Long Day

’s Journey Into Night Essay, Research Paper

The Fog of Substance AbuseAs the fog descends around the Tyrone.s summer home, another fog falls on the family within. This fog is that of substance abuse, in which each of the four main characters of Eugene O.Neill.s play, Long Day.s Journey into Night face by the end of Act IV. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a metaphoric representation of the path from normalcy to demise by showing the general effects of substance abuse on human psychology and family dysfunctions through the characters Mary, Jamie, Edmund and Tyrone.

Mary Tyrone makes the transition most clearly throughout the entire play. In Act I, her hands move restlessly, and she seems to be quite nervous. When she appears in Act II .one notices no change except that she appears to be less nervous, . but then one becomes aware that her eyes are brighter and there is a peculiar detachment in her voice and manner. (O.Neill 58). These subtle signs of her relapse back to chemical dependency continue until the final scene, where she is most obviously under the influences of a chemical substance. The morphine seems to make her reminiscent of the past. In Act III, she talked about her two childhood dreams of becoming a concert pianist or a nun. By Act IV, she has dragged her old wedding dress from the attic and attempted to play the piano again. This presents a psychological reasoning for her relapses. She considers herself to be growing old and ugly, and often refers to the how she was at one time young and beautiful. .To her, the ugliness of the hands is the ugliness of what she has become over the last twenty-five years, which is why she uses the pain of the rheumatism in them as her reason for the morphine. (Chabrowe 181). Thus, it can be correlated that at one time she used the morphine to escape pain, and when she realized that it made her feel youthful again she became addicted.

Her failure to desist is also connected with her interfamily relationships. When she was accused of relapsing she said, .It would serve all of you right if it was true. (O.Neill 47)! This suggests that she is seeking justification to continue her drug addiction by using her family.s suspicions as a reason to relapse (Bloom 163). Not only are her actions influenced by her family, but they also influence the men, namely Edmund. He is quite aware of his diminishing health, and suspects that he may have Tuberculosis. He feels, however, that he can overcome his illness as his mother overcame her addiction. His optimism is crushed when he realizes that she has indeed relapsed. Mary and Edmund are connected in more ways than a mother is to her youngest son. Michael Hinden notes that besides the fact that they share the same physical features, they have both tried to kill themselves and are both linked to sanitariums (62). Because they are so similar, it is not unusual that he uses her strength as motivation to persevere within his own problems, while her failure ensures his own failure in his mind.

Jamie is the disappointment of the family. He enjoys the company of whores and other alcoholic degenerates. He was expelled from college, and was a seemingly bad influence on his younger brother. Mary blames Tyrone for Jamie.s alcoholism, since he fed Jamie a teaspoon of whisky as a child whenever he was restless. Yet, Jamie blames his mother. .[His] alcoholism is tied directly to [her] morphine addiction: over the years his drinking has risen and fallen in relation to Mary.s cures. (Hinden 54). He had hoped that if she could beat it, so could he. It is apparent that his alcoholism is also the cause for his failure in life.

In Act IV, Jamie admits that he has glorified his lifestyle in order for his brother to fail. This apparently worked, since Edmund too has a problem with alcohol. Although their relationship seems healthy, it is obviously poisoned. It is not uncommon between two brothers that the younger looks up to the elder, and Edmond does. Knowing this, Jamie purposely sets a bad example due to his jealousy of his mother.s affection for him. This suggests that Jamie knows the harmfulness of alcohol and continues to inflict the bad habit onto his brother in how he .made getting drunk romantic. (O.Neill 165).

Edmund most vividly describes why he drinks. He uses alcohol as an escape from thought. When he describes the night he tried to kill himself, his father claims that he was morbid because he was drunk. Edmund retorts, .I was stone cold sober. That was the trouble. I.d stopped to think too long. (O.Neill 147). He also quotes 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 earth, be drunken continually. (O.Neill 132). These two instances clearly pronounce that Edmund uses alcohol in order to forget. There is irony in this because everything that happens that day makes it impossible to forget the past, and the intoxication only worsens the problem (Bloom 171).

Edmund.s drinking not only has noticeable affects on his psychology (or .morbidness., as his father likes to call it) and his family relations, but it is apparent that his alcoholism has and will continue to cause problems with his health. According to www.lungusa.org, TB development .may be [due to] drug or alcohol abuse or a lack of health care because of homelessness.. I