Long Day’s Journey Into Night

         The Characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night are deeply affected psychologically. The three men in the family are affected in a similar way. They are all alcoholics and most of the reason is because of Mary, who is terribly addicted to morphine, and when she finds out Edmund has consumption, gets high to the point where she can’t even think for herself. Mary is affected psychologically because she can’t break her addiction anymore and it is now getting worse as Edmund’s physical condition gets worse. At the beginning of the day, the psychological state of the family was tolerable, but it got worse and worse throughout the day, and by nighttime none of them could think they were so messed up.

          First, the three men of the house. Jamie and Edmund, the two brothers were affected a little differently by their mothers morphine addiction. Jamie isn’t afraid to admit the truth, he is brutally honest in the play. “Where’s the hophead? Gone to sleep?” he says referring to his mother. Edmund was always backing up his mother, hoping to God that this was all a dream and that she didn’t shoot up morphine, hoping it was all a lie. “You dirty bastard!” was Edmund’s reply as he punched Jamie square in the face. This happened numerous times throughout the play. Tyrone was in between the two. He hated Jamie for being so honest, and thought Edmund was a fool for not believing. He knew she was on morphine, wasn’t going to not believe, but wasn’t going to make crude comments about it either, he wanted to not think about it unless he knew she was about to take more, then he’d try and prevent her. “Up to take more of that God-damned poison, is that it? You’ll be like a mad ghost before the night’s over!” yelled Tyrone in agony at Mary, trying to prevent her from shooting up again. And all 3 of them turned to alcohol to help ease tensions in the house.

          Mary was mentally affected much differently than the other characters in the story. Mary was a headcase, she was incapable of solving problems without resorting to drugs. Mary always lives in the past, isn’t capable of accepting reality, and worsens her problems with morphine. She always lives in the past;

“Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never have wanted one-never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!”

          Mary is incapable of accepting reality. She refuses to believe that Edmund has consumption, she thinks he is faking the whole thing and that he just as a small cold. “Oh I’m sure you don’t feel half as badly as you make out. You’re such a baby. You like to get us worried so we’ll make a fuss over you.” said Mary to Edmund after he explained to her how sick he felt. And the only thing Mary could do to solve her problems is buy more morphine.

          This entire play, characters were affected psychologically. From the 3 men’s alcohol abuse or Mary’s morphine addiction, the one thing they all have in common is they turn to a dangerous substance to cope with their problems, but in this case, those substances are making all of their psychological situations worse in the end.

Just a quickie on Glass

          I already did my Glass vs. Streetcar post, but i just want to talk a little bit about psychology in The Glass Menagerie. There are many psychological problems with the characters in this play. We’ll start with Tom. Tom was unfit to support his family. He didn’t have the willpower to go to work everyday and put up with his family.

“You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that- celotex interior! With- fluorescent- tubes! Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains- than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that God damn ‘Rise and shine!’ ‘Rise and shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!’

          I think this is a perfect example of how Tom can’t deal with his problems psychologically and ends up walking out on the family.

          Laura is also incapable of acting like an adult because she is so unbelievably shy and mentally affected, she couldn’t even look at the man she was about to go on a date with. As Jim walked in the door, Laura immediately jumped behind the door and hid there until Jim approached her. The first question Jim, her first gentleman caller asks her, Laura retorts, “Excuse me- I haven’t finished playing the Victrola” and awkwardly leaving the scene, leaving Jim in a state of confusion, while he was able to immediately pick up on her psychological issues.

          Amanda is also psychological affected because she loves her children so much but doesn’t know how to communicate with them. The constant bickering and senseless talk she does starts fights with her kids, which lead to all 3 of their psychological issues. It is her rants such as:

“Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread. And chew- chew! Animals have secretions in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down. Eat food leisurely, son, and really enjoy it. A well-cooked meal has lots of delicate flavors that have to be held in the mouth for appreciation. So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!”

          When she says things like this, that is when Tom gets upset and can’t deal with his problems, Amanda yells back and is an emotional wreck because she thinks that her children aren’t as successful as they should be, and Laura is caught in the middle with nothing to say, and is shy and quite in the corner, making her shyness and psychological issues even worse.

Similarities between Streetcar and Glass

          Tennessee Williams is considered one of the greatest playwrights in American History. Two of his most famous plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie have many similarities. Both plays have a similar setting, they both take place in a small, dark, cramped area. Many of the characters have the same personality in the two plays, Blanche is similar to Amanda, and Stanley is similar to Tom. Also in both of Tennessee’s plays, he leaves the reader with an open ending, enabling the reader to ponder upon numerous scenarios. In these various ways in both plays, Tennessee gets the modernist view across to the reader that the American dream doesn’t exist, and that in the end someone will fall, and they will fall hard. Streetcar and Glass are two peas in a pod.

          Both of Tennessee’s plays take place in cramped, claustrophobic, dark areas. In Streetcar, Blanche asks Stella about her house when she first enters:

“You sit down and explain this place to me! What are you doing in a place like this? No, now seriously putting joking aside. Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you write me, honey, why didn’t you let me know? Why, that you had to live in these conditions!”

          In Glass, we see a constant repeat of the dark setting, which sets the mood and tone of the play. Right from the beginning, you can tell it will be a rotten ending just by the lighting, which reflects the personalities of the characters. The Narrator describes the scene as:

“At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and the  sinister latticework of neighboring fire escapes.”

          The constant use of the words dark and narrow give you a cramped uncomfortable feeling that reflects the sad outcome of the play. Both of these two plays are similar in that sense.

          Many of the characters in the two plays have the same personalities. Amanda and Blanche have similar personalities. Both are seen as very annoying to the other characters. In the heat of the argument, Tom yells at his mother Amanda:

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn ‘Rise and shine!’ ‘Rise and shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!'”

          “She’s not stayin’ here after Tuesday. You know that, don’t you? Just to make sure I bought her ticket myself. A bus ticket.” Stanley bluntly stated this to Stella because he couldn’t put up with Blanche’s lies and numerous problems anymore. And In the two previous quotes I’ve shown, Stanley and Tom are alike in a sense that they speak bluntly, say how they feel, are very dominant and can cross the lines with their actions, making both of the two types of characters very hard to like. In both of Williams’ famous plays, he has very similar characters.

          Both plays have very open endings, leaving the reader with many possible scenarios to fill in at the end of the book. Streetcar ends with Blanche being taken away out of the house, clearly psychologically unfit. At the end, no one is told about Stanley and Stella’s relationship, what ends up happening to Blanche or what happens to Mitch, the reader has to fill in what they think might happen with the characters. Also in Glass, the story is a recollection of Tom after he walks out on the family. We don’t know much about Tom’s new life, besides he is unsuccessful, we don’t know how Amanda and Laura get by, we don’t know what they do, we just need to fill it in. In all of these ways, Glass and Streetcar are very similar plays.

         

           

Further studies on O’Neill’s life

          Starting October 16, 1888 and ending November 27, 1953 O’Neill’s life, he was on a quest for a personal truth. O’Neill, as negative and pessimistic of a person you could come across, was this way only because he was a confused individual. His entire life was screwed up, all women in his life had reversed roles, he didn’t believe in the American dream and thought everyone would at some point fall, and was very unfortunate with his family, loosing both of his parents and his brother within 3 years. He himself had tuberculosis, Parkinson’s disease and he remarried numerous times. All of these aspects of his troubled life are reflected in his numerous plays.

          Eugene’s play Desire Under the Elms, perfectly reflects the reversed roles of women in his life and the failure of the American Dream. In this play, Eugene is similar to Eben, a confused individual who hates and loves a woman named Abbie, constantly changing his mind, denying that he stated things he clearly previously stated, to the point where he can’t make any decisions for himself. Abbie’s role is reversed, she is Eben’s lover, but also acts as a motherly figure toward him, which Eugene lived that reality with his last wife that he died with. Both Eben and Abbie’s dreams of one day taking over the evil Cabot’s farm were crushed, and the bad guy prevailed, a theme that commonly appear in O’Neill’s plays.

          Another one of O’Neill’s plays Long day’s Journey into Night reflected the sever problems of his home life, only the characters in the play have different names. This play perfectly bastardized his father, Edward who contributed to the beginning of Eugene’s mother’s fatal morphine addiction. She became addicted after giving birth to Eugene and got heavier when he was diagnosed with Tuberculosis. His brother Jamie wasn’t a bad kid, but being 10 years older than Eugene got Eugene into a lot of trouble. Eugene had an early case of alcoholism and wasted his money on prostitutes, and this was introduced to him by his older brother. None of this was meant to hurt Eugene, but it further confused him, kicked him out of college, got him into trouble, and contributed to his negativity and fading away from finding the meaning of his life.

         Was it his poor home life that made Eugene want to be independent at a young age? It could have been his father being a poor role model, or his mothers severe morphine addiction that made Eugene look at seagulls by the beach at a young age and think of how unlucky he was to be a human. There were numerous reasons that contributed to O’Neill’s insecurities and blindness to his problems, but unfortunately his quest for a personal truth wasn’t discovered before November 27, 1953, while O’Neill passed away in Room 401 of the Shelton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston. O’Neill’s last words being “Born in a hotel room, and God dammit, died in one!”

Desire Under the Elms, psychology

    In Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, psychology plays an important role in the play. The three main characters of the play, Cabot, Eben, and Abbie were all greatly affected psychologically. The entire play, only able to be thought up by one with as sick of a mind as O’Neill, consisted of manipulation of another person. Abbie tried to manipulate Eben, Eben tried to manipulate Abbie but only to get back at Cabot, and Cabot tried to manipulate both of them to keep the farm. The entire play is based on psychology and whoever is the last to be blackmailed, is the last man standing, and unfortunately it’s Cabot.
    Throughout the entire story, Cabot is a jerk. He is the only reason Eben even tries to manipulate Abbie or him, just because Cabot’s cruelty towards Eben. “Ye needn’t heed Eben. Eben’s a dumb fool—like his Maw, soft an’ simple!” said Cabot in front of Eben’s face. Remarks like this make Eben try and blackmail Cabot, and to do that he must manipulate Abbie. He uses Abbie to have sex with her to soil Cabot and try and get back at him. In Nester’s essay about O’Neill’s play, he states “When Eben thinks that if he seduces her then he will be able to take revenge from Cabot and his mother’s soul will be satisfied. So they both are engaged in making love to each other.” And the only reason that Abbie is with Cabot, is so she can one day take over the farm. After Eben makes a remark of how he will one day own the farm, Abbie retorts “Ye’ll never live t’ see the day when even a stinkin’ weed on it’ll belong t’ ye!” Abbie wants full control over the farm. Also, the killing of the baby innocent, Eben tells Abbie to kill the baby, but then later turns her into the police for doing so. Eben realizing then that he loves Abbie admits he was part of the scheme, and he too goes away to jail. Unfortunately, the play ends with both Eben and Abbie going to jail, so Cabot stays on the farm by himself. This proves my point, at the end of the play, Eben manipulated Abbie, his plan backfired, getting both of them in trouble, leaving Cabot with the farm. The last person standing after all of the psychological abuse everyone put on each other, would get the farm. Similar to Blanche and Stanley’s situation in Tennessee’s Streetcar, whoever could take the most psychological abuse would get Stella. And in both stories, the bad guys win, Stanley and Cabot. What is that saying about our modernist playwrights?

Hemingway, Open Endings

Usually I write about how psychology affects the characters, but it is too tough to pass up writing about Ernest Hemingway’s open endings. Ernie has a different approach to writing than most writers had, and that is why he stood out in the modernist era. He had a much different approach and I personally haven’t seen any writing styles similar to Hemingway. He begins quickly, just throwing you into the story, most of the time the reader doesn’t know what happens before or what happens after the story as well. For example, in his short story “The Killers” within the first line of the short story, the two killers George and Al are already in Henry’s lunchroom and soon after the begin asking George, Sam, and Nick questions. Hemingway gives the reader no prior information about these men, or what may happen, the reader needs to make assumptions and then pick up information as they go along. Hemingway totally leaves the ending up for grabs as well. After Nick warns Ole Anderson he is about to be murdered, and Anderson gives no response and doesn’t care the least bit, Nick retreats to the restaurant, and that is pretty much it. Nick is discouraged and scared about the situation, and the last 4 lines of the short story read like this:

“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.

“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”

“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”

This is how Hemingway leaves the play to end. He doesn’t mention what happens to Nick, Sam, or George. He never mentions if Ole Anderson ever left his room again, why he was acting so strange, or if he eventually got killed. The two killers were never mentioned again either. There are a number of possible scenarios that the reader can fill in to finish Hemingway’s short story, and that is why Hemingway is such an interesting author.

Uncle Ernie’s “The Killers”

Uncle Ernie’s “The Killers” is about 2 men who go into a diner and tie up the waiter and the cook, and wait for a man who goes in most days around 6 o’clock so they can shoot him for double-crossing a friend. Once Ole Anderson doesn’t show, the men leave, and one of the waiters who was tied up, went and told the man he was about to be killed. The man thought nothing of it, and didnt seem to care at all, and thats where Ernie ended the story at. This pertains to my aspect of modernism because throughout the entire short story, everyone in the resteraunt was in a state of confusion over what was really going on. On several occasions, the two men who were about to do the killing would ask the waiter, George, “what do you think were trying to do?” He would never know the answer, and that would add to the confusion of the story and the main characters. George, Sam, and Nick, the 3 workers were all psychologically affected during the hour period the 2 killers were at the resteraunt, and were in a state of confusion. Most of Ernie’s stories are psychologically affecting in a sense of confusion, and “The Killers” brings that out perfectly.

Uncle Ernie Hemingway

Ernie is a messed up dude. Unfair to women, because he didn’t know what to do with them, a raging alcoholic, an insane moustache, he obviously must have some psychologically unfit characters right? Of course! And Nick is a perfect example in his poem “The End of Something.” Nick is a very confused character, he intends on breaking up with his girlfriend Marjorie for an absurd reason. He knows she is equal to him, he taught her everything he knew, and he, like our Uncle Ernie would be, was jealous that she was equal to him. He was psychologically unfit and too stubborn to accept the fact that she was equal to him. Thinking that he was psychologically fit to survive without his beloved Marjorie, he was wrong. She left him on the island they were at and he sat there and wept until the poem was over. Ernie is big into open endings, sad endings, and emotionally unstable characters, probably similar to his past experiences.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Elliot, an ex-patriot from the post World War I era, is one of the Fathers of “Some Attributes of Modern Literature”. My favorite attribute is ” The use of such structural approaches to experience as psychoanalysis, myth, the symbolic apprehension and comprehension of reality.” In Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“, the main character is greatly affected psychologically, and eventually commits suicide. In Carol Christ’s analysis of Prufrock, she mentions how Prufrock is very unstable. She says “Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifingly unstable….The poem, in these various ways, decomposes the body, making abviguous its sexual identification.” Throughout the poem, you only see bits and pieces of the girl Prufrock imagines himself with, just an arm, eyes, nose, things of that sort, and they are placed with inanimate objects, like the sky, the fog, the street. This gives you the perception that Prufrock is an unstable character.

The Hollow Men

There is extensive use of psychology used in the writing of T.S. Elliot. In a lot of his work, Elliot’s characters tend to get caught up in the surreal, purgatory like landscape. It is almost a neutral landscape, where there is no such thing as time and you’re waiting to be judged. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men” is a perfect example of this. In J. Hillis Miller’s summary of The Hollow Men, he mentions the presence of a “dead land,” a “cactus land,” a “valley of dying stars,” hollow like the men themselves. That is psychologically affecting to the reader, and you can tell that the narrator and the main characters are affected psychologically. The psychology of the character affects the setting in most of Elliot’s poems; it also affects the mood and tone as well.