Long Day's Journey Into Night

In an essay on Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Travis Bogard says that "Art never holds a mirror up to nature. It edits, distorts, shapes so that the dramatist's sense of what the experience meant or could have meant can be discerned." O'Neill himself wrote, "Facts are facts, but the truth is beyond and outside them." This study will use the message of these two quotes as a jumping-off point to explore the relationship between "art" or "truth" and "nature" or "facts" as we find them in O'Neill's autobiographical play about his family. The study will consider the significance of the playwright's dedication to his wife, and will consider the characters of Mary, Edmund and Jamie in terms of the light they shed on these issues.

In his dedication to Carlotta, O'Neill calls the work "this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood" and says that he wrote the play "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones" (7). Before we even begin the play, then, we are in the realm of conflict between "art" and "facts."

There is, in art, the desire and the opportunity to paint a picture of life which is more clear, more understandable, more loving, perhaps, than life itself usually is. This is not to say that O'Neill did not in reality come to such a state of forgiveness and understanding for his own family, including himself. He may well have. But it is to say that, once we read in the dedication the intention of O'Neill (to pity, f

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all the light shed on the character of Mary we could feel little but identification with her sorrow and ongoing disappointment, which every human being feels many times in life. However, O'Neill gives us much more of Mary than that closing note of grief for herself and her long-lost happiness. He gives us a portrait of Mary as a woman who is capable of driving a person mad with her compulsive nervousness and obsession with controlling her husband and sons. For example, James is squaring off in an argument with the brothers, and Mary is so obsessed with keeping the peace, or the appearance of peace, that she acts in a truly schizophrenic way, first barking at James ("James! There's no reason to scold Jamie") and then reassuring him ("You mustn't mind Edmund, James. Remember he isn't well" (26). A saint might pity Mary at this point, but certainly her sons, and even her husband (who deserves little pity at this point himself), would be forgiven for feeling a little crazy having to deal with her obsessive denial of the sickness and conflict going on everywhere around her O'Neill certainly wants the reader to pity Mary by the end of the play, but obviously he feels that true pity---or love, understanding or forgiveness---cannot oc

Category: Psychology - L