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O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is in great part about feminine suffering. Throughout the play Mary recalls the happy times of her life-as a promising piano student at the convent and as a young woman who believed that she had a religious vocation but gave it all up when she married James Tyrone. The action of the play chronicles Mary’s regression. The issue of Mary’s addiction to morphine is crucial to the problem of the Tyrone family. She abandons the family during her drugged states. Her habitual injection of morphine is motivated by an emotional rather than a physiological craving. She does not have psychic capacity for empathy toward her family because of her self-centered view of reality. Mary seems to be a totally lost cause. Living in a fog which shuts out reality, she tries to find the meaning of her existence only in the past. But she is not weak but shrewdly manipulative, managing to set her three men against each other in order to avoid confronting herself with what she has become. At the final act, “The Mad Scene, Enter Ophelia!,” even though Mary claims that she never had the slightest desire to be an actress, she ironically takes center-stage, and becomes a complex and theatrically powerful stage woman. Mary, who finally changes from mother into mad Ophelia by adopting theatrical representation.