Long Day’s Journey into Night 847lished posthumously at its author’s request. O’Neill
(1888–1953) received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for
Drama in recognition of what many consider to be
his masterpiece.
The play is based on the interplay between love
and hatred among the four members of the Tyrone
family on the day when they find out that Mary,
the mother, has gone back on morphine, and the
younger son, Edmund, is suffering from tuberculosis.
Mary blames her addiction on her husband James
Tyrone’s stinginess, while he reproaches his wife
for her lack of will to fight her addiction. Jamie, the
elder son, is a failed actor. He has drinking problems
caused by his mother’s condition, his own failure,
and a sense of inferiority to Edmund. Edmund is a
promising intellectual who blames his father for his
mother’s addiction and feels guilty that she started
on morphine to kill the pains after he was born.
Each has caused great suffering to the others; nev-
ertheless, the family ties are so strong that although
each has symbolically “left” the family several times,
they have always returned.
The play has only four characters: Mary, James,
Jamie, and Edmund Tyrone. Cathleen, the maid,
appears only briefly. Through these characters,
O’Neill explores such themes as family, guilt,
memory, alienation, illness, love, and suffer-
ing. The play is a bitter analysis of family bonds, of
how close or how harmful parents can be to children
and children to parents. It also points at the effects
alcohol and drug abuse can have on family life.
Aloisia Sorop
FamILy in Long Day’s Journey into Night
What makes a family? Few would say that blood ties
are all that are needed; most would call for strong
affection among its members, a common past and
a shared sense of the future, a home and a sense
of mutual responsibility. Are the Tyrones a family?
This is a question Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s
Journey into Night tries to answer by presenting one
day in their life in August 1912.
There is much love and much hatred among the
four Tyrones. Each has caused the failure or tragedy
of the others. Each displays great fondness for the
others but at the same time has his or her own way
of alienating the family. There is constant tension
between each of them and the whole family. They
seem to belong to and at the same time try to tear
away from the family. They show their tenderness
by using nicknames such as “Kid” and “Old Man,”
but they also sneer at one another and use invectives
such as “Broadway loafer,” and “dope-fiend mother.”
The father, James Tyrone, Sr., has always been
closefisted as a result of his very difficult child-
hood. His stinginess, for which the whole fam-
ily repeatedly reproaches him, caused Mary to
be treated by a cheap doctor after she delivered
Edmund, and she consequently became a morphine
addict. Even now, when he is a well-off estate owner,
he makes arrangements for Edmund to be admitted
to a cheap state sanatorium. He is also responsible
for Jamie’s hard drinking habit, as he used to soothe
him with alcohol when he was a child. Despite this,
Tyrone is devoted to his family; he loves his wife
dearly and does his best to protect her from upset-
ting news such as Edmund’s serious illness.
Mary has sacrificed much for James. She left a
rich, well-educated family when she married Tyrone
and started touring the country with him. She used
to be a good wife and mother until she was hurt:
physically, when she was treated with morphine, and
mentally, when her infant son, Eugene, died from
measles as she left him behind and joined Tyrone
on his tour. The lack of a proper home and femi-
nine company that would have offered her stability,
social status, and psychological balance turns her
into a slowly disintegrating person who symbolically
“leaves” her family by deceiving herself that Edmund
has only “a bad summer cold” and finding oblivion in
morphine and memories of the past.
Jamie and Edmund are intelligent, though not
successful in their careers. Jamie kept being expelled
from colleges and he became an actor against his
will. Edmund is a poet and a journalist, widely
read and sensitive. The two sons are terribly upset
to see their mother falling back on morphine after
her short attempt at rehabilitation. They are loving
and at the same time loathing. They reproach their
parents for their weaknesses, but they also long for
harmony in the family. They side together against
their parents, but they also side with their mother in
blaming Tyrone for his self-centeredness, and with
their father when he accuses Mary of losing her will