Family as Destiny in ONeills Long Day's Journey into Night - Essay Example

Family as Destiny in O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night In the absence of free will, family becomes destiny. It is destiny when it turns into the most powerful motivator and shaper of human behavior. In Long Day's Journey into Night (Long Day's), Eugene O’Neill explores the role of families in people’s destinies. He uses stage direction and characters to show the continuing force that a family plays on people’s lives. This essay combines Paul Watzlawick’s Interactional View Theory and Sigmund Freud’s Psychological Theory to understand family dynamics and effects in the Long Day's. The play shows that family can affect people’s destiny through influencing and controlling their identities, and none of them escapes their family’s impact on them because in the absence of open communication and in the presence of Oedipus and Electra conflicts, no one manages to form strong superegos. Family affects people because it influences their identities. Parents impact how their children develop their identities through their communication patterns. Because Mary dotes on Edmund more than Jamie, she affects their identities in different ways. She expresses her anger for Doctor Hardy’s advice for Edmund: “How dare Doctor Hardy advise such a thing without consulting me! How dare your father allow him! What right has he? You are my baby! Let him attend to Jamie!” (O’Neill 111). This exasperation must have hurt Jamie because it only emphasizes that Edmund is their mother’s favorite. In Watzlawick’s Interactional View Theory, intentionality affects communication goals (Penna, Mocci, and Sechi 31). Mary’s intention is to protect Edmund, and in doing so, her main goal is to express her love for him. She does not want to intentionally hurt Jamie’s feelings, but because her primary intention is to protect Edmund from harm, her sensitivity to Jamie is inferior to her goal of sheltering Edmund. In addition, because of repression of innermost bitterness and regrets, Mary tends to be harsh on Jamie. She tells him: “It's you who should have more respect! Stop sneering at your father! I won't have it! You ought to be proud you're his son! He may have his faults. Who hasn’t?” (O’Neill 53). She does not use the same language and tone on Edmund, which separates her more from Jamie. As a result, Jamie becomes an alcoholic and womanizer because he wants to forget this painful truth of his mother’s greater love for Edmund than him. In addition, James does not act like a strong father who can inspire his children to change. He is an alcoholic, but not as worse as Jamie. He tells Edmund: “No. All we can do is try to be resigned – again” (O’Neill 124). The way that James says it, he shows his weakness as a man resigned to his fate. In Watzlawick’s Interactional View Theory, the relationship of how he says it impacts his belief about his family. His fate is connected to being married to a broken woman and being ruled over by her bitterness. Her bitterness shapes his bitterness too. These communication ways signify that families can be an overwhelming force in people’s destiny. Moreover, parents influence their children’s identities through their actions. Mary does not hide her unhappiness from her family through her repetitive heroin addiction. Her addiction is her defense against painful memories: “That's what makes it so hard – for all of us. We can't forget” (O’Neill 39). She cannot forget her dead child and her belief that her life might have been better if she had been a nun. As a result, her addiction shapes the addiction of her children through teaching them to not forget too. Moreover, open communication does not exist in the Tyrones and this affects their actions. Silence indicates people’s underlying intentions. Mary kisses Edmund, and her tenderness erases Edmund’s doubts. O’Neill contrasts this to the effect of her Edmund-centered kisses on Jamie: “On the other hand, Jamie knows after one probing look at her that his suspicions are justified. His eyes fall to stare at the floor; his face sets in an expression of embittered, defensive cynicism” (O’Neill 51). He does not say anything, but his silence says it all. He cannot express his anger directly, but this anger shapes his identity into a bitter and cynic one. Jamie’s cynicism is embedded in his powerlessness. He desires to have power and he emphasizes that on Edmund: “You reflect credit on me. I've had more to do with bringing you up than anyone…Hell, you're more than my brother. I made you! You're my Frankenstein!” (O’Neill 157). He is powerless as a son because he cannot seem to satisfy his parent’s demands from him, so he seeks power as an elder brother. In essence, because their parents are not there for them, with Mary being an addict and James being a workaholic, Jamie becomes the parent, and his actions and words against his brother imply that he is tired of being a parent and he cannot do it anymore. Power is not that attractive when it comes with a string of responsibilities. Parents’ actions shape how their children see themselves and their siblings. Aside from shaping identities, families can control people’s sense of free will. Parents can either be role models or sources of desperation. Mary thinks that her father is an exemplary man, but James knows a different man though: “But [Mary’s father] had his weakness. She condemns my drinking but she forgets his. It's true he never touched a drop till he was forty, but after that he made up for lost time” (O’Neill 129). Mary does not see the similarities between her father and husband because in Freudian terms, she is in denial. She denies the possibility that she married her father in a different form, someone whom she cannot see quite clearly for the man he is because she is blind to their faults and weaknesses. Because of her blindness to her father’s real identity, she becomes exasperated with her husband’s behaviors and blames him for her miserable existence. Moreover, family members can push people into a cycle of mistakes and bitterness. Jamie is angry at his mother: “I suppose I can't forgive her – yet. It meant so much. I'd begun to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too” (O’Neill 156). He blames his mother for his own failures, suggesting that her constant failure is his constant failure too. Instead of changing what his mother is through becoming a changed man, he prefers to stay a bitter, jobless alcoholic to reinforce the failures in the family. Mary has forgotten her autonomy. Her fatalism indicates her strong id: “I hope, sometime, without meaning it, I will take an overdose. I never could do it deliberately. The Blessed Virgin would never forgive me, then” (O’Neill 113). Her id is verging on the death instinct. She might be saying that she cannot commit suicide because it is immoral, but how she says it indicates her strong desire for death. She has lost hope in attaining a happy and meaningful life, so she does not want to live anymore. Without exertion of their free will, their families have taken over their destinies for good. The greatest influences of family on identities are the poor formation of superegos due to Oedipus and Electra conflicts. Freud argues that personality has three constructs: id, ego, and superego. Id consists of primitive desires, including life and death instincts; ego is more objective than id and operates through the reality principle, as it moderates id demands; and superego strives for perfection through the moral conscience (Gray). Oedipal conflict affects superego formation. The Tyrone brothers have a fixated love for their mother. In the scene where Mary says this and kisses Edmund, the latter’s rationality is diminished: “You mustn't cough like that. It's bad for your throat. You don't want to get a sore throat on top of your cold” (O’Neill 51). The show of affection makes Edmund forget his suspicions that his mother is back to her addiction. Jamie loves his mother too, but is at the point of breaking down because of it. He tells Edmund: “You never knew what was really wrong until you were in prep school. Papa and I kept it from you. But I was wise ten years or more before we had to tell you” (O’Neill 50). He is wiser by ten years in the sense that he loves their mother for a longer time than Edmund, but this love is toxic because of their mother’s addiction. This addiction has disabled her from becoming a good mother to them. Edmund is also fixated on his mother. He loves her too much that her drug relapse pushes him to alcoholism. He tells his father: “Well, what's wrong with being drunk? It's what we're after, isn't it? Let's not kid each other, Papa. Not tonight. We know what we're trying to forget” (O’Neill 124). He is aware of his mother’s flaws, but instead of accepting them and making his own life without her, he simply wants to forget through alcohol. While her sons have Oedipal conflict, Mary shows Electra conflict because of her love for her father. She says: “In a real home one is never lonely. You forget I know from experience what a home is like. I gave up one to marry you – my father's home” (O’Neill 64). For her, the best home is with her father. The fixation with her father’s home prevents her from finding and creating her own home. She constantly blames others for her unhappiness, especially as she feels the emptiness of her life without her father. These psychological conflicts prevent these characters from forming a strong moral conscience, where they can lead their lives with autonomy. Apart from Psychological Theory, the Interactional View Theory asserts that no one forms strong superegos because their intention to change does not align with their actions. Characters live in the past, so what they do is different from what they want to change in their lives. Mary tells James: “No, dear. But I forgive. I always forgive you. So don't look so guilty” (O’Neill 106). She says that she forgives him, yet she does not forget what happened to them. Instead, she always remembers these painful memories that drive her to hopelessness and the need to forget. Situational irony is another way to express the gap between content and relationship. Edmund complains of the wall that Mary produces through her addiction: “The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her….You know something in her does it deliberately…to forget we're alive! It's as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!” (O’Neill 132). He hates her for not loving them enough to change, and yet the irony is that he also hides in a fog because he feels that his family’s bad fate is his destiny too. Moreover, with unresolved Oedipus and Electra conflicts, O’Neill uses stage directions to say something about who controls who in the play. The drinking stands for their inner family conflicts: “Jamie pours his and passes the bottle to Edmund… Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them” (O’Neill 168). The mother figure shapes who they are, as shown in this scene where everything stops, just because of Mary. No matter how much they are frustrated with Mary, their love for her binds them, and it is a bind that also stops them from moving on as individuals. They want better lives but they do not want to change to attain it. Family is destiny when people live in the past, particularly the past mistakes of their parents and themselves. No one escapes the powerful role of their families in the play because they are too much filled with love and bitterness for one another that hopelessness sinks in and consumes them. The result is a long journey in life, where all they can go is toward the night, toward their dark destinies. Their journey is long, not because their family holds on to their legs like chains, but because they chain themselves to their families and fail to move without them. Too much family love kills; it kills free will and turns everything into a miserable collective destiny. Works Cited Gray, R. “Lecture Notes: The Oedipus Complex.” 2012. Web. 6 May 2013. O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night. New York: Yale U P, 1955. Print. Penna, Maria Pietronilla, Mocci, Sandro, and Cristina Sechi. “The Emergence of the Communicative Value of Silence.” Emergence: Complexity & Organization 11.2 (2009): 30-36. Business Source Complete. Web. 6 May 2013. Read More