Long Day's Journey into Night: Analysis of Major Characters
"Long Day's Journey into Night" is a poignant play by Eugene O'Neill that delves into the complexities of a dysfunctional family's struggles with addiction, illness, and disappointment. The major characters include James Tyrone, a once-promising actor whose frugality and regret over his squandered talent lead to familial strife. His wife, Mary Cavan Tyrone, battles a morphine addiction exacerbated by her husband's stinginess and her thwarted dreams of becoming a concert pianist. Their older son, Jamie, is a cynical yet charming figure who grapples with alcoholism and a tumultuous relationship with his family, ultimately revealing a conflicted love for his younger brother, Edmund. Edmund, the youngest son, represents the playwright himself, facing his own health crisis due to tuberculosis while navigating a bohemian lifestyle and yearning for artistic success. Also present is Cathleen, the hired girl, who offers a glimpse into the family's dynamics and serves as a sounding board for their struggles. Together, these characters embody the themes of regret, addiction, and the search for redemption within the confines of their shared environment.
Long Day's Journey into Night: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Eugene O'Neill
First published: 1956
Genre: Play
Locale: The Tyrones' summer house, New London, Connecticut
Plot: Psychological realism
Time: 1912
James Tyrone, who is sixty-five years old but looks ten years younger. This strikingly handsome, vital man is based on the playwright's father, James Tyrone, a popular actor. Of Irish peasant stock, this character has never been sick and is impatient with those who are, like his wife and younger son. Because of his poverty-stricken youth, he is incredibly stingy, compulsively turning off light bulbs and reluctant to pay for anything except the cheapest goods and services, except when he is investing in land. His stinginess has brought on the play's central tragedy, the morphine addiction of his wife, for whom he called a quack doctor rather than getting qualified medical help when she was sick after bearing her younger son. Now that the son has tuberculosis, James wants to send him to the cheap state sanatorium rather than pay for decent medical services. Although he loves his family, he is the victim of his own ingrained compulsions. They have damaged him as well: He was a promising Shakespearean actor and thinks he could have become a great actor but squandered his talent by buying the rights to a potboiler play in which he performed for a generation to secure a comfortable income. Consequently, he is a disappointed man who drowns his frustrations in drink.
Mary Cavan Tyrone, his wife, fifty-four years old. Her figure still is young and graceful, but her once beautiful face is thin and pale, her hair is white, and her hands are disfigured by rheumatism. She was educated by nuns in a Catholic school and wanted to become a nun herself. Instead, she met James Tyrone, fell in love, married him, and became addicted to morphine prescribed by an inexpensive doctor. Her hope to be a concert pianist was ruined by her rheumatic hands. As the play opens, she has been home for two months from a sanatorium, where she supposedly became free from her addiction, but the fear that her younger son's illness may be tuberculosis rather than a recurrence of malaria and that her husband will be too stingy to pay for proper medical care for Edmund causes her to relapse. The long day's journey is her gradual retreat into addiction until, at midnight, she is insane from drowning herself in the drug.
James (Jamie) Tyrone, Jr., their older son. Although he is only thirty-three years old, he is ravaged by dissipation. Generally, he is cynical, though he can have a beguiling charm that makes him attractive to women and popular with men. Like his father, he is an actor, but he lacks his father's vitality and squanders his talent on alcohol and prostitutes. Like his brother Edmund, he is fond of quoting decadent poetry. A manic-depressive, like the rest of his family, he has a love-hate relationship with them. In a moment of truth, he confesses to Edmund that he loves him but will try to destroy him by setting a horrible example and warns Edmund to break free of him.
Edmund Tyrone, the younger son, twenty-three years old, tall, thin, and wiry, with large dark eyes, a hypersensitive mouth, a thin Irish face, and a nervous sensibility. He is a portrait of the playwright as a young man. As the play opens, he is in ill health. The crisis is in part brought about by the discovery that he has tuberculosis and must go to a sanatorium. He has been a common seaman and has subsequently lived a bohemian life as an occasional actor and poet. His father complains of his left-wing politics and his morbid taste for decadent literature but admits grudgingly that he has a genuine touch of the poet. Hero-worshiping his dissolute older brother, Edmund has been imitating Jamie's dissipation. It is possible that the enforced stay in a sanatorium will turn his life around and help him become a serious artist.
Cathleen, the hired girl, in her early twenties, “a buxom Irish peasant” with black hair and reddish cheeks, described as “amiable, ignorant, clumsy.” A minor character, she provides some exposition and serves occasionally as someone to whom Edmund or Mary can talk before the other members of the family arrive.