On Source of Mary’s Tragedy

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【Abstract】Long Day’s Journey into Night is a great work of American dramatist Eugene O’Neill. As the only female protagonist fully portrayed in the play, Mary’s tragedy generated a hot debate. In this thesis, through detailed analysis, it is found that Mary is the victim of male-dominated society and men are the source of her tragedy.

【Key words】Long Day’s Journey into Night; mary; source of tragedy

【摘要】《进入黑夜的慢慢旅程》是美国著名戏剧家尤金?奥尼尔的作品。作为作品中唯一被详细呈现出来的女性玛丽也受到批评家的关注。本文通过对玛丽悲剧命运分析，发现她是男权社会的受害者，男人也成为她人生悲剧的根源。

【关键词】《进入黑夜的慢慢旅程》 玛丽 悲剧根源

1. Introduction

As an outstanding play of Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night shows a day of the Tyrones from morning to midnight in the living room of Tyrone’s summer house in 1912. With affectionate description, Eugene O’Neill makes the readers experience a painful journey following the protagonists in the play. Particularly, Mary’s tragic ending evokes a pity in us.

In O’Neill’s works, many women remain both faceless and voiceless. Mary Tyrone is no exception. As is shown in the play, Mary lived in a male-dominated society, in which males were the true sexual “subject”, while females were assigned to be the corresponding part--the sexual “other”. So they turned to be the subordination of males with an inferior status.

2. Analysis of Mary’s tragedy

When Mary was a little girl, she was already inculcated the concept of patriarchy by her father, who spent a lot of money cultivating her to be an elegant lady, which was loved by men in the patriarchal society. During the process, she lost the opportunity of self-development and her own self-consciousness. Mary had a dream to be a nun. Can you imagine a lovely energetic young girl should want to be a nun? It is only because she was deeply corrupted by the influence of patriarchy and became the product of patriarchal society. Based on this circumstance, she was doomed to be the subordination of men.

As a wife, Mary was under the fetters of matrimony. It was Tyrone who destroyed all her romantic dreams. Before getting married, she had a great life: good education, colorful social activities as well as a doting father. Mary once said: “My father told me to buy anything I wanted and never mind what it cost. I’m afraid he spoiled me dreadfully” (O’Neill 114). However, when she got married with Tyrone, everything changed. Just like Beauvoir said, women cannot find any scope for the expression of individual identity in marriage. In her marriage, Mary totally lost her self-identity. First, she lived under Tyrone’s light. Tyrone was a famous actor. This identity defeated Mary’s dignity and status since she was just a housewife. Her old girl friends gradually alienated her. The Yankee neighbors looked down on her. Without friends and social activities, she was so alone that she signed: “If there was only some place I could get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to--not about anything serious, simply laugh and gossip and forget for a while” (O’Neill 46). At this moment, her sole hope was her husband, while Tyrone always ignored her. Without choice, she just waited hour after hour until she became quite used to it. In addition, Tyrone could not give her an actually real home which Mary had been longing for. Since Tyrone’s career, Mary had to live like a refugee in cheap hotels and traveled from one city to another by dirty trains. At the same time, as a housewife, Mary depended on her husband financially. Marxist feminist thinker Emma Goldman proposed that the economic subordination of women is the cause and origin of prostitution. Absolutely, Mary was not a prostitute, but she sold herself to a man through marriage. She lived on her husband, while her husband was a niggard who asked a quack to diagnose her when she was ill. Consequently, she became addicted to morphine. In fact, Mary once wanted to be a painter. She could have her own career. However, when she fell in love with Tyrone, she forgot all her dreams and just wanted to be his wife. Ultimately, it was the man she married that became the blasting fuse of endless misfortunes and her tragedy.

As a mother, Mary was bonded by her sons. In her life, she lived under the anguish and guilt of a dead baby, a seriously ill son Edmund and a alcoholic son Jamie. The dead baby like a nightmare tortured her and made her feel guilty and detest Jamie, whose fault resulted in the baby’s death. Meanwhile, since Jamie was alcohol addicted and always went to the brothel, Mary felt ashamed of this son. In turn, Jamie also hated Mary not only because of his lack of Mary’s love but also his mother’s drug addiction. He even blamed on Mary for his failure. In a word, the terrible relationship with Jamie bothered her deeply. What’s more, Mary had ambivalent feelings toward Edmund. On one level, she had been worrying about Edmund’s disease and showed her love to him. On another level, she hated him. In the play, Mary claimed: “It wasn’t until after Edmund was born that I had a single gray hair. Then it began to turn white” (O’Neill 28). She implied that Edmund’s birth was a turning point of her life. She got rheumatism for giving birth to Edmund. In order to kill the pain of rheumatism, she turned toand became addicted. Radically, there was deeply spiritual estrangement between Mary and Edmund. Even so, Mary always tried to be a good mother, but her sons always sneered her because of her drug addiction. As Beauvoir observes, by being defined as child-rearers, women are excluded from creative fulfillment. Mary, as a mother, didn’t get any return from her sons and self-fulfillment but became poorer and was unable to keep positive to the future.

3. Conclusion

Mary’s sufferings expose the limitations of women in a world shaped according to male’s desires. Her husband and sons demanded her possessing the virtues of nurturing, forgiving and renouncing of her own dreams for theirs. It was too harsh for Mary. She was like a server and the Tyrone men were the masters in the family. They even took Mary’s services for granted. The overwhelming demands and distrust suppressed her and leaded her to be desperate and insane finally. In other word, she was the victim of patriarchal society. From her tragedy, it is also known that having one’s own career and keeping independent is of great importance, and women should have the courage to face the reality and keep positive to the future.

References:

[1]Simone de Beauvoir.The Second Sex[M].London:Jonathan Cape,2010.

[2]George Myerson.Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex[M].Dalian:Dalian University of Technology Press,2008.

[3]Michael Manheim.The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill[M].Shanghai:Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,2000.

[4]Eugene O’Neill.Long Day’s Journey Into Night[M].New Haven & London:Yale University Press,1956.

作者简介：胡杰(1990.08-)，女，山东潍坊人，天津外国语大学14级研究生，研究方向为英美文学。