Long Day's Journey into Night by : Eugene O'Neill

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Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene
O'Neill

• Characterization

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Eugene O'Neill

• He is generally regarded as America's finest
  playwright, was born on October 16, 1888, in New
  York City, the youngest son of James (a
  successful actor) and Mary Ellen (Quinlan)
  O'Neill. The family was Irish-Catholic, and
  O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school
  and then to Betts Academy in Stamford,
  Connecticut, before enrolling at Princeton
  University in 1906. He left Princeton a year
  later.
• O'Neill was emotionally scarred by his mother's
  addition to morphine, and the fact that it was
  his birth that precipitated her addiction. She
  tried to commit suicide in 1902.

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• The year 1912 was a crucial one for O'Neill. He
  continued to drink heavily, and lacking stable
  employment, was forced to depend on his father
  for financial assistance. He attempted suicide by
  taking a drug overdose, and he also divorced his
  wife. During the summer and fall, his father took
  him to their summer house in New London,
  Connecticut. This is the period of O'Neill's life
  that appears in the character of Edmund in
  O'Neill's play, Long Day's Journey Into Night,
  which is set in 1912.

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• O'Neill was established as the leading American
  dramatist of the day.
• Strange Interlude, which lasted for nearly five
  hours in performance, is often regarded as the
  first play in which O'Neill revealed his full
  power as a dramatist. It won for him his third
  Pulitzer Prize.
• In 1936, O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for
  Literature, the first American dramatist to
  receive the award.

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• prevented O'Neill writing any plays during the
  last decade of his life. He died of pneumonia on
  November 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachusetts

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Introduction

• Long Day's Journey Into Night, written in 1941
  but not staged until three years after his death.
  This autobiographical play about the troubles of
  the O'Neill family won O'Neill's fourth Pulitzer
  Prize, in 1957.

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• Long Day's Journey into Night was never performed
  during O'Neill's lifetime. On his twelfth wedding
  anniversary with his wife Carlotta, O'Neill gave
  her the script of the play with this note

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• For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
• 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 enable 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!
• Gene
• Tao House
• July 22, 1941.

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• The play is deeply autobiographical. O'Neill,
  like Edmund, was the child of a Broadway actor.
  The O'Neills were Irish-American, as are the
  Tyrones. Catholicism looms large in both
  families, with a religious father appalled by his
  sons' apparent rejection of the Church. O'Neill's
  father was an alcoholic, and like James Tyrone,
  he gave up a promising career as a Shakespearean
  actor for a part in a commercial but artistically
  worthless play called Monte Cristo. In the play,
  Tyrone speaks of this commercial success but
  never names it. O'Neill's mother in real-life was
  a morphine addict, and like Mary, became one
  after the birth of her youngest child. Jamie is
  also modeled after O'Neill's real-life brother, a
  dissolute alcoholic whoremonger who failed
  miserably at everything he put his hand to. And
  Eugene had an older brother named Edmund who died
  as a baby in the play, the dead middle son is
  named Eugene

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Character list

• James Tyrone Husband of Mary and the father of
  Jamie
  and Edmund
• Mary Tyrone The wife of Tyrone and mother
  of
  Jamie and Edmund
• Jamie Tyrone The elder Tyrone son, he is
  in his
  early thirties
• Edmund Tyrone  The younger Tyrone son, he is ten
  
  years younger than Jamie

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James Tyrone

• James Tyrone is a vigorous, healthy man of
  sixty-five. His predominant trait, other than the
  fact that he drinks too much, is his miserliness,
  which is to blame for many of the family's
  troubles. Tyrone refuses to spend money on their
  summer house to make it pleasant for his wife,
  and he tries to send Edmund to a state sanatorium
  just to save money. Although he is comparatively
  well off, Tyrone lives in fear of ending his days
  in poverty. He tries to secure his future by
  investing in real estate, but he rarely makes a
  good deal. The origins of his miserliness lie in
  his childhood. His father deserted the family and
  at the age of ten, Tyrone was sent to work long
  hours in a machine shop. The family was always
  poor, and Tyrone learned, as he frequently puts
  it, the value of a dollar.

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• Tyrone is an actor who as a young man was
  considered one of the most promising actors in
  America. But he squandered his talent by
  performing for years in a popular melodrama, thus
  getting typecast and ruining his chances of
  getting other, more challenging roles. He traded
  artistic excellence for financial success, and he
  bitterly regrets it. Tyrone is an Irish Catholic
  who despises his sons for rejecting the faith. He
  thinks Jamie is an idle, ungrateful loafer and
  has no respect for Edmund's reading in poetry and
  philosophy, denouncing Edmund's favorite authors
  as atheists and degenerates. Tyrone's great love
  is Shakespeare, and he thinks all other writers
  are inferior.
• Tyrone has a genuine love for his wife, but is
  thrust into despair when she lapses back into her
  addiction. He knows the situation is hopeless.

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Quotes .

• "If he's ever had a loftier dream than whores and
  whiskey, he's never shown it." Act 3
• Tyrone speaks about Jamie.

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Mary Tyrone

• Mary Tyrone is fifty-four years old. She was once
  beautiful and still has a youthful figure, as
  well as a charming, innocent manner. But her
  manner also betrays extreme nervousness. Her
  hands are never still. They too were once
  beautiful, but have become gnarled and ugly
  through rheumatism.

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• Mary was raised in a prosperous home and she was
  devoted to her father, who died of consumption.
  Educated in a convent, she wanted to become a nun
  or a concert pianist, and she looks back at this
  period as a happy time in her life. She was
  introduced to James Tyrone by her father, and
  fell in love with him immediately. But their life
  together, although initially happy, was hard on
  her. She had to travel a lot, stay in lonely,
  cheap hotels and eat bad food. Her husband
  refused to spend enough money to make their
  summer home a pleasant one. One son, Eugene, died
  when he was two, and Mary blames herself because
  she left the baby with her mother so that she
  could accompany her husband on his travels.
  Weakened by the strain of their lifestyle, Mary
  became sick after giving birth to Edmund. She was
  prescribed morphine by an incompetent doctor and
  became addicted to it. She also feels guilty
  about Edmund's bad health, since after Eugene's
  death she felt she was not worthy of being a
  mother and that God would punish her if she gave
  birth again.

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• When the play begins, Mary has been home for two
  months after going away to get cured of her
  addiction, and Tyrone believes she has recovered.
  But it soon becomes obvious that she has not. She
  cannot face the fact that Edmund is seriously
  ill, claiming that he has nothing more than a
  common cold, and starts taking morphine again.
  This cushions her from reality, and as the play
  progresses she starts to live in the past, since
  the present is too painful for her to endure. By
  the end of the play, she has regressed completely
  into the past and talks as if she is still a girl
  at the convent

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Quotes .

• "None of us can help the things life has done to
  us." Act 2, scene 1
• Mary tries to excuse her son Jamie for his
  faults, but her comment reveals her attitude to
  herself as well.
• "I hate doctors! They'll do anything-anything to
  keep you coming back to them. They'll sell their
  souls! What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you
  never know it till one day you find yourself in
  hell!" Act 2, scene 2
• Mary gives vent to her anger.
• "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the
  future, too." Act 2, scene 2
• Mary expresses her depressed vision of how people
  are slaves to what happened in the past.

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Jamie Tyrone

• Jamie Tyrone is thirty-three years old.
  Physically, he takes after his father, and has
  the same robust constitution. But Jamie is a
  cynical man who is wasting his life. He was
  expelled from every college he ever attended,
  although he did acquire some training as an
  actor. With the help of his father he has had
  some success in that profession on Broadway, but
  he never saves any money and is broke by the end
  of the theater season.

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• During the summer, he earns his keep at the
  Tyrones' summer home by taking care of the
  grounds. But he spends most of his time drinking
  whiskey and hanging out at the brothels in town.
  He and his father, who thinks he is a lazy,
  ungrateful, good-for-nothing, quarrel bitterly
  throughout the play. Jamie has been a huge
  disappointment for his father. He has also been a
  bad influence on his brother. At first he tries
  to deny this, saying that Edmund is stubborn and
  independent, but near the end of the play he
  admits that he has deliberately tried to make
  Edmund fail, since a successful brother would
  have made his own failure more galling.

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Quotes .

• if you can't be good you can at least be
  careful." Act 1
• Jamie summarizes the advice he gave to his
  younger brother.
• "Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get
  you nowhere fast. That's where I've got-nowhere.
  Where everyone lands in the end, even if more of
  the suckers won't admit it." Act 4
• Jamie finally confesses the truth about his own
  life.
• "The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia! " Act 4
• Jamie's sardonic remark when his mother enters
  the room, apparently unaware of her surroundings
  

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Edmund Tyrone

• Edmund Tyrone is twenty-three years old and is
  the youngest member of the family. Unlike Jamie,
  he does not have his father's strong
  constitution, but takes more after his mother. He
  suffers from tuberculosis and must shortly go
  away to a sanatorium for treatment.

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• Edmund has led a restless life. His older brother
  was a bad influence on him, and he was expelled
  from college. After that he went to sea, ending
  up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He knows what it
  is like to work hard for low pay. Often in South
  America he was broke and slept on park benches
  because he had nowhere else to go. Once he tried
  to commit suicide. At the time the play takes
  place, Edmund has a job as a reporter on a local
  newspaper, in which he also publishes some of his
  poems. His father hopes that he is now on the
  road to success, having found something he wants
  to do.

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• Edmund rejects the Catholicism of his father and
  is well read in modern poetry and philosophy. He
  has a gloomy attitude to life. Fond of his
  mother, he holds out hope for her as long as he
  possibly can, longer than the cynical Jamie. He
  has many resentments against his father,
  especially when Tyrone wants to send him to a
  cheap sanatorium. But by the end of the play he
  has a deeper understanding of why his father
  behaves the way he does. He also learns to
  understand the love-hate relationship he has with
  Jamie.

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Quotes .

• . "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." Act 4
• Edmund speaks of his feelings as he walked home
  in the fog.
• "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." Act 4
• Edmund tells his father about the ecstasy of some
  of his experiences at sea.
• For a second you see-and seeing the secret are
  the secret. For a second there is meaning." Act 4
• Edmund talks about the meaning of his peak
  experiences at sea.

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Done by

• Siham Ali Al-Shehri
• Huda Muhammad Al-Faify
• Bodour Gabal Al-Solmi
• Nawal Safar Al- Amri
• Nouf Al-Otaibi