Long Day\'s Journey Into Night by Eugene O\'Neill

¶ … Journey into Night

It is an irony of Eugene O'Neill's career that his large-scale expressionist dramas of the 1920s and 1930s -- which earned Pulitzers for works like Strange Interlude and ultimately the Nobel Prize in Literature for O'Neill himself -- seem to have fallen entirely out of the repertory, and O'Neill is remembered chiefly for his least characteristic plays: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill's biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb note that not only do these plays share an obsessive central concern with alcohol, O'Neill also "set both in 1912" and to some extent Long Day's Journey "can be regarded as its sequel" (Gelb and Gelb 506). The posthumous publication and staging of this autobiographical domestic drama Eugene O'Neill's classic American domestic drama Long Day's Journey Into Night has raised the question of why O'Neill apparently withheld the play during his lifetime. To some extent the honesty of its depiction of alcoholism seems to have been too much for him to acknowledge publicly, corresponding precisely with the metaphoric use of alcohol in The Iceman Cometh as a means of avoiding the truth through "pipe dreams." In Iceman the embittered ex-radical Larry, who serves as Greek chorus in O'Neill's saloon-room epic, summarizes the alcoholic's "pipe dreams" this way: "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. And that's enough philosophic wisdom to give you for one drink of rot-gut" (Iceman 9). In other words, the play about alcoholism which O'Neill staged during his lifetime insists on the similarities of the "pipe dreams" of alcoholics as an expressionist version of what motivates ordinary people. In Long Day's Journey, though, alcohol takes on a different meaning -- not as a motivation for ordinary people, but as a pathology specific to art. Over the course of the day which provides the play with its brooding title, the Tyrone family interacts with alcohol -- starting, seemingly, at breakfast -- and alcohol is always present and visible onstage, like a baleful additional character within the confines of O'Neill's small-cast chamber drama. I hope to demonstrate that the image of alcohol is deliberately used to provoke a set of specific assocations which cluster around the word Jamie uses to describe his drinking -- "romantic." I will show how O'Neill clusters the imagery and the use of alcohol in the play around three different ideas of the "romantic," in the sense of erotic, foolish, and sublime or death-dealing (in its manifestation as the specific aesthetic of the Romantic movement). But in conclusion I will address alcohol's role within the play's larger treatment of addictive substances generally, and also the way in which alcohol is actually O'Neill's ultimate clue to the play's meaning, through its role in the dramatic climax of the play's closing moments.

The set of associations adhering to alcohol that I would like to identify among many others in Long Day's Journey into Night is one that I will loosely term "Romantic." It is important that I do not invoke this literary and artistic term out of thin air -- it is the word used in the play by Jamie Tyrone, in the culminating analysis he gives to his brother Edmund in analyzing their own relationship. Jamie claims that he has always been an obstacle in his brother's life, because of an element in his own psychology that he defines thus:

. . . Or part of me did. A big part. That part that's been dead so long. That hates life. My putting you wise so you'd learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it's a fake. Made my mistakes look good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of work as a sucker's game. Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet! (159)

When Jamie is saying that his own deeply-ingrained instinct for perversity not only enabled him to be a negative inluence on his sibling, it also "made getting drunk romantic" in the same way -- out of sheer perversity, because getting drunk is assumed not to be romantic. Yet the same transformation that Jamie describes is, of course, the way in which alcohol alters the drinker's perception.

If "getting drunk" has to be transformed into something "romantic" in order to be enjoyed, it is noteworthy that for Jamie it also manages to transform women into something "romantic" as well. This is made perfectly clear in Jamie's lurid description of his encounter with the prostitute Fat Violet, who is described as being as much a "drunk" as Jamie himself. The transfiguration of base matter into the stuff of romance is effected upon Jamie not only through the ministrations of alcohol when he approaches Violet, but also is re-enacted in the actual speech whereby he describes it to Edmund drunkenly:

By applying my natural God-given talents in their proper sphere, I shall attain the pinnacle of success! I'll be the lover of the fat woman in Barnum and Bailey's circus! . . . Pah! Imagine me sunk to the fat girl in a hick town hooker shop! . . . But you're right. To hell with repining! Fat Violet's a good kid. Glad I stayed with her. Christian act. Cured her of blues. Hell of a good time. (154)

The "romantic" transformation of the sordid act is here entirely recapitulated by Jamie in miniature: he starts off with a grandiose jest at his own expense, then expresses the base fact of his own self-pity at having become so dissipated ("Imagine me sunk to the fat girl"), but finally resolves itself by transmuting the episode into a lofty and ultimately moral experience, and even a "hell of a good time."