Trauma of Subjective Memory in Strange Interlude and Long Day ’ s Journey into Night

Memory and remembrance have a pivotal role in O’Neill’s dramatic art. What has not been adequately appreciated and analyzed is that how far O’Neill’s art stands as a reflection on trauma generally. In the first place the paper analyses that in line with modern concern with memory and trauma, O’Neill is essentially and predominantly concerned with the personal/subjective and not with the collective memory. Secondly the remembrance is charged with traumatic effect and the personas conduct in the plays like Strange Interlude and Long Day’s Journey into Night is an illustration of trauma that expresses itself instantly as well as belatedly to mar human behaviour with variable degree of psychopathology. The traumatized responses in his persona vary, but are definitely regressive assume psychotic urge for repetition that obstruct individual harmonious integration with the self and the others. The immediate impression in performing traumatized memory is that of “affected state” that displays such traumatized reactions as overwhelming depressive behaviour that is repetitive, overlapping and mar the linear life movement, generate shattering anxiety, and “plunging the person into a form of authentic being towards death”. These responses are essentially post modern in nature. The analysis will conclude on the point that the plays do not make provision for the strategies for coping with the trauma that characterized classic and Shakespearean theatre.


Introduction
Memory/remembrance has emerged as one central part of contemporary discourse on aesthetics and literary text.Jeannette R. Malkin (1999) interconnects discourse on memory with post modern aesthetics and late twentieth theatre texts to define and discuss the centrality of memory in contemporary research (1).She argues that "an important group of theatre texts written since 1970s exhibit an exceptional preoccupation with the questions of memory, both in terms of their thematic attention to the remembered or repressed pasts, and in terms of the plays This emphasis on individual memory "found" she writes "Paradigmatic expression in the vitalist philosophy of Bergson, in Proust's idealizing of involuntary memory, in Joyce's stream of consciousness, and, not least , in the psychology of Freud" ( Malkin, 1999, 6).The "post-modern memory theatre, she continues to write involves explicit (and usually 'loaded') evocation of collective past (Malkin, 1999, 8) (Note 1) and that too "without order, causality, direction, or coherence. . . .(Malkin, 1999, 9) As an example of memory in modern theatre, Malkin refers briefly to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov, and Strindberg.She also goes on to assert that memory is performed as traumatized (4) and associates urges to repeat the unhappy past as essentially "psychotic" (21 ) and an indication of the traumatic stress disorder named Post traumatic stress disorder (30).The past in this scenario is replete with the torturous thoughts and experiences that make remembrance a traumatized experience and the past in this case becomes a repository of agonizing inevitability.This traumatized remembrance is in Malkin's words an essentially post-modern experience and characteristics, which has three corresponding components: One it is always "provoked by external events" of great force and magnitude that hinder "its integration into the personality of the sufferer" (30); two it always "expresses itself belatedly", and is therefore "displaced"; Three the trauma of a historical event becomes the pathology of the "history itself".But whatever the form of the disorder, the resultant impression is one of a "wide set of psychological problems, from memory loss and depression to psychotic urges to return to , and eternally repeat the traumatic past"(29).(Note 2) The discussion on memory, and trauma had its pioneering voice in Sigmund Freud whose description of different complexes developed in childhood and their terrible role in the individual's life in the later phases is an apt example of how the individual's life is affected by the past, and how the past creates traumatic present.He regards trauma as "any excitation from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield" (1974,21) provoking disturbance on a "large scale in the functioning of the organism's energy" (1974,21), that would continue to live in the individual for his entire life.Cathy Caruth writes that trauma can not be defined by events that caused it.It consists, "solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it, to be traumatized is to be possessed by an image or event" (172).In "Trauma and Literary Theory," James Berger (1997) asks why psychological trauma has "become a pivotal subject connecting so many disciplines," from literary studies to historiography (569).He probes possible reasons for "such interest in trauma among literary and cultural theorists" (571).One explanation is that inundated exposure to family dysfunction, aggression, wars, and global catastrophes have created extensive consciousness of the effects of upsetting/traumatic events, making it "not surprising that theorists have turned to concepts of trauma as tools of [...] analysis" (572).Furthermore, he shows that conceptions of trauma merge with other critical theories that emphasize problems of representation.As a "discourse of the un-represent able," trauma theory attempts to deal with "the event [...] that destabilizes language" (573), an event so threatening that it provokes denial, amnesia, delayed memory, and forms of expression., Michelle Balaev (2008) writes that a central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity" (149).The term "trauma novel" he writes refers to a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels.A defining feature of the trauma novel is the transformation of the self ignited by an external, often terrifying experience, which illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform the new perceptions of the self and world(15).Martin Adams (2009) analyzing Robert Stolorow's Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections writes that conventionally and simplistically trauma is either about the occurrence of a usually sudden and dramatic event, and/or the inability to integrate excessive affect (375)and that', trauma is 'a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one's sense of being-in-the-world'.In 'Trauma and the 'Ontological Unconscious' Martin refers to Stolorow (2007) who says that 'trauma produces an affective state whose features bear a close similarity to the central elements in Heidegger's description of anxiety and it accomplishes this by plunging the person into a form of authentic 'Being-toward-death'.But this encounter with being-toward-death is itself so traumatic that it cannot be tolerated.It is a realization that there is no ground, no substance.The immediate impression in performing traumatized memory is that of "affected state" (Stolorow .2007qtd. in Martin Adams, 2009 ) that displays such traumatized reactions as overwhelming depressive behavior that is repetitive, and mar the linear life movement, generate shattering anxiety , and "plunging the person into a form of authentic being towards death"( Heidegger qtd. in Adams, 2009).
In this context, the study analyses treatment of memory and remembrance in O'Neill's dramatic art with reference to his two plays Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey in to Night.Though the past as an element of thematic and dramatic structure has been emphasised in different critical studies on O'Neill, what has not been adequately appreciated and analyzed is that how far O'Neill's art stands as a reflection on trauma and traumatized memory performance generally.In the first place the paper analyses that in line with modern concern with memory and trauma, O'Neill is essentially and predominantly concerned with the personal/subjective and not with the collective memory.Secondly the remembrance is charged with traumatic effect and the personas conduct in the plays like Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey into Night is an illustration of trauma that expresses itself instantly as well as belatedly to mar human behaviour with variable degree of psychopathology.The traumatized responses in his persona vary, but are definitely regressive assume psychotic urge for repetition that obstruct individual harmonious integration with the self and the others.The immediate impression in performing traumatized memory is that of "affected state" that displays such traumatized reactions as overwhelming depressive behaviour that is repetitive, overlapping and mar the linear life movement, generate shattering anxiety, and "plunging the person into a form of authentic being towards death".These responses are essentially post modern in nature.The analysis will conclude on the point that the plays do not make provision for the strategies for coping with the trauma that characterizes classic and Shakespearean theatre.

Literature Review
Past in O'Neill is integral to his themes and dramaturgy and as Lurin R. Porter (1993) comments with respect to the role of past in Long Day's Journey into Night, it is at the centre of personas' consciousness (05) playing a determining role in his life and art.Creativity itself in his case is a traumatized response to the deep sense of loss that he encountered in the personal life and the created phenomena represents playwright's to strategy to confront the belated trauma that shapes and conditions the present and the future too.His desertion of his ancestral catholic faith (James E. Robinson, 1995& Edward L. Shaughnessy, 2000), his repeated suicide attempts (James E. Robinson, 1995), prostitution, life of utter wastefulness, and trying to hit bottom (Arthur and Barbara Gelb, 155) speak volume of the traumatized living conditions of this playwright.Doris Alexander's Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade 1924-1933(1992) is built on the premise that "for Eugene O'Neill-as this book shows-a play was an opportunity to confront and solve pressing life problem, and the order in which he tackled plays, and the arousal in his mind of particular configuration of memories and ideas to shape them . . .( 2)", and that and the "nexus of memory" (07) working behind the play is so powerful and intense that "they begin to break out of the ply logic and actually contradict the fact of the play" (07).Her blend of autobiographical and psychoanalytic becomes obvious as she highlights oedipal nature of his relation with the mother as a desired object, which in turn is a reflection of the role of the traumatized past on the present.For instance she analyses Strange Interlude as a play about O'Neill oedipal and sexual conflicts through the personas of Charlie Marsden and Nina Leeds (109).Stephen A. Black ( 1994 ) reads close connection between his traumatized loss and the creative urges in the plays written after 1920-23 traumatic experience of loss of entire family (brother, father and mother), and the plays written in the remaining two decade deal with the confrontation with loss.However, he argues that O'Neill's confrontation with mammoth loss was in the spirit of final acceptance of loss.He contends, "Through the exploration of the family portraits and themes, O'Neill does the work of mourning that goes on at a glacial pace and encompasses most of the playwright's working life.But it does progress.One can follow in the plays his resistance to grief and his erratic progress toward accepting his losses (2).J. Chris Westgate (2008) in his article that is not specifically about memory and its nature refers to the use of memory in Long Day's Journey to argue that it plays vital role in the life of the entire persona in the present.He associates tragic violence with memory in the play that he writes "emerge unbidden from the past to overwhelm the present and the future too" (8).He continues to argue that memory in Long Day's Journey is a deterministic force that "disrupts the linearity of their lives" (8).Quite differently, John Henry Raleigh (1993) analyses from "communal, familial, and personal Memories in particularly Long Day's Journey: The Human memory, on one of its many levels, manifests itself in three overlapping categories: the historical; the familial and social; the autobiographical and personal.At one end of the scale is the constellation of collective memories, given by one's socio-economic class ethnic background, education, religion, the historical period of one's nationality, and so on.At the other end of the spectrum, in a purely private shrine in one's unique ego there are those individual memories that no one else, past, present or future, will ever share or know.Social-familial memories tend to connect to categories, the public and the private. . . .Dramatization of this triadic aspect of memory in our literature is O'Neill's Long day's Journey into Night . . . (205).
The working of collective or communal memory in this play, writes Raleigh is exhibited through the presence of Irish factor in this catholic American family, which in turn generates such levels of morbidity in the Tyrone family that finds reflection in their sense of "not belonging, a kind of cosmic loneliness"(206).This collective memory, he writes, is also reflected in certain other plays like Emperor Jones, the Iceman Cometh, and A Touch of Poet.In The Emperor Jones "there is clearly a collective racial memory at work" (206), and in The Iceman Cometh "a collective social memory operates for some of the characters, evoking the good old days_ 'dem old days'_ in 1890s when Tammany corruption was at its height and they were on the take" (206).But what fascinates the readers is not so much the communal or the collective in memory.It is the personal and the subjective that excites so much indulgence by the characters in several of his plays including Long Day's Journey that is pervasive, and timeless that reminds of what T.S. Eliot writes, "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; ... a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and ... temporal together" (14).The usual form of traumatic experience in O'Neill springs from some personal mistake, loss, and grief, experience that is repeated consistently and recurrently to create what Malkin writes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).In plays like Desire under Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey, the reader comes across the dramatization of Freudian oedipal dynamics at work in the persona life that leaves them preoccupied in the desire and develop sense of mourning on the loss/absence of the desires object(mother) which leaves the sufferers psychotic and neurotic in each case, where each character in varying degrees suffers from the trauma whose origin lies in how individual's experiences in the past.In plays like Desire under Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, loss suffered on account of the absent mother figure exhibited in the oedipal conflicts as a quintessence of the characters' individual and particular infantile experiences in the past makes a very predominantly dark and traumatic appearance in such forms as incest, lust and propensity to put life to end under these impulses.Here it can be said that past is linked with present through dark drives of incest, adultery and even murder, but all without any retribution.The paper, however, analyses traumatic effect of past and traumatized behavior in areas other than Freudian with reference to Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey.Besides there is a need to analyze the treatment of memory and its traumatized performance in the plays to reflect on O'Neill's stand on trauma in his art independent of autobiographical interests.What has not been adequately appreciated and analyzed is that how far O'Neill's art stands as a reflection on trauma generally.In the first place in line with modernist stance on memory and trauma, O'Neill is essentially and predominantly concerned with the personal/subjective and not the collective memory.Secondly the remembrance is charged with traumatic effect and the personas conduct in the plays like Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey is an illustration of trauma that expresses itself instantly as well as belatedly to mar human behavior with variable degree of psychopathology.The past here holds little that can sustain the individual in stifling, excruciating life conditions in the present that have their store house in either down deep in the unconscious drives or in their own acts that have failed to subside/marginalize and therefore continue to surface in the present to the dismemberment of all the concerned., thereby creating what Malkin (1999) calls Post traumatic stress disorder.The traumatized responses in his persona vary, but are definitely regressive and assume psychotic urge for repetition that obstruct individual harmonious integration with the self and the others, and the analysis will conclude on the point that the plays do not make provision for the strategies for coping with the trauma that characterized classic and Shakespearean theatre

Method
The methodological approach this study takes is critical, comparative and analytical.While the major focus on Strange Interlude and Long Day's Journey into Night, other plays of his different dramatic periods have also been referred occasionally to place the treatment of memory and trauma in larger context of his dramatic art.

Traumatized Memory in Strange Interlude
In The Strange interlude, Nina Leeds _ a powerful, but intriguing character_ reveals obsession with traumatized personal past, that hovers around the dead fiancé, Gordon Shaw who was shot down over France before they could consume their love into marital bliss.Her entire behavior is reflection of the underlying stress disorder caused by the traumatic demise of the fiancée that ultimately settles into a fixed behavioral pattern with intriguing strength and constancy as Tamsen Wolf (2003) writes" In The Strange Interlude, audiences were watching the characters' repeated, constrained attempts both to contest and reinforce the causality of the past. . .." (234,) Gordon's memory after his accidental death haunts her in her life through different periods and phases.It initially pushes her desperately to punish herself for what she thinks her "cowardly treachery to Gordon".As Nina makes her first appearance, the readers are struck by the level of pain and grief that has engulfed hr since Gordon's death.O'Neill introduces her appearance as: Her eyes are beautiful and bewildering, extraordinarily large and a deep greenish blue.Since Gordon's death they have a quality of shuddering before some terrible enigma, of being wounded in their depths and made defiant and resentful by their pain.Her whole manner, the charged atmosphere she gives off, is totally at variance with her healthy outdoor physique.It is strained, nerve wrecked, hectic, a terrible tension of will alone maintaining self possession (13, Vol.III).
The death has embittered her towards her father whom she considers responsible for her plight as well as betrayal to Gordon.She calls her, "The professor of dead languages. . ..dead words droning on . ..listening because he is my cultured father. . .(15) .But what she feels on Gordon's death and how desperate she is for his physical touch and sensuality is made obvious in the aside that would also set the pattern of her behavior in the future: Ashes!. . .oh Gordon, my dear one! . . .oh my lips, oh strong arms around me, oh, spirit so brave and generous and gay! . . .ashes dissolving into mud! . . .mud and ashes! . . .that's al! . . .gone! . . .gone forever from me! . .( 17).The sense of her betrayal to Gordon is so torturous and traumatic that she finds it hard to come out it.The sickness itself speaks of the neurotic streak in her personality, springing mainly from the trauma: Nina (With fierce self-contempt) I gave him?What did I give him?It's what I didn't give!That last night before he sailed-in his rams until my body ached-kisses until my lips were numb-knowing all that night-something in me knowing he would die, that he would never kiss me again-knowing surely yet with my cowardly brain lying, no, he'll come back and marry you, you'll be happy ever after and feel his children at your breast looking up with eyes so much like his . . . ., but Gordon never possessed me.! I'm still Gordon's silly virgin!And Gordon in muddy ashes!And I have lost m happiness forever all that last night I knew he wanted me.I knew it was only the honorable code-bound Gordon, who kept commanding from his brain, no, you mustn't you must respect her, you must wait till you have a marriage license!(19).
Darrell confides this mode of self-punishment, this "Gordon fixation" (340,Floyd) in his talk to Marsden, which as Virginia Floyd "helps her to atone in her mind to Gordon" (Virginia Floyd, 1985 p. 340).This single factor or traumatized condition would remain transfixed in her consciousness throughout the play and in all her stages of transition and phases of life that O'Neill has dramatized here in the play.Four things in this affected state would emerge clearly in Nina's character: one the pain and the trauma of her betrayal to Gordon; second her traumatized remembrance implying her failure to come to term with the state; third her expressed thought of motherhood that is powerfully linked with the dead Gordon figure; and fourth her relapsing imperceptibly into girlhood (virginity) denoting here life long desire to return to Gordon.Similarly all the three men that enter in her life after the traumatic demise of Gordon_ Marsden, Darrel, and Sam Evens_ have association to her writes Floyd, with reference to the dead Fiancé.They "possess different personality traits and forms in her disoriented mind a composite picture of her romantic ideal, Gordon Shaw' (Floyd, 1985, 349).Her desire to be a nurse in military hospital is her first reaction to punish herself, which exhibit the initial shock level of Gordon's death.She expresses the desire to go there in defiance of her father's will to stay at home: "(Again with the strange intensity) I must pay!It's my plain duty! Gordon is dead1 what use is my life to any one or me?But I must make it of use-by giving it!(Fiercely) I must learn to give myself for a man's happiness without scruple, without fear, without joy, except in his joy . . . .Don't you see? (18)".Darrel understanding her need for out let of her blocked up emotional life, suggest Marsden to have her marry Sam Evan.But Gordon is wrong in his estimate that Childish Sam would ever be able to provide her necessary out let for the reason that he lacks that physical strength in his personality that Gordon had and that could help Nina in coordinating his love and embraces to that of dead Gordon.It is Darrel himself, who could fill in the gap and provide the necessary out to her pent up sensuality.Gordon's physical strength finds exact equivalence in Darrel, "Nina.(Thinking) Strong hands like Gordon's . . .take hold of you . . .not like Sam's . . .yielding fingers that let you fall back into you self . ..( 79)".Secondly, it is Darrel who serves another Gordon function properly that Sam has for certain hereditary factor failed to perform.Nina in her earlier torturous lamentation on the death of Gordon expressed her desire to have the feel of Gordon's children.Marriage with Sam initially filled her with the promise of having babes, but Mrs. Evan's disclosure of hereditary insanity in the family leaves her no other option but to abort her desired object i.e. baby."Gordon's spirit", as she feels "followed me from room to room" after the surgery for the abortion (71).It is this desire that makes her beg to Darrel to impregnate her with a healthy baby.Darrel after his initial repulsion to any such animal type breeding where he has to serve the laboratory role of a guinea pig, agrees to it for what he terms Nina's happiness, "yes-yes, Nina-yes-for your happiness -in that spirit!(89).The experience, though having the ruthlessness of a scientific experiment fills Nina with remarkable euphoria and confidence, "There! . . .that can't be my imagination . . .I felt it plainly . . .life . ..my baby . . .my only baby. ..the other never really lived . ..( 90)".The euphoria has obvious physical impact on Nina's strained health.It makes her as O'Neill writes "stouter" with "a triumphant strength about her expression, a ruthless self-confidence in her eye" (90).Then the child is conceived, nourished in her maternal womb and given birth in full and absolute realization and remembrance of the dead Gordon.He is christened as Gordon, a name that would irritate Darrel on his coming to know that, but what is more remarkable than this naming the new born after the dead one is the matter of physical resemblance between the two.To Nina, the young Gordon has resemblance neither with Darrel nor Sam, Act VI young Gordon again reminds her of the dead one, " . . .little Gordon . . . he does remind me of Gordon . . .something in his eyes . . .my romantic imagination?(111)", and later in Act VII , Nina again speaks of the resemblance between the two: "He reminds her a great deal of his namesake"(141) and later in Darrel response to what Nina says revels the level of bitterness that he feels for the suggested resemblance; (Touched on a sore spot-with a nasty laugh-cuttingly) Gordon Shaw?Not the slightest bit in the world and you aught to thank Go he does not!It's te last thing I'd want wished on a boy of mine-to be lie the rah rah hero!(141)" .But Darrel irritation apart, young Gordon grows up with greater and greater resemblance with the dead Gordon.Sam equally realizes the exact similarity between the young and the dead Gordon.His physical strength has marked affinity with Gordon Shaw that makes even Sam appreciate him for he himself lacked the stuff, "Evans (to Nina). . .You used to cheer loud enough for Gordon Shaw!And our Gordon's got hi beat a mile, as a oarsman, at least! (Turning to Darrel) And that isn't father stuff either, Ned! Al the experts say so (162)".However greater resemblance between the two begins to show negative effect on Nina herself as well.He is there to fill the gap that Gordon's death had created in her mind.The marked physical and nerve similarity had atoned her to him.Any idea of her son leaving her is utterly unbearable to her and it makes her resent his love affair with Madeline.It also marks his separation and departure from her that reminds of Gordon Shaw's departure, and therefore she would resist any such thing at this particular period of her life.Sam on this occasion sides with Gordon, thereby adding bitterness to the aging Nina.At one point Nina goes back on her words that the young Gordon bears similarity to his ideal Gordon:, "Nina. . . .Don't be modest Sam. Gordon is you.He may be a fine athlete like Gordon Shaw, because you've held that out to him as your ideal, but there the resemblance ceases.He isn't really like him at all, not the slightest bi!(163)".It is only when all the three men desert her that she agrees to Gordon's marriage with Madeleine, preceded by her confession to Marsden of past guilt that made her bow to Darrel for a healthy child.While Marsden responding paternally forgives her, Sam collapses, and falls on the deck.Gordon in that case ceases to hold any other identity for her except that of Madeline lover (164).

Traumatized Memory in Long Day's Journey
Long Day's Journey into Night likewise dramatizes traumatized memory performance through individual characters.The difference here is that the trauma makes its belated appearance that O'Neill dramatizes in the terrible day long journey into night of all the four Tyrones.As the play opens, the family seems to be well placed, quite happy and relaxed that is apparent in their little jokes and taunts they make at each other.But the impression does not lost long as the tension starts making its presence known in their words, gestures and ambivalent feelings towards each other.All the principal characters come out with their own sense of trauma and post traumatic stress disorder that is made manifest in their thoughts, expressions, remembrance and behavior.The trauma leaves them in a position of total psychological impasse.But once again it is the individual whose memory matters here the most.Here the Four Tyrones are of course connected to each other and their action in past have definitely left indelible mark on their psyche, but important thing is that their memorization can not be extended to the extent of making it general.It would remain specific and therefore, its effect would remain determinable to the extent of the family and its individual members.Raleigh ( ) as mentioned above has read communal factor in the memory of the characters here in this play, but he has also admitted the fact that it the private memory that excites greater element of interest in the play.In the first place the play dramatizes the absolute preponderance of the past that is repeated semantically as well as psychologically.In The Strange Interlude, it is Gordon Shaw whose memory determines the life long pattern of Nina Leeds and finds repulsion or applause in all the male characters.Here instead of a person, the word 'past' itself gets an upper hand in the words and expressions of all the principal characters, and each character shares different responsibility and therefore harbors different traumatic reaction to any past action/event.Anyhow the urge for repetition of the past or its obsession/fixity among all the individuals in the play impart what has already been emphasized a psychotic trait to them.What Mary Tyrone says in the play assert the preponderance of the past in an expression that is incredible for its semiotic brilliance and efficacy, "The past is present, isn't it?It is the future, too.We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us" (87).Her words in the dialogue stand in sheer contrast to what James Tyrone had said in response to her eloquent talk of his scandal with a mistress, who actually had sued him as well: Tyrone.(Withguilty resentment) for God sake, don't dig up what's long forgotten.If you're that far gone in the past already, when it's only the beginning of the afternoon, what will you be tonight?(86).And his desperate pleas to Mary in response to her talk of her living in filthy hotels and bearing children there, and young Edmund's death etc, "for God sake, forget the past" ( 87), and, "can't you let our dead baby rest in peace?"(87).Tyrone is terribly mistaken that any part of their past could be laid in peace, or pushed to forgetfulness.He cannot deny that it has tortured their existence so far, and would continue to haunt them as Mary asserts, in their future too.It is beyond the confines of time, and limitations.Neither the living condition that Mary had to experience after her marriage with actor Tyrone nor the death of the baby Edmund would ever be pushed to oblivion as they have captured their entire psychic beings and entrapped them in their wholeness.In fact Tyrone himself partook in making the past live in their present lives by behaving irresponsibly both as a husband and as a father.
Mary's remembrance is particularly excruciating that hovers around her immediate post marriage exposure to the world of extreme pain, death, disease, and above all deep and persistent sense of loneliness and of homelessness that she had to confront in her post marriage life with James Tyrone and that coincided with her dislike for the world of theatre and all that it implied as she says, " I've never felt at home in the theatre. . .I've little to do with the people in his company, or with any one on the stage. . .Their life is not my life.It has always stood between me and-"(102).Initially she had to go through the nerve-wreckening travelling with her actor husband, stay in dirty hotels, and cheap food that naturally ingrained in her deep sense of homelessness and isolation that assume traumatized outlook that surfaces and re surfaces belatedly and consistently.Mary refers to these terrible initial experiences in her normal talk and reverie.In act III this is how she remembers the very early post marriage experience: "I had waited in that ugly hotel room hour after hour.I kept making excuses for you.I told myself it must be some business connected with the theatre.I knew so little about theatre.Then I became terrified.I imagined all sorts of horrible accidents.I got on my knees and prayed that nothing had happened to you.( 113).This became as Mary writes the routine in her life for many years, "I didn't know how often that was to happen in the years to come, how many times I was to wait in ugly hotel rooms.I became quite used to it (113).In the course of the play she repeatedly and painfully refers to it and the deep developed sense of homelessness s and loneliness.In I, ii, she burst s in frustration and says to James, "Oh, I'm so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! . . .You never have wanted one -never since the day were we married!You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!(67).Later in the same act she once again gives vent to her deep shock to her early experience of living in dirty hotels and the developed sense of homelessness in these words "No, no.Whatever you mean, it isn't true, dear.It was never a home.You have always preferred the club or a barroom.And for me it's always been so lonely as a dirty room in one night stand hotel . . .you forget from I know from experience what a home is like.I gave up the one to marry you -my father's home" (72).Though James later in Act IV refutes her idealization of home and father in saying "you must take her memories with a grain of salt.Her wonderful home was ordinary enough" (137), but the early experiences and the dirty hotel narrative was painful and real enough to cause the trauma and create discourse of pain to be felt belatedly and persistently.This sense of loss of home was further accentuated by the terrible family experiences related to birth and death of the babies in sheer contrast to happy prospects of a romantic marriage.It was her constant travelling with the husband that made her even leaves her kids at home to the grandmother without realizing the possible loss, injury, and discomfort to them in her absence.Here the sensuous part of her feminine nature overrides her maternal affection, and love to the dismemberment of the kids left at home and leads to the unfortunate death of new born Eugene through measles infected Jamie (then seven years old).This death as the amount of pain that she experiences so late turned out to be another traumatized moment of her troublesome early life.The resultant guilt emerges strongly as a result of her failure to act maternally for her kids and finds expression in one of the memorable eloquent dialogue, "blame myself.I swore after Eugene died I would never have another baby.I was to blame for his death.If I hadn't left him with my mother to join you on the road, because you wrote telling me you missed me and were lonely, Jamie would never have been allowed, when he still had measles, to go in the baby's room (87)".The expression also reveals her paranoid condition of denial of womanly/motherly responsibility for the procreation/reproduction that could be possible only in the traumatized state.She is, however, later on forced to do by the emotional and psychological necessarily to have other one to mitigate or overcome the initial shock of Baby Eugene's death.The next baby Edmund as he was Christened, however, became foundational in furthering the shock and trauma of death by giving blow to her health, introducing her to terrible birth pains, birth in cheap dirty hotels, treatment through quacks that introduced her to morphine and for the subsequent ill health problems that have continued to best her and the entire family.Her hopeless expression that reflects the trauma of the aforementioned situation is to be found in the lines that she utters to Tyrone, "But bearing Edmund was the last straw.I was so sick afterwards, and that ignorant of quack of the cheap hotel doctor-all he knew was to reduce pain.It was easy for him to the pain (87).Remembrance of marriage in this context is marred by ambivalence and pain accompanying pleasure.Her marriage with James is based upon her instant infatuation with his manly beauty that makes her even disregard her primary and avowed desire to serve the church as a nun ore be a concert pianist , " I forgot all about becoming a nun or a concert pianist.All I wanted was to be his wife."(105).But the immediate post marriage conditions as explained above leave an indelible mark on her mind to create immediate and belated/gradual traumatic stress and traumatized remembrance.Her immediate reaction is one of even recoil from the man who had infatuated her by his male beauty and grace.His drunkenness and late return to the hotel during the honeymoon period disappointed her of his love and later she expresses her disappointment in such words as, "But I must confess, James, although I could not help loving you, I would never have married you if I'd known you drank so much."(113).Later in one of her reverie, she admits the loss that she suffered that she recalls with reference to her wedding gown, "Oh, how I loved that gown!It was so beautiful!Where is it now, I wonder?I used to take it out from time to time when I was lonely, but it always made me cry, so finally as long while ago-"(115).The stress here is on repeated crying on seeing the beautiful gown that made her hide it somewhere in the trunk.And if the love with which the gown was got prepared and the level of attachment that it had with her infatuation and marriage, crying on seeing the gown and hiding it somewhere that she does not remember easily speak of the immediate pain that marriage has given her and the indelible mark that it has left on her mind and consciousness.In the last Act marriage, wedding gown and the desire to be a nun-all merge into each other to create terrible impression of her being in trauma of post marriage despondency and misery.
Here she also repeats her memory of becoming a pianist or a Nun.The later desire finds reflection in what she states when Edmund tries to take hold of her dressing gown in her last scene appearance with that gown, "you must not try to touch me.You must not try to hold me.It isn't right, when I am hoping to be a nun" (174).She even tries to distance herself from the gown i.e. wedding through her uncertain position on why she looks for the gown, "It's a wedding gown.It's very lovely, isn't it?A shadow crosses her face and she looks vaguely uneasy.I remember now.I found it in the attic hidden in a trunk.But I don't know what II wanted it for.I'm going to be a nun-that is, if I can only find-( 172)".In this terrible, nerve shattering state, she is found looking for something that is very urgently required and is very essential for her survival in these difficulties."What is it I'm looking for?I know it is something I lost" (172), and again, "Something I miss terribly.It can't be altogether lost" ( 173) is her next concern here.The urgency and value of this undeclared thing is evident in her next expression, "I remember when I had it I was never neither lonely nor afraid.I can't have lost it forever; I would die if I thought that.Because then there would be no hope (173).This turns out to the other traumatic remembrance of her past disregard of Catholic faith ingrained in her desire to be the nun.She feels the need of Blessed Virgin Mary's forgiveness and blessing to face the crises.The traumatic stress on her disregard of Catholic Church is made manifest in her total relapse into the Convent school days, "I had a talk with mother Elizabeth. . . .All the same I don't think she was so understanding this time.I told her I wanted to be a nun.I explained how sure I was of my vocation that I had prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make me sure, and to find me worthy . ..( 175)".Earlier in the same scene she is seen lost in her second dream of being a concert pianist, "I play badly now.I'm all out of practice.Sister Theresa will give me a dreadful scolding.She'll tell me it isn't fair to my father when he spends so much money for extra lessons.She's not quite right, it isn't fair, when he's so good and generous, and so proud of me.I'll practice every day from now on.But something horrible has happened to my hands.The fingers have gotten so stiff-( 171)".The past desire and the present predicament meet together in this relapse to the past that is total and absolute.The desire for pianist resurfaces in the prevailing terrible condition but the morphine induced rheumatism adds pain to already traumatized remembrance as it has left her hands crippled and misshapen to play the piano perfectly as she and her father had desired in her Convent days.The final impression is one of total traumatized reaction and conduct on her vital losses.
Apart form Mary's traumatized remembrances; the play dramatizes different traumatized reactions of other personas to different factors that are related to both past and present quandary.For instance four factors -all related to past and therefore present through remembrance-Mary's attempted suicide, death of Eugene, knowledge of Mary's return to addiction and Edmunds consumptive state keep the family members traumatized for they represent the loss they have suffered on their account.Tyrone remembers her terrible attempt for suicide in Act II as, "I hope you'll lay in a good stock ahead so we'll never have another night like the one when you screamed for it, and ran out of the housed in your nightdress half crazy, to try and throw yourself off the dock"(86).Mary ties to ignore it by saying "I have to get tooth powder and toilet soap and cold creams-(86).But the remembrance is there and in the final scene it resurfaces to merge with Mad Ophelia who died through drowning.Its appearance in the last act and scene implies the recurrent nature of the traumatized moments in the life of these miserable Tyrones.Both sons Jamie and Edmund are apparently traumatised that makes it presence known through their acute depressive reactions.Jamie's jealousy, and embittered attitude to father and mother is a traumatized response to his brought up in the childhood.Both Tyrone and Mary are cognizant of the fact that he was born with lots of talent that he virtually ruined through life of dissipation, whoring and drunkenness, and both admit that it is the past that has made him so.One need not delve deep into the familial history to understand the specific cause as the narrative of remembrance imperceptibly unearths it.He has constantly lived under the condemnatory gaze of his parent for what they think his deliberate act of infecting the new born Eugene with measles when he was a seven years old boy.Edmund is no less neurotic in his dark and pessimistic view of life.His response to existing life condition that include his own deteriorating health, the fear of having something serious in himself (tuberculosis), mother's return to addiction, and strained family environment is one of acute stress that pushes him to him to a paranoid state of anxiety, fear and even firm faith in life's ultimate insignificance and triviality.His recitation of Baudelaire's poem in Act Four, speaks of what Tyrone calls, "madness" (134), "filth and despair"(132), and "morbid nonsense"(132).He continues, "Or be so drunk you can forget.(He recites, and recites well, with bitter, ironical passion, the Symons's translation of Baudelaire's prose poem)."Be always drunken.Nothing else matters: That is the only question.If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. . .." (132).What Edmund says here is an expression of total denial of all that pertains to meaningful life and is the embodiment of Nietzschean and Schophenaurean world of absolute lack of spirituality, emptiness, utter wastefulness, and decay.The ultimate destiny, that the quotation project is one of constant decline and deterioration.C.W.E.Bigsby's comments befittingly capture the sense of loss prevalent in the expression.Generalising it to the plays appearing towards the end of his career, he writes "O'Neill's characters in his last plays are caught in the decline.This is a theatre of entropy. . . .They are to use the other of his favourite expression, "only a ghost of their former selves" (49).Edmund's sense of loss finds much more direct expression when he makes his birth an unnecessary event, a mistake: "It was a great mistake, my being born a man; I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish.As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be in little love with death (154)".Frederick I. Carpenter (1979) has praised Edmund of making psychological progress from darkness to light, that he thinks comes with Edmunds final understanding of both father and brother.50But this journey to what Carpenter calls light is marred by his own very depressing and thoroughly dark confession of life being a mistake which in turn makes him a lost soul making a final journey to slow death.Similarly the traumatised depressive state is equally reflected in the pernicious drunkenness that all the males surrounding Male in the family exhibit.Drunkenness of the male family members is a terrible reflection of their depressive psychic conditions.Alcohol addiction, writes Menniger (1938) "can be thought of not as a disease, but a suicidal flight from disease, a disastrous attempt at self torture or an unseen inner conflict, aggravated but not primarily caused by external conflict" (43).He also takes alcohol drinking as a step towards "expression of such feelings and memories which threaten to emerge, to become again conscious . ..They feel, with justification, that they have been betrayed, and their entire subsequent life is a prolonged, disguised reaction to this feeling"(44).These statements are a befitting account of Tyrone's family.Father, and both sons are terribly addicted to wine and O'Neill leaves the readers in no doubt about their perverse addiction by projecting father and sons gulping alcohol in what seems to be a desperate attempt to divert their patterned behaviour and mode of expression.They are also found cheating each other at this point.
Edmund.That's what drove me to drink.Why don't you sneak one while you've got a chance?Jamie.I was thinking of that little thing (He goes quickly to the window at right) The old man was talking to old captain Turner.Yes, he's still at it.(Hecomes back and takes a drink)And now to cover up from his eagle eye.He memorises the level in the bottle after every drink.(He measure up two drinks of water and pours them in the whisky bottle and shakes it up) Edmund.Fine!You don't think it will fool him, do you?Jamie.May be not, but he can't prove it (54).This behavior speaks volumes of regression in their relation as well.Their profuse drinking can't be ascribed to any external stimulus, as for example environment or to the general family habit.Its source is undeniably internal springing from their.Likewise enhanced irritability to even minor harmless comments speaks of the psychic regression that has emerged there as a result of consistent pressing and painful past.Even slight humorous remarks prick them to their dissatisfaction, and that result in straining of relations often leading to open accusation.In Act one, for instance, Mary's humorous remarks about Tyrone's snoring habit strains the happy mood that they show in the opening: Mary.You were snoring so hard I couldn't tell which the foghorn was!Ten foghorns couldn't disturb you. . .Tyrone.(His vanity piqued -testily Nonsense, you always exaggerate about my snoring (38).
Later when Edmund supports, Mary's views on Tyrone's snoring by quoting line from Shakespeare, "the Moor, I know his trumpet", Tyrone rebounds angrily by saying, "if it takes my snoring to make you remember Shakespeare instead of the dope sheet on the ponies, I hope I'll keep on with it" (I.21), followed by increased indignation at Jamie's words of "lets forget it", that aims at no particular person, "Yes, forget!Forget everything and face nothing!It's a convenient philosophy if you've no ambition in life except to . .." (I.21).Edmund's humorous account of Shaughnessy incident after giving Tyrone temporary delight ends up at Tyrone frowning at Edmund, "Keep your damned socialist anarchist sentiment out of my affairs (I.25)."Jamie also receives scolding at this point.Tyron (Turns on Jamie)."And you're worse than he is, encouraging him.I suppose you're regretting you weren't there to prompt Shaughnessy with a few nastier insults.You are a fine talent for that"(26).Both sons, Jamie and Edmund share this characteristic with their father and respond frequently in high pitched irritable tones to slight taunts, jokes and remarks that go against their likening.Talk about Edmund's health between Tyrone and Jamie with reference to Dr. Hardy results in James accusing Tyrone directly and very harshly of saving money at Edmund's cost: Jamie (Contemptuously) Hardy only charges a dollar Tyron (stung).That's enough!You're not drunk now!There's no excuse-(he controls himself a bit defensively).If you mean I can't afford one of the society doctors who prey on the rich summer people___ Jamie.Can't afford?You're one of the biggest property owners around here.
Tyron.That doesn't mean I'm rich.Its' all mortgaged-Jamie.Because you always buy more instead of paying mortgages If Edmund was a lousy acre of land you wanted the sky would be the limit Tyrone.That's a lie.And your sneers against Dr. Hardy are lies. ..(I.30).
This irritability develops into a consistent pattern of ambivalent love and repulsion against each other that is maintained throughout the play from the first to the last act with terrible consistency.
Thus O'Neill's plays dramatise memory as traumatized experience that continues to appear belatedly and shatter the life of the concerned in the present.However, one very significant limitation in this concern with dramatizing the trauma through remembrance/memory is the failure to provide possible strategies for coping with the trauma, stress disorder and PTSDs.Tragedies like Oedipus Tyrannous and Hamlet possess this capability in a marked degree.These tragedies are valuable not only for the extreme distress that their protagonist has to bear but also for their natural therapeutic strength (Note 3) as they provide natural and inbuilt strategy for coping with the different traumatized states caused by extreme distress to initiate internal course of overcoming the latent shock to achieve tragic transcendence4.The strategies are not superimposed on the plot and structure of the play, rather they are inbuilt and are apart of the very development of the plot and the characters.O'Neill's art as these plays substantiate on the contrary lacks the so called therapeutic strength for allowing the protagonist to cope with the superimposed crises.The ultimate impression is one of psychological impasse that leaves the protagonist paralysed and neurasthenic the end.The comparison with the classics and Shakespeare is appropriate and legitimate for the reason that O'Neill's own avowed desire was to emulate the model that the Greek had established (see Letter).Shakespeare on the other hand is a presence in Long Day's Journey in particular.It is pertinent to refer here to Chris Westgate analysis of Long Day's Journey in his "Tragic Inheritance and tragic Expression in Long Day 's Journey"(2008) wherein Westgate takes pains to write the play as an attempt on O'Neill's part to set up new idiom of tragedy in the tragic genre, which in his opinion lies in his non-adherence to the tragedy of what he calls closure or "lack of conventional terminus" (04) that lies in the absence of conventional closure in tragedies like hamlet that ends in death of the Protagonist.Here instead the reader comes across the return to a situation that is a routine pattern in the life of Tyrones.There is great deal of wisdom in what Westgate writes, but he does not mention one every important component of the tragedy that lies in the protagonist's development from say misery to achieve transcendence and this development in a sense carry therapeutic value for it provides the suffering persona a strategy to cope with the prevailing chaos and come to term with the crises before he dies.One particular instance of this trauma is to be found in Hamlet.The response of the character in this play to the disclosure /awareness of the traumatized event/ episode that happened to his absolute ignorance borders on acute stress to PTSD.We find the hero regressing down in thoughts, feelings and behaviour as a mark of the impending strength of the awareness of the event of father's death followed by mother's quick marriage to Uncle Claudius.The disclosure comes through a source that is beyond rational comprehension to this otherwise wise and intelligent Prince.But the disclosure has its impact and that is made manifest in the character's soliloquies.However, the plot and structure of the play makes provision for the development of the Prince from the state of shock to the realization of his potentials and virtues that is largely responsible for his intellectual and philosophic strength as well as his heroic grandeur in the face of the crises.Likewise Oedipus Tyrannous is terrible account of human fall from greatness to misery through a complex of circumstances that involve his own temperamental fault.Oedipus end in Oedipus at Colonous testifies the dualistic human position of being a transgressor and epitome of control, progress and intellect.In professor Kitto's opinion his journey which he calls rhythm (388) form a indubitable position of control and strength to that of an outcast, blind, old and from this to the divine status of a prophet symbolizes his resurrection, and transcendence, in turn symbolizing the man's knowledge and in turn transcendence from sufferings (388).(Note 4) O'Neill's dramatic art, however, does not provide any strategy for the coping with the trauma and the traumatized states.However, the remembrance in each case is not followed by development towards resolution of the crises as the plays do not make provision for strategies for the persona to come to term with the terror of the remembrance and it seems that their return to past will ever go on in the same line and on the same model.Mary's drugged condition, her memoir of Convent days; desire to be nun and the frustration that romantic marriage instilled in her life is nothing new; it's return to the early condition and as Westgate writes this "is not the first time that she has taken so much morphine that she becomes a ghost a ghost haunting the past" (4), and "her taking the drugs does not indicate any definitive action that might lead the tragedy to a conclusion . .." (4).In Strange Interlude, Nina Leads' initial strategy to cope with overwhelming crises is that of promiscuity and heterosexuality that, however, leaves her exhausted and neurasthenic.

Notes
Note 1. Attilio Favorini (2003) takes collective memory to be a set of recollections, repetitions, and recapitulations that are socially, morally, or politically useful for a group or community.It tends to be group generated, multi-vocal, and responsive to a social framework.5History.History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus' "The Persians", Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 55, No. 1, Ancient Theatre (Mar., 2003), pp. 99-111 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Note 2. For the desirable side of memory and nostalgia see David Lowenthal (1975) Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory in Geographical Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp.1-36 Published by: American Geographical Society.He analyses the prevalence of nostalgia in modern societies across Europe today that threatens to engulf all of past time and much of the present landscape.The nostalgic view can apply as keenly to a history at second hand as to the scenes of one's own childhood.What nostalgia does require is a sense of estrangement; the object of the quest must be anachronistic.Like Renaissance devotion to the classical world, the remoteness of the past is for us a part of its charm.Note 3.For therapeutic role of drama see R. S. Perinbanayagam Review: [untitled] Reviewed work: T. J. Scheff (1982) Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama.by Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 87, No. 6 (May, 1982), pp. 1454-1456 Published by: The University of Chicago Press.Myles Tierney (1945) He explains using drama therapy to cure such psychological diseases as Alcoholism.Also see Myles Tierney, "Psycho dramatic Therapy for the Alcoholic" in Sociometry, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1945), pp.76-78 Published by: American Sociological Association.Most recently Phil Jones (2007) has through interaction of theory and practice established the importance of therapeutic drama).Accentuating the loss through performance and stage representations would not shake /cleanse the reader/audience, actor out of the alienated, psychopathological self.It can achieve its therapeutic effect through creating empathy and not antipathy through the appeal to human emotions and not through the concentrated, repetitive and narrow confines of the inner self.Note 4. Also see Goldhill, Simon. (1992).Reading Greek Tragedy.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.