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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.

The New Studies of English Language & Literature 40, 2008. 159-178. Among major sources of Hamlet are Saxo Grammticus’ Historiae Danicae, Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques and the Ur-Hamlet written by an anonymous author. In the first work, a beautiful woman who got along with Amleth since his childhood assumes the trace of Ophelia. But instructed to seduce him, she warns him of the trap so he can avoid it. In the second, Belleforest’s description of the seductive woman goes almost in the same way. Lastly, the Ur-Hamlet sprouts the characters of Polonius’s family including Laertes and Ophelia. What is more important is that the author genuinely invented the madness and death of Ophelia. In neither of the two preceding sources were madness, song and drowning of Ophelia. Shakespeare followed the footsteps of the basic frame of the Ur-Hamlet. It is, however, assumed that with his unbeatable imagination Shakespeare created both dramatically intense conflict between Hamlet and Ophelia; and the heart-breaking depiction of her madness, song and suicide. This paper aims to analyze Shakespeare’s embroidery of symbolism on madness, song and death of Ophelia, which reveals her unconscious desire for forgetting Hamlet and remembering Polonius. The symbolic study on Ophelia’s song and death, I believe, makes it possible to correct the marginality of Ophelia as a minor figure and put her up front back.