Liz Pounds, Fall 2009
Home is more of a feeling than an actual, physical place; it is an ineffable sense of deep belonging that instills in people confidence and security. Home can be anything that makes people feel safe, secure, and perfectly connected with what they love. Unfortunately for the characters in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, because their versions of home exist independently from one another, their conflict of interests ultimately destroy any sense of unity that could have flourished in the single idea of home they have tried to uphold. Specifically, the father Tyrone is only at home on the stage, and the mother, Mary, seeks to return the sense of home she felt in her girlhood. Though these characters attempt to find comfort and security as a family unit, their true homes do not involve each other. As long as they remain together, trying desperately to uphold their sham of a united home, they can never truly feel happy or at ease, and so remain without any real home.
Frederic I. Carpenter’s article, “The Romantic Tragedy of Eugene O’Neill,” examines several of O’Neill’s plays in order to trace the idea of the romantic dream and the tragedy of not attaining it. This romantic dream is significant in that it seems to be almost interchangeable with the idea of home, as is evidenced in the specific versions of home to which Tyrone and Mary cling. Carpenter suggests that the romantic dream is one of “an impossible beauty” that cannot be attained (251). However, it is evident in Long Day’s Journey into Night that Tyrone and Mary have at one point experienced the realization of their versions of home. As an actor, James Tyrone feels most confident when he is traversing a stage, trilling out Shakespearean lines to an audience. Evidence of the connection he feels with acting can be seen in Tyrone’s comment to his son: “I studied Shakespeare as you’d study the Bible [… ] I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry” (O’Neill 153). His sentiments seem to express the very definition of home as a deep connection to a particular passion. Here, Tyrone has elevated his love of acting to a nearly ideal status, wherein he is able to conquer any obstacle, and nothing can rattle his confidence. Through his acting career, Tyrone has created a sense of home that belongs entirely to himself.
Tyrone, however, is on vacation at his summer house and is therefore removed from the security of acting, his romantic dream. He is unable to stop himself from comparing this romantic dream to the reality in which he currently finds himself, albeit with tragic consequences; as Carpenter states, “[t]he contrast has emphasized the ugliness of modern reality” (251). Indeed, Carpenter’s comment seems to ring true, as Tyrone’s reality is certainly far less comforting than his true version of home. The reason his reality is so unappealing is because, among his family in the summer house, Tyrone is expected to help maintain the illusion that the family’s living together provides all the comfort they need to find a home among each other.
However, Tyrone lies at the heart of the family’s inability to draw from each other the necessary trust and security to foster that sense of home. His frequent attempts to uphold a cheerful atmosphere by masking his suspicions that Mary is once again using morphine backfire, creating in Mary a damaging sense of distrust. This distrust disrupts the balance of the house, as Mary laments, “It makes it so much harder, living in this atmosphere of constant suspicion, knowing everyone is spying on me, and none of you believe in me, or trust me” (O’Neill 47). Though Tyrone intends to project a comforting feeling of home on the rest of his family, he is ultimately unsuccessful and ends up only adding to the already strained mood in the house, a condition hardly conducive to the formation of a sense of security.
Mary’s characterization of her husband suggests that his failure to unite the family through a feeling of security is because “[h]e doesn’t understand a home. He doesn’t feel at home in it” (O’Neill 64). What she fails to realize is that Tyrone already has a home in his acting, one that does not involve her, but one that he understands more than anything else. It is only when he attempts to create a new home that Tyrone experiences failure and uncertainty, perhaps because the idea of a new home where his family is united has become that unattainable romantic dream that Carpenter discusses in his article. It would follow, then, that Tyrone’s failure to establish this sense of home is “the clear recognition of the dream’s impossibility [that] [leads] him towards resignation and quiescence” (Carpenter 251). His resignation is evident by the end of the play, as the last thing he does is pour himself a drink and take a seat (O’Neill 178-179). His actions indicate that he has given up trying to find a feeling of belonging with his family. His true home will always be on the stage, away from Mary.
Mary can never return to her real home because it exists only in the distant past. In a morphine haze, Mary describes the life she once had and could have had if she had not married Tyrone: “I told [Mother Elizabeth] I wanted to be a nun [… ] I said I knew […] that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent […] I never lost my faith in her” (O’Neill 178-179). The conviction with which Mary delivers these lines indicates that her mind had been fiercely made up to pursue her dream of being a nun; it seems the convent was her true home because it was there that she felt the deepest sense of belonging. She recalls this feeling, saying, “At the Convent I had so many friends […] I used to visit them and they’d visit me in my father’s home” (O’Neill 88). Here, it becomes apparent that Mary craves companionship, something that the play soon reveals she barely receives in the life she has chosen with Tyrone. It is this need to feel accepted and loved that probably initially attracted her to the romantic dream of being a nun, for after all, a nun is a person of great purpose and belonging, qualities that Mary strives to attain.
In dredging up these memories of Mary’s true happiness, she, like Tyrone, begins to compare what could have been to what actually is. As a result, she finds her current state of affairs wholly unsatisfying; as Carpenter states, “the remembrance of the romantic dream [leads] to the rejection of the actuality” (253). Indeed, Mary does seem to reject her actuality, her dissatisfaction stemming from the lack of attention she receives from her family. She tells Tyrone that their house is not a true home because “[i]n a real home one is never lonely” (O’Neill 74). Judging from Mary’s statement, it is safe to assume that she constantly feels lonely and neglected, which she would not have experience if she had remained in her true home, surrounded by friends who loved her. Instead Mary’s actuality is a life plagued by loneliness, as is evidenced by the relief and happiness she expresses when Tyrone and her sons return from their outing: “Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely!” (O’Neill 110). It is this constant loneliness that seems to drive her to reject the sham of a home she has with her family, in a desperate attempt to reconnect with her past life, her real home.
Returning to Carpenter’s belief that the romantic dream is unattainable, it becomes apparent that Mary falls victim to the unattainability of her romantic dream. She can never go back to the past, so in a sense, she is tragically trapped in her present. She must rely on her morphine addiction to aid her in rejecting the life she chose by marrying Tyrone and, in turn, attempt to reconnect with her romantic dream. The description of Mary after she injects the drug indicates that the treatment does work: “She has hidden deeper within herself and found refuge and release in a dream where present reality is but an appearance to be accepted and dismissed unfeelingly […] or even ignored” (O’Neill 99). Ignore it she does, as most of her dialogue following her morphine injection revolves not around her present but around the life she led before Tyrone and her life shortly after they marry. She tells the servant how she did not fit in with Tyrone’s acting life: “I never felt at home in the theater” (O’Neill 104). She also goes on to tell herself that she was “much happier before [she] knew he existed, in the Convent where [she] used to pray to the Blessed Virgin” (O’Neill 109). Clearly, these revelations are testaments to how much more content Mary was when she existed in her real version of home, instead of the one Tyrone has attempted to force on her.
Morphine allows Mary to fully enter a dreamlike state wherein she believes she has actually reconnected with her past. In this episode, she acts presumably like the young girl she once was, saying, “You must not try to hold me. It isn’t right, when I am hoping to be a nun” (O’Neill 177). Her change is significant in that not only has she attained her romantic dream, even if it is only an illusion, she is, at least for the duration of her drug trip, no longer a victim of a false sense of home. Carpenter writes of the characters who attempt to make their dreams a reality, claiming, “[t]hey have dreamed not of realization, but of escape” (251). Mary is, therefore, free from the confines of her forced home, while Tyrone has given up any hope that he can continue trying to give her a shadow of security. Her real sense of home cannot include Tyrone because Mary only felt truly happy when she did not have any connection to him.
A sense of home must provide a person with a feeling of complete security and belonging. This idea of home seems to mimic the concept of the romantic dream put forth by Carpenter in his article, “The Romantic Tragedy of Eugene O’Neill,” which explores the tragic consequences of attempting to attain this dream. For Mary and Tyrone, their true homes do offer them the comforts of security and belonging; however, neither character can be a part of the other’s romantic dream. Tyrone and Mary’s tragedy seems, therefore, to lie in the exclusivity of their versions of home, which prevent them from ever being able to find a real feeling of home in their family unit.
Works Cited
Carpenter, Frederic I. “The Romantic Tragedy of Eugene O’Neill.” College English 6.5
(Feb. 1945): 250-258. JSTOR. JSTOR. UMass Dartmouth Lib., Dartmouth, MA. 12 Dec. 2008.
O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.