Study Guide to Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, one of the best American plays of the twentieth-century.

As a play of the twentieth-century, Long Day's Journey into Night dives into universal themes of loneliness and love. Moreover, it masterfully displays integral human emotions in a way that pulls on the heart strings of all audiences. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Eugene O'Neill's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO EUGENE O’NEILL

 

EARLY LIFE

Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel on October 16, 1888. His father was a popular actor of romantic melodrama and Eugene’s first seven years were spent in the larger towns all over the United States. The success of the Count of Monte Cristo, in which his father played the lead, kept the family engaged in almost continuous road tours. From the age of seven to thirteen he attended boarding schools. In 1902 he was sent to Betts Academy at Stamford and the autumn after his graduation he entered Princeton. Although his parents were Catholic, and he had been in and out of parochial schools from an early age, by the time he entered Princeton he had left the Church and never returned to it.

DISCONTENT WITH COLLEGE

In June of 1903 he was dismissed from Princeton, supposedly for throwing a beer bottle through a window of President Wilson’s house. He could have returned the following year, but he had become bored with college and left to become a secretary in a New York mail-order house, the first in a long series of jobs he held before settling down to write.

YEARS OF WANDERING

In 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins, a union that ended in divorce in 1912. In the same year he went on a gold-prospecting trip to Honduras. He had been reading Jack London, Kipling and Conrad, and we can see in the many journeys of his youth a desire to lead the rugged life of adventure that those writers took as their central theme. In 1910 he shipped on a Norwegian barque for Buenos Aires where he worked at some odds jobs, but ended up, in his own words, “a bum on the docks.” In 1911, after a trip to Africa on a cattle steamer, he returned to New York where he lived at “Jimmy the Priest’s,” a waterfront dive which provided the setting for the first act of Anna Christie. After a last voyage to England he found himself on a train to New Orleans following a wild party. His father was playing there in the perennially popular Monte Cristo. He refused to give his son a handout, but did give him a part in the play. At the close of the season the O’Neills returned to their summer home in New London, Connecticut, where Eugene worked as a cub reporter on the Telegraph.

HIS DESIRE TO WRITE

In December of 1912 O’Neill entered a tuberculosis sanatorium. Weakened by years of irregular living, his health had broken down. During his fifteen month convalescence he first felt the urge to write. When he left the sanatorium he was a man with a purpose. To rebuild his health he disciplined himself to a life of exercise and hard work. In the next sixteen months he wrote eleven one-act plays, two long plays, and some poetry. He read omnivorously, in his own words “the Greeks and Elizabethans-practically all the classics - and of course all the moderns.”

FIRST PLAYS

In the fall of 1914 he went to Harvard to take Professor George Baker’s famous course in playwriting. In the same year his father financed the publication of his first book, Thirst and Other One-act Plays. Several plays in Thirst take men against the sea as their theme. O’Neill’s classic statement of his theme is in the so-called Glencairn group, a sequence of one-act plays dealing with the tramp steamer Glencairn. The group consists of The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home and In the Zone. In these plays man is shown in conflict with nature, which is indifferent to his suffering and inevitable doom. In his early naturalism O’Neill was deeply indebted to Jack London.

FIRST SUCCESS

In 1916 the Provincetown Players put on Bound East for Cardiff. It was O’Neill’s first play to be acted. The Players were a group of Greenwich Village journalists, writers and painters who were interested in rejuvenating the American theater. In 1917-18 he had three plays published in Smart Set, a magazine of protest against the self-satisfied middle class, whose editors, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, were already known as literary critics. The production of Beyond the Horizon in 1920 brought O’Neill his first Pulitzer Prize, and from then until his death no one seriously questioned that he was the leading American playwright of his generation. In 1918 he had married Agnes Boulton Burton, and now, riding the wave of success, he had great faith in the future. However, he resolved he would never sell out to success. His father had felt that the temptation of easy money to be had from a play such as Monte Cristo had ruined his chances of becoming a fine actor. O’Neill resolved he would remain true to his dream and work to express the truth he had in him.

DISILLUSIONMENT

In spite of his remarkable success, O’Neill was convinced that bad fortune was hounding him. Throughout his life, except for brief periods, he had the feeling that man is at the mercy of mysterious forces beyond his control. He began to look back with nostalgia upon his seafaring days, and longed to be on the move again.

FINANCIAL SUCCESS

In the fall of 1920 The Emperor Jones was staged in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Buenos Aires, laying the foundation for O’Neill’s international reputation. One year later Anna Christie opened in New York and brought him his second Pulitzer Prize. In 1922 The Hairy Ape was a success. It dramatized the idea that man has lost his old harmony with nature and is out of place in the modern, technological world. Late in 1922 O’Neill was making $850 a week in royalties. He bought a farm at Ridgefield, Connecticut, and settled down to live in landed elegance as his father had always desired to do.

HIS PESSIMISM

However, O’Neill could not settle down and two years later he was living in Bermuda and working on the idea for Mourning Becomes Electra. His idea of man at the mercy of mysterious forces had broadened through his reading of Freud, a German psychologist (1856-1939), Nietzsche, a German ethical writer who detested Christianity (1844-19000), and Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the romantic period (1788-1860). From Freud he took the idea of man trapped by his unconscious sexual desires. Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy reinforced the naturalistic determinism that had been fostered by his reading of London and Conrad, and his own erratic life. From Nietzsche he took a joyous acceptance of despair as the only sane attitude for a man faced with an indifferent universe.

HONORED FOR HIS WORK

In 1926 he received the degree of Doctor of Literature from Yale University. Although at the height of his career, his personal life was a shambles. The following year he left his wife and two children to court Carlotta Monterey, the actress who had starred in The Hairy Ape. In 1928 Strange Interlude won a third Pulitzer Prize for him. Eugene and Carlotta took a whirlwind trip around the world and settled in a French chateau where he finished Mourning Becomes Electra. The play was presented in New York in October of 1931 and was immediately hailed as his masterpiece. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that “it may turn out to be the only permanent contribution yet made by the twentieth century to dramatic literature.”

AWARDED NOBEL PRIZE

From 1932 to 1936 O’Neill lived on an island off the coast of Georgia. The only successful play he wrote during this period was Ah, Wilderness!, the only comedy he ever composed. The play ran for 289 performances and brought O’Neill $75,000. In November of 1936 he moved to Oregon with plans to write a cycle of plays designed to tell the story of the United States from the early 1700s. In the same month he became the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize.

HIS LAST WORK

During the latter part of his life only a few O’Neill plays were produced. In 1941 he completed the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night which was first staged in 1956, three years after his death. It won his fourth Pulitzer Prize. His vision of life had not changed and the characters are unable to control the dark forces that shape their destinies. The Iceman Cometh was staged in 1946. It was an enormous success, but the play is uncompromisingly nihilistic in its philosophy. He suggests that man’s urge toward the unattainable is his only justification, but what the unattainable is he can never know. O’Neill died in 1953 at the age of sixty-five. No one doubted that he was the greatest playwright America had produced.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

INTRODUCTION

The best introduction to this play was written by O’Neill himself. In dedicating the original manuscript to his wife, he said her love gave him the “faith in love” necessary to write this play, to “write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” Each word of the dedication is fraught with meaning, but for our purpose the most important words are “faith in love,” and “haunted Tyrones.”

Certainly it was O’Neill’s new-found “faith in love” that made possible his pity, understanding, and forgiveness. Critics, commentators, and psychologists have alluded to his “unhappy and insecure childhood” in attempting to account for his predilection for tragedy; perhaps at last he did finally find love, happiness, and security. Brooks Atkinson commented thus on Long Day’s Journey: “The pity, the understanding and the forgiveness that spread through the last act are like a kind of sorrowful benediction and bring a relentless drama to a magnificent conclusion.” (See “O’Neill’s Journey,” New York Times (November 18, 1956, II, 1.)

The use of the adjective “haunted” in the dedication stresses the importance of the supernatural, the spiritual, the unknown. This concern with a Force or power over which man has no control is echoed in the mother’s comment, “None of us can help the things life has done to us.” In this play we see that although O’Neill was unable to explain Life, he was able to accept what Life offered. Lionel Trilling once wrote, “To affirm that life exists and is somehow good - this, then, became O’Neill’s quasi-religious poetic function....” (See “Eugene O’Neill,” The New Republic, 88 (September 23, 1936) 179).

Perhaps like Schopenhauer (German philosopher, 1788-1860) O’Neill would say, “If our life were endless and painless it would probably occur to no one why the world exists.”

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS

To show that Long Day’s Journey Into Night is autobiographical is not necessary-O’Neill’s dedication and the fact that he originally stipulated that it not be published until twenty-five years after his death prove its authenticity as a page from the author’s life. (It is interesting to note that after his death, his wife gave permission to have it published, but Random House, which held the manuscript, felt duty-bound not to publish it. The manuscript was then given to Yale University which subsequently published it.) Our concern in this section is with the facts of O’Neill’s life as they were in August 1912, the date of the play, and what had happened immediately prior to that time.

In December of 1911, O’Neill was forced to go through with a rather sordid episode at a brothel in order to give his first wife grounds for divorce. (In New York State the only grounds for divorce is adultery.) At the request of her lawyer, arrangements were made so that “official witnesses” could testify to his infidelity. Being forced to submit to such a sham was undoubtedly humiliating. Prior to this “episode” O’Neill had been on an extended binge, but soon after, he found himself connected with his father’s acting company (to the dismay of both).

Very early in 1912, O’Neill returned to New York and resumed his attempt to drink and forget. His mother’s drug addiction had grown worse and James O’Neill, Sr., had been forced to send her to a sanitarium near Denver. To top everything off, his roommate at the dive where he had holed-up committed suicide - and O’Neill attempted to follow suit. How sincere this attempt was we are not sure - but in Long Day’s Journey Edmund [O’Neill] does say he is a “little in love with death.”) By July, he and his father had reached a kind of understanding, and O’Neill agreed to spend the summer in New London. Using his father’s influence to get the job, he went to work as a reporter for the New London Telegraph.

These are the facts as we know them. How true his portraits of the individual members of the family were, we will discuss later. In this play the characters, the setting, the references to the past, and the family relationships are, for the most part, “true to life.” The one notable exception is the lack of any mention of O’Neill’s first wife or any allusion to his marriage. Whether he considered the incident too unimportant or too painful, whether he wished to ignore her or forget her, we will never know. However, this is the only significant event or person figuring in O’Neill’s life up to this time that is omitted.

Although the play is autobiographical it would be wrong to assume that the play is an accurate accounting of the events of a single day. Long Day’s Journey is a confession, a revelation, a baring of O’Neill’s soul, but it is also a work of art and not simply a verbatim account of everyday incidents. Consequently, events before and after the fact are included and others are invented. (For instance, O’Neill did not actually learn he had tuberculosis until very late in the fall of 1912.) A writer very often chooses, alters, and arranges his material so that the “truth” he presents is more “real” than the events to which he may allude.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE

O’Neill was much concerned with the connotations of...