MARY TYRONE (KEY CHARACTERISTICS) Flashcards
(14 cards)
Role in the play?
Emotional epi-centre: her addictions and delusions are the emotional epi-center of the play.
Relapses & dysfunction: Her relapses are timed with moments of family tensions (reinforces her role as a barometer of familail dysfunction)
Connection with other characters? –James Tyrone Sr
Marriage is steeped in resentment, she blames him for her addiction due to his parsimony (cheap doctors/ hotels).
Connection with Jamie Tyrone (elder son_
She sees Jamie as a degenerate, corrupting Edmund. She blames him for exposing Edmund to sickness.
Edmund Tyrone (Younger son)
Her favourite child; their relationship is defined by enmeshment and infantilisation. She sees him for his innocence and vulnerability and he seeks her love (despite seeing through her)
Personal context
Former convent girl (almost becomes a nun or concert pianist-dreams crushed by marriage).
Addiction: Became addicted to morphine due to a careless doctor, after Edmund’s birth
Loss of idenity- as a women (she is neither aristist or spirtual just a trapped wife and grieving mother)
Archetypes does Mary fit into?
The Devouring Mother (Psychoanalytic): Overbearing and emotionally supphocating and dependent.
The Tragic Heroine: Victim of patriarchal neglect and medical malpractice; her descent is framed as inevitable (like Blanche DeBois)
The Ghost/ Haunting woman/ Lost matriarch) Mary moves like a ghost through the fog, lost in the past — she haunts the present instead of inhabiting it.
Key context- Mary
Medical malpractice: Set in 1912 when morphine addiction among women was poorly understood and stigmatized.
Domestic obligations: women were expected to supress their ambitions (Marys artistic and religious aspiration are sacrificed for marriage.
Auto-biographical narrative: Based on O’Neill’s real mother, who suffered morphine addiction
Psychoanalytical readings– devouring mother
Emotionally supphocating and depenendent–her possessiveness infantilises Edmund and stifles him.
Psychoanalysis–repression and denial
Morphine becomes a defence mechanism — a literal escape into the unconscious.
Psychonalysis- Oedipal undercurrents
: Edmund’s closeness to Mary, and Jamie’s bitterness, hint at buried oedipal tensions.
Psychoanalysis- Jugian archetypes
She oscillates between virgin (idealised past) and crone (resentful addict).
This duality aligns with Jungian archetypes of the feminine shadow.
Modern Greek tragedy & Mary
Fated- Addiction and relapse is fated.
Tragic heroine- harmatia (addiction & self-delusion)
Chorus- her final monlogue has a choric, lyrical quality–she becomes a ghostlike seer trapped in a memory
Performance & idenity
She desires to perform and cling to her old identity and does so via performance and spectacle.
Her addiction induces a dream-like, theatrical state where she peforms roles in order to avoid pain.
