In the forward to Long Day’s Journey into Night, Harold Bloom states that the play is considered by many critics to be Eugene O’Neill’s “masterpiece” not only for its honesty as a semi-autobiographical play, but because O’Neill captures the realistic story of an American family and presents their story in a new type of tragedy. In this essay, I want to examine the role of fog within this play not only as an atmospheric device but also as a symbol for the Tyrone family’s “blindness” and Mary’s addiction.
The use of fog as an atmospheric device not only gives a mysterious, dangerous mood but also emphasizes the depressing situation occurring in the foreground of the play. The way the fog’s presence increases as the play goes on, parallels Mary’s spiral into her relapse. The play begins in the morning around 8:30AM and the stage directions say that “sunshine comes through the windows at right” (12). This coincides with the hopeful mood James seems to have during Act 1; he believes that this time Mary might have kicked her addiction and Mary herself says “the fog is gone” (17), which even though is just her commenting on the weather, seems to have a double meaning in reference to the metaphorical “fog” she is under while high on morphine. However, towards the end of Act 1, Mary starts acting strangely, brought on by subtle accusations from Jamie that she hasn’t kicked her morphine habit, and on page 41 she speaks an ominous line: “I mean, take advantage of the sunshine before the fog comes back. Strangely, as if talking aloud to herself. Because I know it will.” This comes right before her argument with Edmund about going upstairs to take a “nap,” implying that she has not given up her drug habit and is most likely about to relapse. In Act 2, the stage directions say that “outside the day is still fine but increasingly sultry, with a faint haziness in the air which softens the glare of the sun” (53). This parallels Mary’s entrance on page 60 which reveals she is under the influence of some substance:
Mary enters from the front parlor. At first one notices no change except that she
appears to be less nervous, to be more as she was when we first saw her after
breakfast, but then one becomes aware that her eyes are brighter, and there is a
particular detachment in her voice and manner…
Mary appears to be “still fine” just as the day outside, but there is still the “faint haziness” that affects her speech and gestures; At multiple times throughout Scene 1 and Scene 2 of Act 2, Mary’s speech will begin in one one tone and then abruptly shift to another more detached, impersonal tone. In Act 3, it is around 6:30PM but is growing ever darker, “an early dusk due to the fog which has rolled in from the Sound and is like a white curtain drawn down outside the windows” (99) and this is also when Mary’s state of reality has become even more clouded by drugs, coming to a head in Act 4, when “outside the windows the wall of fog appears denser than ever. As the curtain rises, the foghorn is heard…” (127), in which Mary is completely detached from reality.
The fog not only helps emphasize Mary’s decent but it also provides a contrast to the awareness of the other characters. At the beginning of the play, James, Jamie, and Edmund try and shelter Mary, and each other, from the depths of their pain and resentment but by the end of the play, most of it is out in the open: Tyrone tries to explain himself to Edmund about why he is the way he is, eventually letting him choose his own sanitorium to attend, Jamie comes clean about his jealousy and hatred for Edmund and how it overshadows his love, and it becomes no longer possible to ignore Mary’s relapse as she fallen farther than she has yet. The “fog” has been lifted from James’, Jamie’s, and Edmund’s eyes, but Mary’s character is foggier than ever.
The fog to Mary also seems to represent a state of mind in which one can escape reality temporarily, in which the foghorn represents all that brings you out of that state of mind. For example, at the very beginning Act 3, Mary has already taken a large dose of morphine and seems to be numb to most of what Cathleen is saying, and she mentions the fog outside multiple times over the span of pages 100 - 101:
MARY: That foghorn! Isn’t it awful Cathleen? (100)
MARY: I don’t mind it tonight. Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t stand it any more. (100)
MARY: Dreamily. It wasn’t the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. (100)
MARY: It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. (100)
MARY: It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back. She smiles strangely. But it can’t tonight. (101)
Mary speaks of the fog in a metaphorical way, saying she prefers seeing the world through drug-influenced eyes. However, in all of the Acts before Act 4, Mary goes back and forth between a loose, detached state and pleading, scared voice, being able to be pulled back to the real world by the harsh realities the other characters are facing, most particularly Edmund’s sickness. There is a sinister implication in Act 4 by Edmund that he may be down the same path as his mother as he says on page 133 “The fog was where I needed to be” and how his walk near the sea was “as if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.” Edmund, unlike his father and his brother, recognizes his dependence on substances to help him escape reality, but he also knows that he is happiest away from home and by the sea, evident in the long poetic speech Edmund gives on pages 155 - 156, in which he says that being on the sea caused him to become “drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was free!” (156). And on page 150, Edmund makes it clear that he cannot live without some sort of distraction from reality when he admits he attempted suicide, saying “I was stone cold sober. That was the trouble. I’d stopped to think too long.” I think this line applies to all of the Tyrone family: James uses property investment and alcohol as a way to distract himself from his family’s need for money and support, Jamie seeks women at brothels more for a mother-figure to comfort him more than sex, Edmund was happiest in the middle of the ocean, away from human life and human struggles, but is guilt-tripped by his mother’s addiction that he stays home, and Mary is so full of guilt, about the death of Eugene, and the way her friend’s treated her after getting married, and leaving the convent and her father’s home to marry James, that the only thing capable of giving her escape is a powerful, mind-numbing drug. They all keep distracting themselves with intoxicating habits in order to ignore the hard facts that their family is a self-destructive system; they stay together, enabling each other through guilt trips and arguments because they are all too lonely and dependent to actually leave one another.
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