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Long Day's Journey Into Night Family Analysis

1758 Words8 Pages

Kamila Słowikowska

The Family as Depicted in Eugene O 'Neill 's Long Day 's Journey into Night and Tennessee William 's The Glass Menagerie

One of the most popular theme in the modern American drama is the family. Thaddeus Wakefieled called it "the central subject of American Drama"i. The family functions as the basic social unit in the society. It has a great influence on every individual as it shapes one 's perception of the world. Therefore, this topic is universal and common in different literary forms. However, what considerably distinguish the American drama is the personal approach towards the family and its dysfunctions. The greatest examples of such an approach provide Eugene O 'Neill 's Long Day 's Journey into Night and Tennessee William 's The Glass Menagerie. Long Day 's Journey into Night is considered a masterpiece of the American drama. It is also regarded as O 'Neill 's magnum opus. The author was the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and "the first American …show more content…

As Brenda Murphy notes, "each of the characters in The Glass Menagerie is entrapped in some way and each has found some means of escape"xiv. Amanda retreats into the memories from the past, Tom goes to watch movies and loses himself in alcohol and Laura withdraws to her private world symbolized by a glass menagerie. Laura 's favorite figure from the collection – a glass unicorn – reflects her uniqueness and fragility. At the same time an unicorn can stand for the symbol of beautiful illusions. In this sense "unicorn stands for Whingfields ' combined dreams of escape" and shattering of this glass figure "heralds the collapse of those dreamsxv". Therefore, the play shows the impossibility of the true escape. In the closing monologue Tom explains that like his father before, he decided to abandon his family but after many years he is still haunted by the memories of

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