"Long Day's Journey Into Night" a play by Eugene O'Neill portrays the actions of a dysfunctional family.
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” a play by Eugene O’Neill portrays the actions of a dysfunctional family and brings us on a reflective journey from when the fledgling family had started, devoted to one another with high hopes for the future, to what it is today, a family engulfed in turmoil. Each character caught up in their own cycle of self-destruction and method of escaping their reality that they do not realize that they are making their present situation that much worse. Mary, Tyrone, Jamie and Edmund have all mastered the art of denial, but have failed to understand the concept of responsibility and forgiveness. Throughout the play, O’Neill’s theme is one of a disclosure into the life of a seemingly normal family on the outside yet convoluted with bitterness on the inside, bringing O’Neill’s premise of illusion and truth into the whole story.
Mary Tyrone, a once beautiful girl who dreamed about becoming a nun or perhaps a pianist, has become terribly unsatisfied with the turn of events of her life and the person she has become, tries to flee the self proclaimed world of evils she is living in mainly through her morphine use. She blames her addiction to morphine on the stinginess of her husband, who hired a slip-shod doctor to prescribe her pain killers for the pain giving birth had caused her. Though she blames her husband it is Mary’s own anguish and guilt that caused her to keep coming back to the drugs, the guilt of leaving her baby alone with her son, which caused him to die, the guilt of letting her family slip into such a degree of disparity, that’s what she wanted to run away from and that’s why she is addicted to morphine. Throughout the story there is much mention of a fog that surrounds the house, "[Fog] hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore . . . It's the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you and warning you and calling you back . . . " (O'Neill 98-99). The fog symbolizes the alternate reality that Mary enters when she takes morphine. It's like the rest of the world is not there, and no one can reach into the fog where she is. The foghorn is a constant reminder that the fog is present and therefore points out to the reader the family had problems they can't control. Another method of forgetting reality Mary used was seeking refuge in her past, which caused her much resentment but did so time and time again like her morphine habit. She uses an idealized recreation of her girlhood as an escapist fantasy for all the turmoil that is going on around her.
