Explore the Role of the Past in Long Day's Journey into Night

AS and A Level English

Jack Hextall

Explore the Role of the Past in Long Day’s Journey into Night

Early on in Eugene O’Neill’s play we can see how the past has had an incurable effect on the Tyrone family. Each character has had to endure their own sufferings, and most of these are related in some way to other family members. From an early age Tyrone was left by his father and so growing up to him was actually survival. He managed to help provide his small family with a bare minimum of food and clothing, and eventually started making a substantial amount of money through hard work. However, this success story has resulted in a permanent fault of character. Speaking of his childhood near the end of the play, he explains, “It was in those days I learned to be a miser … Once you’ve learned a lesson, its hard to unlearn it” (p.129). The past has made life difficult for Tyrone and his family because even though he is well off, his unwillingness to spend money has cut off many opportunities, the most blatant being the reluctance to pay for a sanatorium for his dying son.

Much of Mary’s past is happy, with her happy at a convent school and in a loving family. However, she has also had opportunities lost when she married Tyrone at an early age. This frustration becomes an obsession for Mary, who now has no hope of fulfilling these childhood pipe dreams of becoming a nun or a concert pianist, but cannot forget them. Mary became addicted to morphine after bearing her third child Edmund. This has not only crippled her sense of will power and her physical and mental condition, but has made her blame everyone but herself. This denial is obvious to the other family members, but in their own ways they are all guilty of lying to themselves and others. While sometimes Edmund denies the fact that his mother is back on the drugs, Tyrone denies that he is a miser and a drinker: “I never in my life had to be helped to bed, or missed a performance” (p. 98). Mary also denies to herself that Edmund is seriously ill: “It’s just a pose you get out of books! You’re not really sick at all” (p. 78).

One of the main themes of the play is whether the characters can really get on with life after such a history of turmoil. At one point Tyrone begs Mary to forget the past. “How can I?” she exclaims, “The past is the present isn’t it? It’s the future too” (p. 75). This is Mary’s bleak outlook on life, and she believes that one has minimal control. Although this may help her in the short term, by the end of the play we realise that she, like the rest of the family, never has properly addressed her troubles. This means ...

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One of the main themes of the play is whether the characters can really get on with life after such a history of turmoil. At one point Tyrone begs Mary to forget the past. “How can I?” she exclaims, “The past is the present isn’t it? It’s the future too” (p. 75). This is Mary’s bleak outlook on life, and she believes that one has minimal control. Although this may help her in the short term, by the end of the play we realise that she, like the rest of the family, never has properly addressed her troubles. This means that much of the tension between the characters has been held in and is only released when they are not in their right minds.

One way to forget the past, and therefore the present in this case, is by escaping rational thought. The drinking men are better at this than Mary since they do not fall back into the past, but are simply oblivious to the problems that surround them. Edmund argues: “What’s wrong with being drunk? It’s what we’re after isn’t it?” (p. 114). This shows that the drinkers know exactly why they drink, and see it as a calculated risk. Mary on the other hand tends to become trapped in the past when she is inebriated on morphine. This effect usually contains pleasant parts, such as reliving her happy childhood, and unsavoury parts, such as at the end of the play when she accuses Tyrone of bringing the end to her satisfaction. When Mary talks of the fog, she is providing a metaphor for escape. She explains, “It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seems to be” (p. 84). Edmund also feels this way about the ever present fog: “To be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself” (p. 113)

If the fog represents escape and intoxication, then the foghorn is a metaphor for reality. It is a constant annoyance, especially for Mary. It drags her back from her dreamland to the real world, which for her is filled with worry suspicion, addiction and blame. She says, “It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back” (p. 85). The horn is one of the things that Mary is trying to escape, shown when she retires to the notorious spare room after being woken by it. This shows how her addiction is a vicious cycle.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is very closely based on Oneill’s own family life. His father’s family were left by their father as Irish immigrants in New York as a result of the potato famine of around 1840. In the play the characters and dialogue are based on O’Neill’s family life, with Edmund portraying the author as a young man. This reveals to us why the past is such a prominent issue. One of the reasons the play was written was so that the author could try to understand his past. Therefore, since Oneill was much older when he wrote this, not only do the characters have their own histories, but also the whole story is part of the writer’s past.

In conclusion, the past is such an overwhelming feature of this family’s life that one suspects they will never be able to leave its shadow. They have not begun to address their problems properly, substituting long term repair with short-term escape. All the characters in feel, in differing ways, their own blame and guilt towards the others. We are left with a sorrowful and bleak message and it is this that makes the play so inescapably tragic and harrowing.

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