The Road To Ruin: The Beginning Of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey

Abstract

IN HER RECENT, excellent study Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension. (Rutgers University Press, 1958), Miss Doris Falk has indicated the recurrence of psychological motifs throughout the works of the greatest of America's playwrights. It is hoped that further publication will fully analyze the interwoven biographical content which culminates in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Yet Miss Falk, perhaps taking seriously O'Neill's offhand classification of his one "comedy" as a sentimental interim, has dismissed Ah, Wilderness! as falling outside both tragic tension and biography. Examination of this play, originally labelled a play of reminiscence, alongside the crushing Long Day's Journey, however, abrogates such dismissal and refocusses the "comedy" as a "play of old sorrow." Despite the pitfalls which biographical interpretation sets up, this paper will show that Ah, Wilderness! is unquestionably a play of biographical import depicting that time of adolescent innocence which all men pass through just before they are rudely made aware that life can be a bitter experience, that their heroes are not so untarnished as they seemed in their youth, and that a long journey down a road to ruin awaits some before tears and blood exculpate their dead.