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Title: Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day's Journey Into Night (Critical Essay)
Author : Eugene O'Neill Review
Release Date : January 01, 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 99 KB

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Toward the end of Long Day's Journey into Night, with Mary Tyrone lingering at the threshold of memory, Eugene O'Neill makes reference to Shakespeare through Jamie: "The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia!" (824). Edmund immediately turns on Jamie, striking him for the second time during the fourth act, but it is already too late: the hurtful words have been spoken and cannot be called back any more than the history desperately denied by the Tyrones. Shakespeare's Hamlet intrudes on this scene and compounds the central trope of haunting within Long Day's Journey. Normand Berlin describes the "powerful resonances" that follow from reference to Ophelia's distracted singing, "loose-gowned" and with "long wild hair," shortly before going to her "watery death" in "Ghosts of the Past: O'Neill and Hamlet" (312-313). In this moment, Mary becomes the young woman of her youth once more, but simultaneously a woman beset by loss and heartbreak, lost both to herself and to those watching while she descends deeper into hallucination and madness. Surely Jamie understood many of these connotations when he made this reference (he has made many such comparisons of his family to Shakespearean characters already); and perhaps so too did Edmund and Tyrone since the entire family has read and reread their Shakespeare. (1) Edmund's reaction against Jamie, in fact, suggests not just hurt but guilt. Was he already thinking the same thing when Mary descended the stairs, a ghost of the past? Was Tyrone, who had played the great Shakespearean roles years before and now quotes Shakespeare? Without internal evidence, these questions are left to actors taking up the roles of Jamie, Edmund, and Tyrone. But certainly O'Neill meant for audiences, in particular the reading audiences imagined when he insisted that the play never be performed, to read Long Day's Journey alongside Hamlet. Mary need not give her sons or husband "rue" to suggest the pervasiveness of sorrow and the need for repentance. How we read this reference to Shakespeare depends upon how we read O'Neill's ambition in writing Long Day's Journey. Berlin's essay and O'Neill's Shakespeare, his book published more than a decade later, demonstrate this reality. Although Berlin thoughtfully examines the numerous Shakespearean references in O'Neill's plays to trace Shakespeare's unacknowledged but significant influence on O'Neill's dramaturgy, his argument about this particular reference to Hamlet runs aground against the abiding assumption guiding O'Neill scholarship: Long Day's Journey was autobiographical record of the O'Neill family as well as O'Neill's confrontation of that record. Become so commonplace that hardly an essay or review can proceed without acknowledging such antecedency, this assumption subsumes O'Neill's play within a deeply personal journey toward remembrance, confrontation, and forgiveness. Stephen Black's Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy takes this premise as its thesis and privileges the personal need and fulfillment involved in writing Long Day's Journey, a play in which the author meant to "understand what made the O'Neill family behave as it did" (446). It's hardly surprising, therefore, that Berlin's reading of the final reference (more so in the essay but still in the book) begins from the assumption that Shakespeare's tragedy served some therapeutic end for O'Neill when writing Long Day's Journey: "Shakespeare's Hamlet allowed O'Neill to become better acquainted with his own night and with the night of the dramatic world he created" (312). In writing about the family that troubled him all of his life, O'Neill used Shakespeare's concluding scene for Ophelia, if not the entire tragedy, to confront the memory of his mother haunting the New London cottage where he spent those difficult summers during his childhood. Underscoring this point, Berlin continues, "What O'Neill tapped in Hamlet was a reinforcement of his own emotional roots. In a sense, O'Neill had to go to Shakespe