O'Neill Flashcards

?
When was Eugene O'Neill born?
New York City in 1888
1 of 46
When did O'Neill decide to become a writer?
When in a sanatorium for tuberculosis
2 of 46
Why was Long Day's Journey Into Night not staged until after O'Neill's death?
Autobiographical nature
3 of 46
What does Edmund say about stammering in Long Day's Journey into Night?
"I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do... it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people."
4 of 46
What did O'Neill say about most modern plays?
"Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am interested only in the relation between man and God."
5 of 46
What did O'Neill say about the nature of life?
"Life is struggle, often, if not usually, unsuccessful struggle; for most of us have something within us which prevents us from accomplishing what we dream and desire"
6 of 46
What does Mary in Long Day's Journey Into Night say about life?
"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realise it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self for ever
7 of 46
What did Eric Bentley say in 'Trying to Like O'Neill (1952)' about The Iceman Cometh?
"Without the tyrannically, mechanically rigid scenes, there is an excessive amount of freedom."
8 of 46
What does O'Neill say in Memoranda on Masks?
"One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself"
9 of 46
What is a crucial scene in Long Day's Journey into Night?
Jamie's confession to Edmund in Act 4
10 of 46
What does Jamie's confession to Edmund in Act 4 give?
Grasp of internal divisions within characters, divisions which govern their behaviour towards others
11 of 46
What is a major theme shown in Jamie's confession to Edmund in Act 4?
'The past is the present' is a major theme; the way the characters are shaped by the past is powerfully, even grimly, dramatised
12 of 46
What is significant about the use of repetition in Jamie's confession scene?
Coming again and again at the same emotional issue, here the mixture of love and hate, the sense of uncovering what has always been there - Jamie's ambivalent feelings towards Edmun
13 of 46
What is the challenge offered to actors by Jamie's confession to Edmund in Act 4?
Called upon to make plausible a constant recall from one feeling to another
14 of 46
What did O'Neill say about raw emotion?
"Raw emotion produces the best and worst in people"
15 of 46
What helps produce the raw emotion in Long Day's Journey Into Night?
Bareness in a play of few props (though highly significant) - whisky bottle, wedding dress, lights, darkness
16 of 46
What is significant about the word confession in Long Day's Journey into Night?
Right for this Irish-American Catholic family, however lapsed, characters thwarted longing to forgive and be forgiven
17 of 46
What did Sidney Lumet, director of the 1962 film of Long Day's Journey into Night, say?
"I don't feel you can break this play out in the conventional movie sense... This play will be cinematic because of the depth with which O'Neill probes his characters... I wanted literally to take a "long day's journey into night"
18 of 46
What does Judith E. Barlow say on Mary?
"Her repeated recitations of Tyrone's domestic crimes.... are evidence that to forgive yet never forget is not to forgive at all"
19 of 46
Jamie pronounces his own symbolic death, "Think of me as dead - tell people, 'I had a brother, but he's dead'. Significance according to Michael Hinden?
"Jamie's warning is one of the most costly gestures in the play, for by cutting Edmund free, he banishes himself from the one person in the world who still accepts him"
20 of 46
How does Hinden see the lives of James and Mary?
Identical course - favourite and a distant parent, parent each idolized was of opposite sex, frustrated in dreams of careers. "Mary's early enthusiasm for the piano matches Tyrone's abiding love for Shakespeare"
21 of 46
How does Kenneth Tynan in Casebook describe the family cycle?
'The family goes round and round in that worst of domestic rituals, the Blame Game... The wheel, coming full circle, runs over all of them"
22 of 46
What does Frederic I. Carpenter say about Edmund's tragedy?
'[Edmund's] tragedy is not that of defeat, but of a suffering which leads to illumination"
23 of 46
What did O'Neill say privately about the use of 'cometh'?
Meant a combination of the poetic and biblical 'Death comth' and the old bawdy stoyr of the man who calls upstairs 'Has the iceman come yet?' and his wife calls upstairs ' No, but he's breathin' hard"
24 of 46
How is the title interesting according to one commentator?
It is really Death which Hickey's wife has taken to her when she marries Hickey, her insistence that he can change and not get drunk and sleep with whores is making Death breathe hard on her breast as he approaches, about 'to come' in vernacular sens
25 of 46
Tyrone and Jamie argue over getting a better doctor for Edmund in Act 1. What does Tyrone say?
"That's a lie! And your sneers against Doctor Hardy are lies! He doesn't put on frills, or have an office in a fashionable location, or drive around in an expensive automobile. That's what you pay for with those other... fellows, not their skill"
26 of 46
What does Michael Manheim describe as serving as the backdrop to the play?
"The melodrama and the melodramatic effects... serve as the backdrop of the play - part of the set in a sense - but the foreground consists of the life of these figures as we see them relating to one another under the play's testing circumstances"
27 of 46
What does Tyrone say about his son becoming an actor in Act I?
"If you'd get ambition in your head instead of folly! You're young yet. You could still make your mark. You had the talent to become a fine actor! You have it still. You're my son -!
28 of 46
What does Tyrone say in Act 4 about his dreams?
"I didn't want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I'd become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn't want me in anything else."
29 of 46
What does Edmund say in act four about being a man?
"It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home... who must always be a little in love with death!
30 of 46
How can Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh be seen throughout the play?
Critical commentator, the old 'Foolosopher' who functioned like the Fool in Shakespearean comedy
31 of 46
What happens to Larry Slade?
Emerges the tragic character
32 of 46
What does O'Neill say that can be seen to tract both the mood of the play and the development of Larry Slade as a character?
"the comedy breaks up and the tragedy comes on"
33 of 46
What does Manheim say about Hickey?
The "lord of misrule" has become tragic hero
34 of 46
What does John H. Ralegh think about Hickey's message?
"In so far as Hickey's 'message' is understandable or realisable, it is wholly negative and destructive, despite its admonition to face the truth"
35 of 46
What linkages can be found?
Between the plays of O'Neill and the plays of Miller
36 of 46
What can O'Neill be seen as using to provide insights into the human condition?
Close space within the plays, inspired by European dramatists such as Ibsen
37 of 46
When Hickey talks of 'freeing' his wife from the pipe ream of trying to free him from alcoholism what does this do to Parritt?
Brings him to suicidal carthesis; he betrayed his mother and thought doing ti to save his pipe dream but at climax realises did it because he hated her
38 of 46
Why did Hickey kill his wife?
1) Out of love to spare her 2) As his sudden misogynistic outburst suggests
39 of 46
Quote from Mary in Long Day's Journey into Night that links into vision
"None of us can help the things life has done to us... until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self for ever"
40 of 46
What does Aristotle say about tragedy and comedy?
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life
41 of 46
What does O'Neil say about the significance of the characters in The Iceman Cometh?
"a play where at the end you feel you know the souls of the seventeen men and women who appear - and the women who don't appear - as well as if you'd read a play about each of them"
42 of 46
What does Stephen R. Grecco (1974) suggest about the dramatic form of The Iceman Cometh?
Designed first permitting audience to become 'high' and later "guides them toward a recognition, a sobering learning experience"
43 of 46
What does David Murray say about Larry?
Lives in contradiction. "While his grandstand Foolosopher pose can perhaps be described as a pipe dream, it is not an effort to flee from ambiguity or complexity."
44 of 46
What does Mary illustrate?
How difficult it is for women to break free of the expectation of patriarchal society
45 of 46
What is ironic about Mary's name?
Face of her wish to become a nun. Unlike Virgin Mary, the birth of her sons was not a miracle and simply demonstrates her failure to achieve her dream
46 of 46

Other cards in this set

Card 2

Front

When did O'Neill decide to become a writer?

Back

When in a sanatorium for tuberculosis

Card 3

Front

Why was Long Day's Journey Into Night not staged until after O'Neill's death?

Back

Preview of the front of card 3

Card 4

Front

What does Edmund say about stammering in Long Day's Journey into Night?

Back

Preview of the front of card 4

Card 5

Front

What did O'Neill say about most modern plays?

Back

Preview of the front of card 5
View more cards

Comments

No comments have yet been made

Similar English Literature resources:

See all English Literature resources »See all Literature resources »