Family conflict in Long Day's Journey into Night.

1. Family Conflict in
Long Day’s Journey
into Night

2. ◈ •Name:- Aamena Rangwala
◈ •Roll no:-1
◈ •Enrollment no:-4069206420210028
◈ •Subject:- The American Literature
◈ •Email id:- aamenarangwala51@gmail.com
◈ •Batch:- (2021-23) M.A Sem 2
◈ Submitted to:-Department of English Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
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Content
1.Writers introduction
2. Summary
3.Family conflict in Long Day’s
Journey into Night
4.Conclusion

4. Biography of Eugene O’Neill
◈ This reference is taken from The Nobel Prize.
◈ Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16th, 1888, in New York City.The father was
an alcoholic and his mother abused morphine, which she received as a painkiller
when her son was born.
◈ Addiction is a recurring theme in O’Neill’s works. Before his breakthrough as a
playwright, O’Neill lived an rotative life.
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◈ Eugene O'Neill was nominated for ‘The Nobel Prize in literature
1936’.
◈ Eugene O’Neill received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1937.
◈ He died on 27 November 1953, Boston,Massachusetts , U.S.
◈ After his death O’Neill also received the award Pulitzer Prize in
1957,for his best known and most often produced work, Long Day’s
Journey into Night.
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6. ◈ This information is taken from Britannica.Com.
◈ O’Neill’s autobiographical play is based on the gloomy life of a couple and
their two sons. James Tyrone, a semiretired actor, is vain, self-obsessed,
and miserly; his wife, Mary, feels worthless and retreats into a morphine-
induced haze. Jamie, their older son, is a bitter alcoholic.
◈ James refuses to acknowledge the illness of his consumptive younger son,
Edmund.
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Summary

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◈ As Mary sinks into hallucination and madness, father and sons confront each
other in searing scenes that reveal their hidden motives and interdependence.
◈ O’Neill wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten (1952) as a sequel, charting the
subsequent life of Jamie Tyrone.
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8. Family conflict in Long Day’s Journey into Night
◈ This information is taken from (Al-Lehaibi International Journal of Language &
Literature 10.15640/ijll.v3n1a12).
◈ The play is founded upon endless conflict. The father, James Tyrone, is a
miserly man who seems to have failed everyone in the family, including his
wife, Mary. After giving birth to their son, Edmund, Mary is in great pain, and
James sends her to “an ignorant quack of a cheap hotel doctor” because he is
inexpensive . The doctor prescribes Mary morphine, and she ultimately
becomes addicted to it.
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9. ◈ James also fails in his marriage to Mary because he is always away from
home and drinks too much.
◈ In addition, James fails his younger son, Edmund, in sending him to a
cheap, second-rate sanatorium rather than to a more expensive venue
when he is diagnosed with TB. Edmund rails against his father, “But to
think when it’s a question of your son having consumption, you can show
yourself before the whole town as such a stinking old tightwad” .
◈ He also fails his older son, Jamie, by turning him into a drunkard.
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Continue…

10. Conflict Caused by Jealousy between Parents
◈ Conflict Caused by Jealousy between Siblings to parents .
◈ Conflict develops into a jealous rivalry between Mary and James with
regard to their children. Mary says “I know why he wants to send you to a
sanatorium…to take you away from me! He’s always tried to do that. He’s
been jealous of every one of my babies! He kept finding ways to make me
leave them.
◈ He’s been jealous of you most of all. He knew I loved you best” .
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11. Conflict Caused by the Lack of a Home
◈ Home is the center of family life, but James has failed to secure such a center
for his family. Edmund blames his father, Tyrone, for his mother’s addiction to
dope. He says to his father: I know damn well she’s not to blame!
◈ Mary complains that, if she had had a home, none of the disasters they had
faced in life would have happened:there is only some place I could go to get
away for a day .some woman friend I could talk to not about anything serious,
simply laugh and gossip and forget worries for a while.
◈ However, Mary then shows a sense of understanding and sympathy for
Tyrone: “I suppose life has made him like that and he can’t help it. None of us
can help the things that life has done to us”.
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12. Conflict between the past and present
◈ Mary is the one who is more unable to forget the past more Mary uses
morphine, the more she tends to delve back into the past. In fact, her addiction
to drugs is partly caused by her desire to leave the present and come back to a
time when she was happier and was full of hope.
◈ This becomes clear in the “re-memory” of experiences Mary and James
negotiate as they go back and forth discussing innocent childhood dreams of the
past and shared nightmares of the present.. In what follows, the two characters
suddenly return to their past in sharing a kiss. James kisses Mary and
immediately recognizes her as the innocent young girl he married.
◈ She reminisces about her wedding gown, which, to her, signifies the youth,
beauty, innocence, and life she had before her incessant pain.
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Conclusion
◈ The play ultimately suggest the idea that we have to accept the things in
our lives that we cannot change. Regardless of the bitterness and blame
that permeates the family’s dialogue, each of the family members is
emotionally invested in and dependent on one another.
◈ In his 1972 review of the play, William C. Young wrote, “the Tyron family’s
tragedy is undergirded by love.” Despite the conflicts in their relationships,
“there is genuine love in the midst of the apparent hate” .

14. Citation
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◈ Al-Lehaibi, Majed S. “International Journal of Language & Literature.” Family
Conflict Theory in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night : International
Journal of Language & Literature, American Research Institute for Policy
Development, June 2015, ijll-net.com/index.php/vol-3-no-1-june-2015-
abstract-12-ijll.
◈ Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Long Day’s Journey into Night".
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Sep. 2020,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Long-Days-Journey-into-Night-play-by-
ONeill. Accessed 13 April 2022.
◈ Eugene O’Neill – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB
2022. Tue. 12 Apr 2022.

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