Of O'neill's Plays Are Intensely Personal Pieces of Writing
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Long Day’s Journey into Night – Study Guide - 978-1-908563-12-5 www.digitaltheatreplus.com Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. All of O’Neill’s plays are intensely personal pieces of writing, most of which clearly have their roots and inspiration in the events and circumstances of O’Neill’s own life – and none more so than Long Day’s Journey into Night. This play in particular also exists as a very closed world, with little or no reference to the outside world, other than some reference to the immediate neighbours. As such, it is difficult to say definitively whether the wider political and social events of the time were a major factor. However, no playwright exists or writes in complete isolation from the world they are writing about, so some examination of the context of both the year in which the play is set (1912) and the period during which O’Neill is thought to have written it (estimates vary, but let us say 1943-45) could be fruitful. This section will also give some background to O’Neill’s likely experiences as a second-generation Irish immigrant to America, and to the status of two of the play’s key factors: alcohol and morphine. 1912 Cast your mind back only a little over 100 years ago, and the world was a very different place. There was no internet, no television, no air travel – even radio and telephones had only just been invented, and their use was not widespread. The world felt like a much bigger, more unknown and far less inter-connected place than it does today. This alone could account for a play like Long Day’s Journey into Night taking so little notice of the outside world, beyond the four walls of the Tyrone family home. There was little in the way of home entertainment other than perhaps playing cards (as feature in the play), board games (which don’t) or drinking (which does, a lot). Even Hollywood was only just getting started – Universal Studios was founded in June of 1912. Those cinemas which did exist were still showing early (and very short) silent movies. Younger family members would have felt very bored, and a strong desire to get out and into the nearest bar or sports venue, where most entertainment on offer took place. Women would have had far lower status in 1912 than they do today. Women did © Digital Theatre.com Ltd 2013 Long Day’s Journey into Night – Study Guide - 978-1-908563-12-5 www.digitaltheatreplus.com Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. not have the right to vote in 1912, and indeed the Suffragettes were quite active during this time. (Women were not granted the right to vote equally with men until 1920.) Finding women in the workplace was still unusual, except for low-skilled domestic work such as cooking and cleaning. The main (even sole) expectation of middle-class women was to be a loyal wife and caring mother. This perhaps accounts for some of Mary Tyrone’s intense boredom and despair. America as we know it today was still in its infancy. America had only declared independence from England in 1776, and spent much of the next century locked into protracted political and military disputes over how best to govern themselves. Native Americans, steadily persecuted into submission since the first European arrivals in the New World, were still actively resisting their imperial rulers in the early part of the 20th century. There were also periodic skirmishes with Spain, including a ten-week war over Cuba in 1898. In 1912, America was still working out this mess, and still adding states to the ‘United States’. New Mexico and Arizona were made the 47th and 48th state respectively in 1912 (there are 51 states today). So, America as the world power we know today was still a little way off in 1912. In terms of communication, wealth and military power, it was still relatively isolated from the rest of the world. There was a presidential election in 1912, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. He would go on to oversee American involvement in World War I, and the negotiations which surrounded the Treaty of Versailles in its aftermath. Q: Try to make the case for the Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey into Night as an allegory for the position of America in the world in 1912, and the conflicts and power struggles which were going on within itself at the time. The main world news in 1912 was the launch, and then high-profile, tragic sinking of the Titanic, at the time the world’s largest and (supposedly) passenger ocean liner. The Titanic was a British-built ship sailing from Southampton to New York, whose sinking when it struck an iceberg killed over 1,500 people – including 119 Americans. The story was headline news around the world for months, and continues to fascinate people today. In Europe, the First Balkan War breaks out between Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey – sowing the seeds for the later conflict of World War I in 1914. For O’Neill personally, 1912 was the year he divorced his first wife (with whom he had one son), attempted suicide, and was subsequently diagnosed with tuberculosis, and had to enter a sanatorium (just like Edmund in the play). It was also the year in which his great hero, Swedish playwright August Strindberg, died. O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh is also set in 1912. © Digital Theatre.com Ltd 2013 Long Day’s Journey into Night – Study Guide - 978-1-908563-12-5 www.digitaltheatreplus.com Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. Q: Why do you think Eugene O’Neill makes no mention whatsoever either of the sinking of the Titanic, the 1912 presidential election, or of the build-up to the First World War in Long Day’s Journey into Night? 1943-45 Eugene O’Neill delivered the text of Long Day’s Journey into Night to his publisher in 1945 (along with the famous instruction that it was not to be published until 25 years after his death, and must never be performed). It is not known precisely when he started work on it, but we can assume it was in the few years immediately prior to 1945. This period would have seen America and the world plunged into the depths of World War II, which ran from 1939 to 1945 (America joined in 1942). Its effects were felt in almost every country in the western world, even if they weren’t directly involved. The war was known to have hugely depressed Eugene O’Neill. His diaries from the time tell us that he followed troop movements and other developments on the radio, and tracked the war’s progression through Europe on a large wall map. Having lived in France for a while with his third wife, Carlotta, they were especially upset at the invasion of the country by the Germans. O’Neill wrote that to them it was ”almost as if California had fallen”. O’Neill was also suffering from serious health problems during this time, including neuritis (nerve inflammation), depression, bouts of flu, prostate problems and hand tremors. The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and America’s subsequent entry into the war exacerbated problems for the O'Neills. Almost immediately there were petrol shortages and it became difficult to find servants. They had to black out the windows of their large estate, Tao House, in case of air raids (though these never came to America, unlike in Europe). The Californian valley where they were living had all its Japanese-American families taken to internment camps in May 1942, along with all Californians of Japanese descent. The O’Neills knew some of them. The staff shortage meant that the O’Neills were forced to have more regular contact with people living locally to them, by employing them as drivers, or even doing shopping for themselves. This forced contact ended some of O'Neill's isolation. One friend, Barrett Clark, felt it "helped restore the man's essential faith in a world which his reading and contemplation had, in a way, distorted." In turn, several local residents were impressed with the O'Neills' manners and friendliness. © Digital Theatre.com Ltd 2013 Long Day’s Journey into Night – Study Guide - 978-1-908563-12-5 www.digitaltheatreplus.com Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. But a setback came in 1943, when O’Neill’s daughter Oona, a well-known socialite, got engaged to Charlie Chaplin (of silent movie fame). Oona was 18, Chaplin was 54. O’Neill said he would never speak to Oona again if she went through with the marriage. But she did, and her father made good his threat. They never saw each other again. In 1943 the O’Neills put Tao House up for sale, citing difficulties with its upkeep during the war. They moved into a San Francisco hotel until the war ended, where O’Neill presumably wrote some at least of Long Day’s Journey. Eugene O’Neill had spent six years in Tao House, the longest he had lived anywhere, and he was very sad to leave.