Thus Mary loves Tyrone, as when she says, "That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time," in the final act. But Mary and Tyrone's sameness as two people both keeps them together but creates mechanisms, such as addiction, that keep them apart. This connection through denial, love, and addiction is also seen between mother and sons. At one point, Mary is seen, like Jamie, refilling the liquor bottle with water to keep the level the same. The family 'trick' keeps up appearances for both characters. This sameness in protective mechanisms of addiction seems both touching as well as tragic -- both child and mother protecting one another from one another's knowledge, through the same 'hiding' behavior, as if heredity creates both the hideous and debilitating nature addiction and the protective, loving mechanism to cover up the addiction from the family.

The Tyrone family is thus loving, but the individual members cannot help but self-destruct and implode, and thus no one member can pull the others from the addictive pits they are sinking into. Even Tyrone seems to resort to the same coping mechanisms as he did as a child, as when he insists on getting cheap care for his wife, even though the cheapness of her care from Doctor Harry may be one of the reasons she has relapsed, at least if one believe the implications of his son Jamie.

Mary could be giving voice to O'Neil's fatalistic attitude as a playwright when she says, "But I suppose life has made him [her husband] like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things that life has done to us" (63). Mary's father was an alcoholic, the play notes, and she seems to have reconfigured this relationship in her adult marriage. Tyrone's own, unflattering addiction to hording money comes, not from nowhere but Tyrone's legacy of working twelve hours a day in a factory when he was a child, alongside his mother and sisters. They worked their fingers to the bone, just to survive, and barely had enough to eat from day-to-day. Tyrone still...

He was frugal first out of love, but then his frugality became a habit and an addiction that his killing, rather than helping his ailing wife.
Thus, O'Neil's play is compassionate because it does not sentimentalize family affairs nor over-romanticize family differences and discontent -- but no family member is unworthy of some sympathy. For instance, Tyrone and Edmund fight about literature, but the only reason Tyrone the actor cares so passionately about his son's literary aspirations as a journalist and his prose is because he is an articulate actor and artist himself. Edmund's taste in literature. When he says that Edmund's favorite writers are all "atheists, fools and madmen," and "whoremongers and degenerates" it is not because he does not care about Edmund's preferences, but he cares too much. (138).

It has been said that, rather than in a voice of judgment, O'Neill's plays are "written from an intensely personal point-of-view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his [own] family's tragic relationships -- his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three." (Britannica, 2003) Whether true or not, the overall effect of the ineffectual love of the Tyrones evokes pity, compassion, horror, and understanding from the viewer or reader, rather than revulsion or aversion. Love holds the family together, and mutually shared follies, as well as proves the undoing of the individual family members.

Works Cited

Britannica. "Biography Eugene O'Neil." 2003. EONEILL on the web. http://www.eoneill.com/biography.htm[3 Mar 2005]

O'Neill, Eugene. "Long Day's Journey into Night." Yale University Press, 2002

Shafter, Yvonne. "Review of Long Day's Journey into Night." Plymouth Theatre, New York, New York, May 6-August 31, 2003 production. Review retrieved on O'Neill Website. http://www.eoneill.com/reviews/index.htm.[3 Mar 2005]