Character Analysis and Play

¶ … loss affects not just Yank, who wrestles with it throughout the play, but perhaps also Yank's shipmates, Mildred and her aunt, the rich people on Fifth Avenue, the prisoners, and the union members. In what ways does the play suggest that modern existence is inherently dehumanizing?

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill focuses on Yank Smith, a leader amidst the stokers within the heaving furnaces in a liner across the Atlantic. In the whole play, Yank's sense of "belonging" during the new order peaks, the profusion of pride that he gets from what he does, degenerates after he receives a message of social scorn and discovers how insignificant his manual work is, in the world's eyes. His work becomes meaningless and he turns into a deplorable creature (hairy ape) who dies after being crushed; literally, by the animal's hand towards the end of the play (Oldman, 2006).

At the beginning of the first scene of the play, Yank believes that he has a solid unity with civilization of industries. The directions on stage depict "Yank is sitting at the forefront. He looks broader, more truculent, fiercer and more powerful. He also looks like he believes in himself more than others have in themselves. People respect Yank's superior strength; they respect him out of fear. He also presents himself to them as the most greatly developed person among them." (O'Neill, 1964). As these labourers wander around the ocean liner's stokehole one hour following its departure from New York, the leadership of Yank among the workers is highlighted. When Yank asks for a drink, "several bottles are eagerly offered" (188). O'Neill illustrates Yank's involvement in his place of work by stating that the furnace's realm works as a permanent residence for Yank-"(D)isis home" (191) states Yank. The stokehole, more than the place he lived as a child (from which he fled due to physical assault) signifies Yank's symbolic structure and establishes his entry point into culture. Yank rules over his surrounding; he belongs" (193). He sees himself as an important element of the mechanization of that ship:

'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-- --! I'm de muscles in steel, de punch behind it.' (198)

Flaunting his prowess, Yank motivates the labourers into action. He commands them easily through the entire play. Seeing this fervent soliloquy, the workers get "roused into a pitch of frenzied self-glorification" (198).

Although the play plays with the probability, O'Neill nonetheless decides to expose the revolutionary potential of the stokers through Yank. Yank's awareness of his status in society; his sudden, rapid internalization of hegemony ensures his complete self-consciousness as well as his unavoidable downfall. Even though O'Neill maintains that "(m)an's very 'lostness,' and his need for belonging, is the core of his humanity," (Falk 1982) we could say that his work embraces a "lostness" that holds a non-existential, cultural contingency.

Therefore, the tension that comes from the play's reticent political content is everywhere. For example, the second scene takes us to a conspicuously different world, removed from that within the stokehole. After two days, we are on the ship's promenade deck. Here, Mildred Douglas, daughter to Nazareth Steel's president, B.O.D chairman in the line, lies back in a chair on deck together with her aunt (Oldman, 2006). After completion of social service labour in East New York, Mildred travels visits the underprivileged in the city of London, in order to create her "slumming international." (Martine, 1984) The depiction shows Yank's belief in the fact that first-class travellers "don't amount to nothin. Dey're just baggage"(193). Certainly, Mildred makes a confession to her aunt. She says that her many attempts to help the poor are let down by the following:

'I'm afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity. All that was burnt out in our stock before I was born...I'm a waste product in the Bessemer process -- like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it... (I'm) damned in more ways than one.' (203-4)

Unable to please her aunt, someone who believes that she needs to flaunt her intrinsic fraudulence rather than investing in vain attempts at selflessness, O'Neill shows that indeed, the "haves" are "incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious" (201). Therefore, Mildred is "an expression not of life ('s) energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending" (201-2). Here, O'Neill's depiction keeps with the portrayal by Marx of labourers as "the living" and capitalists, "dead labour." This means that, in the change from scene 1 to scene 2, O'Neill emphasizes on the titanic configuration of the political culture of proletariats in comparison with the dwarf-like rank of the bourgeois' politics (Oldman, 2006).

The disagreement between Yank and Mildred; probably the most eventful part of the story, is in the second scene. Mildred is inappropriately dressed in a white coloured dress. She reaches and walks around the ship's sooty underworld. She has two unenthusiastic engineers as her chaperones as she goes down to the stokehole with confidence that her grandfather passed down to her, immunity to intense heat. Mildred's father began his nautical career by being a paddler. However, as she sees Yank's "gorilla face" which is darkened with coal, Mildred screams "Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!"(214), after which she faints immediately. According to O'Neill, "her whole personality (becomes) crushed, beaten in, collapsed by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless" (214). The remark and attitude of Mildred makes Yank react shockingly too. Bewildered and enraged, "He feels himself insulted in some unknown fashion in the very heart of his pride" (214). He throws his shovel at her and then screams "God damn yuh!" Mildred is taken out of the stokehole, she comes out of the stage; she leaves the play (Oldman, 2006).

Their bizarre encounter provokes an irreversible inner conflict within Yank. Mildred's elimination leaves us with the intricate impact of the disagreement. Firmly entrenched in his place of work as the stokehole commander, Yank's disagreement with Mildred changes his self-conception for good. Yet again, the impact; from a Marxist point-of-view, of this disagreement are highlighted by their individual disturbance due to the incident. According to O'Neill, Mildred and Yank seem to balance each other (Oldman, 2006).

For O'Neill, what is important is that eventually, consciousness instigates Yank's death. The belief by O'Neill's: "man's very 'lostness'... is the key to his humanity" (Folk, 1982) is particular relevant in this case, since Yank's, which is full of ultimate knowledge about itself, sets him apart from his ego. It happens that "the theory of ideology... depends of this theory of the ghost" (Derrida, 1994) since to make ideology function, those rooted in its structure must eventually be eluded.

Yank is more of a symbolic figure than he is polemical. He responds against society since he does not find a place within it. He is also destroyed after he finds out that society does not value a man like him. However, Yank is not to be seen as a disillusioned revolutionary. On the contrary, he symbolizes modern man in search for sureness in a place that no longer has its old truths. Those days when the sea and men were one (according to Paddy) are gone. Yank, at first thinks that machinery and steel have replaced them. For this reason, he typically represents a man that has come to terms with the promises and dreams of the industrial society; but has ended up finding them inadequate; like the character Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (1949), or caustic, as Dynamo's Reuben Light finds out when he wants him and the machine to be one. Some people, such as The Emperor Jones' Brutus Jones, feel that there is no place in society, so they need to look in other places. Jones is compelled to revive his past. Yank, on the other hand, lacking such resources, assumes his look-alike animal's identity. Yank is again destroyed after the animal also rejects the identification. At first, O'Neill intended for this character to be Irish, but he then reconsidered it. The play seems more real with the change (Ranald, 2008).