Long Day’s Journey into Night (Historical Context)

Historical Context

There are two historical periods relevant to Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play was written between 1939 and 1941, but it is set in 1912, at a critical period in the author’s own life, paralleling that of his fictional persona, Edmund Tyrone.

Public Events

Events of moment from the outside world do not intrude on the Tyrone family dialogue. For example, there is no mention of the April, 1912, sinking of the Titanic, which took over fifteen hundred passengers to their watery death, and was the greatest maritime disaster of the age. Nor is mention made of Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, which ended in March, 1912, when Scott and the last survivors died in a heroic attempt to reach awaiting shelter and provisions.

O’Neill’s focus, relentlessly on the Tyrone family problems, simply made unnecessary the need for allusions to such important topical events. They are conspicuous only by their absence, a fact that contributes to the play’s claustrophobic impact. An awareness of the outside world is reflected not in events but in the social consciousness of the Tyrones. They have a sense of living on the margins of respectability, not fully accepted by the “Yanks” because of Tyrone’s impoverished, shanty-Irish, Roman Catholic heritage.

For the audience there is a foreshadowing of the impending American love affair with the automobile, which Henry Ford made possible when he introduced the Model T in 1908. By 1913, his company was able to sell the model for $500, putting it within the financial reach of most middle-class families. Tyrone, bound by his past, dislikes the second-hand auto he has bought for Mary, and he expresses his preference for the trolley and walking. Only Mary uses the car, and she must be driven by a paid chauffeur, to Tyrone’s tight-fisted consternation. Clearly, the world is passing Tyrone by, as in real life it seemed to be passing O’Neill’s father by.

A Battle of the Books

Two bookcases occupy the Tyrone living room. The first, small and plain, contains works by modern writers, many of them favorites of Edmund and Jamie: novels by Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal; plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg; poetry by Rossetti,

Wilde, Dowson, and Kipling; and philosophical works by Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, and Schopenhauer. The second, larger, glass-fronted bookcase contains older works, including three sets of Shakespeare, sets of die romantic fiction of Dumas and Victor Hugo, fifty imposing volumes of the world’s greatest literature, several major works of history and miscellaneous old plays, poetry collections, and Irish histories. This second, more venerable appearing bookcase contains the preferred readings of James Tyrone, Sr. There is but one common link: Shakespeare’s picture adorns the wall above the plainer bookcase, implying that he holds a place of honor even in the hearts of the sons.

The rift that separates Tyrone and his sons, though firmly based in familial guilt and shame, has been widened by their disparate tastes in literature and philosophy. Throughout the play, literary allusions and quotations provide a dominant recurring theme in the emotionally charged rounds of repeated accusation and counter accusation. Clearly, Edmund’s taste is for die realists and naturalists in fiction and drama, materialists and nihilists in philosophy, and fatalists and adherents to the detached, art-for-art’s-sake school in poetry.

Tyrone finds Edmund’s tastes deplorable, writers full of nothing but gloom and despair. He dismisses the lot of them as decadent, depressing, and godless. For him, Shakespeare reigns supreme. He even has a theory that the real Shakespeare was not English but an Irish Catholic.

O’Neill’s real father, like Tyrone, was one of the last of the matinee idols, working in a theater that admitted little that was new or unconventional. Typical fare was warmed-over Shakespeare and heroic melodrama, works that provided lucrative vehicles for popular actors like James O’Neill but insulated the theater from the real world. Eugene O’Neill would change all that; influenced by the writers whose works rest on Edmund’s bookcase, by the 1920s he would revolutionize the American theater.

Substance Abuse: Morphine and Alcohol

By 1912, responsible physicians had stopped the indiscriminate use of morphine as a pain killer and treatment for depression. New laws required pharmacists to dispense it only by authorized prescription, ending its unrestricted use. However, for many Americans like Mary Tyrone, the damage had already been done. Morphine and laudanum, another opium derivative, had left thousands addicted, and many faced the social stigma and disgrace that drug addiction finally involved.

The excessive use of alcohol was more widely tolerated, at least in men. The saloon was an established American institution by the end of the nineteenth century. It served as a working man’s social club where males could imbibe, discuss the day’s events, and wager on cards and billiards. Some of the saloons were also haunts for prostitutes, while others were outright bordellos; most, like their English pub counterparts, did not admit ladies.

Many saloon patrons, like Jamie Tyrone, were problem drinkers and gamblers, prone to violence, sexual promiscuity, or insolvency. Their excesses fueled the temperance reform movement, led and supported by a growing legion of women who wanted to protect families from “demon rum” and improve the nation’s moral character and health. The movement would finally win a legal victory in 1919 with the passage and ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. But the victory proved hollow. The ban on alcohol gave rise to illegal bootlegging, bathtub gin, and the infamous speakeasy, a Jazz Age substitute for the old saloon. Unlike the saloon, the speakeasies were patronized by men and the new generation of liberated “flappers,” setting the model for the bars and nightclubs that went into legal operation when prohibition ended.

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, called “consumption” by the Tyrones, was a dread disease in 1912, claiming close to 100,000 American lives annually. Treatment, provided in special hospitals called sanatoria, was largely in an experimental stage of development. Although physicians knew that a germ caused the disease, they had no miracle cure. A few used x-ray treatments, but most tried to counter the disease’s symptoms with prolonged rest, special diets, and an abundance of fresh air. Edmund, who discovers that he has consumption, faces a period of recovery in a sanatorium, just as O’Neill himself did in 1912.

The Great Depression

Prohibition ended in 1933, a half dozen years before O’Neill started writing Long Day’s Journey into Night. Throughout the 1930s, America suffered a deep economic depression from which it had not completely recovered by the time O’Neill began the play. Although O’Neill’s political sympathies were with the working class, he wrote what has been termed “private tragedy,” not social-conscience polemics like Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935) and other works of the leftist Group Theatre. In the 1930s, O’Neill’s reputation went into a decline, despite the fact that he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936.

World War II

World War II commenced in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two years later, on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, by that time O’Neill had finished Long Day’s Journey into Night. The War’s impact and his declining health brought his writing to a near standstill. In 1943, in the middle of the war, O’Neill and Carlotta burned the fragmentary parts of his projected cycle of plays, which by then he knew he would never finish.

Compare & Contrast

• 1910s: World War I begins in the summer of 1914, with the United States joining the allies against Germany in 1917.
  1940s and 50s: O’Neill finishes Long Day’s Journey into Night prior to America’s entry into World War II on December 7, 1941. The Cold War with the Soviet bloc flares into open combat in Korea, a “police action” ending with an armistice agreement signed on July 27, 1953, four months before O’Neill dies. In 1956 the Soviet Union cracks down on dissidents in Poland and Hungary; that same year Long Day’s Journey into Night wins O’Neill, posthumously, his final Pulitzer Prize.
  Today: The 1990s bring an end to the Cold War and to fears of a nuclear holocaust.
• 1910s: The airplane, automobile, and motion pictures, all in their infancy, begin a radical transformation of daily American life.
  1940s and 50s: Films, with sound since 1928, are the most popular entertainment medium; commercial airlines continue to replace trains in distance passenger travel; and American houses start sporting double garages. By the 1950s, television becomes both popular and increasingly affordable; jet engines become common on commercial planes; and large finned automobiles with powerful engines streak through America on a growing network of parkways and highways.
  Today: Houses without at least two television sets grow rare; railroads continue a losing struggle to survive; and automobiles, while legally moving faster on interstate highways again, get smaller, more fuel-efficient, and ever more expensive.
• 1910s: America begins reflecting an awareness of foreign movements in art and letters, of the French naturalists like Zola and Balzac, and the realistic drama of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov; O’Neill reveals that foreign influence in his very first plays.
  1940s and 50s: American readers remain drawn to the fiction of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the plays of Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, and Robert Sherwood also have a dedicated following, but O’Neill’s reputation remains stagnant. By the 1950s, a host of postwar novelists and poets make their mark, challenging Faulkner and Hemingway, Frost and Eliot, for book stall space; the realistic problem play reaches its maturity in the works of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and O’Neill, while avant garde rumblings are heard in the Off- and Off-Off Broadway wings.
  Today: Laurels in fiction are up for grabs; in theater, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet continue making an indelible mark.
• 1910s: Through stricter federal laws governing drug use and the militant success of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, America seeks to end drug addiction and alcohol abuse; achieves Prohibition with ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.
  1940s and 50s: With prohibition repealed in 1933, America returns to imbibing alcohol, creating a new, post-World War II problem: the drunk driver; morphine still widely used as a pain killer. The Beat Generation brings “mind expanding” drugs like marijuana closer to the mainstream; middle-class America turns to tranquilizers to cope with depression; hard drugs begin to plague the inner cities; synthetics like methadone replace morphine in some medical applications.
  Today: Drug abuse remains a major problem, with crack cocaine and heroin an inner-city blight and marijuana use common everywhere in America, especially among the young; groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) help stiffen penalties for driving while under the influence, in some states upgrading repeat offenses to a felony.