The Importance of Family in Ldjin and the Glass Menagerie

The importance of family has been an integral part in the American Dream. Drama has focused on such family conflicts such as drug addiction, marital problems, and coming to terms with past events. The authors' diction and the mood of each particular piece of work accentuate these conflicts. The unique combination of familial conflict, language, and mood has produced great pieces of literature such as Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. These plays have one central issue and that is family conflict. In O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night the main crisis in the family is Mary's morphine addiction and the Tyrone family's denial of that addiction while Williams's The Glass Menagerie focuses on Amanda Wingfield's unwillingness to let go of the past. Each play focuses on a different crisis that the families must endure, but rather than In O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night the Tyrone family is dealing with the morphine addiction of Mary Tyrone. O'Neill's diction creates a mood of denial that mirrors the family's refusal to see Mary's relapse into drug use. No one in the family is able to fully admit to Mary's problem until they are confronted with physical changes in Mary that are undeniable. The family's tendency to deny Mary's problem leads to another crisis that is prevalent throughout the play: blame. The Tyrone's deal with their deficiencies by blaming each other for what went wrong with them. Mary even blames her children for the loss of her youth when she says, "It wasn't until after Edmund was born that I had a single grey hair. Then it began to turn white." (1311). O'Neill uses this ever-present blame to set off the family's denial of their problems. As long as the Tyrones can continue to preoccupy themselves by blaming each other, then they do not have to admit to the looming crises at hand. This type of denial pushes the family farther into their problems, and it soon becomes