3.The American Dream

      The historical American dream is the promise of a land of freedom with opportunity and equality for all. It flowered in America by the efforts of Benjiam Franklin, who was its outstanding example in this “land of opportunity”. Enterprise, courage, and hard work were the key to success.

But since the civil war, and particularly since 1900, the American Dream has become distorted to the dream of business success, and success is measured by the amount of money one can obtain. Instead of the values of hard work and courage, salesmanship came into being. As a product of a producer-consumer society, salesmanship implies a certain element of fraud, the ability to sell a commodity regardless of its intrinsic uselessness.

    This myth of success, deep-seated in the American consciousness, provides a motif for American literature. But it often becomes a anti-myth or the story of the collapse of the American dream.

 

4. Eugene O'Neill and Long Day's Journey Into Night

         Eugene O'Neill was the father of American drama and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced in 1920, Broadway theatre, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce. O'Neill saw the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragedies--a drama that could rise to the emotional heights of Shakespeare. For more than 20 years, both with such masterpieces as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other serious dramatists, O'Neill set the pace for the blossoming of the Broadway theatre.

       Long Day's Journey Into Night is deeply autobiographical. O'Neill, like Edmund, was the child of a Broadway actor. The O'Neills were Irish-American, as are the Tyrones. Catholicism looms large in both families, with a religious father appalled by his sons' apparent rejection of the Church. O'Neill's father was an alcoholic, and like James Tyrone, he gave up a promising career as a Shakespearean actor for a part in a commercial but artistically worthless play called Monte Cristo. In the play, Tyrone speaks of this commercial success but never names it. O'Neill's mother in real-life was a morphine addict, and like Mary, became one after the birth of her youngest child. Jamie is also modeled after O'Neill's real-life brother, a dissolute alcoholic whoremonger who failed miserably at everything he put his hand to. And Eugene had an older brother named Edmund who died as a baby; in the play, the dead middle son is named Eugene. Like Edmund, Eugene O'Neill sailed for years, taking odd jobs. And O'Neill also had fragile health; he was forced to rest for six months in a sanatorium so that he could be treated for tuberculosis, which in those days was a very dangerous disease.

      A play of such a private nature would have been too painful to produce during O'Neill's life. The play was first performed in 1956, three years after O'Neill's death. It won a Pulitzer Prize and has often been hailed as O'Neill's greatest play. Certainly, the play is invaluable for scholars seeking to understand O'Neill's work; Long Day's Journey Into Night reveals the most formative forces of O'Neill's life, as well as the values and virtues he valued most. The play also represents an established artist making peace with his troubled past, forgiving and understanding his family and himself.