Play by Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O’Neill, in full Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, (born October 16, 1888, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 27, 1953, Boston, Massachusetts), foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Brief information of Play
Long Day's Journey into Night is a play in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939–41, first published posthumously in 1956. The play is widely considered to be his magnum opus and one of the finest American plays of the 20th century.
Characters list
James Tyrone
Mary Tyrone
Jamie Tyrone
Edmund Tyrone
Cathleen
Theme of Addiction in long days into night Journey
Morphine and Alcohol
The plot of Long Day's Journey into Night focuses on a dysfunctional family trying to come to grips with its ambivalent emotions in the face of serious familial problems, including drug addiction, moral degradation, deep-rooted fear and guilt, and life-threatening illness.
Mary's morphine addiction is balanced by the men's alcoholism. Although the morphine is perhaps a more destructive drug, alcohol does its fair share of damage to the Tyrone men. It is Tyrone's great vice, and it has contributed to Mary's unhappiness. Drunkenness has been Jamie's response to life, and it is part of why he has failed so miserably. And Edmund's alcohol use has probably contributed to ruining his health.
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.
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