This document summarizes key aspects of Eugene O'Neill's play "Long Day's Journey Into Night" as presented by Mahir Pari Goswami. It discusses how the mother figure, Mary Tyrone, acts as the instigator of psychological conflicts in the family through her morphine addiction, performances of suffering, and manipulation of her sons' guilt. Her addiction is used both to escape her problems and remind her family of her suffering. This has negatively impacted her sons' relationships with women and reinforced their codependence on Mary and alcohol. The document analyzes how O'Neill portrayed the restructuring of the Oedipus complex in the play through the family's dynamics.

1. The mother figure & guilt,
dependence
Presented by
Mahir Pari Goswami
( Teaching assistant )

2. • The mother figure, typically seen as
the stabilising influence on the
familial structure in modern
American theatre, is contrasted in
the Tyrone family by O’Neill as the
foremost instigator for the family’s
psychological conflicts.

3. • Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into
Night exhibits all the characteristics
hallmarks which Sanford Sternlicht
attributes to the women which appear in
O’Neill’s plays, she represents herself as
“a mother, submissive wife, aggressive
daughter, heartbreaker and addict, bar
two, adulterer and prostitute".

4. • These negative roles, however, lie in
stark contrast to Mary’s own pious
consistencies of faithfulness, both in
those of her marriage to James Tyrone
and that of her Catholic religious
upbringing. Mary’s romanticised
memories of convent life acts as a
reminder of her innocent childhood
compared to the psychological
emptiness she feels in her role as a
destabilised wife and mother.

5. • Her lack of faith in her theatrical family
lifestyle finds catharsis through her
display of the regular performances she
makes in front of her family in order to
present her psychological suffering as a
kind of martyrdom.

6. Addiction & Escapism
•Her morphine addiction is more than
an ever threatening relapse of her ill
health, it is the weakness by which
Mary can identify herself as being the
family’s longest suffering victim.

7. • Whereas the Tyrone men find
escapism through alcohol and
financial scheming as a way of dealing
with or forgetting about their
problems and the shared familial guilt
they experience towards one another,
Mary uses morphine not only to
escape her suffering but to constantly
remind her family of it.

8. • The result of the guilt which both Jamie
and Edmund feel as a result of their
mother’s suffering for and and within her
religious faith and familial situation is
apparent in their attitudes towards their
personal relationships with women.
• Jamie and Edmund’s frequenting of
brothels as opposed to the pursuit of
relationships with respectable society
women shows just how damaging the
effects of their mother’s piousness and
emotional fragility have had on the
women they choose to encounter.

9. Oedipus complex
• The fact they cannot find the time to respect or
even pity women in the way they adore or
worry about their mother reflects their guilt by
way of a particularly O’Neill idea of the
restructuring of the Oedipus complex
• In Jamie’s case, he frantically eludes her with
“Mad Ophelia” (O’Neill, 4:106) the most poetic
description of any woman he gives in the play.

10. • Mary herself analyses this oedipal
neuroses herself when shepresumes the
Jamie will “divide” the money his father
has given him for going to town with
Jamie, alluding to how they “divide” their
attitudes on women, guilt and devotion
towards their mother and their
dependencies on alcohol and on her, in
act two, scene two of the play

11. •Mary: You always divide with each
other, don’t you? Like good sports.
Well, I know what he’ll do with his
share. Get drunk someplace with the
only kind of women he likes or
understands. (O’Neill, 2:22, 55)

12. • By commenting on how their sons
“divide” all their financial allowances
and ideological consumption, Mary is
also hinting to the audiences her
awareness that her sons also share a
divided guilt about her emotional state,
indicating a vindictive attempt on her
behalf to control her sons’ individual
sense of themselves.

13. • Jamie and Edmund are constantly
reminded of their debt to her as a mother
who has give up her health and sanity in
order to raise them. Mary therefore
controls her sons by means of the same
psychological guilt that has caused her
morphine addiction, and lays the
foundations for the alcohol addiction that
is destroying her sons.

14. Work Citation
• Barnes, W. (n.d.). Guilt and Dependence as
Practised Family Religions in Eugene O' Neil's Long
Day's Journey Into Night and Marsha Norman's
'night Mother. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from
https://www.academia.edu/6731500/Guilt_and_D
ependence_as_Practised_Family_Religions_in_Eug
ene_O_Neils_Long_Days_Journey_Into_Night_and
_Marsha_Normans_night_Mother