Comparing Mary Tyrone to Blanche DuBois

Mary Tyrone of Eugene O'Neill's "A Long Day's Journey Into Night" is a vastly different woman than Blanche DuBois of Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire." However, they both rely on mind altering substances in order to escape their reality and live, for awhile, in their dreams of happier days. Both women are also fictional sketches of important women relatives in the lives of the authors.

Mary, when she gets so lost in the morphine, can relive her happy childhood days at the convent. She had wanted to spend her whole life there and to be a nun, until she met and fell in love with James Tyrone, the famous actor. But, her life was not what she would have imagined it to be with Tyrone. She lived secluded in hotel to hotel with her troubled family instead of in familial bliss as she would have hoped. When she's lost in being high on morphine, she can forget, for awhile, her troubled existence (for while she blames Tyrone and her sons, somewhat). Using morphine allows Mary to go back in time in her mind, yet she cannot go long in that altered state without pieces of her past creeping in to torment her--such as her suspicion that her eldest son, Jaime, was responsible for the death of her baby, Eugene.

Blanche drinks heavily to forget about losing the family plantation, Belle Reve, due to the countless number of deaths she had to handle on her own and the funerals she had to pay for. As a young wife she endured not only finding out that her charming young husband was gay, but his immediate suicide after her discovery of that fact. She would always feel responsible, as he shot himself after she proclaimed, in public at a dance, that he disgusted her. She went to work as a schoolteacher and was let go due to her promiscuity with a young male student. Blanche had a very shady past to hide from herself and from others - especially in her quest to find a husband to rescue her from her current state. Blanche couldn't come to grips with her past, her aging, and her inability to find somewhere to hide--a place where she could start anew without her past following and haunting her.

Both women naturally try to hide their addiction problems from their family, but neither are very good at it. In both plays, characters add water to a whiskey bottle to hide the fact that they've been drinking - in Streetcar its Blanche, of course, and in Journey it's the boys, hiding the drinking from their father. Their heavy drinking is due, in part, with trying to deal with what their mother is doing upstairs in the guest bedroom. Mary Tyrone isn't the only one in her family guilty of trying to deceive others. But of course, no one is successfully hiding anything from anyone in either play.

As the plays progress, Mary and Blanche cease to care as much about who they're fooling. Mary spends a great deal of her night using her morphine, after taking her hired girl to the pharmacy to fill a prescription. She spends her evening in the guest room, which is customary during her use of her drug, and then comes in the room among her family. Blanche continues to drink more and more heavily until eventually she goes completely mad and is taken away to an asylum.

Another similarity between the two women are the autobiographical elements from the author's own lives that they bring to the stage. Blanche is in part reflective of Tennessee Williams' sister Rose, who, due to what the family saw as madness, underwent a frontal lombotomy. In every one of Williams' plays, there is an piece of Rose in some character. It was certainly his attempt to honor her by not letting her plight be swept under the rug, and in dealing with his feelings about what the family had done to her. And Eugene O'Neill modeled "Long Day's Journey into Night" after his own family; he is, in fact, the Edmond character. Naturally, Mary Tyrone is modeled after his own mother. He made his wife promise, when he gave her the play script on one of their anniversaries, that she'd not have it published for many years after his death--she waited only four.

Sources:

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Characters
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/longdays/characters.html

A Streetcar Named Desire, Characters
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/streetcar/characters.html