Drama > The Theme of Illusion and Reality in the Works of O’Neill in Long Day’s Journey into the Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Without knowing exact details about the life of O’Neill, we can get a fair picture about it by reading his work, Long Days Journey into the Night. This drama in four acts is considered as O’Neill’s semi-autobiography, introducing the reader to his family and their struggles with various substances, with each other, and within themselves. Escaping reality and disillusionment, and living life in an imaginary world, the world of illusion is the central theme for both these plays.

A Moon for the Misbegotten can be imagined as a continuation of the Long Day’s Journey into the Night, carrying Jamie’s character to the next and last play of O’Neill’s. Jamie is the fictional embodiment of O’Neill’s real life brother, who lead the life of an alcoholic, and unsuccessful actor. The Tyrone family represents O’Neill’s real life family, with an actor father, who often drained his sorrow at the local bar houses; Mary, as O’Neill’s mother with a morphine addiction; Jamie, as O’Neill’s older brother, and Edmund as the author himself. All four members of this dysfunctional family have their own ways of getting away from their sad and hopeless reality. The father, James Tyrone, once an inspiring actor, now bitter and disappointed, spends most of his time away from his wife and sons, drinking with his bar friends. Jamie is destined to the same faith, the alcohol, he is a disappointment to the family, he has no drive and ambition, his life is a failure. He’s a boozer, who often goes to the local whore house, and has a strange affection to overweight girls. Jamie’s reality of his ruined life is hard for him to face, drinking seems to be the only way for him to escape home, family and responsibilities. Making love to big girls, even though they do it for money, gives him a sense of intimacy one can only find in a loving relationship. This same fondness for big girls and alcohol is visible in the Tyrone character in A Moon for the Misbegotten. In this play Tyrone is a Connecticut landlord, whose life is ruined by a disturbing and painful memory of a dead mother. His disillusionment is reflected in his self destructing life style, his drinking, and his attraction to cheap women. His only true love is Josie, the burly daughter of one of his tenants. Josie nurses the same feeling towards Tyrone, but it only comes out at the end of the drama, where the two confesses to each other. They also know that this platonic love can not, and will not evolve into something real. Tyrone feels dead inside; his is consumed by his guilt that he feels toward his mother. Josie’s character is interesting and more complicated, she is the kind of woman, who Tyrone despises, but he refuses to believe it. He thinks Josie is a pure, innocent girl, he idealizes her to a point, where no matter how mush she denies this assumption, he doesn’t believe her. This illusion about Josie is one that he created in his own head.

In the Long Day’s Journey into the Night, this same Tyrone is the older son, Jamie. The similarities between the two characters are clear. Jamie admits that he’s life is a failure, but he has his family, especially his father to blame. The “Old Man” forced him to the stages of Broadway, where he failed to imitate the success of his father. The father, James Tyrone, as he likes to remember it, had a triumphant career as a stage actor. We never really find out what stopped him for pursuing even further. One possibility is his marriage to Mary, the fact that this traveling life style is not suitable for small children. Tyrone’s illusion is that he could have been the greatest actor if it wasn’t for his family; he blames them for everything, even though he never mentions it. He expected support from his wife, but all he got was blame. He often cites lines from Shakespeare, from his favorite playwright, whom he thinks was Irish, like himself. He is an alcoholic, and his family knows this, no matter how much he denies it.

The most self-destructive in the family however is not the men, but the mother, Mary. O’Neill portrayed her character after his mother, who too, was a drug addict. It was kept in secret from him for a long time, just like in the play. Mary has many reasons why she started and who is to blame for it. She lives in the fog of her addiction, and this fog gets more and more dense as the play develops into the night. It starts in the morning, in the living room of the Tyrone family. At breakfast all four are chatting, and are in a good humor. When the fact that Mary slept in the spare room comes up, their tone suddenly changes. The spare room is where Mary used to lye in her delirium when she took drugs. The men think that she has been clean since her last therapy, but now they begin to be suspicious again. Mary feels this, and asks them not to look at her like that all the time, it makes her self conscious. Her eyes though can tell the truth to her family. She started again. She often mentions that she hates to live in her house that is inferior, and blames Tyrone’s misery for it. She however likes to live in the fog. The fog hides her from everybody and others from her: “All the people in the world could pass by and I wouldn’t know”. She feels lonely most of the time, but at the same time she’s bothered by the presence of her family. She wants to have company, but she also want to be left alone, alone in her fog. She hates the fog horn that brings her back to the reality, one that she’s not strong enough to face alone. She lives in the past, and blames Tyrone most of all for destroying her life. She wanted to be either a concert pianist or a nun before she met him. She married Tyrone instead of dedicating herself to the Virgin Mary, and her hands became rheumatic which stopped her from being the piano. All she had left was her husband and children. As she says to Cathleen “I forgot about becoming a nun or a concert pianist. All I wanted to be his wife” (105). Tyrone however never cared about her the way she’d expected, he spent all his time with getting drunk. After the birth of Edmund, her youngest son, she became addicted to painkillers. Mary blames again Tyrone, because he wasn’t willing to spend money on decent doctors, instead he hired a cheap hotel doctor, who got Mary hooked on morphine. Tyrone asks Mary many times to forget about the past, but her response is “How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (87). She suggests to us that she will never forget the past, never quit the drugs, the damage has already been made to her, there is no way back. She blames Edmund as well, because before his birth she was healthy. For her recent relapse to addiction is also Edmund to blame, because his condition makes her worry too much. She can’t face the reality that her son might die, so she escapes to the illusions created by Morphine. Only if she could find again that something she had lost on the way. She wants to have faith and trust again; she wants to be able to pray once more.

It is not only Mary who likes life in the fog. Edmund, as he confesses likes the fog, and wants it to be where he is. It hides him, and lets him be alone with himself, where he can reflect to his life. He tells his father when he comes back from a walk: “That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hid from itself” (131). As he was walking in the fog, he felt like he was only a ghost, and he particularly liked this feeling. He also wants to get away from reality, his mother’s addiction, his brother’s and father’s alcoholism, and his own illness. Even though he never mentions it, he must be darn scared from dying from consumption. He’s the one who understands his father’s stinginess, his brother’s drinking, and he is the least condemning toward his mother’s addiction.

Both plays pose the question whether illusion has its place in everyday life, whether it can be justifiable given the circumstances. The reader is not supposed to, but can’t help judging or perhaps identifying with some of the characters. Many of us like the thought of escaping reality into a world we create for ourselves, the world of illusion that is such a routine escape course for many of O’Neill’s characters.

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