"Like ... so many small theatres": The Panoptic and the Theatric in Long Day's Journey into Night

"Like ... so many small theatres": The Panoptic and the Theatric in Long Day's Journey into NightI MICHAEL SELMON Complaining about his younger son in 1945, Eugene O'Neill claimed that Shane lacked loyalty. "My family's quarrels and tragedies were within," the playwright wrote his elder son and namesake. "To the outer world we maintained an indomitably united front and lied and lied for each other.'" Even at that time this protest against displaying personal troubles must have sounded slightly hollow, for both father and son knew how the still-unpublished Long Day's Journey into Night complicated a strict demarcation of public and private . To be sure, in the nearly five years since O'Neill had completed his drama's first draft, only a select few had read the play, and its sole performance had come one evening when the playwright, "obviously struggling to retain control of his emotions," recited the drama's closing lines to two friends.3 Still, the theater press already had spread word of the drama, and soon O'Neill himself would finalize a contract for its publication. In the years which followed, "this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood" would generate far more public scrutiny than any misdeed of Shane's.4 Long Day's Journey of course invoked other gazes as well. Looks dominate its onstage action, be it in broad character traits like the way "the actor shows in all [Tyrone' s] unconscious habits of ... movement and gesture" (13), in recurrent mannerisms like Mary's search for her eyeglasses and self-consciousness about her hair (20), or in specific details like Jamie's concern about appearances while gardening (43). The most relentless of these onstage gazes is the men's constant scrutiny of Mary, their ongoing search for signs of a relapse with morphine. Indeed, the pressure exerted by this scrutiny - the way that, to quote Jamie, the observation "makes it hell for Mama! She watches us watching her" (38) - is so central to the play that Journey has been described as "a structure of watchers-being-watched."5 . This essay explores the interaction of gazes in the play. It investigates the tension generated when the domestic surveillance in Long Day's Journey Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 526 The Panoptic and the Theatric 527 itself becomes an object of audience scrutiny. In particular, the paper considers the way that the loneliness felt by Mary and others under the onstage gaze replicates an isolation felt offstage as well, the way that Journey's domestic surveillance exemplifies the "panoptic" gaze which Michel Foucault has claimed pervades the modern world6 Yet, as Journey progresses, its enactment of surveillance paradoxically begins to countermand panoptic force, permitting Mary a reintegration with others which her domestic history denies. This reintegration helps explain both why O'Neill's closing characterization of Mary proves so compelling and why, despite the play's gloom, so many audience members have felt a sense of transcendence at Jour1zey's end. Since the idea of transcendence is not normally conjoined with Foucault's analysis of power, a discussion of the term seems appropriate. Transcendence has become, as a recent series of articles by Michael Manheim reminds us, a crucial term in the study of the late O'Neill plays.7 The idea first appeared in discussions of genre. Critics have long argued that Journey's success stems from O'Neill's transcendence of melodrama in the play, agreeing with John Henry Raleigh's 1964 claim that while "O'Neill was at his worst when closest to The Count of Monte Cristo," his late plays were characterized by "finely developed characters," "plausible dialogue," and "unmelodramatic plots."S More recendy. many critics have found a second sort of transcendence in Journey. Here, Judith E. Barlow articulates a typical position, claiming that while O'Neill's "depiction of women only rarely strays from the narrow limits of the conventional," with Mary Tyrone he "goes beyond his other creations" to produce a "complex and theatrically powerful stage woman."9 There is at least one obvious 1ink between these two areas of transcendence, for the conventions of melodrama were grounded in gender.10 Foucault's...