The plot of Long Day’s Journey into Night observes the classical unities, its action telescoping from 8:30 a.m. to midnight of an August day in 1912, set in the Tyrones’ summer home at New London’s beach, Connecticut. The curtain rises with Mary and James Tyrone entering their dining room. She retains a young and graceful figure in her mid-fifties, has a striking, “distinctly Irish” face, uses no makeup, and sports dark brown eyes that are “unusually large and beautiful, with black brows and long curling lashes.” Qualifying this favorable impression is her extreme nervousness, expressed by continually fluttering hands so spoiled by rheumatism that they “have an ugly, crippled look.” O’Neill stresses her “shy convent-girl youthfulness . . . an innate worldly innocence.”
James Tyrone, eleven years Mary’s senior but belying his age by ten, is handsome, healthy, soldierly erect. In contrast to his wife, “he has no nerves.” His stolid Irish peasant heritage has kept him fit, but also keeps him from fully understanding the complex natures of his wife and sons. The latter soon join their parents. The elder, Jamie, resembles his father physically but lacks Tyrone’s grace and stamina. He shows “signs of premature disintegration,” while his cynical sneering “gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast.” Twenty-three-year-old Edmund is his mother’s son, with luminous eyes in a hypersensitive face. The author notes, “It is in the quality of extreme nervous sensibility that the likeness of Edmund to his mother is most marked.”
These four tormented persons form a closely symbiotic quartet. Each important attribute of one affects—usually for the worse—the behavior of the other three. Each is both innocent victim and culpable victimizer; each takes turns occupying one angle of a dramatic triangle, playing not only the victim, but also the persecutor and rescuer. In act 1, as in this plays’ humorous counterpart, Ah, Wilderness! (pr., pb. 1933), O’Neill refers to actual landmarks, people, and events belonging to New London’s history, such as anecdotes regarding the pond of a Standard Oil millionaire and the pigs of Tyrone’s tenant farmer. The play is overtly autobiographical, with the playwright saluting his third wife, Carlotta, in his somber preface, for her “love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and forgiveness of all the four haunted Tyrones.” The O’Neills have become the Tyrones, with Eugene making the significant change by calling his alter ego Edmund—the name given the second O’Neill son, who died in infancy when exposed to measles by the oldest.
Two events propel most of the action: Mary Tyrone, despite having recently been treated for drug addiction, relapses into her morphine habit just as her husband and sons dared hope that she was permanently cured; and Edmund learns (as the playwright also did, in 1912) that he has tuberculosis—called “consumption” by the Tyrones—and must enter a sanatorium. During act 1, Tyrone berates Jamie for having encouraged Edmund to ruin his health by drinking and womanizing; then Jamie lashes back at his father, accusing him of...