Mealtime at the Tyrone House

The first three acts are centered around it. Many of their conversations take place waiting for it or directly after it. Yet we never actually see them doing it, and, very in line with the structure of the play, family meals at the Tyrone house disintegrate over the course of the day, although they are served with an impressive rigidity.

In theory, these meals must be a way for Mary bring her family together, at least three times a day, but as the day goes on and less and less people actually show up for family mealtime it is clear that it is merely a facade to make it seem as if they are. Discussion before mealtimes has a rushed, expectant air, like everyone is waiting for it to be over already. Discussion after mealtimes usually revolves around what each person is going to do until the next mealtime.

Now for attendance. Breakfast: All four members of the family are present. Lunch: All four members of the family are present, but Mary is on morphine and lunch is stalled considerably because Tyrone is outside talking to the neighbors. Dinner: Just Tyrone and Edmund. Jamie hasn't come home yet, and Mary says she's not hungry (ie. goes upstairs for more morphine). Even the maid is drunk.

It can be concluded that the mealtimes constitute the framework for the structure of not only the play, but every day of the summer for this family. As depressing as the play ended, what makes it even more tragic is the fact that they are all going to wake up the next morning for breakfast, and do the exact same thing all over again. I take back the word disintegrate to describe the meals because it implies that there is some kind of progression; while the nature of the meals vary from one to the next that progression gets blended together and repeated, much in line with the other themes of the play.

Jamie's Self Image

In Act Four, we get an interesting impression of Jamie's inconsistent view of himself. In his telling the story of his evening, Jamie paints himself as someone who helps other people more than he does himself but simultaneously as someone who knows he hurts others

Jamie's self-image as a self-sacrificing helper is implied when he describes his evening in the brothel and how he chose to visit an unpopular prostitute who wouldn't have had customers without him.

However, when Jamie confesses that he's purposefully tried to make Edmund fail, he demonstrates a fatalistic view of his faults. Although he can admit that he resents and wants to hurt his brother, he doesn't try to change. Like Pop-Eye, "I yam what I yam. "This is still better than the rest of the family, who seem blind or in denial of their faults. Mary never speaks of her addiction. Tyrone doesn't admit that he's stingy for most of the play.

Substance

Reading Long Day's Journey Into Night reminds me of a song by the (now broken-up) band Girls called "Substance." Much like the content of the play, the song's lyrics probe at the concept of escape from reality and pain through substance. Yes, there are plenty of other songs that describe substance abuse (e.g. "Heroine" by The Velvet Underground, anything by The Beatles, and many more), but this one describes the melancholic feel of the play perfectly.

Here are some of its lyrics (although thoroughly depressing, the song as a whole is a worthwhile listen):

"It doesn't have to be this way,
I know something
to take the corners off
and help you rock and roll
right down the road.

And if you want to shape your brain,
I know a substance,
that gets rid of everything
and helps you rock and roll
out of control.

Who wants something real,
when we could have nothing?
Why not just give up,
who wants to try?
Let go of the wheel
turn your ass over
come on take it
it's a simple ride.

I take the key in my hand and it opens up the day
I take the key in my hand and it takes the pain away.

But if I had love I'd throw it all away."

As a bit of background, the song is from an EP called "Broken Dreams Club," and the lead singer, Christopher Owens, spent his childhood without a father and raised in a cult with his mother who was driven to prostitution. He experienced addiction problems of his own, and these lyrics, I feel, resonate critically with some of the emotions that the characters (Mary, in particular) are feeling.

Mary's addiction can be summarized pretty well with these lyrics. On the most superficial level, she uses morphine as an easy way out of the "real" problems she's facing (Who wants something real / when we could have nothing?). On a more subtle level, she also thinks that the drug empowers her by alleviating her pain, whereas in reality she is surrendering her power to the drug, helping her "rock and roll out of control"--but not in a fun way.

The last part of the song is what gets me the most. The female chorus which croons "I take the key in my hand and it opens up the day / I take the key in my hand and it takes the pain away" three times builds up a steady, predictable, and comfortable rhythm. Then, the song ends with a twist that almost sounds like an afterthought, "But if I had love I'd throw it all away." 

I'll leave you to think about it.

Card Games

I found the use of playing cards in Act Four very telling. Succeeding at a game of cards generally involves two components—the luck of the draw and the skills of the player of the game. This dichotomy seems to be something that can be applied to the Tyrone family, as we, or even the family members themselves, wonder if their difficult lot in life is simply destiny being fulfilled, or if their past choices, often dwelled upon by the characters, have made all the difference.

In other words, where does the fault lie? Is hardship really avoidable? This sort of a question comes about as Tyrone and Edmund talk. Edmund ruminates on life’s craziness, and in Tyrone’s response, it is clear that he believes that it is a matter of choice, as he quotes, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

This question of choice relates to other themes in the play, such as addiction. Can Mary be held accountable for succumbing, once again, to her addiction? Is it a matter of willpower—a choice she is making? Or is it a destiny she became locked into long ago?

At the beginning of Act Four, James (Tyrone) is pictured shuffling and reshuffling cards. To me, this is a sort of attempt by him to ask for a different lot in life—to see if he can get a better hand, because the one he has been dealt is devastating.

--Francesca

Take it from Baudelaire

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”

(Translated for Long Day's Journey Into Night by Arthur Symons)

Charles Baudelaire
Enivrez-vous (Paris Spleen, 1864)
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve. 
   Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.
   Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront: "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Baudelaire_Enivrez-vous.html

Since the work of Baudelaire came up in my French class as well as this class last week, I decided to focus my blog post on Edmund's translation of Baudelaire's "Enivrez-Vous" (Be Drunken). I emboldened the parts of the passage that I found to be most significant, in French and in English. I was hoping to find some sort of discrepancy between the two, but as it turns out, Symon's English translation adheres pretty closely to Baudelaire's original poem.

Anyway, I think the poem speaks volumes to the situation of the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey Into Night. They're all trying to evade the passage of time. More precisely, the Tyrones try to avoid any sort of conscious awareness of time's passage. Mary, for example, cannot accept the fact that her past aspirations (to be a nun, to be a show pianist) are forever lost. So instead of living in the present and coping with her situation, Mary dopes herself up on morphine. She lives in world cloaked by a foggy, drug-induced haze. 

Earlier in the play, in Act III, Mary speaks to Cathleen with regard to her hands: "See, Cathleen, how ugly they are! So maimed and crippled... I won't look at them. They're worse than the foghorn for reminding me... but even they can't touch me now... they're far away. I see them, but the pain is gone" (106). To this, Cathleen replies, "If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd a drop taken."

Mary uses the morphine to escape the physical and emotional pain of her present reality. Edmund, Jamie and Tyrone essentially do the same throughout the play with their whiskey. Someone mentioned last class that the whiskey is used not only to assuage the Tyrone men's sufferings, but also to impugn each other's actions. For example, Tyrone scolds Edmund for drinking, "I shouldn't have given you that drink" and then agrees with him moments later that drinking is the only way for them to forget the past. 

The majority of Long Day's Journey Into Night is centered on substance abuse. Baudelaire urges people to be drunken always to avoid the burden of passing time; but of of course, Baudelaire speaks of drunkenness from virtue and from poetry, not just from mind-altering substances such as alcohol and morphine. The Tyrones are perhaps a bit overly-fixated on Baudelaires encouragement to be "drunken of wine." Why not try out poetry sometime, Mary? 


-Kayla

It's the Ciiircle of Liiiiiife

The entire day of the Tyrone’s revolves around cycles. The most obvious cycles appear to be the addictions, especially Mary’s. As the senior James Tyrone says to his sons after discovering Mary’s relapse, “We’ve lived with this before and now we must again…Only I wish she hadn’t led me to hope this time. (O’Neill 80). It is notable that Tyrone mentions that he was led to hope this time, implying that there has been a time before when Mary was fighting her addiction and he did not have hope. Therefore, this would not be Mary’s first cycle of recovery and relapse. However, Mary is not the only character who suffers from addiction and is trapped in a cycle. As Becca mentioned last week, Tyrone and his two sons, James Tyrone Jr. (Jamie) and Edmund, together consume at least five handles of whiskey in the space of time we are with them in the play. In addition, we hear Jamie’s constant drinking being criticized by his parents multiple times. In addition, each act but act one begins with whiskey, further proving the men’s alcoholism. The men are trapped by alcohol and Mary by morphine. Thus, every member of the family is stuck in one or another cycle of addiction.

Furthermore, the play itself operates in a cyclic pattern. Even the title, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, implies the repetition of each day’s progression into night. The beginning of each act shows the characters gathered together in the living room again after a period of separation. Every act also occurs just before or after a meal, with the exception of act four. Act one is after breakfast, act two before lunch, and act three just before dinner. However, act four is still centered on the table, where James and Edmund drink and play cards.

-Anna

Also, who doesn't like the Lion King? Although, Lion King is much more positive than LDJIN. 

Second Semester Senior

“That was in the winter of my senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.”

That last line is heart wrenching. It emphasizes the power of love; a theme I feel is lost within the play. Love seems to be overshadowed by yelling, drug abuse, alcoholism, and the bitterness that has been piled up over the years. Yet we see glimpses of the strong love they have for one another. For example, when Edmund and James play cards and drink away their problems, although once again alcohol rules, the moment seems incredibly sincere. The fact that James shares the story of his past (buying a play and only making money off of one character) with Edmund gives us the insight that he loves his son. On top of that, he lets Edmund choose whichever sanatorium he wants to attend, within reason of course, but for a man as stingy as James this action reveals the incredible amount of love has for his child. This love can also be seen in Jamie’s confession to his brother.

What interests me most however, is Mary’s love. Does she have any? If she does, why the morphine? And that’s what makes the last line so powerful… she is still in love. True love never dies, no matter how much alcohol or morphine you poison it with. The problem is although Mary’s love isn’t dead her happiness is, and the drugs become a way to fog the sadness and try to live in the past. She wants to forget her horrible home and family, and denies Edmund’s sickness. If only the morphine could numb the pain and give her just a bit of happiness it would take her back to the spring of her senior year.

-Ameet

Lack of Respect

 One of the things that I do when I read is I feel like I’m part of the story to the point where I get genuinely frustrated with the characters, as if they were real. I don’t appreciate the static nature of this family, and I will take this post as an opportunity to preach about how and why they’re doing the whole “family” thing wrong.

Every time they get somewhere with their arguments, the Tyrones will find excuses to end the conversation. Whenever Mary starts up a healthy rant on her family’s mistakes, she is attacked by her self-consciousness and meekly rambles about her physical appearance. When she’s not doped up, she feels guilty about her addiction to the point where she has no confidence in her words. This, in turn, causes her family to doubt her (they already doubt her enough for the morphine), so the Tyrone men don’t seem to hear what she’s saying anyway. Instead of respecting her turn, they stare at her pityingly, and she asks them why they’re doing that instead of continuing her necessary lecture. 

Likewise, Jamie just takes his father’s insults with a shrug or simple dismissal. Tyrone just seems really irritable all the time, except when he has moments of pity for Edmund and his wife. He doesn’t know where he stands on any issue (e.g. he struggles to pick between Shaughnessy and Harker because, as we discussed, Shaughnessy represents Tyrone’s bitterness, but Harker represents Tyrone’s aspirations), so he is unable to establish himself as the solid patriarch. Honestly, Edmund seems to be the most rational of them all, but everyone feels sorry for him anyway because he has tuberculosis and his existence stems from the questionable need to replace a dead baby.

This is when I ask myself why I’m so fed up with this family and, more to the point, why this family doesn’t work. The Tyrones share a crippling lack of respect for themselves and each other that blocks their progress individually and as a whole. There is no storm of progress to force them into the future. From a Benjaminian (?) perspective, these people live among the “wreckage” of their past, in a claustrophobic space of dead air laced with the stench of decayed dreams and damning denial.

-Ly

Escape from Reality

In class on Friday, Ameet raised a point that especially stood out to met after completing this week's reading: the literal fog that surrounds the house mirrors the metaphorical fog clouding the lives of the Tyrone family. As the fog around the house thickens, so does the alcohol and drug induced haze the characters bring upon themselves. Mary abuses morphine and the men in the family drink incessantly, presumably to escape the depressing reality of living in a household riddled with problems. For Edmund, the fog provides another method for escape, as he explains to his father:

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

Edmund's familial problems are tied to the house they are staying in that summer. He seems to love when the fog obscures the house, and thus all the problems within, from his view. But his problems do not end there. He wants to escape reality completely, and the fog allows him to do so. Alone, in the fog and feeling like a "ghost within a ghost" he is finally able to find peace. Unlike alcohol, the fog is a true escape from reality.

It is interesting that he brings up the idea of "another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself," because this is exactly what his family achieves within their household. Through constant substance use, the family brings this obscuring fog into their own lives, trying to obscure the problems in front of them. Trying to drown their problems with alcohol and drugs evidently does not work for the family, as the abuse eventually becomes their problem.

For Edmund, the fog provides a true escape from reality, a fleeting moment of peace in an otherwise problematic and depressing life. Yet for everyone else, the fog is simply another failed veil for the problems they face.

-Andrew T.

So much literary name-dropping

While reading I was intrigued by how many literary allusions Jamie and Edmund make. Although each of them uses literary references for different purposes, as a whole it sheds light on their characters.

Jamie:

“Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she, she too remembering days and words that were, will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, we are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, she would not see.”

The Swineburne poem speaks to Jamie’s helplessness and his desire for Mary to recover. It captures his longing for his mother to return to normal, wishing that she would remember him. Although this poem is quite morbid, it reveals Jamie’s true feelings. He’s failed countless times and ruined his life, which leaves him feeling unloved.

Edmund:

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question…Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”

Baudelaire’s prose poem perfectly captures Edmund’s character as well as all of the members of the Tyrone family. They are always intoxicated. For Tyrone the “horrible burden” that weighs heavy on his shoulders is his worry that he will end up in the poorhouse. Edmund on the other hand, is simply dealt a bad hand in life. Consequently, Edmund and the other members of the Tyrone family, resort to alcohol and drugs as coping mechanisms for their problems and insecurities. 

“I’ve never felt at home in the theater.”

Posted by Jack Flynn

This week as I was reading, another line with meta-meaning caught my attention and triggered a whole new line of thinking for me relating to the play. On page 104, Mary laments, “I’ve never felt at home in the theater.” How funny, Mary, because you are a fictional character who exists only in the theater. Tough break.

But the line really got me thinking about whether or not anyone does really feel at home in the house. In the Intro to Production Design course that I’m taking right now, one of the big concepts we’ve discussed is that when designing spaces for actors/characters, you have to think about who “owns” what spaces.

Mary obviously doesn’t seem to feel she has ownership of the house, considering the fact that she’s always bringing up the fact that it’s never felt like a proper home. Edmund and Jamie certainly don’t seem to have ownership in the house in a literal sense and seem more like (horrible, awful, alcoholic) guests. That leaves Tyrone, but I think O’Neill’s stage directions show that he doesn’t own the space either, considering the bookshelves are full of Nietzsche and Marx which he hates.

To me, I think the idea that none of the characters really own the space is a helpful one. Things like the presence of anarchist authors on the bookshelf become physical manifestations of a passive aggressive territory war. And because no one is truly on home turf, it’s more of an even ground which makes the fighting more interesting.