A Long Day’s Journey – O’Neil

In the play A Long Day’s Journey into Night, psychology plays a huge role in changing each character as the day moves into the night. As I read the book, I noticed that Mary and her addiction to morphine effect the sanity of not only herself but the rest of her family. As the day moves on and she takes more and more, more alcohol is drank and the truth begins to come out about Mary’s past dreams (perhaps regrets).

Mary

I had two dreams. To be a nun, that was the more beautiful one. To become a concert pianist, that was the other.

She pauses, regarding her hands fixedly. Cathleen blinks her eyes to fight off drowsiness and a tipsy feeling.

I haven’t touched a piano in so many years. I couldn’t play with such crippled fingers, even if I wanted to. For a time after my marriage, I tried to keep up my music. But it was hopeless. One-night stands, cheap hotels, dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home.

Although deep down Mary knows that she has an addiction, she continuously blames her “crippled fingers” on everything, including the usage of the medications. She tries to convince her family as well as herself that it’s not an addiction.

Edmund

For God’s sake, Mama! You can’t trust her! Do you want everyone on earth to know?

Mary

Know what? That I suffer from rheumatism in my hands and have to take medicine to kill the pain? Why should I be ashamed of that?

When it comes to Edward, Jamie, and Tyrone the main problem is alcoholism. They try to deny, or forget, the fact that Mary hasn’t truly gotten better by drinking more. Although they all try and say something to Mary at one point in the play, she never admits it. Instead, she blames them for her problems, especially her husband, Tyrone.

Mary

“And I still love you, dear, in spite of everything. But I must confess, James, although I couldn’t help loving you, I could never have married you if I’d known you drank so much. I remember the first night your barroom friends had to help you up to the door of our hotel room, and knocked and then ran away before I came to the door. We were still on our honeymoon, do you remember?”

In my opinion, the true meaning for Mary’s addiction is never fulfilling her real dreams which never included anything she ended up with, including her husband and children. She truly wanted to be a nun and with all the problems and sicknesses she faced (Edward’s sickness and her father’s death of the same illness), the more it seems she wishes she had stuck to her dream.

Mary

…I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, and that I prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make sure, and to find me worthy [...]

But Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imaginations. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year of two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we would talk it over again. [...]

That was the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.

Glass

The psychological problems in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams are everywhere. The most obvious, to me, is the major insecurities that Laura deals with daily. She is constantly compared to her mother when it came to “gentleman callers” and had to deal with Amanda, her mother’s, lectures about how she needs to be more outgoing with men. Even though her mother knows that Laura being crippled causes most of her insecurities, she wants Laura to live life as best as possible, even if that means making her step out of her comfort zone.

Amanda – Resume your seat, little sister – I want you to stay fresh and pretty – for gentleman callers!

Laura – I’m not expecting any gentleman callers.

Amanda – (crossing out to kitchenette. Airily) Sometimes they come when they are least expected! Why, I remember one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain- (Enters kitchenette.)

Tom – I know whats coming!

Laura – Yes, but let her tell it.

Tom – Again?

Laura – She loves to tell it.

Amanda returns with bowl of dessert.

Amanda – One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain – your mother received – seventeen! - gentleman callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all! We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house

Also, Tom almost goes insane from the daily nagging of his mother. He has to provide for himself and the two women, and it’s too much stress for him to handle. He hates working in the warehouse, and coming home to his mother just puts him over the edge.

You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that- celotex

interior! With- fluorescent- tubes! Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a

crowbar and battered out my brains- than go back mornings! I go! Every

time you come in yelling that God damn ‘Rise and shine!’ ‘Rise and shine!’ I

say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!’

Tom, unlike his sister Laura, cannot find it in himself to deal with his mother. He does love her, and shows that in his apology, but although Amanda only wants what’s best for her children she drives her son away to the point of disowning himself from the family.

Desire Under the Elms

In the play Desire Under the Elms, the aspect of an open ending could not be more obvious.

SHERIFF–Open in the name o’ the law! (They start.)

CABOT–They’ve come fur ye. (He goes to the rear door.) Come in, Jim! (The three men enter. Cabot meets them in doorway.) Jest a minit, Jim. I got ‘em safe here. (The sheriff nods. He and his companions remain in the doorway.)

EBEN–(suddenly calls) I lied this mornin’, Jim. I helped her do it. Ye kin take me, too.

ABBIE–(brokenly) No!

CABOT–Take ‘em both. (He comes forward–stares at Eben with a trace of grudging admiration.) Putty good–fur yew! Waal, I got t’ round up the stock. Good-by.

EBEN–Good-by.

ABBIE–Good-by. (Cabot turns and strides past the men–comes out and around the corner of the house, his shoulders squared, his face stony, and stalks grimly toward the barn. In the meantime the sheriff and men have come into the room.)

SHERIFF–(embarrassedly) Waal–we’d best start.

ABBIE–Wait, (turns to Eben) I love ye, Eben.

EBEN–I love ye, Abbie. (They kiss. The three men grin and shuffle embarrassedly. Eben takes Abbie’s hand. They go out the door in rear, the men following, and come from the house, walking hand in hand to the gate. Eben stops there and points to the sunrise sky.) Sun’s a-rizin’. Purty, hain’t it?

ABBIE–Ay-eh. (They both stand for a moment looking up raptly in attitudes strangely aloof and devout.)

SHERIFF–(looking around at the farm enviously–to his companion) It’s a jim-dandy farm, no denyin’. Wished I owned it!

For all we know, the sheriff could now be in the fight for the farm with this ending. Although it is pretty clear that Cabot got away with Eben’s mothers farm, the fate of him and Abbie is completely unknown. Did they get arrested? Let go? The death sentence? And how is Cabot going to handle the whole farm by himself?

Also, psychology is a huge aspect in this play. The tension between Cabot and Eben grows as the play goes on. “Ye needn’t heed Eben. Eben’s a dumb fool – like his Maw, soft an’ simple!”. It is obvious throughout the entire play that Cabot is hateful towards Eben, and Eben is the same way as he sneakingly tries to take back what belongs to him through his mother. Eben used his knowledge of his stop brothers’ desires to get them off his hands as Cabot brought another wife home, threatening, once again, Eben’s chance of getting his mother’s land back. Both Cabot and Eben were smart in their ideas of getting back at the other, but Cabot, it seems, was unfortunately the successful one in the end.

Blanche continued…

Another thing that drove me insane about Blanche that I forgot to mention in her last post was how her double personalitly almost made her forget who she truly was. She was convincing others, as well as herself, that her lies were the truth, for example in the very end of the play when she claimed Mitch tried to apologize and she dismissed him. Blanche thought of what she wanted to happen, and tried to talk about it and turn it into reality. Unfortunatly for herself, she was caught in the act and was attacked verybally and physicaly by Stanley, forced to know the truth about herself once again.

Blanche: But then he came back. He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgivness [...]

Stanley: Was this before or after the telegram came from the Texas oil millionaire?

Blanche: What telegram? No! No, after! As a matter of fact, the wire came just as-

Stanley: As a matter of fact there wasn’t no wire at all!

Blanche: Oh, oh!

Stanley: There isn’t no millionaire! And Mitch didn’t come back with roses ’cause I know where he is-

Blanche: Oh!

Stanley: There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination!

I’ve heard about this psychological reaction before in situations like divorce. Some kids whose parents got divorced try to tell people like teachers or friends that their parents are getting back together or that nothing changed or bothered them. I feel that Blanche tried to do the same, trying to act like her husband was never gay, that he simply died, or that she was still a proper southern lady while she was truly a woman known as a drunk whore in Laurel. Blanche regretted everything in the past, and as she tried to remain young looking and acting, she was trying to start over in New Orleans as if nothing had ever happened.

Street Car Name Desire: Blanche is a Psycho.

Blanche, in a Streetcar Named Desire is extremely insecure and searches for security in compliments and being desired.

Since her past husband was a homosexual and Blanche couldn’t “cure” him by being his wife leading to his suicide, she thought herself as less beautiful and less desirable to men in general.

Blanche: [...] There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking-still that thing was there… He came to me for help. I didn’t know that. I didn’t find out anything until after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I know was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give him the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me- but I wasn’t holding him out, I was slipping in with him!

Psychologically Blanche was completely messed up by this experience and completely changed herself. Once a proper aristocratic woman in the south, she became a well known woman, searching to be desired and possibly “save” the men who suffered with the problem her past husband suffered with by keeping herself open to multiple men.

Blanche: Yes, a big spider! That’s where I brought my victims. Yes, I had many intamacies with strangers. After the deateh of Allan- intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with. . . I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection- here and there, in the most- unlikely places- even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy [...]

When Blanche arrived at New Orleans, she c ouldn’t continue her way of finding comfort like she did in Laurel so she tried a new approach. Since she was caught and lost her job, she tried to convince everyone in her sisters town that she was still a virgin and was truly still a proper woman from the south. She looked for confidence by asking for compliments and doing her best to look well in hopes of finding another husband, or another young man to “save”.

Q and A: (Continuation of my last post)

Q: Do you think Prufrock’s struggles are peculiar to him or are they more universal?

-Bazz

A: I definitely think that Prufrock’s struggles are more universal. A lot of what he talked about had to do with his image as well as what other people were thinking. In today’s society, especially with the media these days, that is the most common psychological struggle. He worries about bald spots and how skinny he is. Getting older as well as weight are too things most people worry about and wish to change about themselves.