Long Day’s Journey Into Night:Struggle In The Dysfunctional Family

Eugene O’Neill, winner of both the Nobel Prize for Literature in1936and four Pulitzer Prizes, established his reputation as a milestone in American Theater by his wide-scoped innovative exploration in artistic creation and his deep concern for the tragic predicament of humanity. O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night consummates his artistic style of tragedy with a psychological complexity in his portrayal of modern family and individual tragedy.Instead of following the convention of Feminist, Freudian or Jungian interpretation of Long Day’s Journey into Night, this thesis attempts to address the repetitive theme of spiritual predicament in modern literary works from the perspective of Heinz Kohut’s Self Psychology concerning transgenerational transmission of psychological trauma and the psychological function of parents’ability of empathy to the development of children’s mental health.Apart from its introduction and conclusion, this thesis develops in three parts. The first chapter discusses how the parental characters James and Mary, victimized by their past psychological traumas, are immersed into the spiritual predicament of loneliness, alienation, and loss of faith and belonging, and how it results in their empathic failures to each other and their sons, where is rooted the mental crisis of the families. Then, the struggle of the younger generation Jamie and Edmund in spiritual plight is analyzed in the second part, where Jamie’s cynicism and self destruction, along with Edmund’s confusion in self identity, can both be defined as a painful consequence of their loss of the maternal object—Mary. Chapter Three deals with the family’s way from recrimination to confession. In contrast with Mary’s impotence of confession, the three males finally reach a moment of confession, which serves as an exploration to the light of the "hopeless hope" in their sustained love, thus highlighting the play’s theme of understanding and forgiveness.By discussing individual spiritual plight in the specific dysfunctional family milieu of the Tyrones, this thesis aims to probe into the common theme running through both self-psychology and O’Neill’s play—the psychological dependency of an individual’s mental development on his or her family milieus. Despite the hint of the tragedy of modern man’s struggle, O’Neill intends to emphasize the psychological function of confession and catharsis, and appeal to the mutual understanding and forgiveness based on it with which we can together live life as it is. It is this motif of understanding and forgiveness that testifies his lifelong pursuit in artistic creation, of seeking a solution to modern men’s spiritual predicament, which produced a far-reaching influence on the theater of America and even of the world.