“The right way is to remember. So you’ll always be on your guard. You know what has happened before… That’s what makes it so hard- for all of us. We can’t forget” (45-48). Throughout Long Day’s Journey Into Night, author Eugene O’Neill offers temporary escape routes for his characters to indulge in. Some, even most of these agents, introduce corruption into the Tyrone family (Thiessen). Instead of directly dealing with difficult situations, all four Tyrones isolate themselves from each other to the point where a stifling sense of loneliness and despair envelopes them. In order to provide needed relief from the hysteria, O’Neil induces different elements, such as drink, fog, or transcendence, to protect his characters from reality.
Throughout "Long Day’s Journey Into Night", the use of whisky serves as a corrupted substitute for all pain, while unconsciously distracting the characters from the real pain they face. When drunken with his father, the poetic Edmund recites Baudelaire with complete sincerity, “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question… be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you will. But be drunken” (135). To enforce the effect of a temporary escape, O’Neill constantly has his characters interact while partially or completely drunken. This state of mind serves as a relaxing element. It seems as if these characters can only converse openly in the midst of whisky or some other form of alcohol. Instead of facing the true reality of their chaotic lives, the family, excluding Mary Tyrone, drink to subsidize turmoil. Another character, known for his dreaming, recalls a dream he once had of the sea. Edmund reminisces, “I became drunk to the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment, I lost myself- actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged… within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to Life itself!” (156) Just as being in a drunken state helps to “deny the reality of the present” (Thiessen), another element also allows for escape.
“Why is it fog makes everything sound so sad and lost, I wonder?” (123) Mary’s response to the fog creates a certain ironic twist that ultimately forms a wall around her and her family (Thiessen). While in one situation, Mary criticizes the fog for isolating her from happiness, the next she praises it for protecting her. “I really love fog… it hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel everything has changed and nothing seems to be. No one can find you or touch you anymore” (100). In a sense, Mary’s love-hate relationship with the fog parallels an oscillating vehicle of her “drug-induced escape”: morphine (Thiessen). Just as the fog acts as both a protector and a barrier, Mary’s morphine addiction ironically represents both relief and isolation. Mary’s family express their resentment towards her addiction by subconsciously alluding to her love of the fog. “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” (139; Thiessen). Along with Mary’s appreciation of the fog, her son, Edmund, also comes to love the feeling obtained when wrapped in its darkening hold. “The fog was where I wanted to be… 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 itself… [it was] as if I was a ghost belonging to the fog…It felt so damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost” (133).
Rather than confronting the overwhelming pain directly, each Tyrone reverts nostalgically to a dream or some lost memory (Thiessen). “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” (87). Throughout the play, the members of the Tyrone family each desire to transcend in order to “escape the reality of the present time… and remove themselves from the community of the present” (Thiessen). To describe these characters completely, one might refer them to be ghosts of their own past. As the play unfolds, readers discover how truly unhappy these characters are by their constant desire to be somewhere or somebody else. Mary continually remembers her girlhood, at times reverting her behavior to that of a schoolgirl (Thiessen). She also reminds herself of her dreams before she married James Tyrone, “I had two dreams. To become a nun, that was the more beautiful one. To become a concert pianist, that was the other” (104). Although Mary seems to be the ultimate “ghost” in their lives, other family members also journey into their past to resurrect old memories of happiness. James reminisces his old acting days, where people respected him, “That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did”, and recalls it being one of the greatest events in his career. “I had life where I wanted it” (150). On the other hand, Edmund’s transcendental memory is solitary, “isolated not only from his family, but from each individual living person, so that he could be united with all people through nature, escaping his own human body” (Thiessen). “[I] became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the breeze… For a second there is meaning… It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish” (156-157).
Even though drink, fog, and transcendence supply the Tyrone family with a temporary escape, the painful reality is that it encourages a dependency on those reoccurring elements. Rather than immediately addressing the factors that “perpetuate their misery” (Thiessen), the family rotates through the dependency cycle, until it ultimately smothers and ruins them. So, in fact, the sources of escape do not aid their survival, but eventually lead to their destruction, isolating the Tyrones from all hope.
Works Cited
Alone in the Dark: Isolation in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. 1999-2008. Trinity Western University. Bryan Thiessen. eOneill.com. 21 Sept. 2008. <http://www.eoneill.com/library/essays/thiessen2.htm>
