III.

 

Against these oppressive, horizontal landscapes, O'Neill juxtaposes the strict vertical hierarchy of the ocean liner. In the opening scene, a stoker named Long, who harbors socialist dreams of unionizing the workers, repeatedly classifies the stokehole as a kind of "hell." The bottommost deck of the ship, populated by the enslaved primates, is indeed a fiery and torturous prison of never-ending labor, from which there appears to be no escape, despite the political ideals or nostalgic dreams of its inhabitants. Every setting that ensues (with the exception of the promenade deck) is classified as another version of "hell"; the word expands in meaning with each new iteration, until its utterance is ritualized through Yank's repeated interjections "What de hell!" and "T' hell wit' it!" which punctuate his last monologue.

 

The second scene takes place at the apex of this layered structure, with "the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about—sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it." Here we meet Mildred, the "discontented" and anemic daughter of a steel magnate, reclining on the top deck of the ship with her spinster aunt. They are, O'Neill tells us, "incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived" (130). While the stokers are a robust mix of ethnic types, a representative group of recent European immigrants, the fully assimilated passengers and officers on the upper decks are in fact so pale that their whiteness functions as a ghostly mask more than any kind of racial essence (see Fig. 3). As Mildred's aunt remarks, in response to her niece's interest in "excavating old bones," a euphemism for exposing her family's humble beginnings, "Yes, you are a natural born ghoul. You are even getting to look like one, my dear" (131).19 The farther one progresses to higher decks, the more effete, bloodless, and cold the characters become; rather than approaching divinity, as we would expect in the vertical landscapes of the Romantic era, these humans are, in fact, becoming extinct.

 

Conspicuously clad in a white dress, Mildred's descent from the chill of the promenade deck to the heat and grime of the engine room—via a series of ladders that call to mind the operative metaphor of social Darwinism—sets the plot of The Hairy Ape in motion (see Fig. 4). Once again, the stokehole is equated with hell, but for Mildred, who flirts with the "handsome, virile" Second Engineer, threatening to "drag the name of Douglas into the gutter! . . . [f]rom which it sprang" (134), the possibility of such punishing heat promises a thrilling return to her "common" roots, a genealogy she has thoroughly romanticized:20

Second Engineer— . . . A fine day we're having.

Mildred—Is it?

Second Engineer—A nice warm breeze—

Mildred—It feels cold to me.

Second Engineer—But it's hot enough in the sun—

Mildred—Not hot enough for me. I don't like Nature. . . .

Second Engineer—(forcing a smile) Well, you`ll find it hot enough where you're going.

Mildred—Do you mean hell?

Second Engineer—(flabbergasted, decides to laugh) Ho-ho! No, I mean the stokehole.

Mildred—My grandfather was a puddler. He played with boiling steel. . . . I should have inherited an immunity to heat that would make a salamander shiver. It will be fun to put it to the test (133, 132).

With this exchange O'Neill begins our descent into the expressionist landscape, from the aesthetic "heights" of the promenade (bright, cold, feminine, inert, and ghostly) to the supernatural depths of "hell" (dark, hot, masculine, laborious, and beastly).21 These dualisms, so typical of the humanist worldview, do not remain static for long, however. The haunting presence of Mildred's puddling grandfather, working to purify "impure" metal (a commentary on the importance of racial and ethnic "purity" in nineteenth-century America—and a clue to Mildred's buried ancestry), expands the meaning—and movement—of "descent" toward a more evolutionary (and therefore rhizomatic) signification, recontextualizing Mildred's preoccupation with her "inheritance" and "stock" as genetic, rather than economic, concerns—ones that must be "put to the test."

 

Figure 3: Scene 2 of The Hairy Ape, produced by Aleksandr Tairov's Kamerny ("Chamber") Theatre, Moscow, circa 1925. Mildred talks with the Second Officer on deck while her aunt looks on. The women appear to be in whiteface. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Figure 4: Scene 3 of The Hairy Ape, produced by Aleksandr Tairov's Kamerny ("Chamber") Theatre, Moscow, circa 1925. Note the layered structure of the set and the presence of the ladder at right, on which Mildred descends to the stokehole. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

 

Furthermore, by invoking the legend of the salamander, O'Neill equates social assimilation with environmental adaptation and ultimately survival, transforming the spatial hierarchies of the ship into "natural" habitats where experiments such as the one Mildred proposes may be conducted. As Sylvia Terrill Peel explains,

The surface implication of Mildred's assertion is that, because her grandfather worked with molten metal, she should by heredity be able to endure intense heat. [. . .] The Irish myth behind the salamander image claims that a salamander must have fire to live; removal from the fire will cause its death. In light of the myth and Mildred's inability to make good her boast, another interpretation becomes apparent. She proves by fainting in the stokehole not only that she failed to inherit the strength of her ancestors, but that . . . when removed from her wealth-protected environment, she cannot survive (142).

Mildred's obsession with her family's past is what motivates her interest in social work, reflecting a "trace" of "sincere" interest in "discover[ing] how the other half lives" (132), much like the colonial "ethnographers" whose travels were funded under the auspices of research or exploration, but in fact constituted opportunities for adventure, acquisition, and exploitation. Mildred's own trace of sincerity turns continually toward various social "poses" in which her interest is feigned rather than truly engaged, an attitude she projects retroactively onto her grandfather: he "played with," rather than worked at, "boiling steel." It is Mildred herself, in fact (a mere two generations away from the blue-collar world of her grandfather), who is an expert at "playing with" social customs, at taking on certain poses in order to maintain her mobility within the vertical hierarchy. "You are quite free to indulge any pose [. . .] that beguiles you," her aunt allows, in reference to Mildred's social work, to which she replies:

Mildred—I would like to be sincere, to touch life somewhere. (with weary bitterness) But I'm afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity . . . I inherit the acquired trait of . . . wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damed by it, as they say at the race track—damned in more ways than one.22 (She laughs mirthlessly.)

Aunt—(unimpressed—superciliously ) You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really—except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.

Mildred—(again affected and bored) Yes, I suppose I do. Pardon me for my outburst. When a leopard complains of its spots, it must sound rather grotesque. (in a mocking tone) Purr, little leopard. Purr, scratch, tear, kill, gorge yourself and be happy—only stay in the jungle where your spots are camouflage. In a cage they make you conspicuous" (131-32).23

In Mildred's initial complaint, O'Neill continues to shift between economic and genetic metaphors, cleverly alluding to an interspecies performance practice (horseracing) in which the two concerns are interdependent. Mildred's melodramatic protest that breeding has dam(n)ed her is enacted when she descends to the stokehole, and her histrionic narrative reaches its symbolic end—in hell. But when pressed by her Aunt to embrace her artificiality rather than lament it, Mildred transforms instantaneously from ill-fated racehorse to bloodthirsty leopard, from cynical self-pity to the far more fitting pleasures of survival. This allows O'Neill to compare two particularly theatrical, and interrelated, phenomena: camouflage and the pose.

 

As techniques that function within the play in ways similar to the dramatic mask—where racial "essences" surface in defeat—these forms of imitation, as Margot Norris argues in Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985), belong "to the realm of Nature rather than culture, to the inhuman as well as the human" (53). In Darwin's description of protective adaptation in insects, he observes that "resemblance is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. The caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed, offer an excellent instance of a resemblance of this kind" (qtd. in Norris 53). Norris remarks that "the implications of this discovery are enormous," and names Darwin as "the author of a theory of imitation that reverses the Aristotelian aesthetic by showing life itself to be mimetic under certain conditions" (53).

 

By asserting that imitation's "practice might be organic, unconscious, and involuntary, that its teleology might be political rather than aesthetic, and that it may serve as a pivot of historical change" (53-54), Norris offers a posthumanist viewpoint that is just as (if not more) relevant to modern drama as it is to her own subject, the novel. By bridging the gap between the adaptive mechanisms of nature and those of culture, the multivalent forms of natural and artificial selection O'Neill has woven throughout this scene can now be "read" through a language of performance that challenges the poetics of humanism.24

 

Once Mildred's genetic viability is impaired ("would that my millions were not so anemically chaste!" [134]), wealth provides the kind of camouflage needed to survive in the "jungle" of Fifth Avenue, a safety zone that Mildred nevertheless quits for "New York's East Side" and "Whitechapel"—the urban equivalents of the ocean liner's engine room. But by donning a white dress that functions as costume rather than covering, and descending down the ladder of social evolution toward her ancestral habitat, Mildred approaches the "cage" in which her camouflage will cease to function, and her pose will finally—and literally—collapse. As she enters the stokehole,

She starts, turns paler, her pose is crumbling, she shivers with fright in spite of the blazing heat, but forces herself to . . . take a few steps nearer the men. [They] have turned full around and stopped dumbfounded by the spectacle of Mildred standing there in her white dress . . . [Yank] brandishes his shovel murderously over his head in one hand, pounding on his chest, gorilla-like, with the other . . . He whirls defensively with a snarling, murderous growl, crouching to spring, his lips drawn back over his teeth, his small eyes gleaming ferociously. He sees Mildred, like a white apparition in the full light from the open furnace doors. He glares into her eyes, turned to stone . . . As she looks at his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him, putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of his face, to protect her own. This startles Yank to a reaction. His mouth falls open, his eyes grow bewildered (136-37).

Before she faints into the arms of the engineers, Mildred whimpers, "Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!" (137). (See Fig. 5.)

 

All of the tropes O'Neill has set into motion intersect in this crucial moment of misrecognition, when the hellish stokehole is transformed from a zoo, where "spectators . . . regard unimpeded, imperiously, omnivorously, masters of all they survey" (Malamud 229), to a "contact zone," where social actors function "in terms of copresence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (Pratt 7). If the "imperialist gaze" Roediger describes is indeed "a shared social activity" (37) as its presence in a contact zone would suggest, we can conclude that the scene of (mis)recognition between Yank and Mildred—framed by "asymmetrical relations of power" that determine the direction and impact of their gazes—is reciprocal, interactive, and "interlocking."25

 

Yank himself begins this exchange of looks as a snarling, murderous, and growling gorilla (O'Neill will use these very same words to describe the gorilla in the last scene) but is soon "turned to stone" as he "glares into [Mildred's] eyes," anticipating his subsequent appearance as Rodin's sculpture The Thinker. When finally startled out of this interpellative freeze-frame,26 he becomes simply "bewildered," and remains that way until the very end. Similarly, Mildred's scopic predation, prefigured by her feline self-description, is arrested by the power of Yank's "ferocious" gaze, which reduces her skillful linguistic parrying to a "low choking cry" and causes her dramatic pose (which had heretofore sustained her performance of self) to "crumble." In a clichéd style straight out of nineteenth-century melodrama, she faints, like those Victorians who shuddered at the prospect that their own ancestors were, indeed, apes.

 

Figure 5: Scene 3 of The Hairy Ape, in which Mildred (Carlotta Monterey) and Yank (Louis Wolheim) share a powerful gaze. Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1922. Photo: © Estate of James Abbe / Kathryn Abbe (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

 

The intersecting perspectives of this "contact zone" can now be identified as those of science, history, and theater, allowing the "imperialist gaze" of the spectator (Mildred, and by implication, the actual audience) to be reversed, as it is in the final scene at the zoo. The theater itself is now the crucible in which these powerful looks are forged, and the platform upon which O'Neill's critique of humanism rests. By showing us that the binaries he erects in earlier scenes are not, in fact, essences, but rather positions—which are, like the ship itself, in constant motion—O'Neill opens up the forced perspectives of humanism to reveal the rhizomatic fields of performance and evolution, in which the possibilities of becoming constantly restructure our view.

 

In Yank's case, his interpellation by Mildred (and Paddy) reverses his previously undifferentiated relationship to labor and thus to his own body, evidenced in the coal-dust's original, positive signification: "[Paddy] can't breathe and swallow coal dust, but I kin, see? Dat's fresh air for me! Dat's food for me! I'm new, get me? Hell in de stokehole? Sure! It takes a man to work in hell. Hell, sure, dat's my fav'rite climate" (128). Rather than revealing the traces of Yank's hard-earned labor, the soot now signals his subaltern position. His sense of "belonging" in the world of steel, heat, and speed is now as impossible as Paddy's dream of "belonging" in a seafaring utopia.

 

As members of the chorus intone at the beginning of scene 4 (directly after the stokehole encounter), in response to Yank's "To hell wit' washin'":

It [coal-dust] makes spots on you—like a leopard.

Like a piebald nigger, you mean (138).

Here the discourses of race and species are once again linked to each other and to the theatrical mask. In the corrective shift that occurs between these two choral entries, Yank's potentially powerful relationship to Mildred (whose own leopard "spots" are unobservable) is quickly reconfigured as powerless and degrading. Unlike the chorus, "Yank has not washed either face or body. He stands out in contrast to them, a blackened brooding figure" (138). The coal-dust cannot be washed away because it is no longer a material substance; Yank's "blackened, brooding figure" signifies his categorical exclusion from the human.

 

As Homi K. Bhabha explains in his essay "Of Mimicry and Man," "Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body." The "discriminatory identit[y]" of the "Simian Black" to which Yank has been reduced, therefore, is "constructed across traditional cultural norms and classifications" to achieve one of the "strategic objectives" through which colonial "mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (92, 90, 86). This mimicry (which Bhabha develops within the field of postcolonial theory) is related to the imitative practices of camouflage that Norris claims have a political, rather than aesthetic, teleology, something Bhabha terms a "partial representation"—or "metonymy of presence"—that "rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. . . . Mimicry is like camouflage," he writes, "a form of resemblance that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically" (89, 90).27

 

In the aftermath of Yank's "split skin," Paddy and Long seek to understand and name the powerful discourses through which the stoker's interpellation has been produced:

Long— . . . What right `as they got to be exhibitin' us `s if we was bleedin' monkeys in a menagerie? . . . we're all `er slaves, too! And she gives `er orders as `ow she wants to see the bloody animals below decks

. . .

. . .

Paddy— . . . and the Second [Engineer] pointing at us like a man you'd hear in a circus would be saying: In this cage is a queerer kind of baboon than ever you'd find in darkest Africy. . . .

Yank—(slowly) She was all white. I tought she was a ghost. Sure.

Paddy—(with heavy, biting sarcasm) `Twas love at first sight, divil a doubt of it! If you'd seen the endearin' look on her pale mug when she shriveled away with her hands over her eyes to shut out the sight of him! Sure, `twas as if she'd seen a great hairy ape escaped from the Zoo!

. . .

Yank— . . . (Coming over to Paddy—slowly) Say, is dat what she called me—a hairy ape?

Paddy—She looked it at you if she didn't say the word itself.

Yank—(grinning horribly) . . . Hairy ape! So dat's me, huh? . . . I tought she was a ghost, see? She was all in white, like dey wrap around stiffs. She didn't belong, dat's what! . . . I'll show her if she tinks she—She grinds de organ and I'm on de string, huh? I'll fix her! . . . I'll show her who's a ape! (139-40, 141, 142, 143).

Figure 6: Scene 4 of The Hairy Ape, produced by Aleksandr Tairov's Kamerny ("Chamber") Theatre, Moscow, circa 1925. Here Yank (front, right) first appears in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

 

The structuring ideologies of the "contact zone" are here explicitly voiced by the stokers themselves: Long and Paddy focus on their perceived roles as captive, performing animals, and cast Mildred and the Second Engineer as slave owner and circus barker, respectively, reifying existing power differentials. Yank's slowly dawning realization of his own place in the vertical hierarchy, however, causes him to spurn Mildred (and the accompanying "myth of the undifferentiated whole white body") with sexual and racial slurs (elsewhere in this same scene he calls her "a skinny tart" and "a white-faced bum" [141]), and finally to cast her as a ghost, effectively dehumanizing her, as she has done to him.

 

In order to "show [Mildred] who's a ape," Yank attempts to master, if not dominate, the new symbolic environment (humanism) in which he must survive. Rather than passing off the furry mantle to another actor, as Paddy does so cleverly in this scene, Yank attempts to counteract Mildred's animalizing gaze. After the dramatic shock of misrecognition, the humanist dream of transcendence is what motivates Yank's actions. In fact, as soon as Mildred's pose "crumbles," his own futile impersonation of the humanist ideal begins. The next time we see Yank, he "is seated forward on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker'" (138). (See Fig. 6.)

 

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