The dependence of men upon Mary in Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is shown in the very first scene and throughout the play. Therefore, Mary becomes the central character around whom the males in this play revolve. She emerges in the few moments of normalcy as the source of life for them, the quiet hub around which they move, happy in her presence. But the house and the people residing inside are only living an illusion, Mary worst of all. She retreats to the past and dreams about dreams that never were. She denies the sickness and addiction occurring in her household. Mary retreats deeper and deeper into a bearable illusion, having the fog envelop the truth that destroys her and her family.
The summer house seems to be truly a home, and the comforts it offers, though modest, are sufficient to the family’s well-being. But the illusion of the home is an essential image, to establish for it is not what it seems. Mary never considered the house to be of any comfort, “I’ve never felt it was my home. It was wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest way” (O’Neill, 44).
The room is shabby, poorly furnished, a temporary residence at best. It is like the cheap hotels of Tyrone’s road tours, where Mary has waited alone, spending nights in idleness. Although Mary and the entire family try to hide this in the beginning of the play, the truth emerges, and we learn that they are trying, ever so desperately, to deny the real world, to fog it up. As Mary says, “[the fog] hides you from the world and the world from you” (98).
The Essay on Hope House Home Katherine Rosaline
2 nd Hope House Fundraising Committee Meeting Minutes African Growth Ministries, Hope House Baby Home Date: Saturday, May 14, 2005 Time: 3-5 pm Location: 16 Lore sho Grove Attendance: Virginia Nyambura Main ah, Carolyn Scant on, Mary ke GathaiyaPerinus Wainaina, Terry Howard, Rosaline Knobs, Katherine Maloney and visitor Katherine Kavanagh. Regrets: Jim Kim otho 1. Review and approval of the ...
Mary is under two devastating illusions. One, she denies the illness of her son, Edmund. She claims that he has a summer cold, nothing more. More importantly, she pretends not to have a morphine addiction. She makes every excuse possible for why she engages in taking morphine, but never confesses to the true nature of her problem.
As the play progresses into the night, and as we delve into the mind of Mary, we learn of her many past delusions. She believed she lived in a loving household, when, in actuality, her father was an alcoholic. She claimed that she wanted to be a nun or a concert pianist. But the dreams of lost faith and spent talent are dreams of escape. She wanted to flee to where she could be sustained by a vision and live a simple, virginal existence. She needed to be alone in a protected silence. In seeking her “true self,” Mary sought a self that didn’t exist. She places her failures on every member of the family but herself– Tyrone for being niggardly; Jamie for killing Edwin; Edmund for being born and causing her addiction to morphine, “I was so healthy before Edmund was born… bearing Edmund was the last straw” (87).
Mary’s refusal to accept her responsibilities has bred in her a guilt that she is incapable of bearing, and she uses the morphine to eradicate the pain.
Mary entered into a dream in which isolation was her terror and her need. It is in this trek that she explored the main theme of isolation in illusion. Repeatedly, she remarked that she could find her glasses and therefore could not see to fix her hair. In other words, she couldn’t see what she was. Her wedding dress was a symbol of something that was never a substantial reality. But Mary recoiled when she came in contact with objectivity. She clouded everything around her and secluded herself in her own dream of pain. Mary was “so happy for a time” (176), but her quest was for a hope lost, a goalless search for salvation never to be attained.
