Long Day's Journey Into Night

I would say that the character in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night that contributes most to the dysfunction in the Tyrone family is Mary, the mother and wife who is addicted to morphine. Not only is she already dysfunctional by being addicted to something as dangerous as morphine, she is ridiculously addicted, becoming more and more crazy and stoned as the night progresses. She prods every person in the house consistently, trying to push her hatred for herself onto others. Her most obvious victim is her husband, James. She tells him again and again that she disapproves of his thriftiness and his drinking. She even gets to the point of telling him that her marrying him was a mistake on her part because she wanted to become a nun and a pianist. This is hurtful stuff that she is only saying because she is stoned, but then again maybe it is the truth and the only reason she is able to say it now is because she is stoned.

She creates confrontations with her sons just as much as her husband as well. Mary constantly argues with her sons about drinking, even though they go right ahead and drinks in front of her nevertheless. She feels as if Jamie has wasted his life away with booze and prostitutes. She treats Edmund, her younger son, even worse by not accepting his tuberculosis. She doesn’t listen to the doctor Edmund went to see because he is cheap. Edmund tells her many times in the play that he is seriously sick but she keeps insisting that her has a normal cold. This is not a normal reaction a mother has when their child tell them he is sick. This is how powerfully motivated her life is by the morphine. She doesn’t completely approve of how her family had turned out, so she escapes by taking larger and larger doses of the morphine. This drug has turned her into a monster, a mother who can’t even help her sick son try and get better. She is more focused on running back upstairs, away from her family, back to the drug that will make her feel good in the moment but will never help her life become more than shambles.

I think that a lot of her depression stems from the baby that she lost before she gave birth to Edmund. Losing the baby meant that she had failed that round of being a mother. When she finds out that Edmund is seriously ill, she thinks that she is getting what she deserves by failing her previous child. If only her mind wasn’t being diluted by the morphine she continues to pump through her system, the she would be able to realize that it wasn’t her fault that she lost the baby and she needs to move on. If she could move on from the grief than it would be possible to kick her drug habit. I wouldn’t say that Mary is the most dysfunctional member of the Tyrone family, but she definitely causes the most trouble between the array of characters.