The Hairy Ape is placed in the chapter entitled “The 20th Century” in the widely used Prentice-Hall Concise Anthology of American Literature, edited by George McMichael, an anthology that my English department has favored through its various editions for many decades. The textbook’s arrangement places O’Neill’s play between Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound. On my syllabus The Hairy Ape comes after poems by Robinson, Frost, Pound and Eliot. After O’Neill, the next author taken up is Cummings. (I do not teach Sherwood Anderson.) Admittedly by staying close to the order of the textbook’s table of contents, I take the road more traveled by. Has it made all the difference? Perhaps. I believe that it strongly implies where O’Neill’s place is in American literature. I believe that this is the best that I can do as a professor in an American literature survey course. It is one thing to chide graduate students about not falling into the “chronological trap” in an American drama seminar, but to expect sophomores to question the subtext of a syllabus is to fail to respect their déférences. For similar reasons, I do not believe a discussion of any sort of “drama versus literature” debate is warranted.

I begin by emphasizing O’Neill’s subtitle “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes” in my introductory remarks. (This is especially important since the subtitle is not included in the anthology’s text.) By so doing I connect the play to Pound’s famous dictum “Make it new.” By stressing the form of the play I am able to emphasize the importance of form to O’Neill’s modernist contemporaries and place the playwright within one context of his time, since “ancient” ties O’Neill to the classical traditions that Pound and Eliot were reworking in their poetry. With “modern,” I want to show that O’Neill should not only be linked to Pound and Eliot’s modernist aesthetic, but that it is also important to stress that O’Neill was a leftist political radical unlike some of the other American modernists of the time, Pound, Eliot and Frost. This enables me to bring up the play’s political content without seeming to impose “current relevance” on the play. It is necessary to spend some time talking about the Industrial Workers of the World, (why do students instinctively call the I.W.W. “The International Workers of the World”) and radical concepts such as socialism and anarchism and the significance of “the damned capitalist clarss” that Long imprecates. In some semesters, I also find it necessary to comment on the Social Darwinism that Yank seems to represent in his famous speech about how he is steel,” how he makes the ship move—that he “belongs.” He dismisses every immaterial thing as bunk—this is also perfectly “naturalist.” Depending on the interest level of the class, even though I am wary of having students load up on too many “isms”, I might mention naturalism and determinism as well in order to show some of the artistic trends that the modernist writers were reacting against. Of course, in a discussion of the staging I bring up expressionism. The cage-like atmosphere of the stoke hole, 5th Avenue crowd of grotesque marionettes and the “gorilla” at the play’s conclusion are among the expressionist aspects of the text that I emphasize.

It is almost always necessary to explain O’Neill’s particular importance to American drama. Even when I have encountered students who have studied O’Neill before, they almost never have sufficient knowledge of American drama to accept The Hairy Ape without any prologue. I have encountered several students over the years who have often studied Long Day’s Journey in a high school AP English class. Such students also sometimes know about Mourning Becomes Electra and The Oresteia. And I once had a student who had written a high school research paper on Greek tragedy and Desire Under the Elms. It would appear that students who are introduced to O’Neill are taught that he is part of “drama.” Indeed this is how I recall being introduced to O’Neill in high school. We read Sophocles, Miller, Ibsen, Williams, Shakespeare and others strictly as dramatic literature separated from any local context. These experiences and representatively ignorant comments such as Harold Bloom’s that O’Neill is not influenced at all by any American dramatists impel my emphasis on The Hairy Ape’s close relationship to American modernism.

On my syllabus I entitle this portion of the course “The American Century?” I do this to stress the ambiguous role of American-ness in our time and O’Neill’s antipathy to conventional American values. Such a title is also a good place from which to encourage students to understand O’Neill’s questioning of conventional American values. As far as The Hairy Ape is concerned I offer some background on Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 diatribe against “hyphenated Americanism” to bolster Yank’s initial disengagement from Long’s political and social agitation—not to mention the stage directions and descriptions that O’Neill provides for Scene V’s Fifth Avenue confrontation.