Long Day's Journey Into Night: Haunted by the Foghorn

The third act of LDJN finally gave me a bit of clarity after two long acts of one unknown after the other. There's definitely a pattern in the events of the play as bad memories from the past are gradually raked up, causing cycles of tension, confession, guilt, forgiveness, and many other feelings. I want to specifically discuss O'Neill's description of the characters as "the four haunted Tyrones" along with the motif of the foghorn in the play. I think both of these ideas are interrelated because they revolve around the characters' repression of the past and unwillingness to confront past issues. They are all essentially haunted by the past due to unresolved issues that occurred in the past. I noticed that Mary frequently talks about her convent days where she was youthful with vitality and beauty. Whenever she talks about the past, her eyes light up and she suddenly transforms to her former youthful self. However, not everything in the past was beautiful and dreamy. Mary constantly reminds James of how she's never had a real home and that they had one-night stands, stayed in dirty hotel rooms, which she claims is not a fit environment for her Jamie and Edmund to be raised in. A particular haunting memory she brings up is how sickly she was when carrying Edmund and that she regrets having another baby after the death of her previous son. These memories don't only haunt Mary, they are family issues that involve everyone else, especially Edmund because he feels as if he's responsible for his mother's current state of insanity and loneliness.

Not only is she haunted by the past, Mary's mention of the foghorn shows her unwillingness to live in the present: "It's the foghorn I hate, it won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back." (101) Since the foghorn is a reminder of her current state and essentially a wake-up call, the fog can be seen as her drugged state when under the influence of morphine--which is described as being detached from reality. I think act three serves to show Mary's perspective of her struggle with the past and the struggle to recover from her morphine addiction. She claims that the fog protects her from facing reality because  "[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 anymore." (100).  Mary's desire to escape from reality worries her family and they're all sad to lose the "real" Mary. However, they are also to blame for not giving Mary proper treatment, especially James who didn't take her morphine addiction seriously enough and insisted to give her a second-rate treatment.