A Very Long Day's Journey Into Decay

Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a play written by the American playwright Eugene O’Neill in the early 1940s. I must admit I had no hopes for this play, yet as I kept reading it completely got me. It’s fascinating in many ways but what I would like to focus on by now is how well elaborated this play is even though it used little resources, such as the characters themselves, and symbolism.

“Mary: (…) I do feel out of sorts this morning. I wasn't able to get much sleep with that awful foghorn going all night long.” ― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

O’Neill managed to narrate the story skillfully through symbolism, announcing what would happen next. For example, at the beginning of the play Mary complained about the foghorn noises that kept her awake during the previous night, introducing what might have been the first sign of her weakness for morphine. Later on, she kept complaining about it, and when the evening faded, they appeared again: 

“From a lighthouse beyond the harbors mouth, a foghorn is heard at regular intervals, moaning like a mournful whale in labor, and from the harbor itself, intermittently, comes the warning ringing of bells on yachts at anchor.” ― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

                                  

The reappearance of the foghorn suggests that the problem might get bigger and clearer, and it did, since Mary had a relapse that made her behave even stranger than before she went to rehab. Now, let’s try to see the gravity of the situation. Mary discovered the drug when some doctor recommended it to her for the pain after Edmund’s birth. By then, she was still coping with her previous son’s death, so morphine did not only inhibit the physical pain, but it also helped her soothe her grief. In the first scene, she realized that Edmund had the same symptoms her father had had before dying, even though she tried to ignore it. And since she had no support from her friends or her family (she actually didn't have any friends), the only thing that kept her from being miserable was morphine, which took her back to the times where she was happy. 

Her state after the relapse is alarming, because -I would dare to say that- she represents her family’s  stability. As the night fades and it gets darker and foggier, Mary’s detachment from reality and herself along with the fog that increases through the evening declare that the family’s fight against decay is lost. 

I might be wrong, but I believe that the author played with symbolism very carefully, since he wrote the play thinking of his own family. He wanted to portrait the complex struggle he and his family had lived in the simplicity of a day in their living room, and he found a successful way through the use of  symbolism. 

Sources

O’Neill, E., (1956). Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

The Biography.com website (2015). Retrieved 09:37, Aug 17, 2015, from http://www.biography.com/people/eugene-oneill-9428728.