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Mary Tyrone's Crisis of Agency

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.1.0041

2161-4318

Patrick Maley,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

Just about the only desire shared by members of the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey Into Night is the desire for a peaceful family life. Although each is acutely aware of how he or she threatens that peace, and each is alert to the threats posed by the others, the four are united in the effort to remain a family in spite of their collective destructiveness. The most strenuous efforts to preserve Tyrone family happiness come from Mary, who tries using performative language to assuage any threats to a happy family. So when Tyrone's insecurity and anger begin to flare, she tells her husband, “You mustn't be so touchy”; when concern grows over Jamie's vices, she says, “He'll turn out all right in the end, you wait and see.”1 She repeatedly downplays the severity of Edmund's illness by calling it just “a bad summer cold,” and she avoids questions of her sobriety constantly with utterances like “I'm quite all right, dear” (720, 741). Although each Tyrone is deeply flawed, Mary will brook no confrontation with the forces endangering family peace.Such a drive to avoidance is understandable from Mary, who is expected to act as matriarch of a contentious family striving to keep the tattered threads of Tyrone happiness together. This task's difficulty grows when compounded by her battles with addiction, guilt, and crippling fear that the worst is true of Edmund's health. She seems to recognize how little can be done to repair the deep fissures weakening her family's foundation, and so she turns to language in hopes of patching those fissures long enough to ignore their threat. When we consider all that Mary has suffered through since abandoning the convent for James Tyrone—the death of a young child, a painful pregnancy and resultant morphine addiction, an attempted suicide, and now the threat of losing Edmund to the same disease that took her father—it becomes difficult to fault her for whatever strategy she chooses to battle her and the family's psychological demons. Peace and calm are Mary's goals, and we should understand that desperation motivates her to whatever means she deems necessary to maintain a sense of serenity among her family, even if that serenity is falsely constructed through language.Eugene O'Neill and Long Day's Journey, however, are far from cooperative. Through a pattern of language and avoidance, the play indicts Mary as the catalyst of its tragedy. Placed by the Tyrone men's shunning of responsibility in the unenviable position of tending to her family's unity, Mary acts exclusively through language, responding to her challenges only with utterances that describe a peaceful family—one in which Edmund is not gravely ill and all the Tyrone men get along, for example—but she does nothing to support that condition. Ordinary language philosophy shows us that a speech act is a more extended process than uttering words without ethos or a commitment to support their performative work, and because Mary has neither she never succeeds in wiping away family problems with language. Since her family leans so much upon her for support, Mary's ineffectual speech acts have the disastrous consequences of triggering this play's tragedy, the final collapse of the Tyrone family.The Tyrone men are foolish for putting their frail wife and mother in a position of such responsibility, and so blame for the conditions of this tragedy ought to be spread among its characters. Moreover, each man has habits that are destructive to himself and the family, and it is proper to censure their vices and lack of accountability. But Long Day's Journey places the bulk of responsibility for the Tyrone family on Mary, asking her to nurse all its ills. Her failure thus makes her the agent of this tragedy, the force triggering its downturn. The men place their family on the precipice of tragedy with their unreasonable expectations of Mary, but she pushes the Tyrones and the play over the edge with her failures of ordinary language.This is at once an unsympathetic and a recuperative reading of Mary Tyrone. While treating her as culpable for her family's collapse and the play's woeful conclusion, I locate in her human agency powerful enough to cause tragedy. None of the Tyrone men are agential enough for their actions to have repercussions as severe as Mary's; each passes the buck to the other and ultimately to Mary. O'Neill himself does the same, placing this tattered family's burden on the shoulders of its frail mother figure (further weakening his own defense against the charge of misogyny).2 In the face of all this, however, Mary takes action through language. Although her utterances are ultimately destructive, she is the only Tyrone to respond to the family's troubles.Although Mary engenders the tragedy of Long Day's Journey with her failures of performative language, she reveals in the process a depth and complexity to her humanity unseen in any of the play's other characters. This play's tragedy is provoked not by the work of fate or merciless existence, but by the repercussions of the ordinary faults of an everyday human. Long Day's Journey thus reveals a tragic humanism, an ethos that finds the human struggling against and failing to overcome the faults of ordinary human existence. Mary's struggle is harrowing and perhaps hopeless, but the responsibility for the effects of that struggle rests ultimately with her, an ordinary human within a limited social sphere.Analyzing Long Day's Journey through Mary's crisis of agency—she must act, but her actions cause destruction—allows us to identify in this play both a paradigm of O'Neill's humanist aesthetic and an influential precedent for the humanism of later American drama. Many of O'Neill's most notable characters—from Ella Downey and Yank, through Lavinia Mannon and Ephraim Cabot, to Larry Slade and Con Medley—struggle in their attempts to avoid the effects of their ordinary human agency. This trend reveals a persistent tragic humanism that indicts many O'Neillian characters as direct contributors to their own suffering. Moreover, understanding how O'Neill characterizes Mary's crisis allows us to recognize the foundation for an ensuing tradition of American drama attuning itself to the work of human characters. The focus on repercussions of everyday human agency found in the work of playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, and others adopts and builds upon O'Neill's tragic humanism. Later playwrights' evolution away from O'Neill's classically inflected concern for the human in light of metaphysical forces and into an interest in the human vis-à-vis social and political frameworks intensifies American drama's examination of the repercussions of humanity's actions upon itself. Ever skeptical of the suggestion that society could strip the human of basic agency, American playwrights work often with O'Neill's model of great human suffering beginning with ordinary human action.By addressing her family's challenges with language aimed at wiping all problems away, Mary treats her utterances as speech acts, expecting them to exert a performative force in the social context of her home. In reality, although her language has agency, its effect is to create a phantom construct of Tyrone family stability rather than to mend the threats to actual stability. Her words are limited in their effectiveness because they are fundamentally ordinary, restricted in power by their speaker's inability to support their work. Stanley Cavell argues that ordinary language “limit[s] the (inevitable) extension of the voice, which will always escape me and forever find its way back to me.”3 Cavell establishes this concept of a limited space between speaker and utterance in responding to Jacques Derrida's critique of J. L. Austin's speech act theory. Austin's set of lectures collected as How to Do Things with Words opens with the assertion that there exists a type of utterance, the saying of which “is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.” He goes on to dub this sort of utterance a performative, then spends much of the subsequent lectures identifying the problems and limitations of the concept. Most famously, he claims, “Surely the words must be spoken ‘seriously’ and so as to be taken ‘seriously’? This is, though vague, true enough in general—it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem.”4 For Austin, performative speech acts that are uttered while joking or in the improper circumstances, for example, do not succeed in performing the action of their design and are therefore infelicitous, a term Austin offers along with felicitous in place of false and true for categorizing the outcome of performatives.Derrida's deconstruction of How to Do Things with Words picks up on this point, faulting Austin for advancing “the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention.” According to Derrida, failing to recognize “that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration” makes Austin's argument “untenable.”5 For Austin, one must have the proper authority to perform a speech act felicitously—in certain circumstances, for instance, a speaker must be a ship's captain and not its purser for the utterance of “I now pronounce you husband and wife” to create a marriage felicitously—but according to Derrida such a condition transfers power from words to the intention of their speaker, and intention is never verifiable or even assessable.Derrida's critique is most important here because Cavell's riposte helpfully clarifies Austin's argument, illuminating the operation of speech acts in ordinary society and in Long Day's Journey. According to Cavell, Austin's insistence on proper circumstances “seems the reverse of making intention the organizing center of the analysis of performatives, since in a sense in certain major categories of performatives it shows intention to be inessential to whether a performative is in effect.” A ship's purser could have every intention of felicitously marrying a couple, but no amount of earnestness will allow his utterance to do so. Similarly, a ship's captain who utters the conventional words of marriage in the conventional circumstances engenders marriage, regardless of his intentions. Cavell writes: “I read Austin not as denying that I have to abandon my words, create so many orphans, but as affirming that I am abandoned to them, as to thieves or conspirators, taking my breath away.” “As if that price of having once spoken,” he continues, “is to have spoken forever, to have taken on the responsibility for speaking further, the responsibility of responsiveness, of answerability, to make yourself intelligible.”6 Cavell shows that the social performance of an Austinian speech act is more than the pronouncement of language that effects change; it is the rupture of that language into its myriad effects, all of which are tethered to the speaker. To enter into the social context of language is to take on a great ethical burden, and intention might be one of any number of conditions contributing to the felicity or infelicity of a speech act, but it is certainly a minor factor, relegated well below the social circumstances of the speaker, audience, and utterance.When Cavell speaks of words abandoning a speaker but forever finding their way back, he is defining a referential framework in which an utterance remains marked by and in reference to its speaker. That speaker and his or her social conditions (e.g., authority, ethos) contribute to the performativity of the speech act but do not determine felicity in an omnipotent, authorial sense. Instead, a combination of the social conditions of the speaker, the circumstance of the utterance, the nature of the audience, and any number of other factors determine felicity or infelicity. Most important, though, regardless of whether a speech act turns out to be felicitous or infelicitous, language always acts, affecting some kind of change. Even ultimately infelicitous language will act within the context in which it is uttered, creating a condition of responsibility for its speaker. A speech act changes the circumstances of a social sphere, and the effects of that utterance point always back to its speaker. Words rupture context, but they do so as a result of an agential speaker, one bearing as a result what Cavell calls “the responsibility of responsiveness,” the necessity to be accountable for the effects of language.This concept denies any notion of divorce between speaker and utterance. Although Mary attempts to deploy performative language to fix her family's problems, her words are merely tools that rely upon their user for support. Devoid almost entirely of ethos within the rhetorical situation of the Tyrone home, Mary cannot support proclamations of conditions like Edmund not being gravely ill or Jamie's vices not being destructive with anything more than hollow language, and so her speech acts are doomed to infelicity.If Mary were to have any hope of mending her family's ills with language, she would need to support her language's many ruptures with action or explanation. This task is greatly complicated by her family's implicit demands that she remain a soothing, calm, and above all sober center for their family unity. When she claims that Edmund is only suffering from a cold, for example, she does not rupture context in such a way that makes everybody somehow overlook the clear severity of his illness; rather, her language suggests that Mary is not overly fearful about her son's health and therefore will not turn again to morphine. In order for her to support her “summer cold” speech acts—in order to embrace Cavell's notion of “the responsibility of responsiveness”—she would need to embody all the calm and sobriety implicit in those utterances' performances. The Tyrone men quickly realize that this is not the case, but they allow the charade of felicity for her speech acts to go on unchecked so that they may continue to pretend as a group that all is well with the family. Enabled by her family, Mary thus uses language to build a façade of family peace and happiness, but as the play progresses and the façade grows more elaborate, Mary becomes unable to support its weight.Approaching Long Day's Journey through an examination of Mary's contribution to its tragedy opens new terrain for understanding both the play and character. Rather than treating Mary as either a passive victim of circumstance or one among a bevy of destructive forces in the Tyrone home, we will be able to understand the complexity of her impact on the play by recognizing the daunting position from which Mary is compelled to act. As a result, we can see this play as a condemnation of the family structure that would go to great lengths to shun individual and collective responsibility. Existing treatments of Mary's influence on the play's tragedy tend to follow one of three tracks. First, some critics indict Mary for triggering tragedy by making an active choice to return to morphine. Although these arguments offer any number of explanations for her choice—from James Tyrone's cheapness to Mary's disgust with herself—they are notable for allowing Mary no excuse for her decision. Laurin Porter, for example, argues that “Mary takes morphine again, the play suggests, because of the likelihood that her favorite son Edmund has contracted consumption…. To escape the pain this fear brings, a pain she cannot bear, Mary withdraws, via morphine, into a happier past.”7 Approaches like this preserve a certain level of agency for Mary, but regularly overlook the extent to which Mary has become victim of her addiction and, as a result, devalue the powerful forces triggering her relapse. Factors like Edmund's health and her family burden are less challenges that Mary avoids through morphine than they are instigators of addiction.A second approach overcorrects this method by evacuating Mary of agency completely, excusing her from responsibility on the grounds that O'Neill has created a dramatic space too harsh and oppressive for human choice. While acknowledging that “Mary seems the most reprehensible Tyrone,” Barbara Voglino, for instance, argues that “if none of the Tyrones can bear life and all seek to withdraw from it, perhaps Mary's retreat into the fog of morphine is less reprehensible and even necessary.”8 This approach follows a Nietzschean poetics: it suggests that Mary stands facing the Dionysic abyss and has no choice but to wallow in morphine, as each Tyrone man must wallow in his particular vice. This methodology is too quick to discount how the Tyrones face their challenges. To argue that these figures are helpless victims to universal forces is to argue that actions like Tyrone selling his soul for “That God-damned play” or Mary leaving the convent are moot, and that the characters bear no accountability for their decisions (809). While all the Tyrones are clearly oppressed by powerful psychological and social forces, this approach sacrifices too much attention to the significant responses characters offer to their oppression.Rather than laying blame on the play's characters or its oppressive metaphysics, the third approach to Long Day's Journey investigates the dynamics of the complex family charade that defines the play's interpersonal relationships.9 As Spencer Golub recognizes, “the tenuous reality that [the Tyrones] have created and performed together” involves primarily “accept[ing] the morphine addict's performance of good health as reality,” an act that “is a matter not only of conditioning but of self-protection.”10 This approach focuses on how the Tyrones create and attempt to sustain the dangerous condition of their family life, locating tragedy in their ill-conceived construction of false happiness. While helpful in identifying the fraught conditions that sustain the action of the play, this approach does not do enough to identify the dynamics of the family's collapse. As Judith E. Barlow points out, O'Neill “implies that this particular bout with drugs is worse than previous ones…. Although Mary's readdiction begins as part of a repetitive cycle, the stress is on the uniqueness and even the finality of this day.”11 The long day of the play's focus is the final unraveling of the family, so a thorough investigation of their charade's importance to the play must focus on its demise.In drawing on the strengths of each of these critical approaches, I am interested in tracing how the contextual factors at work on Mary make her the linchpin of the tenuous family structure, and then in how she ultimately fails to support its shabby construction. Mary triggers the final collapse of the Tyrone family, but that is not to say that she is entirely to blame for this tragedy. Instead, Mary is a catalyst for the play's tragedy, the blame for which can be distributed among the entire family. The contextual factors that place Mary in a position of responsibility for her family's well-being range from her own psychological demons and Catholic guilt, to the more powerful influence of the Tyrone men's implicit demands for her to fulfill the traditional womanly role. “Like most of O'Neill's male characters,” argues Barlow, Mary's “husband and sons demand of her that triumvirate of virtues which Essie Miller and Nora Melody possess: nurturance, forgiveness, and renunciation of her dreams for theirs.”12 Barlow is the critic who recognizes most clearly the process by which the Tyrone men place their mother figure in a position of responsibility from which Mary then causes the family collapse. “Mary Tyrone is finally neither mother nor virgin,” she continues, “and in this lies much of the tragedy of the Tyrone family. The men demand that she be a mother in all senses of the word, but she cannot and will not fulfill that role.”13With Barlow, I am insisting that the core of this tragedy is Mary's response to the position in which her family places her, but I am arguing further that language drives this process. Mary responds to the demands of supporting her family with speech acts that she has no recourse to support, and this process is complicated by the Tyrone men allowing Mary's hollow performative language to construct and bolster false family happiness. In the end, Mary's ethical burden of language proves too much, and her attempt to absent herself from the ordinary social sphere of the play denies the family its support and sets off its collapse.The tragedy of the Tyrone family begins long before the play opens, but the tragedy of Long Day's Journey has a clearer beginning: the family's relying on Mary to sustain its falsely constructed happiness. The men realize that their charade depends upon Mary inhabiting the role of nurturing wife and mother, a role that includes sobriety; this dependence on Mary's well-being becomes clear from the start. As soon as she exits the first scene, Tyrone scolds Jamie for challenging Mary's conviction that Edmund is suffering a summer cold: “You're a fine lunkhead! Haven't you any sense? The one thing to avoid is saying anything that would get her more upset over Edmund” (729). While it is clear that he worries about his wife's nerves and their effect on her health, he later reveals the larger scope of his concern: “She's been so well in the two months since she came home. (His voice grows husky and trembles a little.) It's been heaven to me,” not simply because Mary has been feeling better, but because “this home has been a home again.” Jamie admits that he has “felt the same way” (734). The men's most specific demand of Mary is neither health nor nurturance, but to be a normalizing foundation upon which they may build their own personal and familial identities. Jamie drunkenly admits as much later to his younger brother, after Mary's relapse is beyond denial: “I suppose I can't forgive her—yet. It meant so much. I'd begin to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too” (818).All the men's expressions of concern for Mary are similarly coupled with selfish motives. They clearly want her to be healthy and happy, but they are more invested in how that health and happiness will benefit them. This selfishness makes Tyrone's parsimony a red herring for this tragedy. There is little doubt among Edmund, Jamie, and Mary that Tyrone contributed to his wife's addiction by treating her first with “that ignorant quack of a cheap hotel doctor” and then with the cut-rate Doctor Hardy (765). Edmund makes this charge most explicit in the fourth act: “I know damned well she's not to blame! And I know who is! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you'd spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was born, she'd never have known morphine existed! Instead, you put her in the hands of a hotel quack who wouldn't admit his ignorance and took the easiest way out” (802). While it may be true that Edmund is “repeating [his] mother's crazy accusations” (803)—for how else would he have any knowledge of the matter other than to have heard it from his mother or perhaps second-hand from Jamie?—it is certainly true that he is here voicing a conviction he shares with his brother and mother.Since this anger centers on how Tyrone contributes to his wife's addiction, his miserliness belongs in a category with Mary's Catholic guilt, the death of Eugene, the painful birth of Edmund, and Edmund's worsening illness as factors leading to the addiction. The tension of the play, however, comes not from the fact that Mary is an addict but rather from how she and the rest of the family manage that reality on this particular long day. Tyrone's parsimony is a convenient target for the family's anger because he embodies it before them, but that anger is fundamentally selfish. Mary and the boys ultimately resent Tyrone for contributing to the frailty of the person upon whom they all must rely for their happiness. This anger underscores the pattern of codependency among the family and the Tyrone men's desperate need for Mary to be their normalizing center.In the face of such desperation and daunting odds, Mary could simply refuse to act; critics who argue that she chooses morphine over engagement with her problems usually find this to be the case. But there is an important mediator between the men's implicit demands and Mary's relapse: her attempts to create and sustain happiness with performative language. Mary's utterances like “It is just a cold! Anyone can tell that!” perform in their very vocalization, ostensibly creating a condition of family normality and happiness (727). Mary attempts to convince her family that Edmund is not facing a serious health threat and that she is not concerned about her son to such an extent that might cause her to revert to her morphine addiction. These and similar speech acts achieving felicity would mean that the family happiness so coveted by the Tyrones is feasible within an ordinary reality. It does not take long for the Tyrone men to know better, but they are only too willing to play along, allowing Mary's language to bolster false family happiness. Mary deploys this strategy with less and less conviction throughout the play, and her morphine use increases as challenges to the apparent felicity of her performative language mount. Morphine use becomes a consequence of her poorly performed speech acts; it produces an effect she needs in order to be able to dedicate herself to the charade she is supporting.Over the course of the play, Mary directs such normalizing speech acts at three areas of tension: the family's father-son strife, Edmund's health, and her own struggles with addiction. All three directly threaten the construct of family happiness, and so Mary's efforts to assuage these tensions through language are specific attempts to support that construct. The issue of father-son conflict is a constant refrain for Mary through the first two acts: “Now, James, don't lose your temper” (727); “You mustn't mind Edmund, James. Remember he isn't well” (727); “Don't call your father the Old Man. You should have more respect” (739); “Stop sneering at your father! I won't have it! You ought to be proud you're his son!” (748); “Remember your father is getting old, Jamie. You really ought to show more consideration” (749); “You shouldn't treat him with such contempt all the time. He's not to blame” (762). In these lines, she seeks to soothe the tension among the Tyrone men and thereby preserve the idealized image of domestic tranquility. Tyrone is constantly ready to throw Jamie out of the house, and Edmund seems more closely allied with his brother than his father, so the tension among the Tyrone men threatens to destroy the stability and happiness of their home. Mary thus endeavors through language not simply to mend the bond between father and sons, but to attend to the family's collective well-being.In theory, Mary could resolve the Tyrone father-sons tension though language, but most would likely argue that the relationship is strained beyond repair. Her pronouncements about Edmund's health and her own well-being are different. Jamie is right, “The Kid is damned sick,” and no amount of denial is going to change that (727). What is worse, considering the importance of Mary to the Tyrone family construct, is that Mary is terribly worried about her son and has already begun to slide back into the fog of morphine addiction. Nonetheless, Mary persists in her attempts to preserve family stability with language, and the Tyrone men continue their attempts to preserve her agency for as long as they can. They seem to recognize her language's inability to cure Edmund or preserve her sobriety, but they are far more interested in the show. As long as they can pretend that she is sober and that her speech acts are felicitous, they can consider her their stable foundation, and so they do all they can to preserve her in the state that is most useful for them.Early in the play, the men fear that painful worries over Edmund's health will cause her addiction to flare, and so all their professions of concern for Mary's health must be understood as concern that she not relapse. A remarkable early exchange demonstrates this and many of the family's most problematic habits: MARY:Of course, there's nothing takes away your appetite like a bad summer cold.TYRONE:Yes, it's only natural. So don't let yourself get worried—MARY:(quickly) Oh, I'm not. I know he'll be all right in a few days if he takes care of himself. (as if she wanted to dismiss the subject but can't) But it does seem a shame he should have to be sick right now.TYRONE:Yes, it is bad luck. (He gives her a quick, worried look.) But you mustn't let it upset you, Mary. Remember, you've got to care of yourself, too.MARY:(quickly) I'm not upset. There's nothing to be upset about. What makes you think I'm upset?TYRONE:Why, nothing, except you've seemed a bit high-strung the past few days.MARY:(forcing a smile) I have? Nonsense, dear. It's your imagination. (721–22) Tyrone attempts a sort of “Mary maintenance” here. He has just finished praising her appearance and resilience, and now he works to distract her from concern for Edmund. For her part, Mary professes first that Edmund is not seriously ill; second, that she is not worried about her son; and third, that her health is fine. Regrettably, none of these speech acts are powerful enough to alter the reality which they challenge; they instead support the misnomer of family happiness, contributing to the mistaken communal belief that Mary is not dreadfully worried about Edmund's ill health and therefore not in danger of the relapse