Long Day's Journey Into Night Memory and The Past

Yelling at Jamie here, James criticizes his practice of ignoring anything that's inconvenient, and struggling only when necessary. Jamie tires of arguments quickly, and would prefer to have everyone forget their gripes for a while. Still, it's important to note that Jamie's apathy really only applies actively to his own life – with regard to Edmund and Mary, he wants to face their sickness and addiction, respectively.

As we mention in the quotes for the "Suffering" theme, Mary is incapable of taking her own advice here. Not only can she not let things go, she constantly obsesses over what is passed – though she keeps instructing her family members to do what she can't and forget. Her inability to forget the past is a driving force behind the decline of Mary's character.

Right after Mary finishes reminding James how all her friends abandoned her when she married an actor, James reminds her of the time she ran out of morphine and tried to throw herself off the dock. This is too much for Mary, and she begs James not just to keep the thought to himself, but also not to remember it in the first place. Mary keeps insisting that no one can forget the scars life has given them, but in truth, she wants all bad things to be forgotten, especially if they're bad things she's done.

Morphine keeps working as a kind of time machine for Mary, a trope that reaches its peak in the play's conclusion. Her method of forgetting about her present pains isn't some sort of out-of-body experience, like Edmund's sailing epiphanies. Instead, she floats off regularly in substance-induced trances to simpler times, before she left her convent and married James.

Here we have the clearest indication that Mary is attempting to escape from her present reality through morphine. The foghorn here can work as a symbol, just like Mary's hands, Edmund's sickness, or even conversations with James – all of these things remind Mary of all the suffering in her life, and morphine lets her drift back in time and forget about her worries.

This is an unusual moment for James, who doesn't usually ask that the past be forgotten – though it makes sense considering what a jerk he was during their honeymoon. Even more interesting, though, is Mary's suggestion that she remembers everything bad James does, but always forgives them. Is this really true though? It seems to us that perhaps Mary can explain James's behavior, but she never really stops feeling resentful toward him, does she? Unless she's in her most abstract "nobody can change anything" philosophical mode, it seems like she does attribute guilt to him.

We always knew that Mary's hostility toward the family has been centered around her miserable past, and we knew that James's cheapness is also a holdover from his childhood. Here, we learn for the first time that the source of James's obsessive drive to make something of his sons also arises from his personal history, because he feels that he missed his chance to be someone great instead of just someone rich.

This is a poignant moment – James can't even recognize that his wife is carrying her wedding dress in her arm. Even if he can't remember the dress itself, how can he not know what a long, white, satin dress would be for? It's as if the idea of their wedding has completely faded from his memory.

We've already spent a lot of time wondering what Mary might have lost (see her "Character Analysis," for instance), but whatever it is, it's something representative of days gone by. The whole play, Mary's been trying to wipe away the memory of the past thirty-six years, but whatever she's looking for is something that exists only in her mind. This gives Mary an awkward relationship with her own memory – she wants to erase a part of it, but another part is the most valuable thing she has in the world.

We discuss this quite a bit in "What's Up with the Epigraph?" but it deserves a place here too, since we can't overstate the importance of memory and the past to this play. It's interesting that the play itself is based on O'Neill's own memories. (E.2)