O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey: Three Reasons the Mother’s Multiple Personality is Missed by Readers, Theatregoers, and Literary Critics

First, there is the red herring of her drug abuse. The fact is, drugs can only mimic isolated components of multiple personality, such as amnesia (alcohol blackouts), changes in behavior (failure to control violent, sexual, or other impulses), and changes in mood (cheerfulness or sadness). Drugs cannot account for the kind of complex changes, back and forth—in sense of identity, memory, behavior, and orientation to past or present—that were depicted in Long Day’s Journey, as quoted in my last post.

Second, the mother’s alternate personalities did not identify themselves with different names. But the obvious reason is that nobody ever asked them who they are and what their name is.

Third, the mother’s behavior was so odd and peculiar that she may have appeared, at least to the intellect, as just plain crazy. But if she were really crazy—psychotic, delusional—then the end of the play, when she comes in carrying her wedding dress, would have struck the audience, and the family, as pitiful and bizarre, not poignant and endearing, as it does.

Unlike people with psychosis, people with multiple personality are emotionally engaging and involving. If O’Neill’s mother was depicted as truly crazy, the audience would feel that the author, especially in that last scene, was holding his crazy mother up to ridicule, and I don’t think the play would have won a Pulitzer and be considered O’Neill’s best.