Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
285), but not much else in the way of growth or progress in his character. We know from the stereotype that if Jones escaped, he would go back to being the same old Jones. We know from the beginning how the play has to end because we know how the character is going to react to everything that happens. The play would be considerably more interesting if Jones were a real flesh-and-blood person whose unique character could develop during the action. We see his past come back to haunt him, but the events which we are allowed to see are only the violent events. One wonders, who was his mother? Did he have a wife? When he was a member of the church, did he truly love God? Did he try to be good? Did he have children? We see the slave block which could help us to feel sympathetic, but it is an experience common to all slaves. The fact that slavery happened fifty or more years before Jones' life began, implies that his anger toward whites is something he's born with like an instinct and reinforces the stereotype. We don't see anything that would help us to understand Jones as an individual human being with a unique identity.
Similar problems occur in The Hairy Ape, which explores the effects of industrialization and the evils of capitalism. The alienated characters are not much more than spokespersons for their social positions. Hank, for example, portrays the worker who is so incapable of thinking that he doesn't know he is being exploited. Paddy speaks for the "good old days," when there was beauty and harmony in seafaring. Long offers a socialist perspective and sees...
Mildred is the stereotype of the rich man's offspring, who has grown up surrounded by so much wealth she is spiritually empty and searching for meaning in "good works." However, her weakness (part of the stereotype) is exposed when she practically faints at the first sight of the dehumanized, mechanized, world where working men are treated as animals and kept in their place.
The problem is that they are one-dimensional characters. We can see them struggling against the unnatural industrial surroundings in which they must live. But we don't see anything about them other than where they fit in the hierarchy of the American workforce, just as we saw only that Jones was primitive, trying to be civilized, and confronting his "native" beginnings. That's the trouble with accepting stereotypes. Except for reading about them and seeing them in the movies, my grandmother never knew a black person. A dimension of her experience which might have added richness and meaning was shut away from her because of her beliefs. Stereotypes don't allow us to see people as human beings we can like or dislike on an individual basis. They often prevent us from experiencing the richness of diversity. In The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, they are not empowering because there is no hope. The characters cannot escape from their social positions, or their stereotypical images, and we never really find out who they are in relation to anything else.
Bibliography
O'Neill, Eugene. Early Plays. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Bibliography
O'Neill, Eugene. Early Plays. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Hairy Ape In Eugene O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape, the titular character, Yank, has an identity crisis while working on a ship, and travels through New York attempting to find somewhere where he belongs despite his rough appearance and undeveloped social skills. In the end Yank is ultimately unable to find anywhere to belong, but nonetheless, examining the two instances in which he comes relatively close, at the Industrial Workers of
Iceman Cometh is a brilliant play by Eugene O'Neill that experiments with the painful side of emotional life. It's all about the different dreams that people aspire to achieve. They live with the hope of one-day achieving them and this is what make their days go by. The characters in this play are all broken-hearted souls who live with their never-ending aspirations of having a better tomorrow. About the Playwright
Racial or ethnically-based teasing and peer pressure has long been associated with academic achievement, as Tyson et al. point out in his 2005 report studying the behaviors of blacks and whites during high school. While Tyson et al. also suggests that "school structures" are somewhat to blame for "stigmas" of "acting white" or "acting high and mighty" (582), he maintains that that teasing and peer pressure and also important
Emperor Jones Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play The Emperor Jones tells the story of a young African-American man who has killed a man and gone to prison and then winds up a ruler of men. O'Neill was interested in social injustice and many of his plays deal with inequalities in the United States of America. In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance in New York had brought African-American artisans widespread attention and
Earl of Rochester / Aphra Behn Masks and Masculinities: Gender and Performance in the Earl of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment" and Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" Literature of the English Restoration offers the example of a number of writers who wrote for a courtly audience: literary production, particularly in learned imitation of classical models, was part of the court culture of King Charles II. The fact of a shared model explains the remarkable similarities between "The
It is the context of Catholic Ireland (and not so much the Hays Production Code) that allows Ford's characters to enjoy the light-heartedness of the whole situation. Such context is gone in O'Neill's dramas. O'Neill's Irish-American drinkers have left the Emerald Isle and traded it over for a nation where religious liberty denies the right of any religion to declare itself as true and all others as false. The Constitution,