This paper examines Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). It specifically focuses on the four haunted Tyrones. It offers explanations on what the four Tyrones are haunted by and how it affects their lives and relationships with each other. O’Neill’s play is a story about one catastrophic day in the family of the Tyrones. The drama portrays the degeneration of the members of the family into sickness, dependence on drugs as well as being haunted by the past. The play demonstrates a variety of the problems that befall families such as depression, the abuse of drugs and substances, sickness, and unfulfilled dreams.
In the play, the four haunted Tyrones are James Tyrone and his wife Mary and their two sons Edmund and Jamie. As the day captured in the play starts off, it emerges that James, Edmund, and Jamie realize that Mary has spent the night in a room that was meant for guests and it was in the same room that she used to take morphine. The knowledge of where Mary spent her past night triggers ideas in the boys that their mother might not have managed to drop her drug taking habit which implies that the addiction has overpowered her and as such, she cannot function normally without being under the influence. Mary is haunted because of her drug taking habit because she is unable to have a healthy relationship with the other characters in the text because she acts defensively. She is haunted by the fact that she devoted part of her life as a youth to religious instruction in a convent where she was being prepared to be a nun. She is also haunted by the bad experiences she has had in life that include the death of her father, the dispossession of the home in which she spent her childhood, loss of her innocence, her religious convictions as well as the death of one of her sons. The burden of carrying this emotionally draining load impacts negatively on Mary, especially because it hampers her ability to live in ...