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Naturalism In Long Day's Journey Into The Night

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The trope of naturalism in western theater have readdressed the form of dramatic arts from the royal narrative and biblical tales to stories of commoners that the audience can actually relate to. Naturalism also allows the distinction of tragedy and comedy to dissipate by developing a plot that focuses on a day-to-day occurrence. This convention is represented by playwrights who are writing in a more colloquial voice with stories about the middle-class -or working-class, and their struggles. Naturalism gave birth to the works of Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee that pushes the nuance of dysfunctionality and addiction to its extreme in works such as Long Day’s Journey Into The Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The two playwrights zoom in towards a domestic issue that were driven a lot by each character’s desire for happiness and the disappointment that are not being expressed appropriately that drove them to an addiction as form of escape from the reality. The two plays place a tragic maternal figure who escapes their unachievable idea of happiness through a facade of lies in the forefront of the narrative. In Long Day’s Journey Into The Night, Mary Tyrone’s ideal happiness comes from her sense of nostalgia and what defined her happiness when she married Tyrone while Martha’s imaginary son and her inability to face the reality of a dull life of being married to a university professor are what became of her tragic downfall at the end of Who’s Afraid of Virginia

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