“[The Hairy Ape] remains one of my favorites. I have an enduring affection for it—always will have—and an enduring respect for it as drama, the more so because so few people have ever seen what it is all about.”—Eugene O’Neill, in a 1944 letter to Theresa Helburn

There are four aspects of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1921) that, because of the play’s strong naturalist-expressionistic stylistic component, have hitherto been neglected: first its “comedy,” as O’Neill describes it in the subtitle, “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes”; second, its connection, or opposition, to Italian futurism; third, its choice of so lowly a protagonist as Robert “Yank” Smith to symbolize humanity itself;[1] and last, the relationship of The Hairy Ape to ancient Greek tragedy.

Starting with The Hairy Ape’s “Italian connection,” or connections, O’Neill not only ironically invokes Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321) but also implicitly responds to the futurist movement in the arts (including drama) founded by his contemporary Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Originally called simply Commedia, like The Hairy Ape’s own subtitle, “A Comedy,” Dante’s masterpiece was reissued in Venice in 1555 with the adjective divina applied to the work’s title for the first time, thus resulting in the title still used today. The characters whom Dante meets on his journey in the Commedia, moreover, are drawn largely from ancient Roman as well as recent Italian history and even from contemporary Italian life. Hence this narrative poem could itself be called “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,” just as O’Neill describes his play.

Additionally, even as O’Neill succeeded in The Hairy Ape in forging an urban American argot that assimilates the spoken English of immigrant Germans, Jews, Scandinavians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Italians, Cockneys, and Irishmen, so too, from a reverse angle, did Dante enrich courtly Italian with his native Tuscan dialect to create a serious literary language that would take the place of Latin and become the ancestor of modern Italian. In fact, Dante’s use of language was one of the reasons for the “low” title of Commedia, for in this work he treated a serious subject, the redemption of humanity—one normally reserved for “high” tragedy—in the low and vulgar language of Italian, not Latin as one might expect.

Finally, although in structure a journey to, or through, the Beyond of hell, purgatory, and paradise, the Commedia is actually a realistic picture and intense analysis of earthly human life. But Dante’s literal journey, of course, is also a spiritual one: an allegory of the progress of the individual soul toward God and of the progress of sociopolitical mankind toward peace on earth—hence the “comedy,” or happy-cum-heavenly ending, of the poem. Similarly, Yank takes a literal as well as figurative journey in The Hairy Ape. Like Dante, he also begins in hell—the inferno-like bowels of the stokehole of a transatlantic liner, as O’Neill describes it in scene 3:

The stokehole. [. . .] murky air laden with coal dust [. . .] masses of shadows everywhere [. . .] [The men] use [. . .] shovels to throw open the furnace doors. Then from these fiery round holes in the black, a flood of terrific light and heat pours full upon the men [. . .] [as they] hurl [coal] into the flaming mouths before them. (134-135)

It is in hell, furthermore (a hell, appropriately, where men seem condemn-ed or cursed to an eternity of hard labor, in the sweat from which they will slowly roast), that Yank meets Mildred—or, it could be said, that this Adam (“naked and shameless” [137]) meets his Eve (“dressed all in white” [130]), who turns out to be something other than Dante’s idealized Beatrice. For Mildred not only violates the atavistic, animalistic Yank’s territorial space, she also gives Yank knowledge or consciousness of himself—or of himself as others view him—for the first time, and with it the power to think. But “[t]inkin’ is hard” for Yank (162), so hard that at least five times in the play, subsequent to his single encounter with Mildred, O’Neill has his protagonist sit “in the exact attitude of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’” (138). This 1881 sculpture is often considered to be optimistic, even uplifting—the epitome of contemplative, intelligent man—but one must not forget that Rodin designed it as the central piece of his monumental work The Gates Of Hell (1880-1917), which would portray brutish humanity attempting to puzzle out the truth and meaning of existence. So construed, thought or self-reflection is a kind of hell that separates or alienates humanity from nature, in contrast to the union with nature enjoyed by all other animals.

Yank, however, is identified with the machine or the machine age; he “belongs” (one of his favorite words) to the age of steam, power, and speed. In the stokehole of this particular ship, moreover, he is the supreme being and unquestioned ruler—“fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest” (121). Or at least he was until Mildred’s simple look of revulsion and her words “Oh, the filthy beast!” (137) topple Yank’s confidence and self-respect, completely changing his perspective on his life and work. Just as Mildred descends the evolutionary ladder, so to speak, to see “how the other half lives” in the nether regions of the ocean liner (132), so too does Yank ascend from the bowels of the ship, shortly after his encounter with her, to discover a world on high he never knew really existed and in which he does not fit. To be sure, he begins his actual as well as metaphoric journey in a quest, at first, for revenge against Mildred’s upper class, only to have that journey become, more and more, a search for self.

His journey takes Yank from hell progressively back through the evolutionary scale to four places on “earth,” in New York City—Fifth Avenue, the prison on what was then known as Blackwell’s Island (Roosevelt Island today, in the East River between Manhattan and Queens), the meeting hall of the Idustrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) on the Brooklyn waterfront, and the zoo (possibly the Bronx Zoo, but probably the closer one in Central Park, because he spent the previous night on a bench in Battery Park at the southernmost tip of Manhattan)—purgatories, all, that lead to physical punishment (as opposed to spiritual penance) for Yank’s “sins” and ultimately to his death. (“I ain’t on oith and I ain’t in heaven’, get me?” Yank tells a gorilla at the zoo—his closest “relative” in terms of appearance, strength, and outlook, and what the “evolved” but overbred Mildred saw in the stokehole when she looked into Yank’s “gorilla face” [137]—“I’m in the middle tryin’ to separate ‘em, takin’ all de woist punches from bot’ of ‘em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell, huh?” [162]. Maybe, but it could just as well be what they call purgatory.)

“Christ,” Yank asks as he is dying at the hands of the uncaged gorilla, “where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?” (163). The answer lies, not in the uniting of his immortal soul (if he has one) with God, but in the freeing of Yank from the prison-house of self and the reunion of his mortal body with the elements of nature. After what he has been through, one could say, this is heaven enough. As O’Neill himself once explained in a 1924 interview in the New York Herald Tribune, Yank while alive had “lost his old harmony with nature, the harmony which he used to have as an animal” (qtd. in Estrin 61)—and that the stoker Paddy thinks was the ancient order of things on sailing ships, when “a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one” (127).

O’Neill went on to say that

Yank can’t go forward and so he tries to go back. This is what his shaking hands with the gorilla meant. But he can’t go back to ‘belonging’ either. The gorilla kills him. The subject here is the ancient one [. . .] man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt to ‘belong.’ (Estrin 61)

Yank can’t go forward, O’Neill says, by which he means that this stoker can no longer identify himself with the modern world of machines, materialism, and technology (a world, it must be said, that eventually would replace him, or the job he does, with a machine). Mildred has seen to that: as Yank himself puts it, “Sure—her old man [. . .] makes half de steel in de world—steel—where I tought I belonged [. . .] Steel! It don’t belong, dat’s what! Cages, cells, locks, bolts, bars [. . .] holdin’ me down wit him at de top!” (154). But neither can Yank go forward by identifying himself with the labor radical Long’s Christian socialism, which enlists the Bible in the proletarian struggle against the capitalist class. Yank’s loss of self and stature is strictly loss—it’s not replaced by anything. Once his illusion of supremacy in the world gets shattered, nothing can take its place—certainly not the worship of a new, or another, Superior Being.

Yank can’t go forward, then, and he can’t go back: he “ain’t got no past to tink in, nor nothin’ dat’s comin’, on’y what’s now—and dat don’t belong” (162). Indeed, he’s caught, as O’Neill’s subtitle tells us, between “Ancient and Modern Life.” But his comedy is obviously not divine—“Hell! God!” (140) is Yank’s contemptuous response to Long’s religious belief—as was Dante’s. Dante’s faith resolved the tensions in his Commedia between ancient Roman paganism and contemporary Catholic harlotry—and a harlot is what he called the Church of his time, in addition to supporting a secular ruler for Italy in place of the pope. (A heretic is what the Church called Dante, whose Commedia audaciously consigns seven popes to the Inferno, and who himself was consigned to exile for such audacity.) Yank, by contrast, has no faith in anything anymore—neither in God, Nature, Man, Woman, nor Machine.

Furthermore, it is Yank’s peculiar faithlessness—his deviation, finally, from the norm of belief in or attachment to something—that marks him as a secularly comic character of a unique kind. So unique or extreme that, unlike the usual comic character, such as Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Molière’s Orgon, or even O’Neill’s own Richard Miller from his only “real” comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933)—who creates havoc or disorder through deviation from reasonable values like common sense, good nature, social intelligence, flexibility, moderation, and tolerance—Yank cannot be reintegrated into his society in the end. (For one filmic version of a conventional comic character in action, see Chaplin’s Gold Rush [1925] with its gentle, telescoped satire of material greed during the Roaring Twenties.) At the conclusion of The Hairy Ape, life does not go on and it certainly does not multiply as it does in traditional comedy, which (derived as the word “comedy” is from the ancient Greek komos, meaning “revel,” and aeidein, meaning “to sing”) often ends in festivity and marriage. Yank is all alone and “outside,” in death as in life, on earth as in—the earth. And there, “perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (163), unlike the usual comic protagonist, who really belongs from the very beginning and has only to wake up to that fact in the end.

Nonetheless, in his rejection and betrayal by all classes of society, Yank has something of the Christ-figure about him, as does the Cashier in German Georg Kaiser’s play From Morn to Midnight (1912)—which O’Neill read before he wrote The Hairy Ape, and which uses the station-play (or stations-of-the-cross) structure, borrowed from medieval religious drama, that became characteristic of both German and American expressionism.[2] Like From Morn to Midnight and Shaw’s even earlier Major Barbara (1905), The Hairy Ape also links capitalism and Christianity in a mutually beneficial political conspiracy to exploit the poverty-stricken masses. (That “conspiracy” takes the form of explicit Salvation Army scenes in the Shaw and Kaiser plays, but the Salvation Army gets only one passing and contemptuous reference from Yank [125].) When, for example, Yank asks Long, on Fifth Avenue in scene 5, where “her [Mildred’s] kind” is, his friend replies, “In church, blarst ‘em! Arskin’ Jesus to give ‘em more money” (144). When the wealthy churchgoers come out, they discuss ways to combat radicals (of the working class) and false doctrines (like anti-capitalism). At the same, they refer to their pastor as Doctor Caiaphas” (147), an allusion on O’Neill’s part to the high priest Caiaphas, who presided at the council that condemned Christ to death and declared that “It was better that one man die for all people” (John 18.14).

The authors of the other three gospels note that when Christ died “the curtain hanging in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matt 27.50-51; Luke 23.45-46; Mark 15.37-38). The modern oppressors of humanity, for their part, specify in The Hairy Ape that proceeds from their “hundred percent American bazaar” will be used for repairing just such a curtain, i.e., for “rehabilitating the veil of the temple” (147). O’Neill thus suggests in the Fifth-Avenue scene that the moneyed class, using the pretext of religious zeal, will ruthlessly crush any movement that threatens its economic position and will crucify anew any presumed—and presumptuous—rebel. Yank falls into this category at the end of scene 5 when he is “clubbed [. . .] and fallen upon” (149) by the servants of the rich, the police, even as they subdue him at the end of scene 6 when he tries to break out of jail. Something similar occurs again at the end of scene 7, when Yank is overpowered by Wobblies, or members of the I.W.W., who suspect him of spying for their nemesis: the police. With immobilized arms and pinioned legs, as clumsy and artless as an animal, Yank takes on here the traits of a misunderstood savior—or the characteristics of a despised cross-bearer.

Christ-figure though he may be, Yank is meant as well—if only by O’Neill’s choice of his first name, together with his melting pot of a “language,” Brooklynese—to be the archetypal American, analogous to the archetypal Italian of futurist drama (which was still being produced in Italy at the same time as The Hairy Ape was being staged in New York). The central preoccupations of the futurists were speed and technology; like Yank, they were particularly drawn to the intoxicating power of machines, as Yank himself describes it in the following speech from early in the play:

Sure I’m part of de engines! [. . .] Dey move, don’t dey? Dey’re speed, ain’t dey! Dey smash trou, don’t dey? [. . .] Dat’s new stuff! Dat belongs! [. . .] I start somep’n and de woild moves! [. . .] I’m de ting in coal dat makes it boin; I’m steam and oil for de engines; I’m de ting in noise dat makes yuh hear it; I’m smoke and express trains and steamers and factory whistles [. . .] And I’m what makes iron into steel! Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I’m steel—steel—steel! (128-129)

The futurists welcomed steel and all the other products of industrial society—with its electricity, urbanization, and revolution in the means of transport and communication—with an all-embracing optimism, for they saw them as the means by which people would be able to dominate their environment totally. The speed, change, and motion of the industrial age were also fundamental to the futurists’ love of the modern and their rejection of the static, lethargic past—the very “natural” past about which Paddy rhapsodizes in scene 1 of O’Neill’s play. As these Italians realized—in such plays as Genius and Culture by Umberto Boccioni (1915), The Arrest by F. T. Marinetti (1916), and Lights by Francesco Cangiullo (1922)—the effects of the speed of transport and communication on modern sensibility were such that people were aware not just of their immediate surroundings but of the whole world.

In essence, then, the limits of time and space had been transcended—as they are, in a sense, in any production of The Hairy Ape, which moves from a transatlantic ocean liner bound for Southampton, England, to several locations on the streets of New York, and which takes place over a period of two months. Now it was possible to live through events both distant and near at hand: in fact, to be everywhere at the same time. Accordingly, Marinetti and his followers held that the speed of modern life called for a corresponding speed of communication in contemporary art, which should—unlike the conventional theater—be far briefer and more compressed or synthesized than even The Hairy Ape, yet at the same time incorporate simultaneous action occurring in different places or at different times.

Futurism took hold in Italy—and, in somewhat different, more metaphorical, as well as more short-lived, theatrical form, in the former USSR (which, unlike soon-to-be-fascist Italy, restricted or completely suppressed the freedom even of those artists, like the Russian futurists, who supported the Communist Revolution)—as in no other Western nation partly because this country, like the Soviet Union, underwent industrialization (as well as nationalization or consolidation) much later than, say, the United States. For this reason Italian futurists embraced the machine age and all that it made possible—including war, which they labeled the supreme, health-bestowing activity—to an extent unknown in American artistic circles.

Here, by contrast, playwrights like O’Neill, Elmer Rice (in The Adding Machine [1923]), and Sophie Treadwell (in Machinal [1928]) were using techniques borrowed from the German expressionists (who themselves rejected or at least vigorously questioned modern technology along with the military-industrial complex it spawned) to question both their country’s rise to economic-cum-martial supremacy and its engineering of what amounted, in effect, to a second Industrial Revolution. Hence O’Neill’s attempt, in The Hairy Ape, to depict the stokers—with the possible exception of Yank, “their most highly developed individual” (121) and consequently the very kind of individual (unsentimental, autonomous, hyper-efficient) championed by the Italian futurists—as soulless automatons who move and work mechanically, look alike, and speak with “a brazen, metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns” (124).

But the rich in this play are equally mechanical—and hardly a class to which Yank would (or could) aspire to belong, anyway—from the “incongruous, artificial [. . .], inert and disharmonious” (130) Mildred and her aunt, to the “procession of gaudy marionettes” on Fifth Avenue “with something of the relentless horror of Frankenstein monsters in their detached, mechanical unawareness” (147). And one of the reasons O’Neill made them so was less to indict or satirize the wealthy, as a polemical, anti-capitalistic workers’ drama of the 1930s might, than to suggest that the rich, too, are victims of modern industrial civilization (which may be why, when Yank swings at them on New York’s Fifth Avenue, nothing happens: they are already lifeless victims). Out of tune with the natural world, hardly in communion with any spiritual one, and consequently out of synch with, or unattuned to, themselves, they find their ideal representative in the bloodless, wraithlike Mildred, who has “a pale [. . .] face, [and] looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia” (130). It appears, O’Neill writes further, “as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending” (130).

Yank Smith, moreover, is symbolic of the wealthy of the world in addition to all its workers, even though he rejects, and is rejected by, both the workers’ movement and the uppermost leisure class. He is representative, then, of the displacement of modern humanity in general: of people who, in the Marxist sense, become alienated from themselves because their work is not part of their life; because their work takes over their life entirely, as in the case of Yank; or, in the case of the idle, upper-class Mildred, as opposed to an unemployed member of the underclass, because work is something that they do not even want. As a result, these people find themselves alienated from other human beings as well, with whom they no longer share a social essence or of whose society they no longer feel they belong.

In Yank’s case, that alienation translates into a kind of permanent, fatal existentialism—a paralyzing clash, if you will, between Dante’s medieval-cum-Renaissance Christianity and Marinetti’s twentieth-century totalitarian godlessness (or elevation of science and technology to godlike status). And the very structure of The Hairy Ape reveals this clash, which itself, in a sense, prevents Yank from moving either backward or forward, on to the past or back to the future. For, on the one hand, the episodic form of the play may be conducive to the illustration of a progressive if incremental journey toward spiritual wholeness or organicity; on the other hand, however, that same episodic form, in the rapidity with which it can transcend or condense time and place, suggests the Machine Age of which Yank is a part, with its ease of transport, atomization of human existence, speed of tempo, and even simultaneity of experience.

Looked at another way, the eight scenes of the play break down half and half between modernism in the form of futurism and medievalism in the form of the stations-of-the-cross drama. The first part of The Hairy Ape, all on the ship, is “modern.” Here, the principles of Marinetti’s futurism seem evident in the stokehole as Yank and his cohorts feed the machine at the same time they are, in a way, fed by it. The stokers’ language in scene 1, for example, incorporates simultaneous speech during which they “talk over” one another, and actions themselves occur simultaneously when, in scene 2, the men (whom we should be able to see on stage) work below in the stokehole even as Mildred and her aunt are visible on top on the ocean liner’s promenade deck.

After Mildred meets the “filthy beast,” of course, the play completely changes. Following one more scene aboard ship, scene 4, the underlying structure of The Hairy Ape switches to that of a medieval station drama, reliant now upon sequence rather than simultaneity. Thus, just as the play’s own dramatic journey moves away from the modern and into the past, Yank devolves to see himself ultimately as the Hairy Ape (in both his description and in O’Neill’s final stage direction [163]). The fateful meeting with Mildred, one could say, is the end of modernism-cum-futurism for him: “thought” or (self-) reflection kills Yank’s forward movement in the present, and then in scenes 5-8 he learns that, although he may call himself a “Hairy Ape,” he can’t go back in time, either.

Yank, then, doesn’t belong in either temporal realm after his brief but deadly encounter with Mildred—a fact brought home all the more by Mildred’s disappearance from the plot at the end of scene 3, and with her any hope for the beautification or beatification of this “beast” through romance. (Improbable as such a romance may be, Paddy hints at it in scene 4 when he declares, “[Yank’s] fallen in love” [139]. When Yank says that he has really “fallen in hate,” Paddy retorts, “’Twould take a wise man to tell one from the other” [139].) For examples of ape-like characters who do belong in their respective Renaissance and modern “forms” or realms, who have a self-awareness initially denied to Yank, and who themselves have their encounters with beauties (Miranda and Blanche DuBois), one need only turn to Yank’s distant ancestor Caliban from The Tempest (1611) and his near descendant Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, just three years after the release of the Hollywood film of The Hairy Ape, starring William Bendix and Susan Hayward).

Why so lowly a naturalistic character as Yank as symbolic protagonist of this drama? Because, in his utter identification with the machine, he is as close as we can get in a modern character to primitive or prehistoric man’s union with nature, on the one hand, and the communion of a Christian saint, martyr, or “mere” true believer with God, on the other hand. He is what Emerson, already in the mid-nineteenth century, was calling the machine man, “Metamorphosed into a thing.” And it is precisely because of such utter identification that Yank’s eventual alienation from the machine (something not foreseen by the Italian futurists in their attempt to fashion man himself as the most superior of machines)—his fall, as it were—is rendered more dramatic, more effective, than it would be for a character not so closely identified. When Yank loses this identification, he has nothing left to fall back on: certainly not God or nature, nor, obviously, is his mind sophisticated enough to embrace secular humanism. He becomes like a puppet without his deterministic strings—one that can no longer be “yanked,” if you will. Moreover, as O’Neill himself points out above, even when Yank tries to commune with his “brother” ape, his evolutionary ancestor, he is rejected. He dies in a cage of steel as night falls on the Central Park Zoo, without a future of either a material or a spiritual kind.

We may feel superior to this “comic” character, as we do to comic characters in general from our objective viewpoint, but we laugh at him at our own peril—unless, that is, our laughter is accompanied by the smile of recognition. For Robert “Yank” Smith is an alienated Everyman—in nuce, every Robert Smith in America, then as now—or he is no one. O’Neill’s discovery, you see—and the discovery of other American dramatists at this time—was that “small” events in the lives of “small” people like Yank could be presented so that they reflected the wider world outside a ship’s boiler room, or a home’s living room. A national literature of plays thus set in bourgeois living rooms or proletarian workplaces—and, whatever their deeper meanings, dealing first with earning a living, surviving a domestic crisis, experiencing love, or facing death—is a deeply democratic literature, one which assumes that the important subjects are those that manifest themselves in the daily lives of ordinary (not “noble” or “heroic”) people like Yank Smith.

And, common man or not, Yank certainly has his stature increased by O’Neill’s use of the equivalent of Greek choruses throughout The Hairy Ape. In the stokehole scenes, the forecastle scene, the Fifth-Avenue scene, the I.W.W. scene, the jail scene, and the zoo scene—indeed, every scene except the second one between Mildred and her aunt, in which Yank does not appear—O’Neill introduced the clamor and chatter of people or animals to set the tone and milieu of his drama; to indicate the masses from whom Yank stands out, to remind us of the essentially social nature of human experience at the same time as we are supplied with a host of witnesses to Yank’s private or individual suffering; and to provide us with a kind of frame or lens through which to view Yank as he undergoes his agon.

That frame or lens was heightened in the original New York production during the Fifth-Avenue scene because the actors playing rich people wore Greek-like masks (the first use of masks in a serious play on Broadway, where The Hairy Ape was moved from the Provincetown Playhouse, also in New York)—a device that O’Neill later regretted he had not used in the stokehole scene and other scenes as well. Our socio-choral perspective on Yank might thus be derisive or dismissive, depending on the “chorus” and its mask, but then again it could be a combination of the reverential and the fearful (as it is in the case of the stokers in scenes 1 and 3), or it could be lamentatory (as it is in the case of the “chattering, whimpering wail” [163] of the monkeys at the end of the play, after Yank has expired).

Whether we view Yank as a fully tragic character in the classical sense seems to me less important, however, than the fact that O’Neill has bestowed on so lowly a figure a number of characteristics we traditionally associate with tragedy. To wit: a kind of freedom of action that enables Yank to choose his course without much restriction, at the same time as we sense the tragic irony of his choices; his own crude proletarian idiom, which, like verse, sets him apart and has a peculiar evocativeness, even exaltation; a life lived, not in a home (let alone with a wife and children), but outside in something akin to a public arena (on a “public” ship and in other such places), where publicness itself—like Yank’s choral witnesses—confers moral, spiritual, and philosophical significance on his actions; a hubris in his superior physical strength, which is contrasted with Yank’s bewilderment (a word used no fewer than four times in the stage directions by O’Neill to describe Yank’s perception of his situation: 137, 140, 159, 163) at almost everything that happens to him subsequent to his encounter with Mildred; and, finally, Yank’s consciousness or understanding of what has happened to him and why, which is summed up in a concluding recognition speech that forever removes this character from the realm of the pathetic, the uninitiated, the witless, or the merely animalistic at the same time as it confers on him tragic dignity.

Greg Derelian as Yank in the final scene of The Hairy Ape at the Irish Repertory Theatre. See page 180 for a review of this production. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

Ironically, Yank’s consciousness was “given” to him by his nemesis Mildred, and it is fully expressed, ultimately, not to another human being but only to a gorilla and a chorus of monkeys:

So yuh’re what she seen when she looked at me, de white-faced tart! I was you to her, get me? On’y outa de cage—broke out—free to moider her, see? Sure! Dat’s what she tought. She wasn’t wise dat I was in a cage, too—worser’n yours—sure—a damn sight—‘cause you got some chanct to bust loose—but me—[. . .] Youse can sit and dope dream in de past, green woods, de jungle and de rest of it. Den yuh belong and dey don’t. [. . .] Sure, you’re de best off! Yuh can’t tink, can yuh? Yuh can’t talk neider. But I kin make a bluff at talkin’and tinkin’—a’most git away wit it—a’most!—and dat’s where de joker comes in. (161-162)

It is shortly after he speaks these words of recognition that Yank dies in the gorilla’s cage of the Central Park Zoo, never having returned to the security of the stokehole on his ship—an alternative that was open to him but which he bravely did not, could not, or would not take. To the prison-house of self, in life, Yank seems to prefer death in a cage at the hands of a creature not quite of his own kind, yet still very much like him.

It is not by chance that The Hairy Ape assimilates such seemingly disparate international influences as late nineteenth-century European naturalism (with its view of man as an animal or even an object for study and control), Italian futurism, German expressionism, Greek tragedy, and a Renaissance work like the Divine Comedy. For O’Neill was America’s first serious—by which I mean important—dramatist, and he became a serious artist in part because, by the time he came of age, the foundations of an artistic (in contrast to commercial) theater had been laid in the United States. For one thing, the non-profit “little theater” movement, modeled after the independent theaters of Europe, had engendered considerable enthusiasm in places like New York, Chicago, and Detroit; and, combined with the modified, conceptualized realism of the “new stagecraft” of such designers as Cleon Throckmorton and Robert Edmond Jones (who jointly created the set and lights for The Hairy Ape’s initial little-theater production at the Province-town), this movement made possible the production of serious new plays that might not otherwise have had commercial promise.

In addition, selected Americans had observed foreign developments in the performing arts and had returned to write about them in Theatre Arts, the first American periodical devoted, as its title indicates, to a consideration of the art of theater; a number of esteemed foreign troupes and productions themselves had visited the States, if not for the first time then for the first time in large numbers. Moreover, the study of world theater and drama, contemporary as well as classical, had been introduced into several American colleges and universities, along with playwriting classes such as the one O’Neill himself took at Harvard during 1914-1915 with George Pierce Baker; and prizes like the Pulitzer and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award began to be given yearly for the “best new American play.” Last, but certainly not least, the rise of the cinema (and, by the early 1920s, radio along with it) as the most popular art of the twentieth century—even as the theater had been the most popular form of the nineteenth century (a fact that O’Neill well knew from his own experiences as a young man touring with his matinée-idol father, James O’Neill)—cleared the way for serious American playwrights to think about something other than commercial success, something the drama could accomplish that films could not or that the theater could realize better than any movie could hope to do.

All of this, in some measure, was the result of World War I—the first fully and horrifically mechanized war, let us remember—which marked not only the ascent of the United States as a military and economic superpower, but also the opening up of the American nation to outside intellectual-artistic influence on an unprecedented scale. As I have already suggested, the Great War—as it was and continues to be called by those who recognize that “great” in this case is a pejorative term—also unleashed the first wave of American dramatist-critics, who immediately envisioned the negative side, or psychic cost, of the United States’s newly recognized, now unrivaled wealth and power. O’Neill was foremost among these dramatist-critics, and The Hairy Ape, like such other early, experimental plays of his as The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Great God Brown (1925), is evidence both of his newfound dramatic art and of his emergent critical temper.                                           

NOTES

1. No previous critic of The Hairy Ape takes up the possibility of its connection with Italian futurism. As for interpreting O’Neill’s application of the term “comedy” to his play, see Normand Berlin, Eugene O’Neill (New York: Grove, 1982), as representative of those critics who pause to consider The Hairy Ape’s subtitle:

The term ‘comedy’ for The Hairy Ape is troublesome, as are most generic labels supplied by dramatists. Does O’Neill want us to take the word ironically? Should we view Yank’s plight from the perspective of an uncaring society? Is it a comedy because Yank is a common man, low on the hierarchical scale? Or does O’Neill want us to consider the ending happy; according to his last words, in death ‘perhaps the Hairy Ape at last belongs.’ (66-67)

Timo Tiusanen, O’Neill’s Scenic Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), is one of the only other O’Neill critics who try to answer some of Berlin’s questions, in Tiusanen’s case by locating the play’s comedy in “bitterly ironical contrasts” such as that of Mildred and her aunt “sitting in their deck chairs [. . .] as sadly incongruous as Paddy was down in the forecastle” (116-117).

2. O’Neill is quoted as stating that he had read Kaiser’s drama before writing The Hairy Ape in B. H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York: Dover, 1947) 83.

WORKS CITED

Estrin, Mark, ed. “Eugene O’Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others.” Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. 60-63.

O’Neill, Eugene. The Hairy Ape. Complete Plays 1920-1931. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 1988. 119-163.