张千楚
国际关系学院外语学院 100091
Long Day’s Journey into Night is an autobiographical play of Eugene O’Neill’s later period of creation. In this work, the objective enemy which the characters resist is no more the unknown forces from the external world, but the inner world twisted by the external force. The alienation of The Tyrones spiritual world caused by “money” replaced the role of “divinities” and “fate”, and has made the theme of this work a modern tragedy. He gained enlightenment from Nietzsche's philosophical theory, cast aside his past values, and established the artistic creation route of using tragedy to find spiritual sustenance for mankind in the post-god Era.
A Brief Introduction of “Dionysus Spirit”
The core of Nietzsche's artistic aesthetics is the inheritance and sublimation of the Dionysian spirit of ancient Greek mythology. Nietzsche believed that the traditional Christian belief in the West had collapsed and that any moral system based on it needed to be reevaluated. The value orientation of Nietzsche's Dionysian spirit theory is highly consistent with O 'Neill's original intention of creation, so O 'Neill's plays are full of the application of this theory. In the mainstream view of academics, Eugene O’Neill is commonly regarded as the successor of the ancient Greek tragic culture. In his theatrical works, O’Neill implanted elements of modern drama into the frame work of ancient Greek tragedy, focusing on describing the inner activities of the characters.
Whiskey and Morphine: The Irrational tendencies of Dionysian Spirit
20th century in America, the prosperous material life led a series of social problems. Instead of assisting human beings to heaven, “scientific spirit” has imprisoned people’s spiritual freedom and threatened American civilization in fact. O’Neill was deeply distressed by the crisis of that moment. Therefore, he regards sensibility, which is defined as an important part of Dionysian spirit as the solution to the problem caused by rationalism.
O’Neill’s portrayal of their split personalities is in line with Carl Jung’s psychological theory. They all believed that everyone’s personality was primitively unified, which means that everyone was born with a complete personality and there is no need to work on building a new one. But not everyone can maintain that integrity, the inner balance, throughout his life. Many external factors would destroy the balance in personality, then lead to split personality.
James, once a highly acclaimed actor in Shakespeare’s plays, became a “professional” actor of Count of Monte Cristo. Then his career as an actor ended from that time in the pursuit of money. Mary was well educated and gifted at playing the piano. She had dreamed of going to Europe and become a nun. But influenced by the craze of American housewives at that time, she chose to return to her family and concentrate on becoming a loving wife and mother. On contrary, she was drifting in the life of touring with her husband around the country and the drug addiction caught in a difficult childbirth made her in a trance all the time. Therefore, the couple often daydreamt or got drunk, reminiscing about the good old days. Most of the time, their true selves were squeezed by the pretense, resulting in a deteriorating state of split personality. Also, their unhealthy personalities affected Jamie and Edmund. Jamie and Edmund were influenced by the negative behavior pattern from their parents, which hindered the development of their personalities since childhood. Jamie used to be smart and health at school. His father’s alcoholism and mother’s indifference towards him led Jamie to sneer at everything. He pretended to be indifferent and tried to hide his desire for the work and life of ordinary job under his shell of contempt for everything. Edmund was a sensitive poet who became depressed under the influence of his parents and brother. Even if he ran away from home, there was no way to escape from his original family and repair psychological trauma.
The Tyrones are living in the shadow of split personality. They were aware of their own situation, and indulged in whiskey and morphine. But none of them have the courage to break away from the illusion of the Apollo world. They were unable to give up themselves totally (die), or to obtain the authentic liberation with the guide of Dionysus. The only thing they had achieved was to wear a painful mask and hide the true self underneath. In this personal tragedy about a doomed family O’Neill conveyed the aesthetic value of failure and destruction.
O’Neill’s Artistic Redemption: Detachment from the Suffering of Reality
At the end of the play, the father and his sons had a conflict in which they confessed part of their real thoughts. Still, no one found the way to end the pain. Finally, Mary was in the hallucination of morphine, and her monologue about being a nun ended the whole tragedy. Such ending reflects the artistic redemption in Dionysian spirit in O’Neill’s plays. At the same time, all the moral standards and precepts designed by “Apollo world” are totally ignored. In this way, people approach the joy of their human lives.
Conclusion
The humanism expressed by O 'Neill in Long Day’s Journey into Night is very much in line with the doctrine of Nietzsche. He used a kind of Dionysian revelry to create conditions for the humanism in literature. Through Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill was calling on people to re-examine themselves and convert to Dionysus (nature). In the illusion of Dionysus, the disciples could have a deep insight into the hypocrisy of the modern society. When they are sober, they must find everything in reality unbearable. In this state, for example the Tyrone family, they can temporarily break through their loneliness, experience the falsity of real life, and then complete the transcendence from materialism to humanism. O 'Neill successfully realized the artistic goal of “expelling the superficial hedonism of American society with the modern psychological tragedy” and explained a more advanced optimism spirit through the principles of Dionysian spirit. Under the guidance of humanist aesthetics, he devoted himself to stimulating people's motivation to get rid of the dilemma, extracting aesthetic and cultural values from the doomed futile struggles of characters, and repairing the psychological wounds of modern people by tools of Nietzsche's Dionysus.
作者简介：张千楚（1999.01-），女，蒙古族，辽宁抚顺人，国际关系学院外语学院英语系本科在读，研究方向：英语语言文学翻译方向