Transcript About Long Day`s Journey into Night

The American Drama and
Eugene O’Neill
American Drama

Although the theatre was popular in America
from colonial times, and although many
Americans wrote plays which were produced,
American drama of a quality to command
respect abroad is the product of the 20th
century. It began in rebellion.


Stimulated by the naturalistic, symbolic, and critical
drama of Europe, experimental theatres sprang up in
America in the 1910s. In the meantime, modern
American dramatists began to attract attention. Among
them, Eugene O’ Neill was standing out.
These authors wrote for the new theatre. They not only
tried to avoid the clichés of plot, characterization,
dialog, acting, and staging which had stultified the
older drama, but they experimentation peculiar to the
period was expressionism---the mingling of the
realistic and the fantastic or symbolic. Experiments of
this kind abound in the work of Eugene O’ Neill, the
greatest American dramatist of the interwar period.
work

Beyond the Horizon

The Iceman Cometh

Long Day’s Journey into Night
进入黑夜的漫长旅程

Emperor Jones

The Hairy Ape
天外天
卖冰的人来了
琼斯皇帝
毛猿
Characteristics



chaos and hopelessness
realism, naturalism and expressionism
sets, lighting, and sounds
Comments
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, and
Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays

O’Neil was no doubt the greatest American
dramatist of the first half of the 20th century.
He was the first playwright to explore serious
themes in the theater and to carry out his
continual, vigorous, courageous experiments
with theatrical conventions. His plays have
been translated and staged all over the world.
The early period (1913-1919)
• Period of apprenticeship
• Bound East for Cardiff （1916）《东航卡迪夫》
his first play, marking the beginning of O’s long
and successful dramatic career and ushered in the
modern era of the American theatre
Features
sea life, one-act plays
romanticism, naturalism, realism,
The middle period (1920-1938)
• Summit of his career, more experimental in
technique, with wider scope of subject matter
• Beyond Horizon (1920) 《天边外》his first play
of success, established his reputation, Pulitzer
Prize
• The Emperor Jones (1920) 《琼斯王》
• The Hairy Ape (1922) 《毛猿》
Features
These plays are daring forays (袭击) into race
relations, class conflicts, sexual bondage,
social critiques, and American tragedies on the
Greek model.
These plays are known for their unusual stage
devices and powerful use of symbolism, and
The Hairy Ape (1922) is one of O’Neill’s
experiments in expressionism.
Desire Under the Elms (1924) 《榆树下的欲望》

Strange Interlude (1928) 《奇异的插曲》
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) 《悲悼》
Features
These three plays exemplify O’Neill’s ability to
explore the limits of the human predicament,
even as he sounds the depths of his audiences’
hearts.

The late period (1939-1943)
• Period of maturity, return to realism
(realism+modernism)
• The Iceman Cometh (1946) 《送冰的人来了》
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) 《进入黑夜
的漫长旅程》, autobiographical
Features
During his final period O’Neill returned to
realism.
 (1) The Iceman Cometh (1946): proves to be a
masterpiece that is a complex, ironic, deeply
moving exploration of human existence and
predicament. It is a tragedy, realistically set in
a Bowery bar, symbolically portraying the loss
of illusion and the coming of Death.

(2) Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), for
which he own his final Pulitzer
posthumously(死后出版的) in 1957. It has
gained its status as a world classic and
simultaneously marks the climax of O’Neill’s
literary career and the coming of age of
American drama.
Long Day’s Journey into Night is an autobiographical tragedy
depicting a day in 1912 in the unhappy life of the Tyrone
family, (which was the first of his posthumously produced and
published plays.) With the influence of Sigmund Freud’s
theories about the power of irrational drives, the existence of a
subconscious, the role of repression and suppression, the
importance of sex and the lifelong influence of parents,
O’Neill tried to examine the human plight—the external
conflict between people’s aspirations and the mysterious
forces in life which limit and shatter their lofty dreams in the
end. He wrote plays on various subjects and in various styles,
trying to depict the universal predicament of modern men.
Features of O’s plays

Trying to discover the root of human desires
and frustrations.

Seeking meaning and purpose in life, but
ending with disappointment.

Pessimistic, leaving the characters without
illusions or hope.
Style and techniques

Experimenting with new styles and forms,
borrowing from both traditional and modern
theories and techniques
•
•
•
•
•
Realism
Naturalism
Symbolism
Expressionism
Masks, choir, interior monologue, asides

Supplementary Readings
Long Days Journey into Night (1956)





Setting: the summer home of the Tyrone
family, August 1912
James Tyrone, the father, a famous actor,
anxious to become rich at the expense of his
own talent;
Mary Tyrone, the mother, a drug addict;
James Tyrone, their elder son,
Edmund Tyrone, their younger son.




The mother becomes mentally ill because she
is extremely unhappy with her married life.
Young Jamie loses faith in life.
Edmund the wanderer comes back with
tuberculosis.
All the four suffer frustrations and wish to
escape from the harsh reality, James and Jamie
looking for solace in their cups, while Mary
and Edmund seek the protection of the fog
which they hope would screen them from the
intrusion of the world outside.


They meet in the living room of the family’s
summer home at 8:30 A.M. of a day in August,
1912 and torment one another and themselves
until midnight. The father is angry with the
mother for her drug addiction, the mother with
the father for his failure to offer her a home, the
father with his sons for being good parents.
All are torn in a war between love and hate, and
no one is sure which is the stronger emotion.
The long day thus journeys into night when the
tragedy of the family is finally enacted. Love
gives way to hate, day to night, and hope to
despair.
Analysis
a.
b.
Long Day's Journey into Night is undoubtedly a
tragedy---it leaves the audience with a sense of
catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing
of powerful events, and it depicts the fall of
something that was once great.
b. The play is largely autobiographical; it resembles
O’ Neill’ s life in many aspects. O'Neill himself
appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the
younger son who, like O'Neill, suffers from
consumption.


c. The play also creates a world in which
communication has broken down. One of the
great conflicts in the play is the characters'
inability to communicate despite their constant
fighting.
d. The play is all the more tragic because it
leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the
future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one
long cycle of a repeated past bound in by
alcohol and morphine.
American Drama

Renaissance of drama: 1930s
• left-winged drama, proletarian drama, southern
drama, black drama
• Eugene O’Neill
• Clifford Odets (克利福德·奥德茨): Waiting for
Lefty 《等待老左》
• Elmer Rice (艾尔默·莱斯): The Adding Machine
《加算机》
• Lilian Hellman (丽莲·赫尔曼): The Little Fox

American drama after WWII
• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) 田纳西·威廉斯:
southern dramatist


The Glass Menagerie 《玻璃动物园》
A Streetcar Named Desire《欲望号街车》
• Arthur Miller (1915- )阿瑟·米勒


Death of a Salesman《推销员之死》
All my Sons《全是我的儿子》
• Edward Albee (1928- )爱德华·阿尔比, Theatre of
the Absurd


Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?《谁害怕弗吉尼
亚·伍尔夫》
The Sandbox 《沙箱》
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
尤金·奥尼尔
Life and Career

A great playwright, a tragic life
•
•
•
•
•
•
Son of a traveling actor
One year at Princeton
Life as a seaman
1912, TB, start of career as a playwright
1920, first full-length play put on Broadway
1936, Nobel Prize, 4 Pulitzer Prizes (1920，1922，1928，
1957)
• Unhappy marriages, suicide of oldest son, drug addiction &
mental illness of younger son, daughter’s marriage,
Parkinson’s disease
General Evaluation
Eugene O’Neill was America’s greatest playwright.
The first American dramatist to ever receive the Nobel
Prize for literature (1936).
Winning Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays: Beyond
the Horizon (1920); Anne Christie (1922); Strange
Interlude (1928); and Long Day’s Journey into Night
(1957).
“Founder of the American drama,” and “the American
Shakespeare” in the history of American drama.
Three Periods as A Playwright



Early realist plays : utilize his own
experiences, especially as a seaman
expressionistic plays : influenced by the
ideas of philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche,
psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl
Jung, and Swedish playwright August
Strindberg. (rejected realism in this period)
Final period :(returned to realism ) depend
on his life experiences for their story lines
and themes.
Major Works

45 complete works, 20 considered major
works
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
Introduction to the Play
Long Day’s Journey into Night, completed in 1940, is an
autobiographical play that O’Neill’s wife allowed to be published in
1956, after O’Neill’s death. The four-act play takes place during a
single day in August 1912 at the summer home of the Tyrone. The
Tyrones of the play are in fact modeled on the O’Neill family. It is
not a happy tale. The play is set in the living room of a
summerhouse in August, 1912. the play starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends
about midnight. The members of the family are James Tyrone, the
father, an actor; Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted mother; Jamie,
their elder son; and Edmund, their younger son. All the members
suffer frustrations and wish to escape from the harsh reality. One
day, when they meet in the living room, they show bitterness,
resentment and even hatred for one another. No one finds warmth,
comfort and peace at home where love gives way to hate and hope
to despair. The play explores the tragic nature of family relations,
and questions the possibility of forgiveness and redemption.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
Detailed Introduction of the characters
James Tyrone: father, a popular actor playing Mount Cristo,
is the supporter of the family and earns money. Anxious to
become rich at the expense of his own talent. But his dream of
becoming a first-rate Shakespearean actor has died.
 Mary Tyrone: wife and mother, a drug addict, is a sensitive
and nervous woman of fifty-four. She suffers rheumatism (风
湿病) since giving birth to her third child. The mother
becomes mentally ill because she is extremely unhappy with
her married life. Because of her lonely married life and the
painful disease, she resigns herself to her morphine (吗啡)
addiction, which lulls her into a life-long dream of being a nun
or a pianist.

A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
Detailed Introduction of the characters
 Jamie: the elder son, aged thirty-three, is an alcoholic
sentimental poet. He loses faith in life. He shows a
habitual-expression of cynicism (and has a
Mephistophelean cast, but he is attractive to women and
popular with men. )
 Edmund: the younger son, is like his mother not only
in appearance but also in temperament. Aged only twentythree, he is a poet by nature and is apparently in poor
health, with feverish eyes and a sunken face. Edmund is
stricken with tuberculosis.
All the four suffer frustration and wish to escape from
the harsh reality.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
They meet in the living room of the family’s summer
home at 8:30 A. M. of a day in August, 1912 and torment
one another and themselves until midnight.
(1) The father is angry with mother for her drug addiction;
(2) The mother is angry with his sons for being good for
nothing;
(3) The sons are angry with their parents for not being
good parents;
(4) The mother curses the father for his failure to offer her
a happy home.
Father and sons torture and curse each other, drinking to
escape the cruel reality. All are torn in a mental war
between love and hate.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
Theme
The long day thus journeys into night when the tragedy of
the family is finally enacted. No relief is felt, no light is
seen, and all ends in the engulfing darkness. In a
figurative sense, Long Day’s Journey into Night is a
metaphor for O’Neill’s lifelong endeavor to find truth and
the way to acceptance. The former he found, namely, the
faithless, fragmentary nature of modern life, whereas the
latter he did not: for him all passed into night. In despair
O’Neill thought of the old God of the Catholic church on
which, it is ironical to note, he had turned his back long
before.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
The Précis of the Selection
Mary Tyrone is recently discharged from a state
sanitarium (疗养院) as cured of her drug addiction. In
August 1912, once again she is back at her summer home
with her husband James and their sons, Jamie, at 33, a
hard-drinking, cynical Broadway hanger-on, and Edmund,
a sickly, morbid intellectual. Mary’s appearance and
detached conversation soon make it clear that she is not
cured. As the men drink heavily to escape reality, she
nostalgically revives past dreams of becoming a nun or a
concert pianist, and seems an innocent girl again. But she
also reveals that her addiction began when her miserly
husband chose a quack doctor who treated her with
morphine after her sickness in giving birth to Edmund.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
The Précis of the Selection
Like his mother, Edmund wants to “be alone…in another
world…where life can hide from itself.” Like her too, he
shows both love and hate to his family as he confronts his
limited future as a consumptive(肺病患者), realizing that
his father will send him to the cheapest state sanitarium,
since he is expected to die. Jamie drunkenly tells Edmund
how much he loves him and yet how much he hates him
as responsible for their mother’s addiction. All are baffled
and hurt in a war between love and hate.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
1.
2.
Technique
Time Order: In Long Day’s Journey into Night, time
is restructured to conform to the back-and-forth
process of recollection. This altered sense of time is far
more cyclical than is it linear. Additionally, Mary, the
protagonist in Long Day’s Journey into Night can at
least escape into herself—into a drugged and numbed
interior state of withdrawal.
Characters: In this play the characters are capable of
grappling with reality, and it is the hopelessness of
their own psychology—the alienation of self-control—
and not the alienation of self from society, which is the
force propelling the dramatic action forward.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
About Long Day’s Journey into Night
3.
4.
5.
Technique
The Stage Setting: The stage setting in the play
conveys a world which is painstakingly realistic.
Tone: In Long Day’s Journey into Night there is a
somber pessimistic tone that results in the
disintegration (瓦解) of the main character.
Dialogue: The dialogue in Long Day’s Journey into
Night is eloquent and flowing.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
Comment on O’Neill
O’Neill was no doubt the greatest American dramatist
of the first half of the 20th century and a tireless
experimentalist in dramatic art.
1.
O’Neill was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art.
He took drama away from the old traditions of the last
century and rooted it deeply in life. He successfully
introduced the European theatrical trends of realism,
naturalism, and expressionism to the American stage as
devices to express his comprehensive interest in
modern life and humanity. He introduced the realistic
or even the naturalistic aspect of life into the American
theater.
A Survey of American Literature—Eugene O’Neill
Comment on O’Neill
2.
3.
4.
5.
He was the first playwright to explore serious themes
in the theatre and to carry out his continual, vigorous,
courageous experiments with theatrical conventions.
His plays have been translated and staged all over the
world.
He won Pulitzer Prize four times (1920, 1922, 1928,
1956) and the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his achievements
in plays.
As the nation’s first playwright with 47 published plays,
he did a great deal to establish the modes of the modern
theatre in the country.
O’Neill’s ceaseless experimentation enriched American
drama and influenced later playwrights as Tennessee
Williams and Edward Albee.