Commenting On The Female Characterization In Long Day's Journey Into Night

As the "founder of American stage", Eugene O'Neill is one of the most outstanding playwrights of America in the twentieth century. He succeeds in both endowing American drama with serious themes and experimenting with various dramatic skills. Meanwhile, his achievement in characterization of females is also noteworthy. But to some degree, the female consciousness in his plays has been more or less neglected. Many critics hold negative attitudes towards his female characters as well as his view of womanhood. They think that O'Neill never exceeded the narrow limits of the traditional male idea of women popular in the Western culture and literature. Louis Sheaffer, his biography author, thinks that most of O'Neill's women characters are either lascivious and fierce and tough evil women or they are extremely virtuous women with unbelievable sublime minds. Some feminists even assert that O'Neill never really intended to create the real women images. These remarks are lopsided views and are unfair comments on O'Neill, which reflect those critics' prejudices and misunderstanding against O'Neill and O'Neill's view of womanhood. In fact, the woman characters created by O'Neill possess the unique female consciousness, and bear the profound realistic meaning.This thesis attempts to study the representative female characters—Mary Tyrone in O'Neill's play-- Long Day's Journey into Night in order to illustrate the female characters' agonies and sufferings, and showed great sympathy, understanding and support for them, in hope that people should pay close attention to the sexual inequality, and the multiple familial and social problems caused by sexual inequality. To avoid these tragedies from happening, we have to change the traditional relationships of the two sexes, and to rebuild a new one, thus achieving the harmonious co-existence of the two sexes in the real sense. The thesis is composed of five parts.The first part is Introduction. It summarizes the unique position and influence of O'Neill in the American drama. It introduces the positive and negative evaluation of O'Neill. Based on the research achievements and deficiencies concerning the female consciousness in O'Neill's works, the Introduction puts forward the thesis statement.Chapter One discusses O'Neill's female vision. As a male playwright with a distinctive perspective, O'Neill was deeply influenced by his female consciousness in his play writing. It illustrates the contents of the female consciousness in his some representative works. It explores the three sources of O'Neill's female consciousness: the personal experience, the religious impact and the literary influence.Chapter Two is concentrated on the causes of female dependency on male and Mary Tyrone's dependency on male based on the exploration of O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night. In the patriarchal society, female is considered inferior to male, whether mentally or physically. Traditional male is always the image with the features of masculinity, chivalry, bravery, violence. The gendered patriarchal society has deprived women of the ability to live an independent life, and forced them to turn to men or marriage to men for their happiness and security.Chapter Three points out that Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night represents integration of female images in O'Neill's final writing period. Mary Tyrone is depicted as victim and victimizer. Mary Tyrone suffers too much from the death of her son, the loss of her faith and so on, which O'Neill is very sympathetic with. Moreover, Mary who refuses the constraints of family life is a woman resistance to the angel in the house. She doesn't devote herself to endless domestic needs, escapes from reality into a more tolerable oblivion, and exists as a threat to the family and gender prescription in the patriarchal society. The women character, created by O'Neill in Long Day's Journey into Night, is more rebellious, free-minded and has a stronger sense of self-awareness, compared with those in his early and middle works. It was a play that the role of women develops from self-sacrifice to self-awareness. New women are not satisfied with being the "angel in the house". They start to find access to self-development and self-expression. O'Neill's sympathy with her suffering and his depiction of Mary's conflict with the stereotypical gender role, her resistance to it and her desire to go beyond it mark O'Neill's mature attitude towards women.The last part is the conclusion summarizing the whole thesis. By analyzing the female character in Long Day's Journey into Night, the thesis reveals that traditional feminine virtues, such as patience, obedience and tolerance, which were highly praised, is giving way to self-confidence and independence in O'Neill's works. It also prospects for possible ways of women's emancipation. Although women have been subjected to the male-dominated values, their submissive position has become a position of strength.