A Spiritual Ecology Analysis Of Long Day's Journey Into Night

Eugene O'Neill is a great dramatist and America's important playwright as well as the founder of modern American drama. He is the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, and four Pulitzer Prizes for his plays. One of his late works Long Day's Journey into Night was put on the theatre and it was such a great success that many critics thought it was the finest of his works and the peak of his tragedy writing. It has been analyzed by many critics from different perspectives. Under the direction of the new literary critical theory--green ecocriticism, this thesis is to discuss his masterpiece, a semi-autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night to disclose the meaning of natural ecology, social ecology and spiritual ecology in the work and to dig out of the ecological thoughts and aesthetics in it. This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one is introduction. It briefly introduces the source of the subject, surveys the studies on O'Neill's tragedies, especially his Long Day's Journey into Night, and generalizes the scholarship in the ecocriticism study, from which the writing intention and innovation of the thesis come out. Next the origin, statua quo and future development of ecocriticism as a new study are provided while its definition, core viewpoints and the relative theoretical points are stressed. The last is the structure of this thesis.Chapter two describes O'Neill's life experience and his ecological thoughts in Long Day's Journey into Night. First we come to O'Neill's feelings about the mystic power and strength in life and nature. Second is his pursuit of art and his objection to the commercialism of theatre. Third is his tragedy of family life and his consciousness of ecological intersubjectivity.Chapter three analyzes the spiritual ecology crisis of the Tyrone family, such as the father James Tyrone's stinginess and his greed for money; his wife Mary Tyrone's loneliness, fear and despair; his elder son Jamie's indulgence in dissipation and alcohol; his younger son Edmund's melancholy and befuddlement, and shows the love and hatred, pity and forgiveness, understanding and sympathy between them and probes people's longing and waiting for the spiritual garden. Through Edmund's words, O'Neill expresses that nature can baptize and rectify human's broken-heart, human should come back to nature and blend with nature and keep the balance and harmony of his soul.Chapter four is conclusion. O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night not only reveals the association between nature and human, society and human but also the human's intricate spiritual world. It contains abundant ecological wisdom, consumedly inspiring us in how we should treat the environmental crisis nowadays...