"Suitable Feminine Companionship": On Mamie Burns and Fat Violet in Long Day's Journey Into Night

In act 4 of Long Day's Journey Into Night, Jamie tells Edmund a sentimental story of the evening he has just spent with a prostitute, Fat Violet, in the establishment of Mamie Burns. Burns has previously been identified as based on Addie Burns, a madam in the redlight district of New London, Connecticut. Newspaper reports from the period make it clear that Burns was in prison for statutory rape in 1912, when the play is set, and they also lead to the identification of Viney Malady as the original Fat Violet. The idea of the abettor of rape being convicted as the rapist opens a new perspective on what Carlotta Monterey O'Neill and O'Neill's biography have told us about his actual brother's complicity in his traumatic sexual initiation at an early age. This material opens new perspective on O'Neill's Strange Interlude, Exorcism, and "The Ballad[e] of Old Girls."