Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night: "Crumble and fade and--regrets--recriminations … 'If you'd done this, it wouldn't've cost me that!' " - Page 4

The junkie mother pretty much takes care of the horror in the piece, but she's also witty, not just passively as a playwright's conception, but actively, as a sharp-tongued wife. You should not make too little of the comedy. The Broadway cast at any rate got most of the laughs and that's central to the way O'Neill reimagines tragedy for the modern stage here. He had tried a decade earlier with Mourning Becomes Electra to transpose ancient Greek tragedy to the Civil War era in Massachusetts and while the play is intense it doesn't come across as modern or American, exactly, and the motive remains obscure. It feels like a willed act of despair, out of touch with the sense of tragedy as the poet's way of guessing how far death penetrates life from the other side of … we don't know what for sure. (Which, oddly, is why it makes sense both that Greek tragedies were presented as part of religious festivals and that modern secular audiences still respond to it.)

With Long Day's Journey O'Neill abandoned the Greek model, which also led him to abandon the high status of the tragic figures in both ancient and Renaissance drama. The Tyrone family is grand, in the American way: partly by virtue of having scrabbled to the top, and partly by virtue of putting on airs. Whether or not this adjustment was necessary for a theater patronized by a modern, democratic, educated, middle-class paying audience, it certainly suits the representational literary mind since the advent of the realistic novel in the 18th century (which came into existence at the same time as the modern audience).

But the lowering of the characters' status doesn't just introduce realistic representation; it also brings in irony. Irony becomes inevitable when the inherited tradition of tragedy deals with mundane lives--the Tyrones, Jr. and Sr., trimming hedges in front of the shabby summer house in which the bill-paying patriarch that night will chide his son for leaving the lights burning, and so on. It should be a comfort to Philip Roth who in Portnoy's Complaint felt that Jewishness kept his torment from being majestic enough for tragedy. O'Neill makes it seem like a modern condition, and sees what's bitterly funny about our suffering like royalty and feeling there must be a dignified literature to memorialize it.

The comedy is also central to the family theme. The harsh jokes the Tyrones make at each other's expense reflect the kind of comedy possible only within a family because you don't have the wealth of information about anybody else--not just what they've said and done but what they're particularly sensitive about--and nobody else would put up with it. When Tyrone, Sr. says to Mary that the house is not a prison, she says, "No. I know you can't help thinking it's a home," and all the complaints we've heard about his cheapness, about his dragging her and the children on the road with him year after year, about the shabbiness of the summer house which is the only settled abode they've had, and about Mary's isolation because she's too ashamed to invite anybody over (though it's also because she's been too proud to socialize with theater people), set the audience up for explosive laughter at her malicious wit. We need all the exposition to appreciate how ingenious the attacks are.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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