Bohemians on the Bookcase: Quotations in Long Day's Journey into Night and Ah, Wilderness!

Abstract

The literary allusions in act 4 of Long Day’s Journey Into Night have worried producers and commentators alike. Often pared down on stage to cut the play’s running time, they are heard as redundant, unnecessary, even as a substitute on O’Neill’s part for the hard work of writing expressive dialogue. George Steiner deplores the quotations in Long Day’s Journey, suggesting that their brilliance “burns a hole” in the fabric of the play and shows up O’Neill’s deficient writing. In response to Steiner, Laurin Porter has argued persuasively for the economy and effectiveness of these quotations. She goes through all the musical and literary allusions in the late plays, showing how they reinforce character and theme, move the plot, and create counterpoints of feeling, atmosphere, and thought. Indeed, she argues, the allusions are deeply and significantly embedded in the plays.1 In this article I would like to suggest that they serve another purpose as well. The quotations from what James Tyrone, speaking to Edmund, calls “That damned library of yours!” evoke the darkest, most radical thought of the previous century, the late-romantic nineteenth century that the characters in O’Neill’s play, set in 1912, are trying to survive without knowing how.2 The quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, Wilde, and Dowson suggest in their pessimism an impasse reached by the end of the romantic century, an impasse of identity. The characters in Long Day’s Journey, who have inherited their identities from the previous century, no longer know who they are. Ah, Wilderness! contains quotations also, from the same or similar nineteenth-century authors, but they are not so troubling because there are fewer of them, they are briefer, and their purpose is clear and less