Thorough Analysis of The Character: Mary Tyrone

Mary Tyrone is fifty four year old women. She is wife of James Tyrone and mother of Edmund and Jamie Tyrone. She has a thin face with beautiful long lashes and the brown eyes. As far as her physical appearance is concerned, she is suffering from a disease, in which her hands are always shaking and whenever she sees her hands, they are wrinkled. Mary is a morphine addict. At the beginning of the play, she is living in Tyrone summer house for the past two months. When we see the character of Mary, we see that she is caring for her children and her husband, but her character is modified by two strong impulses, one is her care and other is her hatred, and both passions are modified into one to give two sighted view of the reality.

First of all we will focus on the past of Mary, she was a convent girl student, she was very beautiful and having the appeal to attract the opposite gender, she first met James Tyrone backstage after a performance in which Tyrone was a protagonist and she instantly fell in love with him, marrying him and travelling with him during his money-making tours, which made him money but did not give him artistic fulfillment.

She has two impulses in herself, at first time she abuses her husband because she thought that Mr. Tyrone was responsible for her present condition, because Mr. Tyrone use to send her to a cheap doctor, so that his money could be save and on the other hand she says: “Oh! Tyrone I still love you and I always love you”

These are the impulses, at one moment she says that I hate you, and the next moment she says I always love you and ask her sons to love their father as well because she always love her husband.

Mary’s Idealism:

Any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind, often contrasted with realism is known as idealism. She never had time to develop strong interests of her own. Hence Mary idealized her father that is why she at first associated Tyron with his exaggerated virtues, specially his generosity. Then as time pass on, she could not avoid comparing Tyron unfavorably with her father who die young.

Tyrone once protested:

“Her father was not the great, generous, noble Irish gentleman that she makes out”. In reality, her father too had a weakness. He drank himself to death on wine, worsen by consumption. Mary criticized on Tyrone’s drinking habit but the memory of her father’s alcoholism represses her contempt.

Mary’s Nostalgia: A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal association is called nostalgia. As far as her physical appearance is concerned, she is suffering from a disease in which her hands are always shaking. Whenever she sees her hands, they are wrinkled and she reminds her past and become nostalgic that once these hand used to be very beautiful and I was able to attract men with my physical appearance but where that beauty is gone and she is always remembering her happiest past.

And the second thing that she has faced many sufferings, first of all Mary has been addicted to morphine since the difficult birth of her youngest son Edmund, death of her father, death of her son and loss of her virginity as a nun. She continues to blame Jamie for Eugene’s death. Jamie is always looking for the worst weakness in everyone. The doctor who treated her simply gave her painkillers, which led to her long time morphine addiction that continues to plague her.

She focused on everything, why her present situation is happening to her. She curses herself that my present is happened to me due to my wrong decision, and she is cursing Edmund, Jamie and Mr. Tyron. Mary’s feelings towards her mother are cold. She thinks, her mother was a little jealous of her. Her mother wanted her to become a nun. Her role of wife and mother shattered to ground. Since then, she has been retreating through morphine to adopt the guise, of the virginal convent girl, which her rejecting mother had urged upon her when she was an immature maid.

Mary’s Deception: The action of deceiving someone or a thing that deceives. Deception is in the way that she is thinking that she will regain her physical beauty. And she want that people admire her physical personality. She goes to Edmund, Jamie and Tyrone and what they do in return they deceive in her that you are still beautiful.

She often says that she has gain weight and Tyron says, you are still beautiful just the way you are, you have gain a little weight but you are still beautiful my love and smoother her hands. (Act 1 pg. 15-16) And same is the case with Edmund, Mom you are still beautiful.

And Jamie says I can lay down my life for you, you are my life. This is the deception that she takes, to just satisfy herself. She already know her swear condition, and she is living still in the world of deception, the world of past and all the time she abuses Edmund she says that, “It was your being bond that determined my present condition. What I am just all because of you. Has you been not born, I would have been beautiful right now. And it was your being born that make me psychologically ill, I started taking pills and those pills had bad effect on my health”.

Despite of her physical appearance she also has deception when other members of the family try to keep Mary from knowing that Edmund is seriously ill, and Mary obviously attempts to deceive herself with the comforting belief that Edmund is only suffering from a “summer cold”.