Covert Appropriations of Shakespeare: Three Case Studies

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2007 by Hirsh, James

At the outset of the final episode of the play, James Tyrone and his two sons.Jamie and Edmund, are on stage whenjames's wife Mary enters exhibiting signs that she has lost her struggle against drug addiction. A startling number of specific features of this episode resemble elements of 5.1 of Macbeth, (l) This is the last appearance of Mary in Long Day's Journey, and 5.1 is the last appearance of Lady Macbeth. (2) Lady Macbeth is described as sleepwalking by the Waiting-Gentlewoman and the Doctor, and the episode has long been designated "the sleepwalking scene." A stage direction in Long Day's Journey informs the actress playing Mary and readers of the play that she "moves like a sleepwalker* (174). (3) Each sleepwalker is oblivious to the presence of the other characters on stage. (4) Each sleepwalker talks to herself, and her words are overheard by the other characters. (5) In each case the speaker's isolation from other characters on stage in the current circumstance exemplifies the speaker's more general isolation from others. After the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth's relationship with Macbeth, the one person with whom she was close, deteriorated, so Lady Macbeth was cut off from others even before her insanity radically isolates her. Mary's current state of drug-induced oblivion is dramatized not as a temporary relapse but as a decisive failure in her long-term battle against an addiction that isolates her from her loved ones. (6) In each case the sleepwalker relives past experiences. (7) In each case the eavesdroppers express pity for the sleepwalker. (8) In each case the eavesdroppers regard the sleepwalker as at least partly responsible for her own suffering. (9) In each case the sleepwalker becomes fixated on her hands. Lady Macbeth obsessively rubs her hands, which she imagines are stained with blood: "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" (5.1.43). At one point during Mary's soliloquy occurs the following stage direction: "She lifts her hands to examine them with a frightened puzzlement" (171). Imagining herself back in her convent school and puzzled by the aged appearance of her hands, Mary decides to seek out Sister Martha: "She'll give me something to rub on my hands" (171). (10) In each case the real or imagined condition of the speaker's hands is an emblem for her loss of innocence. (11) In each case the sleepwalker's affliction seems beyond cure. This appropriation is shocking. Lady Macbeth is one of the most notorious villains in world drama, whereas, as O'Neill himself indicated, the character of Mary is a portrait of his own mother.

O'Neill distracted playgoers' attention from this shocking appropriation, however, by supplying at the very outset of the episode a red herring, an explicit allusion to a different Shakespearean character. At the entrance of Maryjamie speaks as if he were reading a hypothetical stage direction in Hamlet "The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!" (170). On the surface this is another of Jamie's bitter sarcasms. Ophelia is an innocent, young, unmarried woman, while Mary is a drug-addicted mother of two grown sons. An ironic parallel shortly emerges. In her drug-induced state Mary imagines that she is once again a young woman with the intention of joining a nunnery-as Ophelia is urged to do by Hamlet. But significant non-ironic parallels also emerge. Each female character is in an abnormal state of mind to which she has fled from a reality too painful to bear, and each is profoundly pitiable.