, Mary reflects the condition of all the Tyrones: their narratives amount to carefully formulated melodramas of lost felicity and cruel victimization. As in The Iceman Cometh, each character portrays himself as the protagonist in a melancholy tale of thwarted ideals and violated family sanctity; yet also as in Iceman O’Neill subordinates this melodramatic bent to the goal of self-revelation, relegating almost all dramatic incident to a past still retrievable through confession, narrative, and counternarrative. Just as he unmasks the melodramatic conception of home, however, O’Neill also undermines its crucial opposition between good and evil along with its absolute distinction between self and other. Melodrama may be “an attempt to explore the ‘other’ point of view, to give it a chance to speak for itself ” (Lang 11), but only when this otherness is absolutely clear and fixed. Simple and distinct moral identities remain essential: as nineteenthcentury American playwright Charles Saunders declared, “Virtue shall hold no intercourse with vice.”8 The villain must be villainous throughout, unless he can be converted finally and totally to the side of good (ideally just before dying); a sympathetic character may be permitted a measure of moral

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ambivalence, as is Philip Fleming in James Herne’s protorealist Margaret Fleming, but only if virtue can be established and made to prevail through some other character, such as Philip’s faithful wife Margaret, a defender of traditional maternal values to the point that she maintains home and marriage with Philip (but without further sexual relations) and takes up the duties of raising her husband’s illegitimate child. Good may not triumph over evil in each particular, but good is typically the basis for sympathy and identification, while evil always aims to induce a feeling of alienation and dread. The highly volatile dynamic of antipathy and identification in Long Day’s Journey depends heavily on the myriad “shifting alliances” that figure even in O’Neill’s earliest preliminary notes (EOW 283), but it also generates a novelistic interpenetration of Self and Other that dissolves melodrama’s simple link between Evil and Otherness. Identity typically remains unproblematic in melodrama, but in the modern novel—especially in Conrad, Joyce, and Proust—it forms a basic interest of the exposition, as a character struggles to know and express himself and his place in the world. The apparent emphasis on a discrete self in Long Day’s Journey proves illusory on close examination, for each Tyrone is constructed dialogically as an other within the various personal melodramas enacted by all four family members. As the play progresses and the fog outside grows denser, the distinction between heroes, villains, and victims becomes increasingly vague. Most characteristically, each Tyrone serves, intentionally or not, as victim or villain in the melodramas envisaged by another member of the family: Mary is a fallen woman in thrall to morphine and negligent doctors; Tyrone is the cruel father too stingy to save his son; Jamie is the jealous older brother bent on fratricide, an enemy of all family values. Aside from the visible effects of his consumption, Edmund is less forcefully drawn, less melodramatic in conception: his function seems primarily to be the others’ victim, though of course his villainy is essentially innate, since his birth is blamed for causing Mary’s addiction. The effect of bringing all of these roles into simultaneous contact is to break down the moral distinctness of the Tyrones’ identities and to show their complete entanglement within a complex matrix of identification and rejection. Thus we hear certain events recalled and reviewed by Tyrone, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund until the objective facts disappear and only the family’s web of interdependence remains. The theme of “will power,” addressed at several points in the play, serves to illustrate how the opposition of individuals on one level—that is, the melodramatic—becomes on another level an underlying bond. This theme is especially apt for demonstrating the illusion of autonomy because it figures so centrally in earlier plays such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. In Long Day’s Journey O’Neill examines the problem of will most persistently in relation to Mary’s drug addiction, as in the second act when Mary assails Doctor

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Hardy, the Tyrones’ cut-rate family doctor: “When you’re in agony and half insane, he sits and holds your hand and delivers sermons on will power!” (CP 3:757). Soon afterward Edmund pleads with Mary to fight her incipient relapse: “You’re only just started. You can still stop. You’ve got the will power! We’ll all help you. I’ll do anything!” (CP 3:769). When Mary evades his pleas, Edmund resigns himself to the same sense of hopelessness that has already taken hold of his mother and later criticizes his father in terms similar to Mary’s attack on Doctor Hardy: “After you found out she’d been made a morphine addict, why didn’t you send her to a cure then, at the start, while she still had a chance? . . . I’ll bet you told her all she had to do was use a little will power!” (CP 3:802). If by “will power” Edmund means the capacity to shape one’s own destiny, then for the Tyrone family it can only be an illusion, though one that is dying hard. Tyrone, the actor of romantic melodrama, is the last member of the family to relinquish his faith in the individual will. After Edmund sardonically calls life “so damned crazy” in its frustrating ironies (CP 3:810), Tyrone at first quotes Shakespeare in rebuttal: “ ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings’ ” (CP 3:810–11). Tyrone’s irrational hunger for real estate similarly bespeaks an anxious conviction that one might circumvent fate through sheer resolve: like Brutus Jones, Tyrone has contrived a plan to save himself from ruin. Both Jones and Tyrone depend on a false mastery of geography to save them from what they fear most: in Jones’s case this means being able to escape quickly through the forest, which he has studied carefully and stocked with supplies; Tyrone likewise buys land obsessively to escape an old age in the poorhouse. Just as Jones is stripped layer by layer of his imperial identity, however, the events of the day wear down Tyrone from his initially robust and “soldierly” bearing to the “sad, bewildered, broken old man” who “stands a second as if not knowing what to do” at the end of the third act (CP 3:718, 790–91). In the final moments of the play as he witnesses the consummation of Mary’s narcotic relapse, he “gives up helplessly, shrinking into himself . . .” (CP 3:825). Though in many ways she is the most oblivious character, Mary sees and demonstrates most clearly that the power of will alone is never adequate to resolving life’s most fundamental problems. Mary voices the play’s central axiom, its implicit denial of will power: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (CP 3:765). The will is dissolved in the past’s persistent return: just as no one is to blame for the Tyrones’ family destiny, no one person is capable of saving them from themselves, not even Mary. O’Neill’s novelistic method in Long Day’s Journey is most purposeful in its relentless evocations and revisions of a family past, and its representation of an intersubjective destiny markedly different from the tragic frustrations of such heroes as Oedipus, Hamlet, Brand, and Willy Loman.

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If Tyrone, the product of the nineteenth century and its melodramatic vision of heroism, clings tenaciously to a future-oriented belief in will power, Mary holds on even more fiercely to its retrospective counterpart, the “true self ” that exists prior even to “the past” within a kind of timeless personal mythology. This self is perhaps necessarily always a lost self, a fixed, idealized condition that Mary uses to make sense of her current predicament but to which she can gain access only through the back door of morphine. Thus the irony, not fully apparent at first, of Tyrone’s hearty expression of love very early in act 1: “I can’t tell you the deep happiness it gives me, darling, to see you as you’ve been since you came back to us, your dear old self again. . . . So keep up the good work, Mary” (CP 3:721). When Mary utters her important statement on the relation between past and present, the irony of a return to this “dear old self ” becomes plain: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever” (CP 3:749). Both Tyrone and Mary are invoking a time mythically prior to these “other things” that “come between yourself and what you’d like to be,” but what Tyrone calls her “old self ” and Mary her “true self ” are divergent fictions generated by the repeating crisis of Mary’s addiction.9 Mary’s sense of a “true self ”: while he believes it is morphine that obscures the real Mary Tyrone—that is, the sweet and modest young woman he married—she envisions a virginal self, a young woman who knows nothing of James Tyrone, and she requires morphine to reclaim it. In Bakhtin’s terminology this self in its wholeness and purity stands at “an absolute epic distance [that] separates the epic world from contemporary reality”; however, within a novelistic framework such as O’Neill devises in Long Day’s Journey the “disintegration of the integrity that an individual had possessed in epic (and in tragedy)” reaches “toward a new, complex wholeness” (Dialogic Imagination 13, 38). This new wholeness crosses beyond the bounds of simple individuality to generate an image of familial intersubjectivity that displaces the individual hero at the center of O’Neillian tragedy.10 James Tyrone has of course forsaken his own better self by following the artistic path of least resistance in pursuing a sure-fire, money-making role.11 In Mary’s narcotic regression to a utopian maidenhood full of piety and family happiness, O’Neill dramatizes their mutual reinvention of the past. Indeed, Mary’s narrated past subtly illuminates Tyrone’s. As she tells Cathleen, “I had two dreams. To be a nun, that was the more beautiful one. To become a concert pianist, that was the other” (CP 3:777). Later, Tyrone gives Edmund the corrective account of Mary’s childhood, adding that one “must take her tales of the past with a grain of salt” (CP 3:800). The notion that she had genuine musical talent, for instance, “was put in her head by the nuns flattering her” (CP 3:800): “They don’t know,” Tyrone explains to Edmund, “that not one in a

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million who shows promise ever rises to concert playing” (CP 3:801). He fails to apply this hyperbolic statistic to himself, though, because to do so would explode his own pipe dream of the kind that pervades The Iceman Cometh, his belief that as a young man he “was considered one of the three or four young actors with the greatest artistic promise in America” (CP 3:809). Tyrone cites the authority of the famous actor Edwin Booth, with whom he once shared the stage, to corroborate his judgment, just as Mary cites the judgment of the nuns. Though Tyrone’s artistic “promise” may have come much closer to fruition than Mary’s, it has become just as fictive in the family’s current circumstances. Mary’s longing to become a nun—her “more beautiful” dream—rather than her unrealized musical promise corresponds to Tyrone’s failure to become a great Shakespearean actor. Tyrone says of Mary that she was “never made to renounce the world” (CP 3:801), but both of them make compromises and abandon their dreams: Tyrone buys worldly success by purchasing and starring in a lucrative though artistically ruinous play, while Mary embraces “the world” by marrying the actor James Tyrone. At the level of personal melodrama the spouse becomes a kind of villain responsible for frustrating these dreams. At the novelistic level, however, oppositions between self and other take on a decisive measure of irony; the comparability of their personal melodramas draws Tyrone and Mary effectually into closer union. The document recording Edwin Booth’s exact words of tribute, like the young actor whose potential they extolled, is now lost, a fact that underscores the close relation between Mary’s lost “true self ” and Tyrone’s ruined artistic career. Fittingly, when Tyrone wonders where he has stored that scrap of paper, Edmund observes with irony, “It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress” (CP 3:811). This novelistic technique of establishing multiple perspectives on the same set of events establishes the basis of familial tragedy. Fraternal relations in Long Day’s Journey offer perhaps the most explicit context for O’Neill’s study of psychic intimacy and the sense of shared fatality among family members. As Bennett Simon has suggested, “Oedipal conflicts do not seem to gel in this family” where the father seems less a strong patriarch than an “older sibling” (181).12 If Jamie’s debauched and self-destructive cynicism mirrors his father’s gradual collapse, and Edmund’s consumption parallels his mother’s morphine addiction, the bond between Jamie and Edmund reaches the point of shared identity—recalling O’Neill’s often confusing experiment with masks and identities in The Great God Brown and his use of a split protagonist in Days Without End. Travis Bogard incisively sums up this principle in Long Day’s Journey and O’Neill’s earlier plays: “As with Robert and Andrew [Mayo], as with the doubles in the Mannon family, which is the self? Which the Double? In O’Neill’s plays it is not entirely evident that the

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self, in all instances a self-portrait, has sufficiently strong identity to make clear which of the ‘brothers’ is the reflected image of the other” (448–49). The strategy basic to O’Neill’s doppelgänger and the various masked (Brown and Dion) and pseudomasked (for example, Lavinia and Christine Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra) pairings in the plays of the 1920s and early 1930s was a radical, if somewhat jagged, dissection of the self on stage, an attempt to undermine the apparent integrity of characters who by nature of the medium appear physically whole in the theater. O’Neill strove for what Melville, Conrad, Faulkner, and Joyce could achieve more readily in their novels: a manner of exposition that makes plain the deeply implicated, sometimes wholly interdependent identities of the main characters, one of them frequently a narrator. Especially in Conrad—in the Marlow of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness and the captain-narrator of “The Secret Sharer”—as well as in Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and the “persistent, though unconscious, exchange of thoughts and impressions between them” (Gilbert 26), this interdependence of identity emerges as the structural principle central to the modern novel. In such Faulkner novels as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, identity is a force that emerges as two characters enact their ritualistic reconstructions of the past, as in Absalom, Absalom! when Shreve and Quentin piece together Charles Bon’s life history: “It was Shreve speaking . . . [but] it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal, the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere . . .” (303). Such moments epitomize the connection between storytelling, identity, and the past that constitutes the interdependent fraternal identities of Jamie and Edmund. At times their brotherly conflicts evince the morality-play aspect of melodrama, with Jamie as the cynical, vice-ridden, “Mephistophelian” enemy of traditional family virtue (CP 3:722) and Edmund as its virtuous defender—a role he plays when he strikes Jamie for making cruel remarks about their mother’s addiction. But O’Neill complicates the melodramatic configuration in several ways: the bonds between Jamie and Edmund are too complex and too ambivalent to support a simple Cain-and-Abel melodramatic struggle. Edmund is by no means saintly, either sexually or in his taste in literature, which particularly in poetry tends toward the decadent: Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Dowson, and Baudelaire. Jamie points out that it was he who introduced Edmund to poetry, adding, “And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you’d write! Hell, you’re more than my brother. I made you!” (CP 3:819). Jamie expresses his affection for Edmund most succinctly when he twists a conventional declaration of hatred: “I love your guts, Kid” (CP 3:814). Later he assures Edmund, “I love you more

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than I hate you” (CP 3:821), a statement crucial to understanding most of the family’s alternately bitter and conciliatory exchanges. Jamie’s resentment and animosity toward Edmund springs from his feeling that Mary has abandoned him for “dope,” in his eyes the vice of a whore. Jamie admits he has tried to corrupt Edmund, largely to punish him for his role in causing their mother’s drug problem: “Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part. That part that’s been dead so long. That hates life. . . . Never wanted you succeed [sic] and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet! (He stares at Edmund with increasing enmity.) And it was your being born that started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, God damn you, I can’t help hating your guts—!” (CP 3:820). O’Neill shows Jamie’s cynicism here to be primarily a defensive pose against the painful fact of Mary’s addiction, which Jamie identifies with his own drunken defeatism: “I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too” (CP 3:818). Instead, he settles for warning Edmund to be on guard against his hatred and jealousy—as if such a warning were now the greatest brotherly love Jamie can offer: “Remember I warned you—for your sake. Give me credit. Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself ” (CP 3:821).13 In this distant echo of the curtain line from O’Neill’s first play, A Wife for a Life, Jamie concludes a searing self-condemnation that becomes his highest expression of brotherly concern, perverse though it is, distinguishing him ultimately from the conventional “black sheep” brother of melodrama. To insist on simple, discrete, and antithetical identities for any of the Tyrones is to ignore Jamie’s “in vino veritas” advice to Edmund late in the play: “You’re a damned fine kid. Ought to be. I made you. So go and get well. Don’t die on me. You’re all I’ve got left” (CP 3:821). We may infer that Jamie feels now that life holds utterly no promise for him, but senses that somehow he may survive through Edmund. Having already given Edmund his nascent literary ambitions, Jamie here bequeaths to him the remains of his own will to live, his own exhausted identity. One is tempted to cite an episode from the elder James Tyrone’s professional past as a dramatic paradigm of the roles played by Edmund and Jamie, his alternating in the roles of Othello and Iago opposite Edwin Booth. Yet Edmund, as such commentators as Bogard and Judith Barlow have remarked, seems conspicuously underendowed with the sharply defined traits of a stage character—even of the ambiguous kind to be found in the three other Tyrones—and thus seems incapable of being either an Iago or an Othello. Indeed, his fundamental aloofness almost disrupts the web of familial tensions O’Neill creates among the Tyrones. Edmund’s mystical bent especially appears to set him apart from his family; in describing his epiphanic experiences at sea, his “saint’s vision of beatitude” (CP 3:812), he concludes with this

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personal credo: “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death” (CP 3:812). If, as Michael R. Booth proposes, early Victorian melodrama replaced the metaphysical ideal of romantic tragedy with a domestic one (Prefaces 22), Edmund here expresses the wish to be released from the incessant melodrama that life has become for him, wishing he were a part of brute nature instead of “a stranger who never really feels at home.” Feeling alienated from the very domestic realm that melodrama depends on, the sense of belonging to a family, with his mystical predilections Edmund in fact summarizes the family’s fundamental problem, translating its specific interpersonal predicaments into the context of existential estrangement. Being somewhat outside the idea of “family” is a feeling that afflicts all four Tyrones but is also the sympathetic force that ironically binds them to one another, and Edmund is the character who seems most at home, as it were, within the play’s essential homelessness.14 One late exchange between Jamie and Edmund illuminates the position in which O’Neill has placed Edmund relative to the play’s unfolding truths. Having returned drunk and melancholy from the brothel in town, Jamie inveighs against Tyrone’s miserly plan to send Edmund to the stateoperated sanatorium: “The sooner you kick the bucket the less expense. (with contemptuous hatred ) What a bastard to have for a father! Christ, if you put him in a book, no one would believe it!” Jamie’s portrait of their father would be simplistic, a melodramatic image of the cruel father. On the other hand, Edmund’s reply, “Oh, Papa’s all right, if you try to understand him—and keep your sense of humor” (CP 3:814), points to the very task O’Neill himself undertook in Long Day’s Journey: a compassionate portrait of “all the four haunted Tyrones,” as O’Neill puts it in the dedication to his wife Carlotta (CP 3:714). Edmund’s function may be compared to Charles Marsden’s in Strange Interlude, a character who becomes the play’s central consciousness, a novelistic figure of the sort Henry James called a “reflector” who serves not to alter events but to bring them into focus and perspective. If the other Tyrones continually mourn the death of their lost selves, Edmund wants nothing as much as to lose himself; the glimpse of momentary self-transcendence he provides effectively throws the more mundane internal conflicts of the other Tyrones into sharper relief. A design that O’Neill revealed to Nathan in 1929 provides a further clue about Edmund’s role in the expository structure of Long Day’s Journey: O’Neill at one point wished to write a play utilizing “a secure talky [that is, cinematic] background to make alive visually and vocally the memories, etc. in the minds of the characters” (SL 354); Judith Barlow conjectures that

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Edmund, as spectator and listener in Long Day’s Journey, serves as just such a background, a blank screen onto which the temperaments and utterances of the others are projected. Barlow argues that Edmund “functions as the audience’s touchstone: our perceptions grow as his do. The very structure of Journey forces us into a position analogous to Edmund’s: he knew something was wrong with his mother long before he discovered the exact nature of her malady. . . . Like Edmund, we are witness to the wrenching confessions of the other Tyrones . . .” (110).15 Barlow concludes that Edmund is less theatrically moving, less melodramatic: “Nothing in the logic of the play demands that Edmund have erred and suffered the same way the rest of the Tyrones have . . .” (111). Indeed, following Tyrone’s pained admission that he committed artistic suicide by appearing through “years of easy repetition” in his mediocre play (CP 3:809), Edmund delivers what is at once the play’s flattest and most pointed statement: “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now” (CP 3:810). The stark neutrality of this response, its complete lack of ambiguity or internal tension, tends to confirm Edmund’s role as what Bogard calls “a participating observer, a little apart, an eavesdropping creature of the imagination” (440). O’Neill thus creates in Edmund a dramatic alter ego who watches, listens, perhaps records it all, and tries to understand. To see oneself means necessarily to see through the eyes of those who have shaped one’s life, to imagine one’s own identity in and through them; reciprocally, to be a vital part of a family means somehow to offer that identity back. As a fledgling writer Edmund may turn out to be the Tyrones’ Ishmael, who alone escapes to tell the story of his family’s demise but in whom each Tyrone survives. It seems misleading, however, to see Edmund Tyrone as O’Neill’s more or less straightforward self-portrait. Certainly as a whole Long Day’s Journey is almost too starkly autobiographical, and the events and experiences to which Edmund refers correspond to identifiable aspects of O’Neill’s own youth. But given the often radical intersubjectivity of O’Neill’s characters, even when, as in Long Day’s Journey, he succeeds in portraying them exclusively through the conventions of stage realism—that is, without the masks, thought asides, or quasi-expressionistic devices of earlier plays—it seems probable that the author did not intend as straightforward a correspondence between Eugene O’Neill and Edmund Tyrone as virtually all published interpretations of the play assume.16 The playwright who insisted, by way of comparison, that All God’s Chillun Got Wings is “never a ‘race problem’ play” but “primarily a study of the two principal characters, and their tragic struggle for happiness” (qtd. in SA 139),17 would likely be reluctant to identify himself absolutely with one of his characters or to write what he considered his greatest work as an autobiographical roman à clef in play form. The very fact that the surviving Tyrone is named Edmund, the name of the O’Neill son who died so early, and

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the dead Tyrone is named Eugene clearly should alert one against presupposing any simple correlation between Eugene O’Neill and Edmund Tyrone. In a sense, in this exchange of names O’Neill comments on his own play as an act of self-fashioning, despite its overwhelming candor and its obvious biographical realism. We cannot assume O’Neill as artist to be wholly immune from the same acts of distortion that his characters live by. As both Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh demonstrate, a “true past” and a “true self ” have a potent mythic and imaginative authority that withstands any test of verisimilitude; an acute sense of their absence becomes the basis of O’Neill’s dramatic historiography of loss. O’Neill knew he had difficulty with straight self-portraiture. In 1926 he told Barrett Clark, then at work on his pioneering study of O’Neill’s life and plays, “I myself might not be so good at writing [an autobiographical sketch]; for when my memory brings back this picture or episode or that one, I simply cannot recognize that person in myself nor understand him nor his acts as mine . . . although my reason tells me he was undeniably I” (SL 203). Before Long Day’s Journey O’Neill had used various “mirrors” in his plays as a means of self-analysis—Robert Mayo, Eben Cabot, Lazarus, Orin Mannon—but they were at least partially derived from Jamie, his brilliant, Dionysian, selfdestructive brother, despite the characters’ physical resemblance to the playwright and, for that matter, to Edmund Tyrone.18 In Long Day’s Journey the playwright seeks a principle of identity—both personal and familial—in the brother he never knew but whom he may have identified with to the point of envying his condition beyond life’s regrets and for being the only son whom their mother could love without reservation.19 In any case, O’Neill’s avowed intention in writing Long Day’s Journey, as he states in the dedication, was “to face my dead at last . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (CP 3:714). Among these “dead” must be included the late Edmund O’Neill, the family’s most crucial victim, the son whose death stands at the heart of O’Neill’s family history. Almost exactly reversing the finale of Mourning Becomes Electra, where Lavinia Mannon takes up the burden of her family’s violent past as its sole survivor, in Long Day’s Journey the dead child Eugene Tyrone is the character whose very absence embodies, as it were, the living absence at the center of the Tyrone family and thus becomes the focal point of its history. In this tragic structure O’Neill has decisively reinvented an essential formula of his father’s melodramatic theater, what Frank Rahill describes in his discussion of Pixerécourt’s seminal Coelina as “a figure out of the past, returning to his familiar haunts after a long absence in disguise or changed beyond recognition, his reappearance serving to bring to a head a situation growing out of his disappearance” (Rahill 32). At least three plays important to the career of James O’Neill—Adolphe Dennery’s The Two Orphans,

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Louis N. Parker’s Joseph and His Brethren, and, of course, Fechter’s Monte Cristo—rely heavily on the plot element of a lost child (or young adult) and its deeply moving reconnaissance years later with family and friends. In a remark about melodramatic structure pertinent to O’Neill’s novelistic design in Long Day’s Journey, Rahill points out that such a return of the missing family member “commended itself particularly to playwrights working within the restrictions imposed by the classical unities, since it made possible a point of attack close to the denouement and thus helped solve the frequently troublesome problem of holding the action within the classically required span of twenty-four hours” (32). Working in a comparable fashion O’Neill is able to concentrate the Tyrones’ family history virtually in its entirety by evoking the person who embodies its past and determines its future: the second son. Like the murder that keeps haunting the innkeeper Matthias in The Bells by Leopold Lewis—the melodrama of retrospective guilt to which Jamie Tyrone alludes (though erroneously) in act 4 of Long Day’s Journey (CP 3:815)20—the death of Eugene Tyrone haunts the lives of the four surviving Tyrones in a postmelodramatic variation on the reconnaissance motif: a painful moment of self-recognition. Thus when Jamie tells Edmund late in the play to “tell people, ‘I had a brother, but he’s dead’ ” (CP 3:821), he refers ostensibly to his own ruined life but may also allude to a sense of identification with his dead baby brother, Eugene. Similarly, when Edmund declares also in act 4 that walking on the beach in the fog fills him with the sense of having been “drowned long ago” and becoming “a ghost within a ghost,” he conveys a death wish that enshrouds itself within the ghostly presence of the dead brother. In a sense the play’s chief action is the individual and reciprocal efforts of all the Tyrones to come to terms with the death of the second son, the event at which all their individual fates intersect. Raymond Williams implies this pattern when he states that in Long Day’s Journey “primary relationships are in experience a profound alienation, and the self that emerges from them is a ghost who will struggle to touch life at some point, but who in the pain of this knows unreality as the greater reality”; it is this struggle, Williams argues, that generates tragic consciousness in the play (117). Each Tyrone plays the role of the lost child in a melodrama of his or her own making, a lost self struggling to reappear within a recovered ideal of family unity and individual wholeness. Just as O’Neill saw himself as a substitute for his dead brother, in Long Day’s Journey he creates a second Edmund and thus an opportunity for the “four haunted Tyrones” at last to face their dead and achieve perhaps a resolution of personal and collective guilt. Williams misses the power of absence in Long Day’s Journey, however, when he concludes, “It is not, in the end, that the relationships create the [tragic] consciousness. Dramatically, it is the consciousness that creates the

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relationships. What looks like a family drama is an isolate drama” (118). In this play, even more so than in Strange Interlude, consciousness is dialogic and intersubjective, not isolated. The playwright may seem to be constructing an autobiographical novel-play driven wholly by a deep confessional imperative, but in fact O’Neill participates in the Tyrones’ process of self-understanding by giving Edmund Tyrone his own outward life and inward experiences. That O’Neill did not see himself directly as part of the Tyrones as a family unit is made unmistakably plain in the monument he commissioned in 1938—the year before he began work on Long Day’s Journey—to be placed in St. Mary’s cemetery in New London, Connecticut, site of the O’Neill summerhouse, dubbed Monte Cristo Cottage for the play whose great revenues financed its purchase. O’Neill specified that the names of the other four O’Neills—James, Ella (Mary Ellen), James, Jr., and Edmund—be inscribed on the memorial; O’Neill insisted in strong terms that he not be buried there with them. “I don’t [sic] want any space left [on the monument] for those to come, because no one else will ever be buried there. . . . This is simple and clear with no chance for mixing up who’s who,” he explained. “It simply follows pattern [sic] of cast of characters in a play, which is absolutely appropriate for an actor’s family” (SL 475–76; emphasis added). Also to be buried in this family plot, just as she is buried within the plot of Long Day’s Journey, was Ella O’Neill’s mother, Bridget Quinlan, who sometimes looked after the O’Neill boys when James and Ella went out on tour; indeed, it was while in her care that Jamie fatally infected his year-and-a-half-old brother Edmund, the incident that would form the center of Long Day’s Journey. This catastrophe only confirmed Mrs. Quinlan’s disapproval of her daughter’s marriage to an actor, and perhaps it is more than coincidental that the Bridget in the play, the cook who never appears onstage, also disapproves of James Tyrone, especially his habit of playing the Irish peasant outside in his shabby clothes for the neighbors’ amusement instead of coming dutifully and punctually to sit with his family at mealtimes (see CP 3:752, 778).21 Perhaps O’Neill began writing Long Day’s Journey as an “isolate drama” in accord with the feelings that made him wish in 1938 not to be buried some day among members of “an actor’s family” in a New London cemetery; however, the play as O’Neill eventually wrote it places him centrally, if problematically, among all the Tyrones and their search for self-understanding. Rather than his most direct and undisguised self-portrait, Edmund Tyrone is thus O’Neill’s ultimate mask, the figure from the past with whom he formulates the problem of identity as a reconnaissance within the context of family. Clifford Leech offers this shrewd explanation for O’Neill’s choice of the name Edmund for the younger son: “With the lapse of the years [O’Neill was] able to separate himself when writing from the self of the play’s action: perhaps he was helped in this by the interchanging of the names Edmund and

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Eugene” (110). Certainly the fact that O’Neill gave the other three Tyrones the same first names as their O’Neill family counterparts but chose to break this pattern by exchanging names with his dead brother, suggests an intention beyond mere irony: O’Neill in effect endorses the kind of death wish that Larry Slade expresses in The Iceman Cometh in quoting from Heine’s “Morphia”: “Lo, sleep is good; better is death; in sooth, / The best of all were never to be born” (CP 3:582). Moreover, if a character such as Charles Marsden or Larry Slade with his dead or transcended desires could function effectively as a novelistic central consciousness, someone passed beyond desire altogether through death would offer the ultimate site of pure, detached, but ever-present narrative consciousness. In Long Day’s Journey O’Neill claps his mask to the person he most envied, “the beloved dead baby into whom O’Neill’s identity flowed” (Alexander, Creative Struggle 86): the dead brother beyond the pains of self and family but still deeply implicated in its fate. This condition beyond life becomes almost the normative state in the play: Edmund’s vision of “the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams” (CP 3:812) is its most definitive statement, just as Mary’s regression to an idealized childhood—to that period in her life when she felt strong enough to renounce the world and become a nun—is its most compelling scenic image. But Tyrone’s obsessive fear of the poorhouse is also a vision, if primarily a materialistic one, of “the last harbor.” When Edmund mocks father’s plaintive histrionics over wasted electrical power, Tyrone responds: “That’s right, laugh at the old fool! The poor old ham! But the final curtain will be the poorhouse just the same, and that’s not comedy!” (CP 3:794). Jamie’s version of “the final curtain,” though, is a sort of comedy. His cynical joke about gaining salvation at the Last Judgment by bribing God in effect satirizes Tyrone’s plan to fortify himself against ruin with wealth and property. Jamie even quotes from the very play through which Tyrone sustains his personal myth of failed artistic promise: “Slip a piece of change to the Judge and be saved, but if you’re broke you can go to hell! . . . ‘Therefore put money in thy purse.’ That’s the only dope. (mockingly) The secret of my success! Look what it’s got me!” (CP 3:820). The line from Othello is fitting: in Jamie’s cynical vision of Judgment Day one can hear Tyrone’s own self-reckoning: “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder. . . . I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been” (CP 3:810). The irony in Tyrone’s reflection is that after all he has neither a solid home nor real artistic success; even the tremendous profits from his lucrative play are tied up in questionable real estate whose long-term value also seems dubious. This twofold foreclosure exemplifies the tragedy in Long Day’s Journey: each Tyrone, with the potential exception of Edmund, compromises his ideal to settle for a safer and more worldly

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life, only to discover that such compromises, though perhaps unavoidable, ultimately offer less true sustenance than the forsaken ideals. The play’s novelistic interplay of fantasy and reality, revelation and counterrevelation, allows a more complete exposition of both these ideals and the motives for abandoning them; it also confirms that life is larger than any one character’s power to control or comprehend it. This vision of tragedy is more compelling than O’Neill could achieve in his American history cycle, but in another sense it points to the fundamental reason for the failure of that massive project. The cycle, O’Neill declared to Lawrence Langner in a 1936 letter, had meaning only “in the spiritual and psychological history of the American family in the plays. The Cycle is primarily just that, the history of a family. What larger significance I can give my people as extraordinary examples and symbols in the drama of American possessiveness and materialism is something else again” (SL 452). Yet what may ironically have doomed the cycle is precisely its unwieldy historicity and O’Neill’s inability to find any “life-giving formula” to focus it dramatically (Carpenter 135). John Henry Raleigh’s assertion that for O’Neill, like Strindberg, the love–hate relation of the sexes and the family as a battlefield, was readily transferred to “human history”—an arena of action he calls in somewhat anti-Aristotelian fashion “the greatest objective reality that there is” (“Strindberg and O’Neill” 50)—seems to miss the significance of both Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh as the realized historical vision of the American history cycle. Apparently what O’Neill needed was not to trace American history in its larger, explicit lineaments but to see it as a kind of “well-made” play where a historical process has gathered to the threshold of some resolution. In Long Day’s Journey Mary’s retrospective regression into girlhood is central to this more focused historical vision. The James Tyrone she conjures from memory to displace the aging husband of her own frustrated adulthood is the young actor friend of her father, playing the part of a dashing French aristocrat. When she met him backstage, Mary recalls, Tyrone “was handsomer than my wildest dream, in his make-up and nobleman’s costume that was so becoming to him.” She continues: “He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world. At the same time he was simple, and kind, and unassuming, not a bit stuck-up or vain. I fell in love right then. So did he, he told me afterwards. I forgot all about becoming a nun or a concert pianist. All I wanted was to be his wife” (CP 3:777–78). The aspect of unreality in her description of James, besides confirming the description of Tyrone in the stage directions as a mix of noble thespian and shabby peasant (CP 3:718–19), suggests that her love for him originated as a kind of fantasy. Mary’s drug habit epitomizes her marital disappointments: her morphine world is analogous to the “other world” that she once imagined James had come from, as well as the lost world of childhood

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happiness she has built upon her recollections of love for her father. The wedding gown reminds her of the evening that brought to such an abrupt halt her dreams of the convent and the concert stage and initiated all the suffering of her life as Mrs. James Tyrone. The gown her father bought for her thus points back toward her idealized youth and ahead to her difficult adult life; while clutching it she returns ambiguously to the temporal threshold between her former “true self ” and the drug-crippled, unfulfilled wife she has become. Following Mary’s memory back to the origins of her life with Tyrone reveals a kind of recapitulation of modern, postrevolutionary history, with marriage as its central metaphor. She recalls her eager anticipation to meet the famous James Tyrone, matinee idol: “You can imagine how excited I was when my father wrote me he and James Tyrone had become friends, and that I was to meet him when I came home for Easter vacation. . . . My father took me to see him act first. It was a play about the French Revolution and the leading part was a nobleman. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I wept when he was thrown in prison . . .” (CP 3:778). Here as elsewhere in the play O’Neill takes liberties with the facts of his own family’s history, in this instance to create for Tyrone a kind of composite persona resembling James O’Neill as both Edmund Dantès and the Count of Monte Cristo, though in a pre-Napoleonic setting. Ella O’Neill in fact met her future husband for the first time not backstage after a performance but during his visits to her father in Cincinnati in the early 1870s when Ella was about fourteen.22 This image of her initial infatuation with the young James Tyrone recalls certain traits in the two wives of A Touch of the Poet, the only completed play from the American history cycle, drafted immediately before and finished the year following O’Neill’s composition of Long Day’s Journey. Like Mary Tyrone, Nora Melody fell in love with her husband “the day I set eyes on him” and continues to cherish her initial image of Con as the heroic aristocrat “born rich in a castle on a grand estate and educated in college” (CP 3:192), an image confirmed each year when he marks the anniversary of Talavera by retrieving his splendid officer’s uniform from a “trunk in the attic”—the same trunk, perhaps, where Mary and James Tyrone store the tokens of their lost selves. Mary Tyrone also strongly resembles Deborah Harford both in physiognomy and in her susceptibility to a man playing a noble part: if Deborah’s grandiose fantasies of prerevolutionary and imperial France (developed at greater length in More Stately Mansions) provide her a romantic escape from the mundane constraints of marriage, they also make her susceptible to being “impressed in spite of herself by [Con’s] bearing and distinguished, handsome face” when she first encounters him dressed in his uniform and bearing himself with the grandeur of a Napoleonic war hero (CP 3:216–17). On his side Con is perhaps even more the actor than James Tyrone, combining as Tyrone does the roles of Irish peasant, romantic hero, and American gentleman. Though

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he does acknowledge early in act 2, “I’m done—finished—no future but the past” (CP 3:213), Con ultimately loses even this past, a psychic breakdown upon the death of his heroic military self that corresponds closely to Tyrone’s transfiguration from the “soldierly” fellow with “head up, chest out, stomach in, shoulders squared” in the opening scene to the “sad, defeated old man, possessed by hopeless resignation” of the final act (CP 3:792). By making the French Revolution figure so prominently at the start of Mary’s life with Tyrone, O’Neill translates the explicit historiography of his failed American history cycle into the cogent symbolic framework of a family tragedy that moves from the dazzling promise of the French Revolution, the demise of the Napoleonic self exemplified in Monte Cristo, the failure of marriage to master the predicament of alienation, and finally into the tragic cycle of familial terror and compassion stemming from the death of a child, the supreme emblem of its unrealized hopes.23 Despite this historicized subtext, the play does not move “into an unknown of endless possibility,” as Michael Manheim contends (“Transcendence of Melodrama in Long Day’s Journey” 40). In fact, the gloomy state of the world preoccupied O’Neill in 1939 and 1940 as he worked on Long Day’s Journey and The Iceman Cometh. It is revealing that O’Neill believed the title of Long Day’s Journey into Night might be taken to signify “the present world’s crisis,” as if the fear of another global war should be sufficiently on Nathan’s mind, as it was on his own, that the word “night” might evoke it. O’Neill’s disclaimer therefore seems rather to acknowledge that this play of “deep pity and understanding and forgiveness” had overtones, at least for the playwright himself, of impending worldwide catastrophe. Long Day’s Journey is perhaps, as Tom F. Driver argues, O’Neill’s image of a world where “there is no future” (112), or, in John Orr’s even gloomier speculation, a “prophetic vision of human extinction on a scale made possible by nuclear war” (205). What is certain is that Long Day’s Journey articulates the haunting paralysis that dominates the end of The Iceman Cometh, giving it a cyclical etiology where the future is, in effect, the commentary of the past on the present—the excruciating but candid dialogue between lost ideal and untenable reality. Mary met James Tyrone, fell in love, married him, and was “so happy for a time” (CP 3:828). If Long Day’s Journey into Night ends in a wordless union of past and future, of resignation and desire, in The Iceman Cometh the idea of marriage as destiny and its metaphoric connection to the course of modern history since the age of revolution take on even more ominous implications.

No t e s 1. In the variant “Late Lacy” ending of the Fechter-O’Neill version (the script reprinted, Best Plays of the Early American Theatre), Haydée does appear in the final

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scene, displacing Mercedes as Monte Cristo’s great love: “O, my lord, Heaven has made me younger than her, that I may have the happiness longer to love you! (Tableau, and curtain)” (261). 2. Michael Hinden makes a similar assertion in his book on Long Day’s Journey: “This extra room would have belonged to baby Eugene [or rather, the grown man Eugene], had he not died” (26). Hinden’s book, otherwise an excellent introduction to the play, oversimplifies O’Neill’s relationship to melodrama: “Dire threats, multiple incidents, rapid changes, a variety of colorful sets, last-minute revelations, and clever unravelings—Long Day’s Journey into Night offers none of these. The play spurns the traditional manipulative devices of the stage” (31). This statement is largely true, but the contrast of Monte Cristo and Long Day’s Journey should not completely obscure those melodramatic elements—especially “dire threats” and “rapid changes”—that O’Neill’s play retains. 3. Mary makes a very brief reference to her attempt to drown herself one night near the end of act 3 (CP 3:787). 4. See “The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles” in Jakobson and Halle, Fundamentals of Language, where Jakobson observes that “it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called ‘realistic’ trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both” (92). 5. Peter Szondi stresses this element in Brecht’s “epic theater”: “The dramatic concern with ends is replaced by an epic freedom to pause and reflect. Since the active individual has now become the object of the theatrical performance, the performance itself can go beyond this individual and ask questions about the causal grounds for his actions” (71). 6. Stanton B. Garner discusses this aspect of narratives of the past in Ibsen’s Ghosts, a play that has much in common with Long Day’s Journey: “A play such as Ghosts, where little happens on the level of overt stage action, is fiercely active in its formulations and reformulations of the dramatic past, and this continual revision of unstable narrative frameworks occasions the play’s cognitive disorientations. Revising a past potentially explosive in its revelations is a fundamental action of Ibsen’s drama on its audience . . .” (19). 7. Freud’s theory examines the “freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents” (“Family Romances” 74): the child begins to see his parents’ shortcomings and replaces them imaginatively with other, nobler parents. Freud acknowledges, however, that this process, like Mary’s idealization of her father, is in fact “an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women” (78). Certainly this tendency may also be found in Jamie, who clearly longs for the days before Mary’s morphine addiction—or at least before he knew of it. Also, in the diagram of early childhood influences that O’Neill drew up about the time of his analysis with Dr. Hamilton, O’Neill makes three references to his father as a “hero” but notes also that this admiration was later displaced by “hatred & defiance of father” (see SP 505–506). 8. From Rosina Meadows, the Village Maid; or, Temptations Unveiled, excerpted in Grimsted (243). 9. In “O’Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, ‘Death Instincts,’ and the Trauma of Birth,” Stephen Watt observes: “As Mary Tyrone implies, the ‘true self ’ in O’Neill is at least partly fictional, symptomatic of what Lacan describes as the

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internal ‘discordance’ within one’s ‘own reality’ which, successfully resolved or not, constitutes the ‘I’ ” (227). Similarly, C. W. E. Bigsby comments that in Long Day’s Journey “the true self has no existence outside the ironies generated by the collision between platonic form and reality” (Critical Introduction 99). 10. Manheim’s Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship and Alexander’s Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle admirably demonstrate how persistently O’Neill pursued this notion of familial destiny even in such individualistic heroes as Yank of The Hairy Ape and Brutus Jones. 11. In a comment directly relevant to the imprisonment of Edmund Dantès and his emergence as the Count of Monte Cristo, Bert O. States observes: “The romantic hero’s discovery, usually while in prison, of his true self and his freedom of soul more or less disappears in naturalism and is replaced by the escape from society through the side door of suicide” (Great Reckonings 85n). In Long Day’s Journey O’Neill replaces suicide as such with various forms of self-annihilation, Mary’s addiction being the most central of these. 12. I have speculated elsewhere that for O’Neill as for other modern writers—including Freud himself—the fratricidal story of Joseph from Genesis provides a stronger psychoanalytic paradigm of family strife and personal ambition; see my essay, “Eugene O’Neill’s Joseph: A Touch of the Dreamer.” 13. The emphasis in this twist on John 15:13 should be compared to the curtain line in A Wife for a Life, “Greater love hath no man than this that he giveth his wife for his friend” (CP 1:11), which presents another kind of self-sacrifice offered by one man to another man, a younger version of himself. Both the Older Man of Wife and Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey have resigned themselves to death-in-life. 14. The notion of “homelessness” as a source of the novel’s peculiar dialogism is suggested by Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel”: “The novel begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness, which no longer possesses a sacrosanct and unitary linguistic medium for containing ideological thought” (367). O’Neill’s sense of “homelessness” seems closely related to his unfulfilled search for a “language of the theater,” also suggested by Edmund’s acknowledged failure to articulate his vision of mystical self-transcendence. 15. This configuration of characters may have guided the casting of Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film version of Long Day’s Journey. The three most theatrically vivid principals are played by powerful and distinguished actors: Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards, Jr. Edmund, however, is played by the skillful but less commanding Dean Stockwell. Casting such an actor in the younger brother’s part tends to support O’Neill’s own vision of the play (as suggested by Barlow’s comments). 16. Doris Falk, for example, calls Edmund “the young O’Neill” (184). John Henry Raleigh refers to the younger son in Long Day’s Journey as “Edmund-Eugene,” though he also lists the discrepancies between the two, including “a certain ruthlessness” about O’Neill that seems lacking in Edmund Tyrone (Plays 92). Like Raleigh, Virginia Floyd uses “Edmund-O’Neill” in her analysis of the play (Plays 549). Clifford Leech writes simply that “the playwright gives himself the name Edmund, which was the name of a brother who died in childhood (here called Eugene)” (108); and Michael Manheim notes parenthetically that the younger Tyrone son “stands for O’Neill himself ” (New Language of Kinship 5).

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17. From “All God’s Chillun’ Defended by O’Neill,” New York Times 19 March 1924 (qtd. in SA 139). It should also be noted, of course, that in giving his own parents’ names to the two main characters—Jim and Ella—O’Neill implies that All God’s Chillun dramatizes his parents’ childhood and marriage. 18. Michael Manheim devotes the third chapter of Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship (47–59) to tracing the image of Jamie in The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed. His premise is that O’Neill considered Jamie more gifted than himself and thus felt uneasy about his own success as a writer—a notion expressed in Long Day’s Journey when Jamie tells Edmund, the aspiring writer, “Hell, I used to write better stuff for the Lit magazine in college!” (CP 3:819). Manheim writes, “[William] Brown is the successful fraud O’Neill desperately feared he was becoming, and Dion is the brilliant but wasted Jamie who drank himself to death” (48). Travis Bogard likewise suggests that the talented young dreamers of O’Neill’s preCycle plays, despite their facial resemblance to Edmund Tyrone, “are in fact another character, one who conforms closely to the characterization O’Neill drew of his brother in both the Tyrone plays” (442). 19. In his initial notes for the play, O’Neill described the “dead son” as the “only child [Mary] loved—because living sons cause too much pain” (EOW 283); in the earliest scenario, the father and the elder brother are named Edmund Tyrone, and the younger brother is named Hugh (EOW 285)—significantly the name of the dead eponymous character in O’Neill’s next completed play, Hughie. 20. Bogard’s note in Complete Plays, 1932–1943 records that Old Gaspard, the miserly character to whom Jamie likens his father, actually appears in The Chimes of Normandy, a “light opera” by Robert Planquette (1005). 21. In Son and Playwright Sheaffer reports, “Mrs Bridget Quinlan, besides taking a dim view of all actors, even one Irish and a good Catholic, realized that her daughter was ill-suited for the uncertainties and rigors of theatrical life” (15); according to the Gelbs, “It took James the better part of a year to win over Bridget and make Ella his bride” (33). In Son and Artist Sheaffer reprints an intriguing, elliptical outline of the family history that O’Neill drew up during his interviews with Dr. Hamilton in 1926 and later expanded and reshaped in Long Day’s Journey. Among these notes is an account of how Jamie O’Neill infected Edmund with measles: “Birth of second child five years after first. While still infant, M[ary] is forced to leave him to travel with husband who is morbidly jealous of her, even her affection for children. Baby is left with mother [Bridget Quinlan], catches measles, through carelessness of mother in allowing older brother who has measles to see baby. Baby dies. [Mary] gets back too late—dead—she is prostrated by grief—blames herself— husband for keeping her away, bitterly [sic] at mother for lack of care—elder boy as direct cause, unconsciously (?)” (511). 22. The play alluded to here is the 1876 New York production of The Two Orphans. James O’Neill played the cripple, Pierre Frochard, not the romantic nobleman Chevalier de Vaudrey, who was actually played by Charles R. Thorne. O’Neill was perhaps more suited for the nobleman’s role and in fact had essayed the latter role in San Francisco; the New York Times reviewer found him “altogether too robust as Pierre” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb 36). In 1890 James O’Neill tried to pull away from Monte Cristo by producing and starring in The Dead Heart, a play of the French Revolution that, unlike The Two Orphans, featured such “highly effective” scenes as the storming of the Bastille, along with “surging masses of color, glitter of weapons, grime and fume of smoke, and yells of vengeance,” according to the reviewer for the

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Boston Transcript (qtd. in SP 42). This might also have been part of the play referred to, generically as “a play about the French Revolution” in Long Day’s Journey. Coincidentally, as recently as 1993 a visitor could see a poster advertising The Dead Heart on the wall of the living room at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, just above a bookcase situated near the site of James Tyrone’s “glassed-in” bookcase, as described in the opening set directions (CP 3:717). 23. O’Neill’s parents as sources of the characters in A Touch of the Poet have been sketched by Floyd (Plays 444–45) and Josephson (88–102).

MICHAEL SELMON

“Like . . . So Many Small Theatres”: The Panoptic and the Theatric in Long Day’s Journey into Night

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omplaining about his younger son in 1945, Eugene O’Neill claimed that Shane lacked loyalty. “My family’s quarrels and tragedies were within,” the playwright wrote his elder son and namesake. “To the outer world we maintained an indomitably united front and lied and lied for each other.”2 Even at that time this protest against displaying personal troubles must have sounded slightly hollow, for both father and son knew how the stillunpublished Long Day’s Journey into Night complicated a strict demarcation of public and private. To be sure, in the nearly five years since O’Neill had completed his drama’s first draft, only a select few had read the play, and its sole performance had come one evening when the playwright, “obviously struggling to retain control of his emotions,” recited the drama’s closing lines to two friends.3 Still, the theater press already had spread word of the drama, and soon O’Neill himself would finalize a contract for its publication. In the years which followed, “this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood” would generate far more public scrutiny than any misdeed of Shane’s.4 Long Day’s Journey of course invoked other gazes as well. Looks dominate its onstage action, be it in broad character traits like the way “the actor shows in all [Tyrone’s] unconscious habits of . . . movement and gesture” (13), in recurrent mannerisms like Mary’s search for her eyeglasses and From Modern Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 526–539. ©1997 by University of Toronto Press.

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self-consciousness about her hair (20), or in specific details like Jamie’s concern about appearances while gardening (43). The most relentless of these onstage gazes is the men’s constant scrutiny of Mary, their ongoing search for signs of a relapse with morphine. Indeed, the pressure exerted by this scrutiny— the way that, to quote Jamie, the observation “makes it hell for Mama! She watches us watching her” (38)—is so central to the play that Journey has been described as “a structure of watchers-being-watched.”5 This essay explores the interaction of gazes in the play. It investigates the tension generated when the domestic surveillance in Long Day’s Journey itself becomes an object of audience scrutiny. In particular, the paper considers the way that the loneliness felt by Mary and others under the onstage gaze replicates an isolation felt offstage as well, the way that Journey’s domestic surveillance exemplifies the “panoptic” gaze which Michel Foucault has claimed pervades the modern world.6 Yet, as Journey progresses, its enactment of surveillance paradoxically begins to countermand panoptic force, permitting Mary a reintegration with others which her domestic history denies. This reintegration helps explain both why O’Neill’s closing characterization of Mary proves so compelling and why, despite the play’s gloom, so many audience members have felt a sense of transcendence at Journey’s end. Since the idea of transcendence is not normally conjoined with Foucault’s analysis of power, a discussion of the term seems appropriate. Transcendence has become, as a recent series of articles by Michael Manheim reminds us, a crucial term in the study of the late O’Neill plays.7 The idea first appeared in discussions of genre. Critics have long argued that Journey’s success stems from O’Neill’s transcendence of melodrama in the play, agreeing with John Henry Raleigh’s 1964 claim that while “O’Neill was at his worst when closest to The Count of Monte Cristo,” his late plays were characterized by “finely developed characters,” “plausible dialogue,” and “unmelodramatic plots.”8 More recently, many critics have found a second sort of transcendence in Journey. Here, Judith E. Barlow articulates a typical position, claiming that while O’Neill’s “depiction of women only rarely strays from the narrow limits of the conventional,” with Mary Tyrone he “goes beyond his other creations” to produce a “complex and theatrically powerful stage woman.”9 There is at least one obvious link between these two areas of transcendence, for the conventions of melodrama were grounded in gender.10 Foucault’s notion of panopticism helps us identify a second link, an interaction between cultural history and the specific strategies O’Neill employs in his play. Foucault introduces the idea of panopticism and the relentless observation it entails in his 1977 work Discipline and Punish.11 There he argues that nineteenth-century life—a past which, as Mary Tyrone reminds us, is a continual presence in Long Day’s Journey as well as in our world—was permeated by the sort of surveillance epitomized in Jeremy Bentham’s proposal

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for a Panopticon. This circular prison with glass walls and a central observation tower used vision as a force. It inverted the penal system’s previous understanding of power, Foucault argues, by reversing the architecture of the dungeon. Earlier prisoners had been confined in a darkness which “ultimately protected” them, for group confinement created “compact mass[es] . . . [of ] individualities merging together” and thus permitted a collective resistance.12 In contrast, Bentham used visibility to break down such masses. He designed the Panopticon so that from its center one can observe . . . the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. . . . Visibility is a trap. (200)

How does this shift in penal theory relate to Long Day’s Journey into Night? One link is that the convergence of vision and power was by no means restricted to the prison, for “the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (20). This mechanism proved remarkably flexible, with panoptic technology being adapted to a wide variety of everyday interactions: it may be taken over either by “specialized” institutions (the penitentiaries or “houses of correction” of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents–children cell, have become “disciplined” . . .). (215–16)

In short, the link of surveillance and power was wide-ranging and tenacious; its legacies pervade the present day (228). This widespread dispersion of the panoptic idea enables Journey’s audience to link the drama’s onstage action with forces in offstage life. Foucault’s allusion to “so many small theatres,” however, suggests an even more immediate connection between panopticism and O’Neill. Journey’s interpreters long have noted the drama’s persistent gaze, the surveillance which like the Panopticon makes Mary’s visibility a trap. For instance Elliot Martin, the stage manager for Journey’s New York premiere, recalled that at its first rehearsal director Jose Quintero insisted “that the play dealt

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with guilt and that he wanted to see this through their eyes. He said, ‘This is a play about eyes.’ ”13 The drama’s composition reinforces the point, for from the earliest scenario O’Neill ended his first acts with a stare.14 But the clearest evidence of the way surveillance permeates Long Day’s Journey comes from the script itself, as David McDonald has shown. His 1979 analysis meticulously details the way “that Long Day’s Journey into Night is a structure of watchers-being-watched”;15 the structure he uncovers is relevant to any discussion of Journey. According to McDonald, “[t]he dramatic situation of the first act may be described as ‘watching Mary.’ ” Tyrone’s opening comments on Mary’s physical appearance, for instance, “establish Mary as someone closely watched and Tyrone as someone who watches her closely.”16 Physical staging reinforces the point, for Tyrone sits behind Mary until she declares in exasperation, “You really must not watch me all the time, James” (17). A close look at Journey reveals that this staging is typical, that O’Neill’s directions repeatedly call for the asymmetrical vision of characters who stand so that as they watch, their gaze cannot be resumed. So persistent is this pattern that soon we agree with Jamie: the surveillance “makes it hell” for Mary (38). We perhaps also begin to wonder about the consequences of such surveillance, to consider the possibility that Mary’s re-addiction in some sense is caused by the family’s suspicion. O’Neill himself emphasized this possibility in revision notes about “What really happened” the night before the drama begins: [Mary] had been frantic—given in—gone to bathroom, spareroom—then, thinking of Edmund, for his sake had conquered craving which was brought on by continual worry about him—at end, she tells Edmund this—he wants [to] believe but can’t help suspecting—it is this lack of faith in him, combined with growing fear, which makes her give in—17

O’Neill’s link of observation with addiction again brings panopticism to the fore. Foucault notes how a person subject to panoptic surveillance typically responds by internalizing the constraint: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, . . . inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”18 While Mary Tyrone naturally analyzes daily life, “subjected to a field of visibility,” in far less academic terms, she too recognizes that surveillance leaves its marks: It makes it so much harder, living in this atmosphere of constant suspicion, knowing everyone is spying on me, and none of you believe in me, or trust me. [. . .] If there was only some place I could

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go to get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to [. . .] [. . .] You go out But I am alone. I’ve always been alone. (46, responses by Edmund omitted)

Such dialogue reminds us that at least one relation does not change when Mary injects the morphine, that the drug and the isolation it brings in some sense reiterate the feelings of confinement she already had internalized. The prescription simply makes the inscription physical. Yet making things physical is never a simple act, as the theatrical Tyrones know well. Mary’s injection is clearly transgressive, a penetration so shocking that Jamie conflates several taboos in his struggle to describe it: “Never forget the first time I got wise. Caught her in the act with a hypo. Christ, I’d never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!” (163). The penetration likewise runs counter to panopticism’s preference for the “non-corporal,” its impulse to “[avoid] any physical confrontation.”19 Inevitably, then, when Mary injects the morphine—when she embodies the isolation which lay implicit in the men’s gaze—the dynamics of power change. Mary’s onstage interpreters recall struggling with this shift. In the New York premiere Florence Eldridge, who first attempted to play the drugged Mary as somnolen[t] and [peaceful], changed her characterization when she found that “there was something that did not fit.”20 Later Geraldine Fitzgerald too came to play Mary as a woman whose “reaction to morphine . . . would make her overactive and excitable rather than drowsy,” a woman who became “the victimizer and not the victim.”21 Numerous aspects of the script reflect this new power. While Act One features Mary’s complaint about how the men “go out,” for instance, by Act Four it is Tyrone who complains: “When she gets to the stage where she gives the old crazy excuse about her hands she’s gone far away from us” (116). It is ironic, of course, to hear a veteran actor decry any “stage,” and elsewhere in Journey the word does refer to the theater.22 The ambiguity points to the way that Mary Tyrone has begun a new sort of performance. Her journey might have started with the “small theaters” of domestic panopticism, but her morphine dependency paradoxically has led to a partial independence. Yet this independence comes less from Mary’s leaving the domestic theater than from her playing a heightened role in the larger drama. The ambiguity in Tyrone’s concern about his wife’s “stage” reminds us that there always has been more than one level to Mary’s performance, that like the men onstage we as audience also have watched her closely throughout the play. One of Journey’s most explicit discussions of panoptic surveillance provides a similar reminder. In Act Two Mary, shortly after her relapse, confronts her husband about her life of constraint:

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Mary. (With a strange derisive smile.) You’re welcome to come up and watch me if you’re so suspicious. Tyrone. As if that could do any good! You’d only postpone it. And I’m not your jailor. This isn’t a prison. Mary. No. I know you can’t help thinking it’s a home. (75)

The resonance here stems in part from the way the exchange connects home, surveillance, and prison. But like “stage,” in Journey the word “prison” also is linked to the theater, most clearly through Mary’s reminiscence about the time when as a schoolgirl she first saw Tyrone on stage: “I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I wept when he was thrown in prison” (105). Again, then, O’Neill puts the gaze confining Mary in a theatrical context. Such associations over time create a form of metatheater, heightening the audience’s consciousness of their own gaze upon the play. 23 And Journey increasingly emphasizes this juxtaposition of gazes. On one level, reminders of onstage surveillance recur throughout the script, reminders like Mary’s lost glasses or the bottle of “red-eye” whiskey.24 Indeed, the continual observation of the whiskey’s level extends the panoptic gaze from the mother to the sons, and we see how they like Mary chafe under their father’s “eagle eye” (54). Panopticism in its broadest sense similarly provides the background for the closing acts. Foucault had warned of a world where the panoptic structure organizes society, where “prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”25 In Journey the unseen Doc Hardy becomes this world’s warden. Offstage but constantly observing, shuffling the son to one sanitarium and the mother to another (118–19), Doc Hardy reminds us that escape from the domestic prison is at least as difficult as Monte Cristo’s escape from his dungeon. Nevertheless, because the panoptic is contextualized within the theatric, escape becomes possible in Long Day’s Journey; indeed, it becomes possible through the same mechanisms which facilitated Monte Cristo’s breakout. When Mary Tyrone first saw her future husband in the melodrama based on Monte Cristo, she did not look beyond his handsome “make-up and his nobleman’s costume that was so becoming to him” (105). After thirty-six years of marriage, however, other aspects of the Count probably had greater appeal. R.B. Kershner points out one possibility as he explains Monte Cristo’s importance to another literary proxy, Stephen Dedalus of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: As [Monte Cristo] himself explains in an extended speech, the real source of his power is the fact that he belongs to no country; indeed, he has no identity. We might say he has stepped outside the Panopticon, or has discovered an invisible location within it.26

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This account of losing identity to escape panoptic surveillance equally well describes the drugged Mary Tyrone. While critics often recognize the influence of Monte Cristo on her husband’s theatricalism, the parallel here suggests that Mary too might look to the Count as a model. Or more precisely, the parallel suggests that Eugene O’Neill used a theatricalism learned from his actor father to suggest an alternative to the onstage constraint in Journey. Describing Monte Cristo late in his life, O’Neill recalled “see[ing] my father . . . dripping with salt and sawdust, climbing on a stool behind the swinging profile of dashing waves. It was then that the calcium lights in the gallery played on his long beard and tattered clothes, as with arms outstretched he declared that the world was his.”27 Here O’Neill’s memory focuses on the techniques which create the illusion. Long Day’s Journey into Night shows a similar interest. Certainly when Tyrone in Act Three “stands up abruptly—and a bit drunkenly—and begins turning on the three bulbs in the chandelier, with a childish, bitterly dramatic self-pity,” his proclamation that “The poorhouse is the end of the road” (128) lacks the audacity of Monte Cristo’s “The world is mine!” But as Edmund teasingly reminds us (“That’s a grand curtain. . . . You’re a wonder, Papa” [128]) Tyrone too projects a self-conscious theatricality, drawing attention to the audience’s gaze. O’Neill criticism often has downplayed this aspect of his craft. To be sure, a few works always have celebrated his theatricalism. Robert Benchley’s much cited review of Mourning Becomes Electra, for instance, not only praised the “good, old fashioned, spine-curling melodrama” which constituted O’Neill’s “precious inheritance from his trouper-father,”28 but at one point speculated about James’ ghost “standing in the wings and exhorting: ‘That’s good, son! Give ’em the old Theatre!’ ”29 Even critics less fond of histrionics have acknowledged that there are moments when O’Neill insists upon the theatrical gaze, moments like Jamie’s well-known sneer in A Moon for the Misbegotten: “God seems to be putting on quite a display. I like Belasco better. Rise of curtain, Act-Four stuff.”30 Nonetheless, most have argued that such moments are subordinate to a general retrenchment from histrionics in the late plays, to a “[call] for the dawn of a ‘new theatre’ that moves beyond melodrama.”31 Recently, though, scholars have reconsidered this position, noting that in the late dramas O’Neill’s “characters perform for each other” and hence “bring consciousness of performance and playing into the audience’s minds.”32 Such premises have led to explorations of the metatheatrics of individual dramas, and even to the assertion that “it would be difficult to find any O’Neill play into which the theatre does not find its way.”33 Thus it is not entirely a surprise that in the past decade work on Journey has claimed that O’Neill “imbue[s] the play with a thorough theatricality” or that “each Tyrone serves, intentionally or not, as victim or villain in the melodramas envisaged

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by another member of the family.”34 A respect for O’Neill’s theatricalism seems the order of the day. History justifies this respect, for as he composed Journey O’Neill made his interest in the theatric clear. A February 1942 letter to his son provides one example. Here O’Neill asserted that “You’ve got me wrong on my attitude toward histrionics. No one approves more of the right kind in the right place.”35 He closed the letter by invoking the image that Benchley had used to praise Mourning Becomes Electra a decade before: again, congratulations . . . even on your histrionics! I am sure The Count of Monte Cristo, looking down from Heaven—where, since his arrival, all but one of the holy candles have been extinguished— smiled benignly and said, “Well done, Lad! Well done!”36

Note how O’Neill blends Benchley’s praise of melodrama with imagery taken from the recently completed Long Day’s Journey. For the blend to come so readily suggests that theatricalism was integral to the play. Elsewhere O’Neill praises the “old Theatre” more directly. His correspondence while writing Journey included a letter about a Monte Cristo production. In it O’Neill decried attempts to parody the play’s melodrama; “I appreciate your assurance that in the production you are planning the ‘Hoboken’ angle will be prohibited. If I hadn’t trusted you in that, I’d have refused permission.”37 Later, as he tried to explain why the play was “one of the most successful plays of all time in America,” he noted that [t]he answer, of course, was my father. He had a genuine romantic Irish personality—looks, voice, and stage presence—and he loved the part. It was the picturesque vitality of his acting which carried the play.38

O’Neill’s regard for the power of performance is explicit. A draft from the first day of Journey’s composition suggests how such regard lay the foundation for the drama. As he started Journey, the playwright subtracted dates to establish his characters’ ages. His calculations eventually settled on 1873, the year of the Othello production which starred his father and Edwin Booth.39 Thus from his very first words O’Neill grounded his drama in metatheater. Later in the scenario he articulated more fully the link between metatheater and Mary’s eventual escape. “You can’t make me remember,” O’Neill has the Mother declare, “except from outside, like a stranger—audience at a play.”40 Echoed in the final script’s description of Mary’s “strange detachment . . . as if she were speaking impersonally of people seen from a distance” (112–13), this rumination points to the structure of Long

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Day’s Journey. Transcendence occurs when the gaze of an “audience at a play” countermands the panopticism imprisoning Mary. How does this interplay work? Recall Foucault’s comment that panopticism creates “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone” (200). The tragedy of the Tyrone house is that its members are trapped in these small theaters, performing roles the others demand. Certainly this is true of Mary. She repeatedly complains of her isolation: “Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely?” (95). And her numerous shifts of character—her jumps from “guilty confusion” to “uncanny detachment” (75) and her “strange, abrupt change to a detached, impersonal tone” (61)—serve as almost Brechtian reminders of Mary’s struggle to play a role written by men who gaze with “contempt and disgust” at her failures in the part (95). “You might have guessed, dear,” she tells Edmund with poignant honesty, “that after I knew you knew—about me—I had to be glad whenever you were where you couldn’t see me” (119). Mary’s attempts to hide inevitably fail, for panopticism in Long Day’s Journey into Night extends far beyond the family’s watch for morphine. Society too observes Mary—the pharmacist (103), the neighbors, the school friends who leave after she marries an actor (86)—and she must act according to their scripts as well. Thus feminist critics note Mary’s conflicts with the nineteenth century “dictates of pure womanhood,” the “rigorous imperatives that governed the private sphere to which women had been relegated.”41 Theater historians similarly point to her conflict with a melodramatic convention linking “earthly happiness” to “home with its cornerstone of female purity.”42 Under such scrutiny, it is little wonder that Mary would try to lose herself in the panopticon, to disappear into the spare room. The spare room and its morphine do not, however, provide her final escape. Ironically Mary Tyrone, a woman who claims that she “never felt at home in the theater” and who “never had the slightest desire to be an actress” (102), finds her transcendence in a moment of high theater. Critics long have noted “the stunning impact of the play’s final moments when Mary, who has been absent from the stage for an hour, enters dramatically in a blaze of light.”43 She supports her entrance with piano accompaniment, a costume change, freshly braided hair, and even a lavish wedding dress as a prop (170). Moreover, in stark contrast to the abrupt character shifts which marked her earlier struggle to play the part the men hoped to see, Mary now allows only one brief interruption to her speech. The watched now makes her own observations, now follows a different script. With this shift transcendence occurs. Foucault grounded Discipline and Punish in the contrast between the panoptic gaze, where individuals are observed from a single, central point and a second gaze associated with public performances, a gaze dependent upon multiple points of view and hence less

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amenable to rigid control.44 We have seen O’Neill balance these two perspectives throughout the play. Now, with the theatricalism of Mary’s entrance, his stagecraft emphasizes the audience’s gaze. Consider, for instance, the way O’Neill prepared us to see Mary’s final entrance as a dramatic as well as domestic performance. Her initial self-consciousness about being observed and her abrupt shifts of character both led us to think of her as a performer. Similarly James Tyrone’s grand gestures, like his scene with the chandelier, gave the public theater a presence in the home. Hence when “Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier in the front parlor are turned on” and Mary enters, it brings to mind a public performance; Jamie’s “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” underscores this perspective (169–70). Likewise, we earlier heard Tyrone ask “Where is it now, I wonder?” about the paper praising his Othello, and heard Edmund’s reply that “It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress” (152). With the dress thus linked to performance, when Mary drags it onto the stage we see it as a prop. And having heard each man’s Act Four monologue, we are ready to answer the card game’s recurrent question: “Whose play is it?” (143–49). It is Mary’s turn for a monologue. It is time that she takes her part in the larger play.45 Performing this new role, Mary in some sense becomes one with the men. Long Day’s Journey into Night offers no easy consolation, no deus ex machina elimination of panopticism’s constraints.46 Yet while Mary’s final speech confirms her domestic isolation, at the same time its theatricalism allows her to join in the Tyrones’ sequence of monologues, reaffirming her membership in this family of performers. And when we as audience come to recognize both perspectives—when we view the play’s panoptic isolation within the context of its larger theatrical performance—we begin to feel a lessening of the determinism proclaimed in Mary’s aphoristic “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too” (87).47 In short, the interaction of gazes in Long Day’s Journey mitigates the onstage confinement; as Foucault and Mary both predicted, the gaze of an audience at a play offers resistance to rigid control. Indeed, such a gaze does more, for power does more than repress. “Power produces,” Foucault argues; “it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth”; it produces “[t]he individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him.”48 While the claim is broad, it points to a final connection between panopticism and Journey. The efficiency of the Panopticon is linked to the way it provides “a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyed,” a machine which “automatizes and disindividualizes power” by locating it “not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes.”49 The theater, of course, also produces knowledge by distributing bodies, surfaces, lights, and gazes; note how Foucault’s imagery almost parallels O’Neill’s account of the machinery which produced

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Monte Cristo’s escape. Hence when O’Neill invokes the theater’s machinery to rearrange the panoptic gaze—when he introduces a new axis of seeing/being seen which integrates rather than isolates Mary—he moves the production of identity along this axis into the world of the audience offstage. In an important sense, then, the transcendence of Journey does come ex machina. Like the calcium light cutting through the waves in Monte Cristo’s escape or the hypodermic needle that redefined Mary, the audience’s gaze pierces the surface of Journey’s domestic realism, producing a new level of identity. Thus when we hear Mary’s final “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (176), we do not have to share the horror which accompanies her family’s gaze. We instead can celebrate Mary the performer, the Mary who escapes from this onstage gaze into a metatheater outside its view. This theatricalism does not solve Journey’s domestic tragedy; as O’Neill himself noted, “At the final Curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the past.”50 But by infusing the audience’s gaze into the panoptic dyed, O’Neill shifts the drama’s power relations and so allows a feeling of transcendence. In short, by embracing spectacle, by putting “the right kind [of histrionics] in the right place,” O’Neill counters panoptic constraint, transforming the perpetual past of the Tyrones’ home into the perpetual present of the theater.

No t e s 1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 110th Annual Modern Language Association Convention, San Diego. This version has benefited from the discussion which followed that session as well as from comments offered by Linda Brigham and Randi Davenport. 2. Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven, 1988), 569. 3. Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston, 1973), 517. 4. Eugene O’Neill, dedication to Carlotta [Monterey O’Neill] of Long Day’s Journey into Night, corrected ed. (New Haven, 1989). 7. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 5. David McDonald, “The Phenomenology of the Glance in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Theatre Journal, 31:3 (1979), 343. 6. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 195–228. 7. See Michael Manheim, “O’Neill’s Transcendence of Melodrama in the Late Plays,” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 12:2 (1988), 22–8; or “The Transcendence of Melodrama in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Perspectives on O’Neill: New Essays, ed. Shyamal Bagchee, ELS Monograph Series, 43 (Victoria, BC, 1988), 33–42. 8. John Henry Raleigh, “Eugene O’Neill and the Escape from the Château d’If,” O’Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Gassner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1964), 9, 22. The essay was presented at the English Institute, Columbia University, September 1963 (Raleigh, 7n).

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  9. Judith E. Barlow, “O’Neill’s Many Mothers: Mary Tyrone, Josie Hogan, and Their Antecedents,” The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill, ed. John H. Houchin (Westport, CT, 1993), 283, 289. 10. This link is noted in many works, including Michael Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Manchester [1980]); Kurt Eisen, The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (Athens, GA, 1994); and David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800–1850 (Berkeley, 1987). 11. Previously published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975). 12. Foucault, 200–01. See note 6. 13. Edwin J. McDonough, Quintero Directs O’Neill (Chicago, 1991), 54. 14. Virginia Floyd, summary of O’Neill’s working notes for Long Day’s Journey, 26–7 June 1939, Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays (New York, 1981), 285–86. 15. McDonald, 343. 16. Ibid., 345–46. 17. Judith E. Barlow, transcription of O’Neill’s working notes for Long Day’s Journey, Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays (Athens, GA, 1985), 79. 18. Foucault, 202–03. See note 6. 19. Foucault, 203. See note 6. 20. Florence Eldridge, “First Curtain Call for Mary Tyrone,” Eugene O’Neill: A World View, ed. Virginia Floyd (New York, 1979), 286. 21. Geraldine Fitzgerald, “Another Neurotic Electra: A New Look at Mary Tyrone,” Eugene O’Neill: A World View, 291. 22. An O’Neill Concordance, comp. J. Russell Reaver, vol. III (Detroit, 1969), 1516–17. 23. In earlier dramas O’Neill used external theatrical references in a similar manner, contextualizing “the recurring image of a woman imprisoned in a male structure” by allusion to plays like Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata. Suzanne Burr, “O’Neill’s Ghostly Women,” Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, ed. June Schlueter (Rutherford, NJ, 1989), 38–9. 24. McDonald, 348. 25. Foucault, 228. See note 6. 26. R. B. Kershner, “Genius, Degeneration, and the Panopticon,” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, by James Joyce, ed. R.B. Kershner, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (New York, 1993), 377. Long Day’s Journey of course does not explicitly refer to Monte Cristo, for Tyrone’s play remains untitled in the script. The links between Journey and Monte Cristo are well-established though, and in the drama’s working papers O’Neill himself used “M.C.” (for Monte Cristo) to denote Tyrone’s play. Thus in his work diary’s final mention of a Journey revision, O’Neill on April, 1, 1941 records an expansion of Tyrone’s Act Four “late day for regrets” speech (149–50) as “addition father’s M.C. speech IV” (Barlow, Final Acts, 178 n. 36. See note 9.). 27. Eugene O’Neill, quoted in Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O’Neill (New York, 1962), 184–85. This passage is quoted, with slight alterations, in Raleigh, II.

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28. Robert Benchley, review of Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill, New Yorker (7 November 1933), 28, quoted in John H. Houchin, “The O’Neill Discourse,” introduction to Critical Response, 3. 29. Raleigh, 12, quoting Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York, 1962), 753, quoting Benchley, review, (28). See note 8. 30. Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten (New York, 1974), III. 31. Ann C. Hall, “A Kind of Alaska”: Women in the Plays of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard (Carbondale, IL, 1993), 47. 32. Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge, 1979), 188–89. 33. Richard Hornsby, “O’Neill’s Metadrama,” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 12:2 (1988), 14. For one example of a study of O’Neill’s metatheater, see James A. Robinson, “The Metatheatrics of A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Perspectives on O’Neill, 61–75. 34. Michael C. O’Neill, “Confession as Artifice in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” Renaissance: Essays on Values in Literature, 39:3 (1986–87), 433; and Eisen, 135, see note 10. 35. O’Neill to Eugene O’Neill Jr., 2 February 1942, Selected Letters, 526. See note 2. 36. Ibid. 37. O’Neill to Robert G. Dawes, 3 June 1940, Selected Letters, 505. See note 2. 38. Ibid. 39. Floyd, summary of O’Neill’s working notes for Long Day’s Journey, 25 June 1939, in O’Neill at Work, 284. Critics have noted that several of O’Neill’s earlier writings anticipate his work on Journey; many of these efforts too were grounded in discussion of the theatre. The 1920 letter in which O’Neill first writes of his father’s expression of the disappointments which would inform Tyrone’s “late day for regrets” speech in Journey, for instance, was occasioned by a request to update The Count of Monte Cristo. See O’Neill to George C. Tyler, 9 December 1920, Selected Letters, 142–43; and Journey, 14–50. Likewise Floyd notes that the 1924 unfinished play The Guilty One both echoes Monte Cristo and anticipates Long Day’s Journey into Night (xxxiii). 40. Barlow, transcription of O’Neill’s working notes for Long Day’s Journey, Final Acts, 63. See note 17. 41. Bene Mandl, “Wrestling with the Angel in the House: Mary Tyrone’s Long Journey,” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, 12:3 (1988), 23, 20. 42. Grimsted, 229; see note 10. See also Eisen, 127; see note 10. Booth argues the broader claim that a vision of “domesticity and the . . . domestic ideal” constituted “the dominant subject matter” of nineteenth-century drama (23). 43. Barlow, Final Acts, 109. See note 17. 44. Compare Foucault’s chapters “Panopticism” and “The Spectacle of the Scaffold” (195–228, 32–69). 45. Michael O’Neill further develops O’Neill’s use of metatheatrical imagery in this scene (433–35). Barlow in Final Acts surveys some of the revision strategies that O’Neill employed to heighten the dramatic impact of Mary’s final entrance (80–2 see note 17). 46. For some critics the closing constraint is so strong that it precludes any sense of transcendence. Thus Anne Fleche characterizes Long Day’s Journey into

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Night as “the finale of realistic dramas that dramatize and then dispose of woman’s need to rebel” (“ ‘A Monster of Perfection’: O’Neill’s ‘Stella,’ ” Schlueter, 36n7), see note 23; and Hall argues that at the end of Journey Mary “is literally entombed in this early image of herself, a symbol that represents the extremes of the patriarchy’s perception and legislation of motherhood” (46). In contrast, John Henry Raleigh argues that Mary “has succeeded, thanks to the powers of morphine and memory, in her chief aim: to transport herself back to the time before she knew her true self. In a wild, weird, crazy O’Neillian way, one could almost say that for her anyway the play has a ‘happy ending.’ ” “Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Houchin, 210, see note 9. 47. Manheim, “O’Neill’s Transcendence of Melodrama in the Late Plays,” details other ways the drama’s conclusion complicates a simple perspective. 48. Foucault, 194 49. Foucault, 202. 50. O’Neill to George Jean Nathan, 15 June 1940, in Selected Letters, 506. See note 2.

ANNE FLECHE

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What is tragic is not the impossibility but the necessity of repetition. —Jacques Derrida

he characters in Long Day’s Journey into Night find themselves creating a new kind of religion, in which they experience, not sin without guilt, but guilt without sin—the habit of belief without its antecedent. In the circular strategy of the play, the characters revise their pasts to fit their own truths. And in this revision lies an impossible search for origins. (Who did what? When?) Without a cause, a center, the meaning of their suffering keeps eluding them. The endless discussions burrow deeper and deeper after that elusive first cause, pushing up layers of truth, revealing the strata of personal strategies that relativize it beyond recognition. If it were possible to say that something could be more lost, Long Day’s Journey into Night could be described as a play in which what is lost in the beginning becomes progressively, hopelessly, implacably lost. The apparent illogic of this description, which seems to roll up the logic of representation, nevertheless echoes the play itself. In act 2, Tyrone says to Mary, “If you’re that far gone in the past already, when it’s only the beginning of the afternoon, what will you be tonight?” (86). Mary, as the line suggests, represents a challenge to representation: the idea that a character has the power at once to be and not to be. From Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism, pp. 25–42. © 1997 by the University of Alabama Press.

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“Being” seems to demand a referent, just as language demands an auditor—becomes “dialogue.” Realistic drama provides a motivation for dialogue, a reason for being. It promises a fullness of meaning, a logic that connects character and action through a mediating language. Language, and the reality it purports to convey, are representable as communication: the motivated selfrevelation of one character to another. Thoughts are connected through dialogue; they become lucid and perceptible. Similarly, the material world is subsumed into consciousness, as the object of that consciousness. In the language of realism, mimesis attains its formal perfection in a tautological assumption: that the truth is representable and that what is representable is truth. In Long Day’s Journey the lines of connection are tenuous: language doesn’t seem to connect truth with experience, or to connect character with character, or to connect character with the material world. As the play wears on, the characters seem less “motivated,” the “dialogue” more diffuse, and material reality more dense, opaque, threatening, an obstacle course by act 4. “What will you be tonight?” Tyrone’s question to Mary is a rhetorical one, and the play does not answer it. “[W]ho ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve the conflicts of love and duty . . . ?” Artaud asks (41). In the drama of realism, the revelation of character through dialogue is of the first importance. For Aristotle, plot is the first essential for tragedy, character the second (On the Art of Poetry 40). But in modern “bourgeois” theater, as Lukács describes it, character “becomes everything,” “since the conflict is entirely for the sake of character’s vital centre; . . . because the force disposed of by this vital centre alone determines the dialectic, that is, the dramatic, quality of drama” (Bentley 435). Brecht put this another way, speaking of dramatic (as opposed to epic) theater: “thought determines being” (37). Aristotle says that thought “comes out in what [the characters] say when they are proving a point or expressing an opinion” (On the Art of Poetry 39); it is, in other words, the meaning in the dialogue. In dramatic (mimetic) theater, then, dialogue “determines” character; and as Lukács says, character is the ground that determines “dialectic,” the dramatic or dialogic (logic-of-dialogue), in drama. Dialogue and character depend on each other, and as character gains in importance on the modern stage, dialogue becomes more and more heavily freighted. At the same time, the not-human world, the world of material objects, gets squeezed out by this dialogic form. The drama of Renaissance self-mirroring and after has been exclusively a drama of “interpersonal relationships” as Peter Szondi describes it in Theory of the Modern Drama: By deciding to disclose himself to his contemporary world, man transformed his internal being into a palpable and dramatic presence. The surrounding world, on the other hand, was drawn into a rapport

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with him because of his disclosure and thereby first achieved dramatic realization. Everything prior to or after this act was, had to remain, foreign to the drama—the inexpressible as well as the expressed, what was hidden in the soul as well as the idea already alienated from its subject. Most radical of all was the exclusion of that which could not express itself—the world of objects—unless it entered the realm of interpersonal relationships. [7]

Sich entschliessen, the reflexive verb here translated as “to disclose oneself,” also means “to decide” (Szondi 118 n.7x). The “self-disclosure” of dialogue is thus, for Szondi as well as for Lukács and Brecht, self-determining. Character in mimetic drama is understood, circumscribed, and limited by dialogue, by dialectic. By implication, that which cannot be represented in dialogue is outside the drama, for drama is dialogue: “The Drama is possible only when dialogue is possible” (Szondi 10). The relationship between character and dialogue is thus reciprocal in mimetic drama and serves two major functions: to disclose character (to describe, define, and limit it) and to determine those elements of the material world that will contribute to the character’s self-expression. Character is an omnivorous life force, or “vital centre,” that gathers the objective world to itself. Realistic mise-en-scène is not expressive of anything outside the dialogue; it is only meaningful as it accrues meaning via character, establishing a mimetic reciprocity between the text and the stage image. For example, in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Mary Tyrone is associated with the windows, to which she retreats from the unpleasantness of facing the family, the light, the definiteness of objects. Realism tries to make mise-en-scène useful as a setting that identifies character and limits the scope of its action; in naturalism it is also the character-determining environment or, eventually, the expressionistic, symbolic projection of consciousness. O’Neill uses all of these scenic functions in Long Day’s Journey into Night ; as versions of realism, they are not incompatible. But in his play there is a curious retrograde motion in the process of self-disclosure that corresponds, interestingly enough, to the gradual assumption by the characters of the quality and status of objects, mechanical automatons. It is, at the end of the play, as if the characters themselves had been subsumed by the mise-en-scène, instead of the other way around. By act 4, material objects seem to be obstacles to the characters’ self-expression. Edmund and Jamie are each heard entering the house, bumping into things, complaining about the darkness, which, with the fog, blurs outlines and effaces boundaries between people and things. Jamie clownishly announces his own entrance after stumbling into the house and accuses the front steps of low cunning: “The fron [sic] steps tried to trample me. Took advantage

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of fog to waylay me. Ought to be a lighthouse out there” (155).1 Similarly, when Edmund bumps his knee in the dark hallway, it is like the ironic success of an experiment in epistemology: offstage, outside the dialogue, things apparently exist. Not only do they exist exclusive of the character’s speech and of the stage image: Jamie jokes that things have their own consciousness and take their revenge on him. Things take control when the characters no longer see them; the notion that things exist only to express the characters’ ideas about themselves splits them from the objective world, making them vulnerable to it. In fact the deep identity between character and mise-en-scène, through dialogue, is a part of realism’s obeisance to the concept of human mastery of the material world through language and of the material world as an inert mass waiting for the agency of human consciousness to mold, shape, and change it. Even when environment supposedly determines character, in naturalism, the “objective” world’s subjective importance is, if anything, only heightened. For this is only the reverse of the mastery narrative that lies behind realism, and ultimately its scientific assumptions create a new notion of mastery on the idea of environmental change: if environment determines character, it follows that a more desirable environment will result in a happier, more successful human being; or else the natural forces of the environment will weed out the undesirable, leaving a stronger, better adapted race that can make the most of its opportunities. In realism, then, even at its most scientifically ruthless, nothing is unalterable or insurmountable except the fact of ultimate human triumph over things. The narrative of progressive mastery over material means and ends is also the narrative of nineteenth-century capitalist and Marxist economy. Long Day’s Journey into Night actually opens with a story about capitalists that seldom gets more than a mention in criticism of the play.2 In the Shaughnessy story, over which Jamie and Edmund are laughing as they enter in act 1, a lazy, good-for-nothing Irish peasant gets the better of his neighbor, a rich American capitalist, after the peasant’s pigs have taken a wallow in the capitalist’s ice pond. Edmund, who tells the story, is clearly on the side of the Irishman, as against the oilman, the “ruling plutocrat,” while his father, hiding his Irish patriotism, calls Edmund a “socialist anarchist.” Besides its introduction to an ongoing antagonism in the play between father and son, critics have pointed out that the Shaughnessy story provides the act with levity and contrast. But seen apart from these realistic functions of disclosure and coherence, it may seem, on the contrary, a very odd and significant story, especially placed in such a prominent position. It seems to call attention precisely to those stories upon which realism relies for its organization of character and material reality. The image of pigs wallowing in an ice pond is the image of a tale gone amok. And it seems to arrive in answer to Tyrone’s invocation a moment before of a

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philosophy of objectivity and mastery: “Forget everything and face nothing! It’s a convenient philosophy if you’ve no ambition in life” (21). The realistic function of the story thus conveniently obscures its apparent questioning of the realistic philosophy, in which reality is “faced” and overcome, not eluded, much less denied. Shaughnessy, as it happens, wins his battle with the oil millionaire by translating the “facts” into a new narrative with himself as its hero and its victim. His manipulation of the obvious “truth” is a resourceful avoidance of conflict, as the question of how the pigs got into the pond in the first place is forgotten. Shaughnessy’s story parodies the realistic association of truth with mastery and questions the validity of any narrative that asserts it. In revealing narrative as a tool for mastery, not an avenue of self-disclosure, it prefigures the strategy of the rest of the play. The complications ensuing for realistic character are untenable, cannot be “occupied.” Shaughnessy, the tenant who doesn’t know his place, impinges on his neighbor’s territory, subverting the code of mastery and avoiding the dialogic that would reassert it: “He told me he never gave Harker a chance to open his mouth” (24).3 “Truth” is translatable, revisable, losing its adherence to a shared meaning. Partly the play presents this as a problem of subjectivity: “truth” frequently stands in opposition to what the characters “feel” or “believe” or how they perceive things. (“It’s not true the way you look at it!” [144].) But the character that seems to be “revealed” by these subjective statements is often clouded by its objective treatment of truth as something to be molded to a strategic purpose, not expressed but mastered. A story is told, for example, that Mary tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into the ocean in the middle of the night. Tyrone reminds her of this in act 2, scene 2, where she replies by cutting off the tale, then denying it (86–87). But the story is repeated in act 3 by Mary herself, who is now trying to defend Edmund from the doctor’s diagnosis of consumption. The facts of the case, she implies, are the doctor’s narrative “invent[ion],” the “diagnosis” just another story. By act 3 Mary is ready to brutalize Edmund—and herself—with the same facts she had earlier denied: “You remember that, don’t you?” she asks him (118). The suicide attempt, which Tyrone “must have dreamed” in the earlier scene, turns to fact in order to prove the doctor’s diagnosis a fiction. In the context of power relations, fact and fiction keep threatening to turn into each other here, like Prince Hal trying on the sleeping Henry’s crown. Within the framework of recognizable conventions of realistic self-disclosure, Long Day’s Journey into Night undermines the realistic notion of character: its revelation through dialogue and its verification via the mise-en-scène. What of a character that cannot meet these conditions of representation? Does it become invisible? In Strange Interlude, O’Neill explored the possibility of revealing character through the clash of uttered and unuttered

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speech; that is, he tried to separate “thought” from “dialogue,” with “character” falling somewhere in between. Of course, “thought” was still representable, and “dialogue” still carried the action. Interpersonal relationships still developed on the basis of what the characters said “aloud,” for example, when Nina persuaded Ned to give her a baby and when Sam’s mother persuaded Nina to get an abortion. But O’Neill had already opened the door to an examination of dialogue as a form that very much “determines character.” The interior monologues of Strange Interlude might be read as O’Neill’s (necessarily unsuccessful) move to expose language as a cultural product that reproduces its own meaning in narrative. “How we poor monkeys hide from ourselves behind the sounds called words!” Nina says.4 But O’Neill cannot dodge this problem, as is evident from the many silent ellipses in the play that connect the characters’ unspoken thoughts. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Mary Tyrone, too, accuses herself of trying to hide behind words. Alone onstage in act 3, like Nina with her “private” thoughts, Mary is apparently free of dialogical constraints. She recites a prayer, then catches herself: “You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her!” (107). Mary’s attempt to repent, to save herself, here is, interestingly, an attempt at dialogue: she is, after all, speaking to someone. But she catches herself “lying” and “reciting words,” relying on the Virgin’s presence, just as she has relied on Cathleen’s presence for her earlier speeches in act 3. In the form of the dialogic, Mary seeks to define herself, even to redeem herself. She cuts off her dialogue in the recognition of its false “determination” of character, its masklike quality as something she “hides” behind. Unlike the other Tyrones, Mary is neither actor nor poet by profession, and she finds the mask constraining. Earlier in the act she tells Cathleen: “I’ve never had the slightest desire to be an actress,” and “I’ve never felt at home in the theater” (102). But the role she (naively) rejects is uttered in a metatheatrical moment that reveals, if anything, the difficulty of her own representation. Mary becomes more and more in the play the symbol of a loss not easy to represent, and her lines betray the knowledge of this transformation. After act 3 she is no longer even on the stage until the play’s final moments. Actors, poets, and addicts are character types that manage to obviate the need for “motivation”: they are presented as experts at dissimulation. Their attention, in other words, is always deflected a bit away from the scene, so as to steal—and reveal—it. These characters set up circumstances in which character fails to remain stable, in which language fails to reveal a wholeness of meaning. At this point “realism” is exposed by its own technique. Long Day’s Journey into Night is about a family of self-conscious performers who have never been without the audience of the other Tyrones. More completely than Strange Interlude, with its ménage à quatre, this later play interrogates

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the impossibility of the ego’s self-presence, the constant muddying of motivation and desire by the presence of another. For, like God, the family always precedes the self. As the men desert the house at the end of act 3, Mary keeps reminding them that they are “acting”: “You’re so like your father, dear,” she tells Edmund. “You love to make a scene out of nothing so you can be dramatic and tragic” (120). When Tyrone insists that Edmund won’t die, Mary says, “You don’t believe that! I can tell when you’re acting!” (122). Ironically, much of the playacting in Long Day’s Journey is occasioned by Mary, by the need to protect her and to isolate her. But as she isn’t fooled by these acts, and as she withdraws from the play, the question is, whom is this acting meant to deceive? Mary feels entrapped by the falseness of the men, spied upon; theirs is a cruel kindness. Already by the end of act 2, she expresses ambivalence about the presence of the other characters, even in her loneliness: “It’s so lonely here. (Then her face hardens into bitter self-contempt.) You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone. (She gives a little despairing laugh.) Then Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely?” (95). The circularity of this speech encloses a myth of self-reliance (“You’re glad they’re gone”) that cannot help returning to its “loneliness,” its rhetorical gesture toward dialogue. Unable to be alone without her drama of loneliness, Mary moves one step away from the dialogic she will have abandoned altogether by her disappearance in act 4. Yet her presence remains a constant for the other characters, who “act” for her even when she isn’t there. In act 4 Mary’s symbolic function as the representation of loss is the only explicit motivation sustaining the dialogue. Mary, like Nina Leeds, becomes a space or battleground across and around which dialogue remains possible—even necessary.5 Her presence gives the other characters their raison d’être—or at least their reason to “act,” to “be dramatic.” Nina Leeds, Mary’s forerunner, sees herself very much as this symbolic space: “My three men! . . . I feel their desires converge in me! . . . to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb . . . and am whole . . . they dissolve in me, their life is my life” (Complete Plays 756).6 Nina, as the convergence of male desires, represents a locus of plot, of narrative; and this position, like Mary’s, excludes her from the language of disclosure and self-representation. Teresa de Lauretis has argued that, in modern theories of subjectivity (specifically, semiotics and psychoanalysis), woman does not cohere in language, precisely because she occupies that space which makes representation possible: “[T]he position of woman in language . . . is one of non-coherence; she finds herself only in a void of meaning, the empty space between the signs . . . a place not represented, not symbolized, and thus preempted to subject

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(or self ) representation” (8). Similarly, the woman in O’Neill’s plays seems to exceed the limits of character, to be a kind of goal for what de Lauretis describes as the Oedipal narrative of quest and conquest, the place of narrative origin and connection. Nina is explicitly a womb in which narrative (“desire”) converges and forms. Mary, as the religious significance of her name implies, is more ethereal a presence, a spirit hovering and brooding over the male characters, perpetuating their dialogue long after she has left the stage. As de Lauretis suggests, the woman constitutes a challenge to representation, a negativity propping up the signs and distinguishing them from one another, speaking in their silent spaces. Mary’s negativity is made representable by her morphine addiction, which increasingly cuts her off from the men and from the dialogue. Her distance from them is manifested, in fact, by her inability to carry on dialogue, at which the men abandon her to her loneliness, with the excuse that she has abandoned them: “It’s you who are leaving us, Mary” (83). Artaud’s emphasis on materialization, on mise-en-scène, expresses the desire for a theater that need not depend on language. “The theater itself,” he writes, “. . . lives only by materialization” (108). If in realistic drama dialogue is revelation, in Artaudian theater it only obscures meaning: All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest. . . . All powerful feeling produces in us the idea of the void. And the lucid language which obstructs the appearance of this void also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought. That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics. [71]

(Artaud, very much in the spirit of his own desire for translation, quotes himself here.) “Lucid” or “analytical” language obscures the “void,” perhaps the terror of nothingness, which “true” or “powerful” feeling demands. The theater does not deliver itself except through “dissimulation” and “translation”: “the appearance of poetry in thought” requires that “the void” also “appear.” There is something vital to the theater that cannot be “expressed” without being “betrayed.” Moving beyond the reach of dialogue, Mary Tyrone is materialized; transformed by morphine, she becomes something else, a mask or symbol that “hides what it makes manifest.” By making her take morphine O’Neill makes her representable, and this strategy does, after all, enable her to speak, though not primarily through language. Her resistance to the theater, not to say the theatrical, in act 3, preludes her own dissimulation throughout acts 3 and 4. Edmund tries to wake her with

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“the truth” (about his consumption) at the end of the play, and Mary’s terse response, “No!” seems to resecure her mask. In refusing to play that scene, remaining inaccessible to dialogue, Mary denies the dialogical disclosure that obstructs the appearance of the void. In her role as space or battleground, Mary enables the narrative to carry on; yet by denying dialogic, she reveals the void of Artaudian cruelty. In both “roles” she is difficult to represent as “character”—indeed, O’Neill treats her character differently from the others. As he works to suggest structure through Mary, he also stretches the limits of representability for character via dialogue and mise-en-scène. There is a long tradition of this process in realistic drama, for modern dramatists often suggested enigma (the threat to realistic [dia]logic) through the character of a woman: Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Tanqueray. Often these were “fallen” women who had already stepped outside society through crime or sexual impropriety. Mary’s addiction associates her with this category of realistic women: because of it, she betrays the men’s hopes, leaves her husband’s bed to sleep in the spare room, and becomes, for her son Jamie, with his explicit Oedipal urge, like a prostitute: “Christ, I’d never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!” (163). Of course, these “fallen” women were thus placed on an inevitable path toward their own destruction (their sacrifice revealing the environmental ill of which their fall was symptomatic). Eventually they were subsumed, then, into the masculine logic that they had seemed, temporarily, to threaten. It may seem, at first glance, that Mary Tyrone is like them. At the end of the play her addiction to morphine seems more hopeless than ever, and there have been ominous threats that she might commit suicide (86, 118, 121). But Mary is no ordinary romantic/realist heroine who slams the door on her unhappy home or commits a convenient suicide. She is still very much alive at the end of the play, her threat to order is in no sense “temporary,” and her presence is a vital fact for the other characters. Mary’s centrality has been recognized by several critics,7 among them Judith Barlow, who reveals the degree to which O’Neill shaped the play around her. In her book Final Acts (1985), Barlow details O’Neill’s revisions of the play, which made Mary’s submission to morphine more and more gradual and subtle (76 and passim) and which suggested that this particular episode with the drug was unique and final (80–81). Tyrone’s line, for example, “But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this” (174), was revised from an earlier speech in which he had predicted that Mary would be all right again in the morning: “She’ll be sane again tomorrow if she gets a good sleep. . . . She’ll be more careful from now on” (Barlow 80). At the same time, Barlow finds that the references to Mary’s suicide were toned down to the level of suggestiveness (86), a strategy that makes them more ominous, yet at the same time less final. O’Neill’s revisions, while they give the play a sense

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of completion and even inevitability through Mary, also exclude her from the closure of the realistic “fallen woman” ending. Most ominous perhaps is the fact that in all these revisions, which shape Long Day’s Journey around the mother’s gradual submersion in drugs, O’Neill reverses the story of his own life, in which Ella O’Neill overcame her addiction to morphine. Long Day’s Journey in fact insists that people cannot change. Morphine may, as its name punningly suggests, have transformational qualities, but in this play it becomes symbolic of irreversible transformation—of, perhaps, change itself, the one thing that never changes. A careful reading of Long Day’s Journey into Night reveals that the characters insist, over and over again, from the beginning of the play, that change is impossible. Most of these references are either given to Mary or made about her, and by the end of the play it is clear that she represents to all the characters a kind of fatality. If Mary is a “ghost” by act 4, Jamie, Tyrone, and Edmund have been similarly drained of their agency as characters: they play cards “mechanically,” succumb to oblivion through whiskey, and seem, in the final stage direction, unable even to move. This close affinity between transformation and the denial of change is suggested through Mary’s associations with morphine and fog. She first moves to “the windows at right” on the line, “Thank heavens, the fog is gone” (17). Mary is the first to call attention to this metaphor, and it remains a barometric indicator of her growing need to escape, and later, of her surrender to this need. Already by act 2, scene 2 the metaphor is a shorthand between Tyrone and Mary through which they escape confrontation: Tyrone: (Trying to speak naturally) Yes, I spoke too soon. We’re in for another night of fog, I’m afraid. Mary: Oh, well, I won’t mind it tonight. Tyrone: No, I don’t imagine you will, Mary. Mary: (Flashes a glance at him. . . .) [82]

But the fog, which enters the dialogue through Mary and becomes itself the language for her illness, is of course associated with all the characters and even with the play itself. The fog, Mary says, makes one feel “that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be” (98). Edmund, like Mary, responds to this transforming power; when he was out in the fog, he tells Tyrone, “Nothing was what it is” (131). These complicated statements, where the fog has a morphine effect of permanent change, both assert and deny referential meaning, subordinating realistic objective logic to a new logic of perception. “Don’t look at me as if I’d gone nutty,” Edmund says. “I’m talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” (131). But the language Edmund uses to describe his perceptions is still the language of “faithful realism” (154). While he aspires to “poetry” he falls short, and “realism” is the result, faute de

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mieux, an inadequate, even inarticulate language Edmund calls “stammering”: “Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people” (154). Critics who have felt comfortable interpreting this line as an autobiographical reference to O’Neill’s own sense of inadequacy as a writer, and so to his return, thus late in his life, to “realistic” form, risk missing the line’s criticism of realism, and its claim to “native eloquence.” “Fog people” are “drowned,” dead; Edmund describes feeling like “a ghost within a ghost,” “walking on the bottom of the sea” (131). Fog and sea merge, for Edmund, in a liquid that envelops and dissolves him, and from this union comes a language both stammering and eloquent, inadequate yet “faithful,” somehow “native,” expressive of his “home.” Edmund’s “realism” is a language of stuttering imperfection, stumbling over the obvious like an obstacle in the dark. In a similarly contradictory language, the sound of the foghorn in the play is almost always accompanied by the sound of ships’ bells, and so each reminder is also a warning, in a kind of endless movement between the past and future, an anticipation outside of time. These alarms bother Mary less once she is transformed by morphine, but they signal a danger in the amorphousness of self-immersion: it isn’t complete until the self is lost forever.8 The foghorn, like Tyrone’s snoring, wakes the old distinctions, “keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back” (99), interrupting the pull toward stasis, the merging that looks a lot like death. Talk is useless: this point too the play makes repeatedly (44–45, 75, 78, 93, 132, 173), from its first pages, when Mary and Tyrone simulate a “dialogue” that circles politely around concern, resentment, defensiveness, and denial: “We’ll have no talk of reducing” (14); “I know it’s a waste of breath trying to convince you” (15). Within as well as between the characters, conflict surfaces, is interrupted, and resubmerges without resolution. Mary: Oh, James, please! You don’t understand! I’m so worried about Edmund! I’m so afraid he— Tyrone: I don’t want to listen to your excuses, Mary. Mary: (Strickenly.) Excuses? You mean—? Oh, you can’t believe that of me! You mustn’t believe that, James! (Then slipping away into her strange detachment—quite casually.) Shall we not go into lunch, dear? I don’t want anything but I know you’re hungry. (He walks slowly to where she stands in the doorway. He walks like an old man. As he reaches her she bursts out piteously.) James! I tried so hard! I tried so hard! Please believe—! Tyrone: (Moved in spite of himself—helplessly.) I suppose you did, Mary. (Then grief-strickenly.) For the love of God, why couldn’t you have the strength to keep on?

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Mary: (Her face setting into that stubborn denial again.) I don’t know what you’re talking about. Have the strength to keep on what? Tyrone: (Hopelessly.) Never mind. It’s no use now. [69–70]

Act 2, scene 1 ends with this scene between Tyrone and Mary in which the double dynamic of internal/external revision denies conflict and resolution. Like Shaughnessy and Harker, they never engage; they avoid the scene. The strategy of avoidance is employed by the other characters as well; it is a hallmark of O’Neill’s dramatic writing, a technique by which he seeks to express a layered, unstable consciousness that renders dialogic formulas impotent. At the same time, dialogue must go on, and its reaffirmation is achieved at the cost of a whole “truth”: something must be denied for the play to be representable.9 In Long Day’s Journey, the characters long to forget, but “[t]hat’s what makes it so hard—for all of us,” Mary tells Edmund. “We can’t forget” (48). The submerged complications of truth keep resurfacing in the dialogue, causing moments of extraordinary self-conscious revisionism. When Mary’s memories reveal to Edmund new reasons for her persistent illness, reasons that suggest Tyrone as a cause, Tyrone says, “Mary! Can’t you forget—?” And Mary answers, “No, dear. . . . I’m sorry I remembered out loud” (113–14). In act 1, Tyrone accuses Jamie of mocking everyone but himself. Jamie: (Wryly) That’s not true, Papa. You can’t hear me talking to myself, that’s all. Tyrone: (Stares at him puzzledly, then quotes mechanically) “Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows!” (32)

The dialogue lurches on, beyond these appearances of another life it is not disclosing, as if it were a mechanical windup toy, as if the characters were part of its mechanism. The result is not a sense of reality behind a mask, however; on the contrary, what is “revealed” by the slips and interruptions in the dialogue is the actor behind the character. Logically the consequence is an ever-increasing loss of security and authenticity in the character and a growing sense of the reality of the mask. Act 4, in which Mary is absent and the men get down to it—to “understanding” and “in vino veritas stuff,” is a complex masterpiece of theatrical quotation, posturing, and self-deferral. The sudden rush of poetry in act 4 is not transcendent, revelatory of some unifying principle, but intertextual, shattering, ironic. Like the fragments in Eliot’s Waste Land, which the act seems in many ways to echo, the quotations create a tissue of mutually parodic commentaries. They explode out of the scene, making mock connections between the imaginary present in the theater and its literary tradition, tearing the face from the character and

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the act, replacing them with their verso, as Artaud would say, their mocking face. Tyrone is right to take Jamie’s and Edmund’s poetry as a challenge to him, a weapon in their combat, for Baudelaire, Wilde, and Swinburne are revisions of his Bardolatry, just as surely as Jamie’s “trained seals” are a swipe at Edwin Booth. Tyrone: Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him—as you’ll find everything else worth saying. (He quotes, using his fine voice.) “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Edmund: (Ironically) Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea. [131]

The rhythm of reversal and revision that typifies this act is a specifically modernist revisionism, of ironic quotation, juxtaposition, and fragmentation. It is thus aimed at undermining the old order, and indeed Jamie and Edmund use it to pull God, Shakespeare, Mammon, and Edwin Booth out from under Tyrone like so many rugs. It is striking that in the act of Long Day’s Journey that claims the most truth, honesty, and understanding, O’Neill fractures the imaginary world of secure values and replaces it with quotation, with that which undermines language’s originality and authenticity. By constantly referring to other texts, he denies the play any sense of its own self-disclosure, “placing” it, to use the modernist term, making it a stage for literary self-dramatization. Quotation becomes, in act 4, like Tyrone’s “mechanical” quotation in act 1, a reflex of the dialogue, a self-reflexive act of the literary text, not a reflection of “character” ’s unique identity. Instead of creating a dialogue between characters, it creates a dialogue between texts, in which “character” functions as a textual crossing. There is a back-and-forth switching of actor–audience roles among the characters here as well, which begins with Tyrone turning on the lightbulbs of the chandelier. “That’s a grand curtain,” Edmund says approvingly. “(He laughs.) You’re a wonder, Papa” (128). At the end of the act, Jamie provides Mary’s entrance with a stage direction. “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” Edmund fiercely slaps his mouth. “Good boy, Edmund. The dirty blackguard! His own mother!” Tyrone says, supplying both applause and moral commentary (170). In their praise of each other’s performance, the men keep underlining the improvisational quality of character, as if they are trying on effects for each other. It’s no wonder, then, that Edmund’s “understanding” of Tyrone is enhanced by the Edwin Booth story, in which one actor’s praise for another results in a new character: old “Gaspard,” the miser. At the end of

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the speech, Tyrone is thoroughly in the grip of his own theater: “(He glances vaguely at his cards.) My play, isn’t it?” And immediately after, he clicks out the lightbulbs, one by one, to the accompaniment of a kind of reprise—and Edmund’s “ironical laughter” (150–51). But the irony is deeper here than the mere contradiction between Tyrone’s words and his action. It lies in the way he, to use Derrida’s definition of “repetition,” defers himself in order to maintain himself (Writing and Difference 245). He mourns the loss of the little piece of paper on which he had recorded Booth’s praise of his Othello. “Where is it now, I wonder? Somewhere in this house. I remember I put it away carefully—Edmund: (With a wry ironical sadness.) It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress” (152). Picking up Tyrone’s similarity to Mary, and her deferral to a “lost” “true self,” Edmund’s lines show the irony and the tragedy in the reading that is always rereading, the “for a time” that has always yet to be (150, 176). Then, as if aware that once again the dialogic impulse has been threatened, he “adds quickly,” “For Pete’s sake, if we’re going to play cards, let’s play” (152). The need to perpetuate dialogue, as if something could be exchanged, or revealed, or translated by it, drives the notion of “character” out into the open. “The conflict,” as Lukács says of modern drama, “is entirely for the sake of character’s vital centre” (Bentley 435). Character needs dialogue in order to save itself. There is no longer a question about whether dialogue simply reveals character; the dialogic form is not an expression of the character—it never was. Character is an expression of the form. O’Neill thought this was what “tragedy” was about: our attempt to make something express us, instead of realizing that we are the expression (Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher 125–26). Derrida’s remark about tragedy makes O’Neill’s point differently. For Derrida, what is tragic is that the drama can always and only repeat the loss of its object, the referent whose absence keeps the drama in play. The “memory” and “forgetting” so common to plays of the modern period are translations of this philosophic idea of a theater, this shade or “ghost” of a meaning that Artaudian theater reveals as a “mask.” Long Day’s Journey is a play of Artaudian “necessity” and “rigor” (cf. Derrida 238), that is, a play that plays out the tragedy of repetition. As such, its tragedy has been played before, the characters know their roles by heart, and they stay pretty much, if rebelliously at times, in character. With its careful adherence to dramatic unities, the play shows up the tragedy implicit in “metatheatre,”10 the drama’s self-consciousness about its own form: it is the form of the rehearsal, or repetition, of a drama that is always just about to be played. Indeed, O’Neill had to work hard to give all those dramatic unities some sense of unity and completion. In fact as Mary announces in act 2 (87), there is no difference between the past, present, and future, and consequently no sequence, no causality, no return to an ending

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or origin. There is no change from one state to another nor any direction for change to take. Is it the “past” the characters can’t forget? or remember? It seems just as true to say they don’t remember the “present,” the ostensible “action” of the play they are all ready to perform, for struggling after that “past.”11 At the same time, the perpetual audience of the other characters, the demand of the dialogic, seems to split character from itself. Character slides from the temporal distinction of past/present toward the ontological distinction of presence/absence. Mary, who has warned her sons that one changes by imperceptible degrees, “until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever” (61), represents this split. She becomes almost invisible, “ghostly,” her language not a dialogue, spoken in a present that slips away into the past, seated by the windows, thin transparencies on the night and fog. “She’ll listen but she won’t listen. She’ll be here but she won’t be here” (78). Like the men, Mary seems gradually to be absorbed into the mise-en-scène. But unlike them she loses her solidity, becoming watery and insubstantial. As we have seen, Mary is necessary to the play’s dialogic, in which she becomes increasingly symbolic, etherealized, as the barometer of value, the mother, the mother/whore, the haven and the lure. The men, whose fear of her is explicit by act 4—their fear, in fact, motivates the act’s inertia, its rush of language—nonetheless repeatedly invoke her presence. Perhaps nowhere in realistic domestic drama has the mother been so clearly revealed as the figure of male fear and desire. Mary represents the space of the dramatic action, its obstacle and its goal, but also the watery insubstantiality of these things, with her morphine transformations, her association with windows, night, and fog, and her relativistic relation to time and causality.12 “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too” (87). In revisions, O’Neill struggled to give the play a sense of progression and closure through Mary, and Mary’s line does close the play: “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (176). But by these same revisions, O’Neill increased Mary’s symbolic presence, and consequently the central ambivalence and relativism of the play’s structure, so that the “finality” he achieves with Mary’s last line reverberates unsettlingly. “The truth is representable,” that realistic doctrine, depends on our knowing that what is can’t not be. With Mary Tyrone’s representation of invisibility, O’Neill gives that truth the lie.13

No t e s 1. In Jamie’s image, the front yard is an ocean, requiring a lighthouse by the front steps, one example of the fog’s aqueous quality, by which Mary and Edmund seem so transformed.

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  2. For mention of the Shaughnessy episode, see, e.g., Floyd, 285; Barlow, 76–77; and Raleigh, 66. An exception to the rule of scant notice is Egil Törnqvist, who provides a lengthy discussion (241 ff.). In it, he suggests that the story is a pattern for the play’s lack of resolution. In Joel Pfister’s analysis, the lines between Tyrone and Edmund in this scene are suggestive of O’Neill’s ambivalent response to socialist politics.   3. Harker’s name is similar to that of the hero of More Stately Mansions, Simon Harford, in whose play the capitalist end of the “American Dream” is fully explored and deconstructed. Simon’s name also recalls “Harvard,” divinity school to the U.S. theocracy. Barlow explains that in and around New London were the estates of two wealthy men O’Neill liked to satirize in his early poetry. Edward C. Hammond was the neighbor of James O’Neill’s Irish tenant, John Dolan; and Edward S. Harkness was son to one of the founders of Standard Oil (112–13).   4. Strange Interlude in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays, 1920–1931. Further references to Strange Interlude and The Hairy Ape are from the Literary Classics edition and will be cited in the text.   5. Barlow finds that O’Neill thought of the play as a war and the family as a battlefield. Two of his proposed titles for the play were “The Long Day’s Insurrection” and “The Long Day’s Retreat” (75). And Julia Kristeva, analyzing the images of the Virgin Mary in Catholic writings, says that she represents a “privileged space” (250–51; italics Kristeva’s).   6. Others have compared Mary to Nina Leeds. Tiusanen, for example, suggests that Nina is Mary’s prototype (223–24). See also Barlow (70), who follows Tiusanen’s lead.   7. On Mary’s centrality see Barlow, chap. 2; Chabrowe, 71; and Tiusanen, who makes the point implicitly by devoting to Mary much of his argument on Long Day’s Journey.   8. Cf. Raleigh 24: “Fog also represents that blessed loss of identity for which all the main characters, the father excepted, are seeking.” We will return to this theme in the discussion of Iceman.   9. The violent implications of this denial will be explored in chap. 5. 10. In Lionel Abel’s classic theory of metatheatre, there is no modern tragedy, since tragedy requires the implacable values of a premodern age: “George Lukacs [sic] has said that the principal spectator of tragedy is God. I cannot imagine God present at a play of Shaw, Pirandello, or Genet. I cannot imagine Godot enjoying Waiting for Godot” (113). 11. The confusion—or conflation, rather—of remembering and forgetting seems not to have been lost on O’Neill. Two other possibilities for a title found scribbled in his notes were “What’s Long Forgotten” and “What’s [?] Long Unforgotten” (Barlow). 12. In a similar vein, Gerardine Meaney has argued that by refusing to play her maternal role, Mary represents a crisis of representability, at least until the final act. 13. Some elements of this chapter appear in “ ‘A Monster of Perfection’: O’Neill’s ‘Stella.’ ” There I develop more fully the notion that Mary Tyrone is a threat to the play’s Oedipal narrative logic.

BARBARA VOGLINO

Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Question of Blame

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igh praise from even critics generally hostile to O’Neill’s plays1 appears to confirm Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) as “the true summit of his career”2 and, in accordance with Edwin A. Engel’s judgment of nearly two decades ago, very possibly one of the “two [along with The Iceman Cometh] best American plays ever written.”3 O’Neill himself believed Long Day’s Journey was “the best” play he had ever written.4 Although the chief strength of Long Day’s Journey appears to be its complex and credible characterization,5 the manner in which O’Neill attains closure has also received acclaim. In 1964 Robert Brustein hailed the fourth and last act of Long Day’s Journey as “among the most powerful scenes in all dramatic literature.”6 More recently (1988), Normand Berlin has speculated that in the final sequence of Long Day’s Journey “we approach what is perhaps the most effective curtain in American drama. . . .”7 A careful study of the play’s closure will elucidate these superlatives. On a first reading the stage action of Long Day’s Journey appears a simple unfolding of the inevitable. As the play opens, at breakfast in the summer of 1912, twenty-three-year-old Edmund is already seriously ill, and his father, James Tyrone Sr., and older brother, thirty-three-year-old Jamie, are afraid that concern for his health may cause his mother, Mary, whom they have been solicitously watching, to relapse into the morphine addiction from From “Perverse Mind”: Eugene O’Neill’s Struggle with Closure, pp. 95–111, 147–150. © 1999 by Associated University Presses.

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which she is recovering. The family’s continual bickering and game playing to avoid facing the facts of Edmund’s as yet undiagnosed consumption and Mary’s precarious condition bode ill for all concerned. Tyrone blames a malevolent fate: It’s damnable luck Edmund should be sick right now. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for him. (He adds, unable to conceal an almost furtive uneasiness) Or for your mother. It’s damnable she should have this to upset her, just when she needs peace and freedom from worry. . . . (1.734, emphasis added)

Tyrone’s speech, which occurs early in the play, suggests that a fatal conspiracy may have been set in motion to destroy this family, against which their struggles are likely to prove of little avail. As the first act progresses, Mary’s condition—which is the crux of this play—steadily deteriorates. Jamie and Edmund have heard her moving around in the spare room the past night—a site that has always been linked with her drug-taking. When confronted with her activity by Edmund, Mary angrily uses what she calls the family’s “constant suspicion” (1.740) to justify her subsequent relapse. Having apparently succeeded in fighting off her craving for morphine the previous night,8 she has already ominously directed Tyrone and Jamie outside to trim the hedge “before the fog [both atmospheric and drug-induced] comes back. . . . Because I know it will” (1.736). Now, after Edmund’s inquiry about the spare room, she goads him with the accusation of distrusting her into allowing her to retire upstairs alone (1.742). The result is that as early as before lunch the maid, Cathleen, delivers an alarming report: Mary has been “lying down in the spare room with her eyes wide open” (2.744). When she comes down for lunch (2.747), Jamie immediately recognizes her peculiar detachment and bright eyes as characteristic of drug use. The prognosis for Mary from the opening curtain is increasing submersion in the illusory world of drugs. By the close of act 2, when Mary (who is still rational enough to feel some concern for her family) warns Edmund to avoid alcohol because of his illness, Edmund responds by prophesying the end of the play: “Anyway, by tonight, what will you care?” (2.770). By act 3 Mary has retreated from her family into memories of her wedding costume. So absorbed is she by duchesse lace and orange blossoms that she forgets to ask Edmund the result of his anxiously awaited visit to the doctor that afternoon. Edmund has to intrude upon her immersion in the past to inform her, unasked, that he has been diagnosed as consumptive and needs to enter a sanatorium. Mary’s further estrangement from her family through the use of morphine seems by far the most probable outcome of this “long day.”

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Wherein lies the power of this very foreseeable ending? How can it affect the reader/viewer so profoundly when there is no climax or turning point? No surprise? The answer seems vital to an understanding of closure in the less traditionally-structured modern dramas. J. Yellowlees Douglas (1994), in his discussion of interactive fiction and certain modernist novels in which the end is apparent early in the work, maintains that “we do not discover closure in the ‘ending’ of the story. . . . Instead, we find closure in the way in which the narrative gradually confirms our conjectures.”9 In other words, as we read we speculate on the total picture underlying the action, which our further reading will either validate or negate. Closural satisfaction, then, in works such as Ford’s The Good Soldier, in which the “end” is revealed early—and by extension in works such as Long Day’s Journey in which the end is clearly foreseeable—depends less on the perception of the actual “end” of the action (what happens) than on the process by which that “end” comes about (how and why it happens), upon which the reader or viewer has been conjecturing Douglas explains further: Our sense of arriving at closure is satisfied when we manage to resolve narrative tensions and to minimize ambiguities, to explain puzzles, and to incorporate as many of the narrative elements as possible into a coherent pattern—preferably one for which we have a script gleaned from either life experience or encounters with other narratives. [Emphasis added].10

“Resolve narrative tensions . . . explain . . . incorporate”—the reader is expected to work to create meaning out of nontraditional texts. According to Stanley Fish (1980), “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing” (emphasis added).11 Furthermore, the story the reader constructs promises to be intensely personal (“one for which we have a script gleaned from either life experience or encounters with other narratives”). June Schlueter (1995) refers to the individual product of the reader’s creation (“the readerly text”) as that “peculiar misreading that the reader inescapably produces by viewing the writerly text through personal and cultural lenses.”12 Schlueter and her predecessor, Wolfgang Iser, whom she cites, are referring to all texts as subject to personal interpretation. How much more so, then, in a relatively plotless drama such as Long Day’s Journey, peopled by ambivalent characters who require interpretation, can closure be expected to vary in accordance with the personal experience of each viewer. Interpretation of Long Day’s Journey is vastly enriched by re-viewing or rereading the play, at which time the audience is able to view the action from the standpoint of what Frank Kermode designates as “kairos.”13 Knowing what has preceded and will follow the breakfast scene, for example, the

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re-viewer is able to “escape from [mere] chronicity”14 or the succession of events in time portrayed in the scene and perceive what is happening with greater depth. Recognizing the circle of fear and anxiety that Mary’s continual regressions to morphine have caused her family, the re-viewer sympathizes with their game playing. He also perceives the irony in Tyrone’s early speech about “luck”: the family head habitually declines any responsibility that might entail a commitment to action, but characteristically uses “luck” or its equivalent as a scapegoat the way Chris Christophersen (“Anna Christie”) uses “dat ole davil, sea.” The re-viewer of Long Day’s Journey, then, is in a much more favorable position to begin Douglas’s process of “resolv[ing] narrative tensions” from the opening scene of the play. Assignation of blame is the “narrative tension” or “ambiguity” most likely to plague the audience regarding Long Day’s Journey. Who is responsible for the plight of the Tyrone family? Or is James Tyrone Sr. right? Do they just have bad luck? As Egil Törnqvist points out, Long Day’s Journey into Night begins exploring aspects of blame and responsibility early in act 1 with Edmund’s humorous anecdote about the quarrel between Harker, the Standard Oil millionaire, and Shaughnessy, Tyrone’s tenant, who keeps pigs.15 In some mysterious manner the fence separating the two neighbors broke down, and Shaughnessy’s pigs enjoyed a free wallow in the millionaire’s ice pond. Despite Edmund’s narration of the mutual accusations of the two men, the audience never learns who (or what) broke the fence. In a manner reminiscent of the blind lashing out at each other attributed to Harker and Shaughnessy, which functions as a parodic prologue, the battling Tyrones are continually blaming one another throughout the drama. The viewer, who follows their accusations bewilderedly,16 is also thrown into the judgmental position of seeking the scapegoat. According to Alvin Kernan this effort on the part of the reader or viewer to comprehend the responsibility of the characters in a play, insofar as it expands his experience with people and life, is one of the legitimate interests in studying drama.17 It is no easy task to assign blame among the Tyrones. O’Neill, writing a painfully personal play about his own family, made a heroic effort to be impartial and to disclose both the relevant character flaws and redeeming features of each member of his family. The resulting ambivalence challenges the viewer’s imagination to find the “culprit.” Edmund (O’Neill’s stand-in for himself ), to be sure, is exempt from this inquest—unless being born may be considered a crime. His brother shares in the family guilt, however. It was Jamie who entered the infant Eugene’s room and gave the baby the measles that caused his death, thus setting in motion the cycle of guilt and pain that contributed to Jamie’s own deterioration and to Mary’s addiction to morphine following Edmund’s birth. Now thirty-three, Jamie is an acknowledged alcoholic whose only work appears to be the bit acting parts his father

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procures for him. In addition to bitterly disappointing his parents by wasting the promise of his early youth in dissipation, Jamie’s destructive influence as a role model for his younger brother may be partly responsible for Edmund’s development of tuberculosis. With regard to Jamie’s culpability, however, O’Neill also defends the brother he hero-worshipped in his youth and still loved. As I conclude in my “Games” article (1992),18 it is not surprising that Jamie—saddled at the age of six19 with responsibility for his infant brother’s death, and further maimed apparently during his impressionable adolescence by the sight of his mother giving herself a morphine injection20—became a behavior problem in school21 and eventually succumbed to a dissipated life. As the scapegoat for Edmund’s illness as well as Eugene’s death, Jamie is denounced by both parents as an irretrievable ne’er-do-well. His recitation from Rossetti (“ ‘Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell’ ” [4.822]) emerges like a choked cry for help. But instead of offering Jamie his love as a lifeline to pull him out of his despair, Tyrone merely tosses more dirt on his son’s grave: “I am well aware of that,” he says in response to Jamie’s recitation, “and God knows I don’t want to look at it” (4.822). Tyrone has buried all hope for Jamie long ago. Yet Jamie (who even drunk seems to know what he is saying) takes a great risk in act 4 by warning Edmund, who appears to be his sole intimate human contact, against his destructive influence. Fearing that alcohol may kill his consumptive brother, Jamie attempts to withhold the bottle from him: “Maybe no one else gives a damn if you die, but I do. My kid brother. I love your guts, Kid. Everything else is gone. You’re all I’ve got left. . . . So no booze for you, if I can help it” (4.814). When Jamie, despite the “genuine sincerity” (4.814) of his effort, fails to prevent Edmund from imitating his drinking habits, he is driven to take another tack. He confesses the sibling rivalry that has caused him to hate and attempt to destroy Edmund (at the same time that he loves him). He is, in effect, warning his brother against being influenced by or ever trusting him again. In so doing, Jamie proves he loves Edmund more than he “hates” him, and that his intentions are basically good. Instead of being a mere perpetrator of the family’s difficulties, Jamie appears also one of its victims. A more likely candidate for responsibility is James Tyrone Sr., who raised his genetically susceptible sons with teaspoonfuls of whiskey to quiet their stomachaches and nightmares (3.782), and who continues to dole out whiskey to his alcohol-dependent adult sons. Despite his expensive liquor habits, Tyrone claims to be headed for the poorhouse. Although he actually possesses property valued at a quarter of a million dollars (a fortune in 1912), he continually turns off lightbulbs to avoid making the electric company rich. Mary blames her morphine addiction on Tyrone’s penuriousness. She claims that when she was in pain after Edmund’s birth, her husband called in the

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“cheap” (2.2.757) hotel doctor who first gave her the drug. Tyrone, for his part, tells Edmund that the doctor had been recommended to him by the proprietor of the hotel as having a “good reputation” (4.802). Edmund, however, has bitter evidence that his father values money above health. Both he and Jamie blame Tyrone for planning to send Edmund to the state sanatorium22 rather than to a private hospital, where, they are convinced, he would receive better care. Tyrone attempts to acquit himself of this charge as well: “The state has the money to make a better place than any private sanatorium. And why shouldn’t I take advantage of it? . . . I’m a property owner. I help to support it. I’m taxed to death” (4.805). Despite Tyrone’s protestations, however, the audience, who sees him so anxious about burning lightbulbs that his sons trip and fall coming home in the dark, suspects that his insurmountable penuriousness23 must undoubtedly have influenced his decisions concerning the medical treatment of both Mary and Edmund. In Tyrone’s defense, however, O’Neill makes it known that Tyrone, who had to quit school at the age of ten to support his family, was ignorant of the possible transmission of a susceptibility to alcoholism. He had been brought up in the Irish tradition of believing whiskey a health booster and a sign of manliness. The Irish maid, Cathleen, suggests this attitude when she excuses Tyrone’s drinking: “Well, it’s a good man’s failing. I wouldn’t give a trauneen for a teetotaler. They’ve no high spirits” (3.774). Furthermore, Tyrone is not always penurious. He claims to have wasted a small fortune on Jamie’s education and thousands more on “cures” for Mary. On this “long day” he surprises Edmund with a ten-dollar bill for car fare to the doctor’s office instead of the dollar Edmund had requested (2.2.767). At times Tyrone’s miserliness appears only exaggerated thrift. His defense of Hardy as a no-frills doctor who charges a dollar when the others in town with fancy offices charge five (1.730) seems plausible enough. As for turning out lightbulbs, Tyrone’s background of dire poverty in his youth explains all. People who have known such circumstances tend to be exceedingly careful with money all their lives. Finally, when confronted with his miserliness and its possible adverse effect on Edmund’s chances for recovery, Tyrone is persuaded to allow his son some choice regarding the facility he will enter for treatment.24 Tyrone’s share of blame for the family’s troubles, as I have noted in my “Games” article,25 seems to lie less in what he has done than in what he has not done. He does not ransack the spare room to confiscate Mary’s supply of morphine; he does not attempt to reach some sort of understanding with the local druggist; nor does he deny Mary the use of the car to procure drugs. Hamlet-like, Tyrone seems uncertain if he is even responsible for controlling his destiny. He appears desirous of believing in man’s power over his fate: he cites Cassius’s words to “dear Brutus” in Julius Caesar (4.810) and claims to believe in the power of prayer and “the one true faith

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of the Catholic Church” (2.2.759). But when he is not attempting to prove a point to his sons, he refers to “luck” (1.734, 4.810) and to Mary’s addiction as a “curse” from which she perhaps “can’t escape” (1.735). Tyrone’s uncertainty regarding his responsibility keeps him from taking any action to remedy the situation. In his confusion, he just sits and waits: “We’ve lived with this before and now we must again. There’s no help for it” (2.2.759). If the terrifying memory of Mary’s suicide attempt to some degree prohibits drastic measures regarding Mary’s drug supply, Tyrone could at least follow Mary up to the spare room and make an effort to stop her. What is missing is the type of vigorous confrontation that occurs between Tyrone and Edmund in act 4. Only once he hugs her to him and cries, “Dear Mary! For the love of God, for my sake and the boys’ sake and your own, won’t you stop now?” (2.2.764). But he surrenders all too easily. Tyrone has given up hope of saving his wife as early as before lunch: “Never mind. It’s no use now” (2.1.754). When Mary clings to him after the midday meal out of fear or loneliness (a sign that she may really want help), Tyrone leaves her as abruptly as he can. Although Tyrone’s passivity is a contributing factor, Mary seems the most reprehensible Tyrone. It is she who repeatedly takes the morphine and deserts the family who need her, even after undergoing “cures” that have supposedly reduced her addictive cravings. As the play opens, she has already been home from the hospital and ostensibly drug-free for two months. Although her initial addiction appears to have been accidental—the result of a bungling doctor and insufficient knowledge about drug use, Mary’s reasons for continuing to seek the solaces of morphine seem more deeply rooted. Ella O’Neill (the real-life prototype for Mary) appears to have been suffering from depression when her third son (Eugene) was born.26 This condition, which made her more susceptible to the reality-blurring effect of morphine,27 was not alleviated by bearing a child to replace the infant who had died. William Martin states that many recovering drug addicts eventually become readdicted “because they have not solved the problems that first led them to drugs.”28 Although, in the play, Mary tells her maid she takes the drug for the arthritis in her hands, the real “pain” Mary seeks to relieve appears to be her childish incapacity to face harsh realities such as Edmund’s consumption and a married life that has failed to live up to her rather grand expectations. A chronic complainer, she is satisfied with nothing and whines about everything: “I’ve always hated this town and everyone in it. . . . I’ve never wanted to live here in the first place, but your father liked it and insisted on building this house, and I’ve had to come here every summer. . . . I’ve never felt it was my home. It was wrong from the start” (1.738). The servants are stupid, the chauffeur is only a garage mechanic, etc., etc.; the list goes on. Mary never considers herself fortunate to have a summerhouse, a second-hand automo-

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bile (in 1912 when few people owned cars), and a cook, maid, and chauffeur. Instead, she constantly blames Tyrone for failing to provide for her properly as a husband. When Tyrone is late coming in to lunch, she commits the unpardonable sin of blaming him, in the presence of their sons, for marrying her. He should have remained a bachelor, she tells him: “Then nothing would ever have happened” (2.1.752–53). Translation: she would never have taken morphine because no sons would have been born to die, become alcoholic, or grow sick. Such speeches as the foregoing reveal Mary in the very unsympathetic role of nagging wife. In Mary’s defense, however, O’Neill reveals the source of her discontent—the doting father who lavished his quite ordinary means upon fulfilling her every wish. Mary cites her own mother, who said of her, “You’ve spoiled that girl so, I pity her husband if she ever marries. She’ll expect him to give her the moon. She’ll never make a good wife” (3.784). The irony is that Mary does not recognize the truth of her mother’s prediction. Mary continues, “Poor mother! . . . But she was mistaken, wasn’t she, James? I haven’t been such a bad wife, have I?” Tyrone’s reply is excruciatingly poignant: “(huskily, trying to force a smile) I’m not complaining, Mary” (3.784). He still loves Mary and wants to avoid hurting her feelings. However, Mary is not only a “bad wife,” her addictive behavior is ruining all their lives. Her rather abject plea for reassurance concerning the acceptability of her performance only confirms the extent of her drug-induced dissociation. A similar dissociation from fact dominates Mary’s memories of the past. By positioning Tyrone’s more accurate account of Mary’s background in act 4, shortly before the final sequence when Mary returns mentally and emotionally to her girlhood, O’Neill assures his audience that Mary’s memories are not to be trusted. For example, Mary, complaining of her loneliness, recalls her many friends at the convent. However, nowhere in her detailed recollections does she ever cite a single name or activity involving a friend. Those who she claims “cut” her after the scandal of Tyrone’s former mistress suing him appear to have been mere “acquaintances” rather than friends. The truth, which Mary does not seem to recognize, is that she was always a loner. Her father’s favorite and the nuns’ pet, she reveled in such solitary activities as practicing the piano and praying to the Blessed Virgin. In her present married state with the needs of her husband and adult sons still pressing upon her, Mary yearns for the solitude she knew as a girl. Torn between the human need for companionship and her own personal need for more time alone, she is constantly either leaving her family, as she leaves Edmund after breakfast to go take a “nap,” or sending her family away from her, as in the scene after breakfast when she practically pushes Tyrone and Jamie outside to trim the hedge. To justify her antisocial behavior, she denounces Tyrone for being miserly, Jamie for drinking and whoring, and

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even Edmund for being sick at the wrong time. Edmund, however, is not fooled by her accusations and excuses: he observes the deliberateness of her self-narcotization: The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately—to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us! (4.801)

Ruefully perceiving the implications of Mary’s addiction, Edmund suffers. Nevertheless, it is difficult to condemn Mary for trying to escape reality with morphine when her men seek a comparable oblivion through whiskey. On this particular “long day” they begin drinking earlier than usual, as soon as they suspect Mary has resumed her drug habit, which occurs just before lunch. By late night Tyrone is so “drunk” (4.792) he can barely see the solitaire cards; Edmund, who promised to avoid alcohol once his tuberculosis was confirmed, is still drinking; and Jamie returns home drunk but unable to pass out. Also like Mary, who acknowledges her desire to hide in a fog of morphine (3.773), Edmund loves fog: “where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. . . . Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” (4.796). Edmund’s comment reiterates the theme of The Iceman Cometh that people cannot bear too much reality. On one occasion when Edmund claims to have been “stone cold sober” and “had stopped to think too long” (4.807), he, as his grandfather Tyrone appears to have done before him,29 tried the ultimate escape—suicide. If none of the Tyrones can bear life and all seek to withdraw from it, perhaps Mary’s retreat into the fog of morphine is less reprehensible and even necessary. Maybe the problem is not the individual Tyrones but life itself. In many ways the Tyrones appear trapped by forces beyond their control. Heredity plays a large role in this entrapment. Both Jamie’s susceptibility to alcoholism and Edmund’s illness appear genetically traceable to Mary’s father, who died of alcohol-related tuberculosis. Similarly, Edmund’s suicide attempt appears to find an antecedent in the probable suicide of Tyrone’s father. The personal past of each character presents another powerful form of entrapment. Mary seems to be speaking for O’Neill when she declares the inescapability of the past: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too” (2.2.765). Mary’s conception of time as “kairos,” or a dimension lacking in chronic30 ity, seems drug-induced, however. According to Kermode, “Under certain drugs the ‘specious present’ is indefinitely lengthened.”31 Nevertheless, both Tyrone and Mary are forever haunted by the death of their infant, Eugene,

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some twenty-five years earlier. Tyrone, in an innocent display of love for his wife, had wanted her to accompany him on one of his acting tours. Mary, like countless young mothers who enjoy traveling with their husbands, had left the children with her mother, in whose care they ought to have been safe. Unfortunately, this quite blameless action led to Eugene’s death, for which the parents have never been able to stop blaming themselves. Tyrone’s guilt concerning Eugene (which he never acknowledges) was compounded by his selection of the physician who treated Mary with morphine following Edmund’s birth, thus commencing her addiction. This greater guilt, however, was perhaps mitigated by his belief that the doctor, who had been recommended to him, was competent. Mary’s guilt concerning Eugene became keener first from “daring”—as a result of her husband’s urging and contrary to her own wishes (2.2.766)—to have another child (Edmund) to replace the infant for whose death she falsely considered herself responsible, and finally because of the subsequent addiction, and series of readdictions, which caused her to abandon her family for morphine. Thus her initially “false” guilt (Eugene’s death) may have triggered her “real” guilt (the abandonment of her family), by making her more vulnerable to the amnesic, mood-elevating effect of morphine. Jamie’s guilt is comparable to Mary’s in that his initial guilt (regarding Eugene’s death) appears insubstantial in consideration of his youth (he was only six when he entered the infant’s room with the measles). Jamie appears to have been condemned too harshly for going near the baby, despite the fact that he had been warned to stay away. Although Jamie continued to exhibit promise during his youth and, in fact, performed well through prep school, it seems likely that the double trauma of feeling responsible for Eugene’s death and coming upon his mother in the act of injecting herself with morphine eventually contributed to his more reprehensible action of deliberate self-destruction through alcohol and whores. As he grew to hate himself for wasting his life, Jamie allowed his “real” guilt to intensify: he attempted to destroy his more promising younger brother, Edmund, as well, by influencing him to follow in his dissipation. Even Edmund is part of this family cycle of guilt, which begins quite innocently. Edmund is in no way responsible for the pain following his birth that resulted in Mary’s addiction. Nevertheless, he cannot help feeling guilty. In fact, the burden of culpability, however unmerited on Edmund’s part, seems to have triggered a pattern of self-destruction in him comparable to Jamie’s. Edmund, like his brother, is literally drinking himself to death. Also like Jamie (and like his mother with morphine), he finds it difficult to quit. However, although all three are physically endangered by their addictions, in Edmund’s case the death sentence is visible on his lungs: if he does not succeed in controlling his drinking, he will die of consumption. Hopefully, the gifted young Edmund will reclaim his life.

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Critical opinion is divided upon how much responsibility the characters bear for shaping their destinies. Although Judith E. Barlow and Chester Clayton Long argue that the Tyrones make choices that are important in shaping their destinies, William Jennings Adams contends O’Neill’s characters “meet their various dooms without real guilt,” since they do not make any crucial decisions that influence their fate.32 O’Neill does not settle the question of responsibility for the audience in Long Day’s Journey.33 By his own admission, he both blames and vindicates each character in turn: “At the final curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the 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” (emphasis added).34 Nevertheless, an examination of the closure in Long Day’s Journey indicates O’Neill directing the audience away from the assignation of blame and toward compassion for his tormented family. Although they exercise some choices that adversely affect their lives (such as Tyrone’s selection of a spoiled young convent girl for a wife), they in many ways cannot help being what they are. An examination of the fourth act reveals the three candidates for blame virtually exonerated. Jamie, as I have demonstrated, takes a real risk in attempting to save Edmund from himself. Through the courage of his confession he confirms his personal worth at the same time he appears to be undermining it. Tyrone, in the last act, is not only exculpated from the compulsive penuriousness acquired as a result of his impoverished boyhood, but attains something of a heroic status as well. His narration (confirmed by Mary in 3.787) of working in a machine shop at the age of ten, to support the large family deserted by his father, is moving What makes his recitation even more poignant to the audience is the realization that Tyrone, at age sixty-five, is still almost totally responsible for the support of his wife, two adult sons, and their household menage. Tyrone, as if to negate his father’s betrayal, does not desert the whining wife whose addiction disrupts their lives. Nor does he turn his derelict son, Jamie, out of the house to fend for himself. Tyrone is there till the end, bitter though it promises to be. That leaves Mary, who is moving around upstairs during the fourth act. The men, who hear and periodically refer to her motion, dread her coming downstairs. Tyrone has already warned she will be “like a mad ghost before the night’s over” (3.790). The audience awaits Mary’s reappearance as the necessary completion to the play. When she makes her startling entrance holding the wedding dress she has dug out of the attic, Mary—her hair braided, dressed in blue like the Blessed Virgin, of whom she prattles girlishly—is the picture of innocence betrayed. She is so far removed from reality that the viewer can no more blame her than her watching family can touch her as she

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passes beyond their reach at the end of the play. In her almost totally oblivious state, Mary appears less responsible and more sympathetic to the audience.35 Nevertheless, even Mary cannot completely escape the truth. With the closing words of the play she is back in her present misery36 recalling the love for James Tyrone that made her “so happy for a time” (4.828). Escape is at best only temporary, O’Neill suggests. The human condition is to live in suffering and keep trying to forget. Closure is enhanced in this emotional rendition of a situation that does not “end,” but continues on indefinitely,37 by the numerous allusions to terminal conditions38 and words designating completion in act 4. It is, to begin with, “night”—the finish of the “long day” described in the play’s title. Tyrone’s references to the poorhouse as “the end of the road” (4.794) and “the final curtain” (4.794) all suggest the play is coming to a close. Edmund actually uses the word “closes” in his quote from Dowson: “Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream” (4.795). Jamie speculates on Edmund’s “funeral” (4.815) and mourns the irretrievable loss of his mother: “All over— finished now—not a hope!” (4.817). Shortly before Mary’s entrance and the final sequence, Edmund tells Jamie, “You’re the limit! At the Last Judgment, you’ll be around telling everyone it’s in the bag” (4.820). Finally, when Mary appears, Tyrone refers to her condition in a manner that emphasizes the culminating nature of this particular day:39 “It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this” (4.827). As the play comes to a close, Mary, despite her stricken family’s efforts to stop her, is more powerfully narcotized than ever. There seems little hope that she (unlike her real-life prototype, Ella O’Neill, who eventually conquered her addiction)40 will ever recover. Another technique O’Neill employs to facilitate his audience’s perception of closure in Long Day’s Journey is his masterful use of visual and aural impressions, which complement the dialogue of the play to create what Jean Chothia hails as “poetry of theatre.”41 As the fourth act opens, Tyrone is sitting alone playing cards in the dark, except for the reading lamp that illuminates his solitaire game. The foghorn can be heard at regular intervals, along with the warning bells from the yachts at anchor nearby. As the act progresses, lightbulbs are turned on and off with a rhythm that, to some degree, parallels the Tyrones’ attempts to both face and avoid reality. For example, after mock-heroically braving the poorhouse by turning on three of the five bulbs in the chandelier, Tyrone proceeds to confess the excessive regard for money that, he is convinced, cost him a great acting career: “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—” (4.810). In almost the next breath, however, he is turning off the lightbulbs again, concealing his concern for his mounting electric bill with the excuse that the light hurts his eyes.42 An even more intense illumination of the chandelier succeeds Jamie’s

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astonishing confession of his love/hate for Edmund: “Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier in the front parlor are turned on from a wall switch, and a moment later someone starts playing the piano in there—the opening of one of Chopin’s simpler waltzes . . .” (4.823). Following this dramatic blaze of light and sound, Mary appears with her wedding dress, the picture of girlish innocence” (4.823). A new voice is heard in the final sequence of the play: she speaks the language and has the thoughts of a young girl. The visual technique most important to closure in Long Day’s Journey is O’Neill’s astonishingly effective use of pantomime. In my treatment of Mourning Becomes Electra I noted the significance of Lavinia’s closing of the door as the shutters were being nailed in terminating the trilogy. Pantomime in the more sophisticated Long Day’s Journey involves a more complex series of movements. First there is the moving transfer of the wedding gown from Mary to Tyrone’s protective arms: unable to save Mary, at least he can save her beloved gown. Mary’s subsequent movements are described by Normand Berlin as contributing to “the most effective curtain in American drama.” The drugged woman’s actions are so orchestrated that she comes “close to each of her loved ones only to move away from them physically, mirroring her leave-taking into the past.”43 The grief-stricken men are unable to penetrate her self-induced trance. Edmund, behind whom Mary passes last, comes closest. He grabs her arm desperately: “Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption!” (4.826). For a second “he seems to have broken through to her, “because “she trembles and her expression becomes terrified. “Then she is far away again. She murmurs, “You must not try to touch me. You must not try to hold me. It isn’t right, when I am hoping to be a nun.” Edmund drops her arm. There is no hope of reclaiming her. To drown their common sorrow they pour another round of drinks and raise their glasses. Before they can share that drink, however, Mary begins speaking and they lower their glasses, forgetting them. The irony of Mary’s closing speech is overwhelming: “. . . I knew she [the Blessed Virgin] heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me as long as I never lost my faith in her” (4.828). The fifty-four-year-old woman, who speaks the last lines of the play in a young girl’s voice, no longer prays, because she does not believe the Blessed Virgin would listen to the words of a “lying dope fiend” (3.779). Like modern man (as O’Neill depicts him), she is cut off from her traditional faith and has come to great harm. As the play closes, the men, who were anxiously watching Mary for signs of drug use at the opening of the play, are again watching her—numbed with despair that the nightmare has recurred. Henry J. Schmidt cites the closing action (or lack of action) as an example of “modern drama’s dystopian tableaus”:44 “(She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless)” (4.828). C. W. E. Bigsby compares the “silence and immobility” of this final picture to the closure of a Beckett play.45

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The final impact of the play is loss. Tyrone’s acting talent, once praised by Edwin Booth; Jamie’s youth and early promise; Edmund’s health; the thousands of dollars spent to rehabilitate Mary—all gone, wasted, lost in most cases beyond retrieval. “What did I come here to find?” Mary murmurs poignantly. “It’s terrible how absent-minded I’ve become. I’m always dreaming and forgetting” (4.825). The image of Mary fumbling about, searching for some indefinable necessity she feels she has lost, haunts the play as a metaphor for the human condition. Mary can no longer remember what she “miss[es] terribly” (4.826) and feels she desperately needs. The loss is unspecified and general. There are the obvious losses pertaining to her sons—the death of the infant Eugene, for which she feels guilty; the possible death of Edmund (tuberculosis was often fatal in 1912); and the wasted life of Jamie. Mary tells Tyrone, “I’m afraid Jamie has been lost to us for a long time, dear” (3.780). Mary herself represents a great loss to her family as she moves beyond their reach in the final sequence. Time-related losses also pervade the play. Mary mourns the loss of her reddish-brown hair (1.728) and the slender, flexible fingers that once danced across the piano keys. She claims to have lost her “true self ” (2.1.749)—by which she seems to mean the innocent young convent girl who wanted to become a nun before meeting Tyrone. In the last words of the play, Mary also seems to mourn the loss of that first ecstasy of love, when she was “so happy for a time” (4.828). What seems to confirm the Tyrones’ losses as irretrievable (except regarding Edmund, who may regain his health at the sanatorium) is that none of the characters exhibit any behavioral changes that affect the family’s overall situation during the course of the play. Robert Bechtold Heilman describes the manner in which the “periodic notes of tragic self-recognition” exhibited by the various Tyrones fail to materialize into a change of behavior. Mary’s brief insight into herself as a “lying dope fiend” does not stimulate her to quit morphine. Jamie’s awareness of the analogy between his compulsive drinking and Mary’s drug addiction does not help him combat his alcoholism. Even Tyrone’s fourth-act recognition of the excessive regard for money that cost him his career as a Shakespearean actor does not ameliorate his compulsive thrift. Heilman concludes, “[A]t no time is there a painfully earned self-knowledge which then becomes a determinant of action and a molder of personality.”46 Laurin Roland Porter sees some hope in “the Tyrones’ willingness to at last confess their own guilt instead of merely accusing one another,” but notes that the confessions in Long Day’s Journey are not efficacious, since the characters fail to “see their lost ideals as potentially destructive. . . . they aren’t so much seeking absolution as they are sharing their disappointment.”47 Whether or not the Tyrones are even capable of change seems unclear from the play.48

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Some critics have seen a positive significance in the relationships between the men. Certainly in act 4 when Tyrone drops part of his protective mask and reveals the greed that undermined his acting career to Edmund, there is a movement toward greater intimacy. Edmund indicates that the bond between them has been strengthened: “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now” (4.810). Steven F. Bloom, however, argues against “an optimistic interpretation of this play based on new love and understanding that enters into the relationships between Edmund and his father and brother.” He notes that although “alliances have shifted somewhat . . . it is certainly not clear that these are permanent realignments; given the nature of this family, in fact, that seems highly unlikely.” Instead Bloom sees significance in the fact that “the last drink of the play eludes them.”49 They raise their glasses together as if in mutual commiseration at the sight of Mary’s deteriorated condition, but, as she starts to speak in a young girl’s voice, they slowly lower their glasses, each lost in his own grief. The Tyrones, despite their love and concern for each other, are not united in mutual support: what they share is despair. In many ways Long Day’s Journey (1941) seems a forerunner of absurd drama. The Tyrones’ lonely house, surrounded by fog, on the outskirts of a harbor town seems a precursor of the isolated, water-surrounded settings of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs (1951) or Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). Mary’s ambivalence regarding her loneliness foreshadows that of Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954). “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” cries Estragon to his only friend, Vladimir.50 Mary is always either sending her family away (to trim the hedge, to go to the doctor) or leaving them (physically, by going upstairs to lie down, or psychologically by taking morphine). Yet she says she feels lonely. Uncertain whether she desires her family’s presence or not, Mary whispers to herself after the men leave in act 2: It’s so lonely here. (Then her face hardens into bitter self-contempt.) You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone. (She gives a little despairing laugh) Then Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely? (2.2.771)

An examination of Mary’s talk with Cathleen, the maid with whom she attempts to converse (3.773), helps to explain Mary’s confusion regarding her family’s presence. Companionship is not always effective in relieving the loneliness of individuals imprisoned within their own egos. Communication may border upon impossibility, as the two women’s dialogue bears witness. While Mary repeatedly complains about the fog (“That foghorn! Isn’t it

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awful, Cathleen? . . . Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t stand it any more” [3.772–73]) and her domestic problems with Tyrone, Cathleen keeps responding with comments about the chauffeur, who habitually pinches her (“He can’t keep his dirty hands to himself. Give him half a chance and he’s pinching me on the leg or you-know-where . . .”). Mary, in her drugged state, is really engaging in a monologue, and, to a lesser extent, so is Cathleen. Occasionally their monologues intersect, but, in fact, neither finds the sympathetic listener she seeks. The two women’s isolated speeches in different directions approach the discordant dialogue of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Finally, also like Godot, to which O’Neill’s play has frequently been compared, Long Day’s Journey, the action of which is mostly interior and psychological, lacks significant physical action. Normand Berlin observes of both dramas: “Waiting is the play’s non-activity, with Mary waiting for her morphine to begin working its soothing magic, with the three Tyrone men playing a waiting game, hoping that Mary did not return to her habit but finally recognizing how hopeless hope really is.”51 In both Godot and Long Day’s Journey, the characters play games to pass the time that weighs heavily on their hands. Vladimir and Estragon play word games and imitate the tree; the Tyrones, in addition to the various games they play to avoid facing the facts of Edmund’s consumption and Mary’s addiction, play the card games solitaire and casino. Images of existential man alone in a dark world and stumbling to find his way pervade the play. The picture of Tyrone52 alone and drunk, playing solitaire in the spotlighted darkness, wasting the talent once praised by Edwin Booth on the various domestic problems that beset him, seems to fit Albert Camus’s description of the absurd condition: neither man nor the universe is the singular cause of the absurd, but “it is born of their confrontation.”53 The images of Mary searching for some unrecallable object she has lost, and of both Edmund and Jamie, in separate entrances, stumbling in the darkness of the unlit hallway—all seem potential metaphors for the precarious condition of man alone in an—at best—indifferent universe. In such a world man can scarcely be blamed for the way his life turns out. Imperfect as the Tyrones may be, they are not evil: in their hearts they love one another and wish each other well. They are ordinary human beings like the viewer’s own family, like the viewer himself. They do not deserve their lot. In recognizing the at least partial exoneration from responsibility implied through this closure, the viewer can breathe a sigh of relief he, too, may be innocent of much of the blame for his life. Perhaps the best way to endure existence in a world such as this play depicts is to imitate Edmund’s example of stoic acceptance. Edmund’s “strained, ironical laughter” (4.810) when his father once again turns out the lightbulbs (just seconds after regretting his miserliness) prefigures the conduct described

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by Martin Esslin (1962) as the goal of the absurd dramatists. The theater of the absurd, according to Esslin, attempts to free man from the illusions that are likely to cause him disappointment in life and tries to make him “come to terms with the world in which he lives.” For “the dignity of man,” Esslin continues, “lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions—and to laugh at it.”54 Edmund, the stand-in for O’Neill in this personal family drama, laughs at his father’s inability to change because that is the clear-sighted younger man’s only recourse for survival: he must accept life as it is. Through his heroic confrontation with truth, this member of a family who continually seek to escape the truth (through alcohol, drugs, or pretend games) may be able to break out of their circle of entrapment and begin to live, for the first time, on his own. O’Neill does not attempt to impose any artificial hopes upon the ending, as was his practice in such earlier plays as Beyond the Horizon (1918), The Straw (1919), Welded (1923), Desire under the Elms (1924), and Days without End (1933), but in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) the possibility is there. The younger and, consequently, probably more malleable Edmund has learned much about his father and brother in act 4. The hope that he will be able to avoid their mistakes renders the closure less bleak.

No t e s   1. Joseph Golden, “O’Neill and the Passing of Pleasure,” in The Death of Tinker Bell: The American Theatre in the Twentieth-Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1967), 44.   2. Koreneva, “One Hundred Percent American Tragedy,” 170.   3. Edwin Engel, “O’Neill 1960,” Modern Drama 3, no. 3 (1960): 221.   4. O’Neill, to Sean O’Casey, 5 August 1943, in Selected Letters, ed. Bogard and Bryer, 546.   5. Floyd, New Assessment, 46; Carpenter, Eugene O’Neill, 155.   6. Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, 350.   7. Normand Berlin, “The Beckettian O’Neill,” Modern Drama 31, no. 1 (1968): 33–34.   8. Judith Barlow’s examination of the successive drafts of Long Day’s Journey appears to confirm O’Neill’s intention to postpone Mary’s initial morphine injection until after the first act (Final Acts, 78–79).   9. J. Yellowlees Douglas, “ ‘How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives,” in Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George P. Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 162. 10. Ibid., 185. 11. Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem,” 327. Fish is referring to poetry, but his definition seems applicable to any literary work that requires analysis. 12. Schlueter, Dramatic Closure, 30. 13. Kermode defines kairos as time “charged with . . . meaning derived from its relation [to the beginning and] to the end” (Sense of an Ending, 47). 14. Ibid., 50.

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15. Törnqvist, Drama of Souls, 23. 16. The 1986 Broadway production permitted the quarreling and blaming “sub-text to dominate the actual words” (Clive Barnes, “ ‘Day’s Journey’ to Glory: B’way at Its Greatest,” review of Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill, as performed at the Broadhurst Theater, New York [1986]; reprinted in New York Theater Critics’ Reviews: 1986, ed. Joan Marlowe and Betty Blake [New York: Critics’ Theatre Reviews, 1986], 304). The result of Jonathan Miller’s directorial choice was a rushing and overlapping of speeches that was emotionally effective but often unintelligible. 17. Alvin Kernan, Character and Conflict: An Introduction to Drama, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 7. 18. Barbara Voglino, “ ‘Games’ the Tyrones Play,” Eugene O’Neill Review 16, no. 1 (1992): 100. 19. Louis Sheaffer (“Correcting Some Errors, Part 1,” 16) sets Jamie’s age at six at the time of his infant brother’s death. 20. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 73. 21. For an account of Jamie O’Neill’s academic progress, including his expulsion from Fordham University in his senior year, see Shaughnessy, “Ella, James, and Jamie O’Neill,” 50–59. 22. The state hospital at Shelton, Connecticut. James O’Neill Sr. may have considered sending Eugene there because the brother of one of his prosperous acquaintances was being treated at this facility (Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 242). 23. O’Neill appears to have exaggerated his father’s parsimony (probably for dramatic purposes) in this play. Sheaffer notes that O’Neill’s father “could be generous with his family, for he saw to it that Ella always had fine clothes, he gave her costly pieces of jewelry, and he certainly never stinted on his sons’ education” (Son and Playwright, 22). 24. In real life Eugene O’Neill did, in fact, initially enter the state hospital, but left after only two days. Subsequently, James O’Neill Sr. allowed Eugene to be treated at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium, where he was eventually cured (Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 242–45). 25. Voglino, “ ‘Games’ the Tyrones Play,” 98–100. Much of this paragraph is derived from the indicated pages of the “ ‘Games’ ” article. 26. Sheaffer (Son and Playwright, 19) refers to Ella’s “unhappiness” and “chronically low spirits” before conceiving Eugene. The Gelbs (O’Neill, 9, 54) appear to confirm this. Doris Alexander recounts a triple trauma as having devastated Ella prior to the birth of Eugene in October 1888: the death of her infant, the death of her mother, and surgery for breast cancer in the spring of 1887 (Tempering of Eugene O’Neill, 14). Sheaffer, however, refutes Alexander’s assertion that Ella had a mastectomy as a young wife. He cites two extant doctors’ reports that confirm that Ella underwent “breast amputation” in 1918, several years before her death in 1922 (“Correcting Some Errors, Part 1,” 16–17). 27. Sheaffer asserts that the morphine not only freed Ella from pain but “from any feelings of loneliness and anxiety, and made life endurable” (Son and Playwright, 22). “According to medical evidence,” the Gelbs note, “it is unusual for a person to become addicted to morphine unless she actively wishes to sustain the sense of unreality that it provides” (O’Neill, 59). 28. The World Book Encyclopedia, 1976 ed., s.v. “Drug Addiction, Treatment of.” 29. According to Sheaffer, Tyrone’s description of his father’s death by poisoning, which both rumor and Edmund contend was not accidental (4.807), is bio-

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graphically accurate regarding the death of Eugene O’Neill’s paternal grandfather (“Correcting Some Errors, Part 1,” 14). 30. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 46. 31. Ibid., 54–55. 32. Barlow, Final Acts, 106–7; Long, Role of Nemesis, 217; and William Jennings Adams, “The Dramatic Structure of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1956), 393. 33. Clive Barnes pays tribute to O’Neill’s impartiality: “O’Neill never makes judgments in his plays—he is almost Shakespearean in his ambivalence to character” (review of A Moon for the Misbegotten, by Eugene O’Neill, as performed at the Morosco Theater, New York [1973]; reprinted in New York Times Theater Reviews. 1973–1974 [New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1975], 162). 34. O’Neill, to George Jean Nathan, 15 June 1940, in Selected Letters, ed. Bogard and Bryer, 506–7. 35. Barlow, Final Acts, 82–83. 36. Chothia, Forging a Language, 183. 37. “Ends have become difficult to achieve,” concludes Peter Brooks. Traditional endings, he continues, have to a large extent been replaced with permanent deferral, game playing, or the stasis of irresolution (Reading for the Plot, 313–14). 38. See Smith, Poetic Closure, 102. 39. Barlow, Final Acts, 80–81. 40. See chapter 1, note 21, on Ella O’Neill’s recovery from her addiction to morphine. 41. Chothia, Forging a Language, 182–83. 42. Jack Lemmon’s portrayal of James Tyrone Sr. in the 1986 Broadway production emphasized the comically endearing aspects of Tyrone’s character, which have often been overlooked. 43. Berlin, “The Beckettian O’Neill,” 33–34. 44. Schmidt, “How Dramas End,” 20–21. 45. Bigsby Critical Introduction, 1:99. 46. Heilman, The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent, 108. 47. Laurin Roland Porter, The Banished Prince: Time, Memory and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Theater and Dramatic Studies 54 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 89–91. 48. In real life, it should be remembered, the O’Neills fared somewhat better. Ella recovered from her addiction a few years later, and Eugene, with his father’s help, recovered from tuberculosis and began writing plays. 49. Steven F. Bloom, “Empty Bottles, Empty Dreams: O’Neill’s Use of Drinking and Alcoholism in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” in Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill, ed. James J. Martine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 175–76. 50. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 1, 38. 51. Berlin, “The Beckettian O’Neill,” 33. 52. Much of this paragraph is derived from Voglino, “ ‘Games’ the Tyrones Play,” 102. 53. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1955), 23. 54. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 377.

L AW R E N C E D U G A N

The Tyrone Anthology: Authority in the Last Act of Long Day’s Journey into Night

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he stage directions for the opening of act 4 of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night are “The same. It is around midnight.” During the act the argument between father and sons reaches full pitch; but the anger of the family is tempered by repeated deference to literary authority, as Tyrone and his sons quote fourteen times from eight writers and make references to seven others. As I shall demonstrate, the act is largely anger and consolation, for the great problem of the play—who bears most responsibility for the family’s downfall—has been answered in the third act where we see the wife and mother of the house resort to her own authority, and her own distorted memory of the past, which feeds her embittered personality. Our understanding of the family’s defeat at the end of the third act makes the fourth all the more moving, and a consideration of the writers each character quotes, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Kipling, or Baudelaire, and even the writers referred to by O’Neill in earlier stage directions, is an essential element in understanding who speaks with most authority in the play, in discovering who is right and who wrong in its extended argument. Brenda Murphy argues convincingly that the play has two endings, a valuable analysis in explaining the use of quotation, as I shall note. Michael Hinden and Marc Maufort are the only other critics to address this question at length. Maufort concentrates on quotation from Baudelaire alone, and From Comparative Drama 37, nos. 3–4 (Fall 2003–Winter 2004): 379–95. © 2003/2004 Western Michigan University, Department of English.

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not as an authority quoted but rather as an important influence on O’Neill’s thinking. Hinden sees the quotations as representing differences in taste across generations, and as an important part of the family’s literary and theatrical background, but again, not as an almost forensic leavening in the play.1 I shall discuss act 4 first, giving the essential arguments made by the characters in defense of themselves and against others, and then look back at the end of act 3, where the play has its first conclusion. II At midnight Tyrone, half-drunk and unhappy, is dealing cards to himself. Edmund comes home before his older brother Jamie, and Tyrone is glad to see him, although they argue over lights being left on. They will be onstage for the first half of the act, with Jamie and Mary coming in later, both badly impaired by alcohol or drugs. They settle whatever is left of the argument over Tyrone’s cheapness, both dreading Mary’s descent from the second floor. They argue almost to forget about her. After the argument over the lights being on, Edmund accuses his father of sentimental religious romanticism, for Tyrone has claimed in the past that the Duke of Wellington and Shakespeare were Irish Catholics. Wellington was Irish, although a Protestant; and we know from earlier scenes that Tyrone came of age, professionally, in the late-nineteenth-century American theater, when eccentric theories about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays were at their peak. Ignatius Donnelly, in The Great Cryptogram (1887), and others advanced wild theories that would have baffled the intelligent and sensible young actor.2 So O’Neill has Tyrone make a transfer of nationality and religion concerning Shakespeare. If others deny that he wrote at all, in the face of overwhelming evidence, why should not young Tyrone, while touring the Midwest in the 1870s and 1880s, have made his own suitable adjustment to Shakespeare’s life? O’Neill does not tell us this directly, but I think I have reasoned back from the dialogue without going astray from his intent.3 Tyrone: Stubbornly. So he was. The proof is in his plays. Edmund: Well he wasn’t, and there’s no proof of it in his plays, except to you! Jeeringly. The Duke of Wellington, there was another good Irish Catholic! Tyrone: I never said he was a good one. He was a renegade but a Catholic just the same. (127)

The use of “renegade” is important, for Tyrone’s great weakness that emerges in the play is not stinginess, a substantial but commonplace failing that he barely acknowledges as a flaw and that his decency more than offsets.4

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His chief flaw, his only personal regret outside of certain career decisions made in middle age, is his lack of religious faith. Both Tyrone and his wife Mary are tormented by their state of apostasy from Catholicism and talk about religion frequently. The only critic I have found who acknowledges this is Virginia Floyd, who emphasizes their state as lapsed Catholics in analyzing their problems.5 Jamie: We don’t pretend, at any rate. Caustically. I don’t notice you’ve worn any holes in the knees of your pants going to Mass. Tyrone: It’s true I’m a bad Catholic in the observance, God forgive me. But I believe! Angrily. And you’re a liar! I may not go to church but every night and morning of my life I get on my knees and pray! (77)

Toward the end of act 2 Mary says to Edmund, “some day when the Blessed Virgin Mary forgives me and gives me back the faith in Her love and pity I used to have in my convent days, and I can pray to Her again . . .” (94). She says this to her son in a childish, mechanically dreamy voice that seems to absorb more and more of her personality as the play continues. Unlike Tyrone and her sons, she does not reach to literature for authority in act 4, at midnight. She is a “ghost” character as Tyrone calls her, drifting around in reveries of her convent school days, drugged into the past. A little girl does not fall back on Shakespeare or Swinburne to round-off an argument; she quotes an adult, in Mary’s case a nun, whom she loves; or she simply asserts what she believes. Contemporary readers may wonder at religious apostasy as the driving force of the play, at such an old-fashioned mental and emotional stateof-affairs. But Long Day’s Journey into Night is set in an upper-middle-class Irish-American house in 1912, and religious belief is the only workable key to what divides the generations in the play, and it helps to explain the mass of quotation in act 4. Tyrone and Mary reach to religion, the Church, for authority, and, in Tyrone’s case, three times to Shakespeare. Since they are not “good Catholics,” that is, practicing the religion by going to Mass on Sunday and receiving the sacraments, their arguments are hollow, both to the boys and to themselves. The parents are sometimes sound in their criticism of the sons and each other but they speak without real authority, whereas the sons grab at the fin de siècle poets like scholastics quoting the Church fathers, and speak with great conviction, even if they are not sound in their criticism of each other and the parents. In the morning the sons see things as they are and themselves as washed out images of the night before. In the morning the reality of Tyrone’s

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begrudging support is apparent. No one seems anxious to get away from him then, but at night they challenge him and he is vulnerable because he does not support what he says he believes—for his faith is in shreds. He never quotes Cardinal Newman or Orestes Brownson or any other nineteenth-century Catholic writer. He is a failed, sensible, old-fashioned, romantic realist; his sons are young, enthusiastic, and more credible, as terrible as the effects of practicing what they believe are on them. It is important to establish this point before looking at the sequence of quotation. Consider early in the act. Tyrone and Edmund are playing cards, half-drunk, and Edmund has just quoted Symons’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Epilogue,” a passage with references to a brothel, harlots, and invoking Satan. (See Appendix for quotations from poems in full.) Tyrone answers: Morbid filth! Where the hell do you get your taste in literature? Filth and despair and pessimism! Another atheist, I suppose. When you deny God, you deny hope. That’s the trouble with you. If you’d get down on your knees—. (134)

Then, a few lines later, Edmund quotes from Dowson’s “Cynara,” a poem about a prostitute’s “bought red mouth.” Tyrone answers: “It’s madness, yes. If you’d get on your knees and pray. When you deny God, you deny sanity” (134). Nicholas Wallerstein argues that in act 4 Tyrone’s candor when speaking to Edmund about the poverty of his own childhood, as an immigrant from Ireland whose family fled the potato famine of the 1840s, marks a shift in rhetoric, that the old actor’s equivocations and feeble language are replaced by sincere speech that uses various classical rhetorical devices—anaphora, polysyndeton and others—that convince Edmund. There does seem a change in the youngest son’s attitude; and the pitiable state of the other two characters, Mary and Jamie, is a parallel contrast to the understanding that develops between Tyrone and Edmund. If we contrast Tyrone’s reflections on his childhood with those of Mary, which I shall discuss, then laying blame at Tryone’s feet becomes an ever more obvious case of scapegoating.6 III The actual sequence of quotation in act 4, some of which I have commented on above, is as follows: Edmund quotes two stanzas of Ernest Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis”; Tyrone quotes from The Tempest (4.1.157); Edmund recites a long passage from Symons’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Be Thou Drunk”; then Edmund quotes Symons’s translation of Baudelaire’s

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“Epilogue”; he quotes six lines of Ernest Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”; after which Tyrone denounces Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenauer, Nietzsehe, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I’ve three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read. (135)

Then comes a long passage in the center of the act without quotation, as Tyrone and Edmund argue bitterly, trying to unknot their differences without quoting authority, mixing sincere bitterness with curses and invective. Tyrone quotes As You Like It (5.4.60), but there is nothing again until he recites from Julius Caesar (1.2.140). When Jamie finally staggers in he quotes Kipling’s “Ford O’ Kabul River”; then he quotes Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House”; Edmund repeats one line from Dowson and three lines from Baudelaire’s “Epilogue”; Jamie quotes Kipling’s “Sestina of the TrampRoyal” and “Mother O’ Mine”; Othello (1.1.345); Richard III (1.4.55); Rossetti’s “The Choice”; and finally Swinburne’s “The Leavetaking” before Mary rounds off everything with a maxim from Mother Elizabeth of her convent school days, speaking in a morphine stupor.7 The sons quote more writers, with more feeling, unhealthy as their livefor-today, pre–First World War romanticism seems, a fragmented philosophy that has trouble penetrating even the shell around Tyrone’s spiritual emptiness. Anyone reading or seeing the play senses that much of the quotation is attitude, as the characters pause to recite these lines, the father listening to his sons who learned so much from him about recitation; but the argument seems so deadly earnest that any sense of showing off evaporates. An important key to all of this has been given back at the opening of act 1, on the morning of the same day, in the stage directions, describing the parlor of their summer house in New London, Connecticut, long since transformed into a year-round home: Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Stirner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling, etc.

And on the other wall we are meant to see:

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sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three sets of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s History of England, Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire, Smollett’s History of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of old plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing about these sets is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread. (11)

By going back to these stage directions we avoid the oversimplification that a brief analysis such as I have given above of the family’s social status might encourage. We are in an upper-middle-class Irish-American household, but also one of artists: two of the men are actors, one a writer. The two bookcases represent two different states of mind. The first is a repository of authors quoted by Jamie and Edmund, holding an analytic, fragmented modern romanticism, while the other bookcase represents Tyrone’s older, broader tradition, one that seems well-integrated. Shakespeare, Gibbon, Hugo, Dumas, and Irish history make better company together than Nietzsche, Wilde, Schopenhauer, and Kipling and at the same time seems to represent more of Western culture. O’Neill’s division does not allow us to think of the first group as we do of the second. Murphy has noted this at the end of her detailed work American Realism and American Drama: 1880–1940. (This is a close study of the evolution of realism in the work of American playwrights, from the gilded age plays of Howells and James, so largely ignored in critical literature, to twentieth century realists like Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, and others.)8 I would push Murphy’s attention a step further to take note of a crucial omission from Tyrone’s library. The sons have philosophers mixed with poets; he does not. Nor does he have a Bible, a religious biography, or a book by, say, Newman or De Salles. So Edmund and Jamie show two kinds of diversity; later writers representing a less homogenous view of the world than the assumptions about life and the world that probably underlie Shakespeare, Gibbon, and Hugo; but also diverse simply by having any philosophy. A great pillar is missing from Tyrone’s library, and if we are to credit the opening stage directions of act 1, and the last act that they point to, with any importance, we must note that Augustine and Aquinas are not there to face Marx and Schopenhauer, ill-at-ease as the latter appear together. There is not even, to repeat, a Bible or a prayer book. What is the World’s Greatest Literature in fifty volumes if no philosopher stands out from it? “I studied Shakespeare as you’d study the Bible,” (150) Tyrone says to Edmund when they are alone in the first scene of act 4. Perhaps this is more revealing than he realizes. Tyrone has no philosophy that he can frame into words in any authoritative sense. He has been formed by nineteenth-century Catholicism, and is

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a decent, if flawed, man; yet he is a weak example. He cannot impart what strength he has to Mary or Edmund or Jamie, because they are repelled by its lack of depth, of sincerity, of religious conviction. While his sons can argue about Nietzsche in act 2 (granting that most of their references are to poets like Dowson and Baudelaire) he can only tell them to “shut up”; he cannot marshall a philosopher to his side because he is not sure what his philosophy is (76–77). Hard work and professional pride have given him financial results, but Tyrone has not learned (or learned too late) that this is a limited philosophy of the workplace, not the home. So Tyrone, a bad Catholic, is left holding the banner of a perverse Whig version of history as understood by a romantic: Wellington was a Catholic, Shakespeare was an Irishman. His sons share a thin philosophy that has not taken long to misshape them; damaged as they are, they have not yet subsided completely into Tyrone’s self-consciousness of apostasy and moral failure; damaged as they are, they quote their authorities with unselfconscious vigor. At times they disagree among themselves and remake an authority: But you’d better be on your guard. Because I’ll do my damnedest to make you fail. Can’t help it. I hate myself. Got to take revenge. On everyone else. Especially you. Oscar Wilde’s “Reading Gaol” has the dope twisted. The man was dead and so he had to kill the thing he loved. (166)

Jamie offers a candid insight into his younger brother, taking a famous paradox as the basis for another, that is, the dead man kills the thing he loves, whether with a kiss or sword, it matters little. But the thought fades in the fog of his drunkenness, and, a few lines after, he levels accusations at his father, via Richard III, then falls back on Rossetti: What the hell are you staring at? He recites sardonically from Rossetti. “Look in my face. My name is Might-Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell,” Tyrone: I’m well aware of that, and God knows I don’t want to look at it. Edmund: Papa! Quit it! Jamie: Derisively. Got a great idea for you, Papa. Put on revival of “The Bells” this season. Great part in it you can play without makeup. Old Gaspard, the miser! (168)

Tyrone starts the exchange with a joke about the appropriateness of Jamie’s recital that hits the target because the lines already do; but Jamie does not have to turn a phrase on Tyrone. He answers with vicious mockery by

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naming a play that highlights Tyrone’s barren philosophy. To read this only as a dig at Tyrone’s tightness with money is to miss the other part of the joke suggesting that Erckmann-Chatrain’s old French melodrama (made famous in English by Henry Irving) is the root of Tyrone’s wisdom. Albert Wertheim points out that Jamie calls Tyrone Gaspard seven times in the act, although only once to his face. Along with period reasons for bringing in “The Bells,” and Tyrone’s obvious cheapness, he suggests that it is a crack about how far the father has come from his days playing Shakespeare, and I think he is right.9 And as with Murphy’s observation on the contrasting libraries, I would push it further to suggest that Tyrone is intellectually bankrupt in the face of his sons, who are weaker, sicker men, but not without a sense of intellectual confidence. Chesterton wrote in 1913, a year after the play is set: The Swinburnian skeptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind . . . these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these songs; which, so far as any particular sense goes, were almost songs without words.10

This is a plausible profile of the Tyrone brothers, and their father is in no position to teach them. IV In act 3 we see Mary Tyrone, by now heavily drugged, start to turn toward her psychological North Star, the convent in Cincinnati where she went to school. She has made two references to the Blessed Virgin in act 2, and now they continue as she reminisces about the nuns who taught her music and her father, who spoiled her: I was brought up in a respectable home and educated in the best convent in the Middle West. Before I met Mr. Tyrone I hardly knew there was such a thing as a theater. I was a very pious girl. (102)

She drops this thread for a few minutes, then picks it up again, talking with Cathleen, the second servant girl; then she suddenly seems to push through three emotions, talking to herself:

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You’re a sentimental fool. What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent where you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin. Longingly. If I could only find the faith I lost, so I could pray again! She pauses—then begins to recite the Hail Mary in a flat, empty tone. “Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with Thee; blessed art Thou among women.” Sneeringly. You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her! She springs to her feet. Her hands fly up to pat her hair distractedly. I must go upstairs. I haven’t taken enough. When you start again you never know exactly how much you need. (107)

It is a terrible medley of emotions, and whatever agency Tyrone’s cheapness has in the play, it does not enter this scene. Mary despairs, starts to pray, then stops and falls into despair again. Brendan Gill, in a review in the New Yorker of the 1986 Broadway production, noted the single-minded harshness of Mary’s character revealed by director Jonathan Miller, who, with Jack Lemmon in the role of Tyrone, successfully muted Tyrone’s theatrical bluster and allowed Bethal Leslie to stress the selfishness that is so easily concealed by Mary’s triple role as mother, wife, invalid, each evoking sympathy that may distort our perspective on her personality.11 Besides the harshness toward herself in the scene above, consider when she speaks of Jamie to Tyrone in act 2, scene 2, still fairly early in the day. Talking of the death of their third child who caught measles in infancy after Jamie, who had the disease, went in the younger child’s bedroom, she says: I’ve always believed Jamie did it on purpose. He was jealous of the baby. He hated him. . . . Oh, I know Jamie was only seven, but he was never stupid. He’d been warned it might kill the baby. He knew. I’ve never been able to forgive him for that. (87)

This is an absurd piece of moralizing, spoken while she is still fairly lucid, and made barely palatable by her sorrow for her dead child, and her state as an invalid. A little later, on a less harsh note, she reminds Tyrone: But I must confess, James, although I couldn’t help loving you, I would never have married you if I’d known you drank so much. I remember the first night your barroom friends had to help you up to the door of our hotel room . . . (113)

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She is always poking at the others, apparently a concerned wife and mother, smiling, calling up the past as her authority. O’Neill tells us that she speaks “impersonally,” and so she does through the rest of the play, reproaching both sides in the unresolved battle between father and sons with her soft voice, but cushioned from reproach herself by her terrible illness. At one point in the middle of act 4 during the long conversation between Tyrone and Edmund, the son reflects, “It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!” (139). Most critics and playgoers probably conclude that Tyrone and Edmund are essentially good men, and Jamie is a bad one; but Mary is relentless in her subtle, ritual complaining. Yet this has not been generally recognized in the popular and scholarly critical literature. The desire to blame Tyrone, who fights so much with the younger generation, has probably distracted the attention that should be given to her behavior, along with the sympathy her domestic roles tend to attract. An important exception to this is Sheaffer, who very accurately sums up her outrageous behavior: “In the end, then, the family’s tragic history appears to have developed less from James Tyrone’s strain of penuriousness and other flaws than from Mary Tyrone’s abiding immaturity, her inability to face the realities of life and fulfill her obligations as wife and mother.”12 Gill writes of “the tyranny that the ineradicable, maudlin narcissism of Mrs. Tyrone . . . imposes on her hapless husband and sons” adding that this is the interpretation he believes most realistic, after years of seeing many productions of the play, including the first American production.13 The only happiness she has known was in the convent. She has lost that part of her early religious life and will acknowledge no other, substituting drugs for prayer and adulthood. She has the fog over New London harbor and drugs and her memories, bright or dim, and they are like musical themes running through the emotional life of the play. Toward the end of act 3 she says, “I hope, sometime, without meaning it, I will take an overdose. I never could do it deliberately. The Blessed Virgin would never forgive me, then” (121). No one else in the play has lines anything like these. Mary’s domination of act 3 with her distorted memories of her past as her authority—the basis of her thoughts and actions—is the other key to the battle of the poets in act 4. If Tyrone is a religious failure, she is spiritually impotent, unable to ask the Blessed Virgin, in whom she says she believes, for assistance, when that is exactly what she was trained to do in Catholic school, and while she talks about her with almost mystical sincerity. Yet she is not sincere. Brenda Murphy’s performance history of LDJIN points out that some actresses and directors have attempted to develop this highlighting of Mary’s deep chronic destructiveness. She quotes, for instance, an interview with Geraldine Fitzgerald at the time of the 1971 Broadway revival at the Promenade Theatre, who made the point that there is nothing remotely frail about Mary Tyrone, that she is “spoiled, sharp-tongued.”14 Murphy also cites Jonathan

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Miller, already mentioned above, who in interviews at the time of his 1986 Broadway production at the Broadhurst made it clear that he thought there was no “saintliness” about Mary, that she was a tough and “flinty.”15 Murphy also argues in American Realism and American Drama, 1880– 1940 that LDJIN does not have a “conventional and artificial single climax” but rather two peaks, one at the end of both acts 3 and 4. The quotations I have given above substantiate this. Murphy sees the fourth act as a continuation of the tragedy, showing its unresolved quality in the continuing argument, tragedy written in the true flow of life, not the classical mold, observant as the play is of the classical rules of tragedy. Thus the play seems to reach an end, and then, as in life, the story continues.16 The last act is anticlimactic. The father loses both arguments and shouting matches to the boys, practical and successful as he is and weak and dependent as they are. He has no substantial faith in his life, neither in practice nor philosophy. If he did, he would say so, for he has the voice, the motive, and the arena to speak; yet all we hear is the hollow actor’s voice pushing out a cry for a lost religious belief. If he is a healthy man, and Mary sick and destructive, neither has even the rickety philosophical scaffolding that their sons make out of Nietzsche, Wilde, Swinburne, and Rossetti, even Tyrone’s Shakespeare at times.17 Night has fallen on the Tyrone house at the end of act 4, but the plot reaches its climax, technically if not emotionally, at the end of act 3, when Tyrone tells Mary Cavan Tyrone that before the night is over she will be “like a mad ghost.”18

A ppe n di x 1

Quotations Used in Act 4

Edmund: They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. 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. (Edward Dowson, “Vitae Summa Brevis”) Tyrone: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest, 4.1.156–58)

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Edmund: Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.” (Charles Baudelaire, “Be Always Drunken” [trans. Arthur Symons]) Edmund: With heart at rest I climbed the citadel’s Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells, Where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, Not for vain tears I went up at that hour; But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain To drink delight of that enormous trull Whose hellish beauty makes me young again. Whether thou sleep, with heady vapours full, Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful, I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasure of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand. (Charles Baudelaire, “Epilogue” [trans. Arthur Symons])

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Edmund: All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. (Ernest Dowson, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”) Tyrone: A poor thing but mine own.

(As You Like It, 5.4.55–56)

Tyrone: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. (Julius Caesar, 1.2.141–2) Jamie: Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river, Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark! Keep the crossing-stakes beside you, an’ they will surely guide you ’Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark. (Rudyard Kipling, “Ford o’ Kabul River”) Jamie: Then, turning to my love, I said, “The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.” But she—she heard the violin, And left my side and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz. . . . (Oscar Wilde, “The Harlot’s House”) Jamie: Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all,

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The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world. (Rudyard Kipling, “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal”) Jamie: If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still . . . (Rudyard Kipling, “Mother O’ Mine”) Jamie: Therefore put money in thy purse.

(Othello, 1.1.343–44)

Jamie: Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field of Tewksbury. Seize on him, Furies, take him into torment. (Richard III, 1.4.55–57) Jamie: Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell. (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Choice”) Jamie: Let us rise up and part; she will not know. Let us go seaward as the great winds go, Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so, And all the world is bitter as a tear. And how these things are, though ye strove to show, She would not know. Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear; Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, And over all old things and all things dear. She loves not you or me as all we love her. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, She would not hear. Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she,

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She too, remembering days and words that were, Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, She would not see. (Charles Algernon Swinburne, “A Leave-taking”)

No t e s 1. Marc Maufort, “American Flowers of Evil: Long Day’s Journey into Night and Baudelaire,” in New Essays on American Drama, ed. Gilbert Debusscher and Henry Schvey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 13–28. Michael Hinden, Long Day’s Journey into Night: Native Eloquence (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 73–76. Hinden also notes a paraphrase of the Bible in act 4 by Jamie, an interesting corollary to my arguments. 2. For autobiographical background see Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper, 2000), as well as Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968) and O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973). 3. All quotations are from Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 4. Virginia Floyd in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment (New York: Ungar, 1985) says that “In the play, as in real life, much of the blame for the mother’s condition is attributed to her husband’s miserliness” (535). This is probably the strongest statement against Tyrone that my analysis would permit, but Floyd, as I shall discuss, is one of the most judicious critics in analyzing the Tyrones’ drama. 5. Ibid., 538–39. Since the earliest criticism of the play, emphasis has been on the “Irish” half of the label Irish Catholic, with issues like sexual chastity discussed at the expense of the issue that the Tyrones discuss, religion. See for example John Henry Raleigh, “O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and New England IrishCatholicism,” Partisan Review 26 (1959): 573–92. 6. Nicholas Wallerstein, “Accusation and Argument in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill Review 23 (1999): 127–33. For the opposite conclusion about Tyrone see Matt Bliss, “So Happy for a Time: A Cultural Poetics of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” American Drama 7 (1997): 1–17. Bliss dismisses the lines from Tyrone’s apologia to Edmund that Wallerstein’s subtle reading analyzes (148) as “dramatic.” If the critic or playgoer is determined to hate Tyrone, he is certainly a viable target, but aiming at him causes a misunderstanding of O’Neill’s dramatic intent. 7. Kipling’s verse may seem out of place in this group, but his popularity as a poet and the attention he received from serious readers can be seen best in T. S. Eliot’s “Rudyard Kipling,” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 228–51, and George Orwell’s, “Rudyard Kipling,” in My Country Right or Left, vol. 2 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 184–97. For an interesting essay on quotation as one of the great modernist devices see Jean Weisberger, “The Use of Quotations in Recent Literature,” Comparative Literature 22 (1970): 36–45. 8. Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 192–93.

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  9. Albert Wertheim, “Gaspard the Miser in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” American Notes and Queries 18 (1979): 39–42. 10. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), 195. 11. Brendan Gill “Unhappy Tyrones,” The New Yorker, 12 May 1986: 93–94. The production, at the Broadhurst Theatre, also featured Kevin Spacey as Jamie and Peter Gallagher as Edmund. Another memorable production was directed by Richard Maltby Jr. for the Philadelphia Drama Guild at the Walnut Street Theatre in 1975, starring one of the most famous players of the later O’Neill roles, Geraldine Fitzgerald, as Mary, with Richard Pastene as Tyrone, John Glover as Edmund, and Phillip Kerr as James. 12. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 517. 13. Gill, 93. 14. Brenda Murphy, ed., O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001), 81. 15. Ibid., 65–66. 16. Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 192 17. Swinburne, Wilde, and Edward Fitzgerald are quoted several times in the much earlier Ah, Wilderness! Travis Bogard, in his introduction to The Later Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: The Modern Library, 1967), has pointed out that the earlier play is a sort of sunny dress rehearsal for Long Day’s Journey into Night, treating as it does the life of a professional family in a Connecticut town early in the century. It is interesting to note this foreshadowing of the much greater play’s use of poets. Con Melody’s quotations from Byron in A Touch of the Poet are another example of O’Neill’s use of this device in the later plays. 18. County Tyrone in Ulster was the seat of the O’Neill family, which dominated Irish politics for several hundred years until the seventeenth century. Cavan, Mary’s maiden name, is also an Ulster county, but one partitioned from Northern Ireland in 1920 to become part of the Irish Republic. According to O’Neill’s notebooks he considered using Antrim, another Ulster county, as the family name. See Virginia Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays (New York: Ungar, 1981), 285.

E gil T ö rnqvist

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ith its unity of place, time and action and with its evenly distributed attention to “all the four haunted Tyrones,” to quote O’Neill’s dedication, Long Day’s Journey into Night is more of a chamber play than any of Strindberg’s chamber plays. For Strindberg the term and genre not only had a spatial aspect: an intimate piece to be played in a small theatre. It also had a musical aspect. Like chamber music it should, in addition to the plot structure, have a “musical,” theme-oriented texture. For Strindberg the chamber play should be characterized by: the intimate in form, a restricted subject, treated in depth, few characters, large points of view, free imagination, but based on observation, experience, carefully studied; simple, but not too simple; no great apparatus, no superfluous minor roles, no regular five-acters or “old machines,” no long-drawn-out whole evenings [Strindberg 1992, 734].

If we disregard the last point—as the title implies, Long Day’s Journey is a very long play—Strindberg’s criteria admirably fit O’Neill’s masterpiece. With its four protagonists (Falk 194)—an unusual situation in drama—it might be called a verbal string quartet in four movements with an intricate net of turn-takings, modulations, repetitions, leitmotifs and solo parts. From Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre, pp. 176–196, 245–246. © 2004 by Egil Törnqvist.

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As a realistic analytical drama, a drama where the action largely consists of the unraveling of the prescenic action, Long Day’s Journey, as earlier indicated, has its closest structural counterpart in Ibsen’s Ghosts, subtitled “a domestic drama.” While both plays have a fictional time of about sixteen hours, the playing time of Long Day’s Journey, estimated to about four hours, exceeds that of Ghosts by more than an hour. Compared to Ghosts, with its deceased husband/father, its disguised family relations which include inherited syphilis, adultery, an extramarital daughter, an expelled son and near-incest between the two, Long Day’s Journey shows more normal, more representative family relations—except for the wife/mother’s drug addiction and, possibly, the elder son’s alcoholism. And while Ibsen balances his serious main action with a partly comical subplot, Long Day’s Journey is a more tightly knit domestic drama, focusing on the constantly “shifting alliances in battle,” as O’Neill puts it in the notes (F 283), between the family members seen against their partly individual, partly common past. When Mary in one of the play’s key lines states that The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.

she formulates the ideological basis for the analytical drama structure. By providing us with a uniquely comprehensive prescenic action focusing on the past of the parents, O’Neill creates a deterministic counterpart of Mary’s fatalism. When the play has come to an end, we can see how the characters are determined by their own past as well as by that of their parents. At times they accept this state of things, convinced that “you can’t change the leopard’s spots,” as Jamie puts it. At other times, struggling against being “martyred slaves of Time,” as Baudelaire quoted by Edmund has it, they believe in their power to assert themselves, to demonstrate a will of their own. Characteristically, while they tend to be free-will proponents with regard to others, arguing that man is responsible for his own actions, they tend to be determinists with regard to themselves, since this relieves them of responsibility. In this they are highly representative human beings. Either attitude is motivated by a need to escape a fundamental feeling of their own shortcomings. Momentarily they openly blame themselves: momentarily, because to do so for any length of time would be unbearable, which is another way of saying that they all suffer from a strong sense of guilt. By means of drugs (Mary) and alcohol (the men) they seek to counter it by establishing a pipe dream climate—corresponding to the fog outside—in which the painful truth is blurred, softened, made acceptable. The difference between story and plot in drama is fundamental. In an analytical drama this difference is especially noticeable. By story is meant

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the events and circumstances—referred to or acted out—arranged in chronological order; by plot the same events in the order in which they appear in the play. When Long Day’s Journey is called a play without a plot or with a minimum of plot (Leech 108, Tiusanen 303), the word “plot” is used in quite another and to my mind unwanted sense. What is meant is really that the play lacks or almost lacks outward action, which is something else. The prescenic story of Long Day’s Journey reads as follows (acts/scenes indicating the plot within parentheses): 1847.  James Tyrone born (I).

His father, a poor immigrant from Ireland (III), deserts his wife and six children after one year in the U.S. and returns to Ireland, where he dies (III), probably by intentionally taking poison (IV).

The deserted wife, who works as a charwoman, and her children lead a miserable life in a hovel. She fears she will end in the poorhouse. Tyrone is deeply attached to her (IV).

1857.  Tyrone has to finish school at the age of ten to begin work in a machine shop 12 hours a day (III) for a wage of 50 cents a week (IV). 1857.  Mary Cavan born (I).





Her father, a well-to-do businessman, is attached to her as she is to him (I). He spoils her. The relationship between her and her mother is fairly tense (III). From the age of 40 the father takes to drinking, and alcohol plus consumption cause his death (I, II.1).

Mary is brought up in a convent where she has many friends (II.2). She takes piano lessons and is so much praised for her musical talent that she dreams about becoming a concert pianist. Even more she dreams about becoming a nun (III), especially after having had a religious revelation (IV). Tyrone becomes a supernumerary and eventually a fullfledged actor, very successful in Shakespearean parts (IV).

1874.  His artistic apogee occurs when he is playing Othello to Booth’s Iago (IV). 1876.  When graduating from the convent (IV), Mary has had no experience of theatre (III).

She and Tyrone fall in love at first sight, when she and her father visit him in his dressing room after a performance.

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Tyrone is now a handsome man and a star (III), Mary is beautiful (IV). Her mother does not approve of her daughter’s marrying an actor (III).

1877.  Tyrone and Mary marry. While on honeymoon Tyrone is once badly drunk and carried back to their hotel room (III). Mary later finds that only alcohol can make him generous (II.1, IV). A former mistress sues Tyrone (II.1). 1877–1912.  Mary accompanies Tyrone on his tours throughout the U.S. They stay in cheap hotels (II.1). After the children are born a nurse joins them (IV). 1879.  Jamie born (I).

Ca. 1880.  As the hero in a melodramatic play Tyrone gets an income of $35–40,000 per season. The success marks the end of his career as a serious artist (IV).

1884.  Eugene born (II.2).

1886.  Eugene dies of measles caught from Jamie. When this occurs he is looked after by Mary’s mother, since Mary, at Tyrone’s request, has joined him on a tour (II.2).

1888.  Edmund born (I). After his birth Mary is sick for a long time (II.2). She gets rheumatism in her hands and her hair begins to turn gray. To cure her a “quack” gives her morphine (I). 1888–1912.  Mary is for long periods a drug addict.

Unlike Jamie, Edmund is frail. When the boys are sick, Tyrone gives them whiskey as medicine (III).

Ca. 1900.  In desperate want of morphine, Mary tries to commit suicide by drowning herself. Shortly after this Edmund learns about her addiction (II.1, IV).



Contrary to Mary’s wish, Tyrone insists on building a summer house (I).

Although a promising student (III), Jamie is expelled from several schools (I) owing to abuse of alcohol (III).

[1907].  Edmund is expelled from college (I).

Jamie, acting in Tyrone’s company, often leads a dissipatious life on Broadway. He spends the summers with his parental family working on the grounds for board and lodging (I).

[1908–9].  Edmund is dragged into dissipations by Jamie (I)

[1910].  Edmund becomes a sailor (I) and has a rough time, culminating in a suicide attempt (IV).

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June 1912.  Mary goes to a sanatorium where she is treated for her “disease.” After her return to her family, she spends two healthy months with them, putting on weight (I).



Tyrone buys her an automobile and hires a chauffeur (II.2).

Shortly after Mary’s return, Edmund falls ill (II.2). They all hope it is just a bad summer cold. Mary begins to worry about him (I).

August 1912.  Edmund starts working for a local newspaper, writing articles and poems for it (I).

Two days previously.  Tyrone, now a big property owner, meets McGuire, a property speculator, and discusses a new “bargain” with him (I).

Jamie and Edmund visit Doctor Hardy, the family doctor. Edmund is told that he probably suffers from malaria (I) and should avoid drinking (II.1).

Previous day.  Tyrone visits Doctor Hardy and learns that Edmund probably suffers from consumption and should be sent to a sanatorium (I).

Previous night.  It is foggy and the foghorn keeps moaning. Tyrone and Jamie keep snoring (I). 3 a.m.  Jamie and Edmund hear how Mary goes to the spare room, where she remains for the rest of the night (I).

Ca. 8 a.m.  They all have breakfast.

It should be noticed that this chronology is especially for the reader. It is for example he, not the spectator, who is exactly and immediately informed about the age of the characters. Next to the prescenic and scenic action, the former naturally contained in the latter, we have the one referring to events and circumstances between the acts. The interscenic action in this “day at the end of August, 1912” can be construed as follows: 8:30–9:15 a.m. Act I

9:15 a.m.–12:45 p.m. Edmund joins Jamie by the hedge. Then reads. Tyrone and Jamie cut the hedge. Mary takes a morphine injection. 12:45–1:00 p.m. Act II.1

1:00–1:1.5 p.m. All except Mary have lunch.

1:15–1:45 p.m. Act II.2. Mary, offstage, takes another injection.

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1:45–6:30 p.m. Tyrone and Edmund see Doctor Hardy independently of one another around 4 p.m. They are both informed that Edmund suffers from consumption. Tyrone talks to Hardy and a specialist about sending Edmund to a state sanatorium.

Tyrone then meets McGuire at the Club and is persuaded by him to go for a new property “bargain.”

Jamie and Edmund later meet McGuire at a hotel bar, where their suspicions about Tyrone’s new business transaction are confirmed.

Mary, Cathleen and Smythe, the chauffeur, drive to the drugstore to buy more morphine. Mary takes another injection.

6:30–7:15 p.m. Act III. Jamie absent, in town.

7:15–11:45 p.m. Tyrone has dinner alone, then spends the evening playing solitaire and drinking.

Edmund takes a walk on the beach, drops in at the Inn twice and has plenty to drink. Jamie, still in town, also spends the time drinking, then visits Mamie Burns’ brothel. Mary takes one or more injections.

11:45–12:30 p.m. Act IV

Yet another structuring element has to do with what O’Neill in the notes for the play called the “Weather progression” (F 292), the change from fog the previous night through morning sunlight (I), early afternoon haze (II), late afternoon fog (III), to dense fog and black night (IV).1 Turning to the plot, it will be seen that references to the immediate past dominate in Act I. Here we deal largely with traditional exposition. Acts II and III contain relatively few references to the past. References to the more distant past are very frequent in Acts III and IV, notably in the long revelations by Tyrone, Edmund and Mary in the last act. The procedure, in other words, is to gradually, but often in concentrated blocks of information, uncover the past, moving from more recent and superficial circumstances to more distant and far-reaching ones. To put it differently: the plot structure ensures a gradual widening and deepening of the perspective. Let us, to clarify this, look at how the information concerning the play’s two pivotal circumstances—Edmund’s illness and Mary’s addiction—is handled. Here are the explicit references to Edmund’s illness:

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Mary. [. . .] a bad summer cold [1]. Mary. [. . .] A summer cold makes anyone irritable. Jamie genuinely concerned. It’s not just a cold he’s got. The Kid is damned sick. [. . .] Mary [. . .] It is just a cold! Anyone can tell that! You always imagine things! [. . .] Tyrone. Doctor Hardy thinks it might be a bit of malarial fever he caught when he was in the tropics. If it is, quinine will soon cure it [3]. Jamie slowly. He [Doctor Hardy] thinks it’s consumption, doesn’t he, Papa? Tyrone reluctantly. He said it might be [4]. Edmund soothingly. [. . .] You know it’s only a bad cold. Mary. Yes, of course, I know that [8]. Tyrone. [. . .] He’s got consumption. [. . .] He [Hardy] claims that in six months to a year Edmund will be cured, if he obeys orders [29]. Mary. [. . .] After all, everyone has colds and gets over them [31]. Mary. [. . .] A touch of grippe is nothing [35]. Edmund. [. . .] Listen, Mama. I’m going to tell you whether you want to hear or not. I’ve got to go to a sanatorium [38]. Mary. [. . .] it’s just a summer cold. [. . .] I know he’s going to die [40]. Jamie. [. . .] Six months and you’ll be in the pink. Probably haven’t got consumption at all [47]. Jamie. [. . .] Don’t die on me [47]. Edmund. [. . .] Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption! [49].

We move climactically from a summer cold to malaria to consumption. Mary, who is especially sensitive to Edmund’s health, for a long time tries to console herself with the idea that he just suffers from a cold. The three men all encourage her illusion because they rightly fear that if she becomes aware that the illness is serious, she will be exceedingly worried and this in turn will lead to a relapse into drug addiction. In [3] Jamie’s outburst tells us that Edmund may be seriously ill. When this is followed by Mary’s insistence that it is just a cold, we sense that it is not Jamie, as she claims, but she herself who is imagining things. Jamie’s outburst is tempered by Tyrone’s remark that the doctor has referred to malaria, which is easily curable. From [4] we understand that Tyrone has been telling his wife a half-truth, keeping from her the doctor’s more worrying reference

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to consumption. Even there he is not telling the whole truth since, as appears from [29], the doctor had actually diagnosed Edmund’s illness as consumption rather than malaria. Having been told by Edmund, in [38], that he suffers from consumption, Mary in [40] at first, questioning the doctor’s diagnosis, insists on her own consoling alternative. When suddenly accepting the more fatal one, she does not, like her husband, seek consolation in the idea that the illness can be cured. On the contrary, she seems convinced that it is fatal. Her volte-face indicates the split in her mind, telling us that Mary has never truly believed in her own summer cold idea. Rather, she has used this idea to repress her underlying, unbearable awareness that her son is mortally ill. The illness motif culminates with Edmund’s desperate “hurt little boy” outcry in the play’s last configuration, an outcry which is answered with a “No!” by a mother who has drugged herself beyond reach. By this time we fully realize that Edmund’s situation is aggravated by the fact that Tyrone, whose stinginess is another leitmotif in the play, intends to send him to a cheap sanatorium where he stands little chance of being cured. Both sons accuse their father: Jamie. [. . .] What I’m afraid of is, with your Irish bogtrotter idea that consumption is fatal, you’ll figure it would be a waste of money to spend any more than you can help [25]. Edmund. You think I’m going to die. [. . .] So why waste money? That’s why you’re sending me to a state farm [45].

In addition to the references to Edmund’s consumption, there is the information that his grandfather on his mother’s side had died of this very illness. And there is the reference to Shaughnessy’s pigs who after swimming in Harker’s ice pond “were dying of pneumonia.” While it is clear from the beginning that Edmund is ill—although the exact nature of his illness still needs to be established—Mary’s drug addiction, being a shameful “illness” for which the victim can be held personally responsible, is kept more secret. The revelatory steps are the following: Jamie knows after one probing look at her that his suspicions are justified [14]. Then her eyes meet his stricken, accusing look. She stammers. Edmund! Don’t! [18]. Tyrone knows now [21]. Mary. [. . .] James! I tried so hard! Please believe—! [22]. Jamie. [. . .] Another shot in the arm! [28].

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Edmund. [. . .] It’s pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother! [38].

We note how O’Neill has the men discover Mary’s relapse, revealed in her eyes, not at the same time but one after the other in accordance with their stage presence. Jamie, being the one most inclined to face the grim truth, is the first to discover the relapse. Edmund is the second to know, Tyrone the third. There is so far a discrepancy between the characters and the recipient in that while the former know about Mary’s earlier periods of drug addiction and therefore fear a relapse, the recipient is ignorant and at first can only suspect what it is all about. Once we become as aware of the situation and what has preceded it as the characters, we understand, retrospectively, why Tyrone is happy about her putting on weight, why Mary dislikes doctors, and why she is so concerned with her eyes and her hair. Psychologically, the characters’ temperance in the beginning is motivated by their uncertainty as to whether or not Mary has relapsed and by their awareness that an unjustified accusation could lead precisely to what they want avoided. Dramaturgically, it has a suspense-creating function. Here again the reader, helped by the sometimes difficult-to-stage acting directions, will be quicker than the spectator to discover the addiction. The question whether or not the relapse occurred already the night preceding the scenic action cannot be answered with any absolute certainty. Dramaturgically most satisfactory is the assumption that the reason why the information that Mary the previous night went to the spare room, where she used to take her morphine injections, is included is not to indicate a relapse on her part but merely to motivate the sons’ suspicions of a relapse.2 Clearly, a relapse the previous night, assumed by Scheibler (140), would make Mary alone more responsible, even if we assume that her fear of what might befall Edmund already here plays a part. If, on the other hand, we assume that her relapse takes place not until the interscenic period between breakfast and lunch, then we are faced with the fateful concatenation that the men’s fear that she will relapse, nourished by what happened the previous night, leads to their close observation of her, an attitude which she experiences as distrustful and which affects her nerves and contributes to her relapse between Acts I and II.1. It is precisely this web of causality which enables the characters to reproach each other for what happens to her. Of fundamental importance is the linking, in the minds of the characters, of Edmund’s illness with Mary’s morphine addiction. Two examples may illustrate this. When Jamie, referring to her “illness,” states, “They never come back!” his remark is followed by:

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Edmund scornfully parodying his brother’s cynicism. They never come back! Everything is in the bag! It’s all a frame-up! We’re all fall guys and suckers and we can’t beat the game! Disdainfully. Christ, if I felt the way you do—! [28].

Edmund’s reaction is seemingly motivated by a less pessimistic attitude to life and by his concern for his mother. But the main reason why he rejects Jamie’s fatalism is, again, that he subtextually applies it to his own situation. Aware that he himself may suffer from a difficult-to-cure illness, he cannot accept the idea that you “can’t beat the game.” When Edmund in [45] blames Tyrone for his “damned stinginess,” he picks a revealing example. Had he spent money on “a decent doctor” when Mary was sick after having given birth to Edmund, “she’d never have known morphine existed!” Instead he turned to a quack “because his fee was cheap!” Edmund’s laying all the blame on Tyrone at this moment is not an expression of a deeply felt conviction. At other moments he seems inclined to lay the chief blame on Mary. It is rather a need to do so in the present situation, since Edmund is acutely aware of Tyrone’s stinginess not only with regard to Mary’s illness in the past but also to his own presumably even more fatal illness at this very moment (Wallerstein 128). From the recipient’s point of view, as Falk (194–95) declares, each of the four protagonists “is partly responsible for his own destruction and partly a victim of the family fate.” But how do the characters themselves look at the question of responsibility/guilt? According to Raleigh (280–81), “the father believes the most in personal responsibility, yet he also thinks that chance or luck always plays a crucial, even decisive role in human affairs,” whereas Mary is a determinist. Jamie is called “a mutabilist who believes that nothing good ever lasts,” and Edmund “sees no pattern to anything.” Attractive though this neat pattern of four different opinions may seem with its suggestion of a gap between the generations, it is nevertheless a simplification in its indication that the characters embrace one and the same view on the question of responsibility from beginning to end. It is a static view inimical to drama which to the intended first-time recipient by definition is dynamic, not “world” but “process.” A closer look at how the “responsibility motif ” is handled shows a more varied picture. It is true, of course, that Tyrone explicitly is a spokesman of free will as the other three are not. But he is not the only one. Doctor Hardy, too, Mary complains, “delivers sermons on will power” [27]. Behind her partial phrasing we sense her own feeling that the doctor does not understand what she is up against. “I’ll bet you told her all she had to do was use a little will power,” Edmund later mocks Tyrone, indicating how the father has let himself be influenced by the doctor. But what is really wrong with the doctor’s appeal to

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Mary to use her own will to cure herself ? That Tyrone agrees with Hardy’s view has, of course, to do with the fact that it relieves him somewhat of his own responsibility for Mary’s addiction. When Mary blames Tyrone for having brought Jamie up “to be a boozer,” Tyrone defends himself by denying this parental influence. Instead he puts the blame on Jamie himself. “So I’m to blame because that lazy hulk has made a drunken loafer of himself  ?” he asks rhetorically. Jamie, he finds, is self-responsible for his alcoholism. Or, to be more scrupulous, this is what he finds at this moment after having been attacked by Mary. His view cannot be separated from the situation in which it is expressed. When Edmund, the atheist, blames “life” for being “so damned crazy,” Tyrone, the Catholic, defends it by quoting Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar : “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Not life but man is to be blamed. But Tyrone significantly finds it difficult wholly to apply the belief in free will and personal responsibility to himself. In the last act he makes it clear to Edmund that he regards his miserliness as determined by the poverty of his parental family. And when admitting that he ruined himself spiritually when starring for years in a part that brought in heaps of money—a logical consequence, perhaps, of his poverty as a child—he significantly says that “it [the play] ruined me” and that he had “become a slave to the damned thing,” thereby turning himself into a victim much the way Mary does with regard to her morphinism. The counterpart of Tyrone’s Shakespeare quotation, emphasizing man’s free will, is Mary’s emphasis on determinism amounting to a belief in fatalism in the following speech: None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever [14].

In line with this she later tells Cathleen that Tyrone “can’t help being what he is” [35]. And in [37] she similarly tells her younger son: “Please don’t think I blame your father, Edmund. He didn’t know any better”—being environmentally determined, she means. Mary’s conviction is borne out by the very structure of the play. For what else is the combination of the comprehensive prescenic action and the observed scenic action but an illustration of the truth of what she is saying? Like Tyrone, Mary cannot live up to her own belief in determinism. She frequently blames her husband both for Eugene’s premature death, for her own morphine addiction, and for not providing her with a proper home.

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When she momentarily blames herself and says that “Now [nowadays] I have to lie, especially to myself ” [33], we sense that both her blaming of others and her herewith conflicting determinism/fatalism are merely projections of a deeply felt guilt and personal responsibility. Unable to blame herself for any length of time, Mary must resort either to self-defensive reproaches of others or into the drugged state of morphinism which blots out the sense of guilt and responsibility. Her description of the reasons for Eugene’s death shows how the reproach mechanism works: Mary. [. . .] I blame only myself. I swore after Eugene died I would never have another baby. I was to blame for his death. If I hadn’t left him with my mother to join you [Tyrone] on the road, because you wrote telling me you missed me and were so lonely, Jamie would never have been allowed, when he still had measles, to go in the baby’s room [31].

Although she initially claims that she is blaming only herself, Mary— while providing important information for the recipient—obliquely continues to blame both her own mother, her husband, and her eldest son. The same kind of self-blame weakened by subsequent blames we find in the following statement: It was my fault. I should have insisted on staying with Eugene and not have let you persuade me to join you, because I loved you. Above all, I shouldn’t have let you insist I have another baby to take Eugene’s place, because you thought that would make me forget his death [31, my italics].

Here Mary, after again initially taking responsibility for what has happened, continues to give Tyrone an active role and herself a passive one in the matter. Having declared that it is her own fault, she goes on to imply that it is actually his. While the aggression in these speeches is oblique and subsequent to initial self-criticism, the more common speech pattern is that of an outburst of aggression, followed by a conciliatory afterthought: Tyrone. [. . .] You’ll obey me and put out that light or, big as you are, I’ll give you a thrashing that’ll teach you—Suddenly he remembers Edmund’s illness and instantly becomes guilty and shamefaced. Forgive me, lad. I forgot—

The egocentric, paternalistic thought concerning a triviality ironically precedes the altruistic awareness of the son’s precarious situation.

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A more complicated case is the following, where Mary scolds Tyrone for having let Edmund in his weak physical state drink whiskey: Do you want to kill him? Don’t you remember my father? He wouldn’t stop after he was stricken. He said doctors were fools! He thought, like you, that whiskey is a good tonic! A look of terror comes into her eyes and she stammers. But, of course, there’s no comparison at all. I don’t know why I—Forgive me for scolding you, James. One small drink won’t hurt Edmund.

Mary’s often repeated idea that doctors are fools—she is in this respect truly her father’s daughter—based on her experience of the “quack” who started her onto morphine, is here inconsistently rejected. Doctors may be fools when they advise her but experts when they advise others. Or rather, they are fools or experts according to the measure in which they adjust to what Mary wants to hear. Realizing that she has blundered by bringing up her father, whose illness and drinking habits fatefully parallel Edmund’s, Mary has landed herself in a dilemma. In an attempt to spare Edmund, she ends up by stressing the contrast between her father’s heavy drinking and Edmund’s “one small drink.” The last-mentioned speeches are interesting not least because they show sudden emotional changes within one and the same speech.3 Such reversals usually occur between speeches and are then motivated by what another character says or does. Characteristic of O’Neill’s dialogue in general and of that in Long Day’s Journey in particular is that such emotional changes, sometimes amounting to abrupt reversals, are signals that the character, rather than reacting to someone else, is reacting to him- or herself. They indicate, in other words, an inner division and may, in fact, be seen as a kind of audible thinking. The monologue, defined as a speech of some length and preferably some coherence addressed to one or more characters, is on the grounds of verisimilitude acceptable in realistic drama. The soliloquy, defined as a speech by a character who is or believes himself to be alone, is acceptable there only when talking aloud to oneself may seem plausible, for example in the case of insanity or drunkenness. In Long Day’s Journey there are three straight soliloquies, all of them by Mary. The first concludes Act II.2: She comes and stands by the table, one hand drumming on it, the other fluttering up to pat her hair. She stares about the room with frightened, forsaken eyes and whispers to herself. It’s so lonely here. Then her face hardens into bitter self-contempt. You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone. She gives a little despairing laugh. Then Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely? [34].

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Mary has by this time taken two morphine injections, one shortly after the other. This affects her mind and motivates her talking to herself. Addressing herself in the second person, her soliloquy, revealing her mind divided between rejection and acceptance of her loneliness, could be described as an interior dialogue (Pfister 130). The final invocatory question shows her seeking an answer in a near-prayer to the Virgin Mary. The second soliloquy, appearing early in Act III, which foreshadows Mary’s concluding speech in Act IV, is considerably longer: Bitterly. You’re a sentimental fool. What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent when you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin. Longingly. If I could only find the faith I lost, so I could pray again! She pauses—then begins to recite the Hail Mary in a flat, empty tone. “Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with Thee; blessed art Thou among women.” Sneeringly. You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her! She springs to her feet. Her hands fly up to pat her hair distractedly. I must go upstairs. I haven’t taken enough. When you start again you never know exactly how much you need. She goes to the front parlor—then stops in the doorway as she hears the sound of voices from the front path. She starts guiltily. That must be them—She hurries back to sit down. Her face sets in stubborn defensiveness—resentfully. Why are they coming back? They don’t want to. And I’d much rather be alone. Suddenly her whole manner changes. She becomes pathetically relieved and eager. Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely! [36].

The inner division now concerns the past versus the present. The prayer to her divine namesake makes the phrase “blessed art Thou among women” sound like narcissistic wishfulness.4 Sensing her inability to put true feeling into her prayer, blocked by her self-contempt, and aware that the morphine is slipping out of her blood, she is about to take another injection when she is interrupted by the return of Tyrone and Edmund. The soliloquy ends with her contradictory desire on the one hand to be left alone with her morphine, on the other to be relieved from her loneliness. By offering both alternatives in a soliloquy, O’Neill makes it clear that we are here not concerned with a social persona hiding a naked face but with fundamental inner division. The third soliloquy is found toward the end of Act III: Mary vaguely. I must go upstairs. I haven’t taken enough. She pauses—then longingly. I hope, sometime, without meaning it, I

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will take an overdose. I never could do it deliberately. The Blessed Virgin would never forgive me, then [39].

The morphine has by now slipped even more out of her system. In anticipation of her appearance at the end of the play, she again informs us that she wants more morphine. Suicide, a crime to a devout Catholic, is on her mind. An accidental overdose is offered as a—hypocritical—solution to the problem. The three soliloquies have much in common. In all three Mary addresses on the one hand herself, on the other her namesake the Virgin Mary. Addressing one means addressing the other. Mary is mirroring herself in the Blessed Virgin. Having given birth to three boys, one of whom has died and two of whom seem doomed to a premature death, as we have noted before, Mary identifies herself with the Virgin Mary whose single son died prematurely and whose virginal state corresponds to the virginity Mary has lost and longs to recapture. The identification reaches a climax in the final act, where we see her as another Virgin Mary in “a sky-blue dressing gown,” neglectfully carrying her old “white satin wedding gown,” a mad “Ophelia,” through a near overdose returned to her innocent past. Florence Eldridge, the first American to play the part of Mary, has told that she had asked “an authority on drug addiction” to read Long Day’s Journey (Eldridge 286). The conclusion of this expert was that in Mary’s behavior “there was pathology involved as well as addiction.” To declare a real person pathological is one thing. To declare a dramatic character pathological is quite another. It is simply not desirable, since it creates a distance between the recipient and the character in question. Identification is replaced by alienation. Being a paper figure in a text with an opening, a middle and an end rather than a person of flesh and blood, O’Neill’s Mary is neither pathological nor a drug addict in a real-life sense. Had she been that, the soliloquies should either have been replaced by pantomime or just silence, or they should have been shaped differently. To make them arresting and meaningful the playwright had to dramatize them, stylize them. The shape of the soliloquies is more dramaturgically than psychologically motivated. In addition to the straight soliloquies we find pseudo-soliloquies in several places. A pseudo-soliloquy, we recall, is a situation in which a character seemingly addresses one or more other characters but actually, hardly aware of their existence, is thinking aloud. Characteristically, this type appears as soon as Mary has taken her first injections. Thus in the beginning of [35] O’Neill explicitly states that “in nearly all the following dialogue there is the feeling that she has Cathleen with her merely as an excuse to keep talking,” a statement that reveals that O’Neill in this configuration very aptly strikes a note

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between dialogue and soliloquy corresponding to Mary’s slightly drugged state of mind. The configuration opens as follows: Mary [. . .]. That foghorn! Isn’t it awful, Cathleen? Cathleen [. . .]. It is indeed, Ma’am. It’s like a banshee [35].

Agreeing in their negative evaluation of the foghorn, Mary and Cathleen nevertheless interpret the sound differently. For Mary it is a sound that calls her back to undrugged reality; for Cathleen, inclined to Irish superstition, it is associated with the supernatural being in Gaelic folklore who forebodes death by mournful wailing. The dialogue continues: Mary [. . .]. I don’t mind it tonight. Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t stand it any more. Cathleen. Bad cess to it. I was scared out of my wits riding back from town. I thought that ugly monkey, Smythe, would drive us in a ditch or against a tree. You couldn’t see your hand in front of you. I’m glad you had me sit in back with you, Ma’am. If I’d been in front with that monkey—He can’t keep his dirty hands to himself. Give him half a chance and he’s pinching me on the leg or you-know-where—asking your pardon, Ma’am, but it’s true. Mary [. . .]. It wasn’t the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog.

Just as Mary shows the effect of her morphine injections, so Cathleen, who has just had a fair amount of whiskey, “shows the effect of drink.” This is the realistic motivation for their talking at cross-purposes, hardly listening to one another. By having them seemingly talk about totally different matters—one about her experience of the fog, the other about her experience of a man—O’Neill accentuates the separation between them. And yet the two topics have something in common, be it in the form of contrasting attitudes to the fog. The next pseudo-soliloquy occurs in [37], when Mary at length describes her wedding gown, symbol of her romantic hopes for her marriage, long tucked away “in one of the old trunks.” Her nostalgic description of the wedding gown is accompanied by a “girlish expression” on her face, the visual sign that at this moment “the past is the present” to her. The verbal description serves to prepare us for the visual appearance of the wedding gown at the end of the play. While Mary’s awareness in these pseudo-soliloquies that someone else is present is indicated by her mentioning their names, this is not the case in

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the play’s concluding configuration. The term pseudo-soliloquy is here nevertheless justified since Mary is certainly aware of the presence of the three men, although, by now heavily drugged, she hardly recognizes them as being her husband and sons. Thus when Tyrone relieves her of her neglectfully carried wedding gown, she thanks him as she would a stranger. Only Edmund, the one closest to her because it is about him she feels most guilty, manages to break through the bank of fog she has built around herself. His telling her that he has consumption is like the foghorn calling her back to reality. But even he manages to break the spell only “for a second.” After this second she is back in the past, in the fog. Even more so, since at the very end, the pseudosoliloquy turns into a straight soliloquy. Mary, who has moved away from the men and placed herself on the sofa “in a demure school-girlish pose,” is now totally forgetful of their existence, completely reliving the past, the time before the three existed in her life. Only in the play’s very last sentence does she in an alienated way—note the third-person form—reconnect with the man she once married: “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” The modifying last words bring the play to a conclusion which at the same time is the beginning of the play we have just witnessed, the story of what that falling in love eventually led to. Even the language of Long Day’s Journey is carefully patterned. In the religious sphere references to God and Christ, usually in the form of swear words, are frequent with the men, who also use expressions such as “damned” and “hell.” Mary has a very different idiom. Only once does she refer to God as a punishing Jehovah. For the rest she turns to the Blessed Virgin, her namesake, as representing “love and pity.” In quite another way Jamie is singled out from the rest. His use of New York City slang, Chothia (159) points out, “indicates his alienation from his own home where no one shares his language.” Although entrances and exits in any drama are primarily motivated by the dramaturgic need constantly to change the constellation of onstage characters, in a realistic play like Long Day’s Journey this need must be disguised by various motivations, the purpose of which is to make entrances and exits appear plausible. The plausibility can in principle be of two kinds: outer and inner. Outer reasons for entrances and exits are especially linked with minor characters, in this case the servant Cathleen. Her entrance in [15], for example, is simply motivated by her announcement that “lunch is ready,” her exit there by Mary’s request that she “tell Bridget,” the cook, that she has to wait a few minutes with the lunch. Her entrance in [41], similarly, is motivated by her informing Tyrone and Mary that “dinner is served,” and her exit there by the fact that she has fulfilled her task. This is all very trivial. A less experienced dramatist might have left it at that. O’Neill, on the other hand, realizes that even a servant’s modest stage presence should, if possible, be padded with meaning:

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Tyrone [. . .] Abruptly as he hears the pantry door opening. Hush, now! Here comes Cathleen. You don’t want her to see you crying. [Mary] turns quickly away from him to the windows at right, hastily wiping her eyes. A moment later Cathleen appears in the back-parlor doorway. She is uncertain in her walk and grinning woozily. Cathleen starts guiltily when she sees Tyrone—with dignity. Dinner is served, Sir. Raising her voice unnecessarily. Dinner is served, Ma’am. She forgets her dignity and addresses Tyrone with good-natured familiarity. So you’re here, are you? Well, well. Won’t Bridget be in a rage! I told her the Madame said you wouldn’t be home. Then reading accusation in his eye. Don’t be looking at me that way. If I’ve a drop taken, I didn’t steal it. I was invited. She turns with huffy dignity and disappears through the back parlor [40–41].

Cathleen’s entrance is properly prepared by the sound of the door. Tyrone’s admonishment to his wife and her concomitant obedience inform us of their wish to keep Mary’s addiction hidden even to the servants. Most importantly, Cathleen’s drunkenness, guilt feelings and inconstant attitude parallel in petto the behavior of all the Tyrones. She even momentarily adopts a familiar tone, motivated by her drunkenness, that seems more appropriate to them than to her, and her remark that she did not steal the alcohol links her with the two sons whom we have seen doing precisely that. Cathleen, in short, here appears as an unwanted intruder into the family’s private domain. Edmund’s exit at the end of [2] has a double reason. The trivial one is that he has left his book upstairs; the psychological one, here made explicit, that he cannot stand Tyrone’s scolding of Jamie and therefore decides to “beat it.” Both reasons help to characterize Edmund as, on the one hand, an avid reader—he later proves to be a burgeoning writer—and, on the other, as loyal to his elder brother and/or exceedingly angry with his father, whom he fears wants to send him to a cheap sanatorium. Although the reason he does not return with the book in hand until [8] is primarily dramaturgic—his absence allows for various comments on and reactions to his recent illness by the others—psychologically it is motivated by his wish to repress his anger under the circumstances by staying away from his father. The inclusion of Bridget provides Mary with plausible reasons for exits to the kitchen to ensure configuration changes. But even more than in the case of Cathleen, O’Neill here makes use of padding by linking Bridget to the central action, in her case to Mary. The fog affects Bridget’s rheumatism as it does Mary’s, and she appears to be as much of a whiskey addict as Mary

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is a “dope fiend.” In Act I Bridget, who wants company, keeps Mary in the kitchen for a long while with “lies about her relations.” In Act II.1 Mary, similarly, keeps Cathleen in the living room with memories of her own happy past, memories which, according to Tyrone, must be taken “with a grain of salt.” Both need a listener. When Mary tells her husband that she has “had to calm down Bridget. She’s in a tantrum over your being late again, and I don’t blame her,” she is using the cook as a means to attack Tyrone. It is an oblique act of revenge for the blame she senses from him for her relapse. Never appearing but always lurking in the background—the Cook in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata may have been an inspiration—the “raging divil” in the kitchen incarnates the reckless side of Mary which finally destroys her three men: Mary. It’s no use finding fault with Bridget. She doesn’t listen. I can’t threaten her, or she’d threaten she’d leave. And she does do her best at times. It’s too bad they seem to be just the times you’re sure to be late, James. Well, there’s this consolation: it’s difficult to tell from her cooking whether she’s doing her best or her worst.

Mary’s characterization of Bridget is a disguised self-portrait and selfdefense. In her marriage Mary claims to have “done the best [she] could— under the circumstances.” She is no more suited for marriage than Bridget is for cooking. Her excuse is that Tyrone has never understood that just as you cannot expect the food to taste good if you are late for it, you cannot expect a woman to be a good wife if you do not give her a proper home. The lack of a real home is Mary’s constant complaint aimed at her husband. At the end of the play we experience how she, in the words of Swinburne’s “A Leavetaking,” will not know, hear and see her nearest and dearest, thereby leaving them. Bridget’s offstage attitude has found its onstage counterpart. It would be difficult to find a drama in world literature that is more leavened with autobiographical facts than Long Day’s Journey. O’Neill’s tendency to let his own life experience, particularly his relations to his own family, color his work is now well known. Nowhere is it more transparent or more penetrating than in Long Day’s Journey. This awareness has led to an enormous interest in mapping out the autobiographical background for the play. This is of course a completely legitimate undertaking for those who are concerned with O’Neill’s life rather than with his work, notably his biographers. But frequently data gathered from life sources are used as if they were part of the play, explicitly or implicitly.5 One of the first readers of the play was Karl Ragnar Gierow, at the time the head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, the theatre honored with the world premiere of Long Day’s Journey. Gierow, well aware of the autobiographical nature of the play, has

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emphasized that we are here confronted with “an autonomous, independent work of art” not in need of any support outside itself (Gierow 39). This is a healthy antidote to the now widespread view that the play cannot be properly understood without knowledge about its autobiographical background. If this view were true, the play could hardly claim the honorable position it now has both in the study and on the stage. For in that case the normal recipient would be prevented access to essential information in the play—clearly an absurd standpoint. Besides, even the autobiographical background can sometimes be controversial or obscure—as when the biographers differ in their presentation of data with regard to when and why O’Neill’s mother became a morphine addict (Raleigh 291–92). This is not saying that knowledge about the autobiographical background is superfluous or uninteresting even when our focus is on the completed play as an autonomous unit. (It is certainly relevant when we are concerned with the play-in-progress, as has earlier in this book been frequently demonstrated.) It can be a very useful tool when trying to establish how O’Neill has handled this background in his play, what he has retained, what he has left out, and what he has changed.6 And why he has done so. In short, it can help us understand the author’s intentions and the play as it is. A few examples may illuminate this. Even the peripheral fifth onstage character, the non-family servant Cathleen, is vaguely linked with the Tyrones/O’Neills for those who know that O’Neill’s first wife was named Kathleen Jenkins (G1 208). Similarly, the choleric offstage cook, Bridget, is apparently named after O’Neill’s grandmother on his mother’s side (G1 16). To O’Neill the choice of the name may have suggested that the cook, next to her servant role, plays the role of “mother” to Mary. This explains, in part, Mary’s quite conciliatory attitude to the domineering cook. However, this biographical explanation must, in my view, give way to the much more important dramaturgic one, offered earlier: Bridget as an anticipatory incarnation of Mary’s aggressive alienation. Deviations from the autobiographical reality may throw light on the fabric of O’Neill’s play. For example, why did the author not have Edmund, his alter ego, reveal that by 1912 O’Neill was actually officially married and had a two-year-old son, when he did make him refer to his own experiences at sea and his suicide attempt? Obviously because the former data, unlike the latter, did not fit into the thematic texture of the play; turning Edmund into a married man with a son would have spoilt the tight-knit family structure and unity of action. Why did he select a day in August for the “long day” rather than a day in October, which would have corresponded better with reality? The reason was hardly a wish to be true to the fact that it was in the summer that the four O’Neills were together in their New London summer house.

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For how would the recipient of the play know or care? More likely the reason was a dramaturgic one, a need to find a natural explanation why some of the characters at times find themselves outside, yet close to the house, a circumstance that facilitates desired exits and quick reentrances and enables communication with the nearby offstage environment. In addition O’Neill may have wished to suggest a symbolic contrast between the stifling heat early in the day—the pain of soberness—and the fog-bound coolness later, the consoling illusion worked by a drugged state of mind. What I am implying here could actually be generalized into the formula dramaturgic considerations usually precede thematic and psychological ones. Confronted with the extra-textual background, the conclusion must be that we must distinguish between the sender’s and the recipient’s text. There are obviously ingredients in the play—the naming of Cathleen and Bridget, for example—inaccessible to the general recipient. Although it may be well worthwhile to examine such ingredients, we must not lose sight of the intended situation of reception, the reception of an autonomous play needing no support in the form of knowledge about the autobiographical background. The same is true with regard to hindsight factual knowledge. When Hinden (1990, 47), for example, argues that the fact that morphinists rarely become addicted “tends to exonerate James Tyrone,” he is confusing what we know now from “recent medical research” with what people knew in 1912. More seriously, he is confusing what a Doctor Hardy might have known even then—although it is irrelevant since it is never suggested—with what Mary’s three men, confronted with her many relapses in the past, legitimately fear in the play. To them on this August day in 1912 it seems clear that Mary is hopelessly addicted, and it is this feeling of despair on their part that should be communicated to an audience, not the idea that Mary is addicted for pathological reasons, even less the idea that she could be cured from her addiction—as her model, Ella Quinlan, in fact was two years later (S1 280). Awareness of the real-life situation is here merely an irritating obstacle to a proper reception of the play. What is true of Mary’s ending is true also of Edmund’s. Clearly, within the frame of the play itself everything suggests that Edmund is doomed to a premature death. Having been openly attacked for his stingy recklessness with regard to his son’s health—to save money Tyrone wants to send him to Hilltown Sanatorium, a cheap state institution—Tyrone tells Edmund that he can go to any sanatorium he likes. “I don’t give a damn what it costs. All I care about is to have you get well.” Yet what seems to have been generally disregarded by the critics is that a little later he offers his son “another sanatorium” that is even cheaper, “only seven dollars a week,” and consequently, we may conclude, even worse than Hilltown. And Edmund, indicating a longing for death, agrees: “It sounds like a good bargain

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to me. I’d like to go there.” O’Neill could hardly have made it clearer that Edmund’s days are numbered. Only for those who know something about O’Neill’s life and who realize that Edmund is the author’s alter ego is the somber fate in store for the character tempered by their awareness that O’Neill himself was cured at the sanatorium he was sent to. For the normal reader or theatregoer this extra-textual knowledge is not valid and is, as in the case of Mary, merely an obstacle to the intended understanding of the ending.7 It is easy to see that awareness of the autobiographical data will easily affect recipients who, linking O’Neill’s paper figures with their real-life counterparts, may find it difficult not to see a more hopeful ending in the play than the one suggested by the author. For within the frame of the play itself, it is an end “without hope” for the future, as Falk (182) puts it. Or, considering Mary’s long concluding (pseudo-)soliloquy, an end with a future that is the past. For as the play’s central ideological line tells us: “the past is the present [. . .] It is the future too.” What is positive with the ending, Falk implies, is the “measure of tolerance and pity” the characters feel for one another. Sewall, as we have seen, strengthens the positive aspect by speaking of an inner release. That especially the end was designed “with deep pity and understanding for all the four haunted Tyrones,” we need not doubt. Insofar as we recognize ourselves in them, this pity and understanding can be extended to all of us as human beings derived from a first family of identical constellation.

No t e s 1. For the symbolic significance of the weather progression, see Törnqvist (1968c, 95–99). 2. This interpretation seems confirmed by O’Neill’s notes for the play, “from after breakfast to the first trip upstairs” (F 281) and: What really happened—she had been frantic—given in—gone to bathroom, spare room—then, thinking of Edmund, for his sake had conquered craving which was brought on by continual worry about him—at end, she tells Edmund this—he wants [to] believe but can’t help suspecting—it is this lack of faith in him, combined with growing fear, which makes her give in [F 293]. 3. Tiusanen (300) seems to touch on the matter in passing when he states that “it is within the speeches that a major part of the drama is acted, it is within the utterances that the masks are changed.” Italicization of “within” would here have helped clarify the meaning. The reversal-within-speeches may be compared to Sewall’s (168) remark—pointing to a consistent interiorization—that what takes place in the play “is all within—within the confines of the Tyrone living room, within a single day, within the family [. . .].” At the end “they have to find out that the endless blame-laying was a dead-end, that there would be no release until they could look within themselves and be honest to what they saw. This is the true within-ness of the play, the true suffering.”

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4. Cf. the scenario’s “then she [the Blessed Virgin] will help me and I will love myself ” (F 291). 5. A slight example of this is Leech’s (109) referring to Jamie and Edmund as “both sons on stage,” that is, actors. While this was true about both in reality, it is true only about Jamie in the play. 6. Raleigh (87–88) provides a very useful list of the deviations in the play from real-life circumstances. 7. On the somewhat dubious premise that even the recipient lacking in biographical knowledge might be aware of the Edmund–O’Neill connection, Black (1992, 58) argues that even this recipient would sense that Edmund “may well survive his consumption.”

MAGDALEN WI NG-CH I KI

The S(ub)lime Symptom and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

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here are many ways of reading O’Neill’s plays and in this paper we pose the question: what is it about O’Neill’s plays that convey his understanding of the modern tragedy? On analysis, they very quickly reveal a new, tragic sublime, one that is inextricably linked to the enjoyment of symptoms. In contrast to the Aristotelian paradigm, which foregrounds the tragic jouissance as a result of the inevitable “outbound” conflicts between human flaws and fateful mishaps, O’Neillian theatre addresses the problem of existence in the capitalistic Man. The lethal, symptomatic jouissance enlivens the subject, then reduces it to a state of deadly inertia, and calmly sends the subject to the realm of the living dead. In the words of Žižek, this deadly existence “is the very opposite of dying.” It is a sublime but “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.”1 In most cases, the world of classical tragedy is about the realm of the Real: the heroes’ love of the Real Thing, the confrontation of the Real chaos, the heroes’ acknowledgement of the nonsymbolizable (Real) laws. According to Žižek, the “paradigmatic case of classical tragedy is that of a hero who commits an act the consequences of which are beyond the scope of his knowledge—who unwittingly commits crime by violating the sacred order of his community.”2 We can even generalize the development of some classical tragedies using this formula: “Master—Desire—Thing.” The hero is by nature From Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 20, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 5–23. © 2006 by Magdalen Wing-chi Ki.

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a discursive master capable of turning an existing master signifier for his own use, thus inventing his own master’s discourse (e.g. Macbeth’s own “power” discourse, Hamlet’s “intellectual doubt”). Eventually, the subject is so much otherized by this grand signifier that he forsakes his well-being to desire the unattainable and the transgressive (the primordial “Thing”). He thereby ends up becoming a spectacular “Thing” in the eyes of the audience. In classical tragedy, the problem of “desire” becomes paramount for the hero and rules out the possibility of metonymic substitutions by turning back against the homeostatic pleasure principle. Lacan explains the relation of desire, pleasure, and metonymic substitution in this way: the child desires the mother and is punished or castrated by the father’s law. Henceforth, upon its entry in the Symbolic order, the child learns to repress his primordial desire and remains happy with his endless metonymic substitutes in the signifying chain (e.g. cars, careers, travels). As the substitute is never as good as the original objet a, the child’s growth involves a double refusal: the “primordial refusal” (Versagung originelle) of the mythical object and the “self-refusal” to consent to the substituting signifiers. However, tragedy highlights the fact that, at some point, the master wants to “act in conformity with his desire.” The hero would rather brave the question of non-being than accepting a substitute. The reason why acting in conformity with one’s desire means tragedy is twofold. First, Lacan points out that the human’s true object of desire is always the desire for the Thing—i.e., the (m)Other. While the pleasure principle commands desire to circle round the (m)Other, if the hero acts “in conformity with his desire,” he will transgress the Oedipal law and invite divine punishment. Second, Lacan has little problem in pointing out that the hero’s “going beyond the pleasure principle” is also the desire for death, since the Thing is situated in the realm of the Real (i.e., confusion and chaos), anybody who dares go near it will be traumatized and consumed. Oedipus Rex and Antigone are perfect examples to illustrate this formula. In the case of Oedipus, the love of “Truth” has enabled Oedipus to fathom the secrets of the Sphinx and become a master, but his desire for “Truth” has also led him to the fatal discovery that he has violated the incest taboo. As a result, the gouging out of his own eyes signifies not only Oedipus’ abject Thing-like status, but also the Thingness of Truth for no prophecy can foretell it. Truth tends to “slip into a liminal boundary between its existence in the Real and its existence only as a (belated) representation.”3 On the other hand, Antigone is so structured by “family ethics” that she posits herself not as a fiancée but solely as Polynices’ sister at the very beginning of the play. The logic of her ethics decrees her self-mastering action, i.e., to bury her brother’s corpse—a “Thing” lying out there—though she knows his very behaviour is indefensible in the eyes of the world. Although Antigone bemoans her state of being, her (genuine) voice is ultimately barred by this desire for the ethical

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signifier. Antigone’s entombment makes her a “beautiful Thing” for it commemorates the courage of an abject woman who dares to act in conformity with her desire (which is also the ethical Other’s desire). In many cases, the power of classical tragedy always lies in portraying the sublimity of the Real: the master (e.g. Romeo) recklessly pursues the barred object of desire (his love), the hero, braving the horror of transgression and his Real destiny, then becomes a Thing. The paradox is that the chaotic Real in fact leads to the audience’s embrace of the Law and moral catharsis. The heroes’ suffering allows the audience to have a glimpse of the shocking “Thing,” and the tragic ending enables them to accept the metonymic logic in the core of the homeostatic pleasure principle. If the Real plays a dominant role in classical tragedy, the O’Neillian theatre is a perfectly logical space devoted to the tragic facet of the Symbolic. In fact, O’Neill’s plays endorse a new formula: “Subject—Disavowal—Symptom.” The hero is not a master by nature; however, he is subjectified by the capitalistic discourse to become the “economic Man.” Pettigrew’s words offer a succinct explanation of this idea: “ ‘Your money or your life!’ exclaims Lacan (XI, 212). If you accept the signifier, you lose Being. This is why Lacan speaks quite dramatically of the lethal signifier, the ‘lethal factor’ ” (XI, 213). However, if you refuse the signifier, you fall into non-meaning.”4 In the O’Neillian context, the lethal signifier is indeed “Capital” for it opens up a new world of (false) enjoyment for the subject to recognize reality. In Long Day, James Tyrone valorizes his cultural capital to become a famous Actor, and he subsequently entwines himself to the capitalistic discourse and befriends McGuire—a false friend—in order to be “a cunning real estate speculator.”5 He suffers many losses due to McGuire’s advice, but he chooses to remember buying Chestnut Street, McGuire’s “famous one stroke of good luck.” While the subject half-knows its misrecognition, O’Neill’s plays often lead us to see how the process of “fetishistic disavowal” can effectively forestall the subject from demystifying reality. In the words of Laplanche and Pontalis, disavowal is a “specific mode of defence which consists in the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception.”6 Disavowal thrives on the principle of metaphor (e.g. the miser believes that “money is everything,” the alcoholic says “the bottle is my life”). It reveals the fact that the subject is knowingly covering up a lack, i.e., the non-sense, the non-enjoyment of the fetish. As Žižek says, the fetishist’s “I know but nevertheless” is exactly the key to understanding this problem: the subject is “not fetishizing commodities or money, but actually the fantasy itself.”7 To explain this clearly, the fetish functions at two levels. The fetish is first portrayed by the Other as a sensational, mythical objet a, a “Real object of fullness”. After the subject’s firsthand experience of it, it empirically becomes an unfulfilling object (after all, money is a stack of

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coins and paper, the bottle makes one weak). The fetish is then realized to be an empty objet a, a “false real” (to use the words of Alain-Jacques Miller). However, the metaphoric mechanism of disavowal helps hide the authentic experience to allow the subject to (make-)believe in the power of the mythical, omnipotent fetish, so much so that the subject’s fantasmal being qua the fetish (e.g. capital, bottle) becomes “more to him than himself ”. Here, the disavowal is essentially a disavowal of the empirical truth to embrace a symbolic enjoyment, a happiness that is decreed not by the self but by the Other. Through the voice of the Other, the subject also endorses a disavowal of the Real (chaos, accident) to (make) believe that reality can be contained by the potent signifier. The miser always speaks as if money is the be-all and end-all of life, for it “can solve all problems.” The disavowal of the poverty of the Symbolic enables the subject to exist, to anchor itself firmly in the sterile happy discourse of the world, to identify with the self-deluding fantasy, to deny its genuine unhappiness. Thus Edmund exclaims, “facts don’t mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that’s the only truth!”8 The formation of symptoms (for example, depression) occurs exactly due to the simultaneity and the split between sense (truth) and fantasy in consciousness. In Long Day, James Tyrone uses whisky to drown his sorrows while Mary uses morphine to seek happiness. The symptom mirrors the truth of the subject’s being while it also intercepts truth so that “there is an internal veto, an internal no-saying.”9 The symptom marks the return of the repressed truth but it also intercepts this truth by allowing the subject to defend and enjoy the fetishistic distortion. Lacan calls this the “identification with the symptom.” As a result, Jacques-Alain Miller tells us, “we are used to considering that a symptom has a supplementing function, that is, we do not take the symptom as a dysfunctioning, we take it on the contrary as an apparatus which reestablishes functioning. It allows the subject to sustain himself in the world.” The formula “subject-disavowal-symptom” can be seen in many O’Neillian classics such as Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and Mourning Becomes Electra. In Mourning Becomes Electra, the grandfather Abe Mannon changes from being an ordinary person to become an economic Man when he starts one of the first “Western Ocean packet lines.”10 All the Mannons endorse a primary fetishism to see Capital as a mythical Thing. Money makes them posses a genuine sense of “fullness” even though the Mannons knowingly realize that the “Real” reality (libidinal chaos, political chaos, a warring world) cannot be solved by money. Eventually, the aloof, mask-like “Mannon face” bespeaks the triumph of the fetishistic fantasy. Hence, the servant Seth notices that the Mannons have “been top dog around here for near on two hundred years and don’t let folks forget it.”11 It is in this sense that even though all the male Mannons love the beautiful French nurse, they have

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to disavow their feelings for she signifies a disruptive force that can destroy the Symbolic fantasy. David, the romantic, takes the leap to marry her, but he soon becomes ashamed of his connection with her and kills himself. In Hairy Ape, Yank, having little money, turns to an “enlightened” secondary fetishism to see the Capital as a “false Thing.” Yank represents the working subject who takes pride in his labour power and attempts to demystify the fetishistic illusion by sending people back to the Real (the dynamite and the zoo). While the worker aims at unveiling the empirical truth that the upper class/democracy is an ineffective system, little does he know that this attempt is actually a disavowal of his covert, materialistic fantasy. Hence Yank displays the classic hysterical symptom: he glorifies his work and bemoans his entrapment as a stoker, he denies the grandeur of the Capital and reiterates the impotence of his (cultural or financial) poverty, he tries to be an independent person but calls for vengeance after noticing how the wealthy lady scorns him. Yank displays honesty when he says he wants to think but he simply can’t “t’ink.” Yank asserts that he is the Capital and the master of the society: “I’m steel—steel—steel!,” the “steam and oil for de engines,” “de ting in gold dat makes money;”12 but the presence of Mildred in white (and calling him a “filthy beast”) makes him become aware of and furiously deny his slave-like, impoverished status. As a result, O’Neill uses this play to foreground how the homeless subject, imprisoned by the Capital fixation, wants to rebel against it. The tragic fact is that, after much pretence, the enlightened worker cannot relate his life to the Marxist worldview (the glory of the Labourer and a life of hardship/productiveness) or to the views of crude capitalism (the cult of class to hide the unproductive life of the privileged). The Hairy Ape’s death in the arms of the gorilla embodies the worker’s symptomatic “disfigured jouissance.” The impoverished Yank is disfigured by his work in the “stokehole,” and in turn his labour empowers him to distrust the capitalists. His enlightened consciousness brings a pseudo-independence to disavow the rich and the romantic (“all dat crazy tripe about suns and winds . . . dat’s all a dope dream”13). However, such thoughts clash with the ways of the world and his covert identification with wealth, his hidden romantic desire to be loved by the pretty, “white-faced, skinny tarts.”14 Yank’s death does not denote the power of divine retribution but the futility of warring with his truth and symptoms. The O’Neillian romantic outlook is, at times, curiously akin to the logic of capitalism. In the first place, the capitalist’s fetishistic consciousness always turns differences into a metaphoric convergence. For example, in the eyes of businessmen, all goods are in a way “alike” for they lead to the same thing—more Capital. Second, the concept of “exchange control” favours the occasional restriction of business deals with undesirable members in the particular area. Its function is to bar the conversion of valuable (home) assets into

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other (foreign) assets, thereby reducing the inflow of unwanted assets from abroad and keeping the money in one place. It is in this light that we can understand why O’Neill’s plays often dramatize the links between the primacy of Capital and the immoral, “inbound” (incestuous) romance. Most of his plays feature the presence of a potent patriarch around whom everybody revolves in the hope of capturing the paternal phallus. While the patriarch is excessively strict and invites the hatred of his wife, somehow the women all fall in love with the paternal privileges and the same masculine phallic face. Meanwhile, all the sons love-hate the father figure, end up longing to be rich and then going after the same phallic mother-figure. If Christine hates Ezra Mannon in Mourning, she loves Brant and Orin—who look exactly like Ezra. In Desire Under the Elms, all the males in the Cabot family go after the phallic Minnie, who alone possesses the potency to remain “purty” after all these years. Preposterous as these duplicated relationships may seem (Ape’s face is Ezra’s face is David’s face is Brant’s face is Orin’s face), the O’Neillian romance dramatizes the primitive functionings of capitalism: everybody loves the same thing (or the same face, the paternal Capital), and good resources must be kept in one place (or one family, one society) for the sake of affective or financial conglomeration. In Long Day, all sons fail to have substantial relations with women other than Mary. To Christine and Vinnie in Mourning, no male faces can get their attention and only Abe-Ezra-Brant-Orin can capture their hearts. Orin also fails to see the loveliness of other women—only the maternal Christine and Vinnie seem to be the most lovable of women. The O’Neillian incestuous romance is structured like a financial layout to forestall the outflow of wealth/emotions to other families and thereby safeguard the hegemonic enterprise. However, the irony is that it also leads to the family’s confusion and disintegration along blood/emotive lines. Instead of growth, it results in a drying up of wealth and emotions. If the Greek incest taboo is wrought with mythical impulse and fixation, O’Neill’s plays have none of these characteristics for the incestuous logic is, in fact, a rational choice, an obsession for people who are too interested in “family property.” In Mourning, Captain Brant is back to claim his rights, Vinnie is envious of the mother’s rightful ownership of her husband, the mother is eager to keep the son’s affection for herself, and Orin is jealous of his sister’s suitors. Given the fact that the family portrayed by O’Neill is usually the wealthiest one in the area, following the notion of exchange control, the members deem that any inbound alliance can be profitable to the self, while the outbound alliance is viewed in a hostile light. For example, the Cabot sons never want their father to remarry in Desire Under the Elms. Orin never likes the idea that Vinnie or Christine loves Brant in Mourning. As the obsessional organizes her enjoyment by protecting her “property” through envy, gossiping, feuding and defamation, Vinnie loses

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no time in being the informer to destroy her mother (just as Jamie loses no time to use his “vile tongue” to corrupt/attack his brother). If Electra kills her mother out of “Justice” (in Hegelian terms, the noble consciousness), what Vinnie displays is a pure ignoble consciousness as she uses the name of “Justice” to secure her paternal interests, to claim her idea of “rightful properties” (i.e., her father and her brother). To Lacan, the obsessional features a distinctive type of “self-disgusting” enjoyment that is centred on the question of Being and death. The obsessional’s wish is to justify its Being, to fight lack/death by positing its Being to the quest of the “full,” phallic Thing. As this Thing is exactly not the “full,” joyful, mythical Thing in the Real, hence the obsessional tends to attach herself to a set of recurrent ideas, or rituals to reassure herself of her fullness, of having no disappointment or fear of death. However, the obsessional subject also feels a special burden of guilt, for example, Jamie Tyrone’s or Vinnie Mannon both know that their quests have violated the laws of ethics. In the O’Neillian context, the end of Mourning is not surprising as Vinnie savours her full Being (she owns the house, the capital, the men in the family) and the full, symptomatic force of guilt and lack. Her behaviour manifests the typical obsessional’s symptom when she chooses not suicide but perpetual procrastination to wait “for death.”15 On the one hand, this signifies a gesture of self-punishment; on the other hand, this self punishment is also turned by the subject to be the source of a new, self-disgusting jouissance. It marks the obsessional’s classical choice of remaining with something that makes her suffer, of recognizing herself in the (joyful) suffering. It demonstrates the process of what Lacan calls the “identification with the symptom, the reabsorption of the symptom in pleasure” (c.p. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations). The guilty obsession and the joy of selfruin all lead to a fantasmal enjoyment that works this way: while mourning signifies a state of being in pain, the obsessional disavows lack and turns this into a state of self-fulfillment. The obsessional makes two simultaneous statements: being in lack, “I am the most dead person in the world”; however, being dead, “I am now happy and immortal.” Thus, the obsessional celebrates the fantasmal joy of living a life beyond suffering as she is both the slave and the master of her traumatic experience. O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is another classic example that illustrates how the lacunary subjects choose to disavow reality and embrace their s(ub)lime symptoms—in the form of madness, miserliness, alcoholism and drug addiction. The sublimity of symptoms lies in the subject’s welcoming a life decreed by a horrible union between nonsense and truth, a life that is self-wasting and “between the two deaths.” The Tyrones take refuge in their symptoms and thereby reproduce a recurring form of death and become the undead, the very emblem of pain, and the hallmark of a walking disaster.

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The Birth of the Father In a capitalistic society, a man is not a “Man” until he is subjectified by the monetary discourse. O’Neill has no hesitation in demystifying the “ugliness of American reality” behind the innocent discourse of the “American dream”. Unlike Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, O’Neill chooses not to romanticize the castrating effect of Money with a dreamy outlook, but to foreground how this unconscious language can regulate the living body. In the play, Mr. Tyrone’s rise to prosperity represents the birth of the modern, masculine Subject—the economic Man. If the American society grants the status of a “master” to a wealthy man, Eugene O’Neill leads us to see that he is but a “victim” who has surrendered to the logic of the Other. O’Neill forces the reader to see that a man like Tyrone is “caught as a whole, but like a pawn” in the play of the capitalistic signifier, “and this even before the rules are transmitted to him. . . . Such an order of priorities has to be understood as a logical order, that is, as an always actualized order.”16 While pleasure in itself may not be a linguistic phenomenon, the idea that Money can give pleasure is certainly related to “the ordering function of the culture, a culture that separates man from nature, by inscribing him from the start in language, in the founding law whose primordial interdiction” is that of the law of the father.17 The fear of lack on the ontological level is translated by the capitalistic discourse to become Tyrone’s fear of poverty, the “fear of poorhouse.” In O’Neill’s play, Mr Tyrone has no hesitation in forgoing what he truly likes in order to accommodate to the desire of the Other. With all his money, he ends up saying “I don’t know what the hell it was I wanted to buy.”18 O’Neill wants his reader to understand the importance of history; however, Tyrone’s confession narrative also leads us to see the boundary between history and story can be very thin. Old Mrs. Tyrone’s suffering may have a direct impact on James Tyrone, but it is not from Old Mrs. Tyrone that he learns how to be a “stinking miser.” The moment Mr. Tyrone gets an extra dollar, she spends it “all on food” to ensure the well-being of her family.19 It is in this sense that we see a person can disavow the past to explain away his self-disgusting jouissance. The “fear of poorhouse” is an excuse to justify his love of “second hand bargains in everything,”20 to accumulate wealth, to “memorize the level in the bottle after every drink.”21 It forgets the fact that the subject is not searching for a(n attainable) mode of existence to compensate his past, but actively seeking an insatiable symbolic enjoyment constructed by the Other. In the heat of pursing what he (or the Other) wants, the subject can use all kinds of reasons to turn anything into the quest for more money. Hence, Tyrone’s mother pushes him to see “the value of a dollar,” his love for Mary is “an added incentive to ambition.”22 The disavowal of all substantial relations for a symbolic happiness means that the Subject can effectively cut off the link between the self and its body,

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the self and the needs of the people around him. In Marini’s words, the subject favours “the submission to the imperious command of a terrible superego: ‘Jouis!’ Both the other and the self are being put to death in the name of the Other.”23 Eventually, Mr. Tyrone’s master discourse valorises the word “expenditure” to “quilt” and totalize all his family relations into a readable set of figures. “Expenditure” is his dominant signifier (S1) that can enslave everything (S2) so that all human relations or investment can be neatly arranged, thereby becoming easily measurable according to the notion of “growth” or “use value.” In Mr. Tyrone’s eyes, Jamie is an “evil minded loafer”24 because he is depraved and unproductive. Edmund is disappointing for he is weak in terms of his health or financial well-being. As the master discourse allows the master to read reality lucidly, Mr. Tyrone is the only character in the play that is exempt from despair and confusion of values. Thus Mary notes, “Ten foghorns couldn’t disturb” Tyrone.25 To a miser like Tyrone, the world is a very stable, easily readable zone: his enemy is the one who wants to “have the house ablaze with electricity at [night], burning up money!”26 For all his “fake pride and pretence,” James Tyrone recognizes the truth of his being a “stinking old miser.”27 He sells his talents for money, spends his money on many “bum piece[s] of property,” and ends up celebrating his life by drowning regrets with alcohol. The paradox of success and non-being, happiness and unhappiness eventually leads Tyrone to utter—with clear-headed sincerity—something that he really desires to do and never desires to put it into action: “On my solemn oath, Edmund, . . . I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.”28 It is in this sense that we know, in spite of John H. Raleigh’s interesting article, that Tyrone’s honest duplicity has nothing to do with the Irish “national concern with betrayal” or “Judas Complex.”29 On the contrary, the crux of Tyrone’s problems lies in the diseased enjoyment in the symbolic register. Wealth or success may bring a lot of pain, but the fetishistic illusion is “in himself more than himself.” O’Neill gives us a masterly character whose words are characterized by “empty speeches”—for his entire being is oriented toward the discourse of the Other. To Lacan, the empty speech speaks mostly to the (phallic) Other, instead of voicing the self ’s authentic needs or minding other people’s being. In the play, Mr. Tyrone is constantly talking in vain about someone who can never be at one with “his” wish: his sons are good for nothing, merely trying to use up all his money. At times, Mr. Tyrone talks to his wife, but he can only do so using the language of an actor: “If I’ve watched you it was to admire how fat and beautiful you looked;” Mary has “the most beautiful hair in the world.” Her white hair only makes her “prettier than ever.”30 This quasi-romantic role-playing “dialogue” helps him disavow Mary’s suffering and deny his responsibility for her decline. While it allows readers to feel a momentary

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tenderness toward Tyrone, we can feel that this romantic voice cannot be endearing for it bespeaks a “double bind performance” instead of genuineness.31 Mary knows that Tyrone “isn’t a great actor for nothing”—for he can say one beautiful thing though he intends to do another. The moment his bottom line resurfaces, it is about the importance of frugality: “the glare from those extra lights hurts my eyes,” “there’s no use making the Electric Company rich.”32 In that light, any communicative words that affect the relational context can only be refuted by the unspoken communicative exchanges. Tyrone’s love for Edmund is genuine, but Tyrone cannot control his addictive miserliness. Hence, love means that he will still send Edmund to a doctor like Hardy because he “only charges a dollar.” James Tyrone disgusts himself, but no degree of self-disgust can change his love of bargains. His excuse is simple: “[i]t is a late day for regrets.”33 Galatean Femininity Mary Tyrone represents another stout defender of the empty speech. In the play, Mary cannot talk to her family without using the girlish speech of the Other and she cannot appear in front of people without making a fuss about her hair. In other words, Mary represents the prototype of some women who cannot see themselves without first having their images mediated through the judgmental eye of the Other. If Tyrone’s problem originates from his desire to fill up the lacuna in the centre of being by having a Subject-identity, for Mary it is her relationality to people. It certainly dooms her project of becoming a nun—for a nun has to die to the worldly self constructed by and through the voices of the Other. Though alone in the house, Mary Tyrone is forever people-oriented for she always places/imagines herself in the “object” position for others to admire. In the play, Mary’s love of being under the Other’s eye cannot be further away from the masculine notion of being a Subject. Mary says she loves playing piano, but the only thing she can remember is the nun’s opinion of her performance. What “Mother Elizabeth says” becomes an “acoustic mirror” (to use the words of Kaja Silverman) for Mary to construct her Being and mirror her fullness. The ultimate issue is—though it is inevitable that a person will be reduced to become a linguistic “object” in another person’s statement (the moment other people talk about “me,” the “I” enters into other’s conversation), O’Neill tells us that it is certainly unwise to put the Other in the Subject-position, thereby turning the self into a Galatean object (as in the myth of Pygmalion) who can only come into Being if the Other admires her. It can do no one any good if the self has to constantly seek unity through the eyes/language of the Other, or by asking questions such as “what do you think of me?” or “do you like my hair?” Given the relational nature of this objectified self, we can understand why the hysteric always appears to us in the form of a question poser. Gérard

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Wajcman says the “hysteric’s enunciation is injunctive: ‘Tell me!’ ”34 By letting the Other occupy the Subject-position, the self not only intensifies its docile dependence on the Other, but also heightens its discontent—for the self knows very well that the “me” in the Other’s eye (as a linguistic construct) can neither represent the “I,” nor portray the asymbolic facet of the self. As the libidinal body cannot be the body in the Other’s statement, the questions come back again and again—much to the annoyance of the Tyrones.35 O’Neill’s representation of Mary certainly mirrors a woman’s ontological dilemma: a woman is constantly forced to learn a male-centred language that is not her own. At school, she is under the eyes of the nuns. In a patriarchal family, she has to let her father, brother, and husband occupy the Subject-position, while she herself valorises the voice of the Other for the affirmation of her being. If the master admires her, the little girl/wife—like Galatea in the Pygmalion story—will feel revived immediately. In this light, it is no wonder that Mary will fall for Tyrone at once—for he is exactly the eloquent master who can verbally construct her state of being, and give her a sense of fullness. He is handsome and vocal, so Mary is happy to let Tyrone speak, and let the stereotypical, coquettish, girlish speech speak for her. The opening scene gives a wonderful illustration of the function of the Galatean teasing speech: Mary lures Tyrone to inform her of her looks, to pay compliments to her, to become his object of desire, to let him become her master, and to playfully defy his master status/authority (what I am is not what you say), hereby giving her a pedestal status (as an object) and an imaginary defiance (as a subject). Things soon turn sour for Mary. Tyrone—like most husbands—is the absent master in the domestic sphere. Mary is left alone in shabby hotels without knowledge of her status as no one bothers to put her in a body of statements. Meanwhile, Mary’s body suffers much as James Tyrone knowingly puts her under the care of a “cheap old quack.” In Long Day, we can see how the double bind behavioural pattern keeps doubling itself: Mary learns from James Tyrone that his input is always contradictory (i.e., loving words will not lead to caring investment, or taking her for a night out). And Mary’s conflicting feelings towards her family owe much to her prolonged exposure to people who say one thing while they mean another. James leans over and kisses her cheek impulsively—then turning back adds with a constrained air. So keep up the good work, Mary. Mary Has turned her head away. I will, dear.36

It reenacts the classic situation: the wife says she loves her husband when she instinctively turns away from him—because his words of trust actually belie a deep distrust of her. Mary says Tyrone “has made [her] very happy” so she can “forgive so many other things,” then she accuses herself for being a

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“sentimental fool” because she “was much happier before [she] knew he existed.”37 Mary senses that Edmund is dying, but she speaks with a “strange obstinate” expression that she knows he is only having “summer colds.” The gap between the enunciated content and the nonverbal message is further shown in Mary’s reaction to Jamie. Jamie tries to reach for his mother, but she draws away from him, as she does from Edmund and James. To understand why Mary cannot speak her mind, we have to turn not only to Mary’s relationality with the Other but also to the mechanics of a Galatean communication. On the one hand, words transmit information on the communicative level; on the other hand, the Galatean discourse decrees a self-regulated deference to the presence of the Other. The self has to heed the wish of her “creator” so that she can play out a role expected of her. It is in this sense that we can understand why she hates Tyrone and her wedding dress, and yet, she cannot let them go. In the play, Tyrone’s ways of conveying conflicting messages more or less simultaneously can only teach Mary to do her share of contradictory behaviour. The moment she hears her family is back, her face shows “defensive stubbornness” and resentment, but she bids them welcome with these words: “I am so happy you’ve come. . . . I’m all the more grateful to you for coming home. I was sitting here so lonely and blue.”38 In short, she says what is expected from her in order to make her family love her and make her relational self happy. Her genuine feelings and voice are disavowed. To forget this painful bond, Mary chooses the morphine discourse for it can give her a symptomatic enjoyment while the hallucination can treacherously restore and preclude relationality. Under the influence of the drug, Mary can keep thinking about the Other while shutting out all interactions with the outside world. Her foggy speeches are like dreamy soliloquies as she further otherizes herself, refuses to hear words spoken by her family, but imaginatively hunts down the Other’s view of her, and explains to those imaginary Pygmalions why she is as she is, and why she fails their expectations. At the end of the play, Edmund tells her that it is not a summer cold that he has, but consumption. Mary says “No” to stop further communication. Her words are devoted to the imaginary Other: “I play so badly now. I’m all out of practice, Sister Theresa will give me a dreadful scolding.” “I’ll practice every day from now on. But something horrible has happened to my hands. The fingers have gotten so stiff—”39 It is easy for readers to realize that the morphine narrative is a fully fledged false history in the hope of re-presenting herself as a lovely object to the judging eyes of the paternal Other, of winning their sympathy/admiration, of explaining away her present failures. In the play, the significance of Mary’s “hands” and “wedding dress” can carry several functions: in reality, they are but mundane, functional objects. However, in Mary’s imaginary discourse, they stand for two romantic dreams that now end in disappointment and self-pity (i.e., “You know that I could have been

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. . . but now I am . . .”). Talking to the imaginary Other, she invites the Other to side with her and hate the Tyrones as she visualizes showing her ugly, swollen knuckles to Sister Martha in the Infirmary. Talking to herself, these two objects contribute to her self-defeating stance (“I can’t . . . for my fingers are useless now . . . Sister Theresa will blame me”). Here, the imaginary Other changes sides and is now against her. As a result, Mary hates herself. Eventually, her bipolar love–hate, for–against attitude towards her self and the Other leads her to a stubborn insistence on self-loss: she wants to become “absentminded”: “I am always dreaming and forgetting.”40 Mary’s morphine language reinforces her love of a disfigured jouissance. She first takes up an “innocent” position, demands to be recognized as an effect of the nun’s pedagogic discourse or Tyrone’s romantic language; then she disavows this self-objectifying position, reveals that a religious vocation never fulfills her longing (“a waste of time”), Tyrone’s patriarchal discourse cannot satisfy her (she was only happy “for a time”).41 However, Tyrone is also responsible for her suffering and her disfigured fingers. Behind the masks of an innocent tone, it marks a victim’s bitter accusation of her love and need of the Other, and of her lost opportunities. Eventually, morphine leads her to ask a typical hysteric’s question: “What is it I’m looking for?” The dreamy soliloquy tricks the lonely wife into becoming the ideal reader of her (falsified) history, pushes others to fall in with her perspective instead of interpreting them (even though Mr. Tyrone painfully contradicts her version and says Mary is “never made to renounce the world” for she “was a bit of a rogue and a coquette”42). However, this self-interpreting language can only heighten the disjunction between the subject and the object-position—for no answer can satisfy her. She is barred from feeling like a docile object and from being contented with her sons’ reassuring answers. She cannot find any joy in the self-subjectifying (false) explanation of her past and present. As Mary is so used to setting her face “in an expression of blank, stubborn denial,”43 she finds pleasure in a life full of fog and self-disfigurement. Post-Oedipal Envy Castrated by Tyrone’s (financial) Law, Jamie struggles to stage his ineffective “guerrilla warfare” against the paternal power.44 Meanwhile, Oedipal complex and sibling rivalry join forces to produce a self-destructive parasite who quarrels incessantly with his father, wastes away his life, and corrupts the well being of his brother. Jamie’s position bespeaks the dilemma of an elder son: on the one hand, the elder son hates his father, but he cannot ignore the phallic signifier (Money) which forces him to become a Subject. On the other hand, even though the brothers join hands to fight the father, Jamie cannot forget his hatred of Edmund—for his parents favour the young one over himself. James M. Mellard has long pointed out how, in modern times,

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family conflicts can change from a father–son confrontation to a brother against brother situation.45 As the sons can no longer afford to kill the rich father, rivalry breaks out among the brothers owing to their competing desire to become the Man and inherit the family property. At first, the relationship between brothers is constructed along fraternal lines. However, Mellard notes that one of them will gradually rise to a quasi-paternal position to provide guidance and insight to the younger one. Finally, the new father-brother destroys or corrupts his peers by seeking a surplus jouissance for himself—while offering no cultural, financial protection to the young. In Long Day, James and Edmund’s relationship mirrors how the brotherly conflict can be as bad as paternal oppression. Jamie represents the “brotherly” desire to establish an egalitarian “play-oriented” discourse to replace Mr. Tyrone’s paternal doctrines. To a certain extent, the love of “play” is not unlike Lacan’s idea of the “university discourse” for “play” is by nature carnivalesque: it cuts across class boundaries, subverts the authority of the father, allows the self to adopt the multiple roles of being a father-figure to the young, a truth-seeker to analyze his family’s situations. Jamie can be a hedonist who throws his “salary away every week on whores and whiskey,”46 he is also an enlightened man who challenges his father’s decision of sending Edmund to another “cheap quack” like Hardy. Jamie can also be a bitter ironist: adores “Broadway” and the pinnacle of success means that he will “be the lover of the fat woman in Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”47 Through abusive critique and truthful analysis, this playful discourse gives the self a new freedom to mingle noble and ignoble values, blend the Shakespearean high culture with lowbrow curses, repudiate the corruptive values of the father—while engaging with these selfish practices to corrupt the brother. Jamie’s “play” is in fact an equivocal game that refutes his father’s influence while the play discourse is necessarily tied to the world of Money and to the master discourse (“the winner”). For all his liberating gestures, Jamie looks down on Edmund, considers him “still wet behind the ears.”48 Jamie hates his father, but he has to count on Mr. Tyrone for help in sorting out all his financial troubles. The playful discourse allows Jamie to pose himself as an imaginary Hero to Mamie Burns, a mentor to Edmund, a rebellious figure who knows how to heal himself with the comfort of wine and sex. This “selffathering” role is so well disguised that, unless he is in need of money, Jamie can cynically worship himself, and leads Edmund to worship him. However, the father knows very well that the elder son is no hero for Jamie has not “the guts to go off on his own,” Jamie always came “whining to [him] the minute he was broke.”49 In fact, the interdependent closeness between the father and son is witnessed by their abusive communication: a descriptive remark is immediately followed by a hostile remark, but it will always gravitate towards a resigned conversation. For example, Jamie hates his father for digging up the

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fact of his being expelled from every college he attended, Jamie ends in admitting that “he is a bum” to end the quarrel. Then they will go out and work together on the front hedge. O’Neill tells us that, despite the liberal facet of “play,” Jamie actually shares the paternal love of competition and dominance—yet he does it without the father’s love of honour and labour. Michael Manheim notes that, at first, there was a healthy “brotherly camaraderie and competitiveness” for the young Tyrones share “the time-honoured cynicism of educated youth.”50 However, Jamie’s fear of non-dominance gets the better of him and his jealousy shows in the form of wanting his family’s love all for himself. Hence he constantly represses his brother, wants him “to fail” and accuses Edmund of being “Mama’s baby! Papa’s pet!” His evil intention (“I did it on purpose”)51 cannot be further away from the egalitarian assumption of “play.” For whatever Jamie does, he moralizes his (decadent) behaviour with a cynical, equivocal guise so that whatever good things his father wills him to do, he does it not; and whatever bad things he wills himself to do, he moralizes it till he feels he has a good conscience. Tyrone tells Jamie to get a decent job, Jamie chooses to gamble his money away as a playful gesture of “resistance.” And the moment Jamie hears that Edmund is now a decent writer, he feels threatened and says Edmund is only “a pretty bum reporter.”52 The father-brother always disguises his malice with a defiant, nonchalant gesture; however, Jamie cannot hide it from the judgmental eye of Mr. Tyrone—though he has successfully attracted his brother’s gaze. Jamie knows that Edmund looks up to him as a “hero,” and he deliberately corrupts him with all his cynical mottos: “every man was a knave with his soul for sale, and every woman who wasn’t a whore was a fool.”53 In turn, this playfulness becomes a game to hide his self-disgust, his will to dominance and envy. Jamie actually will do his “damnedest to make [Edmund] fail,” to make Edmund “look even worse by comparison.”54 The confession of Jamie is a touching scene, but it can only horrify us for the post-Oedipal tie can be more oppressive than the patriarch’s regime. In the words of Mellard, the post-Oedipal “regime reconstitutes the thanatic jouissance of the totemic father.” We can interpret this statement in the following way: if the ancient totemic father dominates every woman, suppresses all his enemies to guarantee the lifestyle/productivity of the society, “the new father-brother offers no advantages to children, cultural others or women—for example, it disavows or denies entirely female desire, if not female existence as the sister.”55 What the father-brother aims at is an anti-social enjoyment that is on the side of murder or theft. Whoever he loves, he has to possess/kill it, with no thought of responsibility or social conscience. In the play, Jamie murders his career, says he feels like a “corpse” in the house. However, like a “dead man,” he has “to kill the thing he loved.” As a result, he is secretly happy that Mary and Edmund are heading for a fall—because a dead person

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“wants company.”56 This envious, (self-)disgusting, symptomatic jouissance can only alert us to the dangers of the post-Oedipal subject. The subject simply endorses the ruthless way to arrogate all desire to himself—even though he loves those people that he is corrupting, and hates those objects that he desires. Instead of welcoming the father’s superego, the brother uses the “id” to form the basis of thanatic jouissance. Tyrone tortures everybody (including himself ) to follow his true love (Money); however, for the sake of his id, the post-Oedipal subject has no fixed object of love or hatred. Jamie loves Edmund, but he will also “give [Edmund] the glad hand, and at the first good chance [he] will stab [Edmund] in the back.”57 The Failure of Poetic Sublimation In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Edmund represents the ultimate hope of countering the fetishistic illusion. However, this hope has no future, as symbolized by Edmund’s having tuberculosis, and his journey to a cheap sanatorium. With a strong feeling of alienation and anxiety, Edmund represents the rise of a poetic subject who is capable of producing his own language to formulate a new identity. Unlike Jamie and Tyrone’s habitual quoting of words from Kipling, Swinburne or Shakespeare, Edmund invents his own speech to give voice to his feelings. In the words of Frederic Carpenter, “Edmund Tyrone, seemingly passive, develops steadily, although unobtrusively, during the play until at the end he achieves what O’Neill had prophesied for his autobiographical hero: “the birth of a soul.”58 His independent lifestyle constitutes a radical break with the Tyrones’ way of saying one thing while meaning another, or their addictive blaming of each other for their present suffering. With the sun, the sand and the hot seaweed, Edmund puts aside the lethal jouissance of money, envy or drugs. He is portrayed to be the only character who can savor the world in the Real fullness: nature gives him an “ecstatic freedom,” the “saint’s vision of beatitude.” However, while this full speech marks his authentic existence, Edmund’s voice is death-bent: It was a great mistake, my being born as a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.59

If Jamie’s joy lies in the destruction of the Other for the capture of the empty fetish (more money, more sex, intense competition), Edmund’s notion of enjoyment is far more destructive in the sense that it is truly anarchic. The fullness of being is closely linked to the thanatic jouissance of death. It marks a total disavowal of resistance, for the “flight” discourse foregrounds

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a pseudo-solution that is at best, anti-reality, and at worst, anti-life. With Edmund’s radical “stammering,” he unveils the ennui of a life trapped between sense and non-sense, truth and foggy dishonesty. However, such poetic vision only pushes Edmund to further disavow or reinvent the painful life with the erasure of all boundaries between the surface and the latent meanings, truth and falsehood. Thus Edmund says, I want to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. . . . The fog and the sea seemed part of each other . . . As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea.60

While these poetic signifiers allow a moment of pseudo-transcendence or liberation, this vision can only prompt readers to realize a diseased, selfmutilating jouissance—the self is to be a ghost in a fog, which in turn is the ghost of the sea. It welcomes a collapse of identity, a confusion of being in non-being, an infinite regress (regrets) in the great chain of life, an elation of death/loss in the cosmic union. Instead of fighting for life, Edmund identifies with his symptomatic illness and aestheticizes the beauty of flight and death (to be “in another world”). The lack of health and hope is turned around to become a celebratory event, an anticipation of fullness in existence. This language is genuinely problematic for it aims not at validating critical confrontation but at affirming deformation as transformation—thereby uniting the fog with the joy of amnesia, dreams with “ecstatic freedom.” It is no wonder that Mr. Tyrone calls it “morbid filth.”61 O’Neill said he wrote Long Day’s Journey “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” However, pity and understanding do not lead to a Freudian sublimation or “fatal balance” (to use the words of Doris Falk62). The ending of the play mirrors the tragic subjects’ simultaneous recognition of their truth and the insistence on their lethal, symptomatic jouissance. No accusation can wake Mr. Tyrone up from his desperate miserliness, no acoustic mirror or reassuring words can rouse Mary to return to reality. Meanwhile, no honest confession from Jamie can ever change his self-corrupting game of envy, and no poetic discourse can push Edmund to restore his faith in life. The dying Edmund wills himself to “always be a little in love with death.”63 With the Tyrones’ total commitment to the enjoyment of miserliness, dominance, drugs, wine, sex and morbid thoughts, O’Neill’s play shows how the modern subjects’ slime symptoms erupt in the form of a sublime downward spiral. The “faithful realism” of Long Day is not about “stammering” being the “native eloquence” of “fog people,”64 but about the all too human choice—the decision of enjoying the night and coping with denials and symptoms instead of braving the dawn of metanoia.

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No t e s   1. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso, 1999) 292.   2. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? (New York: Verso, 2001) 22.   3. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Othello’s Lost Handkerchief: When Psychoanalysis Finds Itself,” Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Richard Feldstein and Willy Apollon (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 153.   4. David Pettigrew, “Lacan: The Poetic Unconscious,” Disseminating Lacan, ed. Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 194.   5. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale UP, 1955) 15.   6. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholsou-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973) 118.   7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989) 28.   8. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 127.   9. Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Seminar of Barcelona on Die Wege der Symptombildun.” The London Society of the New Lacanian School (2003), accessed 25 April, 2005, . 10. O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill (New York: Modern Library, 1959) 689. 11. 600. 12. O’Neill, Hairy Ape, Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill 48. 13. 47. 14. 86. 15. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 99. 16. Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan, trans. Anne Tomiche (New York: Rutgers UP, 1993) 45. 17. 45. 18. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 151. 19. 148, emphasis added. 20. 84. 21. 54. 22. 148, 150. 23. Marini, Jacques Lacan 59. 24. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 39. 25. 17. 26. 126. 27. 149, 146. 28. 151. 29. See John Henry Raleigh, “O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and New England Irish-Catholicism,” O’Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Gassner (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964) 125–41. 30. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 17 and 28. 31. If Freud predicts that the unquestioning internalization of the Other’s (fantasmal) law will produce a pathological subject, Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and Weakland claim that unresolved contradictions in the self can generate a double bind situation that leads to the onset of schizophrenia. They point out that such a subject

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will eventually reproduce a double bind behavioral pattern: the mother will tell her boy that she loves him while she turns away her head in disgust. “In this example, the mother conveys two messages to the son: one of love, conveyed verbally, and one of disgust, conveyed non-verbally.” See Gregory Bateson, et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science 1.4 (1956), reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972) 201–227. 32. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 151. 33. 150. 34. Gérard Wajcman, “The Hysteric Discourse,” The Symptom 4 (Spring 2003), accessed 25 April 2005, . 35. In the words of Gérard Wajcman, the “hysteric starts out with her ‘I am what you say,’ and ends with her ‘All of what I am you cannot say,’ bringing about objet petit a // S2, the disjunction between knowledge and object.” 36. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 17. 37. 105, 107. 38. 107, 108. 39. 171. 40. 171. 41. 176, 170. 42. 138. 43. 63. 44. Frederic Carpenter, Eugene O’Neill, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1979) 160. 45. James M. Mellard, “Lacan and New Lacanians, Josephine Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance,” PMLA 113.3 (May 1998) 395–407. 46. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 31. 47. 160. 48. 156. 49. 35. 50. Michael Manheim, “The Stature of Long Day’s Journey into Night,” The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Michael Manheim (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 213. 51. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 165. 52. 35–6. 53. 34. 54. 166, 165. 55. Mellard, “Lacan and New Lacanians” 396. 56. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 166. 57. 166. 58. Carpenter, Eugene O’Neill 60. 59. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 153–4. 60. 131. 61. 134. 62. Doris Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958) 180. 63. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey 154. 64. 154.

Chronology

1888

1895 1902

1906 1909

1910 1911 1912

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill born on October 16 in a New York City hotel room. His parents are James O’Neill, Sr., a popular actor, and Ella Quinlan O’Neill, who came from an affluent family. Eugene has one older brother. Another older brother died as an infant. Eugene starts at Catholic boarding schools, moves around as his parents do. As a teenager he rarely sees his mother during the school years. O’Neill learns of his mother’s morphine addiction and renounces Catholicism in the same summer. Persuades his father to let him attend a secular school. Begins learning about drinking, prostitutes, and avant-garde writers from older brother Jamie. Starts at Princeton University; drops out within a year. Elopes and marries Kathleen Jenkins. Father arranges a number of jobs for O’Neill, none of which he takes to. Father pays passage for him on a steamer to Honduras and Eugene “discovers” the sea. Son, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, Jr., is born. O’Neill sails to Buenos Aires, having joined the crew of a steamer. In Buenos Aires, he lives in squalor and drinks heavily. Returns to the United States. Attempts suicide. Divorces. Returns to his parents’ home. By the end of the year, enters a sanatorium for tuberculosis. 223

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1914 1916–1919

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

1928 1929 1931 1933 1934 1936 1937

1939 1940

Chronology Recovers and decides to become a playwright. Enrolls at Harvard. Publishes Thirst, and Other One Act Plays. Joins the Provincetown Players, a theater company in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which produces several of his early plays. In 1918 marries novelist Agnes Boulton, with whom he has a son, Shane. Agnes continues her writing career, prompting tension between her and O’Neill. Shane later becomes estranged from father and dies a heroin addict. Beyond the Horizon is produced, awarded a Pultizer Prize. Father sees the play, which brings about a form of reconciliation with his son. Father dies shortly thereafter. Anna Christie is produced and wins Pulitzer. Gold and The Straw are produced. Mother dies. The Hairy Ape and The First Man are produced. Brother dies after decades of injury wrought by alcoholism. All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Welded, and Desire Under the Elms are produced. The Fountain is produced. Daughter Oona O’Neill is born (she later marries Charlie Chaplin, infuriating her father, who disowns her). The Great God Brown is produced. O’Neill begins affair with Carlotta Monterey. Lazarus Laughed, Marco Millions, and Strange Interlude are produced. Strange Interlude wins Pulitzer. Dynamo is produced. Divorces; marries Carlotta Monterey. Mourning Becomes Electra is produced. Ah, Wilderness! is produced. Days Without End is produced. Wins Nobel Prize for Literature. Builds “Tao House” in Danville, California. Disillusioned and no longer interested in seeing his plays produced, he essentially leaves the theater community. The rest of the thirties and early forties are spent writing, particularly his never-finished eleven-play cycle “A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed.” Writes The Iceman Cometh. Writes Long Day’s Journey into Night. Instructs that the play is not to be produced until decades after his death.

Chronology 1943

1946 1947 1950 1953 1956

225

Completes A Moon for the Misbegotten. In mid-forties, he and Carlotta are living in New York, their marriage strained. His ability to write diminishes due to health complications related to neurological problems. He helps mount some productions and hires a secretary. Lives in Hotel Barclay. The Iceman Cometh is produced. A Moon for the Misbegotten is produced. Son Eugene dies. Dies on November 27 in a hotel in Boston. Wife gives permission for a production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, which wins posthumous Pulitzer.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. Bruce J. Mann is dean of the liberal arts division at Northern Virginia Community College. He is the editor of Edward Albee: A Casebook. Laurin Porter is a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has written on O’Neill for the Eugene O’Neill Review and is the author of Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote. She is a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights.

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Contributors

Marc Maufort teaches at the Free University of Brussels. He is the author of Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism. Gerardine Meaney is an associate professor and director of Irish studies at University College Dublin. Her research interests include postmodernism and the relationship between literature and film. Richard B. Sewall was professor emeritus of English at Yale University. He authored, among other works, The Vision of Tragedy and The Life of Emily Dickinson, which won the National Book Award for biography. Kurt Eisen is a professor of English and interim associate dean, arts and sciences at Tennessee Technological University. Aside from O’Neill, his research interests include modern drama and theater, film studies, performance theory, and American literature. Michael Selmon is a professor of English and the provost and director for academic affairs at Alma College. His research centers on modern drama. Anne Fleche is a lecturer in the literature department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aside from her book on Tennessee Williams and O’Neill, Fleche has published essays on dramatists in various journals. Barbara Voglino is a playwright. She is a contributor to the Eugene O’Neill Review and has been an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and William Paterson College. Lawrence Dugan is a librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia. He has written on O’Neill in the journal Comparative Drama. He also has contributed to the National Review and published poems, most recently in Daedalus. Egil Törnqvist is professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam. About O’Neill he has written Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Supernaturalistic Technique. He is a Strindberg and Bergman scholar and also has published books on Ibsen. He has lectured widely in Europe and in the United States. Magdalen Wing-chi Ki has been a part-time lecturer of English literature at Chinese University of Hong Kong. She published Jane Austen and the Dialectic of Misrecognition and has an essay in Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama.

Bibliography

Abbotson, Susan C. W. Masterpieces of 20th-century American Drama. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Adler, Thomas P. “ ‘Daddy Spoke to Me!’ Gods Lost and Found in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Through a Glass Darkly.” In Critical Approaches to O’Neill, edited by John H. Stroupe, pp. 161–168. New York: AMS, 1988.

Alexander, Doris. Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Ardolino, Frank. “Irish Myth and Legends in Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.” Eugene O’Neill Review 22, nos. 1–2 (1998): 63–9.

Bagchee, Shyamal, ed. Perspectives on O’Neill: New Essays. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1988.

Barlow, Judith E. Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Berlin, Normand, ed. Eugene O’Neill, Three Plays: A Casebook. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1989.

——— . “O’Neill’s Shakespeare.” Eugene O’Neill Review 13, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 5–13.

Black, Stephen A. “Reality and Its Vicissitudes: The Problem of Understanding in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Eugene O’Neill Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 57–72. Bliss, Matt. “ ‘So Happy for a Time’: A Cultural Poetics of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” American Drama 7, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1–17.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’Neill. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.

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Bloom, Steven F. “ ‘The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia!’: O’Neill’s Use of the Delayed Entrance in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 226–238.

Brietzke, Zander. “Too Close for Comfort: Biographical Truth in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Eugene O’Neill Review 25, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 2001): 24–36. Brustein, Robert. Millennial Stages: Essays and Reviews 2001–2005. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Casper, Vivian. “The ‘Veil,’ Neoplatonism, and Genre in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Eugene O’Neill Review 29 (2007): 73–110.

Chura, Patrick J. “ ‘Vital Contact’: Eugene O’Neill and the Working Class.” Twentieth Century Literature 49, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 520–546.

Dawes, James R. “Drama and Ethics, Grief and Privacy: The Case of Eugene O’Neill.” Eugene O’Neill Review 17, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1993): 83–92. Forseth, Roger. “Denial as Tragedy: The Dynamics of Addiction in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Dionysos: The Literature and Addiction TriQuarterly 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 3–18.

Frank, Glenda. “Fractured Comedy: A Glimpse into Eugene O’Neill’s Tragic Constructs.” Eugene O’Neill Review 27 (2005): 135–151. Furey, Frank. “Performing the Past: Text, Subtext & Meta-Drama in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Theatron (Spring 2004): 39–47. Garvey, Sheila Hickey. “O’Neill’s Bridge.” Eugene O’Neill Review 27 (2005): 98–114.

Grene, Nicholas. “Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Tyrones at Home in America.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 109–19.

Hall, Ann C. “A Kind of Alaska”: Women in the Plays of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Hinden, Michael. “O’Neill and Jamie: A Survivor’s Tale.” Comparative Drama 35, nos. 3–4 (2001–2002): 435–445.

Hirsh, James. “Covert Appropriations of Shakespeare: Three Case Studies.” Papers on Language & Literature 43, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 45–67.

Ito, Akira. “On Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Language and Culture 17 (1989): 195–217.

Jones, Edward T. “The Tyrones as TV Family: O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1994): 93–97.

Manheim, Michael, ed. Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Maufort, Marc, ed. Eugene O’Neill and the Emergence of American Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989.

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Moorton, Richard F., Jr. “The Author as Oedipus in Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Papers on Language and Literature 25, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 304–325. Murphy, Brenda. O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Raleigh, John Henry. “Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Modern Drama 31, no. 1 (March 1988): 63–72.

Smith, Madeline C. “Land and Sea: O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and the Humorous Tyrones.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 37 (1991): 123–130. Usui, Masami. “Mary Tyrone’s Drug Addiction and Quest for Truth in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Studies in Languages and Cultures 16 (1990): 109–122.

Acknowledgments

Bruce J. Mann, “O’Neill’s ‘Presence’ in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” From Theatre Annual 43 (1988): 15–30. © 1988 by Theatre Annual. Laurin Porter, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: Descent into Darkness.” From The Banished Prince: Time, Memory, and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O’Neill. © 1988 by Laurin R. Porter. Reprinted by permission. Marc Maufort, “American Flowers of Evil: Long Day’s Journey into Night and Baudelaire.” From New Essays on American Drama, edited by Gilbert Debusscher and Henry I. Schvey. © 1989 by Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam–Atlanta, GA. Reproduced with permission of Rodopi in the format other book via Copyright Clearance Center. Gerardine Meaney, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: Modernism, PostModernism and Maternal Loss.” From Irish University Review 21, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1991): 204–218. © 1991 by Irish University Review. Reprinted by permission. Richard B. Sewall, “Eugene O’Neill and the Sense of the Tragic.” From Eugene O’Neill’s Century: Centennial Views on America’s Foremost Tragic Dramatist, edited by Richard F. Moorton, Jr. © 1991 by Richard F. Moorton, Jr. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.

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Acknowledgments

Kurt Eisen, “The Spare Room: Long Day’s Journey into Night” From The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination. © 1994 by the University of Georgia Press. Reprinted by permission. Michael Selmon, “‘Like . . . So Many Small Theatres’: The Panoptic and the Theatric in Long Day’s Journey into Night.” From Modern Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 526–539. © 1997 by the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto and the University of Toronto Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Toronto Press Incorporated (www.utpjournals.com). Anne Fleche, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Seen and the Unseen.” From Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism. © 1997 by the University of Alabama Press. Reprinted by permission. Barbara Voglino, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Question of Blame.” From “Perverse Mind”: Eugene O’Neill’s Struggle with Closure. © 1999 by Associated University Presses. Reprinted by permission. Lawrence Dugan, “The Tyrone Anthology: Authority in the Last Act of Long Day’s Journey into Night.” From Comparative Drama 37, nos. 3–4 (Fall 2003–Winter 2004): 379–95. © 2003/2004 Western Michigan University, Department of English. Reprinted by permission. Egil Törnqvist, “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” From Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre. © 2004 by Egil Törnqvist by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640, www.mcfarlandpub.com. Magdalen Wing-chi Ki, “The S(ub)lime Symptom and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” From Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 20, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 5–23. © 2006 by Wing-chi Ki. Reprinted by permission.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.

Index Abrams, M.H., 8 addictions, play of, 54–55 Ah, Wilderness! (O’Neill), 85 All God’s Chillun Got Wings (O’Neill), 101–102, 111n17 allusions, literary, 24, 62–63, 167–168 See also Baudelairean echoes in play; quotation, as essential element in play American history cycle, proposed, 106 American Realism and American Drama (Murphy), 168 Antigone, as classical tragedy, 204–205 Artraud, Antonin, 134–135, 136 Augustine, St., 8 autobiography, creative (defined), 8 See also Long Day’s Journey into Night, as creative autobiography Barrow, Judith, 54, 114, 135, 142n7, 153 Baudelaire, Charles, 37 Baudelairean echoes in play, 50n3–4, 51n8, 163–164 “Anywhere Out of the World,” 38–39 “Be Always Drunken,” 174 common themes, 49 “Deja,” 47–48 “Enivrez Vous,” 49

235

“Epilogue,” 39, 41, 42, 49, 166, 167, 174 Flowers of Evil, 38–41, 43 “La Mort des Amants,” 43–44 “La Solitude,” 38 “L’Albatros” and, 38–39 “Le Crépuscule du Soir,” 41 “Le Mauvais Moine,” 38 “Le Vampire,” 41–42 “Le Vin des Amants,” 45 “L’Ennemi,” 43 “Les Litanies de Satan,” 40 “Les Projets,” 45–46 “L’Etranger,” 45 “L’Homme et la Mer,” 47 “L’Invitation au Voyage,” 47 “Réversibilité,” 42 “Spleen,” 43 Beckett, Samuel, 157–158 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (O’Neill collection), 37 Benchley, Robert, 119, 120 Bogard, Travis, 7, 16, 54, 97–98 Booth, Edwin, 25, 62, 120, 139 Bound East for Cardiff (O’Neill), 73 Bridget (cook), 104, 198 Brutus Jones (Emperor Jones), 95 capitalism, 130, 142n2, 207, 210 Cathleen (maid), 22–23, 132, 148, 193–194, 195–196 Catholicism, 165

236 characterization, through dialogue, 127–129, 137–141 closure, defined, 144 Confessions (Augustine), 8, 9 confessions as escape from time downward spiral throughout play, 28–29 failure of, 30–31, 33, 156 hope in act 4, 29–30 Tyrones remain trapped in time, 31, 132, 151 Conrad, Joseph, 69–72 Contour in Time (Bogard), 16 Cook, George Cram, 19 Desire under the Elms (O’Neill), 56, 85, 206, 208–209 dialogue, self-disclosure of, 127–129, 137–141 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 114–115, 121 Dynamo (O’Neill), 85 Edmund Tyrone as bland version of O’Neill, 7, 8, 16, 200 as failure of poetic sublimation, 218–219 blaming, 188–189 deviations from autobiographical reality, 198–199 foreshadowing before confession, 32 guilt and, 152 on hearing he is being sent to state sanatorium, 78–79, 186–187 ideal moments of past hold hope, 26–27 monologues directed at, 14–15, 92 on poor talent of, 49–50 quotes from Baudelaire by, 39–40, 41 self-portraiture of O’Neill problematic, 100–105, 110n16

Index

Eldridge, Florence, 117, 193 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill), 94, 95 Eugene (absent character), 89–90 Final Acts (Barlow), 135 Fitzgerald, Geraldine, 12, 117 Flowers of Evil, The (Baudelaire), 37–39, 50n1 See also under Baudelairean echoes in play Foucault, Michel, 114–115 Ghosts (Ibsen), 56, 63, 180 Gierow, Karl Ragnar, 197–198 Gill, Brendon, 171, 172 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 16–17 guilt accusations of family, 27–28, 34n14–17 Hairy Ape, The (O’Neill), 85, 94, 206, 207 Ibsen, Henrik, 180 Iceman Cometh, The (O’Neill), 44, 85, 92, 106, 108, 143, 151 Intimate Journals (Baudelaire), 37 Irish immigrants in America, 22–23 James Tyrone apex of his life, 25, 62 as enabler of Mary, 148–149 as first-generation immigrant, 23, 166 as lapsed Catholic, 164–165, 169 as Monte Cristo, 118–119 capitalism and, 210 disavowal of reality by, 205–206, 211–212 guilt and, 147, 152 Jack Lemmon as, 171 miserliness of, 170, 171, 172, 186, 199, 210–211, 211–212

Index

monologue of last act, 14, 29, 31, 92, 153 scapegoating of, 166, 177n6 Jamie Tyrone, 109n7 confession of, 80–81, 217–218 Edmund and, 216–217 Fat Violet and, 31 guilt and, 39, 146, 152 monologue describing gift to Edmund, 14–15, 92 post-Oedipal envy and, 215–218 speech patterns of, 23–24, 195 Jardine, Alice, 54 Jenkins, Kathleen (first wife), 198 Jim Tyrone (Moon for the Misbegotten), 31 Lee, Robert C., 21 Lemmon, Jack, 171 library of Tyrones (stage directions), 62–63, 167–168 Little Poems in Prose (Baudelaire), 37–38 See also under Baudelairean echoes in play Long Day’s Journey into Night absurd drama forerunner, 157– 159 as lyric poetry, 9, 17n10, 138–139 as O’Neill’s masterpiece, 1–2, 143, 179 as play of addictions, 54–55 as postmodern play, 65 biographical roots disadvantage to, 54 blaming in, 76–77, 146, 171, 188–191 dedication of, 9, 179 entrances and exits in, 195 family roles in, 22, 86–89, 94–95 incestuous romance and, 208 interpretation as personal, 145–147 a play of family ghosts, 58–60, 136, 165 realism in, 16–17, 130–131

237

reality disavowed by characters in, 209 shared identity in, 97–100 title of, 108, 142n5 vocal unity of characters in, 9–12 See also plot structure of play Long Day’s Journey into Night, as creative autobiography as three-dimensional portrait of O’Neill, 16–17 biographical roots as disadvantage, 54 confrontation of past by O’Neill, 19 discrepancies between play and reality abound, 197–199 Edmund not straightforward selfportrait, 101–105, 110n16 O’Neill’s strategy in, 7–10 See also Edmund Tyrone; O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night, ending of ambiguity of, 82–83, 200, 201n7 artificial hopes lacking in, 158–159 as sublime downward spiral, 219 as union of past and future, 108 closure in, 144, 153, 154–156 final act as anticlimactic, 173 modernist approach to, 65 opening scenes of Act IV, 164 See also quotation, as essential element in play Long Day’s Journey into Night, staging of Bloom on, 2–5 Broadway production (1986), 171, 178n11 first “performance,” 113 gazes in play, 113–114, 122–123 interpretations by actresses of, 117, 171 O’Neill’s theatricality and, 119– 120 opening scenes of, 143–144

238

Index

panopticism and, 114–115, 116, 121, 123 pantomime and, 155 theatricality of Mary’s final entrance, 121–122 transcendence and, 114, 120–123 watchers being watched, 116 See also plot structure of play loss, irony of, 53–54, 65, 140, 156

Moon for the Misbegotten (O’Neill), 31 More Stately Mansions (O’Neill), 22, 85, 107 motifs. See symbolism Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill), 55, 85, 102, 119, 120, 155, 206– 207, 208 Murphy, Brenda, 168, 172–173

Martin, Elliot, 115 Mary Tyrone ambivalent feelings expressed by, 77–78 as complainer, 149–151, 172, 197 as lapsed Catholic, 165 as morphine addict, 20–21, 32–33, 33n5–6, 94–95, 135, 149, 214–215 as mother/whore, 32, 35n18, 88 as pathological character, 114, 193 as second-generation immigrant, 23 centrality of, 133–136, 141 compared to Nina Leeds, 133, 142n6 confesses desire to be a nun, 21, 42–43, 81–82, 96–97, 170–171 final act monologue of, 15, 25–26, 46, 90–91, 92 Galatean femininity and, 212–215 interpretations by actresses of, 117, 171 loneliness of, 122–123, 133, 157 maudlin narcissism of, 172–173, 192–193 objections to theater by, 88–89, 132 pseudo-soliloquies of, 193–-195 regression to girlhood of, 21, 59–60, 91–94, 106, 109n7, 118, 153–154 revisions to play on, 135–136 suicide attempt by, 131 three soliloquies by, 191–193 monologue/soliloquy, defined, 191

Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 8 Nigger of the “Narcissus” (Conrad), 69–72 Nina Leeds (Strange Interlude), 133 Oedipus Rex, as classical tragedy, 204–205 O’Neill, Edmund (brother), 102– 103, 111n19 O’Neill, Ella (mother), 104, 107, 136, 149, 160n26, 161n48, 199 O’Neill, Eugene as elegist of Freudian “family romance,” 5 as sympathetic to Tyrone family, 219 as unseen narrator, 9–10, 12–13, 16–17, 57, 200 atheism of, 40–41 Conrad’s influence on, 69–72 on family roles, 87 illness of, 160n24 note to Carlotta (wife) on play’s completion, 75, 83 on plans for play, 85 on the sea, 74 sources of, 72, 79 theatricality of, 119–120 tragic outlook on life of, 72–73, 108 See also Edmund Tyrone O’Neill, Eugene, works of Ah, Wilderness!, 85 Bound East for Cardiff, 73 Desire under the Elms, 56, 85, 206, 208–209

Index

Iceman Cometh, The, 44, 85, 92, 106, 108, 143, 151 Moon for the Misbegotten, 31 More Stately Mansions, 22, 85, 107 Mourning Becomes Electra, 55, 85, 102, 119, 120, 155, 206–207, 208 Strange Interlude, 131–132 Straw, The, 85 Touch of the Poet, 22, 85, 107, 112n23 See also Long Day’s Journey into Night O’Neill, James (father), 102–103, 119, 120, 160n23 O’Neill, Shane (son), 108 the past, symbolism of, 21, 26–28, 108, 140–141 plot structure of play discovery of Mary’s relapse, 186– 187, 200n2 Edmund’s illness and, 184–186 interscenic action, 183–184 prescenic structure of, 181–183 weather progression in, 184 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 8, 9 pseudo-soliloquy, defined, 193 Quinlan, Bridget (grandmother), 104 Quinlan, Ella. See O’Neill, Ella (mother) Quintero, Jose, 115–116 quotation, as essential element in play, 49, 139–140, 163–164, 165, 166–167, 173–177, 177n7 See also Baudelairean echoes in play Sea Mother’s Son (working title), 62 Shakespeare, references to, 57, 60– 61, 95, 164 Shaughnessy (neighbor), 130–131, 146 soliloquy/monologue, defined, 191

239

Strange Interlude (O’Neill), 131–132 Straw, The (O’Neill), 85 Strindberg, August, chamber plays and, 179 symbolism blue dressing gown, 21, 59, 193 cultural assimilation, 22–23 death, 44 family meals, 22 fog, 20–21, 23, 24–25, 94, 130– 131, 136–137, 141n1, 142n8, 151 foghorn, 137, 157–158 lost glasses, 25 morphine, 136 the past, 21, 26–28, 108, 140–141 repetition, 56 water images, 32–33, 48 weather progression, 184 wedding gown, 90–91, 107, 122 windows and Mary, 129, 136 Szondi, Peter, 128 themes, common, 49, 86, 94–95 Theory of Modern Drama (Szondi), 128–129 time, linear. See confessions as escape from time Touch of the Poet (O’Neill), 22, 85, 107, 112n23 tragedy, defined, 72, 203–204 Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno), 72–73 Unamuno, Miguel de, 72–73 “Use of Quotation in Recent Literature” (Weisgerber), 49 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 157–158 Weisgerber, Jean, 49 will power as theme, 94–95, 188–189 Williams, Tennessee, 16–17 Wordsworth, William, 8