Paper 108: The American Literature

 Paper No: 108 - Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day's Journey into Night 

This blog is part of assignment of Paper 108: The American Literature

 Topic: Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day's Journey into Night 

Table of Contents: 

Personal Information

Assignment Details

Abstract 

Keywords

Symbolic Parallel to Ophelia

Shakespeare as Emotional Framework

Familial Recognition and Pain

Therapeutic Use of Tragedy

Autobiographical Undertone

The Challenge of Autobiographical Reading

Problem with Personal Praise

Reconsidering the Role of Tragedy

The Shakespearean Paradigm and Tragic Closure

Conclusion

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Personal Information: -

Name: - Manasi Joshi

Batch: - M.A. Sem 2 (2024-2026)

E-mail Address: -mansijoshi202@gmail.com

Roll Number: - 15

Assignment Details: -

Topic: Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day's Journey into Night

Paper & subject code: - Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day's Journey into Night

Submitted to: - Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar

Date of Submission: - April 17,2025

Abstract:

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night explores the deep psychological and emotional scars passed from one generation to the next, presenting a powerful depiction of tragic inheritance. The play examines how familial trauma, addiction, and guilt become inherited burdens, shaping the lives and destinies of each character. This tragic inheritance is expressed through the characters’ recurring patterns of behavior, self-destruction, and emotional paralysis. O’Neill’s use of language, silences, and symbolic elements such as fog intensifies the tragic expression of the family's suffering. The play serves as both a personal and universal tragedy, portraying the Tyrone family’s desperate struggle with memory, blame, and the search for meaning amidst inevitable decline. Through autobiographical elements and classical tragic structure, O’Neill crafts a modern tragedy rooted in familial fate and emotional legacy.

Keywords:

Tragic inheritance, Tragic expression, Eugene O’Neill's Long Day’s Journey into Night, Family trauma, Addiction, Memory and guilt, Symbolism (fog, morphine), Emotional paralysis, Modern tragedy, Generational suffering, Autobiographical elements, Tyrone family, psychological realism

Introduction: 

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night stands as a deeply personal and emotionally charged play that explores the painful complexities of family, memory, and self-destruction. Central to the drama are two key themes: tragic inheritance and tragic expression. Tragic inheritance refers to the emotional, psychological, and even genetic burdens passed down through generations—addiction, illness, guilt, and denial. Each member of the Tyrone family is weighed down by a past they did not choose but cannot escape. Alongside this, the play gives voice to tragic expression—the characters’ way of articulating, confronting, or, at times, suppressing their pain. Through moments of confession, silence, argument, and blame, O’Neill reveals how language becomes both a weapon and a lifeline within the family. In this introduction, we begin to see how the themes of inherited suffering and expressive tragedy define the emotional depth and dramatic power of the play, making it a timeless exploration of human vulnerability and familial fate.

About Topic  

In the closing moments of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill invokes Shakespeare through Jamie’s sharp exclamation “The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia!”—a reference that deepens the thematic layers of haunting, memory, and madness. This Shakespearean allusion, drawn from Hamlet, is rich in implication and contributes significantly to the tragic vision of the play. The reference operates on multiple levels:

Symbolic Parallel to Ophelia: Mary Tyrone, in her descent into morphine-induced hallucination, mirrors Ophelia’s tragic decline. Like Ophelia, Mary becomes a spectral presence—visually and emotionally disconnected from those around her, embodying both youthful innocence and profound sorrow.

Shakespeare as Emotional Framework: As Normand Berlin suggests in “Ghosts of the Past: O’Neill and Hamlet,” O’Neill’s intertextual use of Shakespeare allows him to confront personal and familial trauma through dramatic form. Ophelia’s image becomes a vehicle for understanding Mary’s psychological disintegration and O’Neill’s own need to dramatize his familial grief.

Familial Recognition and Pain: Jamie’s invocation of Ophelia is not just an intellectual remark but a deeply hurtful provocation, recognized instantly by Edmund, who physically retaliates. This moment indicates that Shakespearean reference is not abstract—it is felt, painful, and personal, reflecting shared literary knowledge within the Tyrone family and underscoring emotional truths they otherwise struggle to express.

Therapeutic Use of Tragedy: Berlin and others argue that O’Neill turned to Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, as a form of catharsis. The use of “supertragedy,” as Berlin calls it, helps O’Neill to mediate his own memories and grief. Shakespeare’s Ophelia becomes not just a character, but a mirror for Mary Tyrone and a symbolic bridge between O’Neill’s private anguish and his public art.

Autobiographical Undertone: Critics like Stephen Mack and Berlin agree that O’Neill’s engagement with Shakespeare is inextricable from his autobiographical impulse. The play, often interpreted as a deeply personal reckoning with O’Neill’s own family history, uses Shakespearean intertextuality to articulate what personal memory alone cannot fully express—thus, Long Day’s Journey into Night becomes both an act of mourning and a literary tribute.

The Challenge of Autobiographical Reading: 

Relying on autobiography to interpret Long Day's Journey into Night such as O’Neill’s family history—can both reveal and limit understanding. This method often searches for answers in real-life facts, whether proven or guessed, and may miss deeper artistic meanings.

Problem with Personal Praise

Many critics, like Ben Brantley in the 2000 revival, praised the play for its emotional honesty rather than its dramatic form. This view also appears in early reviews and documentaries, which value the play as a confessional work more than as crafted tragedy. Such readings can overshadow its artistry.

Reconsidering the Role of Tragedy

Rather than seeing O’Neill simply as a suffering artist, this analysis explores how Long Day’s Journey engages with the genre of tragedy. The Hamlet reference is key—it introduces not just personal grief but a tragic tradition that the play enters into and reimagines.

Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill draws heavily on the traditions of Shakespeare and Strindberg to explore the nature of tragedy, inheritance, and personal identity. These influences are not simply referenced but woven into the structure and language of the play, creating a dialogue between old forms of drama and O’Neill’s modern reinterpretation. Shakespeare represents literary wisdom and the grandeur of traditional tragedy, while Strindberg embodies rebellion and psychological depth. This duality emerges powerfully in Act IV, where Tyrone encourages Edmund to remember Shakespeare and forget the “third-raters,” implying a reverence for classical forms. In contrast, Edmund's reference to “stuff as dreams are made on” echoes The Tempest but then deflates it with irony and detachment, reflecting Strindberg’s influence. These exchanges highlight O’Neill’s internal conflict—between honoring the legacy of tragic drama and forging his own voice through emotional honesty and familial pain. As critics like Farman Clay argue, O’Neill revises tragedy not to create heroic arcs, but to expose the repetitive, unresolved suffering within a family. Unlike classical tragedy’s closed form and moral resolution, O’Neill’s tragedy is open-ended, intimate, and unresolved—fitting a 20th-century reality of lingering emotional wounds rather than heroic downfall. Thus, the play becomes not just a personal confession but also O’Neill’s dramatic wrestling match with the literary giants before him.

The Shakespearean Paradigm and Tragic Closure 

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night subtly engages with the Shakespearean tragic tradition, particularly through its echoes of the “closed form” of tragedy, where resolution is often achieved through death or psychological annihilation. As Gerardine Meaney has argued in her conception of the “tragic paradigm,” such closures—exemplified in Shakespearean figures like Othello, who collapses into self-destruction through Iago’s manipulations—serve as foundational models for modern tragedies. O’Neill inherits and adapts this structure, as seen in characters like Jack Townsend in Dynamo, who commits suicide, or Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, who leaps to his death. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, this tragic arc does not culminate in literal death but rather in a symbolic demise through Mary Tyrone’s descent into drug-induced delusion. Her addiction, rooted in loss and failed faith, becomes a form of living death, especially when she retreats into a hallucinatory past where she is once again a convent girl. This recursive retreat, presented without the finality or moral resolution of traditional tragedy, subverts the Shakespearean model while still invoking its emotional intensity. The play’s concluding scene, where Mary’s morphine-fueled monologue suspends the action in a ghostly liminality, offers no cathartic closure. Instead, it presents a cyclical and unresolved sorrow, reflecting the characters’ existential paralysis. Tyrone’s and Edmund’s weary resignation—“All we can do is try to be resigned” and “Or be dead drunk you can forget”—further underscores the absence of transcendence. Thus, while O’Neill draws heavily from the tragic conventions of Shakespeare, he reframes them within a modernist lens, portraying the psychological disintegration of his characters as the new terminus of tragedy.

Conclusion:

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill powerfully shows how tragedy can be both inherited and expressed through generations. The Tyrone family is trapped in a cycle of blame, guilt, addiction, and regret—each member shaped by the past and unable to break free from it. Their tragic inheritance includes not just addiction and illness, but also emotional wounds passed down through silence and misunderstanding. O’Neill expresses this tragedy through deeply emotional dialogues, long monologues, and a setting filled with fog both real and symbolic—that blurs the lines between truth and illusion. In the end, the play’s tragic expression lies in its raw honesty, showing how personal suffering becomes a shared family legacy, where love and pain are forever tangled.

Reference 

Westgate, J. Chris. “Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night.’” The Eugene O’Neill Review, vol. 30, 2008, pp. 21–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29784852. Accessed 9 Apr. 2025