Long Day's Journey into Night

 This blog is related to our thinking activity allotted by  Yesha Ma'am. This blog is about  Long Day's Journey Into Night play by Eugene O'Neill.

    Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a play in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939 -41,  first published posthumously in 1956. The play is widely considered  to be his magnum opus and one of the finest  American plays of the 20th century. The play setting was The Summer home of the Tyrone's,  August 1912. The play, which is considered an American masterpiece, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

  Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. He was a famed playwright and his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night,  is at the apex of a long string of great play, including beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange interlude (1928),  Ah! Wilderness (1933) and The Iceman Cometh (1946). 

Long Day's Journey into Night  'Written in Tears and Blood' 

O'Neill  completed the semi- autobiographical play in 1942 but  instructed that it not be published until 25 years after his death.   The play  portrays one day in the life of the dysfunctional lrish - American Tyrone family on a summer's day in 1912 at their cottage in New London.   Mary Tyrone is a morphine addict; her aging actor husband  James and their two sons, Jamie and Edmund are alcoholics

 Conflict between the family members- and their individual and collective despair - intensifies as the day goes on, culminating in a wrenching final scene.  

O'Neill dedicated the autobiographical work to Carlotta in honor of their 12th wedding anniversary, describing it in his dedication as a "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood." 

Theme of Addiction in Long Day's Journey Into Night 

Morphine and Alcohol 

 The plot of long day's journey into night focuses on a dysfunctional family trying to come to grips with its ambivalent emotions in the face of serious familial problems, including drug addiction, deep rooted fear and guilt. 

Mary 's  morphine addiction is balanced by the men's alcoholism.  She is on morphine in each scene of the play, and her use increases steadily as the day wears on. Although she loves Tyrone, she often times regrets marrying him because of the dreams she had to sacrifice of becoming a nun or a concert pianist.