This paper examines Eugene O'Neill's deliberate use of alcohol as a layered symbol in Long Day's Journey Into Night, tracing how the play clusters drinking imagery around three distinct meanings of the word "romantic" — erotic, foolish, and sublime or death-dealing — drawn from Jamie Tyrone's own self-analysis. The paper situates Long Day's Journey alongside The Iceman Cometh, noting O'Neill's shared preoccupation with alcohol and self-deception across both works. It then moves through the play's specific moments — Jamie's confession, his description of Fat Violet, and Edmund's quotation of Baudelaire's prose poem "Enivrez-vous!" — to show how intoxication functions not merely as personal pathology but as an aesthetic and philosophical stance rooted in the Romantic literary tradition.
It is an irony of Eugene O'Neill's career that his large-scale expressionist dramas of the 1920s and 1930s — which earned Pulitzers for works like Strange Interlude and ultimately the Nobel Prize in Literature for O'Neill himself — seem to have fallen entirely out of the repertory. O'Neill is remembered chiefly for his least characteristic plays: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill's biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb note that not only do these plays share an obsessive central concern with alcohol, O'Neill also "set both in 1912" and to some extent Long Day's Journey "can be regarded as its sequel" (Gelb and Gelb 506).
The posthumous publication and staging of Long Day's Journey Into Night raised the question of why O'Neill apparently withheld the play during his lifetime. To some extent, the honesty of its depiction of alcoholism seems to have been too much for him to acknowledge publicly — corresponding precisely with the metaphoric use of alcohol in The Iceman Cometh as a means of avoiding the truth through "pipe dreams." In Iceman, the embittered ex-radical Larry, who serves as Greek chorus in O'Neill's saloon-room epic, summarizes the alcoholic's "pipe dreams" this way: "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. And that's enough philosophic wisdom to give you for one drink of rot-gut" (Iceman 9).
In other words, the play about alcoholism which O'Neill staged during his lifetime insists on the similarities between the "pipe dreams" of alcoholics and an expressionist version of what motivates ordinary people. In Long Day's Journey, though, alcohol takes on a different meaning — not as a motivation for ordinary people, but as a pathology specific to art. Over the course of the day which provides the play with its brooding title, the Tyrone family interacts with alcohol — starting, seemingly, at breakfast — and alcohol is always present and visible onstage, like a baleful additional character within the confines of O'Neill's small-cast chamber drama.
The image of alcohol is deliberately used to provoke a set of specific associations that cluster around the word Jamie uses to describe his drinking: "romantic." This paper traces how O'Neill clusters the imagery and use of alcohol in the play around three different ideas of the "romantic" — in the sense of erotic, foolish, and sublime or death-dealing (in its manifestation as the specific aesthetic of the Romantic movement). The conclusion addresses alcohol's role within the play's larger treatment of addictive substances generally, and the way in which alcohol is O'Neill's ultimate clue to the play's meaning, through its role in the dramatic climax of the play's closing moments.
The set of associations adhering to alcohol in Long Day's Journey Into Night that this paper identifies is one that may be loosely termed "Romantic." This literary and artistic term is not invoked arbitrarily — it is the word used in the play by Jamie Tyrone, in the culminating analysis he gives his brother Edmund when examining their own relationship. Jamie claims that he has always been an obstacle in his brother's life, because of an element in his own psychology that he defines thus:
". . . Or part of me did. A big part. That part that's been dead so long. That hates life. My putting you wise so you'd learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it's a fake. Made my mistakes look good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of work as a sucker's game. Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet!" (159)
When Jamie says that his own deeply ingrained instinct for perversity not only enabled him to be a negative influence on his sibling but also "made getting drunk romantic" — out of sheer perversity, because getting drunk is assumed not to be romantic — he is also describing, of course, the way in which alcohol itself alters the drinker's perception. The very transformation Jamie attributes to his own corrupting influence is the transformation that intoxication performs.
"Alcohol transforms the sordid into the romantic for Jamie"
"Edmund quotes Baudelaire on perpetual intoxication"
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