The Dangers of Retrograde

Amongst the many convoluted conversations within Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, there is, within the second scene of the second act, one between Mary and the elder Tyrone which exemplifies the issues O’Neill finds within the tribe of the Irish immigrants and their America-born descendants. Mary Cavan Tyrone is an Irishwoman, described by O’Neill as “fifty-four, about medium height,” with a “young, grace figure… once… extremely pretty” although her hair is “pure white;” she has an “extreme nervousness” about her, and “her hands are never still” despite the rheumatism which O’Neill remarks has “knotted the joints and warped the fingers” (Act I). Mary is “humiliated by her inability to control the nervousness” which is relayed through her perpetually moving hands, but one may come to understand that it is not merely the nervousness which humiliates her, but what causes her nervousness. Mary is addicted to morphine, although she refuses throughout the play to admit it. The elder Tyrone, James Tyrone, is himself described as “sixty-five,” though he “looks ten years younger;” he is an actor, and carries himself with the grandiosity of one, belying his “humble beginnings” in act rather than personality, for his beliefs and “inclinations are still close to… his Irish farmer forebears” (Act I). Unlike his wife, Tyrone “has no nerves” (Act I). Physically, these two are almost nothing alike. Mary carries the visage of her age, though her features are haunted by their past form. Tyrone, on the other hand, belies his age entirely, looking a decade younger than he is.

It is not merely their physical differences which produces the distance between these two, however; there is a greater disparity at work, which O’Neill presents to articulate his concerns with Irish immigrants and their potential tribal issues. In Mary is seen the Irish tendency to obsess over the past and become overwhelmed by it; in Tyrone there is the Irish tendency to also abhor the past, and thus either ignore, embellish, or idealize the past, or some combination thereof. O’Neill, too, warns against tribal hubris, a characteristic of the Irish immigrant tribe; pride in oneself and one’s cultural identity, he posits, may prove detrimental to the immigrant, as it inclines them to bring their ways to a land which unforgivingly rejects and/or subverts their ways. Tyrone’s hubris forces him to both purchase land that is not profitable and to carry the façade of the eloquence¹ which the Irish in their very myths held to such high regard. Mary’s pride causes her to reject the agency she simultaneously strives to attain.

Mary states, in Act 2, scene 2, that Tyrone “mustn’t be offended;” she immediately adds, “I wasn’t offended when you gave me the automobile. I knew you didn’t mean to humiliate me,” a statement at first glance meant to mollify the horror and offense with which Tyrone is overwhelmed when Mary claims that Smythe, the driver Tyrone pays to take Mary wherever she wishes to venture. However, as Mary states later, the audience comes to comprehend that Mary says this because she believes Tyrone gave her the car to give her agency, an act which is twice problematic. First, the act insinuates that she must be given her agency, as if she was originally without it. And though she knows Tyrone loves her (“and it proved how much you loved me”), it stings still in that Tyrone obviously pities her. As Mary says a few lines after this first barbed statement, she hates more those who pity her than those who merely cut her off. On another level, Tyrone purchasing the car shows just how little he understands Mary. Although Tyrone has decided so, it is not that she needs to get out of the house that is her problem; obtaining a car implies that she would have places to visit. This is not the case, Mary explains; she lost most of her friends “after [she] married an actor” and experienced the mortification of enduring the lawsuit her husband had to settle due to “the scandal of that woman who had been [Tyrone’s] mistress.” These lines invite one to recognize a problematic aspect of a patriarchy. Tyrone has not only decided when and how Mary has agency; he has refused, and continues to do so throughout the entirety of the play, to acknowledge Mary as a legitimate and fully-fledged human being, objectifying and infantilizing her.

Implying that he knew where Mary’s mind was going, and thus that he had engaged in this argument before, Tyrone pleads, “For the love of God, for my sake and the boys’ sake and your own, won’t you stop now?” The outcry, despite its timing, is rendered vague by the realization that he could be referring to the conversation as a whole, to Mary’s passive-aggressiveness, and/or to her addiction. The audience’s question matches Mary’s response (“Stop what?”), which in turn reveals that Tyrone, despite being a studious and well-versed actor, is himself without eloquence, particularly when it comes to speaking with his family. Additionally, Tyrone’s response reveals that, despite his love of the idyllic past, he cannot handle his own. He strives to abandon it for something he believes is better and nobler. That Tyrone is an actor only exasperates the point; he made his career living the lives of those with nobler and more dramatic lives than he, the descendant of mundane and ultimately futile farmers, could. Mary cannot handle the past either, but she strives to confront it, unlike Tyrone, who ignores the pain in which Mary dwells. He stifles her attempts to reconcile and move past her agony. And, when the past becomes something he cannot avoid, he rewrites it, as evidenced in Act IV when Edmund mentions that, to Tyrone, “…facts don’t mean a thing… What [Tyrone wants] to believe, that’s the only truth! Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example.” Tyrone rebuts, “So he was. The proof is in his plays,” despite the fact that within Tyrone’s library are various copies of the histories of England and the works of Shakespeare, any of which would point to the contrary.

Next, Mary exclaims that she and Tyrone have and always will love each other, and begs to “remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped – the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”

“You won’t even try?” Tyrone queries, again without the specifics mandated by eloquence; Mary takes advantage of the vagueness of Tyrone’s question, replying, “Try to go for a drive this afternoon, you mean? The tired tone of this conversation, emanating especially from Tyrone, insinuates that this is not the first time Tyrone and Mary have spoken this way to each other, and supposes that it will not be the last. Returning to the topic of her general loneliness and dissatisfaction, Mary continues, “There is no one I can invite to drive with me, and I never know where to tell Smythe to go,” verbalizing her belief that Tyrone isolated her from society, although she herself belies her agency in the matter. As explicated by Mary earlier in the play, she left the convent she had been studying in to marry Tyrone; her decision to do so led to some of her friends cleaving themselves from Mary’s life, and others pitying her, whom she herself elected to abandon. Additionally, the suddenness with which Mary chooses to go to the drug store leads the audience to the belief that she has selective agency. She only knows where to ask Smythe to take her when Tyrone remarks, “If you’re that far gone in the past already… what will you be tonight?” Wishing not to answer nor acknowledge that which Tyrone’s question addresses, Mary diverts back to her original topic “defiantly,” much to Tyrone’s ire. He exclaims next, “I hope you’ll lay in a good stock ahead so we’ll never have another night like the one when you screamed for it… to try and throw yourself off the dock!”

Mary initially attempts to ignore this barb (stage directions: “tries to ignore this”) by listing off that which she needs from the drug store, but she “breaks down pitiably,” incapable of doing so, and pleads, “James! You mustn’t remember! You mustn’t humiliate me so!” After Tyrone apologizes for doing so, Mary denies the episode, having regained power in the conversation, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing like that ever happened. You must have dreamed it.” The internalized frustration Mary and Tyrone feel towards their past constantly builds into devastating explosions, as they never address their issues explicitly. They never own up to their misgivings, nor accept that they have made mistakes, and they are made to suffer for it, most notably through their relationship with their children. This scene, however, reveals the girth of the chasm between this Irish husband and wife; it shows how the past is enabled to haunt the Tyrone family. It is also in this scene that we come to comprehend which aspect of the past haunts the family with the most prevalence. Mary explains, “…bearing Edmund was the last straw. I was so sick afterwards, and that ignorant quack of a cheap hotel doctor – All I knew was I was in pain. It was easy for him to stop the pain.”

Tyrone outbursts, “Mary! For God’s sake, forget the past!” He knows to which memory Mary’s words lead.

“Why?” Mary inquires, “How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.” Here, Mary not only divulges her suspicions that Jamie, the firstborn son, purposefully (albeit not necessarily consciously, as if it were in his nature to do so) spread his disease to the newborn Eugene, who would perish before Edmund was conceived. O’Neill embeds in the first statement (“The past is the present, isn’t it… but life won’t let us.”) the crux of a naturalist’s argument. Naturalists arose from an understanding of Darwinism which implied that fate dictated more than oneself, and that oneself was entirely governed by one’s environment and the circumstances surrounding oneself. Mary carries the hopelessness naturalism can yield; she believed that she was without agency, and that to grasp for power was to grasp for individual atoms, futile and meaningless. She cannot move on from the past, for it controls her future, and her present, forever and always. Mary believes she is consumed by the past, and that her life will be nothing but the past, ad infinitum.

“Are you back with Eugene now?” asks Tyrone. “Can’t you let our dead baby rest in peace?” He knows the answer; Mary knows the answer. She cannot. She is ensconced entirely by the agonies of that which she cannot change, and because she cannot change her past, because she has not the power to do so, she is without agency, and thus must continue to live in the agony which pushes her to dwell in that fog which she finds most comfortable. As time progresses forward, Mary’s mind wanders steadily backwards, as if her internal clock is forever in retrograde, only reset by the attainment and abuse of morphine.

O’Neill expresses many concerns for Irish immigrants and their descendants in this scene. He shows the audience the Irish tendency to dwell on the past obsessively whilst simultaneously straining to move on from it. This tension alienates and frustrates the first generation of Irish immigrants, as they experience at a greater magnitude than their descendants the tension of such a paradox. Mary exemplifies the Irish immigrant who obsesses over the past; she almost exclusively references memories from times which precede the play. Granted, the entirety of Long Day’s Journey Into Night occupies a single day, but the range Mary covers over the course of that day is enormous. She starts her backwards meandering by referencing the previous night; by the end of the play has gone back to decades before the moments the audience gets to observe. Tyrone, however, abandons, negates, and otherwise refutes the past. Every time Mary brings an aspect of the past to his attention, Tyrone tries to silence her. The same goes for his interactions with Edmund and Jamie. Tyrone’s gaze is exclusively on the future, except when he is forced to make a decision which interferes with the image he wishes for others to see. His hubris obscures his ability to see that which will truly be in his family’s interests, which highlights another warning O’Neill has for Irish immigrants: he provides with the Tyrones an example of what occurs when one abandons or corrupts the values of one’s homeland culture to pursue the values of the new culture.

By attempting to garner land and rent it out in the American fashion, as well as live out his dreams as an actor, James Tyrone puts himself and his family in a financial situation that is ultimately undesirable. But, rather than admit his wrongs, because he believes he is living out the life of some nouveau-Irish success, he continually accepts the help of those who continue to either bankrupt him or cause physical harm to his family in the form of poor care. The “quack” to whom Mary refers, who knew how to remove her pain, is the selfsame doctor who treats Edmund, who has not gotten well despite the prescriptions and procedures given by the doctor. And, despite all the land which Tyrone rents out, his own family is without a proper home, living in hotels when they are not altogether in the summer house. Edmund posits later in the play that society itself knows the class of the Tyrones, despite James’ intent otherwise. They are not poor, the Tyrones, but they may find themselves bankrupt, with one son who is too ill to work, another who is a failed actor, a moderately successful actor who squanders money away, and a façade to maintain. Mary, too, has a different kind of pride. Her haughtiness presents itself as blamelessness. She speaks and acts as if she is without agency, and yet much of what she does is by her own volition.

O’Neill warns, too, of the division which occurs between the first-generation immigrants who subscribe to the lifestyle of Mary and James, and their descendants. Mary and Tyrone provided for Jamie and Edmund an atmosphere of subtle yet perpetual hostility. James wanted children who would follow in his footsteps, as evidenced by the remarks he makes throughout the play, chiding Edmund for reading those writers which James regarded as “morbid” and chastising Jamie for not quoting Shakespeare. The bitterness which arises when two people in love cannot resolve their shared past, O’Neill reveals, provides an atmosphere so acidic that it severs the bond between parent and child. Though Jamie follows his father’s career, pursuing acting as the elder Tyrone, Jamie has notably failed and exemplified those aspects of actors about which Mary was undoubtedly warned (“you know how actors were considered in those days”). Edmund’s collection of books rivals that of his father’s, but rather than focus on Ireland and Anglo-Saxon philosophies and memories, it is comprised of French and German philosophers and poets who speak not of a romanticized past, but of the detriments of the past and its institutions. Because James and Mary could not form a cohesive parental unit, Jamie and Edmund cleaved themselves from their parent’s culture, interacting with it only on a surface, stereotypical level. Jamie’s Irish-ness became defined, then, by his drunkenness and debauchery; Edmund’s by his brooding and eloquence. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is O’Neill’s warning to the tribe of Irish immigrants still coping with the history of their embattled country: carry not the cultural baggage into one’s family, or watch it and the remnants of your culture drown beneath its weight.

1 Eloquence appears in such myths as that detailing the life of Taliesin, a Celtic poet-mystic; additionally, the Irish god Ogma, one of the three gods of skill, presided over speech and language as well as eloquence. The attributes of a god are inherently vital to the culture from which the god originates.