Although we hear “dope” a few times in the reading for this week, morphine is Mary Tyrone’s drug of choice. Oh, uh… spoiler alert? The word morphine appears three times, in the last quarter of play.
A friend of mine was administered morphine during pregnancy late last summer: one of her pelvic bones (the acetabulum, probably, where the femur joins the hip) fractured from calcium depletion. I went to the ER with my mom once when she disjointed her hip replacement (same location as my friend’s fracture), and they gave her various “dope” escalating to valium and propofol. My brother, a doctor, has led me to believe that modern medicine’s use for morphine is as a rare last resort for extreme pain.
Even when we read “dope” early in the play, the type of drug isn’t explicit. Here are a couple definitions of dope from the Oxford English Dictionary online:
1. Any thick liquid or semi-fluid used as an article of food, or as a lubricant.
2. A preparation, mixture, or drug which is not specifically named; “stuff,” slang (orig. U.S.).
Here are two from the New Oxford American Dictionary:
1. informal: a drug taken illegally for recreational purposes, esp. marijuana or heroin.
• a drug taken by an athlete to improve performance: [as modifier]: he failed a dope test.
Edmund says the word morphine twice, both times with Mary as the subject of the sentence (“she’d never have known morphine existed” and “she’d been made a morphine addict”). James, Sr., says it once, in reference to his ignorance—“What did I know of morphine?”.
What do we make of the linguistic constructions of these sentences? That is, why is Mary the subject in Edmund’s lines, but Tyrone is the subject of his own? Why is Tyrone’s a question and Edmund’s are declarative? Why do the Tyrones generally avoid the word while not at all avoiding the subject of suspecting Mary (for the record, variations of the word “suspect” appear fifteen times in the play)? Why are these the two characters who do say it?
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