The Workings of the Domesticated Gothic on the Family Dynamics in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is undoubtedly is a tragedy, it leaves the audience with a sense of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing of powerful events, and it depicts the fall of something that was once great. The play focuses on the Tyrone family, whose once-close family has deteriorated over the years, for a number of reasons: Mary's drug addiction, Tyrone Jamie, and Edmund's alcoholism, Tyrone's stinginess, the boys' lax attitude toward work and money, and a variety of other factors. Since the American family is comprised of identifiable character types such as the fallen father, the alienated mother, and the haunted son in a gothic sense, the plot of Long Day’s Journey into Night focuses on a dysfunctional family trying to come to grips with its ambivalent emotions in the face of serious familial problems, including drug addiction, moral degradation, deep-rooted fear and guilt, and life-threatening illness. This paper aims to investigate how this play utilizes the elements of gothic genre within domestic framework and tries to elaborate these gothic elements in this modern play in order to find out the function it has in the domesticity of the American family dynamics in the play. It is observable in O’Neill’s play that a Gothic portrait of the American family borrows dramatic techniques from the Gothic literary tradition in order to criticize traditional American myths about the family including the belief that a type of social harmony will result if each family member adheres strictly to his or her prescribed role within the family.

کلیدواژه ها:

Gothic ، Family