Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is one of the most representative American playwrights of the 20th century. His debut play was Beyond the Horizon (1920) --a drama of two brothers who took a different path in life than the one each wished because of the same woman. He won four times the Pulitzer Prize: Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night. And in 1936, Eugene O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Long Day’s Journey into Night was finished on 20 December 1940—as the author wrote at the end of the manuscript. It was a gift for his wife on the occasion of their 12th wedding anniversary. The play is the dramatic story of an American family with two sons and unhappy with their lives as most of O’Neill’s characters are. The story unfolds in four acts and the action is set at the summer house of the Tyrones, on a day of August in 1912. In Act III, we learn about a fog coming from (Long Island) Sound that is in New York, so the house is in Connecticut. The play has four characters: James and Mary Tyrone (father and mother, married for over thirty years and still in love), Jamie and Edmund (older and younger sons). James is a theater actor. This allowed for a significant number of quotes and allusions to Shakespeare. Mary was educated in a religious establishment and she wanted to become a pianist, which allowed music at the end of the play. The two sons take a lot from their father: from drinking to literature and theater. Jamie is the only one who has a line paraphrasing the New Testament, so the mother educated her sons in the Catholic religion. From the two sons, Jamie took mostly the drinking part from the father while Edmund took the cultural knowledge quoting from philosophers and poets. “TYRONE (thickly). Where you get your taste in authors — That damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, 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.” (Tyrone, Act IV) But both Mary and Edmund were sick and what that was, whether it was a mental or a physical illness, whether they accepted it, if there were any cure for what they had, all unfold gradually keeping the reader in suspense until the end of the play. Their illnesses are the lenses through which we learn the good and the bad about each character’s past, present, and Edmund’s future. “The past is present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.” (Mary, Act II, scene 2) Eugene O’Neill knows his characters from all points of views and in the smallest details. The settings are described at length and the scene directions are precise. His text has a literary value. Furthermore, despite the American segregation, O’Neill’s text is inclusive. He gave Edmund a line (Act I) that mentions Jack Johnson, who was the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion. The text included an autobiographical echo when O’Neill mentioned a hotel in Manhattan (New York) where he tried to commit suicide when he was in his early twenties (Act IV). Thank God it was a failed attempt! At 52, Eugene O’Neill wrote the modern drama masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night awarded post-mortem a Pulitzer Prize (1957).
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