"Only the Past When You Were Happy Is Real": Feminine and Masculine Mourning in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night

The present article conveys a psychoanalytic Freudian and Lacanian examination of the feminine and masculine mourning in Eugene O'Neill's 1940 modern tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night. I will show that the work of mourning in this play is both feminine and masculine, but with a particular emphasis on the feminine mourning and, secondly, on the autobiographical aspect of the Tyrone/ O'Neill family. Whereas for the feminine character Mary Tyrone the darkness of her psyche appears within the sickness of the body and her mourning is repeated in a history of histerisation, Edmund Tyrone, the playwright's alter ego and a seagull figure in the modern theatre, longs for death and he mourns nothing else but his own self.