Critics Flashcards
Michael Hinden
drugs and alcohol
Recent medical research indicates that patients who are given
morphine solely to control pain rarely become addicted. This evidence tends to exonerate James Tyrone from Mary’s plight to addiction.
Dr. Ronald Melzack
Drugs and alcohol
According to Dr. Ronald Melzack, “when patients take morphine to
combat pain, it is rare to see addiction…. Addiction seems to arise only in some fraction of morphine users who take the drug for its psychological effects, such as its ability to produce euphoria and relieve tension”
Only those who crave the drug’s mood-altering effects require ever
increasing doses for relief.
Michael Hinden
drugs and alcohol
Ella O’Neill found God; her son found art.
Travis Bogard
Reality and Fiction
Edmund is more than an imaginary figure. He is a figure from
history and one upon whose truth to life an audience has a right
to insist.
Gerardine Meaney
Reality and Fiction
This extraordinary insistence that the play be subsidiary to a (bio
graphical) reality independent of it is the worst kind of literary
voyeurism: a demand on the writer to exhibit all his scars.
Gerardine Meaney
Paralysis
Stasis and circularity are the very texture of the play. The
repetition reaches an apotheosis in the final scene, for this play does
not culminate in catharsis, nor even in destruction. It ends instead in a stasis which implies an inexorable continuity without change.
Gerardine Meaney
autobiography, imposter syndrome, guilt
Shakespeare’s Edmund (King Lear) is the brilliant bastard, the original individualist, who is in every sense illegitimate. Edmund Tyrone is also
a usurper. He has taken the place of Eugene, the dead son of Mary
and Tyrone, and of the other absent Eugene, Eugene O’Neill, whose surrogate and distortion on stage he is.
Gerardine Meaney
irony
Mary Tyrone denies her men the possibility of any sense of home
Gerardine Meaney
comparison, quote significance (?)
The apparently innocuous quote by Jamie in the first act, “the
Moor, I know his trumpet”, identifies his father with the
jealous hero of Othello? This foreshadows Mary’s later accusation, “He’s been jealous of every one of my babies”.
The same quote identifies Jamie himself with lago. And of course in this scene it is Jamie who casts suspicion on Mary as lago on Desdemona. As it is lago who is truly jealous and a usurper so it is Jamie, too, who corrupts Edmund out of jealousy of his parents’ affections
Gerardine Meaney
son on son conflict
His struggle for priority in an Oedipal conflict with his father is also a struggle for priority in a struggle with his literary fathers.
Laurin Porter
Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night, the play that
in some sense he had been preparing for his entire career, at the
peak of his artistic powers.
Laurin Porter
isolation
The selection of allusions, their number, and the ways they are used, I will argue, function on a subtextual level to reinforce the fact of Mary’s isolation within the family unit as well as our awareness of it.
family doesnt talk to her in literary quotes
Laurin Porter
isolation
It is an all-male club, and the literary references become, if you will, gendered language.
The allusions form a “language of kinship,” to borrow (and slightly re-interpret) Michael Manheim’s very useful term, making explicit what we sense when we watch the play: that Mary is at the same time paradoxically the sine qua non of the family? the “one thing needful” to all three men? and yet psychically isolated within the very family that depends on her.
It is also worth noting that though the piano may provide a means of
self-expression for Mary, her choice of music? Chopin waltzes? is by
definition word-less. In a very real way, language in this play belongs to the men; at the very least, they share a special coded language which excludes her.
Laurin Porter
gender
She does not exist as an autonomous individual with the same access to agency and power that the men have. Rather, she is a product of the roles that society has bequeathed to her as wife and mother and is seen by her husband and sons through the lenses of their particular needs, a phenomenon which is reinforced both by gendered linguistic practices and the allocation of stage space.
Laurin Porter
gender
Mary is constructed by the gaze of the men, a phenomenon which, like the gendered language and space of the play, helps account for Mary’s isolation and deep loneliness.
McDonald
surveillance
calls LDJN a
“structure of watchers-being-watched”
Laurin Porter
gender, isolation, surveillance
Selmon, drawing upon Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, describes the
Tyrone family dynamic as a panopticon.
T]he whole point of this arrangement was that the prisoners should know that they were being observed or, crucially, that they might being observed. This constant possibility is always present in the prisoner’s mind, and thus the force of discipline is no longer just “outside,” and capable of being avoided or hidden from, but “inside,” in the prisoner’s own mind.
Constructed by their gaze, aware of their constant surveillance, Mary is a prisoner in her own home. It is her husband and sons’ space, not hers, just as it is their language and their power.
Normand Berlin
forgiveness
He wrote in his dedication to his wife Carlotta,”with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” The
word “all” in the dedication indicates that in the act of writing
O’Neill is attempting to understand himself as well as his family
and to forgive himself and his family for the hell they created for
each other.
connection to no exit
Carlotta O’Neill
“When he started Long Day’s Journey it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own
writing. He would come out of the study at the end of a day gaunt and sometimes weeping. His eyes would be all red and he looked ten years older than when he went in in the morning.”
Normand Berlin
autobiographical significance
What makes it the highest achievement in American theater is not its autobiographical aspect. It is what O’Neill’s dramatic art does to make it a self-contained work of art that can be appreciated without
knowledge of the dramatist’s personal life.
Normand Berlin
shakespeare quote
Jamie is O’Neill’s Hamlet. Bitter and cynical, his whole life revolves
around the condition of his mother.
“mad scene enter ophelia” connects himself to hamlet
Eugene O’Neill
autobiography
about Iceman Cometh; applicable to LDJN
“I knew ‘em all; I’ve known ‘em all for years. All these people I’ve written about I once knew.”
Grant H. Redford
autobiography
That he drew on personal experience is true, but it is not true that the value of any of the plays depends on how closely they parallel that experience.
Carlotta O’Neill
autobiography
“He explained that he had to write this play. He had to write it because it was a thing that haunted him. and he had to forgive whatever caused this in them [his mother, father, brother]
and in himself.”
After he had completed it, she writes, “he felt freer. It was his
way of making peace with his family, and himself.”
Eugene O’Neill
love and forgiveness
autobiography
In his dedication of the play to her he says that her love had
enabled him “to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”
Eugene O’Neill
greed
James Tyrone
O’Neill once quoted from the New Testament to express this view-he was speaking specifically of the United States -“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”
According to Grant H. Redford in LDJ this theme, that devotion to
material things corrupts, is embodied in the father, James Tyrone.
Bigsby
quotes allusions
Rather than speak their own lives they hide in the language of others
Bogard
He (Tyrone) buys bad real estate to purchase the security he cannot find.
Steven A Black
edmunds speeches about his trips and poetry
hope
We sense that he may well survive his consumption and find a more coherent way to live that the other Tyrone’s have found.
Steven A. Black
hope
The hope we feel for Edmund is essential to our hunch that the play is tragic. Here is the great paradox of tragedy
Tynan
autobiography
We are watching a crucial day in O’Neil’s late youth, covered with a thin gauze of fiction
Downer
tragedy
‘Long Day’s Journey into Night is a tragedy, not because it obediently follows the precepts of Aristotle, but because it considers the possibilities for human failure in the pursuit of happiness, a way of life of which Aristotle never dreamed.’
Stephen A. Black
The audience may easily overlook the character’s positive traits. ‘They are all highly intelligent, imaginative and sensitive, educated, skilled in logical analysis, often capable of deep and complex fellow-feeling.’
Stephen A. Black
style of the play
The play’s action as a series of ‘quasi-judicial proceedings, in which accusations and denials are made, evidence is adduced’
Fathima
tragedy
‘The Tyrone family suffers from what Freud called the pleasure principle’ (The tendency of people to seek pleasure and avoid pain, often at great lengths.)
Meaney
intertextuality, allusions quotes
‘James Tyrone haunts, is the ghostly double of, the Shakespearian heroes he once played, but which his own ‘tragic flaw’, the greed bred by insecurity, has ensured he will never play again.’
Katalin G. Kalay
tragedy, allusion quote
can the crisis and singular tragedy opening up, journeying
through the single day in August, 1912 till midnight be seen as a tragedy of letters?
Katalin G. Kalay
shakespeare allusion
The picture of Shakespeare is decisive: on the one hand, it is clearly recognizable even for the less keen-eyed spectators; on the other hand, it is placed above the young generation’s bookcase, thus indicating that they, too owe something to their father’s master.
Katalin G. Kalay
Shakespeare allusion quote james tyrone
In Act Four, well under the influence of alcohol, he seems to agree stubbornly with Edmund’s scornful suggestion saying that for him, Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, and this gesture, though quite
absurd, is one of self-identification, it acknowledges his intimate, almost family relationship with his favorite writer.
Stephen A Black
The assumption that understanding gives people control over themselves, over circumstances, and over nature itself
Travis Bogard
“The Tyrones world is seen in its barest essentials”
