LDJiN Mini Research Paper

Setting in the truest sense of the word means the surroundings or environment of anything. In all plays, the author writes in stage directions on how they envision the scenes to be played out; the very beginning of Long Day’s Journey into Night opens up with “easy banter of the Tyrone family after breakfast and ends at night with the characters defenseless and in large measure defeated … surrounded by the outer darkness.” (O’Neill, Gale). This play, an autobiographical work written by Eugene O’Neill, takes place in the temporary summer home, the Tao House. The word Tao describes the flow of the universe and of nature itself; true to this statement, the elements in this play demonstrate the simplicity and naivety of denial.

Characters constantly find solace in the fog that surrounds the house. Mary, a morphine addict, tells Cathleen, a maid in the house, that the fog “hides you from the world and the world from you… No one can find or touch you anymore.” Mary feels at peace in the fog because she can deny the problems in her life. She forgets her second-born son’s death, her inability to overcome her addiction, Edmund’s apparent illness. She can continue to live her life with eyes glazed over under the pretense of a better life. The fog which is the very atmosphere for the Tyrones, gives a false sense of security for these characters; this creates the misperception that all of life’s problems can be ignored as long as the vision is impaired.

The darkness inside of the Tao House due to James Tyrone’s frugality exemplifies the isolation from the truth. James refuses to have lights on, despite Edmund and Jaime’s pleas for light to be shed. James doesn’t want to face the destruction within the house, the destruction he had a part of. He could have prevented Mary’s addiction if he spent more money for a better sanatorium; he sees that Jaime, his first born son bearing his name, is a lost cause and has no hope of rising from the ashes. Through isolation in the darkness of the Tao House, James can experience the hopeless solitude that will only last until the morning sheds the rays of truth through the windows. This gift of vision, seen as a curse for James, is often prevented with the drawing of the curtains. He will do whatever it takes to delay the sight of anything dealing with the present, thus projecting the family into the never ending spiral towards the past.

Instead of accepting inalienable truths, the characters live day-to-day in a haze of being ghost like. Edmund feels “damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost” (O’Neill, 133) which describes the feelings flowing through the veins of the Tyrones. Mary’s final appearance in the play consists of her in a morphine induced hallucination of being a concert pianist, holding her wedding dress in her frail arms. Jaime sleeps with the women in town with reckless abandon, not seeking a better path for his life, in order to forget his failure and to make even fat women like Fat Violet feel loved and appreciated.

These characters, embodying aspects of O’Neill’s life, can not and will not overlook the conflicts and achieve steps to pursuing a better life. They have the opportunity to resurrect themselves but they consistently choose not to. Despite the simplicity in their childlike denial, it is detrimental to the family relationships within the play. The Tyrones are so beyond help that this defiance against the true nature of events might be necessary in order to even survive. None of the characters are near the stage of self-actualization, which will only fuel their unending elliptical pattern until they ultimately perish.


Bibliography
"O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night Opens, November 7, 1956." DISCovering U.S. History. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Junior Reference Collection. Gale. Lee County Library System. 21 Sept. 2008
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O'Neill, Eugene. “A Long Day's Journey into Night”. Yale UP, 1989.